WRONGDOING IN INDIA
The High Courts. The petty courts. Disappearance of the
school clock. Methods of Indian police; indignation of the
villagers; conduct of the police complained of; an inquiry
instituted; unsatisfactory result. Police torture leads to
concealment of crime. Detection of crime difficult in India.
Thieving. Serious moral wrongs. Successful concealment.
In the Indian High Courts justice is administered with extreme care,
and sentences are pronounced with a full sense of responsibility and
with complete impartiality, so far as it is possible to come at the
truth where a large measure of false evidence is almost sure to have
place in every case. Indians who have been raised to important
judicial positions have shown themselves fully competent to discharge
the duties of their office rightly, and have shown much legal
sagacity, together with the other special qualifications which go to
make a good judge.
But when you descend to the petty courts, the state of things is less
satisfactory. When everything is in the hands of a lower grade of
Indian officials, and European supervision is necessarily of the
slightest, influence and money and favour and luck have much to do
with the chances for or against the prisoner. In the tracking of
culprits and the gathering of evidence, and in all the preparatory
work in which police are engaged, it is to be feared that unlawful
methods are still practised, especially in the more remote country
districts. Some of the European police do not seem to take much
trouble to stamp out these abuses.
We had an opportunity of seeing something of the ways in which Indian
police try to discover an offender, after the disappearance one night
of the clock from the village Mission day-school. We informed the
_Patel_, or headman, of our loss, which was the correct procedure. He,
at leisure, held a sort of court of inquiry in the verandah of the
Mission bungalow; but as nothing transpired he, again at leisure,
reported the matter to the city police, and two men in plain clothes
were sent to make preliminary inquiries. Not being able to ascertain
anything definite, they began to put in practise their own methods of
extracting evidence. They caned a suspected boy in order to try and
get him to confess, and also one of his companions who they supposed
might know something about it. I myself saw the marks of the cane on
the boys. The punishment would not have been excessive supposing they
had been convicted of the offence. The police were also said to have
beaten a labouring man in order to extort a confession, because there
was a rumour that the boys had given the clock to him.
The village, usually friendly and easygoing, began to get much
exercised over these attentions of the police. The _Patel_, a foolish
and dissipated young man, found his liberty seriously curtailed by
having frequently to attend the City Police Court to report progress.
The village _Mahars_, or low-caste men, are liable to be called upon
amongst their other duties to serve as village constables. These men
were getting tired of having to act as escort to the boys and others,
who were being summoned daily to the court, often being kept waiting
there for the whole day. A large deputation of villagers arrived at
the Mission bungalow to protest, and my assurances that none of these
proceedings arose from any promptings of mine were only partially
believed.
We were left in peace for a week or so, and I hoped that the matter
was at an end. But the police woke up again, and set upon Bhau, the
son of the Mission gardener, on the ground that he cleaned the school
and thus had access to the clock. Bhau was not a particularly
estimable character, but having helped to clean the school for many
years, it did not seem likely that he should suddenly have taken it
into his head to steal an old clock. But it is a disturbing feature of
police inquiries in remote districts, that they feel that anything is
better than to let the crime pass into the category of offences the
perpetrators of which have not been discovered.
It was now the turn of Bhau and his relations to appear daily at the
city court. For a time no cruelty was perpetrated, until one afternoon
two police appeared in the village and beat Bhau in the village
_chowdi_, or place of assembly, and they ordered him to attend the
court again the next day. As soon as I heard what had happened, I was
naturally as indignant as the villagers, and went myself to the court
with the boy. I was quickly taken to the Hindu police inspector of the
district in which Yerandawana is situated. In him I found a courteous,
English-speaking Brahmin, who promised to come himself and look into
the matter. He did so, examined Bhau, asked various questions, and
promised that the conduct of the police should be investigated.
Meanwhile I had written a letter of complaint to the District
Superintendent of Police, and two inspectors, one a Mohammedan, the
other a Hindu, were sent to hold a formal inquiry. One of these men
revealed something of their methods, when engaged in collecting
evidence, by remarking to me that "a few slaps would not be of much
consequence, but that anything of the nature of cruelty must not be
allowed." It was only in response to my assertion that nothing
whatever of the nature of punishment must be used in order to obtain
evidence, that he said, "Of course not. It must be stopped
altogether."
