Venue: FTK-Centre for Information Technology (CIT), Ansari Auditorium Complex, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

On 13th September last year, the country’s capital was rocked by serial bomb blasts. Almost instantly, the Delhi police targeted the Muslim-majority neighbourhood of Jamia Nagar: a series of illegal detentions, including that of a student and a social worker, quickly followed. But even these could not have prepared the residents, or the Jamia (University) community, for what was to happen on 19th September. In a mid-morning raid on a flat in Batla House, the Delhi Police’s Special Cell shot dead two young men, alleged ‘masterminds’ of a shadowy organisation called Indian Mujahideen. An inspector of the Delhi Police was also killed in the incident. Another series of arrests ensued, in which friends and acquaintances of the killed were arrested as co-conspirators or bombers. The media had a field day, with headlines like “Graduates with killer degrees” and dubbing Jamia Millia—to which one of the slain, and two of the arrested youth belonged—as the “nursery of terror”. Aged between 22 – 24 yrs, Zia, Saquib, Zeeshan, Shakeel and Saif, were trotted as the perfect examples of the new-age Islamic terrorist: young, urban, university educated. 

Civil Rights activists and local residents had from the day of the ‘encounter’ itself started raising questions about the Delhi Police version. All demands for a free and fair judicial enquiry into the episode of ‘encounter’ and subsequent arrests were stubbornly rejected by the UPA government. The Delhi Police flagrantly flouted all National Human Rights Commission guidelines pertaining to encounter killings, emboldened by the Lieutenant Governor’s helpful refusal to even allow for a simple magisterial enquiry. The NHRC continued to wring its hands in despair over this, but shied away all the same from instituting an independent enquiry of its own. Till of course it was pushed into doing so by the Delhi High Court. Unfortunately, the so-called custodian of Human Rights, decided to base its conclusions on the ‘evidence’ provided by the Delhi Police alone, bothering neither to visit the site of the encounter, to seek out potential witnesses, nor to investigate the questions raised by the civil rights groups. Little surprise then, that the NHRC merely parroted the Delhi Police story.

One year on, the trials against the youth arrested from Delhi are yet to start. After the various state police departments cut a sorry figure when they drew up their own list of ‘masterminds’, the move has been to implicate these arrested youth into bombings all across the country. The accused continue to be shuttled from Tihar to Sabarmati jail endlessly, with little signs of the trial beginning anytime soon.

But none of this—illegal detentions, arrests, ‘encounter’ killings, the ineffectualness or partisanship of bodies such as the NHRC—is unique to Jamia Nagar. From Maharashtra to Karnataka to Kerela to Uttar Pradesh and Rajsathan, regardless of the incumbent government, the cry of war against terror’ has provided a license to the security agencies to kidnap, illegally detain, torture, and falsely implicate hundreds of Muslim youth on charges of terror. The police’s lies have been nailed often enough: the CBI indicted the Delhi Police Special Cell of falsely implicating two men—police informers actually—as Al Badar operatives; 19 young men subjected to third degree torture for days at private farm houses by the Andhra Pradesh SIT were exonerated by the court of any involvement in the Mecca Masjid blasts; Aftab Ansari, declared a top HUJI terrorist by the UP STF, was similarly exonerated and the STF’s claim of having recovered RDX was shown to be a sham. Meanwhile several Right wing groups which preach and practice hatred against minorities continue to enjoy state patronage and protection.

Evidence upon evidence is piling up against the Gujarat government which routinely staged fake encounters to fan a paranoia about the impending threat of ‘Islamic terrorists’—the shameful cases of cold blooded murders of Sohrabuddin and Ishrat Jehan being. The culture of impunity and the celebration of extra-judicial killings as a just means to deal with ‘terrorism’, means that any questions about custodial torture, false arrests, encounters etc are declared as ‘unpatriotic’; that communal witch hunt can easily masquerade as nationalist enterprise; that sections of our citizenry are condemned to exist in the framework of ‘security’ alone, pushed out of the ambit of citizenship rights; that bodies such as the NHRC, which were created to safeguard the rights of the citizens, are reduced to being the mouth pieces of the State.

 In this context, JTSA is organising a national convention to raise a concerted voice against encounter killings, continuing arrests of innocents, to pave the way for a national framework on encounter killings, and to push this pressing issue onto the centre-stage of Indian polity. We firmly believe that neither can democracies be built on extra judicial violence nor can terrorism be combated through communal witch-hunts.

The Jamia Teachers' Solidarity Association is to release its Report,  'ENCOUNTER AT BATLA HOUSE : UNANSWERED  QUESTIONS' in Hindi. (बाटला हाउस 'मुठभेड़' : अनसुलझे  सवाल) at the All India Convention on:  State, Democracy and ‘Terrorism’: One Year after Batla House ‘Encounter’ (Venue: FTK-Centre for Information Technology (CIT), Ansari Auditorium Complex, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi Date: 1st October 2009, Thursday, Time: 9.30 am onwards)