Politico and Police Terrorism: Arnab Goswami Arrest & Sushant Murder Case

Politicians & Police Nexus - Terrorism in Open

For most Indians, the best cops are the ones who beat bad guys. The more angrier and violent a police officer, the more agreeable and upright he or she is. Pop culture’s portrayal of such cops is cheered on by the public, the depiction of police brutality savoured like justice. 

In 2019, custodial torture claimed lives of 1,731 people in India; in 2018, a total of 1,966 people were killed this way, according to ‘India: Annual Report on Torture’ released by a consortium of NGOs.

But as citizens happy with ‘instant justice’ — which is mostly carried out against poor people, members of lower castes, and all those unable to pay bribes — we have played a key role in perpetuating this culture of gratuitous violence by the police either through vocal support or mostly through our silence.

In the beginning of lockdown, families sat and watched videos and clips of police officers ‘punishing’ violators — raining lathis, making them do sit-ups and hop like frogs. On social media, commenters approvingly wrote, “Yehi hona chahiye aise logon ke saath (such people deserve this treatment),” happy in their ignorance that their support is not for ‘justice’ but for a system of oppression, which could make them one of its victims too.

The police were clearly flexing their muscles on the poor by forcing them to do these humiliating acts that the public and media cheered without batting an eye. Many roadside shopkeepers and people who had stepped out of their homes just to buy milk and vegetables — termed ‘essential goods’ by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the start of the lockdown — were beaten up black and blue, with some even allegedly dying as a result of the beating. The rage was justified as police ‘just doing their duty’.

The concept of justice in India is itself violent, with people baying for blood by calling for public hanging of the accused. The common opinion for the police to teach criminals a lesson, instead of taking them through the defined course of justice and correction, is very strong. The widely celebrated act of Telangana Police shooting dead four people accused in the Hyderabad rape case in December 2019 is a case in point.

It is this active support to police violence — by the public and the State — that has emboldened violent officers to think they will get away with torturing citizens such as Jayaraj and Bennix. Perhaps they will and this culture will continue to persist because all of us are tweeting Black Lives Matter over the police brutality in the George Floyd case.

Police brutality is caste and class sensitive. While the middle and upper classes or privileged upper castes can’t even imagine getting thrashed by the police in broad daylight, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and labourers live with this reality.

Indian police is imperialistic because it is based on the model devised by British colonists more than one-and-a-half centuries ago. It was designed to oppress anyone who raises their voice against the colonial rule, and the Indian State uses this to its full advantage.

About two in five personnel in Bihar and one in five surveyed in other states received no formal training on human rights. Training in modern concepts of justice and in human rights is the need of the hour.

According to the Status of Policing in India Report, Indian police officers have 15-hour shifts and function on 77 per cent of the ideal strength. Personnel’s work conditions are physically and mentally taxing, and lower-ranking personnel are grossly underpaid.

The coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed lives of at least 60 police personnel, has affected the police force too just like everyone else. In such a scenario, mental health briefing and regular counselling becomes a necessity.

But while such measures can improve the daily lives of personnel, a bigger, more impactful intervention is needed to overhaul the daily policing and officers’ attitude towards citizens and justice.

Because we have failed to hold the police accountable even as they have acted as state-appointed goons out there to subjugate voices of dissent.

Until systemic changes are brought in, India’s police officers sworn to uphold the Constitution will keep doing what an imperialist system knows best — oppress, subjugate and even kill. Because as a public, we expect and support police violence. That’s the problem.

Arnab Goswami Arrest

The police has shown no compunctions in going after the critics of the political outfit in power—present Shiv Sena-led coalition.

The Mumbai police have spent a good part of the past five months defending their investigation of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide. But for the past month, the police have gone on the offensive against its critics – especially Republic TV, which since its inception three years ago has unabashedly gone after anyone it saw as an opponent of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah regime at the Centre. In the past, Republic TV has run motivated and vicious campaigns against fellow journalists, human rights activists, politicians and the Gandhi family.

