I will Donate Rs.1 Crore for filing PIL.

The government was aghast and, not unexpectedly, moved the Supreme Court for expunction of those words. The Supreme Court did order the deletion on the ground that a decision on the issue before Justice Mulla did not necessitate that observation. But Justice Mulla stood his ground in his own inimitable way and seized an appropriate opportunity to comment on the controversy over his condemnation of the Indian police. He said: “As regards the complaint that the remarks are all too sweeping in character, there is a presumption that the evil is not equally sweeping. If, out of these two, anyone can be said to be more extensive and sweeping, it is the evil itself and not the observation.”

Lawyers also point out that the Supreme Court ordered expunction of what it had seen as an obiter and did not enter the question whether it was too sweeping or contrary to facts. One can even argue that Justice Mulla’s bitter description of the Indian police is even more fitting today.

The skeletons tumbling endlessly these days out of the capacious cupboards of the Indian police are ample evidence of the truth in the late Justice Mulla’s trenchant comment - irrespective of whether his words are on official record or only in popular memory. For quite some time media reports of fake encounters and the holes in the stories dished out by the police were pointing to a hitherto unimagined scale of the rot. And now a confirmation of the criminality of an alarmingly large number of India’s policemen is coming from the judiciary.

When a High Court finds it necessary to sentence wholesale 10 policemen, including an Assistant Commissioner, to life imprisonment in a single case, as it happened in Delhi a few days ago, the situation must be frightening indeed for the citizenry. Yet we still do not know whether the unavailing defence of ACP Rathi and his men that the shooting of two innocent businessmen inside a car was a case of mistaken identity is the end of the horror story.

Allegations have been heard from the side of the bereaved families that the policemen’s excuse that they were trying to eliminate a terrorist was a deliberate lie. What really happened, according to this version, was that the killer policemen carried out their lethal mission at the behest of a rival of one of the businessmen killed. If that is really so, the police marksmen had made their services available for what is called a contract killing or a supari in underworld lingo. This is not something previously unheard of.

Remember the case of D.G.Vanzhara, a Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) in Gujarat, two other IPS officers and nearly a dozen other subordinate policemen now awaiting trial for abduction and murder of Sheikh Sohrabuddin and his wife? After the crime had been committed, DIG Vanzhara crowed at a press conference about his team’s “patriotism” in liquidating - in an encounter — a “terrorist” of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba, who had entered Gujarat to target Chief Minister Narendra Modi and other Gujarat political leaders.

In reality, according to a more credible version, this was a contract job done by police gunmen on hire for private gain. Some marble dealers, troubled by extortionist demands of Sohrabuddin, a petty criminal, sought his elimination and found in Vanzhara a willing instrument. Sohrabuddin’s wife was killed to hide evidence. The DIG and his accomplices expected impunity. They looked for reward even from Chief Minister Modi, who had justified the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom as a natural “equal and opposite reaction” to the loss of some 60 lives in a mysterious burning of a railway train at Godhra.

Criminality in policemen does not, of course, have the same motivation across the Indian landmass. Private gain by contract killing with State apparatuses misused for its facilitation is one. Commumalism is another impulsion which has worked with some virulence in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. In Punjab and Kashmir policemen turned lawless out of sheer desperation in containing separatist challenges. A variation of this phenomenon is now seen in Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar where policemen are finding it difficult to cope with the Naxalite challenge and are losing control over their own selves. And then there are policemen who take innocent people in custody, torture and kill them for nothing more than sadistic pleasure. All this in the Indian republic or state of the people for years with the administrative machinery seemingly unaware of the goings-on.

True stories of the terrorisation of the people by the police are being told only now. They are just too many to be swept under the carpet. People are talking today and the courts are taking note. In one typical revelation, 2097 illegal cremations were done by the police in three crematoria in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar between 1984 and 1995.

The Punjab police killed uncounted innocent men and did not even care to hand over the bodies to the relatives for dignified funeral. In the modus operandi of the Punjab police there are touches of the bizarre too. In several cases policemen collected rewards after “killing” men who were allegedly wanted, live or dead, and those “killed” have since been found leading normal lives! Three thousand people are still officially listed as missing in Punjab. The Punjab and Haryana High Court’s judgment earlier this month in the case of the abduction, torture and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra should help in bringing some discipline back to the State police force. Khalra paid with his life for ferreting out the truth about the secret killings and cremations. A sessions court sentenced a DSP to life imprisonment and four other policemen to only seven years. The High Court has now ruled that the seven years is inadequate punishment and the four so leniently treated must also be behind bars for life.

Punjab has been effectively rid of separatism but the problem persists in Kashmir in a more acute form in spite of all that police, military and para-military are capable of doing. Almost as a result the will of the forces of law and order to distinguish between rebels and peaceful citizens has dipped dangerously and atrocities are taking brazen forms. In Kashmir, UP and Bihar, a sharp decline in the moral authority of successive corrupt administrations led to a breakdown of discipline.

Even the National Capital Region of Delhi has not been able to remain immune to the deadly virus. Here and also in Mumbai a kind of Ramboism by “encounter specialists”, who like cricketers flaunt their scores in century or half century, is responsible for cavalier killings. The spread of the evil of fake encounters is fanned by a system of rewards for unverified gallantry in fighting “dreaded criminals” or “Pakistani terrorists”. One or two at least of the “encounter specialists” are also alleged to have done some contract killings.

There are no reliable figures yet of men and women killed in fake encounters or of custodial deaths in India. But the administrative culture of suppressing inconvenient facts is now facing challenges. Public opinion is becoming restive as, thanks largely to the competition in the media in exposing corruption, lurid details of fake encounters are being published and a still upright higher judiciary is hauling up lawless policemen.

