Khaki in Dust Storm: Communal Colours and Political Assassinations (1980–1991) Police Diaries Book 1

By Amod K. Kanth

Khaki in Dust Storm is a gripping story of immersive investigations led by the celebrated police officer Amod K. Kanth who found himself at the vortex of India's tumultuous period of the 1980s and early 1990s. An era of dramatic crime, assassinations and terrorism, this period witnessed the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the horrific riots that followed; the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi; the murder of Lalit Maken and General Vaidya; public attacks by terrorists and bloodbaths at the peak of the Khalistani militancy; India's first-ever organised mass explosions through improvised electronic device in 1985, popularly known as 'transistor bombs'; and the growing influence of drug abuse and financial frauds. Leading into the minefield of these most sensational crime investigations that rocked India, he reveals in this book facts, stories and anecdotes that have hitherto remained outside the public discourse. He pieces together the details, narrates behind-the-scene manoeuvres, and carefully constructs the psyche of the perpetrators and the backdrop, weaving together a fantastic and powerful tale.

This is also a story of a cathartic evolution of a police officer who, after landing in the coveted Indian Police Service, finds his dreams challenged and confined to the restricted role in the face of India's myopic conventional policing. This resulted in his eventual metamorphosis, overwhelmed by the need to search for a wider and transformative perspective in policing that could lay the groundwork for more expanded and gratifying interactions between the police and the community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9789388630894

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It is 7:30 AM. A winter morning in Safdarjung Enclave. I am back from my walk in Nehru Park. An hour’s brisk walk in the early morning has been a part of my daily routine for many years since the time I lived in Satya Marg, Chanakyapuri. I love the park for its relative isolation and the hanging bridge at the centre. Occasionally, I bump into my friends and acquaintances.

Rekha, my wife, is up and joins me for the morning tea at the family lounge. In all the houses I have ever lived in, I always had a family lounge—small, cosy but a very significant space; more so than the drawing room because most of the important pieces of work—personal and official—are discussed here. Rekha is my permanent morning-tea-and-newspaper partner in the family lounge. Our son Pratinav joins us later.

I flip through the pages of newspapers and a few official files of Prayas. After going through the papers, my eyes suddenly fall on a photocopy of a five-page article in the daak (mails and official communications) file maintained at home. It’s an article on Prayas published in the political magazine, The Wildfire. It contains a detailed and, surprisingly, authentic account of my work in the social sector at Prayas along with my work as a policeman in the past, concluding with all I advocate and have practised in the name of ‘community policing’. This is a pleasant surprise.

I am curious to see who has written it. I read the byline. It is Aradhna Hurpikar. The name sounds familiar to me. Have I met her earlier? How does she know about my police work in such detail if she has not met me? I try to find out from my decades-old staff officer, Jitender Kumar.

I do not get through to Jitender over the phone. So, I get up and move towards my office. This small but beautifully designed room is my refuge, mainly because it also houses my library. The room has a few cupboards, storing some of my old police diaries and personal files stacked according to dates and subjects. These diaries and files document my work of over three decades in the police department.

Today, professionally, I am a social worker, the General Secretary of Prayas Juvenile Aid Centre Society, an ‘endeavour’ or an NGO (non-governmental organisation), dedicated to the cause of social justice, fulfilling the basic needs and rights of the children, poor and marginalised. There is a strong sense of continuity in what I do today with my earlier avatar as a policeman.

The comfort of my tiny study relaxes me. However, the moment my eyes fall on the cupboard, I am filled with a vexing sense of incompleteness. The papers seem to challenge me and they assert their presence, as if waiting for me to unleash them from the closed coffers.

While I wait for Jitender to call me back, I read Aradhna’s article again. She seems to have done detailed research on me. Her understanding of my work, perception and method of policing is thorough. She writes about Prayas, drawing out its close relationship with the police and the method of policing, which, though often stereotyped, is not totally different from what I have tried to practise during my career as a police officer.

She has stated that social work and police service are not disconnected, and the proof of that is Prayas and various other civil society organisations (CSOs) where I have served during the past three decades. I could justify the coexistence of these two activities within the queer All India Service (AIS) Conduct Rules’ definition of ‘charitable work’.

My mobile rings. It’s Jitender calling from the Prayas office.

‘Good morning, Sir! Sorry I was in the bus and didn’t hear the phone ring.’

