Blood on My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters

By Kishalay Bhattacharjee

'You are here to catch militants, so you have to catch militants. This is your business. You can't say, I have a budget of only 30,000, so I can't catch them.'

This anonymous confession by an army officer splits wide open the anatomy of staged encounters in India's northeast, and explains how awards and citations are linked to a body count. Speaking to investigative journalist and conflict specialist Kishalay Bhattacharjee, the confessor tells of the toll this brutality has taken on him.An essay by Bhattacharjee and a postscript that analyses the hidden policy of extra-judicial killings and how it threatens India's democracy contextualize this searing confession. An explosive document on institutionalized human rights abuse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351772590

Kishalay Bhattacharjee

Kishalay Bhattacharjee is a senior journalist who has been with broadcast television for twenty years, seventeen of which he spent at New Delhi Television (NDTV) where he was a resident editor covering conflict in India's northeast as well as in the Maoist corridor. He is a regular columnist and speaker on conflict and post-conflict situations in India.Bhattacharjee received Ramnath Goenka Award (2006-2007) for his coverage of internally displaced people, was a Panos Fellow for HIV/AIDS (2007) and also an Edward Murrow Fellow in Journalism (2006). His coverage of the abduction and rescue of two Italian tourists was nominated for the best current affairs programme by Association of International Broadcasting (AIB) Awards in 2013. He has made several documentaries, one of which, Santi, Lucy and Thoibi, was screened at international festivals in Goa and Barcelona. Kishalay Bhattacharjee was selected chair of internal security and a senior fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in 2011.

Book preview

BLOOD ON MY HANDS

Confessions of Staged Encounters

Kishalay Bhattacharjee

HarperCollins Publishers India

To all the unknown people and the many voices

engulfed by silence …

and to you, my dear Bambi

I wish I didn’t have to write this book but

someone had to tell the story

Contents

Manhunts

Rehman Miah

Rehman’s Story: The Crossover

Confessions of an Army Officer

Rehman’s Story: The Encounter

The Official Version

Confessions: The Trade

Confessions: The Headcount

Confessions: The Brothers

Confessions: Irregular Militia

The Scoop

The Kill That Wasn’t

Confessions: Manipur

Confessions: Outlawed

Confessions: The Surrender

Indira Gandhi and the Emergency: A Legacy

Postscript

A Note on Non-textual Sources

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About Author

Copyright

‘The blood froze in its veins. That’s why it can’t be spilled,

but only broken to pieces.’

– Yehuda Amichai

Manhunts

It is a winter morning in 2004, after the harvest festival in the month of January. It is the time for feasting and festivities. The sun is elusive and the air mostly wet and dull.

A police officer sits in his office in a district of Assam near the Bhutan border. He wears a moustache and a broad smile and is generally firm with his views, even if they offend others. He is an unlikely candidate for the job and hardly enjoys doing what he is expected to do. But he does it well; he does his job the way it’s meant to be done.

It has been an extraordinary season. The Royal Bhutan Army – aided by the Indian Army, in one of the biggest covert operations ever in the northeast – has dealt Assam’s twenty-five-year-old terrorist group, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), a devastating blow. For years, Bhutan was a safe haven for armed separatist groups. No longer. The role of the Indian Army in the operation has not been made official, but it was there for everyone to witness. Not a single picture of this massive operation has been released. Along with ULFA, camps of other groups like the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and the Kamtapur Liberation Organization (KLO) were also bombed, and there were mass surrenders by militants who were hounded out by air force strikes – or so it was told.

Dressed in starched khaki, the police officer asks for ‘lal cha’ or black tea, while talking to some visitors known to him. In Assam, lal cha is largely preferred to tea with milk. The visitors are passing on National Highway 52 and have stopped by to say hello to their old friend. Their conversation is mostly about the ongoing arrests and surrenders. A day earlier, a bus full of women in the ranks of ULFA as well as the wives of some ULFA cadres and leaders caught in Bhutan while fleeing the raids had arrived here. The police officer is now busy making arrangements for their accommodation and organizing legal procedures. The women look exhausted and some are accompanied by their children. Though the interaction is friendly, the officer is careful not to divulge anything official.

A young army captain is at the door and tentatively seeks permission to enter. He hesitates to speak but is assured that the visitors are the police officer’s own people; he can go ahead and talk without any worry.

‘This is embarrassing, but I have run into an overdraft, so is it possible to borrow some amount? … I promise to return the favour as soon as possible,’ says the young captain.

The police officer, notwithstanding that visitors are around, assures the young man: ‘My balance is rather low, but I hope I can transfer some amount to you by tomorrow morning. It is a tricky time, you see.’