The government was aghast and, not unexpectedly, moved the Supreme Court for expunction of those words. The Supreme Court did order the deletion on the ground that a decision on the issue before Justice Mulla did not necessitate that observation. But Justice Mulla stood his ground in his own inimitable way and seized an appropriate opportunity to comment on the controversy over his condemnation of the Indian police. He said: “As regards the complaint that the remarks are all too sweeping in character, there is a presumption that the evil is not equally sweeping. If, out of these two, anyone can be said to be more extensive and sweeping, it is the evil itself and not the observation.”

Lawyers also point out that the Supreme Court ordered expunction of what it had seen as an obiter and did not enter the question whether it was too sweeping or contrary to facts. One can even argue that Justice Mulla’s bitter description of the Indian police is even more fitting today.

The skeletons tumbling endlessly these days out of the capacious cupboards of the Indian police are ample evidence of the truth in the late Justice Mulla’s trenchant comment - irrespective of whether his words are on official record or only in popular memory. For quite some time media reports of fake encounters and the holes in the stories dished out by the police were pointing to a hitherto unimagined scale of the rot. And now a confirmation of the criminality of an alarmingly large number of India’s policemen is coming from the judiciary.

When a High Court finds it necessary to sentence wholesale 10 policemen, including an Assistant Commissioner, to life imprisonment in a single case, as it happened in Delhi a few days ago, the situation must be frightening indeed for the citizenry. Yet we still do not know whether the unavailing defence of ACP Rathi and his men that the shooting of two innocent businessmen inside a car was a case of mistaken identity is the end of the horror story.

Allegations have been heard from the side of the bereaved families that the policemen’s excuse that they were trying to eliminate a terrorist was a deliberate lie. What really happened, according to this version, was that the killer policemen carried out their lethal mission at the behest of a rival of one of the businessmen killed. If that is really so, the police marksmen had made their services available for what is called a contract killing or a supari in underworld lingo. This is not something previously unheard of.

Remember the case of D.G.Vanzhara, a Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) in Gujarat, two other IPS officers and nearly a dozen other subordinate policemen now awaiting trial for abduction and murder of Sheikh Sohrabuddin and his wife? After the crime had been committed, DIG Vanzhara crowed at a press conference about his team’s “patriotism” in liquidating - in an encounter — a “terrorist” of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba, who had entered Gujarat to target Chief Minister Narendra Modi and other Gujarat political leaders.

In reality, according to a more credible version, this was a contract job done by police gunmen on hire for private gain. Some marble dealers, troubled by extortionist demands of Sohrabuddin, a petty criminal, sought his elimination and found in Vanzhara a willing instrument. Sohrabuddin’s wife was killed to hide evidence. The DIG and his accomplices expected impunity. They looked for reward even from Chief Minister Modi, who had justified the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom as a natural “equal and opposite reaction” to the loss of some 60 lives in a mysterious burning of a railway train at Godhra.

Criminality in policemen does not, of course, have the same motivation across the Indian landmass. Private gain by contract killing with State apparatuses misused for its facilitation is one. Commumalism is another impulsion which has worked with some virulence in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. In Punjab and Kashmir policemen turned lawless out of sheer desperation in containing separatist challenges. A variation of this phenomenon is now seen in Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar where policemen are finding it difficult to cope with the Naxalite challenge and are losing control over their own selves. And then there are policemen who take innocent people in custody, torture and kill them for nothing more than sadistic pleasure. All this in the Indian republic or state of the people for years with the administrative machinery seemingly unaware of the goings-on.

True stories of the terrorisation of the people by the police are being told only now. They are just too many to be swept under the carpet. People are talking today and the courts are taking note. In one typical revelation, 2097 illegal cremations were done by the police in three crematoria in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar between 1984 and 1995.

The Punjab police killed uncounted innocent men and did not even care to hand over the bodies to the relatives for dignified funeral. In the modus operandi of the Punjab police there are touches of the bizarre too. In several cases policemen collected rewards after “killing” men who were allegedly wanted, live or dead, and those “killed” have since been found leading normal lives! Three thousand people are still officially listed as missing in Punjab. The Punjab and Haryana High Court’s judgment earlier this month in the case of the abduction, torture and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra should help in bringing some discipline back to the State police force. Khalra paid with his life for ferreting out the truth about the secret killings and cremations. A sessions court sentenced a DSP to life imprisonment and four other policemen to only seven years. The High Court has now ruled that the seven years is inadequate punishment and the four so leniently treated must also be behind bars for life.

Punjab has been effectively rid of separatism but the problem persists in Kashmir in a more acute form in spite of all that police, military and para-military are capable of doing. Almost as a result the will of the forces of law and order to distinguish between rebels and peaceful citizens has dipped dangerously and atrocities are taking brazen forms. In Kashmir, UP and Bihar, a sharp decline in the moral authority of successive corrupt administrations led to a breakdown of discipline.

Even the National Capital Region of Delhi has not been able to remain immune to the deadly virus. Here and also in Mumbai a kind of Ramboism by “encounter specialists”, who like cricketers flaunt their scores in century or half century, is responsible for cavalier killings. The spread of the evil of fake encounters is fanned by a system of rewards for unverified gallantry in fighting “dreaded criminals” or “Pakistani terrorists”. One or two at least of the “encounter specialists” are also alleged to have done some contract killings.

There are no reliable figures yet of men and women killed in fake encounters or of custodial deaths in India. But the administrative culture of suppressing inconvenient facts is now facing challenges. Public opinion is becoming restive as, thanks largely to the competition in the media in exposing corruption, lurid details of fake encounters are being published and a still upright higher judiciary is hauling up lawless policemen.