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Where transparency is the answer

Visuals are more evocative than words and two recent news photographs (January 27 and 30) affirm this. Unwittingly, they gave the two sides of the same story. One was the poignant picture of Maya Sharma, widow of police inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, receiving the Ashok Chakra from President Pratibha Patil. He died in the course of the September 19, 2008 police encounter at L-18, Batla House in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar. The encounter also claimed the lives of two allege d terrorists, Atif Ameen and Mohammad Sajed, and injured a third, Mohammad Saif. The second photograph was that of a massive rally held in the capital by Muslims, mainly from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. The rally renewed the demand for a judicial inquiry into the encounter, for which Sharma was posthumously decorated.

Ms Sharma’s reaction to the award was that it vindicated her husband’s honour. “The award is proof that he died a martyr.” She made a pertinent point. The Ashok Chakra, the peacetime equivalent of the Param Vir Chakra, is awarded for “the most conspicuous bravery or pre-eminent valour or self-sacrifice.” By this measure, the award would be the most comprehensive rejection of the theory that the September 19 encounter was staged against innocent civilians.

Sharma’s death has thus far been the police’s strongest defence in a case that has seen a rash of rallies and protest marches by Muslim masses and civil rights activists. Nonetheless, for all their quarrel with the police and the government, the protesters have had no convincing explanation of how the inspector died: If the alleged terrorists were innocent, unarmed civilians, then, by implication the police killed one of their own.

Yet this presumably open-and-shut case has been dogged by suspicion and controversy with protesters periodically demanding a judicial probe, because the investigation has lacked transparency. The official insensitivity in the L-18 case contrasts sharply with the speed with which the same establishment quelled doubts raised in the aftermath of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Thanks to this difference in approach, L-18 remains a festering wound while the air was quickly cleared in the Mumbai aftermath, ending any possibility of social unrest.

Those trying to get to the bottom of the L-18 encounter have been fobbed off, denied the most basic information and condemned as anti-national and worse. Rights activists who filed applications under the Right to Information Act for a copy of the police FIR were told that the matter related to national security. However, this seeming concern for the safety of the nation did not stop sundry police sources from leaking tendentious — and often contradictory — information on the details of the encounter, on the antecedents of the alleged terrorists and on the astonishing range of terror plots they were said to have masterminded.

Not only were there gaping holes in the stories but also police teams in different States competed in naming different masterminds for the terror attacks the Delhi police attributed to Atif Ameen’s team. The encounter was a single incident involving a single truth. Yet the police narrative changed by the hour, as the Delhi Union of Journalists noted in its meticulously compiled report, Delhi Blasts: A look at encounter coverage. From the number and make of guns, cartridges and laptops recovered from L-18 through the composition of the police team and the number of bullets that hit Sharma to the organisational links of the alleged terrorists, no two newspaper accounts matched. Depending upon which police source did the briefing, the alleged terrorists were variously traced to SIMI, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Indian Mujahideen and so on.

The wildly varying unofficial accounts combined with persistent official stonewalling to create suspicion and fear in the minds of Muslims, who were convinced that the encounter was simply an excuse for the government and the police to target the community. Till today, the Delhi police have not completed the formality of a magisterial inquiry into the encounter as specified by the National Human Rights Commission. So much so, on January 22, the Delhi High Court pulled up the police for the lapse, causing Muslim and rights groups to ask: “Is the government hiding something?”

Just where untamed emotion can take a vulnerable people ready to believe the worst was demonstrated after the Mumbai terror attacks when Union Minister Abdur Rahman Antulay alleged a Hindutva terror plot behind the killing of Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare and fellow officers Ashok Kamte and Vijay Salaskar. The terror attacks had played out live on 24-hour television; the government had in its possession compelling evidence to establish the Pakistani identity of the assassins. But for Mr. Antulay, the fact that Karkare and his fellow officers were found in the same spot bespoke of a conspiracy. He voiced his suspicions in the Lok Sabha: Who was the mysterious caller who directed them to the Cama hospital when the action was at the Taj Mahal hotel?

Soon Mr. Antulay was joined by others. The Urdu press bought the story wholesale as did Muslim community leaders and politicians. The campaign seemed about to spiral out of control when the government acted with uncharacteristic speed and intelligence. It fielded Home Minister P. Chidambaram to present its case. Which Mr. Chidambaram did — without melodrama or emotion. His minute-by-minute account of the whereabouts of the three officers, complete with details of who called whom, silenced Mr. Antulay and the swelling numbers of sceptics. Had the government not done this, the Hindutva theory would have been echoing in seminar rooms and political rallies, leading to a potentially explosive situation.

However irrational the Muslim community’s initial reaction, there was a reason for it. For community members, taunted and targeted by the Sangh Parivar for their alleged terror links, Karkare was a hero who had tracked down the Malegaon blast case suspects and established the truth of Hindutva terrorism. Muslims saw this as justice, as clinching proof of the Indian state’s impartiality. When Karkare, who had become a symbol of their hope and quest for justice, was reported killed, they were distraught. His death seemed too much of a coincidence.

We now know why and how Karkare and his fellow officers found themselves in the same spot. Yet even Mr. Chidambaram’s clarification perhaps did not capture the full picture. Kavita Kamte, wife of Ashok Kamte, did her own investigation, and her conclusion is that the three police officers spent nearly 40 minutes planning a strategy; in fact that Ashok Kamte shot at and injured terrorist Ajmal Amir Iman ‘Kasab.’ She said the brave officers received neither help nor reinforcement.

The shocking lapse discovered by Ms Kamte is one aspect of the case. The other is her finding that the three officers led from the front, which fairly demolishes the conspiracy theory. Individual efforts such as Ms Kamte’s only underscore the need for transparency. The government helps itself by being transparent. It could have come out with the full facts without waiting for Mr. Antulay to unveil his conspiracy theory.

However, transparency cannot be left to the discretion of the government. There exist clear guidelines on the procedure to be followed in arrests and encounter deaths. In two communications to all Chief Ministers, dated March 29, 1997 and December 2, 2003, the NHRC laid down that in all cases of deaths in encounter, the investigation must be done by an independent investigating agency. And where, based on a specific complaint, a “cognisable case of culpable homicide” is made out against the police, an “FIR to this effect must be registered.” A magisterial inquiry must also be held “in all cases of deaths which occur in the course of police action.” Further, “the next of kin of the deceased must invariably be associated in such inquiry.” In the Batla House case, the FIR, or what has been leaked so far, appears sketchy while the court has had to intervene to start the mandated magisterial inquiry.

The accountability question comes up again and again. On December 21, 2008, the Maharashtra police arrested Amir Talha, a 22-year-old native of Azamgarh employed with a high profile IT company in Hyderabad. Newspaper reports, quoting top police sources, named him a key suspect in the Delhi blasts and claimed that he was a SIMI activist with close links to the Lashkar and the Indian Mujahideen. Ten days later, Mr. Talha was released, with the Maharashtra ATS unable to find a shred of evidence against him. On January 13, a Central Bureau of Investigation inspector, Santosh Kumar, moved the court after he was threatened by an officer of the Delhi police special cell. Mr. Kumar proved that the officer had framed two Muslim youths in a terror case.

The UPA government, one of whose first acts was to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 (POTA), has sanctified a near-clone of POTA through the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2008. Yet police reforms which are the key to ensuring accountability and transparency in police action remain a distant dream — despite tomes written on the subject and the many anguished reminders from the Supreme Court.

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