After presiding over more than 10,000 encounters and 178 encounter killings in the last seven years, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday congratulated the police in his state for shooting down a teenager and his companion, both wanted in a murder case, in Jhansi. His home minister went one step further and stated that the killings were historic and a message to criminals that this is indeed “new India”.
It is not just the Uttar Pradesh government which has found the easy way of “encounter killings”. It was not long ago a Supreme Court-appointed panel busted the claim of “encounter killing” forwarded by the Telangana police in a case in which four alleged rapists were shot and killed. The police in the LDF-ruled Kerala are accused of killing eight people, alleged Maoists, in encounters in the last seven years. Reports of “encounter killings” are not rare in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, though they hardly make national news.
But it is the Uttar Pradesh government that has adopted “encounter killings” as a state policy and takes pride. It is only a few days ago that a shocked Supreme Court ordered the immediate release of a person who was jailed for almost a year after the same state government slapped the draconian National Security Act in a case relating to municipal tax recovery.
Human history is all about instant justice delivery by the mighty and powerful and it took centuries and even millennia for people to conceive the very idea of the rule of law. Modern jurisprudence posits the basic tenet that a person should be considered innocent until proven guilty. Article 21 of our Constitution translates this idea into words by prescribing that “no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law”.
Encounter killings go against all that democracy stands for and takes us back to the time when might was right. It reduces the Constitution, rule of law, rights and criminal jurisprudence to a farce.
Unfortunately, people who have no recourse often come out in support of encounter killings, blaming the long-winded justice delivery system and its attendant delays. It is imperative that we address these delays but that cannot serve as a ruse for replacing procedure.
It is time for everyone who has a stake in the rule of law and constitutional governance in this country to take notice of the actions and utterances that come out of India’s most populous state and ponder the contours of the “New India” that people who run the state government must imagine. Uttar Pradesh is not an entity unto itself; it must follow what the rest of India does. To ensure that, a fair probe must be ordered into Thursday’s encounter killings and facts uncovered.
It is said that the Stone Age ended not because people ran out of stones, but they discovered better weapons instead. The Union government and the higher judiciary must wake up to the reality that Uttar Pradesh presents and stop it from slipping back in time.