Early on Wednesday morning, news trickled in that the Maharashtra police had arrested Republic TV editor and founder Arnab Goswami in a case of abetment of suicide. The case had been closed earlier in April 2019, but was reopened in May this year by home minister Anil Deshmukh.

Besides leading investigations against Goswami, the Mumbai police have also been busy registering cases against bloggers, social media busybodies, news channel employees, and even actors for making ‘offensive’ remarks against Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray or his son.

The U-turn by the Raigad police in the abetment to suicide case against Goswami goes to show how deeply politicised the force has become. It had closed the case against Goswami when the BJP was in power in the state, and it has arrested him now when a new coalition is in power.

A brief survey of events of the past two decades would show that Mumbai’s unique position as the country’s capital of money, glamour and crime has made many of its police officers supremely powerful, politicised and corrupt.

In no other part of the country do you would come across ordinary police inspectors running real estate empires worth hundreds of crores. But in Mumbai, you will. Here, some officers have been known to eliminate real estate players, senior cops have been found to be in cahoots with gangs run by Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan and an officer was removed from his post as Mumbai police commissioner and arrested soon after for shielding a fake stamp paper racket.

Also in no other part of the mainland (not even Gujarat), will you find officers enjoying almost blanket immunity for excesses and human rights violations. But again, in Mumbai you will. Very rarely have the press, courts and elected politicians tried to hold the Mumbai police accountable. Extrajudicial killings by the dozens have instead been storied by script-writers and crime reporters as Ab Tak Chhapan and Class of 83. ‘Encounter specialists’ is a phrase that crime reporters in the city use in their copies as if it is a special designation, hardly caring to see the long trail of cold-blooded murders, devastated families, widows and orphans that the spate of unabated police ‘encounters’ left in their wake.

Much before the phenomenon of encounter killings reached the shores of Gujarat, it was the streets of Mumbai that witnessed ‘shootouts’. Not everybody who was gunned down was an underworld shooter. Barring a few, almost every ‘encounter’ was fake. Yet, very few ‘killers in uniform’ were investigated or punished.

Khwaja Yunus, a 27-year-old engineer, went “missing” 18 years ago after being picked up as a ‘terror suspect’. Officially, he is still missing although it is apparent that he died in police custody. The law presumes a person dead if they are not traceable for seven years. But the officers who had picked Yunus up and tortured him are back in service, reinstated by the current Shiv Sena-Congress-NCP regime. The Maharashtra government recently informed the Bombay high court that the state had not even conducted a departmental or disciplinary inquiry against the four police officers, as was ordered by the court way back in 2004.

A sub-inspector with 83 encounters to his “credit”, and who was once arrested on charges of disproportionate assets, has recently been promoted. When it comes to giving its officers a license to kill, the Maharashtra government supersedes all, except the insurgency-torn states.

Sushant Singh Rajput case

When Disha Salian, a manager at the talent management firm that represented Sushant Singh Rajput, fell from a high-rise building in Malad on the intervening night of 8-9 June, the news largely went unnoticed. But there was chatter about it on social media platforms – and it disturbed the 34-year-old Rajput. He called up his lawyer and asked who Disha Salian was. And he wanted to know why his name was being associated with her death. Days later, on June 14, Rajput, who shot to fame playing MS Dhoni in the biopic on the former Indian cricket captain, was found hanging in his flat in Mont Blanc Apartments on Carter Road in upscale Bandra. Mumbai Police says Rajput ended his own life. His death put an end to a promising career but has opened up a can of worms.

The actor’s death has now become an inter-state issue, a Maharashtra vs Bihar clash, and it has become a full-blown political issue with the name of Aditya Thackeray, Maharashtra’s environment minister and Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, Maharashtra’s environment minister and Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s son, dragged into the whole affair. 

We as a nation need to speak against the politico police terrorism else the whole country state police will start feeling as a DemiGod.

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