Simulated encounters, real murder
Reports of the cold-blooded killing of civilians by security forces in Jammu & Kashmir, the Northeast and Chhattisgarh, in the name of combat operations against insurgents or Maoist guerrillas, grabbed headlines in India during the first half of this year. Despite the public hubbub, the top brass in the Indian Army, police and paramilitary forces have kept quiet about the allegations, and seem to be in favour of standing behind their men whatever their crimes may be.
In January this year, the infamous Ganderbal killings, in which the murder of three civilians was covered up and attributed to an 'encounter', came to light after a probe by a special investigations team (SIT) headed by the deputy inspector-general (DIG) of the J & K police. The victims were villagers 'disappeared' from south Kashmir: carpenter Abdul Rehman Padroo and street vendors Nazir Ahmad Deka and Ghulam Nabi Wani.
The investigations in Ganderbal uncovered yet another case of police complicity – in the killing of Maulvi Shaukat Ahmad Kataria of Banihal in Doda District, who 'disappeared' last October from the local mosque where he was the imam. A SIT found that the photograph of a "slain Pakistani militant'' – identified by the Ganderbal police as Abu Hafiz, of Karachi – was actually a picture of the missing imam. In line with the prevalent police practice, weapons had been placed on the body to implicate the deceased. In this instance, the weapons were found to have come from a cache of arms seized from militants in genuine operations, which the police had kept out of the records with the intention of using them to provide clinching 'evidence' in simulated encounters.
Bringing the guilty to book in the Kashmir encounters case has been particularly difficult due to the conflicting interests of the security agencies involved. In early May, the army filed an application in a lower court in Srinagar, challenging the SIT's chargesheet – which names, in addition to five policemen, five personnel of the paramilitary Rashtriya Rifles, including a colonel and a major, implicated in the killing of Maulvi Shaukat. The army claimed that the J & K police should have sought permission from the Home Ministry before filing the chargesheet, because security forces deployed in J & K were protected under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the AFSPA. The J & K police, however, maintained that the army personnel were not "acting in the line of duty", and therefore should not enjoy impunity under the AFSPA.
In April, the public uproar regarding the Ganderbal killings led the J & K government to set up a commission of inquiry, which is expected to submit a report by the end of July. The attention being given to these fake encounters has also enabled whistleblowers from within the ranks of the security forces themselves to gather the courage to reopen older cases of disappeared persons. What is revealed is a sordid saga of murder and high-level cover-ups.
BSF cover-up
A case in point is linked to the incident that occurred on the night of 7 September 2003, in the J & K district of Pulwama. That evening, a Border Security Force (BSF) commander with the 42nd Battalion, Narender Singh Dangawas, claimed to have killed Ismail Bhai, supposedly a Jaish-e-Mohammad militant from Karachi, during a counter-insurgency operation. But Ghulam Nabi, the stationhouse officer at the Rajpura police station, where the body was brought for identification, told this writer that the body had never been positively identified. The implication was that the report was falsified.
Despite the dubious nature of the Pulwama operation, Dangawas was recommended for a President's Police Medal. Before he could be awarded, though, an insider blew the whistle. Constable Subhash Rathod testified against his commanding officer, telling BSF authorities that an officer of the intelligence wing of the BSF had handed over an innocent Kashmiri to Dangawas, who later killed him and faked the encounter. Yet, Dangawas continues to be shielded by the BSF: all of the five inquiries that the BSF has conducted of the matter over the past four years have exonerated the commander.
The J & K police remain suspicious, and an investigation into Dangawas's actions remains open. But investigations have stalled, supposedly because no one has come forward to identify the victim's body. Evidence unearthed by this writer, however, suggests an elaborate cover-up. For instance, while Dangawas claimed that 66 of his soldiers had taken part in the encounter, 47 of them have subsequently testified for an internal, confidential BSF enquiry that they had not in fact been involved. Similarly, the situation report prepared by Dangawas claims that Constable Bashir Ahmed fired 68 rounds during the encounter, but Bashir himself says that he was nowhere near the scene.
