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

[taraprakash]

I seem to agree with Swami's analysis. He is wrong if India means some nooks 
and corners in Gujarat, U.P. and Hyderabad.
I personally believe that analyzing every police atrocity, every social 
discrimination tfrom religious angle is a conspiracy of the religious 
extremists to weaken the progressive movement in India. I also believe that 
only secular power left in India is that of Maoists who, if need be, take on 
green brigade in Bihar, take on RSS in Kandmal, Orisa and don't mind 
attacking a church in Maha Rashtra and elsewhere. Let me clarify that this 
is just my belief for which I have no qualitative or quantitative to 
support. So if someone thinks otherwise, they may be right. I just don't 
want to argue on this.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Taha Mehmood" <2tahamehmood at googlemail.com>
To: "reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 7:03 PM
Subject: [Reader-list] The decline of the ‘encounter death’


> 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.
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