The killing of a rape accused inside a police vehicle in the limits of the Thane Commissionerate raises troubling questions. The man who was killed had come to police notice only a year ago when his second wife lodged a complaint against him of forcing her to have unnatural sex with him. He was neither a gangster nor a hardened criminal. This year in August, he was employed by a privately-run school in Thane district as a janitor. No inquiries were made about his antecedents despite the fact that the school caters to girls who are four years old and older.
On two consecutive days, the teacher sent two four-year-old girls to the washroom with the recently recruited janitor. It was only when the children complained of pain that their mothers realised that the children had been raped.
The teacher recounted the events and the janitor was arrested. All hell broke loose when the sordid details became public knowledge. It attracted the ire of the entire locality and from there spread to adjacent middle-class localities. The fact that two little girls were the victims shocked everyone.
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With polls to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly due in November, the Opposition grabbed the opportunity to berate the Mahayuti government, ignoring the fact that such an offence could have occurred under any party’s watch. Marches, demonstrations and “rail rokos” followed in quick succession with massive crowds participating. The BJP was the most troubled since its representative, Devendra Fadnavis, was the deputy chief minister heading the home ministry.
With the Mahayuti under attack, the BJP sensed danger. The Opposition was blaming the government for not protecting women and children despite its pro-women slogans. The propaganda was hurting the Mahayuti, forcing it on to the back foot. It is this factor that has set many wondering if the “encounter” was staged at the instance of the political leadership.
The Mahayuti, a combination of three political entities with the BJP as the mentor and the Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar faction of the NCP as partners, was the only entity that stood to benefit from the “encounter”. Sweets were distributed by the locals when it was announced that the accused had been killed by the police. The Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena announced a reward of Rs 1 lakh for the senior inspector who allegedly shot dead the accused and Rs 50,000/- for the junior officer who is said to have been shot in the leg in the incident. Hoardings praising the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis were put up in Thane and Mumbai; the leader was pictured with a pistol in his hand.
There is not an iota of doubt that the people of Thane were pleased when the “encounter” was publicised. Their anger against the Mahayuti evaporated as soon as the police took on the role of judge and executioner.
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A thought that occurs to me as I write this article is that a year or so ago in Hyderabad four alleged rapists of a woman doctor were arrested and then killed by the police in similar circumstances on the outskirts of the city. The Bharatiya Rashtra Samithi of K Chandrashekar Rao, in power at the time, received encomiums from the public but lost the subsequently held assembly elections. Maharashtra’s ruling dispensation should keep this in mind.
The Hyderabad “encounter” was greatly appreciated by the people of that city, but was found to be full of holes by stakeholders of the judicial process, that is, the police, the prosecutors and the judiciary. So also in the case of Thane. A police party, led by a senior police inspector, and consisting of a junior inspector and two men (three if you count the driver), left by a police vehicle, to transport the accused to Thane from Taloja jail where he was lodged following his arrest. The case for which he was being freshly investigated was the year-old complaint lodged by his second wife. Incidentally, the man’s first marriage reportedly lasted only two days, the second lasted 10 days, and he re-married for a third time.
It is not usual to depute a senior inspector on escort duty of prisoners. Even the junior inspector was superfluous. The accused could have been questioned in Taloja jail itself about his second wife’s complaint. It did not require such elaborate arrangements.
The senior inspector deputed for the job has a chequered history. A decade or so earlier, Arup Patnaik, then police commissioner of Mumbai, had recommended the officer’s dismissal from service for facilitating his (the senior inspector’s) own relative’s escape from police custody. The recommendation was not accepted by the state’s DGP though the escapee was a known gangster.
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After the Thane incident, interesting but damaging information about senior inspector Sanjay Shinde, who allegedly fired the fatal shot, is emerging. He was seen as a budding “encounter specialist” in the style of his mentor, Pradeep Sharma, who is facing trial in the murder of a businessman whose car was found laden with explosives and parked outside the home of Mukesh Ambani.
The escorting police party has now come out with a story that the accused, who must have been handcuffed and his face covered with a black hood, snatched the pistol of the officer sitting next to him and unlocked the weapon, without knowing how a pistol works. The entire story given by the police is unbelievable. It is even more amateurish than the story put out by the Telangana police when they disposed of four alleged rapists last year.
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In most cases of fake encounters the victims are poor. This remark was made by a police constable in a group of policemen discussing the sordid event. That same man went on to remark that if the accused was a rich man or a politician like the alleged molester of women wrestlers or the Karnataka MP accused of raping several women, the police would not have dared to stage such an “encounter”.
The police encounter as a people-friendly method of tackling crime has been adopted in Uttar Pradesh in a big way. It has assured Yogi Adityanath of votes in earlier elections. How and why this magic did not succeed in the recent Lok Sabha elections in the crucial state is a matter for the BJP to ponder.
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If the political leadership has ordered the Thane “encounter”, there is no way to prove that. It is finally the four policemen who will lose out. That will be grossly unfair and unjust.
The writer, a retired IPS officer, was Mumbai police commissioner, DGP Gujarat and DGP Punjab, and is a former Indian ambassador to Romania