A travesty is unfolding, across states, and in an otherwise noisy democracy, it is playing to a disquieting silence. Reports in this paper on Tuesday shone a light on three police “encounters” of alleged criminals in three states on Monday. In Badlapur, a 23-year-old janitor arrested last month for allegedly sexually assaulting two four-year-old girls, was killed by the police in “retaliatory firing”; in Unnao, the UP Special Task Force gunned down an accused in a jewellery robbery case, days after his co-accused was killed in a police encounter; in Chennai, one of the most wanted men in the region became the third history-sheeter to be killed in similar circumstances since July. Common to these killings in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu is not just the fact that all three men who were killed had serious criminal charges against them, but also this: All three deaths reek of a police vigilantism that is allowed to get away with murder — literally. Going by past record, it is safe to say that these killings will not be thoroughly scrutinised for the short-circuiting of due process in a constitutional democracy, nor taken up as an urgent issue by the Opposition parties or the Court, nor made into a cause for mobilisation by society. The culture of quietude and impunity in which they take place criminalises the police while making everyone else a witness, if not complicit.
The police approach of shoot first and ask no questions later, far from being censured, is celebrated and encouraged politically. In UP, for instance, most notably on the watch of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a dismal pattern has been firmed up by this brutalised policy of crime and punishment. The accused, who, according to similar-sounding FIRs, arrive invariably on a “motorcycle” and are killed in the early morning hours or at night by policemen who claim to have carried out “nyuntam (minimal) firing”, are treated as guilty, and law enforcers are cast as agents of vigilante justice. The political establishment is self-congratulatory. Last month, after the rape and murder of the RG Kar Medical College doctor, Mamata Banerjee’s ever-ascendant nephew, who likes to seize the moral high ground against his political rivals, called for short-circuiting due process by hanging or killing “rapists” in an encounter. Police encounter numbers are totted up and projected as evidence of the government’s “zero tolerance” on crime. And, as in the killing of Atiq Ahmad, don-turned-politician and his brother, at point blank range by assailants, right under the nose of policemen who were escorting them to hospital in 2023, it also enables a dystopian scenario of citizens conducting their own encounter killings.
The Supreme Court has recently spoken out against “bulldozer justice” – the outrageous practice of state governments demolishing homes and properties of people accused in crimes, in the name of acting against “illegal encroachment” — and invited suggestions for pan-India guidelines. It must now turn its attention to the other routinised violation of due process, across states, of encounter killings. In a constitutional democracy, when the executive crosses lines, other institutions need to act as a check. In this case, “the people” seem unmoved because few will shed a tear for a rape-accused or a murder-accused. However, their execution in cold blood is a stain, deep and dark, on the justice system. Every encounter killing is the state thumbing its nose at the law and at due process. Only the courts can — and they should — step in to draw the line.
