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It is difficult to tell if there was public or even media outrage over the latest ‘encounter killings’, that most deceptive of Indian euphemisms to mask murder by the security forces, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
The April 7 murders were a horrific occurrence even in a state that has been notorious for encounter killings since the 1970s when thousands of Naxalites, or radical left-wing cadres were murdered by the security forces after they launched an armed struggle to fight rural exploitation.
This is what happened less than a fortnight ago. Twenty men — daily wage workers travelling by bus from their villages in neighbouring Tamil Nadu to work as construction workers and coolies — are plucked from the vehicle by a special task force of Andhra police and forest officials, taken by truck to an unknown location, shot dead at close quarters and then dumped in the forest. Their bodies are displayed the next morning as sandalwood smugglers killed in an ‘encounter’ when caught in the act of cutting red sanders trees.
None of the ghastly details of how the hapless labourers were done in would have come out if three of the group had not escaped and had the courage to talk to a local human rights organisation that visited the area on a fact-finding mission.
Read: Forest killings put India's 'fake encounters' in spotlight
The survivors were subsequently brought to the National Human Rights Commission in Delhi which ordered that protection be provided to these men along with its standard but futile prescription that a judicial inquiry be launched into the killings, that action be taken against the guilty.
Encounter killings, which are actually custodial deaths, are possibly the most egregious of the abuses committed by the security forces in South Asia.
Encounter killings, which are actually custodial deaths, are possibly the most egregious of the abuses committed by the security forces in South Asia although Pakistan and Afghanistan might contend that the equally euphemistic ‘enforced disappearances’ are just as bad. These disappearances, which human rights organisations say are arrest and abduction of people by state agents, results in a situation where the disappeared are outside the protection of law. It is not even considered a crime. In states like Manipur both atrocities are carried out systematically by police commandos and the army, the encounter killings being more brazen in nature since the security forces enjoy absolute impunity in the north-eastern theatre of insurgency. But is there any national outrage? The state hardly figures in the consciousness of the country, much less its conscience. The representative view is that such measures are necessary in the national interest.
The killing of the Tamil workers, perhaps because of the numbers, did stay on the front pages for several days. But another so-called encounter a day earlier in which five Muslim men were killed in Telangana, a state recently carved out of Andhra Pradesh, barely made it to the news. The men, who were facing trial for their alleged links with SIMI and other radical Muslim organisations, were killed en route to a court hearing after they allegedly attacked their police escort. The men were handcuffed, unarmed and heavily outnumbered, and it calls for complete suspension of disbelief to credit the official story that they snatched weapons from the police who then shot them in self-defence.
The true horror lies in the way many of the newspapers have purveyed these stories, particularly the latter. The official version has been reproduced blindly, reflecting the inherent biases towards the minorities and the less privileged. Worse still are the reactions of the readers who by and large seem to think encounter killings are an accepted way of bypassing the law to get the better of criminals deemed ‘terrorists’. Most of the comments on media websites said this: cops might get out of hand but they remain the saviours of society.
When the state insidiously encourages and even legitimises these extra-judicial killings society accepts that such measures are necessary. So, encounters, even the tautological ‘fake encounters’ — that is, executions so obviously staged — are necessary to fight evil. Under this rubric is included anyone the state does not like: suspected criminals, gangsters, political groups with extremist ideology and even trade unionists. Sometimes, but rarely, businessmen, too, can become victims.
Official patronage for this was, and still is, evident in many states: in Karnataka to tackle smugglers, in Manipur to fight insurgency and in Maharashtra to clean up Mumbai’s gangs. In the country’s premier city, handpicked policemen earned fame and fortune (some were later jailed for unexplained wealth) as encounter specialists who enjoyed unparalleled impunity to clean up its underbelly. Their exploits were retailed regularly by an admiring media and magnified in celluloid with such adulatory films as Ab Tak Chhappan (56 so far) which refers to the tally of killings.
The policy was best deployed in Gujarat under Narendra Modi, when the state’s top cops were engaged in relentless pursuit of a whole lot of people who were set on eliminating the chief minister for unknown reasons. A host of people from a young girl student of Mumbai to extortionists, housewives and terrorists were eliminated in ‘encounter killings’ by trigger-happy cops who clearly had the state behind them. Nothing is more revealing and more damning of this complicity than the resignation letter that the former deputy inspector general of police D.G. Vanzara wrote in 2013.
That letter was written from jail after a central investigation indicted him and other top cops for carrying out several fake encounter killings. Vanzara’s defence was that it had all been done at the behest of the government. “We, being field officers, have simply implemented the conscious policy of this government which was inspiring, guiding and monitoring our actions from very close quarters.”
So pervasive is this culture of encounter killings that other political parties did not raise Cain over this shocking letter nor pursue it to its logical conclusion. It’s a politically expedient policy that unites them all.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, April 20th, 2015
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