South Carolina officer gets murder charge in man’s death.’ This lead story by the New York Times on April 8 was about a policeman who shot an unarmed black man in the back. Many similar reports about single black men – often with a criminal record – being shot at by white policemen have anguished the United States and its media in the last few months.
‘Watch it! Multiplexes must screen Marathi films at 6pm’. This was the Times of India’s lead story in Mumbai on the same day. In Delhi, Hindustan Times led with ‘Diesel vehicles get 10-year limit’.
On April 7, news broke that police in Andhra Pradesh murdered 20 men, most of them Tamils, for stealing trees. The same day, police in Telangana murdered five men who were handcuffed and being driven to a court.
Neither of these stories was lead-worthy for the editors of two of India’s largest English papers. The encounters did not even make the front pages as a single column in print. Perhaps, rightly so.
The truth is: the middle class and Anglicized India do not care about blue collar workers (tree choppers) or Muslims (encounter victims) being dealt with outside the framework of the law.
It doesn’t concern us. If we were to read the comments under these stories online, the majority of them agree with the police’s action. And they are full of hatred for the victims, judged to have deserved punishment without trial. Even the media reported the stories with extreme prejudice and callousness. The Indian Express, usually a responsible newspaper, broke the story under the headline ‘5 SIMI activists shot dead on way to court in Telangana’. The paper’s correspondent wrote “among the dead is Vikaruddin Ahmed, who killed two cops in Hyderabad after terrorizing them whenever possible.” It is remarkable that such editorializing, casual assertions, and loose language are allowed by a national daily. But, this being India, it is possible and also the norm.
The police told the Indian Express that “Vikaruddin and his associates continuously incited the armed escort by taunting, abusing, and spitting at them since they started from Warangal. The other four dead are: Mohammed Zakir, Sayed Hashmat, Izhar Khan, and Sulaiman. They all have several aliases.”
The report added that Vikaruddin, a “former SIMI activist and member of radical social outfit Darsgah Jehad O Shahadat (DJS)”, made some daring attacks on police pickets on the anniversaries of the Babri Masjid and Mecca Masjid blast. In December 2008, he opened fire and injured three policemen manning a picket near Santoshinagar. On May 18, 2009, he shot dead a Home Guard, while on May 14, 2010, he shot dead a constable at Shah Ali Banda.
Had a judge found him guilty for these? Probably not, since he was attending court as an undertrial. That didn’t stop the paper from concluding he had done it.
The demonization continued: “Vikaruddin had started a fringe fundamentalist organization ‘Tehreek Galba E Islam’ that has ties with DJS. Police had announced a reward of lakhs of rupees for any information on him. He was arrested in July 2010 from the house Dr Mohd Hanif, a sympathizer. Based on information given by him, his brother Sulaiman and three others, who belonged to his organization and helped him in his operations, were arrested.”
If 25 black men were executed illegally in the US in one day, the government would have fallen and the population would have rallied around the victims. In India, those of us who did not applaud the police only yawned.
The media has long bowed to its readership/viewership and accepted police abuse, so long as it doesn’t concern our target group of readers or viewers. On Tuesday night, middle-class hero, Arnab Goswami’s show on Times Now discussed the politics of the beef ban, and indulged in the usual scaremongering over ‘terrorism’ (ie, Muslims).
When I was editor of a newspaper in Mumbai 20 years ago, the encounter culture had just come to our cities from Punjab and the Northeast, where such killing is now actually lawful. There are more Indians who support that law; its critics are automatically seen on TV debates as traitors.
Mumbai’s police killed off gangs that survived by extortion of builders, Bollywood producers and financiers. The newspaper editors who questioned the illegal police action came under attack from the management and readers. The belief was that, given the failure of the state to enforce law through convictions, it was all right for the government to enforce order through eradicating criminals without due process. This produced those cowardly police officers, each with dozens of ‘kills’ to their name. They were glorified as encounter specialists, decorated, and had movies based on them. Their act of bravery was to open fire at handcuffed men.
At that time, I thought this would end at some point. I was wrong, of course. With the public’s focus elsewhere, the state is free to brutalize citizens, and to demonize and dehumanize them though the media after criminally executing them.
(Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist)
