Ishrat Jahan fake encounter: MHA denies sanction to prosecute ex-IB official, 3 others // Criminal Defamation, the Encounter Cop’s Latest Lethal Weapon
NB - The systematic degradation of criminal justice in India continues unabated, in full view of the public. I place these links here only for the record, so that the thundering silence (with some honourable exceptions) of our political leaders and commentators may be pierced by a twinge of conscience - if such exists. It is of greater consequence for the public at large, the honest police bureaucratic officials and judges who still believe in the basic structure of the Constitution and the ideal of the rule of law. As for our government, we can only ask it purely rhetorical questions: why not let the courts decide whether the evidence is prosecutable or not? why are you afraid of a trial that can establish the guilt or innocence of these officers? Why have a justice system at all? Send the police and judges on long leave and hand it all over to the Bajrang Dal. But perhaps you need to keep up appearances.. DS
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has denied sanction to
the CBI to prosecute four Intelligence Bureau (IB) officers, including former
special director Rajendra Kumar, in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case. Sources said the decision was taken at a meeting on
Saturday, presided over by Home Minister Rajnath Singh. “The Home Minister went through all the files
pertaining to the case, and even the replies and counter-replies submitted by
the CBI. Once he was satisfied, the go-ahead was given to deny sanction for
prosecution,” said a senior government official.
“We denied sanction as there
wasn’t sufficient evidence. We cannot go by circumstantial evidence only… We
contacted several legal experts before taking a decision,” said the official.
The CBI has reportedly not furnished “copies of case records and file notings”,
as desired by the MHA. Meanwhile, a CBI spokesperson
said, “We have not received the letter from the Ministry of Home Affairs yet.
Once we receive it, we will examine it.” Kumar and three other IB officials — P
Mittal, M K Sinha and Rajeev Wankhede — were charged with criminal conspiracy
in the case related to the killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others in Gujarat
in 2004. The CBI had charged Kumar with
murder. Kumar, a 1979-batch IPS officer who retired about two years ago, was
posted as joint director of IB in Ahmedabad when the encounter took place. The
CBI questioned Kumar twice on his alleged role in the conspiracy. The CBI
submitted its report to the Home Ministry, which is the cadre controlling
ministry for IB personnel, two years ago. Earlier, then IB chief Syed Asif
Ibrahim had protested against the move to prosecute officers.
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/ishrat-jahan-encounter-mha-denies-sanction-to-prosecute-ex-ib-official-3-others/Criminal Defamation, the Encounter Cop’s Latest Lethal Weapon
Gone is the time when
“encounter specialist” was a badge of honour and envy in the police force, a
suffix that was synonymous with pride, privilege and clout even amongst
civvies. So decisively has the popular tide turned against our “Dirty
Harrys” that officers are now quick to rush to court in a bid to silence
anyone who questions their role in encounters, especially if these are
sensational ones pending before various courts, including the Supreme Court.
Rajeev Trivedi,
Additional Commissioner (Crimes and SIT) with the Hyderabad police,
filed a suit for criminal defamation against five news outlets – CNN-IBN, the
Urdu dailes Siyasat and Etemaad, the Hindi
language Rajasthan Patrika(Jaipur), the Deccan Chronicle,
and the Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee, a Hyderabad-based NGO, for
making what he termed were malicious and false allegations regarding his role
in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. Last month, the Supreme
Court upheld a Hyderabad High Court order allowing the defamation
charges to be prosecuted, although the journalists involved had challenged
the suit as an effort at muzzling the press.
Concealing complicity: Trivedi seems to have taken the maximum
umbrage at Rajdeep Sardesai’s programme on CNN-IBN. On 13 May 2007, Sardesai,
in a broadcast titled “30 Minutes: Sohrabuddin- the inside story”,
said:
“Police sources say Vanjara and
Pandian nabbed [Sohrabuddin’s wife] Kauser-bi in Bidar with help from S.P.
