Opinion Express View: When a state celebrates a police killing in cold blood, it thumbs its nose at the court and corrodes justice

Coming up next on the watch of the six-year-old Yogi Adityanath government in UP: Encounter No 184. Asad Ahmed, son of gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed, and an aide, were killed in Encounter No 183 in Jhansi on Thursday, which was also the third encounter in the Umesh Pal murder case, and third in the first 13 days of April. Those who are targeted, killed or maimed in these chilling and chillingly frequent “encounters” flaunted by the UP police and commended by the chief minister himself are often history-sheeters. Atiq Ahmed, lodged in Sabarmati Jail, at the centre of the latest spate of encounters that go back to the 2005 killing of BSP MLA Raju Pal, has around 100 cases lodged against him, including for murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping, extortion. He is an infamous representative of the troubling phenomenon of the strongman-politician in UP, seen to be patronised and nurtured by ruling establishments led by parties that sought to practise secularism on-the-cheap by blinking at criminal elements of the minority community. So, yes, there is a brutalising context in which the UP Police shoots to kill, in cold blood, again and again, with apparent legal and political impunity — but there can be no justification. The lengthening list of the UP Police’s encounter killings is a stain on its record. It gives the lie to the most fundamental of promises in a constitutional democracy — the assurance of due process, for all, in a system governed by the law. And, by the same token, a promise of protection, for all, against vigilante justice, even that which is perpetrated by the police.

Especially that which is perpetrated by the police. Ever since Yogi Adityanath became chief minister of UP in 2017, in the name of cracking down on crime and establishing deterrence, all sound imperatives of governance, the state has sanctioned brutish, strong-arm tactics by those whose responsibility it is to uphold the law and maintain order. When the police takes the law in its own hands, the danger is real and far-reaching, and it can come back to bite the political hand that feeds it. This is not a strike against terrorists in the fog of war, on the nation’s borders. This is the killing of those with documented cases, trials in progress. Along with the other state instrument, the bulldozer, this perilous institutionalisation of impunity in the heart — and heartland — of the nation corrodes the constitutional letter and spirit.

Advertisement

How many more will it take? How many more killings by the police in cold blood before the court steps in, to remind UP of its system and processes of justice? How many more encounters before it demands accountability? In the state regarded as politically India’s most crucial, in the pause after Encounter No 183, those are the questions.