This cryptic conversation between a senior police officer and a young army officer in this eastern Indian state is not about borrowing money. It is a sinister exchange in the bizarre interplay of power, politics and violence.

Although money will inevitably change hands here, the currency is of human life and murder. The young officer is deployed in counter-insurgency operations and has killed two persons (tagged as militants in his official record), but inadvertently passed the telegraphic message to his senior command that three have been killed. He needs one more to make up for a typographical error. He has none in his ‘kitty’, so he requests the police officer to lend him a live victim.

The police officer casually asks him to come to the riverside early the next morning and take his ‘advance’. Bound, gagged and blindfolded, the victim will not struggle. He will be resigned to his fate like those before him. After he is taken to a suitably isolated location, he will be killed by a few rounds from army rifles fired at point-blank range. His body – along with a story of an ‘encounter’ which strains credulity – will be produced and an ULFA cadre nomenclature issued to him. Photographs of weapons and foreign currency ‘found’ on the body will be fed to an obedient press. The identity of this victim is unknown and will likely never be discovered. If he is identified, he will be officially recorded, at any rate, as a militant who had fired at the army patrol and was killed in the ‘encounter’ which followed. In a climate of surrenders and bombings and shoot-outs, this one death will surely go unnoticed anyway; and thus another murder will be legitimized by the government record.

This is not a mere anecdote. It is a pattern of violence to which India has become inured. It is about impunity and the systematic replacement of the rule of law with lawlessness. It is such that even the parlance of this lawlessness – which is no better exemplified than in the word ‘encounter’, with all its sickening connotations – has entered India’s civil vernacular.

Max Weber notes that ‘the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one’, in which the ‘state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. While Weber argues that violence is inherent to politics, Hannah Arendt states that violence is the opposite of power and is never legitimate. Be that as it may, the arbitrariness and criminality of State violence is a lived reality.

With State-sanctioned killings, there are martyrs and then there are ‘criminals’. But the large number of unknown, unnamed and even unclaimed men and women who have been hunted down by the State for its officials’ advancement or gratification is at the heart of this book.

Of those who have perished under this regime of perversion, vendetta and mistrust, we can name only a few. How many have died remains unknown and will never be publicly mentioned. Its victims have had no funeral rites. They have just disappeared, never to return, and their cries and screams have been heard but faintly. They are remembered only by family members, in conversation that is muted, colourless and regretful.

The anthropologist Michael Taussig asserts that ‘cultures of terror are based on, and nourished by, silence’. Silence has its varying degrees of expression. There have been regimes in living memory where people have accepted the bizarre and depraved just because it is familiar. Similarly, those in the northeast and the Kashmir Valley appear to have become acclimatized to an environment where extrajudicial killings are a routine occurrence, and the public in other parts of the country are accustomed to – and even wearied by – the bland, sanitized reports of ‘encounters’.

And unless death is at our doors, a stifled scream from afar barely registers. There was a time when a single wrongful death made news. Today, with the digital media awash with ghastly images from distant civil wars and the like, even the footage of ten ‘encounter’ victims barely raises civil indignation. Even more worrying are the killings that occur in remote places, where almost nothing is known. What then is recorded is based on the conjecture of a few journalists. Such atrocities have only occasionally found their way to tiny newspaper columns or a few seconds’ television coverage. The rest have been blacked out of human history.

Memory and ‘truth’ contest each other, and identities are blurred as the perpetrator claims to be the victim. But the silence that blacks out the hundreds should not consume the survivors, and that is why it is important to remember the dead.

Often, the names of ‘encounter’ victims are changed by the authorities, so the families of the victims keep waiting for the dead to return. In Kashmir and in northeast India, there are ‘half widows’; women who cannot be certain about the death of their husbands following years of absence. This ambiguous violence is a product of regimes of impunity. Impunity in this context means that perpetrators are exempt or immune from punishment for the killings they commit. There is no fear of accountability, for the ‘truth’ is buried in layers of invisibility.

It is noteworthy that throughout the country’s post-colonial history, the regions most afflicted by ‘encounter’ killings have been designated as being in a state of emergency, thus allowing the State to securitize its territory and legitimize the use of force. For example, around half a million Indian troops are posted in Kashmir, which include the army, the Assam Rifles, the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), the Indian Reserve Police Force, as well as vigilante paramilitary forces like the Special Operations Group (SOG) of the police, the Ikhwans (rehabilitated members of the underground militia run by the Rashtriya Rifles) and the armed members of the Village Defence Committees.

In Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, the vigilante militias are more structured and pervasive. There are no custodial deaths in Kashmir; these are called ‘alley deaths’. People, militants or suspected militants – or indeed at times, uninvolved innocent civilians – are abducted, taken to another lane and killed. The body is then handed over to the police.

There is a legend about how, during a morning walk near the Maidan in Calcutta, Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar had witnessed the Calcutta Police shooting former Amrita Bazar Patrika editor Saroj Dutta. Now, fanciful as that story sounds, there is a fair chance it is true. In Bengal’s collective memory, several hundred such anecdotes make up the folklore of the tumultuous decade of the Naxal uprising. The most telling are the ones of ‘extrajudicial killings’ – people killed without a trial or sometimes even without record. And since the dead don’t talk, the account of how these killings were carried out has slipped into the realm of storytelling. What is known has morphed into the realm of narrative fiction. Animesh and Madhabilata are among the favourite characters in modern Bengali literature, but we are yet to hear from people who tortured Animesh and killed his comrades. That story hasn’t been told. The perpetrators have never spoken openly about their crimes and have preferred to expurgate that decade from their lives.

In this book, perhaps for the first time, some of the perpetrators of this form of violence have narrated accounts of how they hunted down their prey. Their revelations of how the system has coerced and supported them in committing atrocities, then concealed and even rewarded acts of almost unthinkable depravity, are profoundly disturbing, and compel one to question the essential morality of civil government in India.

The lacuna between democratically elected civil government and the activities of government forces is demonstrated by the brazenness – and sheer mindlessness – of some of their abuses. This has remained unchanged throughout the decades. In July 1974, Archana Guha, a headmistress of a school in Calcutta, was abducted by the police from her residence. Archana’s brother Soumen was a Naxalite. Ranajit Guha Niyogi, who was then head of the anti-Naxal cell, kept her prisoner under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). She was tortured for years. Her story is chilling: she was hung upside down and the soles of her feet were beaten; Niyogi used cigarette butts to burn her elbows and nails. But Archana fought her case, and after nineteen years, a court sentenced Niyogi and others to one year’s imprisonment.

Archana is known as the first internationally acknowledged victim of official torture. She survived her ordeal with her life and some recognition of her suffering. Countless others have been wrongfully killed in custody as well as outside, without any acknowledgement. In the decade of the Naxal uprising in West Bengal, prison cells meant for 200 would be crammed with a thousand under torturous conditions. Like in Nazi concentration camps, when prisoners attempted to escape out of desperation, they were shot dead.

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. Bengali literature and films drew on the horrors of those street-fighting years, where the draconian regime of Chief Minister S.S. Ray, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s instruction, killed thousands of young people outside the purview of law. Then Emergency was declared. For the first time, the term ‘encounter killing’ came into use. But other than newspaper reports, there is little primary evidence from this era. And then, the newspaper coverage was limited to news of Naxal attacks and the State’s counter-attacks. The term ‘fake encounter’ hadn’t yet entered our lexicon.

The media has yet to dig under the surface. So, killings are reported but hardly ever questioned. The news of, what was called, the shoot-out killing of Saroj Dutta, who was the former editor-in-chief of Amrita Bazar Patrika, was mentioned in his own former newspaper as a mere ninety-word piece. In it, CPI leader Bhupesh Gupta was quoted, simply informing the press of Dutta’s death.

Typically, the print media coverage of an encounter would be a column length which reads like this:

Two youths, Manna (20) and Shibu (26), described by the police as ‘hardcore militants’ were killed when the police fired several rounds to repulse a bomb attack by a group of miscreants in Muraripukur Bustee under Maniktala police station.

(Amrita Bazar Patrika, 10 September 1971)

Even an article on the edit page from the radical Jayaprakash Narayan failed to go beyond tokenism. On 15 August 1971, when India completed a nervous twenty-five years of nationhood, his Independence Day piece was on West Bengal, where he wrote:

[I]t is not enough that we feel distressed. Most of the political parties in West Bengal declare one thing and work for another. They have their one leg in Parliamentary Democracy, another on violent Revolution. By contrast, the Naxalites are far more honest … politicians occupy seats of power, evidently to abuse this administrative power for violent upheaval at an appropriate moment.

(‘West Bengal: A Challenge to Democracy’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 August 1971)

Significantly, just a day before, on 14 August 1971, the news of the Cossipore killings was splashed across the pages of popular newspapers, but it did not find mention in the editorials:

16 young men were killed and 10 persons including 2 women injured in a widespread orgy of violence and mass murder in Cossipore in North Calcutta from Thursday 8 p.m. to Friday noon … local people