TheDaak review

A Qualitative Analysis of Torture: The Crude Case of Khairlanji Murders

By Bilal Khan

Introduction

The debate about human rights and torture forced diplomats around the world in 1984 to combine their expertise in the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In the Convention, the House invoked articles 5 and 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), respectively, to concretise a linkage of violation of human rights to the case of torture (United Nations 1984). Given that both of these articles dealt with inalienable human rights and dignity, the question of torture, thereby is tied to the state criminalising it. Despite the convention, there is experiential and empirical data to back the torture and inhumane cruelty faced by a large number of people (Amnesty International 2003; Einolf 2007; Asian Human Rights Commission). 

Providing a modular mechanism, the United Nations General Assembly un/intentionally initiated a discourse that was so transparent and so stringent that it could not possibly provide the world with the apt rationalisation of events of mass torture like the case of Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Bay. The commentary attempts to analyse the concept of torture in two ways. First, it would provide a philosophical overview of torture: what amounts to torture and what makes it a particularly heinous crime usually perpetuated by the state? Through a combination of statistical data available to the public, alongside a case study of the Khairlanji Murders,  the essay aims to form a deeper understanding of torture which is a well-documented lacuna in the legal episteme of both international and Indian law, where the latter has no legislation whatsoever to account for torture. The commentary is thereby an attempt to fill this gap by looking at  the increasing violence against the Dalits even after the inclusion of  the Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Act 1989. 

Philosophical Underpinnings

The standard definition given by the United Nations Convention against Torture of 1984 stands as:

The term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. 

In Understanding Torture (2010), Wisnewski has looked at the idea of torture and the various ethical debates around the practice of torture. For Wisnewski, torture can be categorised into six overlapping kinds. These kinds are namely, judicial, punitive, interrogational, dehumanising, terroristic/deterrent and sadistic. Through such categorisations, he seeks to analyse torture on historical and psychological grounds giving a way to understand the effects torture has on its victims (Wisnewski 2010, 7-8).

Due to this dual analysis, Wisnewski stands firmly against strict distinctions like ‘psychological’ and ‘physiological’ torture. Such distinction, according to him, usually renders one or the other to be ‘more’ horrifying. However he also  argues  that torture cannot be  restricted to either psychological or physical forms. It is a ‘combination’ of both of them. Hence, the author notes the importance of looking at torture as a “product of particular interests” (Wisnewski 2010, 11). 

Moving on from these semantic and legal distinctions, one needs to ponder upon the unique severity of torture. For this, Wisnewski discusses how it is an axiom almost to condemn torture, yet it happens in the cases of exceptions. These ‘exceptions’ are basically loopholes found within the definitions of torture granted by international bodies like the UN. 

As mentioned earlier the UN defines an act as torture only when it is committed by any public official. But, as Wisnewski (2010) and Christopher J. Einolf (2007) rightly point out, the definition is reductionist as it leaves out important discussions on torture. Wisnewski views the definition and other legal definitions of torture as inadequate both on historical and philosophical grounds. On historical grounds, the “divergent” contexts in which torture has been deployed does not fall under a set definition. One example can be the case under study- The Khairlanji Murders in 2006. The event relate to the lynching of four members of a Dalit family in Maharashtra at a small Indian village of Khairlanji (Kherlanji), located in the Bhandara district of the state of Maharashtra. The events of Khairlanji unfolded in a manner which was aided by public authorities and then committed by individuals of the dominating caste. The police first arrested the twelve accused members of the Atilkar household only to be bailed out and released later (Teltumbde 2010, 99). The atrocity that later took place was through direct negligence of the state, but was finally committed by the caste Hindus of the village. Here, a definition that standardises torture stands inadequate. 

