August 17, 1998

With the chief minister giving the police a free hand in creating a crime-free society, trigger happy officials go on a killing spree, sparking off a human rights controversy.

By Farzand Ahmed

I want performance, results. I want you to take a vow that you will create a dhamaka (impact) in the state. If noted criminals can be liquidated in encounters, do it. If you take the life of one person who has taken the lives of 10 others, then people will praise you. And I am here to protect you."
- Chief Minister Kalyan Singh to the state police at a law and order review meeting in Lucknow on April 30.

It was almost deafening, the dhamaka on July 25. Five daily-wage workers -- Salim, Nafeez, Sajid, Nanhe and Farmood -- from Meerut were headed for Balipura village when the taxi in which they were travelling broke down. They were at Lodpur village near Muzaffarnagar town, notorious for dacoities. Fearing they were criminals, the villagers mobbed them and informed the nearest police station. A police patrol led by Inspector K.K. Gautam, which was passing by, promptly swung into action, took the youths to a deserted spot and shot them one by one at point-blank range.

The liquidation of the five young men is the latest in a series of such incidents in the state since Kalyan Singh took over. Armed with the chief minister's licence to kill, the state police have eliminated over 200 "hardened criminals" in what they claim to be encounters. But it isn't the people's praise they are getting these days.

Yet to ascertain whether the five men were criminals, the police are suddenly in a spot. Initial inquiries have revealed that barring Salim, none of the others killed had any criminal record. Gautam, however, maintains that the five were looting passers-by when he struck. To validate the claim, he points to firs filed by two persons who, he says, were waylaid by them. "When the police encounters a criminal gang," he continues, "they do not immediately know who among them is a big criminal and who is a petty one. There is no malafide intention behind the killings."

There are few takers for his version though. In fact, the opposition parties in the state have turned the issue into a political campaign, demanding the dismissal of Kalyan Singh's BJP Government which they accuse of targeting minorities. The state units of the Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party and the Bharatiya Kisan Kaamgar Party (BKKP) have formed an action committee to seek the immediate arrest of Gautam on a mass-murder charge. In a bid to draw public attention to the issue, Janata Dal leader Abrar Alvi made an attempt at self-immolation at Meerut last Monday but was overpowered by the locals. In Muzaffarnagar, thousands held a protest rally.

The stir had its echo in Parliament too. SP activists, led by Mulayam Singh Yadav and Raj Babbar, along with the widows of the victims, staged a demonstration on Sansad Marg in Delhi on August 5 before petitioning President K.R. Narayanan to take appropriate action. The activists wanted a CBI inquiry ordered into the episode. "The large-scale killing of innocent youths is the beginning of the end of the blood-thirsty Kalyan Government," says Mohammed Azam Khan, MP.

The political campaign of the parties notwithstanding, the killings have also become a human-rights issue, with the police being accused of playing the role of an extra-judicial authority. "This was bound to happen when the chief minister himself goes around saying that criminals have no human rights," says Sardar Baint Singh, a lawyer heading the all-party action committee agitating against the liquidation of three people in Barabanki district in June-July (see box). "Only hardened criminals have been killed. Had there been innocents involved, the judiciary would have taken us to task," says a defensive DGP K.L. Gupta, adding that the 200 encounter deaths were those of hardcore criminals like Arvind Pandey, Surajpal Yadav, Jarnail Singh and Chattan Singh. Gupta, however, admits that police action "to end the criminal raj" was speeded up in May.

Such action is, however, not new to Uttar Pradesh. During V.P. Singh's tenure in 1981-82, the state police had launched an offensive against dacoits and though more than 300 were gunned down, incidence of dacoity did not abate. Singh then resigned, owning up failure.

But this time, says SP MLA Narendra Singh Bhatti, the style of killing has been different from 1982: the police simply pick up people and shoot them dead without provocation. All-India Muslim Forum President Nehaluddin complains that the police in the new order were "behaving worse than a military junta which at least organised mock trials of the victims before they were executed". The contention is that the police, in a bid to meet quotas, do not bother to check the bonafides or identity of those they choose to kill.

In early July, SP MLA Sandeep Garg moved a private member's bill in the Legislative Assembly to set up a human rights commission in the state. But Parliamentary Affairs Minister Hukum Singh turned it down declaring that "only criminals are raising the issue of human rights" and that "such demands also bring down the morale of the police force". The Government has also not taken any notice of the repeated reminders by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to set up a similar panel in the state. Reason: "Criminals have no human rights". The attitude of the Government has hit the conscience of various civil rights groups like the PUCL, insaf, People's Media and All India Muslim Forum, which have launched a movement against the "policy of liquidation and denial of human rights in the state".

According to the NHRC, Uttar Pradesh tops the list of all states in the country as far as human rights violations are concerned. Over 40 per cent of the complaints received by it in 1996-97 were from the state. These included killings and rape in police as well as judicial custody. During this period, it found that 171 cases of custodial rapes and killings actually took place. This indicated a fivefold increase in such cases over the previous years.

The chief minister is undeterred. With the aim of creating a bhay mukt samaj (society free from fear), he claims 95 per cent of the state's criminals are already behind bars. As for the rest, "andar jayenge ya upar bhejdiye jayenge (They would be put behind bars or will be sent to heaven)." According to reports reaching the police headquarters at Lucknow, when Kalyan Singh gave the police a free hand to liquidate law breakers, some criminals got their bails cancelled and returned to jail to escape encounter deaths. In May alone, as many as 800 returned to various jails. They included 212 in Agra, 190 in Lucknow, 82 in Kanpur and 80 in Meerut.

In fact, the April 30 law and order review meeting was called by Kalyan Singh to identify criminal gangs and fix targets to nab them. The district police chiefs were asked to shortlist the "top 10" criminals in their districts. They in turn asked each police station under their purview to prepare a list of the "top five". A Special Task Force comprising dare-devil officers was set up to deal with the criminals. Gupta admits that such an exercise was underway but denies there are any quotas fixed to liquidate criminals. "The word liquidate does not exist in our dictionary. We are not an extra-judicial authority to liquidate anyone," he argues. "The Government only wants order to be restored in the state and it is not interested in statistics."

But trigger-happy police officials elsewhere take pride in numbers. Says Shailendra Pratap Singh, superintendent of police, Barabanki: "We identified seven top criminals charged with a string of serious criminal cases in the district. Of them five have been liquidated." The police, he explains, resort to such encounters as hardcore criminals cannot be easily arrested. The aim, after all, is a crime-free, bhay mukt samaj. Never mind if in the process, the innocent live in constant fear of becoming unsuspecting victims.

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