Encounters are our killing fields

"Thalappavu”, which means turban or headgear signifying status, is a 2008 Malayalam film that tells the story of young Naxalite leader Arikkad Verghese, based on the confessions of police constable Ramachandran Nair who was ordered to kill him. When he was shot, Verghese, 31, was already a folk hero among tribals in the forests of Wayanad.

Nair’s public confession in 1998 that he had shot Verghese on the orders of K Lakhshmana, then a DySP, led to the senior officer’s arrest and a life sentence. The film version of this story empathised with the social and political issues of the Naxalite movement of the 1970s in Kerala, when many of its revolutionaries fell to bullets. Though the police and state establishment moved away from such extra-judicial killings, the “encounters” of the Naxalite era have haunted Kerala since.

Mumbai has been a different story of a slide. In January 1982, a Bombay crime branch team led by Rajendra Tambat and Isaque Bagwan shot dead Manohar Arjun Surve. Widely known as “Manya”, and categorised by the police as a gangster, Surve became the earliest “encounter” case in Bombay. The men who killed Manya Surve were regular sub-inspectors.

Though Tambat and Bagwan returned to their routine work, they inadvertently became the first example of an estimated 1,200 killings by the Mumbai police over the next two decades. The people the police killed in encounters were described as “criminals”, the various reasons for this final solution often concluded with “self-defence”. One or more weapon of offence was usually “found” strategically close to the dead “criminal”.

The police officers who followed them became known as “encounter specialists”. They acquired a frightening lack of accountability, twinned with unlimited resources and privileges unlike their predecessors or counterparts. Daya Nayak, Praful Bhosale, Ravindranath Angre, Vijay Salaskar (killed in the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai) became celebrated names.

Their deeds have been recorded as daredevilry in many Hindi films. At least eight Hindi films, like “Ab Tak Chappan”, said to be on the life of Daya Nayak, closely followed and magnified their images, making them even delusional. “Criminals are filth and I’m the cleaner”, encounter specialist Pradeep Sharma once said. Sharma, an inspector with 312 listed “encounter killings” stopped only when he was suspended for the death of a “victim”.

So why is India surprised when Sachin Vaze, an assistant police inspector, was found camped in a five-star hotel, drove a Mercedes, and could walk into the Police Commissioner’s office at will? He was doing what his counterparts had done: Leading extravagant lifestyles bankrolled by, often gangland funds, with clout and privileges unheard of by police officers of any rank. The lifestyle of Vaze, reinstated after suspension, may have run on with impunity if he had not recently been accused of parking an SUV laden with gelatin sticks outside Antilia, the residence of industrialist Mukesh Ambani.

Worrying picture

His detention, the transfer of city Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh and the court-ordered enquiry into the corruption charges they levelled against Home Minister Anil Deshmukh, since resigned, are all parts of a worrying picture with a long history. “Police officers who turned rogue are infinitely more dangerous than the criminals they pursue daily. They enjoy the protection of the uniform and consequently become a law unto themselves,” the retired, highly regarded police officer Julio Ribeiro observed after the Vaze-related events unfolded in Mumbai, shocking India.

As Ribeiro noted, this violent form of raw justice, effected on the streets, has been thriving on the adulation of the urban middle class. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has been raising concerns against it for decades. In March 1997, Justice M N Venkatachaliah, then NHRC chairperson and former Chief Justice of India, said in a letter to all chief ministers: “under our laws, the police have not been conferred any right to take away the life of another person”, and “if, by his act, the policeman kills a person, he commits the offence of culpable homicide …”

The NHRC records as many as 1,782 registered cases of “encounters” in India between 2000 and 2017. Uttar Pradesh accounts for nearly 45% (794 cases) of these cases. Probably due to the “thok doh” policy of Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath who said on television “Agar apradh karenge toh thok diye jayenge (if they commit crime, we’ll take them out). He has been untroubled by the flak following the encounter killing of gangster Vikas Dubey last July.

Challengers of this system have been ignored. When investigating cases of staged encounter killings in 2007, Rajnish Rai, a 1992 batch IPS officer, then DIG of the Crime Investigation Department, Gujarat arrested three senior IPS officers (D G Vanzara, Rajkumar Pandiyan and M N Dinesh) for the alleged fake encounter killings of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kausar Bi two years earlier. He was taken off the investigation and put in a “non-post” as DIG of the State Crime Records Bureau.

(The writer is Managing Editor, The Billion Press)