Einolf also argues that the standard definition of torture is impinged upon Western and modern laws of morality, and motives cannot account for a valuable historical study. Apart from historical grounds, on philosophical grounds too, this definition could become too inclusive . For instance, an agent of the state can be a school teacher who is punishing a child, thereby inflicting intentional pain on them which is not lawfully sanctioned. Even though this could have dire consequences, for Wisnewski, these examples are a far cry from torture committed by the police or the military. It can be argued that Wisnewski’s understanding of torture is too stringent and exclusionary but that is precisely his point. He wants to understand the severity of torture and its ontological uniqueness in the human world. For him, a focus on the ‘wrong-making’ features of the torture should be revised. Something makes torture wrong; it is the nature of the act that is usually misinterpreted according to him. 

In analysing ‘torture’, the first argument Wisnewski presents is against the idea of ‘pain’ as the central point of torture. Through the act of torture, pain is inflicted on the body in multiple ways. The body goes through multiple levels of pain for different reasons. The act of piercing can be a painful experience. But the difference between this pain and the pain experienced by a tortured victim is the lack of consent. Wisnewski explains how masochism and religion are activities where pain is literally ‘sought out’ to constitute a sacrificial act. But as he rightly points out, the act itself remains immoral (at least to societal standards). Shiite Muslims performing matam or lamentation during Muharram is one such sacrificial act. The pain in this act of mourning is sought-out yet it does not make the act itself justifiable in other contexts. It is the logic of lamenting the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali that makes it consensual, but the very act remains that of self-harm. 

The consent given by the masochist to the torturer in these acts does not change the very nature of the acts themselves, it must remain a taboo. This makes a complex situation of different kinds of pain based on how one perceives that pain. In the examples cited by Wisnewski, pain becomes an event of interpretation which leads him to use the word ‘suffering’ instead of pain. Suffering gives the connotation of ‘un-wilfulness’ of the activity making it a more appropriate candidate for being the central point for torture. Wisnewski’s movement from pain to suffering reflects his ontological displacement from the phenomenological one. In other words, when Sara Ahmed (2004) discusses pain, there is a critical phenomenological focus on it. For her, pain must be understood in its ‘affectiveness’ and not in its effect. The affect of pain is connected to the formation of the Freudian ego where the very understanding of the self is achieved through negative impressions from outside the body. Arguably,  pain then becomes a necessary sensation of one’s life which is always experienced in relation to something else; it can be wilful or un-wilful. This necessity of pain in one’s life is also pronounced by Wisnewski, and it is for this reason he found it inadequate for torture to be defined through pain. 

After debunking the arguments for pain, Wisnewski problematises the argument of autonomy which has already been discussed to some extent in the arena of pain. He pushes the argument that considering torture’s wrong-making core to be a violation of autonomy is inadequate as the autonomy of a human within the state is always hindered at different levels. He gives the example of imprisonment and questions the reader if they can conflate torture and imprisonment. Here, the author is not situating that imprisonment cannot entail torture, but the act of torture does not necessarily entail imprisonment or a disregard for an individual’s autonomy. Also, imprisonment is not as vehemently opposed to torture in the international legal discourse. 

If pain and autonomy both fall short of constituting the wrongness of torture, then what stands at the centre of the experience? For Wisnewski, it is the violation of agency that makes torture, torture. Now, the difference between agency and autonomy is that agency is formed by sociocultural elements while autonomy is an individualistic paradigm. The word “dismantle” is being used by Wisnewski (Wisnewski 2010, 64). The pain that is inflicted for the very ‘intention’ to utterly annihilate someone’s agency lies at the core of torture. Pain takes over the subject. Such pain is etched onto the body and the psyche of the victim through taking away things that make someone human, i.e., culture. The same “artifacts of culture” that make the victim a subject in their surroundings, are used to destroy the imagined world of the victim. The process is marked by the absolute destruction of language comprehension as well. These kinds of effects render the victim languageless and traumatised even after they have survived the process. Their context is taken away from them by the torturer. Only through a repetitive, “over-representation” of this event can the victim then re-imagine their world (Ahmed 2004, 22). 

