Police Abuses in India Condemned : Human rights: A New Delhi prisoner’s death is the latest in a pattern assailed by Amnesty International.

Savinder Singh, a 30-year-old Indian businessman, was undergoing what Indian police call “tactical interrogation” last month when he suddenly “jumped out” a sixth-floor window of a New Delhi police station.

That’s the police version.

His lawyer and his two brothers tell a different story. The brothers, arrested along with Savinder for alleged illegal possession of foreign currency, were in an adjacent room during the Feb. 28 interrogation, they said in court this week. Savinder was beaten into near unconsciousness for several hours, they said. Then, just after midnight, they heard him scream.

“It is simple,” attorney K. K. Luthra concluded Tuesday. “Probably he slipped out of their hands while they were hanging him outside the window to get a confession. Unconscious men do not jump out of sixth-floor windows.”

If the case before the Indian Supreme Court this week has a familiar ring, it’s hardly a coincidence. The apparent killing of Savinder Singh is just the latest in a litany of cases of police torture, abuse and rape, a record that Amnesty International singled out Tuesday in a blistering 195-page report released in London.

“Torturing suspects has become part of the police’s daily routine throughout India, where hundreds if not thousands of people have died from beatings in recent years, and women are regularly raped in jail cells,” the Amnesty International report asserts.

The report’s cover letter, by the human rights group’s secretary general, Ian Martin, further alleged “a pattern of persistent abuse in the administration of justice in India,” which governments and ruling parties have failed to curb.

The report listed the names of 415 Indian men, women and children tortured, killed or raped while in police custody since 1985 and the details of their cases.

It recounted the cases of women such as Archana Guha, who was arrested and tortured in 1974, and left paralyzed as a result. Despite a prolonged court battle, she has failed to bring the guilty policemen to justice, it said.

It alleged that many other victims have been suspended from ceilings in jail cells, beaten unconscious, given electric shocks, crushed with heavy rollers and stabbed with sharp instruments-- all part of “tactical interrogations” to extract confessions.

“The rape of women by police is commonplace throughout the country, particularly in areas of armed insurgency,” it added.

“Yet at the highest political level, successive governments have flatly denied that torture takes place, much less done anything to stop it.”

Anticipating a political backlash to the report from New Delhi, which has grown so sensitive to criticism from human rights organizations through the years that it has not permitted the agency direct access to the country since 1978, Secretary General Martin attempted a preemptive strike. In a letter sent to 5,000 influential people in India along with an advance copy of the report, Martin acknowledged that the Indian government “may describe (the report) as anti-Indian. . . .”

“It is not,” he argued in the letter. “It criticizes practices that are unconstitutional in India itself. Nevertheless, some may dismiss the report out of hand or suggest that Amnesty International’s motives are hostile to India. . . Others may say that Amnesty International is interfering in the internal affairs of India. The fact is that human rights are as much a global as a national concern. India recognized this in 1979 when it became a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

The Indian government did indeed react Tuesday, charging that the agency had “launched an anti-India campaign” with the report’s release. India’s deputy high commissioner to Britain told the semi-independent news agency United News of India that Amnesty International had failed to give the Indian government sufficient time to reply to the charges.

Citing India’s problems with terrorism and its status as “the world’s largest democracy,” K. V. Rajan said he was “disappointed as well as concerned” with the scathing tone of the allegations.

In a statement issued with the report, Martin did give credit to India’s democratic traditions.

“India is an open country with a vigorous press and a strong judiciary, which has delivered some highly creative judgments to protect fundamental rights,” he declared. “Yet even these and other Indian institutions with substantive powers to safeguard the rights of India’s citizens have failed to provide effective protection to the hundreds, if not thousands of Indian citizens who have died after torture and ill-treatment.

“Time and again, government officials have refused to acknowledge that the problem exists. . . . We believe the government must act urgently to create an effective institutional framework to prevent torture and related abuses,” Martin said.

Attorney Luthra thinks so, too. He is among the handful of Indian lawyers who handle police-torture cases.

“The point is, the laws are there on the books,” Luthra said, “but these lower courts are afraid of giving the relief. They are afraid of police; they are afraid of terrorists.

“But this crude detection method, which is being done routinely, this is the easy way--the old third-degree method. And it’s high time for it to stop.”