The Justice VS Sirpurkar commission report has indicted 10 Hyderabad policemen for firing without provocation on four men accused of gang-raping and murdering a young veterinarian in November 2019. This is yet another instance of the flagging of outright abuse of due process by those whose responsibility it is to uphold it. The Supreme Court-appointed panel’s 387-page report’s criticism of the police version of events that led to the killing of the four suspects when they were taken to the crime scene in the early hours of December 6, 2019, makes for sobering reading. It has concluded that there are sufficient grounds to believe “that the accused were deliberately fired upon with the intent to cause their death” and asked that the police personnel be tried for “murder, causing disappearance of evidence, and providing false information”.
In 1997, the National Human Rights Commission prescribed a set of procedures to be followed by the police “in cases where death is caused in encounters by them”. However, by all accounts, these SOPs are rarely implemented despite the judiciary’s prodding on more than one occasion. In 2014, while issuing another set of guidelines to investigate extra-judicial killings, the SC pointed out that such killings “affect the credibility of the rule of law and the administration of the criminal justice system”. The apex court’s intervention seems to have done little to change the trigger-happy ways of certain sections of the police. According to a report in this newspaper, last year, the Uttar Pradesh police allegedly killed more than 140 people in 8,472 encounters between 2017 and 2021. The problem is also that despite a number of probe panels incriminating policemen for extra-judicial deaths, cases fall through the cracks of the legal system or because of want of evidence. This anomaly was highlighted in a recent verdict of the Raipur Sessions Court. A 2015 report by the Justice Anita Jha Commission constituted by the Chhattisgarh government had incriminated two policemen for killing a minor tribal girl four years earlier. But these security men were acquitted by the Raipur court on April 5, despite Sessions Judge Shobhna Koshta observing that “there was ample suspicion of the commission of the offence by the accused”. “The court could not convict the accused solely on the account of improper investigation resulting in deficiency of evidence,” she said.
The apex court has transferred the Hyderabad encounter case to the Telangana High Court. It’s incumbent on all parties to ensure that due processes are followed rigorously. The gruesome crime committed against the Hyderabad veterinarian requires a proper legal closure, not brutish illegality.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on May 24, 2022 under the title ‘Bring full closure’.
