Custodial Violence and the Protection of Human Rights in Police Custody: a Socio-Legal Study with Special Reference to Moradabad and Rampur Districts of Uttar Pradesh

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Published: Oct 19, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.66669/cineforum.v66iS6.1938
Keywords:
custodial violence, police custody; Article 21, D.K. Basu guidelines, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, Convention against Torture, Moradabad, Rampur

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Munendra Pal Singh
Amit Verma

Abstract

A person in police custody is wholly in the hands of the State, and it is here that the promise of Article 21 of the Constitution of India is most often broken. This paper studies custodial violence as a socio-legal problem, with special reference to the Moradabad and Rampur districts of western Uttar Pradesh. It combines a doctrinal reading of the international, constitutional and statutory framework with theories of police subculture, power, social exclusion and intersectionality. It follows the Supreme Court's response from Sunil Batra (1978) and Nilabati Behera (1993) through D.K. Basu (1997) to Paramvir Singh Saini (2020) and Prabir Purkayastha (2024), and maps the arrest and custody safeguards of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 onto the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Uttar Pradesh reported more custodial deaths than any other state in 2020-21 and 2021-22, yet no published dataset breaks these deaths down by district. The paper argues that India's difficulty lies less in a shortage of rules than in their weak enforcement. There is still no separate law against torture, the Convention against Torture remains unratified, and the prosecution of police officers depends on official sanction and on records kept by the police themselves. The paper ends with a district-level research design and with recommendations that include a torture law, active district oversight of CCTV in police stations, and regular publication of custody data.

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How to Cite
Singh, M. P., & Verma, A. (2026). Custodial Violence and the Protection of Human Rights in Police Custody: a Socio-Legal Study with Special Reference to Moradabad and Rampur Districts of Uttar Pradesh. CINEFORUM, 66(S6), 980–990. https://doi.org/10.66669/cineforum.v66iS6.1938
Issue
Vol. 66 No. S6 (2026)
Section
Original Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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