A BSF informant who wishes to remain anonymous clandestinely recorded phone conversations with 16 BSF personnel supposedly associated with the fake encounter of December 2005. The recordings were made between December 2005 and February 2006, with the aim of bypassing the formal process by which internal reports continue to remain confidential. They were subsequently submitted to the Delhi High Court in 2006 as evidence that the BSF was indeed covering up a fake encounter. Below are some excerpts from the tapes.
Paresh Sahu, Constable, 42nd Battalion, BSF
Sahu: I have made it absolutely clear in all enquiries that I was not part of the operation.
Informant: When the encounter was on, what were you doing?
Sahu: I was on patrol duty.
Shashi Jogi, Constable, 42nd Battalion, BSF
Informant: That means Narender Singh Dangawas fraudulently included your name in the list of those who were part of the operation. Jogi: Yes, that's what he did. So when I was called in for the deposition, I told the senior BSF officers conducting the enquiry that I was just not part of the operation, and so I could not have been part of the team that carried out the fake encounter.
A BSF deputy inspector general, K C Padhi, conducted the first inquiry on the alleged encounter in 2004. In phone conversations recorded by the BSF informant, Padhi admitted that Dangawas played foul.
Informant: But sir, you are aware that many names have been fraudulently added to the roster of those who took part in the operation?
Padhi: I have mentioned it [in my report].
Yet Padhi later cleared Dangawas of all charges. This procedure was repeated with Deputy Inspector General V R Bahl, who sat on yet another inquiry commission. Bahl confirmed to the informant that the evidence against Dangawas was damning, but he nevertheless gave him a clean chit.
There is hardly any tangible evidence to back up Dangawas's version of events. For instance, all Indian security units engaged in counter-insurgency operations make it a point to keep photographs of their operations, but in the case of the Pulwama encounter, Dangawas claimed that all photos had gone missing. His colleagues, however, are more forthcoming. "Commandant Dangawas deleted all the photos from the hard disk of the computers in our unit," alleges Vinay Gehlote, an inspector with the 42nd Battalion, in a taped conversation with the BSF informant.
The process of cover-up, however, required extensive in-house collusion. In Dangawas's first report to his superiors, he claimed to have killed a Bangladeshi Jaish-e-Mohammed militant. But in a subsequent FIR report, the man's nationality had changed and he was said to be with the Pakistani Jaish-e-Mohammed. Then, in 2004, BSF chief J B Negi, replying to an internal enquiry letter, wrote an order giving permission for a Summary Court of Inquiry against Dangawas. In this order, Negi described the victim as a "Bangladeshi terrorist".
Either way, according to official records, a Pakistani Jaish-e-Mohammed militant named Ismail Bhai is now buried adjacent to the Kellar police station in Pulwama District. But is he really a Pakistani, or even a militant? The Delhi High Court is now hearing Constable Subhash Rathod's petition, but Dangawas remains a free man, shielded by the BSF on the basis of a diluted chargesheet. The General Security Force Court that dismissed the charges against Dangawas this past February had only heard evidence against the defendant for the following three charges: first, for an act prejudicial to good order and discipline, in which he was accused of confiscating a civilian's car; second, for ill-treating a subordinate; and third, for committing a civil offence by wrongful confinement and harassment of civilians.
Triple murder in Gujarat
The situation surrounding Dangawas and the Pulwama encounter would have passed undetected if it had not been for the anguished conscience of a member of the BSF's 42nd Battalion. Subhash Rathod's courage in pursuing a court case against his superior seems nothing short of extraordinary, but the collapse of institutional mechanisms of accountability – whereby illegal acts are covered up with impunity – merits closer examination. With five internal BSF inquiries having exonerated Dangawas despite the fact that his superiors knew the encounter in question was dubious, it is clear that internal structures of accountability alone are not enough to ensure justice. This is a particularly crucial disconnect in situations in which human rights come a distant second to concerns of 'national security'.
