NHRC must use pan-India jurisdiction to map suicides nationwide: Human rights lawyer Vrinda Grover

She said the human rights commission must build trust by being responsive, putting reports before the public and taking on board issues that concern the country.

Edited excerpts follow:

As a human rights lawyer, how well do you think NHRC has been able to ensure timely justice and protect the human rights of the people?

Grover: The National Human Rights Commission was founded in 1993 through the statute, the Protection of Human Rights Act. Now, in 2025, if we were to evaluate the NHRC, generally speaking, I would say that in different decades, the NHRC has discharged its role in varying degrees.

The institution also performed differently and under different chairpersons, who earlier was as per law required to be a former Chief Justice of India. I think it would be best if presently I respond to your question in terms of the NHRC over the last decade.

I have interacted with the NHRC in many capacities. As a lawyer, I have represented the NHRC in cases, both before the Delhi High Court as well as before the Supreme Court of India. I have taken complaints on a range of human rights violations to the NHRC and I have also engaged with the NHRC as a domain expert on certain committees.

So I have had multiple engagements with the NHRC. If I review the last decade or so, a marked difference emerges. The NHRC’s intervention in grave issues of human rights injustices is negligible and its engagement with the human rights community in India has stopped.

Earlier, there were regular meetings and exchange of views. Now, there is hardly any interface between human rights defenders, human rights lawyers, human rights experts in the country, and the NHRC.

Secondly, the NHRC has gone very silent on issues of injustice, human rights violations that are deeply concerning today. We learn about them through media reports but we do not see the NHRC being a responsive, proactive institution, and that really was the very objective and the vision with which the NHRC was constituted in this country.

In our society there have always been multiple forms of discrimination, injustice of different groups, as well as individuals and the NHRC has, at different moments, intervened in different ways, especially when the perpetrator was very powerful, and when the perpetrator is the state. The very essence of human rights is, and this is reflected in the Fundamental Rights Chapter, Part III of the Constitution, that human rights must be protected, guaranteed, against the powerful State.

Institutions, like the NHRC and the courts, must intervene effectively to ensure that the state does not abuse that power, the state does not oppress, the state does not act in an arbitrary manner, whether against the poor, working class, religious or ethnic minorities, women, Dalits, journalists, as well as fulfils its promise of equality, of non-discrimination to everyone, whether it is sexual minorities, whether it is disabled people.

So those are the twin roles that the NHRC is mandated with.

The NHRC recently took cognisance of a student’s suicide in the national capital. How can a body like NHRC mitigate or address the situation?

Grover: The NHRC is very well endowed with powers and abroad, mandate of functions, the very regrettable and unfortunate incident of suicide by a schoolgoing boy, can be an occasion for the NHRC to use its pan India jurisdiction to map across the country, the issue of suicide by students.

Why are suicides taking place? What are the concerns? What is happening in the educational system? So, the NHRC does not need to get involved in an individual case, which the police are anyway investigating. So, that part will be taken care of.

But what are the preventive measures? What kind of measures would be required to ensure that this kind of tragedy never occurs again? This reminds me, it’s a totally different scenario, but there was a lot of conversation that took place after the Rohit Vemula incident in Hyderabad University.

What is the role of educational institutions? What should institutions do to ensure both in terms of mental health, but also that will students from marginal and vulnerable groups, like a dalit student, an adivasi student, a first generation student coming from a working class background.

What can be institutionally done to provide a supportive enabling environment? What responsibilities must be there to ensure that systemic and structural discrimination is not replicated? What new apparatus needs to be put in an institution? That’s the kind of broad-based mechanism that NHRC needs to present.

Can you share any case you handled where NHRC’s timely intervention successfully took the case to its logical conclusion?

Grover: I can definitely talk to you about the timely intervention by NHRC on earlier occasions, but unfortunately, as in many cases in India, it often takes longer than a decade for cases to reach their conclusion.

Let me first refer to a case which was commonly known as the Seshachalam encounter case. Seshachalam encounter took place in the forests of Andhra Pradesh, in Seshachalam, where woodcutters from Tamil Nadu, who were daily wage workers were shot dead in police action by the Andhra Pradesh special police task force.

The police’s version is that they were illegally cutting red sanders wood, which is prohibited. When the police stopped them, there was an exchange of fire and they died due to the police firing. People’s Watch, which is a Tamil Nadu-based human rights organisation, brought two survivors before the NHRC in Delhi.

I represented them before the NHRC and we moved the applications, asking the NHRC to immediately pass directions for certain important evidence like police documents, diaries, arms, and ammunition, CCTV footage, etc., to be immediately preserved and secured. The NHRC had also initiated a suo moto enquiry.

This incident took place on April 7, 2015, and immediately orders were passed by the NHRC. The NHRC thereafter even sent its own investigation team to that area to investigate and to look at the records of the police, to question the police.

The NHRC’s timely intervention, both through suo moto, as well as the intervention by people’s watch and hearing the testimony of the surviving witness, as well as sending its investigating team, brought to light important aspects of this police action.

What for me is regrettable is that the NHRC has not pursued it institutionally and has left it to the victims to take forward the legal battle for justice. The victim families, given their social economic marginalisation are hardly in a position to pursue the legal struggle for justice. Has not the NHRC abandoned the victims?

To expect the families of those who have been killed to be able to wage a legal battle after having lost their only bread earner is something that obviously families find impossible to do.

Similarly, I remember a case as far back as May 1987, the Hashimpura massacre case. In around 2016 or so, the district court in Delhi acquitted all the police men and officers of UP PAC prosecuted for the killing of over 40 Muslim men. It was the NHRC which thought that this was a travesty of justice and the NHRC intervened in the Delhi High Court. I represented the NHRC before the Delhi High Court.

Due to the timely intervention of the NHRC, certain evidence that had long been suppressed by the accused and the UP police was unearthed. The Delhi High Court in October 2018 convicted the policemen who were responsible for the custodial communal killing of over 40 Muslim men in 1987. The NHRC did not sit back and watch this travesty of justice take place.

What steps should NHRC take to enhance awareness and reporting of human rights issues?

Grover: I think there are two things to do. This country, for too long, has gone around saying people don’t know their rights. I actually don’t agree with that proposition at all. I think those who are sitting in positions of power and authority and the law enforcement agencies do not know that we are living under the Constitution of India, we have rights and they have duties towards the citizens of this country.

They should train the police to understand that they are a service provider, that if they act against the law, if they violate human rights, they will be held accountable. They will be penalised.

They should make public servants aware. They should make members, elected members aware of the rights of people. I think that is what is required in this country today.

If the NHRC wants people to come to the NHRC, then it will have to build the trust and gain the confidence of the people through your actions and orders. The NHRC must give confidence to the people that it will act in an independent and effective manner in support of human rights.

The confidence-building responsibility is today with the NHRC. It’s an institution in place since 1993. One indicator of the present state of affairs is the recommendation by GANHRI (Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions) in March 2025, to downgrade NHRC’s international accreditation status from A to B.