DECCAN INQUIRER e news bi-weekly EDITOR: NAGARAJA.M.R. VOL.22 ….ISSUE...80…..04/10/2026
Editorial : NHRC FAILING IN IT’S DUTIES
Nature has given birth to all human beings as equals with equal intellect. Every human being gets human rights by virtue of his birth , no Ambedkar, no Modi has given it. Nobody has authority to curtail those human rights.
However in their pursuit of dalit vote banks politicians Ambedkar and Modi have made discriminatory laws grossly violating human rights of innocent people.
Still NHRC doesn't take suo motto action nor action on complaints to stop these government sponsored discriminations.
Why ?
India's national human rights institution is failing its responsibilities and should be downgraded
In March 2025, the GANHRI accreditation body gave India's National Human Rights Commission one year to comply with the Paris Principles. Meanwhile, police still investigate police, appointments lack transparency and pluralism, civil society is sidelined, and serious violations go unaddressed. As such, ISHR urges a downgrade at November's review.
In March 2025, the Sub-Committee on Accreditation (SCA) of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) recommended downgrading the accreditation of the National Human Rights Commission of India (NHRCI). It gave the institution one year to bring its work in line with the Paris Principles, the international standards for national human rights institutions. The NHRCI challenged the recommendation, but GANHRI rejected the challenge in December 2025. The review has since been postponed to November 2026. Ahead of it, ISHR and other organisations have urged the SCA to amend the commission’s current “A” rating to reflect its failure to comply.
Police investigating police
The SCA has repeatedly flagged that the NHRCI relies on police officers seconded from the government to investigate human rights violations, including those committed by police. It has recommended amending the Protection of Human Rights Act accordingly. No legislative change has followed. The Commission has only proposed internal rules that would allow non-police investigators, yet its website still describes an Investigation Division made up solely of police officers.
The consequences of this are demonstrated in the impunity connected with a number of cases including the unfulfilled call by UN Special Rapporteurs in February 2026 for independent inquiries into alarming allegations of hundreds of extrajudicial killings and torture-related deaths, which disproportionately affected Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis.
Appointments without transparency or pluralism.
The SCA has stressed that an institution must be, and be seen to be, independent of government. Yet the government continues to appoint a former civil servant as Secretary-General, whose tenure has now been extended three times, most recently in July 2026. Two commissioner posts have been vacant since 2018 and 2021, and the SCA has noted that the commission has only one woman among its members. The selection of the chairperson, made by the President on the recommendation of a committee that includes the Prime Minister, remains opaque, despite SCA calls to publicly advertise vacancies and consult broadly.
Turning away from civil society
The SCA has heard from civil society actors that the NHRCI does not cooperate with them, and that it avoids those critical of its performance. This matters at a time when the government has cancelled the foreign funding licences of 22,493 NGOs under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, a law UN experts say is used to silence organisations whose priorities differ from the government’s. The NHRCI has not spoken out. It also stayed silent on the arrests of five Indigenous human rights defenders in Assam, even after four UN experts urged their release.
Silence in the face of violations
The Commission has taken up more cases on its own initiative, and its media presence has improved. But these changes look cosmetic. Its redesigned website displays large figures on complaints disposed of, with little context, and no longer clearly shows data on deaths in police and judicial custody or alleged extrajudicial killings, which it once published.
Meanwhile, the NHRCI has said little or nothing about:
the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s August 2026 findings of large-scale violations by law enforcement, including against Dalits, Indigenous Peoples and non-citizens
the use of counterterrorism law against activists, journalists and students, including in the Bhima Koregaon and Delhi 2020 cases
the excessive force used against student protesters in New Delhi in July 2026, which injured over 100 people
the removal of over 60 million names from electoral rolls, and a civil society request for a public hearing that went unanswered
arbitrary demolitions of Muslim homes, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 2024
violence in Manipur, which has killed over 300 people since May 2023
the expulsion of ethnic Bengali Muslims and Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh
What should happen next
The NHRCI had a year to act on the SCA’s recommendations and has not. An “A” rating signals to the world that an institution is independent and effective. For the NHRCI, it currently does the opposite, giving credibility to a body that is not protecting those who most need it. ISHR joins other human rights NGOs in urging GANHRI and the SCA to downgrade the NHRCI at its November 2026 review.
INDIA: A torturous wait for the end of torture
Even as the world commemorated the International Day in support of Victims of Torture as per the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), there seems to be no end of torture for the foreseeable future in India. In fact, forget urgency, authorities in India seem to be completely uninterested in ending the criminal practice. The very fact that India is yet to bring in a domestic law against torture even 39 years after ratifying the United Nations’ Convention against torture in 1997 shows the apathy of its leadership. India, often called the world’s largest democracy, is only one of five countries with this dubious distinction. The other four are Sudan, Brunei, Palau and Haiti.
