The Bangkok-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has taken up Binish’s case, and initiated an email campaign to urge everyone from Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan to local MP and Defence Minister A K Antony and the district officials to ensure “justice” for Binish. The AHRC has also requested the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture to intervene.

Back home in this town, the local police are about to close investigations into the case. According to Binish’s parents, their speech-and-hearing impaired son was hauled by policemen off the road on the afternoon of February 28, beaten up, taken to a police station, his neck pinned against the wall with lathis, and then burnt with cigarette ends on his leg just for fun — all because he came in the way of a passing police patrol.

The policemen deny the charges, saying there is no hard medical evidence to prove torture, including any eyewitnesses. Claiming that the police probe has come to a dead end, Superintendent of Police Nagaraju Chakilan insists the issue may only be “the hallucinations of a sick boy, who looks like he has a low IQ”.

He adds that doctors had told the investigating officers that Binish had a respiratory infection, and the pain — myalgia — might have made him imagine things.

While a case was registered under the sections concerning atrocities against Scheduled Castes, no one has yet been charged as Binish couldn’t tell the name of the police station he was taken to. He was shown a few policemen and asked to identify his “tormentors” at random, but he could not.

Binish’s father Gopalakrishnan, a manual labourer, says the police patrol had picked up Binish, who was on his bicycle, from near a local temple. His mother had been doing temple rituals hoping to make him talk and hear. “Perhaps he did not give way to the police jeep since he can’t hear,”says Gopalakrishnan.

His parents and his autorickshaw-driver brother beagan searching when Binish did not turn up till late evening. By the wee hours, they went to a local police station to lodge a complaint that he was missing. By afternoon a local cable TV channel began airing the news, and soon after, Binish returned home. An auto driver who knew him had picked him up from the roadside, too sick to stand or walk.

His parents claim the policemen took Binish to some unknown hospital before leaving him on the road.

Gopalakrishnan says his son had conveyed to him that when he panicked and tried to flee, he was tied up and thrown into the rear of the police jeep. “He doesn’t know to which police station they took him, but remembers climbing some steps. They kept asking him questions and kept on hurting him when he didn’t answer. They may not have known that he can’t hear or talk. When he returned home, he had several bumps on his head, burn marks and severe pain in his legs, and his throat hurt badly from the lathis that they pinned him to the wall with. He said three cops had together hurt him.”

While Gopalakrishnan claims he had explained Binish’s injuries to doctors at the Cherthala government hospital, the police say the case records mention only that he was brought in with fever and respiratory trouble. Binish was then referred to the Government Medical College at Vandanam, where too, his father said, he tried to tell doctors that the boy had been tortured. Binish’s discharge card, however, says he had been brought in complaining only of “fever, cough and breathlessness”.

IG Vinson M Paul, in-charge of the area, calls it a “mysterious” case that might need to be probed at length.Meanwhile, the 19-year-old stays confined inside his sparse home, too scared to venture out. He used to work in a local scooter workshop, Binish conveys through sign language, his eyes welling up, till the day the police caught him.