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IT MAY HAVE PASSED as another unexamined, unexplained custodial death, or been attributed to a heart attack, had it not been for the blood-soaked bed in the Amritsar mortuary where Jaswinder Singh’s body lay. His mother had arrived early to see him one last time. She found his body bearing telltale marks of brutal torture: deep, dark bruising along his back and the back of his legs, and blood oozing from his orifices. “We arrived just in time to see what they did to him, but too late to save him,” she told me. Instead, the family documented the condition of his body.
A well-built man, over six feet tall, 35-year-old Jaswinder was posted in Tripura with the 42 Battalion of the Border Security Force. On 3 March, he was on leave at home—in the border village of Diwangarh, around forty kilometres south-west of Jammu—when the Narcotics Control Bureau, an agency that comes under the union home ministry, picked him up. What followed was a seventeen-day ordeal that ended in his death.
Jaswinder’s family had no access to him during this time, other than a four-minute distress call that he was able to make from the NCB office in Jammu, ten days after he was detained. His wife, Lovejeet Kour, told me that he begged for help on this call, saying that he was facing unbearable torture at the hands of the narcotics officials. “My biggest fear used to be his safety on the border in Tripura, far from home. I feared him dying at the border,” she said. “But not like this—literally being frisked away while he was on leave and at home, and dying by torture in NCB custody.” Jaswinder’s mother said she could not unsee what she saw that day. “I have not been able to look at the photographs and videos of his lifeless, tortured and bruised body.”
After being picked up, Jaswinder was charged under a case registered in 2024, in which his brother Pupinder Singh had been implicated and later discharged. The case pertained to the possession of 989 grams of heroin. While he was in custody, Jaswinder was charged under another case in which, again, Pupinder had been implicated and then discharged. Both cases were being investigated by the NCB’s Jammu zonal unit.
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