Story of hearing-impaired teen's 'torture' goes to UN

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”.

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...