AleAkhi Mahto would have seen the torturer’s toolkit slowly descend towards him: a sewing needle, a nail file, and a syringe filled with sulfuric acid that would be inserted into his eyeballs. Arrested along with eight others on suspicion of planning the heist, Lakhi was beaten all night at the police station, before being tied to a pig and made to lie in the courtyard. Inspector Muhammad Wasimuddin got a hole in one eye and sub-inspector Mankeshwar Singh got his other eye gouged out. Finally, sub-inspector Binda Prasad poured acid on the wounds.
Twenty-seven prisoners were later found have gone blind Called it Operation Ganga Jal by the Bhagalpur police, most managed to save one eye. Arrested along with Lakhi on that summer night of 1980, Anirudh Tanti managed to save both of them. Wife of Bhagalpur resident, Journalist Arthur Bonner Recorded, managed to rustle up to ₹150 to bribe the police, the cost of which came out of his eyes from the police station.
As they did this week, after the controversial killing of gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmed on April 16, many common people rejoiced. “There was no public disapproval at all,” Journalists Farzand Ahmed and Dilip Bob Information from Bhagalpur again Chief Minister of Bihar Jagannath Mishra addressed The angry mob helped the police gouge out the eyes of the suspected criminals. Eventually, after 2022 extrajudicial execution Residents of suspects in Telangana rape-murder case showered rose petals accused police officers
The love affair with the encounter tells an important story about the country. Large parts of India exist in a state of endemic anarchy, where the power of the elite is experienced through terror. Lacking meaningful access to protection from the criminal justice system, the spectacle of extrajudicial killing brings little solace to many in India: a thing called retribution.
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story of encounter
since 19th In the century, colonial authorities began fighting criminal gangs associated with local feudal lords, who used them to collect revenue and administer justice. The growing regional power of the East India Company, Historian Mark Brown As noted, this brought it “into direct competition with these semi-nomadic bands of merchant-robbers.” The Thuggee and Dacoity Department – was established in 1830 and the kernel from which modern intelligence bureau was born – used brute force to assert imperial authority
The cash-strapped state after independence found itself facing the same problem. in 1953 reports, the Intelligence Bureau lamented that the rural police, the backbone of the criminal justice system, had “disappeared” as an effective force. “The old fear that the police used to instill among criminals has gone away to a great extent,” it continued.
Former Punjab chief minister Pratap Singh Kairon was not unusual in being reputed to patronize dacoit gangs to maintain his power. on one occasion, prosecuting police officers Shot a group of criminals responsible for the murder of three children. Large parts of rural Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were, for all practical purposes, ruled by local landlords through criminal groups.
Under the leadership of KF Rustumji, the Inspector General of Police in Madhya Pradesh, the state began to re-establish its authority in the 1960s. Mass genocide, often fueled by regional ethnic tensions, threatened to engulf the nation-state. Law enforcement efforts, however, relied on a simple device. “Since there is little hope of getting admissible court evidence against a captured dacoit,” a Scholar George Floris dryly noted in 1962, “It is believed that the police are reluctant to capture and prosecute live prisoners.”
After a series of brutal killings of landlords in West Bengal by the Maoists, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi again ordered the use of terror. Kolkata has reportedly witnessed massacres in Kashipur and Baranagar where youths were dragged out of their homes and shot in cold blood,
The same story unfolded in Maharashtra as well. Starting with the alleged extrajudicial killing of gangster Manya Surve in 1982, several hundred people associated with the crime syndicate were shot dead. “Not only was the encounter policy questioned at that time,” Journalist Debasish Panigrahi wrote, “It was warmly welcomed as a necessary step in breaking the back of the underworld.” Every Police Department Worth Its Salt Needs Its Hit-Man, Ex Police Officer Maxwell Pereira Openly recorded.
Few of these cases ever ended in criminal prosecution of police officers. Arjun Goswami, the first prisoner to be caught by the Bhagalpur police complaining of being blind, was denied legal representation by a sessions judge. Fifteen officers were suspended for their role in the blindness after the Supreme Court intervened – but only three were convicted.
A senior police officer involved in the extrajudicial killing of a criminal said this Anthropologist Beatrice Jauregui: “How happy were the people whom he terrorized in the cities and villages! They threw marigold flowers at me and made me sit on their shoulders and took me for a ride. Thousands queued up at the station to thank me for what the courts could not do.”
These realities influenced counter-insurgency operations of the 1980s. In late summer of 1987, Rajinder Singh and 11 other members of his family were shot dead by pro-Khalistan militants. Fearing for his own life, the sole survivor, Joginder Singh, refused to identify the perpetrators in court, even though he had lost every single member of his family. Advocate KTS TulsiThose who prosecuted the case later wrote that the police “challenged evil in an open field in a rain of bullets, but stood with their heads bowed at the door of the Indian courts.”
Farooq Ahmed Dar, known as Bitta Karate on the streets of Srinagar, lived a happy and quiet life in Srinagar, after boasting that he had killed Kashmiri Pandits; Hundreds of people came to their wedding in 2011.
The dilemmas presented by counter-terrorism were vividly illustrated by the extra-judicial execution of alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists Ishrat Jahan Raza and Pranesh Pillai in 2004. The incident was prompted by a complex series of operational decisions, which included concern for safety The decision to kill the intelligence sources was approved at the highest levels of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
After each revelation of extrajudicial killings, there has been moral and judicial outrage but little real introspection or accountability. After prosecution of Punjab police officers decorated in 1996 ThePrint Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta It asked the question: “It is perfectly legitimate to question the methods used by security forces, but isn’t it more important to ask who is ordering them to do so?”
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India’s criminal justice crisis
Liberal norms and laws were not designed for a politics where brutal violence fuels the processes of criminal justice: the collapse of state institutions is one of the first characteristics of all true crises of violence. Philosophers Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarkhave, among others, argued that torture and extra-judicial killings are justified in order to save the state from collapse. Experts like Ian Turner Disagrees, arguing that extrajudicial killings and torture corrupt the very foundation of liberal states.
In India the problem is more complex: exceptions that might have been justified in small wars in Punjab or Kashmir have become embedded as part of the general fabric of policing. Emergency has become everyday.
The evidence suggests that extra-judicial killing does not solve the underlying crisis of violence. Despite the ‘thok do’ aggressiveness of policing in UP, there has been a steady rise in gun-related crimes in recent years, as Nikhil Rampal points out. revealed in ThePrint. And even where extrajudicial killings have restored order, it has corrupted police forces and hollowed out criminal justice institutions, with severe long-term costs on the economy.
The answer lies in giving India’s chronically understaffed and under-resourced criminal justice system the personnel, training and technology it needs. Instead the state and central governments are conspiring- like Available data show – To degrade whatever little remains of police institutions. The question is: will a criminal political class ever create modern policing institutions that will, ultimately, contribute to their own destruction?
The writer is National Security Editor with ThePrint. He tweeted @praveenswami. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)