In cold blood and sponsored by the state

Encounter killings are cold-blooded murders committed by men in uniform. The people shot dead are not killed in the heat of a battle or during action requiring self-defence; they are killed in a planned, pre-meditated manner in much the same way that the mafia does its ‘eliminations’...  We have refused to face this ugly truth for far too long. It’s about time it was faced fairly and squarely.

The Gujarat police ‘Encounter’ with Ishrat Johan, her husband Javed Shaikh and two other men (Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Jauhar) raised uncomfortable questions five years ago when the killings occurred. This had partly to do with the Gujarat police’s role in the state sponsored Gujarat pogrom of 2002, which clearly established that most of the force, including its senior officers, were communal in the extreme.

It also had to do with the suspicious nature of this particular case, where the four victims were dubbed LeT operators with no proof being given to establish that as fact. The Encounter too looked completely stage-managed and badly stage-managed at that.

Now a Gujarat magistrate’s probe has clearly established that the victims “were not linked to LeT as claimed by the police.” Magistrate S P Tamang’s report also said that the police had shot the victims in cold blood using their service revolver. It said that the encounter was ‘planned and executed mercilessly’ by shooting the victims from close range. It further stated that the weapon was ‘planted’ in the hand of a victim to buttress the encounter story.

We know, of course, that encounter killings are not a speciality of Gujarat. The method was used extensively in Punjab when the Khalistani movement had unleashed unspeakable violence against the civilian population.  It was also used in Maharashtra, particularly, in Mumbai, to eliminate the underworld.

However reprehensible and illegal these killings were,  they differed from the Gujarat encounters in two significant ways. The first was that they were not officially sanctioned; the governments may have turned a convenient blind eye to them, but they did not back them the way the Gujarat government has done.

A minister (Jaynarayan Vyas) has spoken  against the magistrate’s findings and has announced the government’s intentions to appeal against the report in the high court. There have been many earlier cases of the same kind too, and only in one case (the fake encounter in which Soharabuddin and his wife Kauser Bi were killed), has the Gujarat government actually distanced itself from the policemen.

That’s not all: there have been well-documented instances of upright police officials  like ADGB RB Sreekumar and  IG Geeta Johri who opposed this policy, being transferred to ‘punishment’ postings.

The second difference between the  Punjab/Maharashtra encounters and the Gujarat ones was that the former were for a ‘higher cause’ (the elimination of the Khalistani militants and the mafia respectively), while the Gujarat encounters were staged by officers like  Ahmedabad police commissioner K R Kaushik, DIG  G D Vanzara, ICP Crime, PP Pande, ACP  GL Singhal and ACP NK Amin, purely for personal gain.

There can of course, be no ‘higher cause’ which can justify extra-judicial killings. Once policemen find that they can get away with cold-blooded murder, they use it with impunity to get rid of people they deem suspicious.

It is now well-known that rogue cops in Punjab and Maharashtra used threats of encounter killings to  blackmail innocent people and amass wealth for themselves. That’s why it’s time for Chidambaram to step in and announce that under no circumstances will fake encounters be condoned.

And the policemen found guilty of taking part in them will be tried for murder. That’s the only way to stop the killing of those who are innocent and just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.