This sums up the focal point of torture for Wisnewski. Beyond this ontological approach, torture can also be understood from the perspective of the persistence of abhorrent crimes in civilised society; for example, Hilary Neroni’s account of torture that places the conversation in rather unconventional yet important waters. Her book, The Subject of Torture (2014), attempts to present a rationale for the obsessive representations of torture in movies and television in the case of America. Neroni’s discussion of torture also starts with Abu Ghraib but takes an interesting turn when she points out the overtly sexual nature of the torture inflicted upon the victims. 

The argument is rather worrying but not shocking. The sexual enjoyment that is the main feature of disgust in the Abu Ghraib photographs brings into question the legitimacy of torture even for the torturer. Joanna Bourke (2004) was one of the first scholars who pointed out the pornographic nature of these photographs and theorised that the photos have a ‘carnivalesque’ essence to them. This brings back the question of the legal definition of torture given by the UN or even the Red Cross–the more individualistic definition in comparison to the earlier cited UN variation. Both of these definitions mention no instance of sexual pleasure or even enjoyment involved in the act of torture. Neroni further notes how Wisnewski started the conversation by pointing out that torture defined by the likes of Marques de Sade could never be included in the legal definition of torture. 

The point being made is that pleasure in inflicting pain renders torture ineffectual. The efficiency of torture depends upon a hidden truth that can be brought out in the open through inflicting pain on the body. This undermines the mind of the victim completely, as the truth lies in the body alone. Neroni states that the emergence and exaggeration of the body over the mind argument arose as a reaction to Cartesian dualism and German Idealism. For her, this is a particular failure brought out by theories of biopolitics that privilege the body above the mind (Neroni 2014, 11) and that is why she deems psychoanalysis to be a better and more adept theory to deal with it. 

Through psychoanalysis, the reason to abandon torture takes a more utilitarian stance than a moralistic one. The rationale to justify torture sediments at the belief that after extreme pain is delivered to the tortured victim now reduced to a body, they will reveal priori unknown truth. But the tortured subject is not a vessel of truth trying to survive, but a desiring subject that will not keep their survival as a priority. Therefore, the logic collapses and the information procured from this subject cannot be trusted. The very rationale for dehumanising the subject is a fantasy at best, that is always rendered impossible. 

Psychoanalysis is a form of collision between the mind and the body. Neither of them is lesser. The desired subject is irreducible to mind or body Most of the media representations (mainly of military torture in cinema) of torture depict how it leads to the ultimate solution to a crisis, but on the other hand, psychoanalysis suggests that in reality torture is highly inefficient. If the information, truth and violence equation is not the conclusive goal of torture then what is? Neroni argues that all torture became was a tool of deterrence, a symbol of power. 

Taking into consideration arguments given by Wisnewski and Neroni, it has to be stated that torture has to be understood and ontologised very differently than what the current legal language allows. From being connected to Sade’s work to an increase in torture porn cinema in Hollywood from the early 2000s to 2010s where Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and James Wan’s Saw (2004) emerged as important names, torture has an inherent sexual angle to it. The voyeuristic photographs of Abu Ghraib confirm this conclusion. 

Contextualising Torture as an ‘Atrocity’

Background and Data

In the case of international law, public authorities are the focus of concern when it comes to torture. In a context of a country, a country-specific approach is needed to understand the stance of the said country on torture. In the case of India, there exists no law within the jurisdiction that supports legislation uniquely designed to deal with torture. Be it the pending Prevention of Torture Bill 2017 or India’s reluctance  to ratify the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the stance has been that of ambiguity and a consistent lack of substance (Nair 2022). However, an absence in the legislative body does not rule out the existence of torture in India. In fact, in 1855 the British government compiled a report of custodial torture being deployed by the East India Company native officers. The colonial report was called the Torture Commission Report of 1855, commissioned by the Madras government. But the problem is that it is the last of its kind. Upendra Baxi looking at the report given by Amnesty International in 1973 commented that “custodial violence or torture is an integral part of police operations in India” (Bhuwania 2009, 8). 