‘Jitender, do you know a journalist named Aradhna Hurpikar? Did she visit our office asking for Prayas and me?’

‘Sir, yes. She had telephoned a few times and also had come to our office. You don’t meet the police and crime-related journalists these days, so I declined an appointment with you. She took your mobile number and left her visiting card with me. I kept it on your office table.’

‘Okay, just WhatsApp me her number.’

Jitender sends her number and I save it. I am surprised to see that she had called quite a few times almost every day as I scroll down the mobile screen. She seems to be quite a tenacious journalist. She writes for the magazine The Wildfire. Who are the other people with her?

I have closely interacted with numerous journalists in my career. From the time when some of them were ‘cub’ crime reporters, they have been good friends. Over the years, they have become acclaimed journalists of extraordinary calibre. Irrespective of my personal bitter-sweet experiences with the media, I have believed that good journalism should always thrive in a country, especially in a great democracy like ours. The mainstay of good journalism is truth-finding, which holds true for policing too.

But this term is very ambiguous. In the name of truth, a journalist can resort to spice-finding. A vicious, politically motivated circle then gets involved in the spicy news. And in this process, the disgruntled gets prominence, the debauched makes money and the target suffers mudslinging. I am saving myself from all this these days. But Aradhna Hurpikar seems different.

While I get busy with work, an hour later, my phone rings again. It’s Aradhna calling.

I pick up the phone. She introduces herself and says, ‘Sir, I am working on the history of policing in India from the 1980s onwards, with special focus on the landmark episodes of Delhi from the time of the assassination of Indira Gandhi and its aftermath. When I look at a period of ten years, from 1984 to 1994, I see that you were at the helm of affairs in Delhi Police, with a brief stint in the Home Ministry and then the CBI. There is no person in my mind who is better equipped than you to give an eyewitness account of the events of that decade.’

She goes on, ‘In the entire history of independent India, I don’t see any other period more eventful than this one—when so many political assassinations took place, so many bomb blasts happened, so many drug cartels surfaced with their international spread of organised crime and so much of Indian politics exhibited signs of shifts and turnarounds. In the midst of all this, we see you at a senior level in the police hierarchy, pursuing things with your evolving methods of policing during the period. I see that so far only a fraction of these cataclysmic episodes and their account is in the public domain. The larger part is still unseen, unexplored. I know that you could be the biggest source of help and inspiration in this project of mine. I am hopeful, Sir, that you will share your valuable time and information with me for this project.’

I am impressed by her research on me and my career. I feel inclined to meet her.

‘You can come tomorrow morning to my office at Prayas in Tughlakabad Institutional Area,’ I reply.

I look at the cupboard where my files have been kept, fossilised through all these years. It is perhaps time for me to reacquaint myself with what I had documented. A bit apprehensive, I walk up to the cupboard and read the spines of the diaries through the glass—Indira Gandhi assassination, 1984 Delhi anti-Sikh riots, Lalit Maken, Arjun Das, General A.S. Vaidya and others killed, multiple bomb blasts in public places, Rajiv Gandhi assassination, drug trafficking and drug-based crime and so on. A shiver runs down my spine.

Indeed, there are mountains of facts along with my own memories, much of which is not known to the people at large. I kept my diaries to myself more as an aide-memoire as I was on duty during those days. But these could now become historical sources and some of these should be documented in official records. But I am still unsure about what Aradhna can dig out from these materials.

Do I want to tell the world my untold story? Should I share my experience with everyone? No, not at all! Then what is it? I hate sensationalism. I never intended to present an exposé on critical and sensitive incidents of history that involved important people. The details in my diaries can be misused and misinterpreted and can be dangerously distorted. So keeping these off records for all these years was wiser in the context of the element of sensitivity involved with them. But conditions have changed now; perhaps, it would be fine if this information sees the light of day.

The incidents recorded, which became the subject matters of prolonged litigations and hugely sensational stories in the media, are all about the people, some very important and some not so, who played crucial roles. These parts of my life and career have remained in public domain in some form; however, it appears to be my responsibility to present appropriate and truthful accounts of the related events.

Today, I have to go to NITI Aayog for one of those routine meetings of the CSOs Standing Committee. Being the Member Coordinator of this body which represents some leading service-delivery national-level NGOs deliberating on the myriad roles of voluntary organisations in our country, I need to contemplate where to place myself.

