"Ishrat Jahan was a second-year BSc student of Mumbai's Guru Nanak Khalsa
College, and a resident of Mumbra, a distant Mumbai suburb, whose family was in
dire straits after her father passed away two years before her own death. She
supported the family (she had three sisters and two brothers), now headed by
her mother, Shamima, giving tuitions to a batch of 20 school kids at her home.
And, to make ends meet, she had additionally taken on the job of a "sales girl"
in Javed Sheikh's business. A spirited young woman, she was determined to see
her two younger sisters and two younger brothers through school and college"
'Encounters Are Murders'
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dmello130909.html
The title of the Tarkunde report, Encounters Are Murders, needs reiteration in
the present ambience of "cultivated ignorance" in the sphere of "governance"
that brushes off extra-judicial killings as mere aberrations. That encounters
are murders also needs restating in the context of the pathological, persistent
mendacity in public life in India and the absurd claim of po-mos that each
"narrative" is as true as the other - writes Bernard D'Mello, Deputy Editor,
Economic & Political Weekly.
Inquiries by magistrates into "police encounter" killings in India have mostly
corroborated the police version of the situation and reality leading to the
deaths. But the Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S P Tamang's investigation of
the facts and circumstances leading to the deaths of 19-year olds Ishrat Jahan
and Javed Sheikh and two others (25-year old Amjad Ali, alias Salim, and
17-year old Jisan Johar, alias Abdul Gani, claimed by the police to be
Pakistani citizens, but their identity is yet to be established) in June 2004
are totally at odds with the Ahmedabad police and the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP)-led Gujarat government's claims. The police officers involved, going by
the magistrate's report, had concocted the story that the four were
"operatives" of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) on a mission to
assassinate the chief minister, Narendra Modi, but were apprehended by the
crime branch police, and shot dead in a "real" encounter on
the outskirts of the city in the wee hours of the morning on 15 June 2004.
Based mainly on evidence from the forensic and post-mortem reports, Tamang has
dismissed the police claim and established that the deaths were "cold-blooded
murders" in police custody carried out by a set of crime branch police
personnel, headed by the then additional commissioner of police, D G Vanzara,
during the day before. The crime branch policemen then brought the bodies near
the Kotarpur Water Works on the outskirts of the city in the late night/early
morning when there were no witnesses around, planted weapons (AK-56) and
ammunition, and thus tried to establish the cause of the deaths. Incidentally,
Vanzara, a favourite of chief minister Modi, is presently in jail as the main
accused in another murder (a staged encounter on 26 November 2005), that of
Sohrabuddin Sheikh, and later on, killing his wife Kausarbi and burning her
body to remove all traces of that crime.
"Police encounter" as a term seems to have originated in the Indian
subcontinent, used by the Indian police, paramilitary, military and other
security forces to explain the death of an individual whom they have killed,
deemed by them to be a dreaded criminal, gangster/outlaw, terrorist, and/or
Maoist/Naxalite. It is a planned extra-judicial killing not authorised by the
law or by a court of law, in most cases, staged by planting weapons alongside
the dead body to indicate the reason why the person was killed. A first
information report is lodged against the dead person reiterating the police
version of events. So it was in the case of Ishrat Jahan, Javed Sheikh and the
two others.
Ishrat Jahan was a second-year BSc student of Mumbai's Guru Nanak Khalsa
College, and a resident of Mumbra, a distant Mumbai suburb, whose family was in
dire straits after her father passed away two years before her own death. She
supported the family (she had three sisters and two brothers), now headed by
her mother, Shamima, giving tuitions to a batch of 20 school kids at her home.
And, to make ends meet, she had additionally taken on the job of a "sales girl"
in Javed Sheikh's business. A spirited young woman, she was determined to see
her two younger sisters and two younger brothers through school and college.
But then, quite inexplicably, according to Tamang's report, on 12 June 2004 she
and Javed, her employer, were picked up by the Ahmedabad crime branch cops,
illegally detained, taken to Ahmedabad and cold-bloodedly shot dead at close
range in police custody (Ishrat between 23:00 and 24:00 hrs, and Javed between
20:30 and 21:00 hrs, on 14 June
2004).
The judiciary in the state of Gujarat has been totally paralysed in the
aftermath of the 2002 pogroms against Muslims, but it now seems to be
recovering. In this, the Supreme Court has been supportive, but not the
Congress-led government at the Centre, which has been largely unconcerned about
the plight of the victims of the pogrom. A union home ministry affidavit filed
in the Gujarat High Court -- in relation to a writ petition brought by Israt
Jahan's mother, Shamina, pleading for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
probe into the facts and circumstances leading to the killings -- agrees with
the Gujarat government that the four persons were members of the LeT and sides
with it in its stand that no CBI inquiry is warranted in the case. There is no
doubt that both the BJP and the Congress continuously vie with each other to
prove who is more patriotic; and here, patriotism means who is more
anti-Pakistan. Indeed, although the lone terrorist captured
in the 26/11 2008 Mumbai attacks, Ajmal Amir Kasab, has admitted his guilt,
the powers-that-be have decided to go on with the trial, using it as an
anti-Pakistan political platform. We do not know in what context Samuel Johnson
said that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel", but my first editor,
the late Samar Sen, who edited the Kolkata weekly, Frontier, used to say that a
particular assortment of rogues resort to it at the first instance. In the
branding of Ishrat Jahan and the three others as "terrorists", what is
roguishly being implied is that in the case of terrorists linked to Pakistan it
is permissible, indeed necessary, to sidestep the required judicial processes
of investigation and trial and punish them by death right away.
