Zero tolerance for violence

The larger lessons of the Ishrat Jahan case

The furore over the increasing intensity of investigation into the 2004 "encounter" in which 19-year old Ishrat Jahan was killed along with three companions near Ahmedabad in Gujarat conceals a larger question, which is not being asked loudly enough. The reasons why this case excites greater comment than is usual are easy to understand. First of all, unlike many other similar cases, it happened in a state largely at peace and not torn apart by insurgency. Second, the motive claimed for Jahan and her companions was that they were Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives out to destabilise Gujarat and assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi; this meant that this case, like similar cases in Gujarat such as the 2005 killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, had political salience right from the start. The questions being replayed in public discourse today - was the Modi government a victim of Islamist terror, or was it creating threats for political gain? - are not new; they were being asked in 2004-05, and during the 2007 Assembly elections as well. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the identity of Ishrat Jahan - a 19-year-old striver who, by all accounts, was both smart and driven - meant that attention was focused on the encounter killing from the start.

Therefore, in all the recent discoveries in this case - whether the revelation, a few years ago, that LeT agent David Headley had apparently told the Intelligence Bureau that Jahan was also an LeT "asset", or the ugly battle more recently between the IB and the Central Bureau of Investigation over the underlying facts of the case - the basic questions have remained the same. Was Jahan a terrorist? Was the threat to Mr Modi contrived or real? How far up did the decision to kill Jahan and the others run? But, in the process, one basic fact seems to be ignored: that, regardless of what can be known now, at the time of the Jahan encounter, all the facts were not known, and yet the evidence suggests that they were killed by the Indian state when the law states that they should have been captured and tried. Much indignation is wasted on why this fake encounter of all fake encounters is subject to such scrutiny; but this comes at the problem from the wrong direction, in that it implies that the Jahan encounter should be dismissed from public discourse. The only proper response to that indignation is in fact to point out that all fake encounters - and similar occasions of violent state overreach - should be the occasion of similar indignation, even if this one has greater human and political interest for most Indians.

Arguments are frequently made that the criminal justice system or the process of investigation is too weak to deal with problems such as terrorism or organised crime, leading to a dependence on encounters - many of which are staged. This may or may not be true. But it is also a dangerous distraction. The only mature response to the weakness of law and order is not to reduce control on the forces of the state, but to increase their capacity. In other words, more and better investigators, not frequent and violent extrajudicial acts. For the glorification or even the permissibility of such things as encounters, fake or not, leads directly to the coarsening of India's police and intelligence. This results in custodial violence, torture, and the simple harassment by the police under the threat of violence to which all Indians are habitually subject. Planning and staging an encounter killing are terrible, true. But tolerance of extrajudicial violence is bad enough, and is the root cause of the problem.