Just Violence, Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police by Rachel Wahl (review)

When considering the justifications for local police violence or the lack thereof, several questions come to mind. Can torture or other forms of extrajudicial violence be illegal yet legitimate in the state agents' eyes? Can and should we accept violators' claims that they are trying to live by a moral code? Is the motivation to use violence in the name of justice a proper justification for the right to use torture? And no less important: Is the struggle against torture and its many causes a contested act or a universal moral ideal? These questions have yet to be systematically addressed at the local level, where most violations take place, even as there is a general consensus among scholars and international legal bodies that freedom from torture is a universally recognized human right.

In a rich and counterintuitive book that challenges conventional wisdom, Rachel Wahl provides a systematic framework to bridge the divide between human rights groups and the police in India over how they understand violence and why the police—and at times the public—tend to view torture as a necessary means of upholding security and justice. Wahl's fieldwork in North India provides a relevant and valuable context within which to address these questions. Just Violence, Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police begins with a narrative in which the police encounter a man (Ajay) who has reported that his wife (Namita) has gone missing. The police apparently resorted to torture against Ajay to draw out confessions about the missing wife. The motives for such torture—however debatable they may be—are described to range from extracting bribes to increasing their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, the latter indicating that responding to the wife's family was the main reason why torture was used as a tool of implementing justice.¹

Wahl follows a systematic—if not a well-trodden—path in making the case that by looking at torture and human rights from the perspective of perpetrators, we gain the key to understanding the police officers' beliefs and the diversity of ethical frameworks circulating on both the local and international levels.² It is thus crucial to understand how police make sense of their violence and how they respond to education and human rights activism to prevent torture. The author underscores the need to explore the reasons police believe it is appropriate and right to use violence. To tackle this challenge, the book points to the lack of consideration of institutional and ideational contexts that, in this case, undermine the success of education and other efforts to promote human rights protections.³ Failure to take into account the local and specific contexts in which officers work leaves little room for researchers and teachers to develop ways to influence the adoption of such violence.⁴

Wahl conducted 119 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eighty-three people, including law enforcement officers, human rights activists and educators, police reform experts, the National Human Rights Commission officials, and several experts from the Bureau of Police Research and Development in New Delhi.⁵ One of the key findings emerging from these interviews is that the vast majority of these police officers consider torture integral to the preservation of a just society. As such, torture is seen as morally incidental, particularly given the weaknesses in material conditions as well as defective political and legal systems that are pervasive in India.⁶ This simply means that these officers' support of torture demonstrates that they may have less faith in human rights concepts, either for their own professional advancement or the lack of applicability of such universal norms in their local communities.

As to why such flaws exist in the Indian police forces, Wahl argues that, although rampant corruption in the system can be explained in several ways, one key explanation stands out: that policing in India is under the control of...