[Reader-list] The decline of the ‘encounter death’

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear all

Few days ago I forwarded on the reader list an article which discussed
how Muslims in America are being made 'unfair target' of FBI
Surveillance. At a fundamental level the writer of the article was
trying to bring to our notice the idea of 'categorical suspicion'
which a tag like 'Islam'  normally attracts in free, democratic
societies.

Today I came across an opinion piece by Praveen Swami wherein he tries
to argue that in the Indian context the perceived communal bias of the
Indian police against 'Muslims' is perhaps a conjectural mistake.
Praveen Swami does a quantitative analysis of NCRB Data of past four
years to conclude that in many instances it is not 'religion' but
'class' which play a major role in making up of filters through which
police profile suspects.

I do not know how much of what Mr.Swami argues is true hence I look
forward to other interpretations of Mr. Swami's point of view.

Regards

Taha

http://www.hindu.com/2009/03/26/stories/2009032654540800.htm

The decline of the ‘encounter death’ Praveen Swami
Most police forces are reducing use of lethal force — and shedding
communal partisanship.

Six months ago, the police raided an apartment in New Delhi’s Jamia
Nagar. Two alleged terrorists and a police officer died. By the
standards a violence-scarred nation has become accustomed to, the
event was unremarkable. But the Jamia Nagar deaths had an exceptional
impact, precipitating charges that police forces across India were
operating a large-scale shoot-to-kill policy directed at Muslims: a
communal project, it was claimed, that was being camouflaged as
counter-terrorism.

Participants at an October 2008 convention in New Delhi, for example,
declared that there was “a concerted effort by the Indian police,
intelligence agencies and certain political parties to portray all
members of the Muslim community as ‘terrorists and extremists’ — to be
arbitrarily arrested, tortured and killed in fake encounters.”

Members of the Coordination Committee of Muslim Organisations — an
alliance made up of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the All-India Muslim
Majlis-e-Mushawarat, the Jamiat Ullema-e-Hind, the All-India Milli
Council and the Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadis — went further, demanding that
during a “search operation in any Muslim locality, at least one-third
of the raiding force must consist of officers belonging to the
minority community, and minority elders of the affected area should be
taken into confidence.”

Media accounts since have elevated the charge that India’s police
officers are trigger-happy bigots to the level of received truth.
Little effort has been made, though, to see if the allegations rest on
sound empirical foundations. They don’t. In fact, the police are
reducing their reliance on lethal force, and shedding communal
partisanship. The reason why they do not rely on force helps to
explain just why India’s democracy, often reviled by metropolitan
elites, is so important to hundreds of millions of voters.

No public-domain documentation exists on the religious identity of
individuals killed by the police. Databases maintained by the National
Crime Records Bureau set down each incident — but not the religious
identity of the victims. The police are obliged to report all lethal
force deaths to the National Human Rights Commission. In addition, the
Union Home Ministry monitors incidents involving the use of lethal
force by the police. For the most part, though, the reporting of
incidents by the States is less than comprehensive.

Based on the available Central government documentation, The Hindu was
able to examine 750 civilian deaths in police firing which took place
between January 2004 and December 2008 — about two-thirds of those
estimated to have been killed during this period. Spread across Assam,
Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh,
Orissa, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West
Bengal, the data exclude deaths in insurgency and counter-terrorism in
the northeast and Jammu and Kashmir. One hundred and forty-six
victims, or 19.4 per cent of the sample, were identified by the police
as Muslims. Given that Muslims make up 13.5 per cent of the Indian
population, it would seem clear that they are disproportionately in
danger from the police weapons.
Misleading

A close study of the available data, though, suggests that this
conclusion would be misleading. For one, the bulk of the killings have
not taken place in the States most often accused of communal bias:
Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and, more recently, Delhi.
Gujarat saw just five police firing deaths in 2005, 16 in 2006 and one
in 2007. Delhi registered just eight during the same period. Andhra
Pradesh saw high numbers of killings, but mainly of Maoist insurgents
of Hindu origin. Instead, an overwhelming majority of killings of
Muslims by the police took place in Uttar Pradesh — a State where they
make up 18 per cent of the population, not dissimilar to their share
of deaths in police firing. The Uttar Pradesh police offensive,
targeting violent organised crime, has claimed hundreds of lives in
recent years — of Hindus and Muslims. In 2007, the last year for which
the NCRB figures are available, the Uttar Pradesh police accounted for
102 of the 250 civilian lethal force fatalities nationwide. By way of
contrast, the police fire in Andhra Pradesh led to the loss of 30
lives, while Maharashtra registered 27 deaths. Rajasthan reported 22
fatalities, most of them during caste riots. In 2006, Uttar Pradesh
saw 103 fatalities, second only to insurgency-devastated Chhattisgarh.
And in 2005, it recorded 42 deaths, placing the State third in
police-firing fatalities after Andhra Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