However, the scholarship surrounding torture in India encapsulates the same lacuna the UN definition also presented: it only focused itself on public authorities and state agents. The socio-cultural paradigm of India suffers from another larger systemic evil which is the caste system. Parthasarathi Muthukkaruppan (2017) argued that the relationship of caste is constantly reproduced by three kinds of violence: (a) large-scale visible violence, (b) structural violence, and (c) symbolic violence. Any understanding of caste, according to him, is inadequate without theorising violence, as caste and violence both share the structural model of relationship . Therefore, in the Indian context, the case of atrocities against the Dalits and Scheduled Tribes is, by and large, one of the most important issues to be discussed to understand socially sanctioned torture. The umbrella term ‘atrocity’ usually encapsulates quite a lot of heinous crimes including rape, arson, mass murder and gang rape. The concept of ‘torture’ in its legally defined understanding cannot be found in the laws against atrocities.  It is also noticeable that the word ‘atrocity’ has to be included directly in the law itself to understand and take into account the range of extremely violent crimes committed against the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. 

In 1955, the Indian Government amended the Untouchability (Offences) Act, later renamed Protection of Civil Rights (PCR) Act in 1976 ;While renaming made the Act (1976) more inclusive of encompassing the citizens,  a hike in atrocities against SCs and STs was observed . To understand the severity of this flaring up, Krishnan mentions a total of 30 incidents that happened from 1968 to 2006 (Krishanan 2009, 12-14). All of these incidents are atrocities and involve groups of victims and perpetrators instead of any one individual. From this sudden increase in the number of atrocities, one can assume it had something to do with the PCR Act (1976). An argument can be made that through PCR and land reforms, Dalits and STs considered themselves as equal citizens of India. The ‘re-humanisation’ of a class of people who were severely ‘dehumanised’ for centuries and the existence of thinkers like Dr B.R. Ambedkar was met with India-wide resistance from the upper castes. Hence, the hike in strategic atrocities being committed against the Dalit community led to the formation of the Prevention of Atrocity (PoA) Act in 1989 which was finally implemented in 1995. 

The act was particularly devised to monitor caste violence on SCs and STs but after three decades of implementation, the statistics are rather saddening. G. C. Pal (2020) notes that from 1995 to 2015 annual average of crimes noted against SCs and STs was 31,939 out of which the annual average for atrocities was 12,928. So, 40% of total crimes that have been committed against SCs and STs can be deemed as atrocities under the PoA Act (1989). Another worrying factor is the growth rate of PoA identifiable crimes, which is 5.2% . With such huge numbers, the implementation of PoA Act (1989) remains a flawed cog in the wheel. A whopping 80% of cases remain pending in trial courts, and the special courts under the PoA do very little to improve these numbers. Krishnan, back in 2009, also noted that of total cases that have been successfully reported, only 1-2% result in actual acquittal. There is an obscene difference between the cases that are registered and the ones that are convicted. This difference creates another problem for PoAAct (1989), where most of the cases are not seen through the lens of discrimination or incompetence by police personnel but through the casteist lens of ‘misusing’ the law. Although this argument does not stand as an official FIR under the PoA Act (1989), this leads to social consequences of which Khairlanji is a potent example. 

These numbers also get highly gendered as well. Given the crucial nature of sexualised violence in the case of Dalit women, it is indeed dire to disaggregate the data on gender lines. Pal inquired about the facts provided by All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (AIDMAM) -NCDHR in 2018 where he found that ‘composite violence’ is inflicted on Dalit women. The recent fact sheet published by the organisation shows worrying details. Out of the 50,879 cases registered under PoA Act (1989) in 2021, 15,855 are alone on women and minor girls (AIDMAM-NCDHR 2022). A very noticeable hike of 11.5% is observed from 2020 in atrocities specifically against Dalit women. Another growth rate observed is in rape charges which is 14.7% since 2020. The data itself shows the gendered nature of the atrocities. The rate of acquittal also remains the same from 2020-2021. Out of 17,322, only 592 cases ended up in acquittal. A shocking 94.5% remains pending. 

In all of these accounts what is visibly lacking is the quantified account of human life. Any and every case of atrocity is not the same. The individual differences and the degrees of brutality these cases have, can never be understood merely through a quantitative account. It is maybe this particular reason that Krishnan mislabels Khairlanji as a case of atrocity occurring in the wake of land disputes and not Dalits asserting their presence. A qualitative analysis can show otherwise. 

