Countering the Maoists

If the Maoist leader, Azad, has been killed in a fake encounter, as his sympathizers believe, then the security forces may have decided to take recourse to this process of elimination, which has increasingly become a feature of their operations in recent years. The Maoists themselves can be said to have set in motion this form of police action during their earlier avatar as the Naxalites.

One of the major figures who was supposed to have been a victim of a staged encounter was Saroj Datta, whose death on the Calcutta maidan was said to have been witnessed by the Bengali matinee idol, Uttam Kumar, during his morning walk.

Recounting Datta’s death, the Naxalite leader, Suniti Ghosh, wrote in his book, Naxalbari: Before and After: “The cold blooded murder of comrade Saroj Datta, secretary of the West Bengal state committee of the CPI(M-L), a member of the central committee and the politbureau, and editor of Deshabrati, after being taken to the office of the deputy commissioner, special branch, at Lord Sinha Road, Calcutta, by the police hounds on August 4--5, 1971 — the very night they captured him — was one among innumerable such instances”.

The probable reason why such killings were resorted to was that the Naxalites were the first group which challenged the government by waging a guerrilla warfare. Before their appearance in 1967, the police had to deal with street demonstrations, mainly by the communist parties, or trade union agitations. Although the police were the targets of attacks, these were mainly with stones even as public vehicles were set alight.

The Naxalites, on the other hand, shunned such open protests and took to singling out the police in urban areas, and landowners in the villages, for annihilation in accordance with Charu Mazumdar’s doctrine of the need to redden a revolutionary’s hands with the blood of the class enemy.

Such assassinations motivated by an ideological conviction had not been seen in India since the days of the British raj when the non-Gandhian freedom fighters or anarchists, as the colonial rulers called them, targeted British officials. It didn’t take long for the police after 1969, when the first party of the Naxalites — the CPI (M-L) — was set up, to take to cold-blooded killings. There is little doubt that the long prevalent practice of using what is known as “third degree” methods in the police stations to torture the accused had accustomed them to extra-judicial operations.

The fact that the CPI(M-L) and, subsequently, its many splinter groups were all illegal entities, which functioned outside the legal system (which they didn’t recognise), enabled the police to kill with impunity.  The Naxalites, therefore, can be said to have made the police to adopt these criminal acts as part of their operational method. After the Naxalite menace had subsided, the police in Mumbai took to eliminating denizens of the underworld with such ferocity that some of the officers came to be known as “encounter specialists”.

Inevitably, in course of time, the habit of killing spread and the government had to suspend several of them. Also inevitably, Bollywood could not resist the temptation of making films on the gory subject such as Ab Tak Chhappan, Shootout at Lokhandwala, and so on. It has to be remembered that fake encounters have their supporters not only in police, but also among sections of mainly the middle class who believe that elimination is the only way to get rid of the gangsters because their trial tends to be long-drawn.  

Even as the criminals dropped dead in Mumbai, fake encounters proved to be a handy weapon against the Khalistani terrorists in Punjab. Along with the gunning down of suspects, the phenomenon of some of them “disappearing”, as in Latin American dictatorships, also made its appearance at the time.

Perhaps the most prominent is Jaswant Singh Kalra, general secretary of Akali Dal’s human rights wing, involved in a campaign about the hundreds who had disappeared. A year earlier, Sukhwinder Singh Bhatti, a defence attorney, who appeared on behalf of the accused, also vanished.

As can be seen from these instances, fake encounters are easy to carry out in urban areas. The Naxalites in West Bengal, the Khalistanis in Punjab and the criminals in Mumbai were all killed in the towns in what was given out as genuine skirmishes with the police. The Maoists have so far avoided this fate by remaining in the jungles. But the point remains that these extra-judicial killings show that the Indian state can be quite ruthless. It may be noted in this context that the killings and even the disappearances become known in the urban areas. But the jungle can hide such acts. The Maoists can bring such incidents to light. But their difficulty is that they may be accused of exaggeration. Besides, such admissions will tend to show that they are losing the battle.