Nights have always been uneasy in Manipur. The saying goes that one is just lucky to be alive. Funerals are so common that people have forgotten to mourn. Instead, they sit in protests, but that too has become just a ritual of sorts. If someone is killed, neighbours prefer to believe that the deceased must have had some militant involvement. Till their own households are affected. No one trusts anyone.
The most insidious and alarming aspect of encounters is that, as with a fatal disease, almost anyone can be a victim. That is not to say that the killings are indiscriminate, any more than is disease. In the northeast, and even in places in the Kashmir Valley, if you are unaccounted for – that is, you have no immediate family, you are not on the electoral roll and have no ration card – you run the risk of being abducted and killed.
Staged encounters are an open secret of the Indian police and military. Anyone who has read enough of Indian history and/or news reads the “encounter death” headlines with deep suspicion. A less well-known phenomenon, however, is false encounters, where not only are the circumstances of death faked, but the person killed is not even a criminal or a militant. This book delves deep into both staged encounters and false encounters (words I will sometimes use interchangeably), explaining how they happen, why the culprits escape justice, and why Indians need to take this problem more seriously.
This is a book that will horrify and disgust you, and that’s a good thing – the problem of staged encounters is one of the most shameful aspects of our country, yet we have become inured to the headlines, making a wake-up call of this kind necessary. The book covers staged encounters primarily in Kashmir and the northeast, although the problem exists all over India. The content is based on news reports (many from the author’s own reporting in the northeast), interviews with the people impacted by staged encounters and the people investigating them, and, most shockingly, interviews with an army officer who admitted to committing extrajudicial killings and was willing to explain how prevalent it is in the army and police force.
Bhattacharjee elucidates why staged encounters are so prevalent, and why nobody is ever held accountable. A system exists in which promotions and citations are tied to the number of militants killed, yet often in areas where actual militant activity is so low that soldiers are unable to meet their implicit ‘quotas,’ driving them to seek out innocents for false encounters: people who lack the status and power to have their disappearances properly investigated. Soldiers find creative solutions to their dilemma: foreign arms are purchased using funds meant for porters and ponies in Kashmir, or units’ Sadbhavana funds meant for supporting local development, and sometimes even money seized from previous victims, and then these foreign arms are planted on the victims to frame them as militants.
Do you know that the number of kills is related to the number of Sadbhavana projects? Paisa hai (there is money) if you can catch militants. You can be the best-trained army of the world, but you can do fuck-all about it. Any unit which has a good number of Sadbhavana projects will also have a good number of kills. It’s directly proportional. You get money, you kill; and because you kill you get money to buy peace – and this cycle continues.
Victims aren’t chosen at random – they are beggars, illegal immigrants, anybody whose absence will not be properly investigated. They are picked up by the police or armed forces, driven to the middle of nowhere, murdered, and then framed as militants with foreign arms and new identities. Shockingly, the police and armed forces sometimes even collaborate with human traffickers and smugglers to obtain funds and victims. The rot in the system is deep, and this book exposes it all.
Much of the evidence is based on interviews, facts known within the army but not to the world at large, but many of the encounters discussed in the book have also been investigated and proven to be staged, such as the murder of Abdur Rehman Paddar in Kashmir, who was given an entirely new identity by the police.
Abdur Rehman Paddar from Larnoo in Anantnag district of Kashmir became Abu Hafeez, a Pakistani commander of the armed outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba, after being killed by the police. Paddar’s family filed a missing person report. He was last seen with a constable on 8 December 2006. It was later discovered that Abdul Rashid Wagay, a resident of Hajan, was using Paddar’s cellphone SIM card. Assistant Sub-Inspector Farooq Guddu, a member of the Special Operations Group of Ganderbal unit, had given Wagay the SIM card. Guddu confessed that police had simply abducted Paddar and killed him. They then falsely reported him as a Pakistani militant killed in an operation, and showed an AK-47 rifle, three magazines, thirty-six rounds of ammunition and a grenade which they stated had been recovered from his body.
Another well-documented case is the murder of Chongkham Sanjit in Manipur.
One of the most recent photographic records of such a killing comes from the eastern Indian state of Manipur in 2009, where a young man, Chongkham Sanjit, was accosted and killed by policemen in a daily market of its capital city Imphal. He had surrendered after being an underground cadre of the banned armed organization PLA (the Manipuri underground organization, People’s Liberation Army). After rehabilitation, he found work in a medical diagnostic centre. It was 10:30 in the morning on 23 July 2009. He was having tea on the ground floor of a commercial complex which sells Chinese-made shoes and clothes and accessories from Thailand and Myanmar. The complex also houses the office of a local cable television channel. Sanjit was in front of a public telephone booth when police commandos surrounded him. He did not resist. The commandos pushed him into the storeroom of a medicine shop next to the telephone booth. Minutes later they dragged out his bullet-ridden body in full view of the public. The entire sequence was photographed blow by blow, though nobody dares to say by whom.