The Khairlanji Murders: A Case Study

As has been established, torture is not criminalised in law as a separate or special offence in Indian laws. Within the PoA Act (1989), atrocities cover a range of crimes committed against the Scheduled Castes but the word ‘torture’ appears nowhere. The Khairlanji incident of 2006 saw different heinous atrocities, but none of them could be named torture as it is not recognised by the state. This makes the Khairlaji incident  partly a state-sponsored crime, for not recognising torture, even though the real perpetrators were the Atilkars. The acts of violence at Khairlanji were atrocious in their appearance, yet they were torturous in their function. One can argue that this absence is not accidental but rather a repressed reality. If the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita criminalises torture (be it state-sponsored or non-state-sponsored), it runs the risk of coming under scrutiny on an international level. Not all atrocities can be deemed as torturous, but the ones that are outrightly sadistic, and are specially drawn out to make a statement, should be legalised as torture. Albeit this is necessary, a complete dependence on international legal definitions of torture could only lead to problems already discussed in the essay. Therefore, at this juncture, a qualitative analysis of the Khairlanji Murders could provide an initial step towards a ‘glocal’ understanding of caste-based torture. 

Anand Teltumbde’s seminal work, The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid (2010) discusses the horrifying atrocity that took place in Khairlanji in 2006. Given the year in which it took place, Teltumbde was almost forced to theorise or enquire about the persistence of caste in Indian society. Unlike earlier accounts of atrocities, Teltumbde also discussed the gradual decline of Dalit movements during the 1970s-80s. For him, this was a crucial reason for the atrocities to rise. But a significant detail that Teltumbde identifies is that crimes which were the norm before acts like PoA (1989) were now criminalised. A part of the upper castes’ culture was taken away from them, and a ‘loss’ of an essential fundamental right was observed. Indeed, only after Dalits resisted in rural areas which was by and large an assertion of equality, the reason to commit atrocities changed altogether—vengeance became central. Here, the line between torture and atrocities is again blurred as an assertion of symbolic power through violence becomes the centre point of the crime. Teltumbde himself asserts multiple times that torture was deployed as a means of sending a message to the Bhotmange family, whose members were murdered. 

The event of Khairlanji is also unique because it was the Shudras or the OBCs who committed the atrocity. Due to the land reforms that were established after Independence, the peasant classes who belonged to the Shudra fold became overwhelmingly the landowning class (Krishnan 2009, 8; Teltumbde 2010, 46). As superficial as it is, for Teltumbde and Krishnan this is a shift from the religious and traditional system of the varna folds. This structural change in class formations gave the governmentally classified Backward Classes social mobilisation. As already stated, the post-1960s is the marker of the rise in Dalit atrocities, but this also marks the rise of Backward Classes and their direct involvement in committing caste atrocities. A village with 787 inhabitants out of which 720 were from the OBC community. Merely three Dalit families existed in the village out of which Bhotmange was one. The importance of these figures explains an uneasy absence of Brahmins or Kshatriyas who are perceived as the main propagators of casteist violence. Teltumbde questions this perception as that which sees Brahminism confined to the Brahmin. Here, the grasp of the Brahmanical instead of the Brahmin is visible. 

Structural violence is a structural condition by which everything appears normal and peaceful. But the condition is such that crimination, exclusion, unwanted inclusion, degradation and humiliation are possibilities written into the very structure of the condition. The way violence works in the structure is subtle and is like an invisible grid. The symbolic violence that works and makes the structure appear normal and legitimate through the language, representation and discourses constitute the symbol field (Muthukkaruppan 2017).

