Fourteen more jail officials from Vellore Central prison were suspended on October 6 in an on-going custodial abuse case. The suspended police authorities include Raju, personal security to already-suspended Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Prisons, Vellore range, R Rajalakshmi. Seven constables and two prison wardens have also been placed under suspension. 

In September this year, a criminal case was registered against Rajalakshmi, Additional Superintendent (ASP) Abdul Rahman, and 12 others for using convicted prisoners to do household work and for physically assaulting them. The case was filed after an life inmate’s mother petitioned the Madras High Court saying that her son, S Sivakumar, had been illegally kept in solitary confinement for 90 days. She said that his son’s life was in danger, and that he had been falsely accused of stealing Rs 4.5 lakh and silver jewellery from the DIG’s home, where he had been forced to work against his consent and in direct violation of prison rules. 

The CB-CID North’s FIR against the accused police officials had found that the convicts were being treated as “slaves” at the DIG’s residence, in violation of the Prison Manual Rules, 1983. 

The FIR—where portions of a report into the matter submitted by the Vellore judicial have been reproduced—adds that as “part of the tortures said to have been done” to the life inmate Sivakumar, he was assigned to solitary confinement for 81 days in the HS4 block and 14 days in the Closed Prison block, apart from being unlawfully forced to do domestic work at the DIG’s home. The magistrate also observed that as per their enquiries there had been “abuses of power in utilising the services of convicts at the residence of the DIG with slavery treatment of aforementioned convicts.” The magistrate had further found that inmates had been treated as house maids for years. 

Rajalakshmi, Abdul Rahman and Vellore Central Prison jailer Arul Kumar had already been suspended by the state government on October 24. Now, apart from the DIG’s personal security officer, officer-in-charge (OC) team constables Mani, Rashid, Raja, Tamilselvan, Prasanth, and Viji; two women constables Selvi and Saraswathi; and prison warders Suresh and Sethu have been suspended.