Good Cop Vs Bad Cop: Reading Between The Lines Of 2019 Hyderabad Encounter

The wee hours of December 6, 2019, brought a special ray of sunshine for all Indians, as Disha’s murderers were shot dead by the police. The killing of the four main accused was widely welcomed with joy across India. Hours after the encounter, a large number of people started gathering at the site, distributing sweets and setting off firecrackers. There were approximately 3 lakh tweets in support of the Hyderabad police with hashtags. It was also observed that those supporting the shooting brutally trolled, condemned and counter-attacked those who called the incident “an execution of suspects without a fair trial.” The “wrongly trigger-happy” and “hoodlum” cops were quickly portrayed as “Singham” and generated a craze of almost a Bollywood-movie style, glorifying extra-judicial proceedings.

It took a lot of persuasion by human rights activists for the Supreme Court to set up the Sipurkar Commission to substantiate this extra-judicial act. The 387 pages of detailed findings were produced by the Commission. They state that the encounter was fake and the accused were “deliberately gunned down.” Moreover, three out of the four suspects were minors. The Commission has come up with a barrage of questions viz.

• Barring cops, were there other eye-witnesses?
• Had police manuals been followed in the event of the encounter?
• Were any warnings issued by senior police officers?
• Why was the FIR lodged after the encounter, tagging four of them as ‘accused’?
• What kind of injuries (minor/major) did police personnel suffer in the brawl?
• Why has the Telangana government not initiated any judicial inquiry as mandated by law?

The police claimed that the four accused were trying to snatch the weapons and that was the only reason that all men had to be shot.

In response to the same, the Commission says, no bullets or cartridges (used) were found from the site. Furthermore, the video footage of the shooting produced by the cops was incomplete. It is a matter of concern whether the police had arrested the right men or they just picked up random people to balance the public outrage. At this point, the Commission has recommended that the 10 police personnel who were involved in this case be prosecuted. They are equally guilty of destroying and withholding evidence. Moreover, the Commission has significantly shed light on critical aspects such as CCTV footage, safety latches on the guns, the distance between police and accused during firing, fingerprints of the accused on the weapons, the timing of the release of the accused from the prison, time duration of the gunshot residue, Disha’s sisters claim.

It should be noted here, that the Commission lacks findings related to the modus operandi of a fake counter that police usually adopt. Had it been done, we would have at least known the exact motive of the cops behind fake encounters.

“Rapes and murders have the lowest rate of conviction” stated the National Crime Commission Bureau in 2021. Usually, police feel quite helpless when the conviction process takes too much time and despite the grievousness of the crime, it has been observed that the criminals are left free due to several legal drawbacks. But can we say that resorting to encounters is a solution to deal with the crime rate? Obviously not. Rather, the police should confess more about any incident where they are a party and stop giving peremptory justice.

There have been a lot of instances of encounters widely done by Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab Police and also killings of Naxalites and dreaded criminals in custody. We definitely have enough points to condemn the acts of these groups but can this be justified as one of the reasons to kill people in custody? Police custody is one such dark periphery where the police exercise ultimate power. And this is the point where most of the encounters are planned.

According to Markendey Katju, “these encounters are not clashes at all, rather all of them are cold-blooded murders.”  The Supreme Court verdict of Prakash Kadam vs Ramprasad Viswanath Gupta observes that “fake encounters by the police are nothing but cold-blooded murders and those committing them must be given the death sentence, treating them in the category of rarest of rare cases.”

Additionally, in 26 paragraphs of the same judgment, SC emphasises that “trigger happy policemen who think they can kill people in the name of encounter and get away with it should know that gallows await them.” The commission of crimes by police can only be put to an end when judicial custody from day one is provided and police should never be allowed to take custody even for some initial days. To deter fake encounters, we have to change the way police act.

I shall conclude here by quoting Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees, “No person will be deprived of his life or personal liberty except with the procedure established by law. The course of justice can only be rendered by the court of law.”

Our country has an independent and integrated judiciary to deal exclusively with judicial matters. The job of the police is to carry out the investigation, not to satiate public sentiments by just doing something abruptly and haphazardly. If the police start acting like judges, then who will do the work assigned to the police? Justice can only be achieved if police help the victims during grief, encourage them to trace the suspects and lastly, corroborate the story with a competent and robust investigation.

This present report of the Commission regained the faith of the people towards the impartial and rational decision-making capacity of the Supreme Court. Let the court punish all the participants in the state-sponsored murders. Moreover, each extra judicial and every course of action of the police must be checked for prevailing justice in the country.