A Murder by Any Other Name

The Supreme Court spells out a policy on encounters to prevent cold blooded killings

Underworld stories can come from all quarters in Mumbai. Recently when I ran across a neighbour, a senior citizen, he told me of a friend of his who had put in his life savings to buy a canteen in the suburb of Jogeshwari. It was frequented by henchmen of the gangster Sharad Shetty.

One day, they casually told the man that they were taking over the canteen. He couldn’t refuse. Friends came to his help to negotiate and they agreed to give him a fraction of the market price. The man went into a shell after that. Most of the gangsters were later shot dead in encounters.

This happened, unsurprisingly, in the 90s, when the Mumbai police decided to go on a killing spree. It was not crime that worried them as much as loss of control. In the 90s, every streetside thug realised how easy it was to make money out of extortion and crime, an orderly affair with the dons being accountable managers of sorts, began to slip into chaos.

What was striking was how these extrajudicial killings were welcomed for some time. Encounter specialists, an elite group given the responsibility to enforce this policy, became heroes. It was only after order was restored and organised crime became organised once more, that ethical considerations came in.

The Supreme Court this week spelt out a policy for encounters so that murders don’t get passed off as heroic deeds. In its order, it has created rigid systems of accountability around every encounter which includes a compulsory FIR and investigation for every such killing with checks and double checks at the executive and judicial levels. No promotions or awards can be given out of turn to those policemen who are part of encounters until their legitimacy is established. And relatives of the dead person can complain directly to a court.

They are well thought out measures, but it also shows how long it has taken for India as a country to arrive at them. The reason is that not just the police establishment but even the common man thought the outright killing of criminals was the only way to address crime. The judicial system was easy to manipulate and it was hard to find a witness against a gangster. Imprisonment itself was not a punishment, because he ran his operations just as efficiently from behind bars.

The problem, however, is not the encounters but also the men who order and do them. Soon after the encounter policy in Mumbai, it suddenly became apparent that most of the gangsters being shot down were rivals of Dawood Ibrahim.

Like good businessmen, he had managed to twist the system to serve his needs. And when Arun Gawli started a political party, he saw his men being killed with a vengeance, showing how politicians had begun to use encounters for their personal agendas.

The encounter specialists themselves started milking the system by becoming arbitrators in disputes in sectors which operate on the fringes of the law, like the construction industry. They became rich, flashy and powerful. Now they keep going in and out of jail and nobody thinks they don’t deserve it.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

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