Arguably then, the act of the Atilkar households is being justified by the very structure of the caste system. Structural violence normalises discrimination in the caste relationship. In India, no outright justification is needed to create legally ostracised individuals or communities on whom torture is justified, as Dalits within the caste system already hold the place of ‘outcastes’.  The unholy truth of Indian society (be it judiciary or socio-cultural) is that it is unable to detach itself from the caste system and its pride due to this systemic structure functioning through symbolic prowess. Traditionally, no matter how low shudras are in the varna fold, they are still superior to Dalits. Politically, the newly acquired social class of landowners would still benefit from the peasant classes which now consisted mainly of Dalits and sometimes forcibly of STs. It was indeed this superiority that led to the increase of disputes between the Bhotmange and the Atilkar households. 

The Bhotmanges themselves were a well-off family in the sense that they were not starving daily. Bhaiyalal and Surekha Bhotmange had three children between them. Surekha was an “archetypal Ambedkarite woman”, a woman who would not back down against the OBCs and replied to them with equivalent anger. Apart from this family, Surekha’s cousins Siddharth Gajbhiye and Rajendra Gajbhiye also bore reasons of hatred towards them. The resistance Surekha showed, the support Bhaiyalal and the Gajbhiye brothers lent her and the Sisyphean quest to educate their children, presents a different story than just ‘land dispute’. If one goes with the categories Krishnan marked, this was a case of Dalits asserting their presence. As suggested by Teltumbde, with the temporal mark of 1977, it can be argued that almost every case of atrocity was that of vengeance against the rising assertion of the Dalit identity. 

But the problem with the situation is that the atrocity itself bore some peculiar markers that fall under the paradigm of torture. Even before the heinous acts of  torture, the constant berating of the Bhotmanges and the assault on Siddharth Gajbhiye can be read as moments of psychological torture on the family. But as Wisnewski has written, such distinctions are only for those who want to justify torture. As mentioned above, the triggering event according to Teltumbde  was the arrest of 12 out of the 15 accused for the attack on Siddharth orchestrated by the OBCs of the village. This arrest itself was a ‘farce’ due to its charges that did not include PoA, 1989 but also because of the position the accused enjoyed in the village. 

The tone of the sadism in the Khairlanji starts from the very beginning. Teltumbde writes how the perpetrators arrived on the land of the Bhotmanges with tractors and a big crowd, “drunk” and in a “celebratory mood”. Bourke’s claim of the carnivalesque essence of torture is visible here. A meeting also ensued before the attack itself; it was carefully strategised. If one goes with Neroni and Wisnewski’s understanding of torture, the point of hidden truth in the body becomes crucial. It is established earlier that the extreme violence that PoA, 1989  legally defines as an atrocity saw a rise only after particular laws were implemented and symbols of emancipation like Ambedkar and reservation in the public sector appeared. The “dialectic relationship” of caste depends upon the positioning of the untouchable as the subject that is inherently and systemically bound to exist outside the society. This dialectical relationship is disturbed by the implementation of laws that inculcate the untouchable into the boundaries of civilised society. Thus, what is visible is the breaking of this relationship and inevitably undermining the Truth of the varna. A Truth undermined is a Truth belied. The Bhotmanges did not hide any truth but they did defy the truth of the Brahmin. Thus, the horrors of the event itself can be interpreted as justifying a truth, forcefully retelling the truth of the society. 

This excursion of truth is also met with a new level of sadistic and sexualised format. Women belonging to the OBCs community were active members in the crime where they stripped Surekha, the 51 year matriarch and the 17 year old daughter Priyanka. After that Priyanka was taken in the shed nearby to be raped. It is important to note how the actual act of punishment takes place in the shed, an area hidden from the major mob. Apart from the raping of the women, what stands specifically horrifying detail is incest invocation. Sudhir and Roshan were “ordered” to rape their mother and sister. The heights of scopophilia and incest voyeurism cross paths with absolute evil. When the teenage boys refused, their genitals were mutilated. The crime revolved around the pleasure of the torturer while the spectators became active participants through voyeurism. Wisnewski’s postulation that the destruction of agency lies at the centre of torture stands true as well. The Bhotmanges were attacked for their agency itself. The place of torture also becomes important in this case. It happened in the same land they were fighting for against the Atilkars. The space of a home plays an important role in being a subject. A complete annihilation is visible during the crime. The relationships of kinship between Surekha, Priyanka, Sudhir and Roshan were also destroyed by the act of rape and then the order to commit incest. What makes a mother, a mother as such was mutilated. In other words, the shift from a woman to a mother entails complex relational shifts to certain cultural phenomena. The ideological paradigms and belief systems with this shift also change. Hence, a mother is ideologically positioned as a mother. This pragmatic and cultural context was destroyed through the logic of torture. Her children were beaten, thrashed, and raped in front of her. She was forcibly made a witness to the torture. Another person whose agency was annihilated was Bhaiyalal, who perceived and saw the attack but could not help his family. Given that he is the conventional patriarchal head of his family, he had to bear a form of emasculation through this act.