To be fair to the BJP-led government in Gujarat, encounters are an all-India
phenomenon. Indeed, they happen even in the nation's capital -- for instance,
the Batla House encounter on 19 September last year, in which two young men
were killed by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police, which claims that the
victims were "operatives" of the Indian Mujahedeen, allegedly responsible for
the Delhi serial blasts. In this case, the National Human Rights Commission
went by the police version, ignoring the independent civil liberties
organisations' findings and what the local residents had to say.1
Truly, independent India has not yet made a break from its colonial past. Just
as the British colonialists put in place a repressive legal structure to deal
with the nationalist struggle for independence and called the latter's militant
section terrorist, maintaining all kinds of repressive sections on the statute
book to deal with the Non-cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India
movements, the present rulers have continued in the same vein as far as the
Maoist movement is concerned, as also with respect to the nationalist movements
in Kashmir and the northeast. The bulk of the encounter killings are to be
found in the districts where the Maoist movement is active and in the areas of
nationalist militancy. Recent fake encounter cases come to mind, for instance,
in the forest village of Singaram in Dantewada district of Chahattisgarh where
on January 8 this year 19 persons were cold-bloodedly murdered by special
police officers, the government
falsely claiming that it was in an encounter with the Maoists. A more recent
case is the "encounter" killing of the unarmed Sanjit Chongkham by the Manipuri
Rapid Action Police Force commandos on July 23 in broad daylight in Imphal, 500
metres from the state assembly, captured vividly on camera and published in
Tehelka (8 August 2009).
It seems that the Indian state has only become more brutal and ruthless since
the dark days of the Emergency period (from 25 June 1975 to 21 March 1977, when
the country was ruled by decree and civil liberties were suspended). One
recalls with horror the encounter killings in Andhra Pradesh, a few of which
were investigated in detail by the committee (set up by Jayaprakash Narayan, as
president of the Citizens for Democracy) headed by V M Tarkunde, due mainly to
the painstaking work done by K G Kannabiran as member-secretary and a group of
committed civil liberties activists. But were the accused who killed young
Naxalites/Maoists in cold blood -- claiming falsely that the latter were killed
in encounters (that had never taken place) -- ever tried and punished for
murder? Was the principle of ministerial responsibility and that of the
collective responsibility of the cabinet ever respected? The country is still
facing the grim consequences of those
serious, to put it in official parlance, omissions and commissions. For then,
the old adage, "impunity breeds contempt for the law", began to apply and such
scorn for the legal code got into the very lifeblood of the wielders of
repressive political power.
There are no reliable statistics on police encounters at the all-India level,
but, for the state of Andhra Pradesh, the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties
Committee (APCLC) has recorded roughly 1,800 encounter deaths between 1997 and
2007. In a February 2009 judgment in an APCLC case related to encounter
killings, the Andhra High Court emphasised that, in all instances of encounter
deaths at the hands of the police, an independent investigation must be
conducted, wherein the plea of self-defence must be reserved to be established
only at the stage of trial. But the Andhra Pradesh Police Association (APPA)
appealed against this in the Supreme Court, which was quick to grant an ex
parte stay on the high court order.2 The entire civil liberties movement,
represented by organisations like the APCLC, the Delhi-based People's Union for
Democratic Rights, and many such state and local area-based leagues are now
anxiously awaiting the judgment of the highest court
in the land: Will the Supreme Court uphold the APPA's petition, which
highlights the great challenge the police claims it faces in combating the
"Maoist threat", and thereby make it even more difficult for the civil
liberties organisations to legally challenge each case of encounter killing and
the version that the police dishes out?3 All the same, the title of the
Tarkunde report, Encounters Are Murders, needs reiteration in the present
ambience of "cultivated ignorance" in the sphere of "governance" that brushes
off extra-judicial killings as mere aberrations. That encounters are murders
also needs restating in the context of the pathological, persistent mendacity
in public life in India and the absurd claim of po-mos that each "narrative" is
as true as the other.
Notes
1 Go to petitiononline.com:80/jtsa2009/petition.html for an open letter to the
prime minister of India, demanding a judicial probe into the Batla House
"encounter".
2 "Position Paper on Encounters", XXIV Ramanadham Memorial Meeting, Andhra
Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee and People's Union for Democratic Rights, at
www.pudr.org.
3 Press Release of the Coordination of Democratic Rights' Organisations on
"Encounters" at www.pudr.org.
With Regards
Abi
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice
he is the worst”
- Aristotle
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