What the ‘custodial death’ of a man from the Pardhi community says about India’s policing practices

July 14 was supposed to be Deva Pardhi’s wedding day. But hours before the ceremony, the 25-year-old was dead.

The police in Guna district of Madhya Pradesh, who had taken Pardhi and his uncle into custody that evening in connection with a case of theft, claimed that he had died of a heart attack.

According to the police, Pardhi said he was suffering from chest pain and was taken to a local hospital but since there was no doctor there, he was referred to the district hospital. Additional Superintendent of Police Maan Singh Thakur told The Hindu that a doctor treated Pardhi for 45 minutes but he died.

Pardhi’s family, however, has said he was tortured in custody. “The police hanged them upside down, tied a black cloth on their mouths and started beating them,” a family member told Scroll over the phone. A police investigation has been initiated and a postmortem is being conducted.

The Pardhi community to which Deva Pardhi is classified as a Denotified Tribe or a Vimukta Jati. In 1871, the Pardhis were among the tribes notified as “hereditary and habitual criminals” under the colonial-era Criminal Tribes Act. After Independence, the Indian government “denotified” these communities in 1952.

Pardhi’s death was just one among a long line of incidents of violence and brutality against members of the denotified tribes. , Despite the new legal classification, these communities continue to face criminalisation at the hands of a discriminatory criminal justice system.

Legal experts and activists Scroll spoke to said that with laws and policing replicating a colonial-era perspective as well as the lack of specialised legal safeguards, these marginalised groups continue to be targeted.

Continued criminalisation

Contemporary rules and laws continue to enable the persecution of denotified and nomadic tribes. For instance, though the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed, several states have adopted the Habitual Offenders’ Act, 1952, which prescribes registering and tracking someone convicted on multiple occasions within a specified time frame.

Similarly, Rule 411 of the Madhya Pradesh Prison Manual states that members of denotified tribes can be categorised as habitual offenders in jail at the discretion of the state government. The National Human Rights Commission as well as activists have called for the Habitual Offenders’ Act to be repealed.

The police have alleged that Deva Pardhi was accused in seven theft cases, according to The Hindu. But as legal experts pointed out, it reflects a broader pattern of these communities being targeted and criminalised.

For instance, a Pardhi man from Bilakhedi in Guna district told Scroll over the phone he had been falsely accused in two cases of theft, one in May 2023 in Delhi and the other in March 2024 in Kota in Rajasthan.

“The [Kota] police showed up saying that my brother was involved in a robbery,” the man said, adding that he was threatened and told to bring his brother to the police. “When I couldn’t do that, they put me in jail.” After spending three months in jail for each of the two cases, he still goes to the hearings.

Supreme Court lawyer Disha Wadekar said that the police play a role in branding denotified and nomadic tribes as “habitual offenders”. “What starts with charges for a petty offense of theft, ends up becoming a charge of rape, or even murder,” said Wadekar. “Tribal people are sent from one police station to another to be charged in a crime they did not commit where they are tortured for confession.”

In addition, the police continue to treat these communities with suspicion. Deepa Pawar, a Mumbai-based nomadic and denotified tribes activist from the Ghisadi community, said that whenever there is a theft in the neighbourhood, the police show up to question youngsters from the community.

Nikita Sonavane, advocate and Co-founder of Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project, said that members of denotified tribes are “often arrested on what are deemed to be petty offenses like theft”. “But these offenses are also borne out of criminalisation of certain kinds of livelihood and culture,” she said.

Laws often end up criminalising the traditional occupations of these communities – for instance hunting or possessing mahua liquor, which is primarily prepared and consumed by Adivasi communities.

Wadekar said that if the police cannot find the real perpetrators of a crime, they detail someone from the denotified tribes.

Advocate Nihalsing Rathod, from the Banjara community, said that members of the Vimukta communities are treated and brandished as “history-sheeters” by booking them in several cases.

A study conducted in 2014 and 2015 in some hamlets in the area of Maharashtra from which Rathod hailed found that at least three or four cases are registered against each member of every family, mostly of theft or trespass. This embroils them in a vicious cycle of litigation expenses, at times forcing them to commit unethical acts to pay their legal fees.

Sonavane said the extent of criminalisation is evident given how “the Pardhi community has to inform the police before getting together for a wedding”. “Because the idea is that if the Pardhis are congregating, they are doing so to commit a crime,” she said.

Custodial torture

In cases of custodial torture resulting in death, such as in Deva Pardhi’s case, legal experts said it is difficult to seek justice. According to Section 176(1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which has now been replaced by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, a magistrate is empowered to inquire into the cause of death when the reason for death in custody is unclear. This is in addition to the investigation by a police officer.

“The probe is being ordered against the police, which is being handled by the police to implicate the police,” said Wadekar. “If you look at it, there is little recourse available to the tribal people.”

Members of denotified communities also suffer because the categories under which they are classified vary across states and even districts.

For example, of the 52 districts in Madhya Pradesh, the Pardhi community is categorised as a Scheduled Caste in 18 districts, as a Scheduled Tribe in 17 districts and under the general category in 14 districts, according to a report by a group called Bhasha Research. Crucially, this leaves the denotified tribes out of ambit of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, which could have protected them from crimes they face because of their caste identity.

As Tasvir Parmar, an advocate from the Pardhi community, summed it up, “Even after getting educated, even after becoming a lawyer, we still feel scared of the police.”