This March two businessmen travelling in a car were shot dead in New Delhi in a case of mistaken identity. The police commissioner was transferred.
- In August, a high court verdict in Andhra Pradesh said that the death of a Naxalite in an 'encounter' amounted to culpable homicide and should be treated accordingly.
- In Mumbai, three petitions challenging these policing methods have been admitted by the high court. Encounter deaths in the city date back to the early '80s. Recently Sada Pawle, who was close to mafia don Arun Gawli, died in an 'encounter'. In October another Gawli associate, Akhil Bharatiya Sena general secretary Jitendra Dabholkar, was killed.
ABU Saiyama, also known as Javed, was picked up by the police on August 26 only to surface days later in a morgue, his body punctured with bullet injuries. The police say Saiyama was actually Javed Fawda, a dreaded criminal linked to the Dubai-based gang of Abu Salem. According to the official version, he was shot dead in an encounter with the police on August 28. But his family says he was just a peanut vendor who had been struggling for the last 10 years to keep them from starving. So which is the right story? A police force wiping out crime under the BJP-Sena regime? Or a reckless shooting and a case of mistaken identity?
The case of Abu Saiyama alias Javed is only the latest in a series of 'encounter' deaths in Mumbai that have attracted much public concern. In Saiyama's case, the police version has been directly challenged in the high court. "Their (his family's) living conditions will bring tears to anyone's eyes," says Ismail Dossa, general secretary of the Samajwadi Party (Mumbai).
This is a forceful argument in favour of Saiyama's sympathisers—if he was a criminal wanted in connection with the Gulshan Kumar killing, had links with Dubai and carried imported firearms, surely he and his family wouldn't live amidst such abject poverty. They allege that the man he was mistaken for, Javed Fawda, is alive and well in Arthur Road, a local jail. However, a senior crime branch official maintains that this is not a case of mistaken identity: "We have witnesses who identified Saiyama as Fawda. They stand by that."
Saiyama was coming out of a local mosque at 2 pm on August 26 when four men picked him up. "They were sturdy policemen in civil clothes. I saw them bundle him into an autorickshaw. A short distance away he was put in a car. That was the last any of us saw of him alive," says John Fernandes, a local resident who has filed an affidavit in the case. Fernandes alerted Saiyama's sister, Rubina Bano, who searched police stations across the city for eight days and registered a complaint that he was missing. She was finally taken to the morgue where she found her brother's body. "I fell down unconscious when I saw his body," she recalls. "It looked like they had run a vehicle over him. There were tyre marks and the chest and upper arms were flattened. The bones of his legs were fractured to powder. And he had five bullet injuries—three in the chest, one behind the ear and one in the groin."
Public sympathy is clearly with Saiyama's family. Alleges Ahad Khan, a businessman: "The same police officer (Vasant Doble of the crime branch) who shot Saiyama tortured and killed my brother (Abdul Ghaffar Khan) in 1984. After an altercation with friends, my brother had voluntarily given himself up as an assault case was registered against him. He was tortured and beaten to death with a hockey stick by the officer, who was convicted by the sessions court. We have appealed to the Supreme Court as he has been reinstated."
A growing list of deaths in "police encounters" has earned Mumbai a dubious record. This year there have already been 69 deaths so far in 'encounters'. Last year, there were 57 deaths, a steep increase from the 1995 total of five. This March, after a youth, Abdul Majid, was escorted out of a local restaurant by two policemen and shot dead, lawyer Majeed Memon appealed to the National Human Rights Commission. He wrote that in encounters till then 23 persons had sustained fatal multiple bullet injuries. All of them died without making a statement. Not a single policemen sustained even minor injuries. "Is anyone safe in this growing police raj?" he demanded. The commission threatened action against the police commissioner if information on the encounters was not submitted before September.
Dogged by criticism that the law and order situation is deteriorating, the state government has supported the police. Chief Minister Manohar Joshi maintained that "it is a matter of self defence". According to him, "whenever the police is attacked they have to defend themselves with weapons. What can we do?"
THE explanations that follow an encounter death, in press releases or to the court, have a familiar ring: "Acting on a tip-off, the police party laid a trap...the accused fired one round towards the police party. On sensing danger to the police party...rounds were fired....the accused fired one round which hit the front glass of the police vehicle."
Significantly, "like heroes in a Hindi film, the police never get hurt. No bullets, no broken glass. There's no real encounter, 99.9 per cent of them are just settings for murder," claims Abu Asim Azmi, president of the Samajwadi Party (Mumbai). Azmi has filed a writ petition in the high court, alleging that the Saiyama case is one of mistaken identity. Azmi and SP general secretary (Maharashtra) Husain Dalwai have appealed to the National Human Rights Commission to investigate the "cold-blooded murder of Abu Saiyama".
As the list lengthens, the police are finding it increasingly difficult to get away with the good guys vs bad guys story. Last month, the high court admitted a writ petition filed by the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) requesting a CBI inquiry into the encounter deaths and demanding that the culprits be charged with culpable homicide. The court ordered the police to submit post-mortem reports and photographs in all encounter death cases since January 1995. "The police say they have acted in self-defence. The state accepts that. No cases are registered, there is no trial. The executioners have become judges. They kill and they decide it is in self-defence," says P.A. Sebastian, CPDR counsel. The CPDR petition alleges that the encounters are being staged to salvage the government's image and counter the impression that law and order is out of control.
The petition was the third in seven days questioning deaths in police encounters. Admitting the first, the court had on October 6 directed the police commissioner to produce records of all cases between January and August 1997. The petitioner, Mohammed Irfan Zaveri, filed a public interest litigation before the high court alleging that most encounter deaths were fake. Zaveri was shot in the abdomen by a sub-inspector, but produced medical records to show that his right arm was incapacitated after an accident and could not handle the chopper the police claimed he was wielding.
His petition has been clubbed with the CPDR's and that of the Samajwadi Party in the Saiyama case. Admitting the Saiyama petition, the court said it was "more than satisfied" that there is a "prima facie case of violation of fundamental right to life". The three petitions will come up for a final hearing late next month. But that is small consolation for Rubia Bano. She has a mother dying of cancer, two younger brothers and three small children of her own to support. With another child on the way, even the job she desperately seeks may be difficult. She says: "My brother and I used to wonder how we would raise the money for mother's funeral. Now when there is no food to eat, I cannot even afford to worry about that." But maybe the courts should.
