Close Encounters of the False Kind

Let’s get some perspective on the issue of extra-judicial killings

The Ishrat Jahan case has elicited a lot of debate on the issue of police encounters in India. That is because Gujarat has been on the radar of civil rights-waalas since the 2002 riots and every development there is tracked with a rigour that’s lacking in several other places in India. The truth is, such encounters happen all over India and many of them get no mention in the 24-hour news cycle.

While routinely going through its newsletters in 2012, India’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) discovered that Assam had not reported over 60 killings to the Commission over a ten-month odd period. According to NHRC rules, every death in police action must be reported to it within 48 hours. In 2011-12, the NHRC opened 79 fresh cases on encounter deaths in Assam; 65 of these were opened on intimation from the state police and the rest on complaints from NGOs and others. In the same year, the United Nations observed that ‘a credible commission of inquiry into extra-judicial executions in India, or at least in the areas most affected by extra-judicial executions, should be appointed by the [Indian] government’.

In 2013, the Supreme Court of India set up a three-judge committee to examine a claim of 1,500 fake—or staged—encounters having taken place in Manipur. Led by Justice Santosh Hegde, it found that six killings were not genuine encounters.

On 12 July 2013, a Mumbai sessions court sentenced 21 people for life including 13 policemen for staging an encounter in the city. Since the 1990s, at least 1,200 people have been killed in Mumbai by a special posse of policemen called ‘encounter specialists’. Despite this statistic, the National Crime Record Bureau of India records zero fake encounters by the police of Maharashtra.

Nearly 60 per cent of all extra-judicial death cases are in Uttar Pradesh, where the victims are usually individuals with criminal backgrounds. Listed as ‘death in encounters’, the NHRC hears at least 60 cases of such killings every week. Most cases are heard more than once, so not all are new cases. In 2012, of the 129 cases that the Commission heard, it found 50 cases involving 59 deaths to have been staged. This is a shocking number; 46 cases involved the police, three involved paramilitary personnel, and one, the Army (which had killed two people in this case).

One of India’s most controversial legal provisions is one that shields security personnel from prosecution for such killings: the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Granting immunity to armed forces engaged in anti-insurgency operations, it was first deployed as an emergency measure in the Northeast in the 1950s and is still in force despite loud civil society protests against it. Applicable in Kashmir too, the armed forces have used AFSPA as a shield in several cases. It does not guarantee impunity for all time. Recently, the CBI registered a case after 15 years against police and Army personnel accused of killing 19 people in the Poonch area in August 1998. In 2010, the Army had tried to invoke AFSPA in the case of a colonel, major and seven others charged with killing three youths taken as foreign terrorists in Kupwara, but the case is not closed yet.

In what is known as the ‘Red corridor’ of India where the armed Communist Party of India (Maoist) operates, detentions resulting in custodial deaths and other extra-judicial killings are not uncommon. India has a culture of impunity in practice that will continue unless justice is upheld. There are several examples of police, paramilitary and armed personnel accused of such killings, but they have rarely been arrested and punished.

It speaks of a warped incentive system. Often, such encounters are staged to win medals and awards. In the Army, unit by unit scores are kept and points earned by the elimination, apprehension or surrender of militants in insurgency zones. If an Army unit wins an award citation, it may get to join a United Nations mission overseas—prized among other things for the money it can earn the men in uniform. It is like a bonus for the ‘good work’ they have done. It matters little that this ‘good work’ could include extra-judicial killings or false surrender cases.

This is how it works: while combat formation in a conflict zone is hard work, the need for recognition pushes them to scout for easy heads to scalp and candidates for surrender. It creates demand for an illegal arms trade, too, since the security forces often buy weapons to display as ‘captured’. These arms come in handy for staged surrenders and are seen in ceremonies attended by the media where former ‘militants’ turn their guns over to the State. Many of these men are freelance actors; they readily serve a three-month jail sentence and emerge for another round of the same farce. Their families get compensated while they serve jail terms.

In many places, the police join the effort for the spoils. While the police lack the military training needed for encounters, they help by identifying and drawing up lists of targets. They sometimes get to pose with these dead targets too, often gun-in-hand, though they may never have held one ever before. The judicial commission on the Manipur killings set up by the Supreme Court held an Army major responsible for one of the killings. Major D Sreeram was awarded India’s highest peacetime gallantry medal in 2009 (one of only two serving Ashok Chakra winners) for the same ‘encounter’ in which cousins Gobind and Nobo Meitei were killed in Imphal’s Langol area on 4 April 2009. Sreeram, leading the Assam Rifles unit, was awarded the medal for a ‘palpable decrease in insurgency activities’ and bringing ‘succour’ to the state’s people.

But one of the most brutal examples of innocent civilians killed by State forces—missing from the current discourse on fake encounters—is from Assam. In 1991, the state government managed to break the United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) and draw a large number of this armed separatist group’s leaders and senior fighters overground. They were banded together to form an irregular force under the banner of the Surrendered United Liberation Front of Assam (Sulfa), tasked with taking on insurgents. As part of the rehabilitation package, they were given business contracts, permits to run liquor shops and other privileges. They were also allowed the use of firearms. While this new militia was used by the State to eliminate Ulfa cadres, it soon began a reign of terror, targeting family members of Ulfa leaders and turning trigger-happy in violation of all norms.

This issue became so contentious that the subsequent government ordered an enquiry of ‘secret killings’, accusing the previous government of covert exterminations. The Assam killings recorded between 1998 and 2000 led to three inquiry commissions under India’s Commission of Inquiry Act of 1952. On 3 November 2005, the KN Saikia Commission was constituted, and it submitted its report to the government on 15 November 2007 (to be presented to the Assembly). The Saikia report investigated 35 cases of secret killings. According to the report, most of the killings occurred in the dead of night and the assailants spoke in the local language. ‘The assailants were invariably armed with sophisticated firearms of prohibited bores, and masked with black wrappers or caps to avoid being identified,’ notes the report. ‘The vehicles used were mostly Maruti Gypsies and vans always without registration numbers. There was police patrolling in the crime areas prior to and after but not during the killings.’

The report alleges a nexus between the state and the surrendered cadres: ‘There was lurking evidence of police-SULFA nexus in the killings, some of the latter being constituted as an extra-constitutional authority and used as executioners. The modus operandi being to visit the family, ask members to persuade its ULFA members to surrender, failing which, to send an advance team to survey the location and structure of the house, then to send armed and masked men at dead of night, knock at the door to wake up the inmates and then drag him/them out and shoot him/them dead, or take him/them away and secretly kill and throw the bodies somewhere.’

So far, nobody has been held responsible for the killings. The police officer who allegedly put together the Sulfa operation later ascended to the highest rank in the police force, serving as Director General of Police in two states of India.

The story is far from over. The use of irregular militia is common in Maoist areas as well as Kashmir. Since Independence, India’s concern with internal security threats has made observers look the other way. It is true that India has had to contain insurrections without policy guidelines and has been successful to a large extent. But it has been at the cost of blatant violations of human rights.

About The Author

Kishalay Bhattacharjee