prasad1
Active member
It reflects the cynicism of the times that we live in that the “encounter” that killed Uttar Pradesh (UP) gangster Vikas Dubey has not come as the slightest shock to anyone.
It is almost like a death foretold. The criticism — as happened with the Hyderabad police’s elimination of four rape accused last year — is likely to be dismissed as the fuzzy, needless hand-wringing of liberals. After all, Dubey, it will be argued, was the man responsible for the murderous assault on eight policemen. Why should anyone waste any angst on a man like him?
That is missing the point. The same lawlessness and absence of due process that makes it possible for the police to avenge the killings of their own men, permits the men in khaki in Tamil Nadu to push rods and sticks up the private parts of a father and son, Jayaraj and Bennicks. You can’t outrage over one and see the other as morally permissible. Yes, in one case the victims were hapless citizens who did nothing but supposedly keep their shop open for a few minutes beyond the lockdown-stipulated curfew. And another case, the self-declared don of Kanpur, was a brutal, violent thug. But the principle that makes one extrajudicial killing possible cannot but spill over into the responses of the police force across the board.
Simply put, you cannot morally calibrate fake encounters. There’s also the sheer tackiness of the script. Even as stories go, this one has a weak plot and poorer direction.
We are actually being asked to believe that a man who dramatically surrendered after a five-day chase from Uttar Pradesh, through Haryana and Rajasthan before ending up in a temple in Ujjain suddenly turned on the police and attempted an escape after the car ferrying him overturned. This is the same man whom we have all seen on video, being slammed against a police car and whacked on the back of his head by an unarmed officer, as he shouts, “Main Vikas Dubey hoon, Kanpurwala”
Curiously, of course, the media, that was tailing the convoy taking Dubey back from Madhya Pradesh to UP, was stopped two kilometres ahead of the site where the alleged accident and subsequent encounter takes place. The police will also have to explain why Dubey’s car is switched at the last moment. Video footage shows Dubey in two different cars at different points in the journey. And, of course, the most basic question of all: How was a dreaded gangster not cuffed? Even if his car did overturn-- and who is buying that — how was he able to make a run for it that he needed to be shot? And if he was shot, why was he not shot in the leg, so that he could be recaptured alive and be interrogated?
www.hindustantimes.com
It is almost like a death foretold. The criticism — as happened with the Hyderabad police’s elimination of four rape accused last year — is likely to be dismissed as the fuzzy, needless hand-wringing of liberals. After all, Dubey, it will be argued, was the man responsible for the murderous assault on eight policemen. Why should anyone waste any angst on a man like him?
That is missing the point. The same lawlessness and absence of due process that makes it possible for the police to avenge the killings of their own men, permits the men in khaki in Tamil Nadu to push rods and sticks up the private parts of a father and son, Jayaraj and Bennicks. You can’t outrage over one and see the other as morally permissible. Yes, in one case the victims were hapless citizens who did nothing but supposedly keep their shop open for a few minutes beyond the lockdown-stipulated curfew. And another case, the self-declared don of Kanpur, was a brutal, violent thug. But the principle that makes one extrajudicial killing possible cannot but spill over into the responses of the police force across the board.
Simply put, you cannot morally calibrate fake encounters. There’s also the sheer tackiness of the script. Even as stories go, this one has a weak plot and poorer direction.
We are actually being asked to believe that a man who dramatically surrendered after a five-day chase from Uttar Pradesh, through Haryana and Rajasthan before ending up in a temple in Ujjain suddenly turned on the police and attempted an escape after the car ferrying him overturned. This is the same man whom we have all seen on video, being slammed against a police car and whacked on the back of his head by an unarmed officer, as he shouts, “Main Vikas Dubey hoon, Kanpurwala”
Curiously, of course, the media, that was tailing the convoy taking Dubey back from Madhya Pradesh to UP, was stopped two kilometres ahead of the site where the alleged accident and subsequent encounter takes place. The police will also have to explain why Dubey’s car is switched at the last moment. Video footage shows Dubey in two different cars at different points in the journey. And, of course, the most basic question of all: How was a dreaded gangster not cuffed? Even if his car did overturn-- and who is buying that — how was he able to make a run for it that he needed to be shot? And if he was shot, why was he not shot in the leg, so that he could be recaptured alive and be interrogated?
This is not justice. India has faltered on the fundamentals of law, writes Barkha Dutt
There can’t be double standards on extrajudicial killings, depending on the case. It isn’t right
