Opinion - Leader Page Articles

From Shah Bano then to Kausarbi now

Harish Khare

Neither claims of deshbhakti nor invocation of national security can justify killing an innocent woman. India cannot claim to be a democratic, lawful society if it countenances rogue police officers playing god.

SOHRABUDDIN SHEIKH has been at the centre of the controversy over fake encounters in Gujarat. His alleged criminal activities have been cited as perhaps sufficient ground for him to deserve what he got at the hands of three IPS officers — D.G. Vanzara, Rajkumar Pandian, and M.N. Dinesh. Some political partisans have sought to use the scandal as yet another occasion to try to embarrass the Narendra Modi government. On the other hand, the Bharatiya Janata Party seems perfectly competent to handle its rivals, even if it means invoking a Hindu-Muslim catechism. The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to ask the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the case or to compel Gujarat to carry out a honest and credible enquiry of its own, a probe that should align the State government once again with the matrix of lawful governance.

Political rivals itch to score brownie points. It is the death of Kausarbi, Sohrabuddin Sheikh's wife, that should be most disturbing to every Indian, whatever his or her religion. No one has yet suggested that she was a partner in her husband's alleged crimes. She was killed simply because she was a witness to her husband's killing by Vanzara & Co., who thought it had — or had been given — the licence to take away anyone's life. It is Kausarbi's death that will haunt the Indian state for long.

Every state authority claims for itself the right to use coercion against its citizens in lieu of the obligation to protect their lives and liberty. The state arms itself with powers in the guise of laws, adorns itself with an ideological narrative, and devises rituals and ceremonies to uphold the legitimacy of its authority over the citizen. The extreme form of this coercion can be a right to inflict pain of death on anyone suspected of "treason," the ultimate crime against the state's interests. The Indian state is no exception to this conceptual arrangement of myths and laws. Now, Kausarbi's death has laid bare the Indian state's pretensions.

At the beginning, the state authority in India drew its legitimacy from the claims made in the name of the freedom struggle against a colonial power. These claims were easily granted because of the leadership's "tyaag [sacrifice]" and suffering; the claims were further sustained because the leadership promised to undertake nation-building as a democratic and egalitarian project. Soon it was discovered that there were sections and parts of the country that withheld affection and obedience to the state and its agent, the Central and State governments. The response was invocation of the right to coerce; and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 was enacted for "disturbed areas." Soldiers and paramilitary personnel were given a legal licence to coerce and kill without having to feel their hand restrained by any notion of accountability. It was, nonetheless, a nuanced, legal, and authorised licence.

This and other similar laws failed to tame the recalcitrant and the sullen. They perhaps even instigated alienation on a wide scale, be it in the Northeast, Punjab or Jammu and Kashmir. And as the political authority also conspicuously failed to do what it had promised to do for the citizen and his or her welfare, the "system" found itself vastly depleted of goodwill, acceptability, and eventually legitimacy. Its coercive writ ceased to run in parts of the country (and to these parts can now be added the so-called "naxalite-affected" areas.)

The new response was to redefine the security of the state as the inviolability of the ruler. Indira Gandhi's assassination provided the perfect emotional, popular, and political context to garner legitimacy for the new "SPG jurisprudence." The modern King must be protected, whatever it may take — and no questions will be asked. The new "blue book" detailed the elaborate rituals, precautions, and arrangements that must be made to protect the Prime Minister. The SPG ritual carries with it not just physical protection of the King but also a set of attitudes and reflexes, anchored in empowered acts of intimidation and coercion. Both the protected and the protectors subscribe to a higher notion of immunity and inviolability.

The SPG (Special Protection Group) became the ultimate status symbol of a ruler presiding over a hallowed state, running rather low on democratic legitimacy.

