Making it to the list of infamy : SC report and trigger happy State
- Sangai Express Editorial :: July 18, 2013 -
Making it to the list of infamy. Manipur certainly seems to have specialised in this.
Throw in a remarkable co-incidence and the stage is just perfect to reflect on the tragedy that is Manipur today.
Even as the Extra-Judicial Execution Victim Families’ Association, Manipur, EEVFAM for short, and the Human Rights Alert went to town to highlight the report and recommendations of the Supreme Court on the basis of the inputs forwarded by the three member Committee headed by Retired Justice Santosh Hegde, after probing six cases of ‘fake encounters’, came the report from the Zee Research Group, that Manipur is the second most trigger happy State in the country after Uttar Pradesh.
Perfecting the art of making it to the list of infamy, nothing less, nothing more. There is also an ironic twist to the stories that have unfolded.
While Manipur ranks second in the cases of fake encounters, none of these cases have been able to shake the political establishment at Delhi and to an extent at Imphal.
Compare this to the Ishrat Jahan case in Gujarat, a State which comes a lowly 17th in the list of trigger happy States and it should become clear where Manipur stands in the context of the understanding of India as a Union or a Nation.
Apart from the carefully planned and executed fake encounters, but which could not withstand the close scrutiny of the Supreme Court empanelled committee, the ghosts of mass massacres continue to haunt the collective psyche of the people. The Malom massacre of 2000 in which 10 or so people were gunned down in indiscriminate firing by Assam Rifles.
The RIMS massacre, wherein even a student of the institution was shot dead by CRPF personnel, the Tonsen Lamkhai massacre, the Heirangoithong mass killings, the systematic and brutal terror unleashed by the Assam Rifles and the Army at Oinam in Senapati district in 1987 are all stories, which failed to move the conscience of Delhi and its agencies.
The BT Road incident, may perhaps be said to be an exception, since it was Tehelka which came out with its damning sequence of photos which showed Sanjit being accosted, shoved inside a pharmacy and later brought out as a dead man killed in an encounter.
It should not come as a surprise if the report and recommendations of the Supreme Court do not make it to the prominent pages of the newspapers published in the metros such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore or Kolkata. But then this should not make much of a difference.
The people of Manipur have been waging their fights or struggles on their own, for the last forty or fifty years.
To come back to the recommendations of the Supreme Court, it came close to a case of rapping the State Government on its knuckles for giving a free rein to the police, especially the police commandos.
The State police do not come under the provisions of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, but the fact that they are all involved in fake encounters, as exemplified by the conclusions of the Hegde Committee, says something significant about a design at work.
A pattern. Catch them, whisk them away, and eliminate them and place a gun on the dead body and come out with an encounter story.
A one line directive.
Surely such a strategy could not have been charted out and implemented without the knowledge of the political masters.
It is this sense of immunity and impunity granted by the political establishment that the thuggish side of the police personnel regularly comes out in full public display.
Cops on their fancy motor bikes, whizzing past the one way traffic.
Honking away at the vehicle ahead, with lathis waving and at times using their lung power to throw invectives to give them the right of way, are spectacles, which Imphalites must have witnessed regularly.
Flip the coin and on the other hand, the State police comes up as an incompetent, lethargic institution, best exemplified by the gross failure to prepare a charge sheet in the Pallel drug seizure case.
It is in this backdrop that The Sangai Express in this very column had sometime back dubbed the State police as the biggest mistake in the world.
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