The estimated 3.2 million registered NGOs working across India appear to be in a churning process to which I can’t stay disconnected. Out of these, the genuine, development-oriented ones are said to be of a small percentage. Many are branded fake and obstructive. Participating in several committees and working groups including the one on Police Reforms and Justice System, which has prepared the present government’s vision documents like ‘India@75’, one of my concerns is driven towards the system of policing in our country. Perhaps, 34 years of policing, 30 years of intense participation in the voluntary sector and 3 years of leading the nascent Child Rights Commission of Delhi formed my evolving and amalgamated approach of addressing social as well as law and order problems.

The socio-economic-political issues that concern people—from the richest to the poorest, within the government and outside, which are talked about today—are, in most cases, epitomes of inequity, injustice, corruption and malpractice in our country. These issues can be effectively addressed when genuine civil society organisations and righteous police, as part of a reformed justice system, join hands.

We have done enough bureaucratic and enforcement-oriented policing that operates under an archaic 1861 vintage Indian Police Act structure. The problems concerning the criminal justice system, and public order and safety, have multiplied hundreds of times instead of abating since India’s Independence, and the Indian police has not proven to be in the right mode of grappling with them. The elixir for all woes lies with police–public partnerships at every stage. We need to create people-centric or problem-oriented policing. I take the liberty to advocate that the entire policing in India should be redefined in terms of community-oriented policing.

As I look at the diaries, I think of rearranging all the papers—chronologically, event-wise and thematically—for the convenience of reference. Not by design but purely by chance, I was deeply connected to the investigations of some of the high-profile political events like the assassinations of Indira Gandhi, Lalit Maken, Arjun Das and General A.S. Vaidya, all of whom were connected with Operation Blue Star and the subsequent Delhi anti-Sikh riots of 1984 as well as the terrorist trails of the Khalistan movement.

Subsequently, when I joined the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), given my background, I was handpicked to investigate the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case. As DIG, Anti-Corruption, in the apex investigative agency, I dealt with several historically sensational cases of colossal economic offences, such as the Jain Hawala case and Harshad Mehta’s bank scam-share market cases, which together engulfed some of India’s topmost politicians, public sector undertakings (PSUs), banks and business houses.

In later years, as Joint Commissioner, South Delhi Range, which was a stint of four years, I handled some landmark cases like the Jessica Lal murder case or the BMW hit-and-run case, both involving the who’s who of Delhi, besides the sons of high-profile VIPs, which exposed India’s criminal justice system. All these cases found a detailed mention in my diaries.

Somehow, prompted by this journalist’s phone call, I begin to arrange my diaries according to the period of her research—1984 to 1994. I pick a diary on the 1984 riots and begin to read it. Every page contains so many names of policemen, common people, politicians, journalists, etc. And, of course, it details my own role and, at times, my feelings and, more importantly, my opinion—both professional and personal. These have so far been my own notes, mostly for my personal consumption.

Diary writing or scribbling notes has been a part of my professional and personal discipline. I can safely say that it is my hobby. Even now, in between my hectic schedule, I take out 15 to 20 minutes every day to note down the main points about the happenings of the day, drawn out of the media and events connected to work.

I have always been keeping records of names, places, persons, things and institutions I come across. In fact, this is our family trait. The Kanths, as we are known in my native state of Bihar, I with all my nine sisters and brothers (sadly, two of us, our dearest brother Binoo and eldest sister Veena, we lost in 2017 and 2020), are known for remembering things and for being ceaseless storytellers, especially in family gatherings.

Remarkably, while moving places during my early years with our peripatetic civil servant father, alongside our mother with her elephantine memory, my family trait of associating with people, coupled with sensitivity and recollections, helped me tremendously.

As I flip through the pages, the gory scenes of genocide during the 1984 Delhi riots suddenly come alive. The large-scale killings in the national capital just a few hours following Indira Gandhi’s assassination on 31 October were among the most shameful incidents in post-Independence India. The situation was absolutely out of control for four days. The police force of Delhi cut a very sorry figure in the public eye despite its efforts to control the situation. There was no night or day for me during those days; I was relentlessly doing whatever rescue work I could manage. It was a time of extreme crisis, and the only thing driving me was the police motto—‘Save as many people as possible.’

