It seems that the self-styled secular brigade is all too eager to lay every crime by the Gujarat police at the door of chief minister Narendra Modi, its object of hate for some years now. However, this exercise can raise uncomfortable questions for other CMs as well, unless the secular brigade among the political class and in the media sees things in their correct perspective.

Right at the beginning let me say with all the vehemence that I can command that any fake encounter by security forces, whether it is by the local police or the army, cannot be condoned. It must be properly investigated and the culprits must receive the punishment stated in law. There cannot be two opinions on this.

Having said this, let us look at the Gujarat incident in which it now transpires that one 35-year-old Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kauser Bi and one Tulsiram Prajapati were picked up from a bus in front of many other passengers on the night of November 22-23, 2005. The operation was apparently by the Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh police. They were taken to Gujarat and at first Sohrabuddin, and then his wife were eliminated by the Gujarat anti-terrorist squad. They made it look like an encounter with a terrorist who was planning to eliminate the CM. Almost a year later, Prajapati was also eliminated, by which time a habeas corpus petition was filed before the apex court questioning the encounter story and asking the whereabouts of Kauser Bi.

Looking at Sohrabuddin's antecedents, the possibility that the police officers concerned were brought into this plan to eliminate Sohrabuddin by some anti-social elements cannot be overruled, even though that does not justify their action. The victim had a criminal history of extortion. He had earlier been booked for murder and kidnapping cases in three states, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. He is reported to be an accomplice of the D-company of Dawood Ibrahim who is wanted by the Central government for many crimes including financing, planning and carrying out the Mumbai serial blasts. Sohrabuddin had already been convicted for eight years in Ujjain after a huge arms cache was found at his farm in Jharaniya in MP in 1994. The arms were linked to another underworld don Abdul Latif.

Reports say that after his release, Sohrabuddin continued to extort money from builders and marble quarry owners in the three states mentioned above. In this, Prajapati was his accomplice. The two had met in Ujjain jail in 1999 where Prajapati was also imprisoned. There they developed plans for continuing with their careers in crime after release. On the night when Sohrabuddin was picked up, Prajapati was with him, occupying the seat next to Sohrabuddin and his wife. It is said that Prajapati was a police informer. That may be the reason why he was not harmed first, and only after a year when the police officers feared he would be an eyewitness to the event, that they eliminated him. I must reiterate that all these possibilities do not justify what these high level police officers have done.

To ignore the fact that such fake encounters and unlawful killings have been the trademark of the police and other security forces in this country, is to vitiate our evaluation of events with only one political purpose - to demonise Modi. In the present case the involvement of the Andhra police has also come to light. Do we jump to the conclusion that the Andhra CM should take responsibility for the killing and quit? Unless there is corroborative evidence this will be farfetched.

So many fake encounters and custodial deaths take place in different parts of India, that one is reminded of what an Allahabad high court judge said in the Sixties: the police is the largest criminal gang in the country. Again, that also might be an exaggeration with more than a grain of truth in it. In Jammu and Kashmir, only recently we have had an exposé on innocent citizens being picked up and killed and buried by the local police. We had similar incidents staged by some army officers. Several army officers have been court martialled for faking encounters with Pakistani insurgents. In all such cases we have not seen any minister in Srinagar resigning despite huge public anger.

In Congress ruled Assam we recently had the wives of suspected Ulfa militants going on a hunger strike to find the whereabouts of their husbands who have been captured by the army. Despite repeated calls from many quarters, the Assam government refused to disclose information about these men. It is strange that the secular brigade is silent about these developments, while jumping at Modi the moment a wrongdoing by his police officers is disclosed.

The same story was repeated in Mumbai where again due to public intervention another encounter specialist was caught for similar killings. In the Naxalite infested Andhra, under different governments, a string of reports has emerged of fake encounter deaths of suspected Naxalites with no inquiry to establish the facts. The leftist intellectuals of Andhra have been targeting several chief ministers of the state for such killings but the state government has not responded. Recently we saw how the West Bengal police collaborated with Marxist cadres to kill several protesters at Nandigram.

The Marxists justified the incident instead of asking the Left Front CM to resign. In this case at least the collaboration has been revealed in detail by media reports about how most of them were kept out of the area while the mayhem was going on.

We have more reports on security forces misusing their power in Manipur, and the recent killing of a lady who was picked up from her residence, raped and then killed under the pretext that she was a terrorist. The Manipur CM at that time did not resign nor did Union home minister Shivraj Patil despite days of public agitation against the government.

In Kerala, a renowned space scientist was accused of selling secrets to a mole and was even imprisoned, but it was later found that the state police - under the then Marxist government - was motivated by political considerations and the scientist was honourably discharged thanks to some public spirited people. Did the Marxist CM of that time offer even an apology?

The point is that the pervasive misuse of power by security forces anywhere in the country is an issue of police conduct, rather than a political matter of getting someone to resign. We need police reforms and that has been demanded in Parliament and outside.

Courtesy: www.asianage.com, May 12, 2007