“Parthipan still does not know why the police tortured him,” Madhu tells TNM, over 20 days after his 17-year-old son was brutally beaten up by at least two police officials at the Pala police station in Kottayam district of Kerala. Sub Inspector (SI) Premson and Assistant Sub Inspector Biju K Thomas (ASI) were suspended on Saturday, November 18 for the assault on Parthipan, but Madhu says a suspension is not enough. “I can see how much this has traumatised my boy. I don’t want this to happen to another child,” he says. Parthipan was picked up by the police on the morning of October 29 on the alleged suspicion that he was carrying drugs. By the time he was allowed to go home in the evening, he was left with a severe spinal fracture, due to which he has now been relegated to complete bed rest for three months.
Madhu says that Parthipan had set out in a car from his home at Perumbavoor in Ernakulam around 6 am on October 29, to visit a friend who resides in Pala. On the way, he was flagged down by the police as part of a routine vehicle inspection. Parthipan, as he did not have a driving licence yet, made the split second decision to drive ahead without stopping. But the police immediately chased him down. The family alleges that what followed was a blatant police excess, with officers Premson and Biju taking Parthipan to an area without CCTV coverage in the police station, alleging he was carrying drugs and brutally beating him up.
Around 8.45 am that day, his mother Nisha got a call from the Pala police station to inform her of her son’s arrest. The family alleges that the police used obscene language while talking to Nisha. “I had gone out to buy some milk, and returned to find my wife in tears. She was still on that call, asking the police not to do anything to our son and that we would go to the station and pay the penalty. They just said they would call us back and the line got disconnected. We tried several times to contact them after that, but there was no response. The officer who called us had given us his name, but we forgot,” Madhu says.
There were no further updates for a while, and Madhu and Nisha hoped the police had released their son. “Finally, around 6 pm, we got a call from Parthipan. He said the police released him and that he would be back soon. When he reached home around 8 pm, he was unable to climb out of the car because of the pain from the beating he took at the station.”
Madhu says that when they released Parthipan from the station around 3 pm after a friend came to pick him up, one of the officers had warned him not to tell anyone about the violence he had to face. “That officer threatened that if Parthipan complained, they would book him in more cases. So he went to a private hospital in Pala and told them that he was in an accident,” he says.
But by the time Parthipan reached home, he was in so much pain that he had no option but to reveal to his parents what happened at the station, Madhu says. The parents soon took him to another hospital in Perumbavoor, and that’s when the doctors found the injury on his spine.
“We have warned him several times not to drive that vehicle without a licence, but he does not listen to us,” Madhu says. But he also asks, does this violation of law warrant more than a penalty? “Why did they beat him up? My child keeps asking me this question and I have no answer.”
Parthipan is a first year mechanical engineering diploma student at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Polytechnic and Engineering at Nellikuzhi in Ernakulam. “Now there is a fracture in his backbone and the doctor has advised complete bed rest for three months. He cannot attend his classes. One of his teachers came home and lent him some books, but I don’t know if he would be able to continue studies this year or not,” Madhu says.
The police had earlier denied allegations of custodial violence against Parthipan, claiming that he was merely questioned because he was driving without a licence. On November 2, Kottayam Superintendent of Police K Karthik ordered an investigation, which was to be supervised by the Deputy Superintendent of Police (DySP) in Pala. As the probe proceeded, the DySP found legitimacy in Parthipan’s version of events, based on which the Deputy Inspector General directed action against Premson and Baiju.