The
Marked People
By Harsh Mander
25 October, 2007
Hindustan Times
In today’s world, many
things have been globalised. One of these is prejudice. In the name
of the global war on terrorism, an entire community has been labelled
and demonised. Terror attacks, whether in Washington, London or Madrid,
are followed by paranoid surveillance, strip searches and prolonged
detentions of large numbers of Muslim youth, often without even tenuous
evidence or respect for their elementary human rights.
The latest to join this global
assault on democratic rights — in the wake of the three bomb blasts
that hit Hyderabad this year — is the Congress government in Andhra
Pradesh. The state Minorities Commission has reported the abduction
and illegal detention and torture by the police of a large number of
Muslim youth within days of the blasts on August 25, 2007. I have heard
from several terrified families of many youth who “disappeared”
for several days without legal trace, chilling testimonies similar to
those made by youth incarcerated in Cheraiapally Jail before the fact-finding
committee established by the Commission. The committee comprised advocate
Ravi Chandran, Professor of forensic sciences Mahender Reddy, and activists
Nirmala Gopalakrishnan, K. Anuradha and Afsar.
What emerges is that tens
of — it is feared hundreds — Muslim youth have been forcibly
picked up from their homes, and more often while they are on way to
work or the market or to worship, without legal arrest. These detentions
have been forced by men in civilian clothes presumed to be policemen.
Among those illegally arrested is an autorickshaw driver, an embroiderer,
a medical student and a software engineer. Almost none have criminal
records.
As they struggle against
their abductors, they are bundled into vehicles without number plates,
their eyes covered with blindfolds that they are not allowed to remove
throughout their detention, their hands bound and their mouths gagged.
They are then driven to unknown destinations, possibly farm houses in
the periphery of the city. In these locations they, and other youth,
are subjected to various forms of torture, including denial of food
for long periods, electric shocks and beatings on the soles of their
feet. Their eyes continuously masked, they lose track of night and day.
They are driven every few days to new torture chambers, grilled about
their role in the bomb blasts and coerced to agree about their alleged
role in the blasts and their sympathies with international jehad. They
are continuously battered with communally-charged taunts by the interrogating
policemen. Some succumb by signing blank confession papers; others stoutly
resist.
Their hapless families are,
of course, not informed by the police about the detention. They are
sometimes informed by witnesses of the police abduction. Many are poorly
educated and impoverished, desperate, but unable to comprehend how to
set about finding their loved ones. They contact the police, who deny
any knowledge of the missing men. Others frantically contact lawyers
and human rights organisations to file habeas corpus petitions in the
high court. These are heard without urgency by the judges, and the police
routinely deny, in court, that the missing men are in their custody.
However, in a few days, they are indeed produced by the same police
before magistrates, claiming that they were arrested just a day earlier.
It is not possible that the habeas corpus petitions by the families
of the youth could have been filed before their arrest by the police,
in anticipation of their future arrest by the police.
The fact-finding committee found “tell-tale signs of bodily abuse
obviously not self inflicted” in the incarcerated youth, including
“noticeable small scars of 1 cm diameter noted on external ears”
and “1 mm to 2 mm scars noted around nipples indicative of electricity
or needle entry”. Even jail records in three cases acknowledge
injuries. They were visibly traumatised, some vomited blood, and others
were severely dehydrated with swollen limbs and barely able to walk.
The Commission observed that since these injuries “are not self
inflicted, these obviously arose during police custody... [therefore]
custodial atrocities on young detainees, all minority persons, stand
proved”.
What is even more worrying
is that the magistrates abdicated their duties by wantonly ignoring
the visible signs of torture (some even noted later in jail records),
when the detained youth were presented before them. Even the high court
judges ignored Supreme Court guidelines by listing habeas corpus matters
for hearing only once a week, unmindful of the imminent threats to the
survival of the youth.
It is remarkable that even
after legal production, following prolonged interrogation under torture,
the police could still not charge most youth with involvement in the
bomb blasts. Instead, the police alleged the youths’ support for
international jehad been ‘proved’ by possession and propagation
of ‘inflammatory’ CDs and pamphlets. The remand case diaries
that I have in my possession describe these CDs as containing “Gujarat
communal incidents like showing burnt bodies, damaged houses, the statements
of victims as well as their relatives” and the other “clippings
like shooting and beheading of… western forces by jehadis”.
I possess and exhibit at least the former. Is that evidence to detain
me for waging war against the State, in the way that these unfortunate
youth have been charged?
The dazed families of the
detained men live with their loss in intense social isolation. They
are not just stigmatised by people of the ‘other’ community,
even their neighbours, friends and relatives avoid contact with them,
for fear that they too will be suspected by the authorities to harbour
sympathies with terrorism. The larger community, especially poorer Muslims
in the city, subsist with the daily cold dread that their own loved
one may be the next target of the police.
An agonised young woman related
to one of the detained youth cried out in a solidarity rally, “We
are also Indians; we love India. Why are we seen as ISI agents and traitors?”
Speaking from the heart, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh warned recently
against the dangers of precisely such ‘labelling’ of communities
as unpatriotic or violent. It is a warning that governments led by his
own party, in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Assam, do not seem to
heed. He recalled that his own community of Sikhs was similarly labelled
in the 1980s. What he did not mention was that thousands of youth were
similarly abducted by the police in Punjab in those times, exterminated
and cremated in mass graves. The story is hardly different for thousands
of young people alleged to be Naxalites in Andhra, who are similarly
abducted and eliminated.
After terror incidents, a hamstrung police are under unbearable pressure
to perform. But crippled by ramshackle intelligence, poor investigative
skills, demoralised and untrained forces and the crumbling fibre of
police leadership, it resorts to shortcuts like the illegal abductions
and torture that Hyderabad has witnessed. As the advocate appointed
by the Commission, Ravi Chandran, concludes, “What is at stake
is not just the lives of 20 odd young boys living in resigned solitariness
in a cell tucked away somewhere on the periphery of the modern city.
What is at stake is the functioning of a healthy democracy. If you have
tears, prepare to shed them now.”
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