2013 has been a good year for law related publications in India, with a clutch of high quality titles from some of the leading publishing houses in the country. Among these, Nitya Ramakrishnan’s In Custody: Law, Impunity and Prisoner Abuse in South Asia would count among the more significant ones.
The first thing about the book is the timing. Agreed it is never a bad time in South Asia for a book on custodial violence, extra-judicial custodial killings, and the impunity available to the police and the armed forces for such crimes. Yet, the fact that these issues have lately been kept on the boil owes to the efforts of a spectrum of actors in the region, most notably in the media and among human rights workers, who have prevented them from receding from public memory.In India, for instance, despite thousands of regularly recurring cases of custodial deaths and torture it is important that at least a few of those cases like Chongkham Sanjit in Manipur, Soni Sori in Chhattisgarh, Ishrat Jahan in Gujarat, Y.S. Sachan in Uttar Pradesh, Afzal Guru and S.A.R. Geelani in Kashmir and Delhi, are still active in public memory and seeking accountability.