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The U.P. burden

Nearly 60 per cent of the complaints of human rights violation are from Uttar Pradesh.

"NUMBERS" IS the main reason the NHRC gives for the manner in which complaints are handled.

The five-member Commission — Chairman and four members — and its current staff cannot reasonably be expected to deal with all the 70,000 complaints they receive every year.

However, the NHRC's onerous caseload is basically the burden of Uttar Pradesh, according to NHRC officials, "particularly western U.P."

Well over 40,000 complaints — nearly 60 per cent of the total — are from Uttar Pradesh. This is after nearly 50 per cent of complaints from the State are dismissed, at the start, for various un-stated reasons.

Bihar and Delhi follow with around 4,000 complaints each a year. Fewer than five per cent of the cases from either are dismissed as inadmissible.

There are fewer than 300 cases from Jammu and Kashmir and less than 200 from the North-eastern States, excluding Assam.

Why Uttar Pradesh? `Proximity' is the usual answer from the NHRC. However, if proximity alone explained it then the aggrieved of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan should also be flooding the Commission with their complaints. But this is not happening.

Another explanation offered by those in the Commission is that `entrepreneurial lawyers' or `touts' who expect to earn a share in any compensation that is awarded assist people to file complaints. How many such cases have there been to suggest that this is a trend? The answer is "a few".

Ravi Nair of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre said that just one category of complaints, "deaths in encounter", recorded by the Commission suggests that the problems in Uttar Pradesh are not explained so easily.

Mr. Nair says there is enough evidence to suggest that "encounters are being used as a method of `crime control' in U.P."

In 2000-2001, 68 of the 109 `fake encounters' — 62 per cent — reported to the Commission were from Uttar Pradesh. So were 75 per cent of cases of illegal detention. The People's Union for Civil Liberties, Uttar Pradesh, in the situation reports it files has recorded that there was an unmistakable pattern in the cases that the police described as `encounters'.

The report for 2002 says, "It is to be noted that in none of the cases reported as `encounter' with criminals, any police person was injured. They have to be regarded as suspected cases of `false' encounters."

One much reported case from 2001 illustrates the impunity the human rights activists speak of.

The Uttar Pradesh police said they had killed 15 "naxalites" in an encounter in Bhawanipur in Mirzapur district. Investigation by human rights groups revealed that 16 Dalit landless labourers, including two boys, aged 14 and 16, had been killed. They did not have criminal records.

The police could not prove that the `naxal' leaders they claimed had been killed were among the dead.

In a case from 2000, the NHRC awarded a compensation of Rs. 16 lakhs to the families of four men killed in fake encounters.

The police claimed that they had "acted on the basis of a secret information that one Dhananjay Singh, a dreaded criminal carrying a reward of Rs. 50,000 on his head, would commit dacoity at a petrol pump on Bhadoi Mirzapur road.

"The police posted three teams on the spot and at about 11.30 a.m. found three persons coming towards the petrol pump who on seeing the police fled and under the cover of the bushes started firing at the police."

The NHRC's own investigation found that the "encounter was entirely fake and that in fact four innocent persons had been brutally killed by the police after taking them out from a hotel in Bhadoi. There was involvement of one DSP, one Inspector, seven Sub-Inspectors and a number of police constables. Further, the cases of Arms Act registered against the deceased were found to be false."

Very few other cases of encounters in Uttar Pradesh have been investigated.

A former Director-General (Investigations) of the Commission admitted that the NHRC has not looked for an explanation for the Uttar Pradesh phenomenon, and that ideally there should be an `empirical study' to understand and explain the deluge of complaints from just one State. There is nothing to stop the NHRC doing this.

— A.M.

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