In good time, the SPG model had to be shared with the senior members of the court. The National Security Guards, Black Cats, and other paraphernalia were devised to create a new, superior class of rulers, who it was felt needed to be protected not so much against any quintessential "enemy of the state" as against political (criminal) rivals. Soon the "leader" felt himself/herself denuded unless protected by a large posse of AK-47 armed policemen, all licensed to kill in the line of duty. New arguments — and new, if nameless, enemies — had to be invented in order to offer a semblance of justification for this new protection regime, even if the citizen was to be left to his or her own devices against the increasingly marauding criminal. National security became the grand new excuse.

It was in this context that the practices and ideology of the "fake encounter" germinated. Many honest and upright officers felt frustrated over their and the police system's inability to get the better of the entrenched and well-connected criminal. They found the criminal justice system too slow and ineffective. They watched helplessly as the criminal was able to suborn the legal process and also secure political patronage and protection.

Invariably there was applause and support, especially from the middle classes, whenever upright officers decided to take a shortcut to eliminate a known but otherwise intractable underworld figure. A certain kind of popular legitimacy accrued on the basis of a doctrine of necessity. The Hindi movie Gangajal brilliantly showcased the mood. In Gujarat the ritual and ceremony of the "fake encounter" ended up mostly reinforcing the "bad Muslim-good Hindu" discourse in the public imagination.

Then came the National Democratic Alliance regime, with its agenda of redefining the basis of legitimacy of the Indian state. The nuclear nationalism of Pokhran-II, the Kargil war, and the Kandahar hijacking were all used to gloss over the rulers' incompetence and to demand insistently allegiance and obedience from all against the "enemy" — Pakistan, ISI, and its presumed local collaborator. Much before Mr. Vanzara encroached on our attention, senior IPS officers were "discovering" ISI plots to kill Keshubhai Patel, Mr. Modi's predecessor.

Effect of 9/11

And then came 9/11. The Washington-inspired "war on terror" confirmed the sangh parivar-brewed categories of friends and enemies. The global indignation over 9/11 was grabbed to graft a new legitimacy on the Hindutva categories of "us" versus "them." These categories were deemed to be validated in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. The debate over POTA was essentially a struggle over the new, officially preferred Hindutva-centric legitimacy. The "us" against "them" myth was deemed to get confirmed with every jihadi attack be it on Parliament House or Akshardham or the Raghunath temple (that too when an "iron" man was presiding over the Union Home Ministry).

In this gathering mood, the fake encounter became sanctified as a ritual to be performed at the altar of the national security church. Police officers who earlier resorted to the fake encounter as a `necessary' shortcut effortlessly adapted to the new mood. The inviolability of the designated priests of the national security church became the new rationale — political, organisational, and intellectual — for the coercion. All those killed in police encounters were invariably declared to have been out to kill L.K. Advani, Narendra Modi, Kalyan Singh, Praveen Togadia, etc.

Even though the NDA was voted out of power three years ago, the attitudes, reflexes, and policies it instigated remain in place. So much so that even the Supreme Court endorsed the death sentence for Afzal Guru as the only ritual sacrifice that would satisfy the nation's presumed "conscience." Whenever the United Progressive Alliance regime has tried to restore some moderation, it has been attacked as being "soft" on terror. Once in a while the National Security Adviser can be relied upon to pitch in with his own distinctive themes and inputs. At another time, intelligence personnel may choose to leak their perceptions of an increased "security threat" to Sonia Gandhi and her family from the terror groups. The national security church will not allow any serious deviation from the prescribed liturgy.

What Kausarbi's death has done is to show how untenable are all those claims that have been made — and conceded — as legitimate exercise of the state's coercive power. In killing Kausarbi, Mr. Vanzara and his rogue colleagues have brought into disrepute the very legitimacy of the Indian state. The King and his men are there to protect the citizen, not to play god, with the power to decide who lives and who dies. Just as another Muslim woman, Shah Bano, became a cause celebre for modernist India, Kausabi's death should shame us into liberating ourselves from the obsession with exaggerated notions of national security, which in turn delay reconciliation at home and abroad.

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