The fact of the matter though is that encounters are not the problem but the symptom of a collapsing system of justice. They are counter-productive and encourage contempt for law within the police. The practice of policing to break the law in the name of law enforcement is unacceptable and intolerable in a democratic society governed by the rule of law. It is objectionable because it is arbitrary as a process, and random in effect.

The National Police Commission in its report (‘Fifth Report of the National Police Commission’) powerfully recommended that false encounters are to be sternly discouraged by police leaders as this is not a remedy for the situation. The answer is to strengthen the law and legal process. Unfortunately some senior police leaders, instead of resisting pressures emanating from their political masters, very often bend backwards to curry favour with them. I still recollect that as a senior officer in-charge of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Orissa police, I was betrayed by a chief minister for not mastering “all the tricks” of the police trade. But by succumbing to the illegal, police officers may land themselves in a deeper morass.

In many states, the police force has ‘encounter specialists’, who quickly become favourites with the powers-that-be. They very often turn into cold-blooded liquidationists and extortionists, who enrich themselves through dubious means. Gujarat’s D.G. Vanjhara possibly falls in this category. However, when the crunch comes, they are left to fend for themselves and their political patrons unceremoniously dump them. Vanjhara has now been dumped because the political establishment in Gujarat wants to present an untarnished image before the Supreme Court. Like Cardinal Wolsey, he will have to rue his unthinking and unquestioning loyalty to the king.

This is the lesson that many police officers have not yet learned. Violating the rule of law is not sound law enforcement and is not desirable even from the limited police point of view. There are cases where the ‘encounter specialists’ ended up helping the gangsters in their intra-gang warfare. Empirical research on organised crime in Bombay, done by the Bureau of Police Research and Development, reveals how Dawood Ibrahim got several of his rivals eliminated through the police by tipping them in advance. Police response in many of the cases was to eliminate, not arrest.

In every police outfit, there are some violence-prone officers who figure again and again in cases of misuse and abuse. Very little empirical research has been done in India regarding these aggressive officers. In the US, the Christopher Commission looked into the use of force by the Los Angeles Police after the Rodney King incident and could pinpoint, after going through the records, a number of officers against whom there were repeated allegations of misuse of force. There should be no hesitation on the part of police leaders to discipline and weed out these black sheep. It has also been found that some police officers are more likely to resort to violence when there are other officers to provide them with physical and psychological support.

There is demand from many quarters, and even from the Central government, to transfer the Gujarat case to the CBI. The Supreme Court, in my opinion, has correctly directed the state CID to carry on with the investigation. Already some upright officers in the CID have courageously and tenaciously uncovered many dark details of the case and there is no reason why they will not be able to carry their investigations to their logical conclusion.

The writer is former director-general, NFRC, and senior fellow,

Institute of Social Sciences