Groups working for police reform?

[Kerim Friedman]

Dear Friends of Budhan Theatre,

I was wondering if anyone could tell me about groups in India working
to reform the police? In working on our film it has become clear that
police violence and corruption are major issues affecting DNT
communities, but it is also clear that this is not just a DNT issue.
I'd be interested in knowing about effective regional organizations
(for instance in Gujarat) as well as ones operating on the national
level.

Thank you,

kerim

[傅可恩]

October 4, 2009
Questions on Executions Mount in India

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/asia/04ahmedabad.html

By LYDIA POLGREEN

AHMEDABAD, India — The tableau was as improbable as it was grisly. The
bullet-riddled bodies of four Muslims lay neatly lined up in the
middle of a road. One of the dead cradled a machine gun. Bomb-making
chemicals and a suitcase full of cash sat in the trunk of their car.
Intelligence reports had identified the four as terrorism suspects.

It was a tidy crime scene with a story to match: four Islamic
extremists who planned to assassinate the powerful chief minister of
India’s richest state stopped cold by a fearless band of policemen
early on the morning of June 15, 2004. The officers were hailed as
heroes.

But the story was too good to be true, according to a recently
released magistrate’s report. The supposed militants included a 19-
year-old college student, a woman named Ishrat Jehan, who had no
evident links to terrorist groups, the magistrate wrote.

The forensic evidence showed that the four had not died in a shootout
but were shot at point-blank range, much earlier than the police had
said. None of the four had actually fired a gun. They had been killed,
the magistrate declared, in cold blood.

The sensational case has fed a heated national debate about the
longstanding Indian police practice of killing suspects. Known
euphemistically as “encounter killings,” such extrajudicial executions
have been a tolerated and even celebrated method of dealing swiftly
with crime in a country with a notoriously slow and sometimes corrupt
judiciary. An officer in such cases invariably “encounters” a suspect
and kills him, supposedly in self-defense.

In cities like Mumbai, which was for decades gripped by violent
organized crime syndicates, officers who killed notorious gangland
figures were often seen as dark folk heroes, selflessly carrying out
the messy business of meting out justice. These officers, known as
encounter specialists, became celebrities, even boasting about the
number of gangsters they had killed.

But Indians have become increasingly wary of police officers crusading
as judge, jury and executioner. Since 2006, 346 people have been
killed in what seem to have been extrajudicial police killings,
according to the National Human Rights Commission.

In many of these killings, investigations have found, the motive was
not vigilante justice. The police often staged such killings for
personal gain: bumping off a rival of a powerful politician in the
hopes of a big promotion; killing a crime boss at the behest of one of
his rivals; settling scores between businessmen.

Here in the state of Gujarat, the grim practice took on an even more
sinister form. According to court documents, lawyers, human rights
activists and the families of the victims, police officers seeking the
favor of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, began killing small-
time Muslim criminals and framing them as big-time terrorists bent on
mass murder. No evidence has been offered to show that Mr. Modi
encouraged such killings.

Riots in Gujarat killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims,
in the aftermath of an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims that
killed 59 people in 2002. Mr. Modi, a prominent member of the Hindu
nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has long been accused
of fueling the anti-Muslim violence with inflammatory remarks.

Tensions between Hindus and Muslims here are high. The officers who
carried out the killings hoped to win promotions and other favors from
lawmakers, according to court documents and human rights workers here.

In Gujarat, the team of officers suspected of carrying out these
killings usually chose their victims carefully. In all five cases
pending in the courts so far, the main targets had shady pasts
confirmed by an arrest or conviction, usually for a petty crime. Most
were Muslims.

But in the killing of Ms. Jehan that formula went awry. She hardly fit
the usual profile of encounter victims. She was a full-time college
student who also worked to provide for her widowed mother and six
siblings.

According to her family, she was on a trip with her employer to help
him set up his marketing business. On June 15, she was shot, according
to the police, along with her accomplices as they tried to evade
capture.

But the Gujarat magistrate’s report shredded that claim. The food in
the victims’ stomachs proved that they had been killed much earlier,
the report said. Their wounds were consistent with point-blank
shootings. Their hands showed no trace of gunpowder residue. The
police had planted weapons on the victims and staged the crime scene.

Gujarat government officials dispute the magistrate’s report, and
Gujarat’s High Court has stopped the authorities from arresting the
officers it named as the court conducts an inquiry.

Jay Narayan Vyas, a spokesman for the state government, said that the
four people killed had been identified by the central government as
terrorism suspects. A government intelligence report said that the
four were possible terrorism suspects, but the central government has
said that these were merely suspicions and could not justify the
killings. Mr. Vyas said that the magistrate had overstepped his
authority. He dismissed the findings as “false propaganda” from
political opponents who wished to discredit Gujarat’s leaders.

Lawyers had known for years that something strange was happening in
the Gujarat police force and that the killings of terrorism suspects
were dubious, said Mukul Sinha, a lawyer for the relatives of several
victims. But hardly anyone thought the killers would be brought to
justice.

Then in 2005, the brother of one victim — a small-time bandit named
Sohrabuddin Sheikh — sent a letter to India’s Supreme Court demanding
an inquiry into the death of Mr. Sheikh, who had been killed by the
police and branded a terrorist and who, like the four killed in June
2004, had been accused of planning to kill the chief minister of
Gujarat.

Under Indian law any citizen can petition the country’s highest court
directly, and the Supreme Court demanded an investigation. In 2007,
Gujarat’s government acknowledged that the killing did not happen as
the police had claimed and that the police had also killed Mr.
Sheikh’s wife to cover up the crime.

The revelation opened the floodgates. “People realized that something
can be done, that it is not impossible to get justice in Gujarat,” Mr.
Sinha said.

After the officers who made up the elite squad that had carried out
these encounters were arrested in the death of Mr. Sheikh, the
killings stopped.

“All of a sudden the terrorists have stopped coming to kill Modi,” Mr.
Sinha said.

But families of the victims are still waiting for justice.

Ms. Jehan’s mother, Shamima Kausar, said that the charge that her
daughter was a terrorist was ludicrous. “She was just a college girl,”
she said, tears welling in her eyes. “She was my right hand. I am lost
without her.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.