:: Antara Dev Sen

Close encounters

Antara Dev Sen

Oct.01 : The Centre has now filed an affidavit in the Ishrat Jahan killing to support her mother’s call for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) enquiry. And to counter the claim of the Gujarat government that, in gunning down the teenaged student and her friends in 2004, it had acted on the advice of the Centre. But you said they were Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) terrorists, said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government to the Congress-led Centre. We merely talked of a tip off, said the Centre. The affidavit, said home minister P. Chidambaram, "did not give a licence to the state government to kill innocent people".

Curiously, instead of focusing on the illegal and immoral act of staging an encounter, the debate now seems to be centered around whether or not the youngsters were terrorists. "The LeT’s official website has claimed that all four were their agents, then why is the Government of India trying to prove the contrary?" argued BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy. Adding, "It seems the institution of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) is under threat".

Sadly, the danger is far greater. It is not the IB, or any particular government or any political party, but the very idea of democracy that is under threat. By sidestepping the main issue of individual freedoms and right to life and offering full-throated non-arguments about "terrorists", we are hitting at the very foundation of our democratic state. Whether the victim of an extra-judicial killing deserved to be killed or not is not the point. In a democratic state we need accountability and fair treatment. Without which we cannot hope for justice.

Ishrat’s case was a fake encounter, ruled Gujarat Metropolitan Magistrate S.P. Tamang. It appears that Ishrat Jahan, 19, Javed Ghulam Sheikh, 19, Amjad Ali, 25, and Jisan Johar, 17, were not linked to any terror group and were killed in cold blood by the state. The Gujarat police kidnapped them from Mumbai, brought them to Ahmedabad, murdered them in custody, lined up their bodies on the streets at night, planted weapons on them and pretended they were Pakistan-supported LeT terrorists who had come to kill Narendra Modi. The fiendish cops were led by D.G. Vanzara, then DIG (now in jail for faking the "encounter" killing of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kauser Bi) and his deputy N.K. Amin, along with several other top police officers including then Ahmedabad police commissioner K.R. Kaushik and the then chief of the Crime Branch, P.P. Pandey.

And what are we, the people with a voice, the students, the media, the aam janata that keeps democracy in motion doing about such calculated murders? What do we do when we see justice being thrown out of the ring as politicians wrestle with mob sentiments and twisted reasoning, much like the monstrous men in a WWF wrestling match? We cheer them on. They play to the gallery and we, the gallery, play along.

Because it is the laziest thing to do. It’s easy for us to accept victims of encounters as terrorists and to support their murder. We skip all the steps between an "encounter killing" and its justification. First, was it a real encounter or a staged killing? Second, if real, was killing the only option? Third, was the victim a truly dangerous criminal or armed terrorist? And finally, did the victim really deserve to die? There could be several more steps between the killing and the justification, but that doesn’t concern us. We ignore the process and base our support on assumptions. Here’s our lazy logic. First, the victim was an armed terrorist. Second, he must die to make us safe. Third, the police killed him to protect us. Finally, the police must be hailed as heroes. This social sanction allows the police to get away with murder.

Exactly a year ago, we saw the "encounter" at Batla House near Delhi’s Jamia Millia University that killed two youngsters. Encounter specialist M.C. Sharma was killed in the incident, apparently shot by the "terrorists". The media served up the police version almost verbatim, hailing the heroic Sharma as a braveheart killed by "terrorists", zealously demanding bravery awards for the hero and denouncing the boys killed and captured by the cops. The boys, some of them students at Jamia, were from Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh, which the media promptly renamed Atankgarh (terror-fort). And except for a couple of notable exceptions, made no attempt to probe the holes in the police theory. The boys were presumed guilty, thus their killing was justified and their assumed killer made the superhero. Never mind that Sharma had been in fake encounters before, like the one at Ansal Plaza where two people were murdered and passed off as Pakistani terrorists — in fact as members of the LeT, like Ishrat and friends.

The police do seem to have this nasty habit of killing Muslims and passing them off as Pakistani terrorists. But if you thought not being a Muslim protected you from such "encounters", think again. They could pretend you were an armed criminal. Like they did with Ranbir Singh, 24, the management student killed in Dehradun in August. Or they could pretend you were linked to extremists, like they did when they killed Chungkham Sanjit and the young and pregnant Rabina in Imphal in July. It’s easy to get away with murder in Manipur, like elsewhere in the neglected Northeast. The security forces, with their special impunity in the troubled states, can murder, rape and torture at will.

And that is a power they are willing to share in Naxalite-dominated regions. Vigilante groups armed and empowered by the state are joining in these extra-judicial killings while we sigh about the "Naxal menace". There are thousands of encounter killings around the country, from Kashmir to Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat to Chhattisgarh and Assam, and we support it all out of sheer laziness. Some of those killed may be Naxals, some may even be terrorists. But most are not. The point is not whether the victims were innocent or culpable. But whether they got justice. That’s the only way to protect our human rights.

Due process of law, which is tossed aside through security measures like encounter killings and tough terror laws, must be respected if we are to keep ourselves and our democracy safe. We must stop supporting instant justice by the police. Because we cannot be a nation of lynch mobs. And finally it is fair procedure — and not murderous cops — that protects us and all that our nation stands for.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com