Special: #Anti-riots #Bill, bill of contention. Six days into 2013, about a 1,000 km away from the nation’s capital, in the faraway north Maharashtrian town of Dhule, a brutal police action, videographed in evidence, has documented the killing of six innocent Muslims by men in uniform. These deaths amounted to crimes but have hardly registered on the nation’s psyche. Months before, in September 2012, four Gujarat police officers shot dead three Dalits, including a 17-year-old, using AK 47s on the night of September 22-23, 2012 at Thangadh in Surendranagar district, not far from Ahmedabad. In early September 2013, the violence in the four districts of Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat, Shamli and Meerut, once again, documented even more crude cases of police complicity. The script that was being played out in western UP, Dhule and Thangadh is a familiar rerun of what the country has witnessed since the late 1980s. Courts and judicial commissions have strongly indicted the police for harbouring a distinct anti-minority bias. In Gujarat, the violence that lasted from February 27 to early May 2002 saw institutional resistance to vile political diktats from about 11 districts and commissionerates, who refused to bend to the criminal intent of their superiors. And they paid for it. If, as repeated bouts of targeted violence have shown, regardless of who casts the first stone, the logic of identity-driven majoritarian institutional functioning is that the minority (linguistic or religious, Dalit, or Adivasi) suffers most. Judicial commissions that have gone into communal carnages over the years reveal two common threads: one, the criminal role of Hindutva organisations in masterminding the violence and two, the partisan, anti-minority conduct of the police. An obvious exception to the above was the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, spearheaded by Congress leaders. Which is not to argue that none from the minority, be he or she a Muslim, Sikh, Bihari, Christian, Dalit or Tamilian, is incapable of the first act of violence. They are. When such acts take place, however as they have done, in Malegaon and Malapuram among others, the police and administration have acted firmly. When minorities — linguistic or religious, Adivasis or Dalits — have been the specific target, however, the functioning of the police has been observed to have turned partisan. It is this that the Bill 2011 seeks to remedy. Perpetrators live secure in the knowledge that the law will not act against them. The PCTV Bill has broadened the definition of dereliction of duty — which is already a crime — and, for the first time, added offences by public servants for breach of command responsibility. With 10 years imprisonment prescribed for this offence, superiors will be deterred from allowing a Delhi 1984 or Gujarat 2002 to happen. Section 197 of the CrPC is a law bestowed by the British, through which errant governments have refused to give sanction to prosecute offenders. The absence of sanction has prevented a Thackeray, Togadia and Modi, equally, from being hauled to court for spewing hatred. The proposed law removes the barrier of sanction when officials are to be charged with offences which broadly fall under the category of dereliction of duty. For other offences, sanction to prosecute is required to be given or denied within 30 days, failing which it is deemed to have been given. Fortunately political players like the Left, the JD (U), the NC and the SP have greeted the tabling of the Bill. Once it is tabled in Rajya Sabha it will be closer to becoming law. No wonder then it is the very forces that have been the political beneficiaries of communal violence that are preventing Indian lawmakers from taking this quantum leap.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 03:44:15 +0000
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