Reports of the cold-blooded killing of civilians by security forces in Jammu & Kashmir, the Northeast and Chhattisgarh, in the name of combat operations against insurgents or Maoist guerrillas, grabbed headlines in India during the first half of this year. Despite the public hubbub, the top brass in the Indian Army, police and paramilitary forces have kept quiet about the allegations, and seem to be in favour of standing behind their men whatever their crimes may be.
In January this year, the infamous Ganderbal killings, in which the murder of three civilians was covered up and attributed to an 'encounter', came to light after a probe by a special investigations team (SIT) headed by the deputy inspector-general (DIG) of the J & K police. The victims were villagers 'disappeared' from south Kashmir: carpenter Abdul Rehman Padroo and street vendors Nazir Ahmad Deka and Ghulam Nabi Wani.
The investigations in Ganderbal uncovered yet another case of police complicity – in the killing of Maulvi Shaukat Ahmad Kataria of Banihal in Doda District, who 'disappeared' last October from the local mosque where he was the imam. A SIT found that the photograph of a "slain Pakistani militant'' – identified by the Ganderbal police as Abu Hafiz, of Karachi – was actually a picture of the missing imam. In line with the prevalent police practice, weapons had been placed on the body to implicate the deceased. In this instance, the weapons were found to have come from a cache of arms seized from militants in genuine operations, which the police had kept out of the records with the intention of using them to provide clinching 'evidence' in simulated encounters.
Bringing the guilty to book in the Kashmir encounters case has been particularly difficult due to the conflicting interests of the security agencies involved. In early May, the army filed an application in a lower court in Srinagar, challenging the SIT's chargesheet – which names, in addition to five policemen, five personnel of the paramilitary Rashtriya Rifles, including a colonel and a major, implicated in the killing of Maulvi Shaukat. The army claimed that the J & K police should have sought permission from the Home Ministry before filing the chargesheet, because security forces deployed in J & K were protected under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the AFSPA. The J & K police, however, maintained that the army personnel were not "acting in the line of duty", and therefore should not enjoy impunity under the AFSPA.