Dirty tricks
Since the Delhi establishment is losing to Narendra Modi, it is resorting to cheap stunts.
By N.V. Subramanian (4 September 2013)
New Delhi: The alleged encounter deaths in Gujarat in which forces inimical to Narendra Modi are trying to implicate him must be seen in two perspectives. One relates specifically to Gujarat and the other to the rest of India, going back to the 1970s, if not earlier.
The Indian Police Service has deteriorated across India. You get the government and the police force you deserve, and the IPS has become worse than you can imagine. All the Central services have become venal and corrupt, but the Indian Police Service is worst of all, honourable exceptions apart. Not just is the service as corrupt as the Indian Administrative Service, it is criminal to boot. According to one estimate, 90 per cent of IPS officers are criminals. Readers will recall this figure in an earlier commentary in this magazine but in another context.
Narendra Modi has undisguised loathing for the Indian Police Service. This is well known in bureaucratic circles in Gujarat. He believes the police to be criminal and cut off from public service. It is not clear when he arrived at this view, but it is reasonable to surmise that he feels Indian Police Service officers let him down during the post-Godhra riots. Perhaps his anathema has an earlier provenance. Whatever the reason, Modi has had little closeness with the police. At bottom, he does not trust the force, and has firewalled himself from it. Amit Shah dealt with police administration, transfer, postings and so on, and Modi, as is his nature, did not interfere. On law-and-order matters naturally, he has dealt with successive police directors-general, but these interactions have been rigidly formal, with the participation of the chief secretary, etc. Police officers of subordinate ranks have been barred from these meetings, because Modi is instinctively uncomfortable with the force.
So when the mainstream media loosely and wildly attribute the “encounter” killings in Gujarat to Narendra Modi, they do not have the smallest idea about the man. They cannot understand his psyche. He is a loner, and he is an outsider apropos the Delhi establishment. Nobody is close to Modi, not even Amit Shah, who is tarted up in the press as his evil Man Friday. Only a very brave, confident man, who has nothing to hide, can remain a loner in politics. Indian politics is a dynastic or group activity. Besides her acquired surname, Sonia Gandhi has her coterie. So does Rahul Gandhi. Lal Krishna Advani once headed the anti-Atal Behari Vajpayee faction in the Bharatiya Janata Party which, despite its vastly depleted strength, is presently deployed against Modi. Modi, on the other hand, has no coterie. He comes alone to Delhi on visits, completes his tasks with speed and quiet, and returns without fuss. No tamasha. No hangers-on. This is not a man who will soil his hands with the crooked Indian Police Service.
Now turn to the perception of a higher number of extra-judicial killings in Gujarat, for which Modi’s detractors are to blame. Because Narendra Modi was hounded by the Delhi establishment and the mainstream media for the 2002 riots, jihadi attention, both local and Pakistan-sponsored, got concentrated on him and Gujarat. The witch-hunt continued despite a clean chit for Modi by the Supreme Court’s special investigation team. From this, it might be derived and inferred that the Delhi establishment and the media were directly responsible for the increased threat to Narendra Modi’s life. With a greater focus of terrorist groups to eliminate him, it was unexceptional for pro-active steps to contain the threats to his life to be greater as well. The Central Intelligence Bureau was involved in securing his life, as the Ishrat Jehan case shows. But even this becomes a matter of contention and controversy for the Delhi establishment paranoid about Modi becoming prime minister.
In any event, Gujarat has had fewer encounter killings than, say, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir at the peak of terrorism. They had mass deaths. One could immediately rebut that two wrongs do not make a right, but then, making an exception of Gujarat is also perverse and scandalous. In his reporting career, this writer has met a fair number of “encounter” cops in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir. This was in the dark decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Without exception, they were all brave men, and some had unbounded courage. They also had the decency to be honest about what they did. Ultimately, they saved Kashmir and Punjab from breaking away. This is no exaggeration.
Almost days before he took his life, stepping before a fast train, this writer met Ajit Singh Sandhu, the former senior superintendent of police of Tarn Taran, a district bordering Pakistan. He volunteered for the posting in Tarn Taran after regular Indian Police Service officers refused for fear of their lives. He was given out-of-turn promotion for the extraordinary risks he took. The border districts of Tarn Taran, Amritsar and Gurdaspur were hotbeds of terrorism in those days, and men like Sandhu turned the tide. Were there excesses? Surely. But terrorists were committing excesses as well, and terrified judges would give them bail at the asking. The situation was no different in Jammu and Kashmir. So when the police reckoned that the judiciary was abetting terrorism in a fashion, it adopted a sort of vigilantism.
All this happened in Congress regimes. Narendra Modi was nowhere on the scene. During the Emergency, there was the infamous Sunder murder case in which the names of Sanjay Gandhi and the IPS officer, Pritam Singh Bhinder, were dragged in, and subsequently, Bhinder’s family benefitted politically from the Congress. This history cannot be erased. Ajit Sandhu told this writer that as Tarn Taran SSP, he would get elimination orders from Delhi, sometimes from the minister himself. Nobody in Delhi protected Sandhu when the Central Bureau of Investigation went in pursuit of him. He didn’t appear suicidal when talking to this writer but he was deeply troubled. The state used him and threw him away. It is not fair, but whoever said states acted fairly?
And do not for a moment think only the police are implicated in encounter killings. The paramilitary forces under direct Central government control have dirtied their hands, and so have the armed forces. Kishenji alias Mallojula Koteswara Rao, the Maoist leader, was declared killed in an encounter in West Bengal in 2011. The covert services will tell you something different, which is nearer the truth. He was tortured and killed in Maharashtra and his body dumped in the forests of Burishol. Why this selective approval of encounter killings? One Central minister salivated at the pictures of massacred Maoists, pressing his officers for more, passing instructions on camera angles in the morgue. And if you believe the West is past such goriness, adhering in letter and spirit to liberalism, think of Guantanamo, the Central Intelligence Agency’s foreign rendition operations, and waterboarding.
India is located in a bad neighbourhood. There is a terrorist state on the west, and terror elements are strong in the rest of South Asia. Terrorists don’t play by the rules. This writer does not foresee the diminishment of encounter killings so long India remains insecure. This may appear immoral but states are scarcely nunneries. Like all campaigns and dirty tricks against Narendra Modi, this too will fail, and make his bid for prime-ministership stronger. But in attacking Narendra Modi, the state cannot be weakened, and that is just what his opponents and rivals have set out to accomplish.
On BRF we recognised the need to reform the Police services and have long standing threads on the issue.
