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Editorial
India’s special cops
 Hundreds of Sikh
youth in Punjab perished in encounters that were clearly fake. In
tens of cases, the fact that the encounter deaths were actually
murders in cold blood committed by the police was proved in courts
of law. Human Rights activist par excellence, Bhai Jaswant Singh
Khalra, gathered incontrovertible evidence that the police cremated
a large number of bodies of unidentified Sikhs in
Punjab
illegally. While Khalra himself was abducted and killed by the
police in a similar encounter, the truth of what he claimed and the
truth of his own murder were both proven later in judicial cases
that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
One would have
thought that the civil society in
India
would have risen to the occasion after such blatant expose of the
ways of the police.
Alas, that was
not to be.
Nothing much has
changed. In Gujarat, the state forces are found to be in active
collusion with the Hindutva elements and indulged in communal
killings. In Punjab, the ham handed ways of the police are still
much in evidence. The arrests of Bhai Daljit Singh Bittu and his
associates of Akali Dal (Panch Pardhani) and the efforts to embroil
the emerging youthful leadership of the Sikh community in shady
cases reveals a pattern of the ways in which the unbridled police
force works in the state.
Ironically, this
is happening at the same time when the role of the Gujarat Police
has been exposed once again in the case of Ishrat Jahan. No one
knows when will New Delhi have the inclination and the will to stop
the rotten elements in the police and security forces from literally
getting away with murder.
When the police
kill an individual in the course of an encounter or operation, the
law is quite clear about what must happen next. If, by his act, a
policeman kills a person, he commits an offence of culpable
homicide, unless it is established that such killing was not an
offence under the law. It is clear that the police and other
security forces tend to abuse their power to shoot and kill, staging
fake encounters in which individuals accused of being terrorists or
criminals are eliminated. Often, the identity of these individuals
is never convincingly established, as happened, for example, in the
infamous encounter staged by the Delhi Police at the
Ansal
Plaza
shopping mall in 2002.
India and the
Indian civil society are also answerable to the world and their own
inner conscience about the impression that the police and security
forces enjoy a certain degree of social sanction for these
extra-judicial executions.
Who should
decide whether the death caused in an encounter is justified or not.
No civilised society can entrust this decision to the same force
which caused the death in the first place.
Such is the pace
of justice that the February 2009 Andhra Pradesh High Court ruling
that every encounter resulting in death must lead to the filing of a
First Information Report against the concerned police officials has
since been stayed by the Supreme Court pending a final hearing in
October. We see no urgency in any quarter in India on this issue.
The so-called
National Human Rights Commission in
India
is powerless, but worse, it seems to be even lacking the will to use
the powers that it has. It is a sad state of affairs in a country
where those in authority tend to use every possible means to subvert
the rule of law.
When an enquiry
into an encounter is dutifully and expeditiously carried out, like
Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate S.P. Tamang did in case of Ishrat
Jahan, then you not only notice the sense of urgency, but also
confront the chilling reminder of the modus operandi of a certain
kind of police officer. Unfortunately, they also tell us why it is
that state governments are so averse to subjecting the operations of
their police forces to independent judicial review. And why India
has cops called Encounter Specialists.
16
September 2009
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