Nationwide, half or a lesser number of civilian fatalities in police
firing were the outcome of counter-terrorism operations — and the
ratio has been declining steadily. In 2005, counter-terrorism
operations accounted for 46.76 per cent of civilian fatalities in
police firing. In 2006, the figure rose to 52.12 per cent. The NCRB
figures show that in 2007, though, just a quarter of civilian
fatalities in police firing — 54 of 252 — were linked to
counter-terrorism.

Put simply, there is no evidence to support the claim that there is an
increased incidence of extra-judicial executions of Muslims — or, for
that matter, Hindus. Even though police forces across India have
intensified intelligence-led operations targeting Islamist groups, the
NCRB data for 2007 show a sharp decline in the use of lethal force. A
large part of the decline came because of a dramatic decline in
killings by the police in Chhattisgarh, where fatalities fell to
seven. Andhra Pradesh also saw a sharp decline in police killings,
from 72 to 45. Only in Uttar Pradesh did deaths caused by the use of
lethal force remain at the 2006 levels.

By global standards, the use of lethal force by the police in India is
relatively low. Figures published in 1987 show that the police in
Dallas, Texas, killed 1.03 people per 1,00,000 population the previous
year. San Diego was next, with 0.83 people killed per 100,000,
followed by Los Angeles with 0.71 deaths. Far from being
trigger-happy, these figures suggest, India’s police forces are
extremely cautious in resorting to lethal force.
Communal bias

What these figures point to is a slow but sure process of
transformation: for which the social transformation brought about by
democracy deserves credit. Less than a decade ago, the police forces
across India faced credible charges of communal bias. Reports of
judicial commissions, which investigated the 1982 riots in Meerut, the
1978 riots in Aligarh and the 1992-1993 carnage in Mumbai, showed
systematic anti-Muslim biases in everything from the use of lethal
force and patterns of arrest to the treatment of prisoners.

New studies, though, have thrown up signs of change. In January 2005,
the Senior Superintendent of Police, Saharanpur, Safi Rizvi — now an
aide to Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram — conducted a study of the
district’s prison population. He sought to test the proposition that
the police were disproportionately likely to act against Muslims and
backward caste suspects. Mr. Rizvi’s study, however, demonstrated that
the prison population of Saharanpur closely matched the district’s
demographic profile. Hindus made up 58.5 per cent of the jail
population, closely mirroring their overall share in the district
population. Muslim prisoners accounted for 39 per cent of the jail
population, marginally lower than their demographic representation.
While Dalits made up 21 per cent of the district population, they
constituted just 19 per cent of the prisoners; Brahmins, in a twist,
were somewhat over-represented in jail.
Class, more accurate

Rather than religion or caste, Mr. Rizvi concluded, class constituted
an accurate marker of which sections of the population were
over-represented in prisons. More than 84 per cent of the prison
population, he found, was made up of the poor — more than twice their
share of the general population, as determined by the National Council
for Applied Economic Research. It wasn’t, Mr. Rizvi noted, that the
poor were more likely to steal: “the fact is that the poor criminal is
promptly sent to jail for stealing 5 pieces of iron from the rail
yard, one bicycle or pick-pocketing Rs. 50. He goes to jail for these
crimes and stays there — unable to afford a lawyer, sureties or
patronage.”

More studies are needed to see if the data from Saharanpur reflect
national trends: anecdotal evidence suggests that Muslims are still
significantly over-represented in the prison populations of
Maharashtra and Gujarat. But if Mr. Rizvi’s findings are borne out by
subsequent studies, it would suggest that Muslim and Dalit voters have
become adroit at leveraging the political process to avoid
victimisation. Police officers, the decline in police-firing deaths
also shows, are increasingly sensitive to the costs of the
indiscriminate use of force. Large-scale violence, or resort to
extra-judicial executions, is no longer possible without inviting
protest — and political or judicial censure. By contrast, Uttar
Pradesh’s anti-crime killings have continued apace because the police
are acting against groups which challenge the influence and authority
of mainstream politicians.

Police forces everywhere in the world reflect the biases of the
societies which give birth to them. It ought to surprise no one that
some police officers in India have communal prejudices. The good news
for India is that democracy appears to be making it ever more
difficult for bigots in uniform to act on their beliefs.