Khairlanji stands as the ugly epitome of torture and the sexual pleasure of the torturer. Reports even showed acts of necrophilia after the crime was committed signifying an effort to perpetuate torture even after they died. As Wisnewski writes, “Death is certainly a great harm, but it is not a harm that continues to be suffered by the person who dies” (2010, 66). 

Conclusion

The problem with torture is double-edged. It makes the human consciousness disgusted and simultaneously excited. This problem starts to manifest itself in the legal language where authorities perpetually want to shun the central agency-destroying core and the sexual pleasure intertwined within the act of torture, thereby the disgust which is legally repressed makes a violent and overt presence. Even in Khairlanji through multiple postmortems, the authorities did not file Section 376, the penal code for rape. The very nature of society that justifies and promotes such heinous crimes ends up being denied. A qualitative take on torture is needed to understand the ideology that guides it. The dehumanisation of the subject before, during and after the act of torture unfolds through ugly fronts that human rights organisations have to face. Thus, the definitions of crime, sin and justice are in need to be deconstructed through a discourse that understands torture for what it is—a sanctioned destruction of agency. 

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. 

AIDMAM-NCDHR. The Crime Against Dalit Women and Minor Girls in India: An Analysis of the National Crime Records Bureau Data 2021, All India Dalit Women Right Forum, 2022. http://aidmam-ncdhr.org/dalit-woman-rise-report. 

Amnesty International. Stories of Torture in the 21st Century, 26 June 2003. www.amnesty.org/ar/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/pol300052003en.pdf. 

Bhuwania, Anuj. “‘Very Wicked Children’: ‘Indian Torture’ and the Madras Torture Commission Report of 1855”, SUR-International Journal of Human Rights, no. 10 (June 2009): 6-27.  www.sur.conectas.org/en/very-wicked-children/. 

Bourke, Joanna. “Torture as Pornography”, Guardian.  May 7, 2004. www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/07/gender.uk. 

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009. 

Einolf, Christopher J. “The Fall and Rise of Torture: A Comparative and Historical Analysis”, Sociological Theory 25, no. 2 (June 2007): 101-121. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2007.00300.x. 

Krishnan, P.S. “Atrocities Against Dalits: Retrospect and Prospect”, Combat Law 8, No. 5&6 (2009): 6-19. 

Muthukkaruppan, Parthasarathi. “Critique of Caste Violence: Explorations in Theory.” Social Scientist 45, no. 1/2, (2017): 49–71. www.jstor.org/stable/26380329.

Nair, Ravi. “India’s Continued Refusal to Ratify U.N. Convention Against Torture Lacks Substance”, The Leaflet, November 21, 2022. www.theleaflet.in/indias-continued-refusal-to-ratify-u-n-convention-against-torture-lacks-substance/. 

Neroni, Hilary. The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film. Columbia University Press, 2015. 

Pal, G.C. “Caste and Consequences: Looking through the Lens of Violence”, Caste: A Global Journal of Social Exclusion 1, no. 1,  (February 2020):  95-100.  www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48644566. 

Teltumbde, Anand. The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid. Zed Books, 2010. 

United Nations, General Assembly. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Resolution 39/46.  New York, NY: UN Headquarters, 1984.  https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/cat.pdf. 

Wisnewski, J. Jeremy. Understanding Torture. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.