This small book contributes far more to the literature on human rights than the tons of academic writings that unfortunately crowd our libraries. Most of those books are produced in countries quite unlike India, where this story is set. As such, they are relevant to countries where police officers generally observe discipline, where most criminal investigations are competently managed, where the judiciary as a whole is uncorrupted, and where politicians are not publicly perceived as sheer frauds.

From the tears of a father’s pen, Professor Eachara Varier tells of another reality. His son’s disappearance draws from him this eloquent, moving and remarkable statement on cruelty, courage, and enduring hope. His story is from India, but it is the story of millions throughout Asia, and in many other parts of the world.

The global human rights community must hear this story. Unfortunately, at this moment in history much of that community tries to avoid getting too close to the daily realities faced by the overwhelming majority of people in the world, preferring instead to dwell in academic works on human rights, which also conveniently avoid reality. 

Professor Varier describes his desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to get his son out of the temporary police camp where he is taken one morning for no reason. Camps such as this exist in many countries even now. These are places where the rules of life and death are very different to the rest of the world. They are places where relatively low-ranked officers have absolute power to decide who to arrest, how to arrest them, how to torture them, when to kill them, and how to dispose of their dead bodies. Above them are other persons—senior police officers, politicians and bureaucrats—who must hide the truth from the families of victims and wider society. A bond of complicity thereby forms between the actual perpetrators and other authorities, a bond so strong that in this story it did not break even in cases where the father knew many of the government officials personally.

This is not a story of some event from history; it is a story of today’s India, today’s Asia. Across the region, huge numbers of innocent people suffer the cruelest forms of torture and death in custody, and thousands are forcibly disappeared. Most victims do not have a father as educated and vocal as the boy remembered in this book. His story is also the story of the thousands of others whose pain and suffering have never been made public.

In India, human rights abuses by the police are set to increase dramatically. A body known as the Malimath Committee has recently suggested reforms to the criminal justice system that will create conditions even worse than those described in this book. These reforms, if realised, will remove the basic legal defences available to an accused person. They will permit torture, custodial death and disappearance to occur anywhere, anytime. Proper redress will no longer be available through the courts, which will themselves become places merely for bargaining, rife with corruption.  

This is a story for our times. It should be read carefully by anyone concerned about the real meaning of human rights. It should be on the reading list of every human rights and democracy education programme. This father deserves to be heard. We will all be better off if we learn something from his bitter and deeply moving experiences.

Basil Fernando,

Hong Kong,

April 2004