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This is a very good and thought-provoking article. I would like to give a few more incidents to enable Ashok Malik to refer in his future writings. Most of the cases occurred in Congress- ruled states and Congress was ruling at the Center.
1) P. Rajan’s case- It took place in Kerala during the Emergency. You may read P. Rajan’s case on Wikipedia and "Stripped Law- Rajan : A revisit". At that time Chief Minister was Achutha Menon ( A communist). The Home Minister was K.Karunakaran (Congress)The CM never resigned at that time.
2)Bhagalpur blinding:- Took place in Bihar. Police blinded 31 under- trial prisoners by pouring acid in their eye. At that time Jagannath Mishra was CM of Bihar. He had not resigned at that time.
"The Bhagalpur blindings refers to a series of incidents in 1979 and 1980 in Bhagalpur in the state of Bihar, India, when police blinded 31 under trials (or convicted criminals, according to some versions), by pouring acid into their eyes. The incident became infamous as Bhagalpur blindings. The incident was widely discussed, debated and acutely criticized by several human rights organizations. The Bhagalpur blinding case had made criminal jurisprudence history by becoming the first in which the Supreme Court had ordered compensation for violation of basic human rights.[1]"
3) Bhagalpur riot
The Bhagalpur riots of 1989 refers to the violence between the Hindus and theMuslims in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar, India. The riots started on 24 October 1989, and the violent incidents continued to happen for 2 months. The violence affected the Bhagalpur city and 250 villages around it. Over 1,000 people (around 900 of which were Muslims[2]), were killed, and another 50,000 were displaced as a result of the violence.[3] It was the worst Hindu-Muslim violence in independent India at the time,[1] surpassing the 1969 Gujarat riots.
Satyendra Narayan Sinha was CM at that time.
In his autobiography Meri Yaadein, Meri Bhoolein, released by the then Bihar Governor Buta Singh in the presence of Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee {now President of India}, Satyendra Narayan Sinha accused his Congress colleagues of "fanning" the 1989 Bhagalpur violence to malign him, specifically mentioning his predecessor and former chief minister Bhagwat Jha Azad and the former speaker Shivchandra Jha. He also accused the Prime Minister of overruling his order to transfer the then superintendent of police K S Dwivedi who had failed miserably to discharge his duties. The decision was not only an encroachment of the Constitutional right of the state government but also a step detrimental to ongoing efforts to ease tensions.[25] When he stepped down from the post of Chief Minister of Bihar, Jagannath Mishra succeeded him. He recalled when he met Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi later on, he informed him about the "role of some Congress leaders" in the riots. The Prime Minister expressed surprise and said "so, the riots were motivated![26]
4) Naxal Uprising in West Bengal
Siddhartha Shankar Ray
After the Congress won the General Election of 1972, he became the Chief Minister of West Bengal from March 19, 1972 to June 21, 1977. He took office shortly after the Bangladesh Liberation War, and his administration was faced with the massive problem of resettling over a million refugees in various parts of the state. The civic services of Calcutta in particular found rehabilitation of the Bangladeshi refugees to be an uphill task, and failed in this aspect. The crackdown on Naxalites also took place under his watch.[9]
Ray is often misunderstood for his role during the heydays of the Naxal uprising in the state. The Left have always blamed him for unleashing a reign of terror, which he didn't deserve. But Ray took all the criticism without a murmur. At his time, the district magistrates and superintendents of police had enough independence. They treated the Naxals under criminal procedures. Ray didn't prevent them from doing that. But he didn't encourage them, either. He was deeply disturbed when the government had to call in the Army in Birbhum to tackle Naxals. "I have no child. But the Naxals, as I see them, are like my children. It pains me when I have to send in the Army to tackle them," Ray had said. He introduced a unique method to tackle Naxals. Jail break and shoot out encounters were done to eliminate large number of under- trial Naxals.
Tcg
It’s always Gujarat
8 Sep 2013
Vijay Salaskar was killed on the evening of November 26, 2008. An inspector in the Mumbai police, he was driving the vehicle that was also carrying senior officers Hemant Karkare and Ashok Kamte when it was ambushed by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terrorists.
This was a dramatic incident that made clear the intensity of the attack on Mumbai on the dark night of 26/11.
Following his martyrdom, the government of Maharashtra recommended Salaskar for a gallantry award. On January 26, 2009, three months after his death, the Union government named Salaskar for the Ashok Chakra. India was grateful to him.
P. Chidambaram, then home minister, took personal interest in ensuring Salaskar’s young daughter was given a government job. No doubt in the years to come Salaskar will go down as an authentic Indian hero and school textbooks will carry chapters on him and his colleagues.
What was the trajectory of Salaskar’s career before he was killed?
