Here are some more TERRORISTS, Where are you P I

Submitted by Nishi (India), Oct 5, 2008 at 09:01

Dear PI,

Where are you, not heard of you since last several weeks. Any way here are fresh arrivals for your consumption, as you dont like any of words of Muslims, hence I am sending you words of 'US', with whom you identify yourself. The following quote is from HT Sunday, 5th Oct. 'Licence to kill" written by Vir Sanghvi, probably a Hindu belonging to somewhere of India. I quoted the relevant portion,see the entire article in the news paper.

"In Delhi, the Rajbir Singh murder is still fresh in everybody's minds. According to the police's own account, their most celebrated encounter cop was actually a crook, offering his services to property dealers and using his gun to build up a vast fortune.

Then, there are the encounters themselves. Some years ago, when I was editor of the HT, the Delhi police told us that they had shot two terrorists who were planning to attack Ansal Plaza and kill Diwali shoppers. We thought there was something funny about their story and the deeper we dug, the more inconsistencies we found. It seemed that the police had brought two men to the parking lot of Ansal Plaza and had killed them in cold blood. Perhaps the men were terrorists who were already in custody but what I found offensive was the naked manipulation of public sentiment: the claim that a Hindu festival was going to be disrupted; the bogus fear of a threat to shoppers; and of course, the self-serving claims of gallantry made by the police on their own behalf.

Something similar seems to have happened at Jamia a couple of weeks ago. I mourn the death of Inspector Sharma but the official story of the circumstances leading to his death simply does not add up. Even if you dismiss eye-witness accounts as being biased, there are too many anomalies: why does Inspector Sharma not have the bullet wounds that were supposed to have killed him in pictures taken after the shooting? Why was he shot from the back at close quarters if he died in a gun battle? Where are the bullets that killed him? How did two ‘terrorists' escape when there was no way for them to have got away? And so on.

The problem is: we will never know. In the case of the Ansal Plaza encounter, all we have are very strong suspicions. And here too, the truth will never emerge. We will just have to guess what really happened.

Worse still, to raise any questions about any encounter is considered ‘anti-national'. The HT was vilified when we questioned the official version of the Ansal Plaza shooting. And already, there is a move to brand anybody who wants to know what happened at Jamia as a ‘terrorist-sympathiser'.

But ask yourselves this: would it have been anti-national to have uncovered the truth of the Barakhamba Road encounter? To have spoken out against Rajbir? To have questioned Daya Naik's killings?

In an ideal world, I'd like to say that there should be no encounters. But we do not live in an ideal world. And society supports encounters.

But if we are going to give policemen a license to kill, then shouldn't we set up some kind of regulation — no matter how secret or informal — to ensure that innocent people are not murdered and society is not lied to?

And at the very least, shouldn't we have the right to ask questions without being called ‘anti-national'?"

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".