Why this apathy for such a heinous crime against citizens, usually indulged in by those bound by the constitution to protect the very same people? Well, the Government of India often adds insult to this injury by whitewashing the public secret of torture being endemic to policing in India and taking recourse in denial. Take, for instance, the position on state sponsored torture the then Attorney-General of India Mukul Rohtagi took in Geneva at the country’s third universal periodic review at the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2017. Invoking Gandhi and Buddha, Rohatagi said that
“Ours (India) is a land of Gandhi and Buddha.”… “We believe in peace, non-violence and upholding human dignity. As such, the concept of torture is completely alien to our culture and it has no place in the governance of the nation.”
Mr. Rohatgi was lying through his teeth as evidenced by the reports of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), a statutory public body to monitor and protect rights. The NHRC, in its annual reports, has repeatedly highlighted the prevalence of torture in the country.
For example, The NHRC in its 2017-18 annual report points out that
“Custodial violence and torture is so rampant in India that it has become almost routine. It represents the worst form of excesses by public servants entrusted with the duty of law enforcement. The Commission regards crimes like rape, molestation, torture, fake encounter in police custody as manifestations of a systemic failure to protect human rights of one of the most vulnerable and voiceless categories of victims. Therefore, it is deeply committed to ensure that such illegal practices are stopped and human dignity is respected in all cases. Besides awarding compensation to the victims or their next-of-kin, the Commission’s efforts are also geared towards bringing an end to an environment in which human rights violations are committed with impunity under the shields of “uniform” and “authority within the four walls of a police station, lock-up and prison, where the victims are totally helpless”.
Similarly, as per the NHRC’s own findings as well as the Ministry of Home Affairs replies in the parliament of India, the number of people getting killed in custody- both in police custody and judicial custody, is rising. For instance, the total number of people killed in custody between April 1, 2019 and March 31 was 1,697. Of these, 1,584 died in judicial custody while 113 in police custody.
Further, most of the victims of torture come from marginalised communities like Dalits, tribal people and minority communiies.
So much so for India’s official position of torture being alien to its culture! Unfortunately, despite the open admission of torture being rampant in the country by the NHRC, the institution often comes across as toothless in making the relevant authorities to implement its orders on things like compensation, let alone follow its recommendations on policy changes necessary to eliminate torture from the country.
To begin with, The NHRC’s recommendations are not binding on the governments, both at state level and on the union government. So they keep flouting its recommendations with impunity. For instance, the NHRC admits in its same annual report (2017-18) that state governments paid compensations in only 151 cases out of the total 757 cases it has recommended for compensation.
There are a hundred reasons behind continuity of the practice and the impunity the offenders enjoy. One of the most important of them is that most of the Indian Penal Code is borrowed from the British Raj’s penal code- made for subjugating a colony and not for establishing a rule of law country. The reforms the IPC needed after independence were never a priority by the acts of omission in the beginning and then acts of commission afterwards. In newly independent India, the most immediate and pressing concern of the leadership was bringing the impoverished country, drained by almost two centuries of colonial occupation and reeling under one of the worst man made famines in Bengal, to stand on its own feet.
Then, the later leadership realised that having a policing system aligned with the rulers, not the rule of law, actually helps them consolidate the power, intimidate and silence the dissenters and continue ruling. Naturally, they threw all the demands regarding police reforms, a must for ending torture, in the dustbin.
Further complicating the fact was a sort of indifference by the larger section of civil society on the issue of torture, brought primarily for the same reason as early Indian leadership. They too saw police reforms as a secondary concern while the country reeled under ‘more pressing’ problems like hunger deaths and caste discriminations. What they ignored, though, was the centrality of the violence in perpetuating poverty and many other ills as Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros brilliantly demonstrated in their book The Locust Effect. It is high time for the civil society to rediscover the linkages and press for police reforms including elimination of torture.
It is high time for the authorities in India to get their act together and make a concerted effort for ending the criminal practice forever. This can only be done by showing political will and pushing for a stringent domestic law against torture with mechanism for independent investigations into allegations of a torture. For example, if such a law against torture mandates the same policing agencies to investigate such allegations whose members are accused of committing acts of torture, the whole practice would become a joke. Further, this requires a lot of investment in fields like forensic sciences for shifting the focus of police investigations from torture based confessions to solid evidence. This goes without saying that this too requires a lot of political will!
International community too must urge India for enacting a domestic law against torture at the earliest and implement it.
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