All the vehicles and limited manpower that we had in my (Central) district were used for not only controlling and nabbing the insurgents and hooligans but also for transferring the injured to hospitals and riot victims to safe locations. I was in uniform throughout and I remember, on 5 November, during a major encounter, my khaki had patches of red caused by the blood of an injured Army jawan whom I carried to Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in a Police Control Room (PCR) van. Memories c0me to life of the ones I comforted during my duty, along with my colleagues and others, or the many others whom we took to hospitals, safe locations and makeshift refugee camps at police stations.

The anger and reaction of the innocent Sikhs of Delhi who, for no fault of theirs, suffered immensely was completely justified. I cannot say anything and so far I have not said anything about the role of the Delhi Police. Definitely, apart from acts of cowardice and dereliction of duties by many, it was also an example of system failure which cost so many human lives. But there were many others in the Delhi Police who had worked day and night relentlessly, bearing all the blame and allegations that were being hurled at us by the media and people at large.

It still remains a question whether the Delhi riots of 1984 were solely on account of the lack of preparation, poor leadership, inefficiency and incompetence of the Delhi Police. Was the police force under duress from the lawless ruffians masquerading as politicians or leaders who took advantage of the frenzy after the assassination of Mrs Gandhi? Did they see an opportunity to loot and kill driven by some latent grievances or did they want to fill the void created by Mrs Gandhi’s death by burning the Sikhs of Delhi?

These questions have deep roots in history, and their answers cannot be given in terms of the performance of the Delhi Police alone.

What I want to bring to light here is that the police force, which plays the special role of crime and public order controller, often becomes an easy target and a scapegoat for ugly twists and turns of law and order situations that are created by others to serve their parochial interests. A lot of the good work gets subsumed into bad publicity, which is the mischief of a few, and it’s the negative incidents that people remember.

Many of my colleagues, juniors and seniors, including the courteous and good-natured Police Commissioner Subhash Tandon, extremely well-informed Nikhil Kumar, model of innovative policing and a close relative of Indira Gandhi, Gautam Kaul, my own senior, Hukam Chand Jatav, and the later-day boss and rejuvenator of the ignominious Delhi Police, Ved Marwah, received their own share of attribution for the Delhi riots of 1984. I do not intend to deny the lapses of the police apparatus and the connivance of a few officers with the politicians to let loose the rioters on the roads of Delhi during those days. It was a man-made disaster of gigantic proportions which affected many people for a very long time.

Those who deliberately let the rioters loose deserve condemnation and punishment. Nevertheless, all of us who worked in the law-enforcement system heard the criticism silently but were simmering inside on seeing the senseless suffering. The frenzied madness, brutality and mayhem that continued in Delhi for four days brought on a sense of immense helplessness and guilt. Yet, we had to keep rendering our services to the victims while taking on the scathing criticism that people were hurling at us.

As a citizen and policeman, I believe that the 1984 Delhi riots was one of the darkest episodes in history that this country has ever witnessed, leading to mass murders and, later, political assassinations and an unprecedented spate of terrorism which had deep roots in the local anguish merging with the separatist Khalistan movement originating in Punjab.

I feel that this journalist would like to see many of these personal records that throw light on the episodes, not only as a disconcerted saga of thoughtless violence but also as a detailed account, which I happened to record contemporaneously. The inquisitive Aradhna Hurpikar would like to get another eyewitness account of the 1984 riots of someone who himself was a part of it, and everything else that it led to.

Another major incident was the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, almost seven years after his mother Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. The conspiracy had its roots in the separatist Tamil Eelam movement in Sri Lanka, which had a serious impact on the state of Tamil Nadu and its politics. It is an irony of democracy that reflected in these heinous episodes witnessed in history. Dangerous and harmful characters like Prabhakaran or Bhindranwale marched freely. However, they did meet violent ends, heralding new eras and hopes. The magnitude and the impact of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the riots of 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991 were so vast and deep that they need fresh scrutiny even now, not only to bring to light the truth behind these events but also to have a fresh look at all that which has perhaps remained either ignored or neglected. Indeed, during this period the country witnessed several political crises of enormous magnitude where the Indian police system appeared to have crumbled down. For good or bad, I was intensely involved with quite a few of these.

During the most violent decade of the 1980s, I confronted several volatile law and order situations for nearly five years in South, West and Central Delhi districts—the last one witnessed the 1984 riots. A series of communal riots took place simultaneously, including the prolonged incendiary ‘Lal Kuan’ within the walled city of Central Delhi, often compared to the Babri Masjid. Following all these and as a fallout after the 1984 riots ignited the transistor bomb cases, I took over as Deputy Commissioner of Police, Crime and Railways, Delhi, my longest and most eventful tenure (1985–1990).

