Counterfeit
Encounters
And The 'Nation'
By Harsh Mander
06 June, 2007
Hindustan Times
The current wave of outrage in
the country over the horrific murders by the men in khaki in Gujarat
is likely to be transient, a passing squall. The dust that it raises
will rapidly settle, and we will forget, in the same way as we have
expelled from memory so many similar inequities of the recent past:
the women who stripped themselves naked in anguish in Manipur
to protest the violations of security forces, the staged killings of
innocents as militants in Kashmir, the mass cremations of thousands
of young men who were abducted by the police and later dubbed Khalistani
extremists in Punjab in the troubled eighties, counterfeit encounter
killings of alleged Naxalite sympathisers in backwaters of rural ferment
and oppression for decades in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Chatisgarh,
and bogus encounters of alleged terrorists in the country's capital,
to name just a few. Even less do we even register the routine killings
of the poorest tribals or dalits after torture and extortion in rural
police outposts, or numerous judicial commissions of enquiry that testify
to the open participation of men in uniform in the slaughter of minorities
in communal riots.
The Central Bureau of Investigation,
in 1996, submitted a report to the Supreme Court that established that
in just three crematoria of Amritsar, as many as 2097 illegal cremations
were carried out by security forces between 1984 and 1995. An independent
human rights investigation
established that illegal disposal of bodies by security forces were
not confined to three crematoria of Amritsar. Disappearances occurred
in all districts of Punjab. In nearly 60 per cent of the cases, the
persons who 'disappeared' was subsequently reported to have died in
police 'encounters'. The victims included doctors, lawyers, journalists,
students, businessmen, even government civil and police employees. In
over 25 per cent if the cases, the police not only took away the victim;
it also destroyed, damaged or confiscated family property. In an equal
number, police abducted and killed more than one member of the same
family. The police routinely refused to inform the victims' families,
and extorted money from them.
The Supreme Court referred
the matter to the National Human Rights Commission, and did nothing
when the Commission took a minimalist interpretation of its ambit. After
around ten years of tortuous proceedings, pursued resolutely by brave
and devastated families of the victims
and supported by dedicated human rights defenders like Indira Jaising,
Ram Narayan Kumar and Ashok Agrawaal, the Commission refused in the
end to hold any officer or agency accountable for the violations, and
declined to investigate disappearances, extra-judicial executions,
custodial deaths and illegal cremations throughout Punjab.
In Andhra Pradesh, again
for a decade, a committee of concerned citizens convened by SR Sankaran,
have tirelessly pressed for the deployment of moral, democratic and
legal instruments to try to stem the unending brutal spiral of violence
that has seized many impoverished districts of Telengana. They observe
that the State continues to portray the Naxalite movement as a law and
order problem, and refuses to recognise it as an expression of people's
aspirations to a life of dignity and equality. The State response remains
violent, including physically liquidating hundreds, mainly youth, in
encounters. The committee finds that these 'encounter killings are not
isolated aberrations or unintended transgressions of law by individual
police personnel' but is in fact a deliberate system response of the
State to crush a complex societal problem through indiscriminate killings.
It concludes that 'encounters introduce terror as a component of governance
and erode its very democratic essence'.
But there are few to heed
these voices of humanity. In Gujarat, in response to a question from
a member of the assembly, as many as 21 encounter killings by the state
police were reported between 2003 and 2006. But the list submitted by
the Gujarat government did not include the names of Sohrabuddin and
Kauserbi, which is a grave breach of privilege. A
deliberate murky cloud of official secrecy continues to cloud the numbers
and circumstances of encounter deaths by the Gujarat State police.
However, even this limited
official report again raises disturbing questions. Six of those killed
were already in police custody, and it is incredible that they could
possess firearms in custody to warrant killing by the police in self
defence. In one case, the police claim that two policemen fired six
rounds to kill a man with a dummy revolver. In no case was there a post
mortem, or the statutory magisterial enquiry. There are no materials
to even subsequently justify the inference that they were terrorists
or grave offenders. All these facts were brought to the notice of the
Supreme Court in a petition earlier this year by BG Verghese and lawyer
Nitya Ramakrishnan, but the court did not find enough basis to order
an enquiry into the encounter killings.
Each nation must strike a
fine ethical and political balance between protecting its security and
the rights of its people. In India, the choice of the executive, and
even the judiciary, have tilted mostly in favour of permitting the uniformed
forces to break the law of the land with impunity, even to kill, especially
in times of perceived threats to national integrity -
cheered along by most segments of the middle classes. Policemen themselves
often claim that are motivated by a higher love for the nation. Many
are, but not those who kill unarmed people in defiance of the law of
the land. KPS Gill, who led the security forces in Punjab in the decisive
'bullet for bullet' bloody combat against militancy of the late 1980s,
describes his forces as men who 'fight and die for India' and 'who risked
their lives in defence of the State'. The disgraced Gujarat police officer
Vanjara also fashions his encounter killings as 'deshbhakti' (patriotism),
and claims that with his arrest, 'the battle lines are drawn', presumably
in his war against the Muslim community, which is of course viciously
demonised as terrorists implacably unfaithful to their motherland. LK
Advani as the Union Home Minister in 2001 announced in Punjab that his
government was 'contemplating steps to provide legal protection and
relief to the personnel of the security forces facing prosecution for
alleged excesses during anti-insurgency operations' in Punjab, Kashmir
and the north-east.
A faked killing is not an
aberration of a few runaway miscreant police officers; it is an integral
if shadowy element of the system itself, one in which the State eliminates
people outside the process of the law, as an instrument to tame civic
dissent. These bullets indeed crush with State terror and lawlessness,
the weakest and most disenfranchised of our people, particularly if
they are restive - religious and ethnic minorities, dalits and tribal
people, agricultural workers and slum dwellers. These are the very people
who are excluded from that 'nation' which the trigger-happy police forces
claim to defend.
We may forget and move on,
but for those loved ones were felled by furtive bullets fired by agents
of a democratic State that functions lawlessly, there will be no closure
or healing. They may never have even seen the bodies of their loved
ones, and the dead have no opportunity to defend their honour. It is
only truth, however ugly, told with unflinching honesty, which would
heal their unassuaged agony. For this to happen, the leaders, the courts
and the people of this land need to stand tall on the side of justice.
No State is genuinely secure of foundations of injustice.
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