The labouring man who was said to have been beaten was called to give
evidence. But unfortunately the policeman who was supposed to have
done this was sitting outside, and beckoning to him, got a word with
him before I realised what was taking place, and the man denied that
he had been beaten. I was glad to see that the inspectors showed real
indignation at this attempt to tamper with a witness. They were both
very polite, and in examining the village boys tried to copy our
paternal way of speaking to them, with rather comical results. When it
transpired that one of the boys was an orphan, the Mohammedan
Inspector said in English, "Oh dear! sad, sad," as if it was the first
case of the kind he had ever met with, and he recommended the boy to
seek refuge in the Mission orphanage.
Although they professed to be indignant with the police, and said that
they would be severely punished, I was not altogether surprised at the
nature of the report which they ultimately sent to the District
Superintendent, a copy of which was forwarded to me. It was
accompanied by a memorandum, saying that the charges appeared to have
been considerably exaggerated, but that the constable who was reported
to have "slapped" the boys had been "transferred to headquarters,"
whatever that might mean.
That irregular proceedings on the part of the police were only stayed
with difficulty by the force of English interference and emphatic
words and letters, suggests how hopeless may be the position of any
unhappy mortal in out-of-the-way places on whom the police choose to
father a charge. Many tales are told of the ingenious barbarities
still practised in the endeavour to extort confessions from suspected
persons, or unwilling witnesses, and it is to be feared that these
tales are not without foundation. The apparent tendency of some
English officials to make light of complaints, does not give much room
for hope that the evil system will be quickly eradicated.
Even supposing that torture was justifiable on the ground that it
leads to the detection of crime, the actual result is probably quite
the reverse. It certainly leads to false confessions. People in their
fear are tempted to say that they have done a certain thing, in order
to escape from present pain. It has often been urged that confessions
made by prisoners to the Indian police should not be accepted as
evidence, and this is a reform urgently needed. The trouble to which
the police subjected our villagers will not deter them from committing
offences, but it has convinced them, from the Patel down to the
Mahars, that if in the future there is any wrongdoing in the village,
anything is preferable to invoking the aid of the police. And that is
a serious result, because in an out-of-the-way village, if the Patel
takes no action, almost any crime, even murder, could be committed,
and the fact need never be known.
It should, however, be added that the detection of wrongdoers is
beset in India with peculiar difficulties. The presence of serious
crime in a certain locality may be a sufficiently self-evident fact,
and yet it may be years before it is brought home to its real authors.
The Western rogue often betrays himself by his clumsy efforts to
escape. The Eastern wrongdoer never commits this mistake. While the
police are searching for him far and wide, he is very likely all the
time living in their midst.
In the smaller sphere of a household or school, there is a similar
difficulty in discovering the real origin of some irregularity.
Thieving may go on in a certain bungalow; all kinds of people are
suspected, almost always the wrong ones; if the police are called in,
they generally lay the guilt on one of the poorer class of servants,
who in sheer fright at being accused, and with the dread of torture in
his mind, is almost ready to say that he is guilty. Innocent servants
are sometimes thoughtlessly discharged without character, only on
suspicion. Not unfrequently, even before the excitement has subsided,
fresh thefts occur, showing that the thief is still at large. And if
he is ever found out, which is not by any means invariably the case,
the chances are that he will prove to be somebody near at hand, who
was supposed to be above suspicion.
Serious moral wrongs may go on in an Indian household quite unknown to
most of its members, and so skilfully concealed that they may have
existed for years without suspicion. Even when the matter has
ultimately come to light, the head of the household is perhaps the
last to learn what nearly everybody else knew. Many Indian schoolboys
are ready enough to tell tales of each other concerning trifling
matters, and Indian school authorities unfortunately rather encourage
the habit, and the sneak does not get sent to Coventry as he ought to
be. But when something serious has happened which it is the duty of
the boys to report, it is rare to find amongst them one of sufficient
force of character to enable him to do so, and the unembarrassed
denial of any knowledge of the offence adds greatly to the difficulty
of detecting the offender. Though there are brilliant exceptions,
Christian principles rarely stand the test of truthfulness when really
serious complications have arisen. And the Indian story-teller so
seldom contradicts himself, and if he finds himself in a corner he
gets out of it so readily, that it is difficult not to believe him,
even when you have the strongest reasons for thinking that he is
deceiving you.
In a certain boys' school it was known that some evil influence was at
work, but it could not be traced to its root. When elder boys left who
were thought to be possibly the cause of the evil, it was hoped that
the trouble would cease. But several generations of boys passed out of
the school, and the evil influence remained. When its source was
discovered after some years, the clue was given by an almost chance
remark of a small boy. The person who had so long been a centre of
corruption had been so little suspected that, even after it had been
brought home to him, it was difficult to understand how he had been
able to secure concealment so effectually that no shadow of suspicion
was ever aroused.