In the same period, opening a new chapter in organised crimes, Delhi became the transit point and also the destination for international drug abuse. I happened to undertake and coordinate in Delhi Police the problem of drug trafficking by nabbing thousands of abusers and pedlars fomented by the syndicates operating in Delhi with tentacles across the country, from borders to other locations.

All through this period, there had been a brewing indignation in me that the police system in India needed basic changes in order to serve the needy and be effective, fair and true to its purpose. Lathi (baton) is no doubt a part of policing but the way it has been epitomised and misused was not something which our country deserved to have. We probably could not come out of the sociocultural system created by the British which was essentially designed by a loyalist and exploitative ruling class to subjugate the masses.

During a decade-long service in police, I came to understand the historical legacy of the Indian bureaucracy, which was once controlled by the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and ably supported by the Imperial Police (IP), which were later renamed as Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and Indian Police Service (IPS), that served for the benefit of the British and Indian rulers as well as the bourgeoisie. After Independence, we had our own country with our own people to serve, but one area that remained mostly unchanged was the Indian police system within the so-called steel framework of the Indian bureaucracy. In spite of a series of lofty ideas and discourses on police reforms, the Indian police remains subjugated to all kinds of political and other forms of pressures.

In Delhi, thulla, a derogatory epithet, is used by the public for the police (interestingly, a highly educated and enlightened chief minister used this term publicly for the Delhi Police and a policeman filed a defamation suit against him which he lost later). It shows that a policeman is despised in the society, and definitely not seen as a friend, a helper or a protector but as a person who uses his power to exploit and terrorise the common man.

In all my private papers and diaries, one phenomenon is distinctly visible and that is my attempted method of handling problems through truthful and transparent enquiries, connected to the person and the situation in question, adopting a humanist way of policing. I find myself fortunate to have undergone experiences as a policeman which made me more convinced on this point of view.

I respect all who followed the routine and laid down methods of policing. I have been doing the same in the functional interest of policing and maintenance of public order, except where my fundamentals appeared to be challenged. Rationally, I feel that it is in public interest to highlight the significance of the aforementioned policing for the common people, now described in common parlance as community-oriented policing (COP) or problem-oriented policing (POP).

I came into police service just by chance, since I never considered myself tailor-made to be a cop. I sometimes think of what Paulo Coelho (with whom I had a chance meeting in Frankfurt a decade and a half ago as a co-member of the Club of Budapest) had said in The Alchemist—‘When you want something genuinely, the entire universe conspires in helping you achieve it’—something which went on to become hugely popular. Was it the contrary in my case? After all, I had not really prepared myself to be a policeman. Did it then largely happen through the conspiracy of circumstances?

Before my entry into this coveted service, I had spent a year as a lecturer at Co-operative College and another year at an institution-building experiment in creating Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial College for the tribals near Jamshedpur. Soon, following a brief stint in the Civil Service, I got into the IPS and underwent varied trainings in Mussoorie, Mount Abu, Hyderabad and the highly regimented Phillaur Punjab Police Academy in Maharana Ranjit Singh’s erstwhile fort, to finally be a part of the Delhi Police, with the Union Territory (UT) (now Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territory or AGMUT) as my allotted cadre.

In all these profiles, I was acutely conscious of the fact that there was no clear distinction between my personal and professional life. Be it lectureship or a magistrate’s job or the job of an IPS officer as an agent of law, for me, each was simply a work or pursuit in which my core interest was to do something deserved and needed for the people at large.

I was posted in Pondicherry, an erstwhile French colony in India, at the beginning of my police career.

The posting, which was brief, played an important role, showing me the continental model of policing. Finding the truth is given prime importance in police investigations, and the processes are all designed towards this end in a neutral manner, leaving the prosecution to an independent agency. Unlike this process, the British and, within their legacy, the Indian accusatory criminal justice system follow the Anglo-Saxon system of policing under which evidence collection against the accused is given prime importance rather than an inquisitorial system that tries to find aspects of truth at the first instance of a crime or even in a law and order situation.

During my entire police career, like most of the common people facing crimes and criminals, I suffered the atrocity of the unduly precious document called FIR (First Information Report) and the accusatory criminal justice system that prevails in the country. Personally, I always believed that justice borne out