Judicial corporal punishment under the formal criminal law, once widespread in India under British rule, is thought to have been abolished in the mid-1950s. However, the law still tolerates tribal or feudal CP under local "traditional justice systems". But we have so far found no evidence that it allows the police to administer punishment of their own volition, which is what appears to be happening in these two video clips.

CLIP 1 OF 2

This 2-minute news item from Times Now TV, an India-wide cable news channel (23 January 2007), reports from Ferozabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

    Two teenage boys, Amit and Shyam, were made to take their trousers down by police. They were then tied to a tree and beaten on the seat of their underpants with a big split or double stick, described by the reporter as a baton.

    The officer responsible, Jagmohan Tripathi, when confronted later by journalists, denied all knowledge of it, despite the fact that he had been caught on film administering the illegal punishment.

    The youths had been accused of kidnapping, but apparently the charges had not been brought to court.

HERE IS THE CLIP:

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CLIP 2 OF 2

This scene was previously misclassified under Pakistan. Apologies for the error. In fact it is from a police station in Bhogpur in Jalandhar district, in the part of Punjab (East Punjab) that ended up in India in 1947.

    There is no sound. The culprit keeps his trousers on. The contents of his back pockets are emptied first. A policeman in uniform holds him face down on the floor while a colleague in civilian dress administers the special leather strap across the seat, four strokes from one side and then four strokes from the other. The strap has a wooden handle.

    A TV news programme (India Today, 28 Oct 2010) which showed (an inferior version of) this silent clip described the event as "a shocking case of police torture" and said that an investigation had been ordered. The recipient is described as a youth charged with fraud and cheating, from whom the police wished to extract a confession. See the slightly hysterical TV coverage at this external link.

    Note the modus operandi, involving the use of a leather "patta" held in both hands and brought down vertically across the buttocks of a recipient lying flat on the ground. The fact that this is so similar to many police CP scenes in the Pakistan part of Punjab, but has not so far been noted in any other part of either Pakistan or India, raises the intriguing possibility that this specific practice, with its specially-designed implement, dates from British rule before 1947, when the whole region was a single entity known as Punjab Province, which had its own law and practices.

HERE IS THE CLIP: