RIGHTS-INDIA: Gujarat State on Trial for Extrajudicial Killings

• by Ranjit Devraj (new delhi)
• Monday, September 14, 2009
• Inter Press Service

For one thing, the word ‘encounter’ has become popularly accepted as euphemism for stage-managed, extrajudicial killings by police in India.

And for another, the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), provincial government in Gujarat led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, was yet to live down the opprobrium of the February/May 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in which at least 1,000 people died and thousands were left homeless.

Human rights activists said there was something too pat about the way the bodies of the victims, the weapons they were supposed to have been carrying and the car they were riding in were arranged at the scene of the shootout on the outskirts of the industrial hub of Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat. Curiously, no policeman was injured in the alleged encounter.

On Sep. 4, allegations by human rights activists were given credence when Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S.P. Tamang pronounced the encounter a fake and said that the four victims -- Ishrat Jehan, a 19-year-old girl student, Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani -- were not linked to the LeT.

Tamang stated in his report that police had, in fact, shot the four in 'cold blood using their service revolvers'.

'Even if the occupants of the car were members of the LeT, the police should have followed due process rather than resort to what can only be described as cold-blooded murder,’’ said Colin Gonsalves, a leading Supreme Court lawyer and rights activist.

Gonsalves told IPS that the police officers involved should be proceeded against as laid down by several rulings. The Justice Jeevan Reddy committee, which dealt with encounter killings, had recommended in 2005 that whenever a policeman kills somebody, a criminal prosecution must be launched and it should be left to a court to decide if a plea of self-defence holds.

Similarly, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), a statutory body, ruled in 2003 that although police had the right to self-defence and may resort to reasonable force while arresting suspects in serious crimes, 'deaths caused in an encounter, if not justified, would amount to an offence of culpable homicide’’.

The NHRC was also clear that a 'magisterial enquiry must invariably be held in all cases of death which occur in the course of police action and the next of kin of the deceased be invariably associated in such inquiry'.

But far from moving against the 21 policemen involved in what has come to be known as the ‘Ishrat Jehan case,’ the Modi government petitioned the Gujarat High Court to have Tamang’s report scrapped as 'illegal and doubtful'.

Unfortunately for the state government, it is already embroiled in another encounter case before the Supreme Court, where it was compelled to admit that the death of Sohrabuddin Sheikh on Jan. 13, 2003 was the result of a fake encounter carried out by the state police.

Sheikh was shot dead by police outside Ahmedabad. They later murdered his wife, Kausar Bi, on Nov. 27, 2005.

Worse, a conscientious former director-general of police in Gujarat, R. B. Sreekumar, has gone public over how so-called encounters were a 'matter of policy' in the state.

Sreekumar, now associated with the Mumbai-based non-governmental organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace’s campaign to secure justice for the victims of the Gujarat pogrom, released in November last year a book detailing collusion between the police and the state government in the 2002 violence.

The 'Diary of a Helpless Man' describes the Modi government -- in power since October 2001 and now running its third term -- as ‘’cruelly communal' and run by bureaucrats who are 'sophisticated sycophants' and by police who are 'the most corrupt in India,’’ with some of its inspectors collecting as much as 3.7 million Indian rupees (75,000 U.S. dollars) a month in bribes.

But credit for legally nailing the fake encounters on the Modi government must go to Ahmedabad-based lawyer and human rights activists Mukul Sinha, who has been handling several cases on behalf of the survivors of victims, including Shamima Kausar, mother of Ishrat Jehan.

'Things are finally beginning to come together after all these years. The end is now in sight to the many cases and investigations filed against the Modi government that are related to the 2002 violence and the series of encounter killings targeting a particular community [Muslims],' Sinha told IPS over telephone from Ahmedabad.

'A real breakthrough came in the case of Sohrabuddin Sheikh,’’ said Sinha, a member of the Jan Sangarsh Manch (JSM) or People’s Revolutionary Forum.

Sinha said the common thread running through the cases he has been fighting is the Gujarat police alleging that the people they executed were members of the LeT and were plotting to kill Modi and other top leaders of the BJP or its affiliates.

'It helped that the name of D.G. Vanzara figured as the police ‘encounter specialist’ in all of the cases,' Sinha said. Vanzara is currently in jail, along with three other members of the Indian Police Service cadre for the murder of Sohrabuddin.

'Modi,' said Sinha, 'has stayed in power all these years by successfully polarising the Hindu and Muslim communities in Gujarat and constantly whipping up public fear that Gujarat was under siege by the LeT.'

Relations between India’s Hindu majority and Muslims -- who presently form about 14 percent of the country’s billion-plus population -- have been uneasy since the partition of British India to create Pakistan as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims.

The JSM is currently the only voluntary agency left in Ahmedabad vocally opposing the Modi regime’s policies. 'We have managed to survive by constantly keeping the people informed about the truth and through our links to the powerful Gujarat Union of Trade Unions,’’ Sinha explained.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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