06 September 2013, 03:30 PM IST
Terrible, indeed terrifying, mistakes can and do take place when a nation is confronted with a threat to its unity and integrity. In our country, these threats emanate from those who seek to secede from India or to overthrow its democratic order or to disturb the social peace to promote their ideological ends. When the instigators of violence are non-state actors - financed, armed and trained by foreign elements that are inimical to our nation - conventional methods to counter it are found wanting. This is especially true when the instigators can count on the sympathy, even complicity, of the communities whose interests they claim to represent.
Strategies to defeat their nefarious designs are thus a double-edged sword: they either succeed in neutralising the perpetrators of violence or else they subject citizens to colossal, collateral damage: the denial of the due process of law. This dents the very foundations on which we have built our republic. Nothing is more inviolable than the right to life. And nothing speaks more for a mature democracy than to acknowledge that this right is supreme.
It is in this context that one needs to subject D.G. Vanzara's lengthy letter of resignation from the Indian Police Force to critical scrutiny. Let us, for the moment, put aside the political blame-game it has generated. The fact is that the top Gujarat cop was allegedly involved in fake encounters. He knew that they were fake. Yet he carried them out at the behest of his political masters. He now argues that he merely followed their orders. He claims that they did not stand by him – and other police officers who have been behind bars for those acts – and then goes on to implicate them in the murders.
His ire is directed at the then state home minister Amit Shah and, by implication, at Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. The latter, in his eyes, is the God who failed him and his force. And he did that under the 'evil influence' of the latter. Such reasoning is quite besides the point. Vanzara, as a senior member of the police force, had no business to kow-tow to what he says his God. His job was to remind the authorities that what they asked him to do in the name of 'zero tolerance for terrorism' is legally wrong and morally reprehensible. He did no such thing. He carried out the orders without a qualm of conscience.
His grouse is that his political masters did not protect him and his fellow-officers in their hour of trial. That grouse is grotesque. Vanzara should have known better. Politicians the world over don't hesitate to ditch their most obsequious followers to save their own skin. Amit Shah, now out on bail for his alleged complicity in two fake encounters, did precisely that.
The issue at stake here is straightforward: did Amit Shah, with or without the connivance of Narendra Modi, order Vanzara to kill suspected terrorists even without giving them a chance to prove their innocence? The blunt answer is: no. To argue, as many of the commentators who back Amit Shah and Modi have done, that all is fair in the war on terrorism is to undermine the very basis on which we have sought to build our republic. And that basis is strict adherence to due process.
Let me repeat. Vanzara is no saint. His accusations against Amit Shah and Modi may well be due to his personal frustrations. But that cannot detract attention from the fact that he, and the political masters he claims to have followed to the tee, engaged in acts that violated due process. Some commentators, partial to the Sangh Parivar, make bold to suggest that had it not been for such violations, the Indian state would never have been able to crush the Naxalite menace in West Bengal and the Khalistani movement in Punjab.
Such reasoning, however, smacks of overwhelming statist conceits. Just as the 'human rights' supporters of the secessionists and sundry terrorists reveal a failure to understand the compulsions of a state threatened with elements hell-bent on destroying it. What about the human rights of their civilian victims?
Where do we go from here? Sooner than later, we need to know who, in fact, is responsible for the fake encounters. They are a stigma on Indian democracy. Those on the fringes of the right and extreme left who denounce 'bleeding hearts' and 'arm-chair liberals' cannot, in the name of realpolitik, provide excuses and alibis for the slaughter of innocent citizens. That is what the Pentagon and Pakistan's ISI, for example, routinely do.
Let the law, as that moth-eaten phrase has it, take its course regardless of who allegedly violates it: Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler, Tunda and Bhatkal, Akbaruddin Owaisi and the Shahi Imam of Jama masjid, Naxals across the country and secessionists in Kashmir and the North east – and all their advocates across the political spectrum. Bring them to book even while addressing their genuine concerns. That alone would serve to uphold the idea of a democratic, law-abiding idea of India.
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