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The trials of undertrials

AS THE SAYING goes, every picture tells a story, but this photograph speaks for itself. Four crouching men with bewildered faces in a small cage on the back of a truck as an armed policeman watches over them. The journey: from a courtroom in Ludhiana to jail. The charges against them: killing peacocks in a forested area of Punjab. The picture, which was taken by a news agency and published in The Hindu late last year, has moved the Supreme Court to issue a notice to the Punjab Government, on a petition seeking a direction for action against the policemen responsible for this reprehensible incident. The Supreme Court was responding to a petition that brought the photograph to its attention and that sought that the fundamental rights of the four accused be protected. That people should be herded like animals is shocking and inexcusable. Such practices have no place in a civilised state and those who were responsible for this incident — and this would include not merely the subordinate policemen present but the higher-ups who permitted the caging of undertrials — deserve to be severely punished.

What this and other such incidents reveal is that the manner in which undertrials are treated remains horrifying despite a long string of judicial decisions that have expanded and strengthened the concept of the right to life and personal liberty (under Article 21 of the Constitution) and have laid down specific regulations in order to see that prisoners, whether accused or convicted, are treated with honour and dignity. The Supreme Court has even laid down restrictions on the manner in which prisoners are transported from jail to courtroom (or vice versa), which is directly relevant to the case about the four caged men in Punjab. In the Prem Shankar Shukla v Delhi Administration case, a case that ironically also pertains to Punjab, the Supreme Court held that, in the absence of the escorting authority recording why a prisoner is put in handcuffs, the procedure of handcuffing is violative of Article 21. While striking down a provision in the Punjab police rules that discriminated between rich and poor in determining who should be handcuffed, the Court declared that freedom from handcuffs for "prisoners in transit between prison house and court house" is something that should be ensured by those at the very top ("from the Inspector General of Police to the Inspector General of Prisons") to the very bottom (from "the escort constable to the jail-warder").

When the handcuffing of undertrials and convicts has been held "prima facie inhuman" and "unreasonable" except in exceptional circumstances, it is astonishing that men charged with killing peacocks were cramped in cages — a practice which is even more cruel and debasing. As the Supreme Court observed in the Sunil Batra case, which incidentally also laid down that prisoners cannot be fettered unless certain key preconditions are satisfied, fundamental rights "may suffer shrinkage necessitated by incarcerations", but they do not "flee the person as he enters the prison". The right to life and personal liberty guaranteed in Article 21 may not be absolute but means considerably more than mere existence or physical survival. The fact that this concept is much broader has been emphasised by the Judiciary which, over the years, has invested it with a meaning that encompasses the whole domain of a person's social and economic life. Among the various things that the right to life and liberty includes is the right to live with human dignity and the right to be free from any form of physical coercion that does not admit legal justification. To pack prisoners in transit into iron cages that are too small to stand in is to subject them to a form of torture and to strip them of their dignity and to make a mockery of the values enshrined in the country's constitutional culture. By capturing something that was sordid, the revealing photograph has provided an opportunity to ensure that this never happens again.

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