Terminate with extreme prejudice!

Post-Independence India has an illustrious history of the State and the police playing Dirty Harry

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

Just as we were getting our fill about the 'encounter' between the Gujarat Police and an alleged terrorist Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who was allegedly gunned down in cold blood, the movie Shootout at Lokhandwala about the 1991 slaying of gangster Maya Dolas by the Bombay Police brings into focus state-sanctioned extra-judicial killings. Staged encounters have become fairly common all over the country. In fact, there is good reason to believe that there is now considerable support for them among the general public, which could be a main reason for their prevalence. This does not make it right, but it is a telling commentary on the state of affairs. Read this along with the recently released report by Transparency International that India's lower judiciary took Rs. 2630 crores in bribes last year and we get a good inkling as to why the general public is willing to go along with the police's murderous ways. Lower judiciary generally refers to the trial courts where evidence is recorded and justice is dispensed, the kind that found Manu Sharma innocent of killing Jessica Lal despite having shot her in front of scores of people, including an IPS officer.

According to the Chief Justice of the Patna High Court, Justice JN Bhatt, only about 6.5% of murder trials result in a conviction. In 2005 there were 32,719 recorded murders all over India and 28,031 attempts to murder. Given this state of affairs it is little wonder that the public applauds the Dirty Harry methods of the police.

But this leads to another more serious consequence. Many individuals in the police then take to contract killings, either to please their bosses or for money. In fact, it is now not uncommon for gangland bosses to contract killings out to the uniformed “encounter specialists”. In Mumbai the topmost killer policeman, Inspector Daya Nayak, who is now facing charges of corruption, has long been suspected of liquidating smalltime hoodlums at the behest of certain dons. Even ACP AA Khan, the main protagonist of the movie, has been suspected of killing Maya Dolas, incidentally brilliantly portrayed by Vivek Oberoi, on instructions from Dawood Ibrahim from Dubai.

In Delhi the escapades of ACP Rajbir Singh of the Special Cell are well known. The most notorious of them was the Ansal Plaza shootings in which two purported Pakistani terrorists were killed in the basement parking lot of the mall. Although the NHRC was forced to take notice of it, even after three years, justice has not been served. In the meantime, Rajbir Singh got the President's Medal for distinguished service and gallantry. But sometimes the police does act motivated by its sense of infantile justice, as we saw in the Barakhamba Road shooting incident where a Delhi Police team gunned down a businessman and his nephew under the mistaken belief that they were the two notorious killers they were trailing. Nevertheless, it is still a murder and the trial is supposedly progressing. Another ACP, in the meantime, has been sentenced to death for an 'encounter' killing over a decade ago when he was still SHO. He recently retired as an ACP.

Encounter killings have been an instrument of state policy right from Independence. The first ordered killings by the state took place in the Telangana region of the erstwhile Hyderabad state within months of Independence, when the Indian Army and the state police gunned down hundreds of persons on the pretext that they were insurgents intent on installing a dictatorship of the proletariat. This, indeed, was the official line of the Communist Party of India then as was championed by its general secretary, BT Ranadive. Poor Ranadive, who had a reputation of being a bit of a Stalinist, had the plug pulled from underneath when Josef Stalin himself decided that the insurgency was not viable and refused to support it.

The policy of the state being the judge and executioner emanated from the office of Sardar Patel, India's first home minister and the role model for many a home minister after that.

The next major outbreak of state killings was in the Naga Hills in early 1956, when the Indian Army killed, raped and pillaged in this remote region of the erstwhile Assam state. This military action was ordered by the ministry of external affairs and the minister heading it was none other than Jawaharlal Nehru.

During the 1960s, extra-judicial killings became the order of the day whenever the state was confronted by an uprising. Brutal Naxalite violence was met with just as brutal methods by the police. In 1966, the Gond people in Bastar revolted against the corrupt and exploitative ways of the Madhya Pradesh Congress government of DP Mishra. Mishra, a Sanskrit scholar of some repute, had few qualms in unleashing the police on the adivasis who congregated in Jagdalpur to pay customary dussera homage to their raja, Pravinchandra Bhanjdeo. Not only did the MP police kill scores of adivasis, they also shot down the raja in cold blood.

During the Emergency, Sanjay Gandhi's handpicked chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, VP Singh, resorted to extra-legal killings in the districts bordering MP, apparently to rid the state of a reign of terror unleashed by dacoits. It's a matter of conjecture whether VP Singh did this to avenge the shooting of his older brother, CPN Singh, a high court judge who was out on a night-time poaching expedition in Mainpuri, UP. But then, this was during the Emergency, at a time when then Attorney General Niren De informed the Supreme Court that people did not have a constitutional right to life and liberty and four out of five learned justices concurred with this.

The troubles in Punjab saw state-sponsored terrorism rise to new levels. Under KPS Gill, the Punjab Police unleashed a reign of terror. The details of this are well documented. Millions were given away as rewards for killing wanted terrorists and many of the so-called dreaded terrorists have now been found to be alive. This means that many innocents were killed and the state exchequer defrauded. Incidentally, when the then governor of Punjab, a former intelligence officer, died in an air-crash, suitcases filled with currency notes were recovered from the crash site. Nevertheless, Gill emerged as a national hero for having rid the nation of a scourge. He seemed destined for higher office and greater honours till one day, in an inebriated state, he allegedly molested a female IAS officer.

In more recent times, the state has continued to meet terror with terror in Kashmir and Andhra Pradesh. The most recent killing of an innocent was that of Abdul Rahman Padder, a 35-year-old carpenter from Kupwara, who was lured to Srinagar by a policeman with the promise of a job. Once in Srinagar on December 8, Padder disappeared only to reappear in the local newspapers on December 10 as a Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist gunned down in an encounter with a Ganderbal police party headed by SSP Hans Raj Parihar. Rewards and honours were generously bestowed by a grateful state. The matter would have ended there but for the zeal displayed by the police to publicise its valour. A photograph of the supposed slain terrorist was published in some local papers and this was shown to Ghulam Rasool Padder, Abdul Rahman's father. Due to the effort of local human rights groups, Padder's body was exhumed in February this year and the DNA test confirmed his identity. Parihar has since been arrested and investigations are still underway, which means the odds are still in his favour.

The police can be quite inventive when it comes to fudging evidence. After a similar incident in Chitisinghpora, where five shepherds were picked up and cold-bloodedly killed, the blood samples of the parents were called for to help in DNA identification. The J&K Police sent the blood of some farm animals instead. Justice is still awaited.

So, by all means, go and see “Shootout at Lokhandwala”. It should make you think. It's also a true story, even though the director claims otherwise. Abhishek Bachchan has done the best acting of his life. Mercifully his role lasts about a minute, half of which is taken up by his death throes.