For 20 years he had been a doughty warrior for the Mumbai police, part of a band of officers responsible for cleaning up the city underworld.Criminal syndicates in Mumbai — some but not all of them later merging into terrorism — established themselves as a force by the 1980s. The state government decided to adopt a proactive policy of neutralising these groups and safeguarding Mumbai.
Salaskar was instrumental in this, killing his first criminal in 1983. Subsequently, he was responsible for removing some 70-80 people who, depending on how you saw them, could have been gangsters, petty criminals, terrorist auxiliaries or just plain suspects.
How did Salaskar do this? Presumably not by feeding his victims lollipops.
Salaskar was an encounter specialist. His methods were his own. The government followed a “don’t ask-don’t tell” approach. There was nobody to leak letters or even ghost-write these for him. There was no gaggle of activists out to challenge the Mumbai police or any politician who was backing it. There was no Central Bureau of Investigation to conduct lengthy investigations into Salaskar’s career record and attempt to finish him. He was lucky.
Sitting in his cell, D.G. Vanzara, former chief of the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad, may well be pondering Salaskar’s luck and fate. Today, Salaskar is held up as a model, no-nonsense police officer. For doing pretty much the same thing, Mr Vanzara is painted as a villain. If we get over the trite cliché that all fake encounters are bad — of course they are; though it must be said not one of
Mr Vanzara’s encounters, or Salaskar’s for that matter, have been legally proven to be fake — it is worth asking why Mr Vanzara does not deserve sympathy.
Mr Vanzara’s encounters, or Salaskar’s for that matter, have been legally proven to be fake — it is worth asking why Mr Vanzara does not deserve sympathy.
He has been in prison for six years now, implicated in three high-profile cases, without the trial having even begun. He is not alone; 32 officers of the Gujarat police, and virtually the entire ATS squad, find themselves behind bars and out of action. The anti-terror network set up in the state in the early years of this century has been crippled.
The CBI and a politician-activist cabal in Gujarat have no interest in quickly taking Mr Vanzara’s cases to resolution. A delay and a battle by innuendo suit them best because they are targeting Narendra Modi’s political future, not “seeking justice” as is claimed. If nothing else, Mr Vanzara deserves to have somebody pay for a good lawyer. If at the end of all this he is acquitted, who will give him back his lost years? Even if there are convictions, it is a fair guess that many of the 32 Gujarat policemen who are currently remand prisoners (undertrials) have probably already spent more time in custody than they may be sentenced for.
Thundering voices on television insist Gujarat cannot be compared to Punjab in the 1980s or Kashmir in the 1990s. True, it can’t; but that doesn’t mean it faced no threat from terrorism. In the 1990s its coastline was used by terror groups to bring in munitions, including for the 1993 Mumbai bombings. After 2002, Mr Modi began to carry the highest threat perception, greater than any other chief minister at least. This has been borne out by successive Intelligence Bureau inputs. In 2010, the WikiLeaks cables revealed Western intelligence agencies believed that the Lashkar threat to Mr Modi was clear and present and had not died out with the elimination of Ishrat Jehan and her accomplices in 2004.
For anybody in public life — politician, civil servant, even activist and journalist — a fundamental test of integrity is in according different subjects equal treatment under conditions of equality.
Has this happened with Gujarat? Why are terror threats to Gujarat and its chief minister ridiculed and the anti-terror operations of Gujarat police sabotaged? Why does this happen to no other state?
Take two other examples.
Recently, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), headed by a Congress member of Parliament, demanded a CBI inquiry into alleged manipulation in the Tulsiram Prajapati case.
Prajapati, a criminal who happened to be a dalit, was killed by the Gujarat ATS. The basis of the commission’s move was a “sting operation” carried out by a conman at the periphery of the media — and previously accused of and arrested for blackmailing public servants using fake “sting op” videos — who found support from Congress Party spokespersons.
The NCSC’s promptness was remarkable. In Uttar Pradesh, dalit writer Kanwal Bharti was arrested for a Facebook post that criticised the state government and backed Durga Shakti Nagpal, the civil servant who took on the sand mafia in Greater Noida. Why has the commission not found Mr Bharti worthy of support?
Second, Mr Vanzara’s long spell in prison, without trial, is seen as justified by those who blame him for the killing of Ishrat Jehan.
Gopal Kanda, a former Congress minister in Haryana, has been charged with harassing, stalking and driving to suicide a woman called Geetika Sharma. This past week, he was given bail and allowed to attend the state Assembly.
There was no clamour in the media.
All women are equal but is (or was) Ishrat Jehan more equal than Geetika Sharma?
Now if only Geetika Sharma had lived in Gujarat and Kanda been a minister in the Modi government…
The writer can be contacted at :malikashok@gmail.com
Copyright © 2011 The Asian Age. All rights reserved.
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