Gujarat’s home minister meets the law

Gujarat's home minister is in jail for authorising murder and India is waiting to see if a commonly practised form of state killing will now end. The case that has brought the issue of encounters – as these killings are known – in focus is the deaths of three people. In 2005, the Gujarat and Rajasthan police said they had killed a man from Lashkar-e-Taiba who was about to assassinate Narendra Modi.

The report of a journalist, Prashant Dayal, showed that the dead man, Sohrabuddin Sheikh was a petty criminal and not a terrorist and that the police's facts were muddled. This led to an investigation after which the police admitted to having wrongly killed Sheikh to win the favour of the administration. More disturbingly, they also admitted to killing Sheikh's wife, Kausarbi, who was present and a witness, Tulsi Prajapati.

An alarmed Supreme Court appointed India's top investigation agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), to start probing the case. As the facts became clear, Gujarat's senior police officers were arrested and charged for these murders. This surprised many because such arbitrary killings are not new here. However, the sustained interest in the case by the Supreme Court has meant that the story has stayed alive over the years.

Few expected what happened last week. One of the arrested officers had turned informer and named Gujarat's home minister as authorising the murders, perhaps to please his boss. This led to the arrest over the weekend of Amit Shah.

Shah is the minister of state, the junior ranking minister on the portfolio. His boss, the senior minister, is Narendra Modi, who is also chief minister. Though Modi has not been named in the case so far, his defence of Shah has seen him take sides in what is essentially a legal matter. Modi plays to his audience and many Indians have no problem with the state eliminating people outside the judicial process.

Encounter killings, or murders which is what they are, have been popular in India since the 80s. The extreme violence during the Khalistan movement led the Punjab police to use swift and illegal ways of executing suspects.

In Bombay, a few years later, police killed suspects who were in custody to end the gang wars in the city. Officially, these were encounters, and unofficially it was felt that the judicial process took too long, and often failed. So proper investigation was dumped, in favour of shortening the process of justice. The police could not stay away from taking sides, however, and today Bombay's police force faces the charge of acting as executioners for dons, getting rid of rival gangsters for money.

Only a few officers have been charged with this, but it is understood that such encounter killings, which usually happen in the presence of at least a dozen or so policemen, happen with full knowledge.

Police in both places, Punjab and Bombay, ultimately succeeded in what they wanted. Today, the movement for Khalistan is dead after its militant supporters have either fled or been killed. Bombay's gangs are a thing of the past also. But this has come at the price of surrendering the law. The case in Gujarat brings back an argument forgotten all these years: should the state commit murder to protect citizens? The Supreme Court says no.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th, 2010.