Encounters of the staged kind

International human rights law prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of life under any circumstances as does the law in this country. Extrajudicial killings, clearly contravene the right to life. Once described as the Dirty Harry phenomena, the rapid rise in encounter deaths in different parts of the country has put extrajudicial killings under the spotlight. The Sunday Express team of reporters and photographers travel all across the country to find out why the law-maker is turning into the law-breaker.

BIHAR
‘First they kill, then they tell lies’

NIRMALA GANAPATHY

Patna: LAST week, as Kundan Gupta watched the images of two-year-old Anshu lighting the funeral pyre of his father, Amitesh Sharma, while his mother, Pramila, looked on, the tears returned. She knew exactly what the young widow and the parents of Amitesh, a 23-year-old jawan who the Bihar Police constables shot down, were going through.

After all, just a couple of months back, her son, Vikas Gupta, along with two friends, Prashant Singh and Himanshu Yadav, were also gunned down in a fake encounter in the Ashiana Nagar area. The wounds of December are still fresh.

‘‘At least my son wasn’t married and didn’t have a small child. How will that child grow up without his father,’’ says Kundan. ‘‘The government assured us that this wouldn’t happen to any other family. But it has. Why do the police do this?’’

On February 4, Amitesh, a Russian mechanism tank driver with the 14th Guard Regiment in Patiala who was home on leave, was returning from his bank in Paliganj when he was ambushed by a police escort party and shot dead. Dozens of eyewitnesses recounted how the constables shot Amitesh although he was unarmed.

The police immediately went into denial mode, called Amitesh a deserter who had fallen into bad company and said they had received a tip-off that the trio were planning to loot the bank. They also claimed that the two friends who were with Amitesh were criminals.

Within 24 hours, the police’s claims were exposed as Amitesh was cremated with full military honours. ‘‘The police first kill my son and then call him a deserter, making up all kinds of lies. My son was a soldier who was proud to be part of the Defence Forces. I used to pray for him and give him my blessings to vanquish the enemy at the border. But he was killed near his own home,’’ says his father Avdesh Sharma, a government school teacher.

In Bihar, there has been a steady increase in the number of ‘‘encounter’’ killings, most of which are widely known to be fake. According to a Bihar police report, the number of killings in police operations shot up from 48 in 1999 to 68 in 2002. In a handful of cases, the state government — in the face of irrefutable evidence — has had to accept that the encounters were false and engineered. And over the years, the number of such cases have piled up.

n In 2001, Chapra DSP Raj Kumar Yadav was chargesheeted by the CBI in a 1995 fake encounter killing in which four persons died.

n In 2000, a Gaya court gave the death sentence to 11 cops who killed three businessmen in a fake encounter in Barachatti. According to the evidence presented at the trial, the businessmen were killed in cold blood. The Patna High Court changed the sentence to life imprisonment.

n In 2000, Anand Pandey, son of Hindi poet Manager Pandey, was shot dead in yet another fake encounter. Investigations revealed that the policemen got into an argument with Pandey, shot him and then tried to pass it off as an encounter.

n In 1999, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) ordered compensation for the wife of Parsu Ram Nut, who was reportedly dragged out of his house and shot dead by policemen.

But these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Two incidents in December last year brought such ‘‘encounters’’ into the limelight. On December 24, advocate Rajesh Kumar and his younger brother, Rajni Ranjan Kumar, were shot dead when they were returning from Muzzafarpur to Begusarai.

A police team led by Inspector Maheshwar Mahto shot at the Tata Sumo in which they were travelling, thinking it was carrying dreaded criminal Dilip Singh and his gang members. According to the driver, Mohd Firoz Alam, who was also injured in the shooting, the policemen did not even bother to verify their identity. ‘‘They said maro salo ko and opened fire,’’ he recalls.

The Begusarai SP, Rajesh Chandra, called the killing ‘‘cold-blooded’’ and held the DSP guilty. Soon after the incident, Chandra told The Indian Express that the officer had a history of being violent and trigger-happy. Unfortunately, RJD supremo Laloo Prasad Yadav intervened and asked for the commissioner’s report. So, the DSP is still at large.

Just four days later, another fake encounter on December 28 kicked off widespread riots and an outpouring of anger against the police. Inspector Shamshe Alam shot three youths — Prashant Singh, Himanshu Yadav and Vikas Gupta — at point blank range and tried to pass them off as dreaded criminals. Alam even went to Laloo’s house to boast that he had killed three criminals. Unfortunately for him, Vikas’s father, who happens to be Laloo’s schoolmate, also went to the CM’s house.

The excuse given by the police and Laloo was that criminals have become so powerful in certain areas that encounter killings are the only way out. According to the latest figures, crime has increased substantially over the last two years. Cognizable offences leapt from 80,435 in 2001 to 84,268 in 2002. Kidnappings increased from 1,428 to 1,668 and rape increased from 655 in 2001 to 747 in 2002.

‘‘It is easier to kill a gangster in an encounter than arrest him. The police work so hard to track him down. If he is arrested, he is released on bail, enabling his return to criminal activities. In an encounter, you save yourself the legal wrangles,’’ says a senior police official quite candidly.

‘‘The police force has no sensitivity. Somehow they seem to think the public is the enemy. Fake encounters have been increasing over the years and it seems like the police just don’t care any more,’’ says Kishori Das, general secretary of the PUCL. He points out that the lure of a gallantry award is another reason why the cops are so trigger-happy in a state where promotions don’t come easily. And the fact that 90 per cent of those awarded the 60 gallantry awards received the honour because of an encounter killing speaks for itself.

Besides the death of innocents, there have also been cases of unarmed criminals being killed in ‘‘encounters’’. In one case involving the death of People’s War Group commander Pratap, the PUCL’s investigations revealed that the Naxal was unarmed when he was shot dead. The police later admitted that it was a staged encounter.

At the end of the day, it is the families of the victims who suffer. Satyendra Mahto has been looking for justice since 1996, when his younger brother, Shashi Ranjan, a Patna University student, was shot dead by the police. An investigation was ordered. Shashi was found to be innocent.

‘‘I went to the market, they said my brother pleaded with the policemen and even offered to give them his college ID. But they shot him instead,’’ says Mahto. The administration promised him a job and compensation. But seven years down the line nothing has materialised.