Editorial: Justice when no one's looking

CHENNAI: Like crickets talking to each other in the night, law enforcement agencies the world over arrive at a common trope to justify extrajudicial killings. In the past seven days, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the US shot dead two immigrants, one in Texas and the other in Maine.

In one, the justification was that the suspect “weaponised his vehicle in an attempt to run over an officer, resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defence.” In the other, the victim “attempted to flee the scene” and the agent fired his weapon “fearing for public safety”.

In India, this is a standard narrative. Last week (July 8) in West Bengal, police shot dead a man suspected of the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in the Baruipur area after taking him to the scene of his alleged crime — at 12.45 am in the night — for a “reconstruction”. The sotto voce official account of the incident checked all the boxes for extrajudicial justice: “snatched the weapon of police personnel”, “fired at us”, “attempted to flee”.

The language varies, but the grammar is the same, be it in the jungles of Bastar, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the mangroves of Bangladesh, or the streets of Manila.

Through repeated use, the trope has been reduced to code. In the Philippines, the Rodrigo Duterte regime grew so weary of explaining the killings in its War on Drugs that it took to slapping the tag word Nanlaban ("he fought back") on the official accounts, whence it passed into the lingua franca and thence into popular culture. In India, the code word is ‘encounter’, which duly acquired a verb form, spawned ‘specialists’ at it, and lent itself to a Bollywood genre.

Lately, the narrative has begun to grow some weird subplots in India. One is the ‘well-done’ response of the public and the floral welcome accorded to encounter heroes returning from the scene. Another is the ‘justice has been done’ endorsement by the family — often the mother, as in the case of the Baruipur killing — of the slain suspect.

This is, of course, a corruption of justice, and human rights organisations have written tomes on it. Extra-judicial killings not only short-circuit due process but also give licence to streetside vigilantes to try their hand at it, as we have seen in the burgeoning of lynch mobs alongside the use of shotgun police methods in some north Indian states.

The encounter trope promotes a culture of impunity within the police framework and provides cover to bad actors who become hand-in-glove with the underworld, as we have seen in Mumbai. In the long run, encounters blunt police methods themselves, depriving investigators of opportunities to study the criminal mind and method and forensic specialists of the chance to fine-tune their tools.

Yet, despite the adverse scrutiny of criminologists, journalists, judges and lawyers, extra-judicial justice has become the option of choice for law enforcement globally, with cover stories getting flimsier with repeated use. This is because the state itself has become more invested in it than in due process.

The prevalence of extrajudicial killings alongside the rise of authoritarian regimes worldwide is unmistakable. The phenomenon existed earlier too, but now with tyrants taking over formerly democratic countries, it is becoming policy. A rogue police force in the hands of a despot aids him in institutional capture and reduces itself to the king’s guard. That, and not public safety, is the real purpose of extrajudicial justice.