On 26 September 2015, The Caravan and Harper Collins, hosted the launch of Kishalay Bhattacharjee’s Blood On My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters. The discussion that followed the launch was moderated by Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor of The Caravan; the panellists were Satyabrata Pal, former member of the National Human Rights Commission; Shiv Sahai, assistant director general of police in Jammu and Kashmir; and Bhattacharjee. In this edited video clip from the event, Bhattacharjee explains the premise of his book and introduces the audience to the trade in human life that facilitates staged encounters in India. Pal details the manner in which reports that were sent on these encounters would follow a fixed template, while Sahai argues that there is a marked difference between "perception and reality."
Hartosh Singh Bal: Kishalay, at the heart of the book is what has unfolded in the north-east. When you started examining encounters in the north-east and started examining the patterns behind them, what did you find?
Kishalay Bhattarjee: You know…what was new for me, when I was writing the book, as against what I reported, was sometimes very embarrassing; because, those very incidents that I had reported as encounters were now unfolding before me as something else. And the one limited point that actually the book will make, is that people who just moved in from across the border, from Bangladesh in to India—as you know we have a very long border with Bangladesh, that about 4019 kilometer border and there are about 65 smuggling corridors there, there is cattle running, there is a whole lot of other stuff that goes on. But anybody who comes in from there, there is a chance that within 24 to 48 hours, and if it’s beyond 48 hours they are not going to be touched, but between 20 to 48 hours, there is a possibility that they are going to be picked up and they are going to be shot dead in what is going to be called an encounter. Now why that happens is that this person…nobody is going to claim him, there will be no outcry about him. You can easily prove him to be a militant from across the border or someone who has found safe haven there. This is a very flourishing enterprise, which is run by a mafia. So what happens is that the mafia… the unit that is taking over gets a briefing from the previous unit, and there are certain numbers that are passed on to this unit and numbers, which we passed on to me as well. There is this mafia that operates…so in lower Assam there will be one mafia and upper Assam there will be this other mafia and the unit that comes in there, that is inducted there, will call them up whenever they require a kill, and this mafia would supply the kill depending upon what kind of person they required.
HSB: Mr. Pal, almost every police encounter has to be reported to the NHRC. Given the context of what you have looked at, are these isolated aberrations or are encounters more deeply rooted in our system?
Satyabrata Pal: It is true, as Mr Sahai says that when the armed forces or the paramilitary or even the police are actually in a situation where they are confronting, almost on a daily basis, an armed enemy, these staged encounters are fairly uncommon. They are rare. But when the…particularly the armed forces and the paramilitary acting under the impunity of AFSPA [Armed Forces Special Powers Act], are in a situation where the violence from the other side has died down but they’re still deployed, then our experience was they used it to the hilt. In these reports that we got from the police in each state, there is a clear pattern. Each state as it were, has its own mythology of how an encounter takes place. In UP [Uttar Pradesh], it is with a party always at a check post, late at night, that sees two men, sometimes three men, all of them usually on a Honda. I don’t know why they choose Honda, but it’s always a Honda. The police ask them to stop and they don’t stop. They open fire, the police fires back, no policeman is ever injured, not a scratch, usually one man dies. If there are three then two die and the one man disappears into the darkness and no one ever hears of him again. That’s the UP myth. In Tamil Nadu, for instance the state buses are lethal. Usually the man is in custody and suddenly…he is usually taken to lunch, it’s his last supper and as he comes out he breaks away from the police escort and tries to cross the road, and is hit by a passing Tamil Nadu state corporation bus. And so, I could give you the mythology of each state. Now, because these were state patterns, they cannot be random. Clearly someone has a set a template, in which reports are to be sent to the NHRC and if they had been genuine, they would not have been. Unfortunately I cannot tell you what the J&K [Jammu and Kashmir] template is, because the J&K police under the provisions of the National Human Rights Commission or the Protection Human Rights Act does not report.
HSB: To come back to J&K, because the point Kishalay is making is that Assam is where the army has picked up these habits. But clearly the army moves from place to place. In the very section of the book you mentioned, there is similar incident that is repeated from J&K where [quotes from book] “Muslim men from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are abducted from Jammu, kept in the post for the two three months and once weapons are purchased, they are killed and shown as militants are trying to infiltrate with weapons.”Is this something you have seen, in terms of what has happened?
Shiv Sahai: There is a huge gap between perception and reality. The fact is that yes, people from the state went to Pakistan for training. Many of them came back, many of them got shot while going to Pakistan, many got shot while coming back from Pakistan. Now, those are huge unaccounted numbers. But, many are people who are reported missing who are still sitting in Pakistan. And every year, you have instances where 45-year-old people with family and children come back. In some instances, they were sitting in Bombay. In some instances, they were sitting in Goa. So, where do you actually get the correct figure and what is actually happening. Between the rhetoric and the propaganda, and the reality, there is a huge gap which I think needs to be addressed more than just doing, do a blame game.
HSB: And the argument is not without basis, so I will act as being a devil’s advocate here, that the police forces, which are under staffed, ill trained, facing the judicial system that does not deliver, often are using shortcuts to what they think are justified ends.
SP: You’re absolutely right, certainly in the two states where you have the largest numbers of these killings—Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh—this was very much the case. In Maharashtra, we had the DGP [Director General of Police] or the ADGP [Assistant Director General of Police] of Maharahstra appear before the commission, before our bench, and he confessed. He said, “Look this used to happen at the time when we needed to wrest Bombay back from the underworld. But now that we have got it back, it won’t happen and it isn’t happening.” Which indeed was the case. Encounters are pretty rare now in Mumbai. In UP, it was really the other point that you make—the judicial system. That many of these people who were being killed, had a criminal record. The reports that we got, all listed…a whole page would be their past convictions or the FIRs [First Information Reports] lodged against them. And the judicial system, for whatever reason, had failed the police. So, either the prosecution had not been able to establish the case or simply the fear of the man, had led in whatever way, to his acquittal. So, the next time the police picked him up, they shot him. So, yes, it is an indictment of the entire system. But that does not retract from the fact, that for whatever reason, these were extra judicial murders.
HSB: Under the current circumstances, how do you assess the role or the need for the army in J&K?
SS: The thing is that there are two ways of looking at it—you can either withdraw the AFSPA by legislation or repealing it, or withdraw by practice. For example, in Srinagar town, now for almost 20 years the army has not operated. So, we can safely say that the AFSPA is not in effect in Srinagar town. Yes, legally the act exists, but by practice the army does not function there, it’s a covenant. They will not enter Srinagar town, and that’s how it is. So, the more important thing is that how does the state machinery slowly—and I think that the J&K police has set a good example. I do apologise on behalf of my colleagues in Maharashtra and UP. They have used very unimaginative methods. Apart from that, the fact is that, I mean, it’s not really as bad as it has been made out to be. But I think that these are fundamental issues. We also have to also examine, why did we bring in the AFSPA. I think the correct reading of the AFSPA is very important. Because the last section of the AFSPA says very clearly that all arrests, all seizures, will be handed over to the local police at the earliest possible instance. So this whole belief that the army can actually arrest somebody and that there is no time limit to their arrest, that they are not open to judicial scrutiny, I think is not true.