Even as the public was trying to come to terms with the unfolding situation in Kashmir this spring, events in Gujarat underlined the precarious position of whistleblowers in the system, further raising questions on their effectiveness in exposing internal rot – particularly when up against collusion at the highest levels. The case in question was the killing of a man named Sohrabuddin Sheikh.
Starting in late 2005, a man by the name of Rubabuddin Sheikh began appealing to the Gujarat authorities to initiate a CBI inquiry into the death of his brother, Sohrabuddin, and to produce his missing sister-in-law, Kauserbi. He finally approached the Supreme Court, which ordered that an investigation be conducted by the state's Criminal Investigation Department (CID). The case was then handled by an agent named Geetha Johri. Her team's first report, released in September 2006, presented evidence to attribute three separate murders to the Gujarat state police's Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS). Johri had also stumbled upon an elaborate nexus of corruption that furthered a political-communal agenda. The investigation stunned India, particularly because it detailed how the police forces from three different states – Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh – had all colluded in the operation and cover-up. For her pains, however, Johri was removed from the investigation in early 2007. It was only after the Supreme Court intervened in March that the officer was reinstated and allowed to continue the investigation.
According to the ATS's internal records, at about five in the morning of 26 November 2005, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, a team comprised of members of the squad and a few Rajasthani policemen saw the headlight of an approaching motorbike. As the bike came closer, the policemen claimed they recognised Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a gangster alleged to have links to Pakistani militant groups. They claim that they leapt to stop the bike, that the biker lost control and that he fired a gun as he fell. The policemen then returned fire, killing the suspect. The story as given was full of holes. To begin with, how could the policemen have recognised Sohrabuddin in the darkness of a November morning against the headlight of the oncoming motorcycle?
Geetha Johri's investigation provides a picture of how the preparations for the 'encounter' had proceeded. The CID team traced Sohrabuddin, his wife and a third person to a bus traveling from Hyderabad to Sangli, in Maharashtra. At around one in the morning on 23 November, a team consisting of ATS personnel, assisted by the Andhra Pradesh police, halted the bus in Karnataka, and dragged the three people out of the vehicle.
It was more than a thousand kilometres away and three days later that Sohrabuddin was shot dead. But the police were not yet finished. On 27 November 2005, the day after Sohrabuddin was killed, his wife, Kauserbi, was brought to a bungalow in Koba, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. There, she is said to have become hysterical upon being told that her husband was dead. The ATS's original plan had evidently not included Kauserbi's murder, but when she vowed to expose her husband's killing, she was poisoned by a police doctor. According to the CID report, her body was carried away in a police jeep and burned.
Even Kauserbi's murder was not the end of the Sohrabuddin cover-up, however. Along with his team, then-ATS chief D G Vanzara (now a deputy inspector general) launched another operation, targeting Tulsiram Prajapati, an associate of Sohrabuddin. As one of the last people to see Sohrabuddin and Kauserbi alive on 24 November, Prajapati was a key witness in the fake-encounter case, and Vanzara did not want him spilling the beans. So, Prajapati was arrested in November 2005 for the 2004 murder of gangster Hamid Lala, a rival of Sohrabuddin's. Fearing for his life, Prajapati wrote to the local court in Udaipur, warning that "the police say they will kill me and spread the story that I escaped from police custody." A year later, in December 2006, his fears turned out to be well-founded. According to the FIR registered in Ahmedabad, Prajapati purportedly escaped from police custody on 27 December. A day later, Vanzara's team was said to have located him at Ambaji, on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, and shot him dead. Just 10 days earlier, the Gujarat CID had listed Prajapati as a witness in the Sohrabuddin case.
The marble dole
Why did this triple murder take place? Who was Sohrabuddin, and who wanted him dead? To uncover the story, this writer tracked the last decade of Sohrabuddin's life from Rajasthan to Madhya Pradesh. Thirty-three years old when he was killed, Sohrabuddin began his working life as a truck driver. He gradually took to crime, and eventually became the main accused in a high-level arms-transport case in 1995. Sohrabuddin's mentor at the time was Abid Khan, better known as Chhota Dawood, the local front man for Bombay's notorious underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim, who is purported to have links to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence. It was this connection that, a decade later, allowed Indian police to label Sohrabuddin a 'terrorist'.
