Arundhati wants judicial probe into Delhi encounter

NEW DELHI: Arguing that she was just among the people who are not buying the police version of the Jamia Nagar encounter in South Delhi, Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy has demanded a judicial inquiry into the entire episode.
    
"I am just one of the thousands of people who are asking some very serious questions from the police...thousands of people are saying a lot of things.
    
"One (of them) is that once the police has killed people, it ceases to be a neutral party," Roy said on a news channel.
    
She said, "Historically, the world over, police and security forces have done things like that. But I am not saying it is fake. I am saying lets have an enquiry."
    
On being asked that in doubting the police, she is ignoring the evidence recovered from the scene of the encounter, she said, even in case of these recoveries, there has been a serious procedural lapse.
    
"When the police makes recoveries at the scene of a crime they should have independent witnesses corroborating it...and even the magistrate is asking for all documents, for the FIRs, for the post mortem reports, for the case diaries (and they are) not being produced," she said.
    
Asked what she suspects or accuses the police of, the writer said, "primarily of giving us a story that does not hold together, that insults our intelligence."
    
Roy said she was not dismissing corroborative evidence such as the clips of vehicles used as bombs at an Ahmedabad hospital which were found in Atif's mobile and a laptop recovered from Batla House in which Al Qaeda literature was found.

Roy said, "I am not dismissing the fact that they may be real terrorists. There are real terrorists (but) who are they, are these boys the real ones? A lot of questions that don't have answers and lot of strange stories are floating around".
    
When pointed out that her views would create an impression that she does not trust police, the acclaimed writer said it is a duty to have serious doubts and as members of civil society to ask the hard question.
    
She also pointed out to different versions put out by police in various states regarding the mastermind of the serial blasts in the national capital.
    
On the publication of "confessions" of alleged terrorists by a news weekly, Roy alleged that the phenomenon of media confessions is now becoming a standard operation procedure of Delhi Police's Special Cell.
    
"Even in the Parliament attack case, the court admonished police for parading these people before the media and giving these media confessions," she said.
    
Accusing the Indian middle class of shunning its liberal democratic values and permitting the country to become a police state, Roy said they will have to ask themselves a serious question about when to speak up and when to keep quiet.
    
"I think we are into very very dangerous situation now....I am saying with these policies that we are pursuing today, every ordinary Indian citizen's life is going to be at risk and we will pay very heavily for the consequences of what is going on now," she said.