Death by encounter

Published August 30, 2016

A CHILLINGLY familiar story emerged from Punjab’s Counter Terrorism Department on Sunday. According to its spokesman, a CTD team transporting four terrorism suspects in a van to a locality in Lahore as part of an investigation into a terrorist attack was ambushed by several gunmen. A ferocious firefight ensued. By the time it was over, the four men who were in custody lay dead and the attackers had escaped under cover of darkness. The police, miraculously, were left without a scratch. The men who were killed had been arrested on suspicion of having perpetrated the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore in 2009, as well as involvement in the bombing of the city’s Moon Market the year before which left over 70 people dead. From Karachi, also on Sunday, there was news of a custodial death. An MQM activist Mehmood Khan, arrested on Aug 11 by Malir police, died in Civil Hospital under suspicious circumstances. The SSP Malir police claimed Mehmood was suffering from complications brought on by diabetes.

Judging from past experience, no effort will be made to determine the veracity of the police’s version in either of these instances. Unbridled power such as that enjoyed by law-enforcement personnel in this country invariably leads to abuse, with personal vendettas sometimes carried out in the guise of enforcing law and order. Only in such an environment can certain policemen continue to thrive despite being known as ‘encounter specialists’, which begs the question: how much savagery would they have had to commit to acquire that sobriquet? Reports of alleged terrorists getting killed in so-called encounters are so frequent that they seem almost banal, unworthy of comment. Police encounters and custodial torture were always tactics present in the law-enforcement playbook but they acquired renewed currency in the aftermath of the Rangers-led operation in Karachi, and a crackdown against religious extremists in Punjab. According to the HRCP, 2,115 people were killed in ‘police encounters’ throughout the country in 2015.

The state appears to have decided in many instances that it is not worth the time and effort to build a prosecutable case, although it has sufficient legal tools at its disposal to do so even in the absence of a functioning witness protection programme. In a brutalised society, witness to some ghastly bloodletting in the past few decades, concerns about due process and accountability may seem ill-judged and pedantic. These, however, will determine the future of this country. Police encounters and custodial deaths are evidence of an increasingly authoritarian state opting to create an illusion of order rather than undertaking the long, hard slog of addressing the causes of violence. The organs of the state tasked with upholding the law cannot be above the law themselves. Mirroring the actions of the worst in our society will only perpetuate the cycle of violence.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2016

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