Rajiv Trivedi of the Hyderabad Special Investigation Unit … Rajiv Trivedi
provided cars with fake number plates in which Sohrabuddin was brought to
Ahmedabad and then killed in a fake encounter.”
This was not a statement or
accusation recklessly hurled, or a conjecture based on fervid conspiracy
theories. In fact, the Supreme Court in its 12 January 2010 judgment had
accused the Hyderabad Police of deliberately obfuscating any probe into the
role played by its personnel in the abduction and subsequent murder of
the couple:
From a careful examination of
the materials on record including the eight Action Taken Reports submitted by
the State Police Authorities and considering the respective submissions of
the learned senior counsel for the parties, we are of the view that there are
large and various discrepancies in such reports and the investigation
conducted by the police authorities of the State of Gujarat and also the
charge sheet filed by the State Investigating Agency cannot be said to have
run in a proper direction...
It appears from the charge sheet itself that it does not reveal the identity of police personnel of Andhra Pradesh even when it states that Sohrabbuddin and two others were picked up by Gujarat Police Personnel, accompanied by seven personnel of Hyderabad Police... It also appears from the Chargesheet that Kausarbi was taken into one of the two Tata Sumo Jeeps in which these police personnel accompanied the accused. They were not even among the people who were listed as accused. Mr.Gopal Subramanium, Addl. Solicitor General for India (as he then was)... was justified in making the comment that an honest investigating agency cannot plead their inability to identify seven personnel of the Police Force of the State. (emphasis added)
In 2007, much before this
ringing indictment, the Supreme Court had also instructed senior
IPS Officer Geeta Johri, tasked with probing the case, to thoroughly
investigate if there was a nexus between the Gujarat and Hyderabad police. It isn’t known whether Trivedi
acted on his own or at someone’s behest in filing the defamation suit, but
the way in which the state government granted the mandatory sanction for
prosecuting the case strongly hints at the latter possibility. According to
Section 196 (2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, for every individual to be
proceeded against under Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code (which
criminalises defamation), a separate sanction order is essential. There
cannot be an omnibus permission. Although this point was raised before the
Supreme Court, the bench rejected it, holding that this requirement was
dispensable.
Judicial indulgence: No
amount of guesswork is required to conclude that this particular defamation
case demonstrates a hitherto unseen police strategy to deal with staged
encounters. The method is this: File a SLAPP
(Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) case against the media and
anyone else asking questions about the executors of extrajudicial
killings and their political masters. The court ought to have clearly seen
through this strategy, but failed to. Worse, in allowing the prosecution to
proceed, the judges went against the precedent set by their predecessors.
That judgment delivered
in the case of R. Rajagopal v Tamil Nadu (popularly known as
the Auto Shanker case) in 1994, took a principled stand
against public officials, especially policemen, being allowed to resort to
criminal defamation cases for covering up their crimes.
The case was about prison
authorities and some top police and prison officers trying to halt the
publication of Shanker’s autobiography. Convicted and sentenced to death for
serial murders, Shanker, in the book, had disclosed how some members of the
top echelons of the police force had initially helped him escape the law.
Ruling in favour of R.Rajagopal, the publisher, Justice Jeevan Reddy invoked
and followed the United States Supreme Court’s decision in NYT
v. Sullivan , which laid down the “actual malice” standard for
criminal defamation cases. Sullivan, the chief of the Montgomery police, had
alleged loss of reputation because of an advertisement in the paper which
claimed vindictive prosecution and racial discrimination against Martin
Luther King, Jr. Rejecting his contention, the court held that public
officials could successfully sue for defamation only if the publication
involved a reckless disregard towards facts and actual knowledge of the
claim’s falsehood.
Undesirable fetters: Referring
to the Sullivan decision, Justice Reddy held that the press and public needed
to exercise constant vigilance over the acts of public officials. He also referred
to the House of Lords’ judgment in Derbyshire County Council vs. Times Newspapers Ltd. (1993) which
ruled that although there was a countervailing public interest in protecting
the reputation of government servants so that they could fearlessly carry out
their functions, it would be contrary to that very public interest if every
allegation of defamation was allowed to succeed in court. If these officers
were allowed to threaten newspapers with libel suits, it would put
“undesirable fetters” on the Fourth Estate’s right to free expression.
