Exactly a month ago, the ravaged body of a young doctor was recovered from the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Calcutta. So much has happened since then that one of the most disquieting developments has passed unnoticed. For the first time in Bengal, a powerful state politician, a lawmaker to boot, declared himself in favour of encounter killings to punish such horrific crimes.
The alternative measure he suggested was capital punishment. The latter is awarded by judicial process. An encounter killing, on the contrary, is an extra-judicial act — in plain language, a crime. However heinous the original offence, an encounter killing compounds the sum of wrongdoing.
Encounter killings were once favoured by the Bengal police to liquidate Naxalites. An ingenious variant was to release them from the prison van to apparent freedom, then shoot them down for allegedly attempting to escape. Like so many hallowed traditions, this practice has dwindled in Bengal. But much of the rest of India is proactively thinking — and acting — as Bengal did yesterday. Is Bengal now aiming to recover the lost ground?
It has a lot to catch up with. In more and more Indian states, encounter killings are the flavour of the season, and rulers perpetrating them hailed by the citizenry. Uttar Pradesh is often considered the epicentre of the practice, but the first place goes to Chhattisgarh: 259 deaths between 2016 and 2022, and 154 so far this year. Mumbai and the former undivided Andhra Pradesh have their own distinguished records. A celebrated instance (if that is the right adjective), avenging the so-called Disha case of the rape and murder of a young veterinarian, occurred in Telangana.
A high-minded Martian might be shocked by such practices. What would he say on learning that this is among the few police tactics to be resoundingly approved by the public? The killer policemen in the Disha case were feted with sweets and flowers. Yogi Adityanath’s fondness for such methods is said to be a major cause of his popularity in a long lawless state. Across India, lawless methods of enforcing the law are advocated by otherwise decent and law-abiding people — because they are decent and law-abiding. They distrust the legal process because of its delays and impediments.
But that is at best the rationalization of a gut alienation. A penchant for lawless justice is ingrained in our culture. The legal process is seen as irrelevant to the dispensation of justice. We tell our children, ‘The policeman will beat you if you’re naughty.’ We assume and often demand that the police will beat and torture a suspected offender, perhaps after we ourselves have had a go. The law and the Constitution are like stiff uniforms we wear to work. Returning home, we change into the snug leisurewear of prejudice, class interest and old custom.
Our notion of justice is thus disturbingly close to lynch law. No wonder that vigilante groups have attained frightening power in so many states. Eating beef is declared a crime, and its suspicion held to justify far greater crimes. On August 27, a man from Bengal was beaten to death in Haryana on that charge. Haryana’s chief minister found this only natural: “Villagers have so much respect for cows that if they hear of such things, who can stop them?” Convicted offenders in the Bilkis Bano case found champions to plead their ‘good samskara’ as brahmins: a social exoneration of multiple rape and murder.
In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a criminal is asked if he considers his actions to be legal. He replies: “If the law would allow it, sir.” The final triumph of illegality comes when laws are misapplied or even rewritten to pander to the lynch-law syndrome. A familiar instance from our times is ‘bulldozer justice’. A citizen displeases the authoritarian State to find his house reduced to rubble: coincidentally, it was found to violate building rules. By coincidence again, most victims are Muslims. Last week, the Supreme Court belatedly reminded us that you cannot destroy a house by criminalizing the owner. One wonders what ‘norms’ the court will now devise to balance two issues it very reasonably finds to be unconnected.
Again, certain states have passed laws making interfaith marriages virtually impossible. Almost any random person can report such marriages, and religious conversions must be approved by the district magistrate. The last stipulation would be comical if the consequences for individuals were less dire.
It does not help that the law functions in geological time. We often read of ongoing litigation dating from the last century; rarely of a case started this decade reaching disposal. Umar Khalid’s bail hearing before the Supreme Court was adjourned fourteen times, sometimes at his own lawyer’s request. One need not approve of Khalid’s politics to find a procedural problem.
Last week, President Droupadi Murmu spoke forcefully and humanely of the “culture of adjournment” and the “black coat syndrome” that terrify humble citizens when they enter a courtroom. The syndrome extends all the way up the social ladder. We cannot do without the law, yet we find it employed to bully and subdue rather than to heal and rectify. We are thus convinced that the law works best when it is abused or violated. In times of anger or greed or grief, we resort to mob murder or gang warfare.
This is where the R.G. Kar protests promise a peaceful revolution. Every one of the hundreds of protests by doctors and common citizens has been entirely peaceful and orderly: they are seeking justice, not revenge. Violence — and that abundantly — has only marred rallies by political parties, protecting their turf against another party that has stolen their thunder by fostering a more endemic lawlessness. That is not even rough justice, or “wild justice” in Francis Bacon’s phrase. It is simply a bid to perpetuate the chaos and violence to which the political class would consign our public life in our own despite.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University
