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

[bipin]

You are right, Indian police working very neutrally in almost everywhere and 
there is no question of any bias behavior by them. They target criminal and 
terrorists only.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Taha Mehmood" <2tahamehmood at googlemail.com>
To: "reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2009 4:35 AM
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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