Comment

The incredible thing about the dismissal of Pradeep Sharma is that it didn’t happen earlier. There is no way that this columnist can verify whether the charges brought against him by the Mumbai police department are true or not, but assuming that they are, why was action delayed for so long?

The other question is if the accusations against Sharma are all true, why is the police top brass dismissing the ‘encounter specialist’ and not prosecuting him?

I have always found the myth-making about encounter specialists particularly offensive. Here I am not talking about just Sharma but about the many police inspectors and sub-inspectors who became known for killing criminals in so-called encounters and whose names and photographs appeared prominently in newspapers, the cop always in a heroic pose with a gun pointing into the distance, a steely look of resolve in his eye, the body tensed up for an action sequence. A caption to the photograph would then give details of the scalps credited to that policeman.

In a way it was like turning to the sports pages of the newspaper and reading about the comparative scores of Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and Laxman. Whose record is better? Who has scored more centuries? Whose average is more consistent? In short, who is the undisputed king of ‘cricket encounters’?

Yes, it was a bit like that except that the police encounters were far more deadly, and those weren’t runs scored, those were human lives extinguished, in cold blood.

Why did this phenomenon happen? Why was it allowed to take place in a functioning democracy with a judicial system in place which worked on the assumption that you were presumed innocent till proven guilty? Why did the police hierarchy, the home departments, and the political ruling class turn a blind eye to what was happening, which was basically that the judicial process was being short-circuited and the police had gone from being enforcers of the law to become judge, jury and executioners?

It’s easy to understand the reasons. The mafia had become all powerful and could not be brought to justice in the normal course because the ruthless dons made sure there were never any witnesses. The encounter specialist became the scourge of the mafia to such an extent that many dons fled to other states where they felt safer or even to countries like Pakistan which were for their own reasons, more welcoming. People said the morality is questionable, but hey, it works.

It works. It worked. And soon it went out of hand. The encounter specialist became much bigger than his designation because he worked out a nexus with the underworld and with it, got himself a power which is difficult to resist — money power.

These policemen became unaccountable even to their bosses, used their reputation as killers to extract money, took sides, and settled scores within the underworld. It was power without responsibility and power without accountability. Much the same thing had happened in Punjab earlier when the police were given free rein to deal with terrorists; after a while, the cops themselves turned extortionists.

It’s the old cliché: unleash a monster to deal with a difficult situation and soon he will be out of your control. That’s the reason that there can never be a benign dictator, however much people, depressed with the slowness and pulls and pressures of democracy, wish for one.

The media must take a lot of the blame for promoting these extra-judicial killings. Newspapers and magazines turned encounter specialists into heroes; they reported the fake encounters as fact without ever questioning police reports, and they ignored the possibility that some of the people being killed may have been innocent (Remember the shoot-out in Delhi’s Connaught Place where businessmen in a car were shot dead by the police in a case of mistaken identity?) Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, it is said. That vigilance has to come from the press, whatever the time and whatever the circumstances.