Each story is shocking for a different reason. Sometimes it’s the carelessness of the armed forces, so confident that they will never be investigated; other times, it’s the inhumanity of the crimes, the killing of innocent people for no reason but greed, with victims as young as twelve; and often, it’s just how insane the whole system is, and the lengths to which people will go for money and power in a corrupt system where they will never be held accountable. Soldiers have posed as arms dealers and negotiated sales to militants, promptly kidnapping and then executing them when they arrive for the deal, and this is then dressed up as an encounter; in Assam, the state supported surrendered United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) cadres, who formed the SULFA (surrendered ULFA) and began extrajudicially killing the family members of ULFA militants, in what became known as the ‘secret killings’; severed human legs have been found by photojournalists in Assam’s rivers, an open secret that the mainstream media barely covers. The perpetrators are not punished, they are rewarded – for example, there is a currently serving army colonel, a recipient of the Ashok Chakra (highest peacetime military award), who led a unit that kidnapped and extrajudicially murdered two cousins in Manipur and then staged it as an encounter (this was confirmed by the ruling of a Supreme Court judicial panel). The list of horrors goes on and on, and there are too many for one person to read about them all in one lifetime – this book, however, gives a representative sample that illustrates the scope of the problem and the environment of terror it has created.
Even in my unit, a young officer once shot dead a man, and it was a case of a mistaken identity. I had to cover it up, so we staged the killing as an encounter. We created a scene, where the boys hired a Tata Sumo, and at the site of the shoot-out, the car was left parked with a bullet-proof jacket inside. And we shot the bullet-proof jacket for forensic to identify that bullets came from the other end as well. It is fairly easy to cook up a story. But often the army screws up, because they don’t take care of the details. They think they can get away under the cover of AFSPA.
Bhattacharjee wrote well, and his book had a powerful impact on me. Some of the stories are so horrific, it’s difficult to understand how the country still functions and that we let this go on. It is also deeply informative. Apart from explaining how staged encounters are done and what motivates them, he gives a deep history of the legal framework that has given the army and paramilitaries impunity for so long: AFSPA has been around since Nehru’s times, MISA was a quirk of the Indira Gandhi years, then 1980 National Security Act, 1985 Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act, etc etc. Most people have never heard of these laws, let alone the thousands who have been murdered, tortured, and wrongfully imprisoned because of them during the Naxalite movement, the insurgencies in Punjab, Kashmir, and the northeast, and Indira Gandhi’s emergency.
In Calcutta today, nobody likes to talk about those rows of burning ghats along Adi Ganga, with brick-walled enclosures where names of ‘comrades’ are inscribed. The bodies of those killed in police firing were dumped there by the State for family and friends to cremate. Many of them had been dubbed ‘Naxalite’ or ‘disappeared’ or ‘missing’ before their corpses came home.
We often think of these events as part of the past, but ‘Blood on My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters’ shows that the laws enabling these atrocities are still in effect today, and that atrocities are still being committed. Bhattacharjee’s book plays a crucial role in telling a part of Indian history that we are forgetting (with some help from the government of course, as the Satluj controversy shows), and that desperately needs to be remembered – the history of how justice and humanity were circumvented by the parliament, the army, and a population that did not care for others’ lives so long as they were themselves safe.
In June 1967, Hnahchang village was set ablaze and destroyed by the soldiers of 3rd Battalion Bihar Regiment. When villagers fled and entered the jungle to erect sheds as shelter, the soldiers followed them and rounded them up. Major Bakshi ordered them into rows, and they were shot dead. Nine were killed, including a three-year-old girl and an eighty-year-old man. Four were wounded. The soldiers set the bodies alight.
Despite the dark subject, this was a fascinating book, and I finished it in two days because I was so hooked onto it. Maybe it’s because I’ve long had a morbid interest in the subject, but I think most people would enjoy reading this. Bhattacharjee makes these cases come to life, and the narration style makes the book hard to put down. I was horrified by much of what I read, but I enjoyed the book throughout. I highly recommend reading this. It’s informative, covers an issue most people know little about, well-written, and addictive to read.
I hope that more people read this book and begin to learn about staged encounters, and more importantly, care about the issue. I hope that, some day, this no longer happens in India.