On 1 June, another Supreme Court
bench stayed the 14 May judgement and tagged the case with
Subramanyam Swamy’s petition challenging the constitutional
validity of India’s criminal defamation laws. This is a welcome
development, but only in a very limited manner. Because the court has not
rectified the fundamental error – of allowing policemen to file a criminal
case as a means of throttling any questioning of their role in encounter
killings.
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Public Appeal by concerned citizens - Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system - Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik threatened
NB: The citation below is from p. 27 of Franz Neumann's book on Nazism Behemoth, The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, published 1942, and republished 1963, p 27.
A pdf file may be read here: <http://www.unz.org/Pub/NeumannFranz-1942-00027> DS. (The counter revolution) ‘…tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Pustch of 1923 had proved this.. In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative acts, which rest on considerations of convenience and expediency, judicial decisions rest on law, that is on right and wrong, and they always enjoy the limelight of publicity. Law is perhaps the most pernicious of all weapons in political struggles, precisely because of the halo that surrounds the concepts of right and justice… ‘Right’, Hocking has said, ‘is psychologically a claim whose infringement is met with a resentment deeper than the injury would satisfy, a resentment that may amount to passion for which men will risk life and property as they would never do for an expediency’. When it becomes ‘political’, justice breeds hatred and despair among those it singles out for attack. Those whom it favours, on the other hand, develop a profound contempt for the very value of justice, they know that it can be purchased by the powerful. As a device for strengthening one political group at the expense of others, for eliminating enemies and assisting political allies, law then threatens the fundamental convictions upon which the tradition of our civilization rests…
Also see
NB: The citation below is from p. 27 of Franz Neumann's book on Nazism Behemoth, The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, published 1942, and republished 1963, p 27.
A pdf file may be read here: <http://www.unz.org/Pub/NeumannFranz-1942-00027> DS. (The counter revolution) ‘…tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Pustch of 1923 had proved this.. In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative acts, which rest on considerations of convenience and expediency, judicial decisions rest on law, that is on right and wrong, and they always enjoy the limelight of publicity. Law is perhaps the most pernicious of all weapons in political struggles, precisely because of the halo that surrounds the concepts of right and justice… ‘Right’, Hocking has said, ‘is psychologically a claim whose infringement is met with a resentment deeper than the injury would satisfy, a resentment that may amount to passion for which men will risk life and property as they would never do for an expediency’. When it becomes ‘political’, justice breeds hatred and despair among those it singles out for attack. Those whom it favours, on the other hand, develop a profound contempt for the very value of justice, they know that it can be purchased by the powerful. As a device for strengthening one political group at the expense of others, for eliminating enemies and assisting political allies, law then threatens the fundamental convictions upon which the tradition of our civilization rests…
Also see
Prajapati encounter case: Gujarat Police inspector Ashish Pandya reinstated in service
Gujarat reinstates another suspended cop after securing bail in Prajapati encounter case
DG Vanzara's letter - Times of India (2013)
Sumana Ramanan - Film-maker releases a dozen clips of controversial Modi speeches made just after Gujarat riots (2014)
Gujarat reinstates another suspended cop after securing bail in Prajapati encounter case
DG Vanzara's letter - Times of India (2013)
Sumana Ramanan - Film-maker releases a dozen clips of controversial Modi speeches made just after Gujarat riots (2014)
'Modi had 71 BJP MP's in Uttar Pradesh to choose from for ministerial office and he chose to make Sanjeev Baliyan, the MP from Muzaffarnagar, a minister of state. Baliyan was accused of violating prohibitory orders & promoting enmity between communities in Muzaffarnagar in September 2013. Thus not only did the BJP win western UP on the back of communal rioting, one of the riot-accused is now part of Narendra Modi’s first ministry
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
short list of examples of respect for rule of law by India's 'mainstream'
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
