CHAPTER XXXI
WRONGDOING IN INDIA
The High Courts. The petty courts. Disappearance of the school clock. Methods of Indian police; indignation of the villagers; conduct of the police complained of; an inquiry instituted; unsatisfactory result. Police torture leads to concealment of crime. Detection of crime difficult in India. Thieving. Serious moral wrongs. Successful concealment.
In the Indian High Courts justice is administered with extreme care, and sentences are pronounced with a full sense of responsibility and with complete impartiality, so far as it is possible to come at the truth where a large measure of false evidence is almost sure to have place in every case. Indians who have been raised to important judicial positions have shown themselves fully competent to discharge the duties of their office rightly, and have shown much legal sagacity, together with the other special qualifications which go to make a good judge.
But when you descend to the petty courts, the state of things is less satisfactory. When everything is in the hands of a lower grade of Indian officials, and European supervision is necessarily of the slightest, influence and money and favour and luck have much to do with the chances for or against the prisoner. In the tracking of culprits and the gathering of evidence, and in all the preparatory work in which police are engaged, it is to be feared that unlawful methods are still practised, especially in the more remote country districts. Some of the European police do not seem to take much trouble to stamp out these abuses.
We had an opportunity of seeing something of the ways in which Indian police try to discover an offender, after the disappearance one night of the clock from the village Mission day-school. We informed the Patel, or headman, of our loss, which was the correct procedure. He, at leisure, held a sort of court of inquiry in the verandah of the Mission bungalow; but as nothing transpired he, again at leisure, reported the matter to the city police, and two men in plain clothes were sent to make preliminary inquiries. Not being able to ascertain anything definite, they began to put in practise their own methods of extracting evidence. They caned a suspected boy in order to try and get him to confess, and also one of his companions who they supposed might know something about it. I myself saw the marks of the cane on the boys. The punishment would not have been excessive supposing they had been convicted of the offence. The police were also said to have beaten a labouring man in order to extort a confession, because there was a rumour that the boys had given the clock to him.
The village, usually friendly and easygoing, began to get much exercised over these attentions of the police. The Patel, a foolish and dissipated young man, found his liberty seriously curtailed by having frequently to attend the City Police Court to report progress. The village Mahars, or low-caste men, are liable to be called upon amongst their other duties to serve as village constables. These men were getting tired of having to act as escort to the boys and others, who were being summoned daily to the court, often being kept waiting there for the whole day. A large deputation of villagers arrived at the Mission bungalow to protest, and my assurances that none of these proceedings arose from any promptings of mine were only partially believed.
We were left in peace for a week or so, and I hoped that the matter was at an end. But the police woke up again, and set upon Bhau, the son of the Mission gardener, on the ground that he cleaned the school and thus had access to the clock. Bhau was not a particularly estimable character, but having helped to clean the school for many years, it did not seem likely that he should suddenly have taken it into his head to steal an old clock. But it is a disturbing feature of police inquiries in remote districts, that they feel that anything is better than to let the crime pass into the category of offences the perpetrators of which have not been discovered.