Sohrabuddin rose quickly in the underworld, his criminal activities eventually spanning four states. According to the Rajasthan police, Sohrabuddin began extorting traders in Rajasthan's lucrative marble industry, which had an annual turnover of INR 50 billion. The marble traders eventually approached M N Dinesh, the Udaipur police superintendent, who it is presumed contacted then-ATS chief Vanzara. The last straw came in 2005, when Sohrabuddin is said to have made an extortion demand to Rajasthan's biggest marble trader (who, with the CID investigation ongoing, needs to remain anonymous). According to the Gujarat CID, Vanzara's phone records showed that, immediately before and after Sohrabuddin's death, he had been in regular contact with this trader's family.
Questions regarding Sohrabuddin's killing cropped up almost immediately after the alleged encounter. Although any incident including an encounter is supposed to be investigated by the local police station, in Sohrabuddin's case Vanzara's team acted as defendant, judge and jury by investigating its own encounter. Vanzara and two other officers of the Indian Police Service have since been suspended and arrested for murder, and several additional policemen face prosecution in the Sohrabuddin case, but the question of impunity remains.
Hit-men in khaki
The term encounter killing has now become synonymous with murder, often involving high-profile cops who are generally assured of future impunity. Veteran police officers blame the rise in encounter killings on a failing justice system. They suggest that policemen frustrated with the slow pace of adjudication and acquittals, evidently due to lack of sufficient evidence, take the law into their own hands. Yet despite the increase in simulated encounters, there are no organised, updated or accurate statistics on encounter or extrajudicial killings, and those involved are forced to rely on their own experience. "The criminal-justice system has to come back on the rails," says Julio Ribeiro, a well-regarded former police commissioner of Bombay. "Twenty-five years ago, this number of encounters was not taking place. It is coming up now more and more. You must understand why the judicial system has become so weak: it is because of corruption. Corruption is the main cause of all this."
In the case of Gujarat, at least, this corruption goes all the way to the pinnacles of the police and political establishments. Three years ago, the Gujarat police evolved a plan of action for a state that had, in their assessment, "become a haven for terrorists". Top police sources who served in the state at the time of the Godhra incident and the riots that followed confirm that there was a clear political directive to eliminate some Muslim criminals, in order to send a message to any who may be planning attacks in retaliation for the 2002 communal riots.
The connection between organised crime and the hit-men in khaki has subsequently come to wield a vice-like grip over many police forces, particularly in Gujarat. "I was asked by high-level bureaucrats to plan the elimination of people," recalled R B Sreekumar, former Additional Director General of Police in Gujarat. "I said it is illegal." At the moment, the justice system of India is heavily dependent on the consciences of people such as Sreekumar, as well as those who led to the breakthroughs in the cases of the Kashmir and Gujarat fake encounters. The health of the system overall, however, is far too important to continue placing it in the hands of a few high-minded individuals.
The recent exposés of extrajudicial killings in India, coupled with the inability of the country's criminal-justice system to address a spate of fake encounters, have brought the spotlight squarely onto India's archaic Police Act of 1861. One solution could be found in a legislative proposal currently being vetted by the Ministry of Home Affairs for a Model Police Act (Himal December 2006, "Reforming Indian policing"). The Supreme Court in September 2006 directed the state and Centre to implement the Act, which aims to ensure transparency in police functioning – including through the creation of state security councils, which would take on the responsibility from the state governments for overseeing the police forces. Several states have refused to accept the new legislation, however. The Gujarat government, for one, has publicly stated that it does not want to let go of control over the state police.
The question therefore remains: Is there enough political will to put in place the reforms directed by the Supreme Court? Former police commissioner Ribeiro says that regardless of the current political climate, the necessary momentum will eventually build up. He notes, "It is not the job of the police to kill people. It is not the job of the police to be judge and executioner."
V K Shashikumar is editor, 'special investigations', CNN-IBN.