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| Words that kill | | | Alok Rai
One cannot afford to be too particular about such things in a country — even, world — in which people are routinely offered, and presumably receive, “free gifts”. (As opposed to the other kind, I suppose, the “gifts” that the shopkeeper gives you in exchange for money.) Even so, and I hesitate to say this for fear of incurring the wrath of the Honourable Ones, but may I, in all humility, offer Justice GT Nanavati a few language lessons? One cannot reasonably, sir, talk about a “pre-planned conspiracy”, because that would imply the necessary existence of some accidental conspiracies, too — a palpable contradiction in terms, surely evident even to a judge? The insistent tautology of the formulation — why not “deliberate pre-planned conspiracy” then? — cries out to be interpreted. In short, children, His Lordship protests too much, and that disproportionate insistence renders the whole thing deeply suspect — rather like the truant schoolboy spinning one excuse too many, or even, perhaps, like the infant Krishna, protesting that he didn’t steal the butter, even though his hands and his mouth are smeared with the stuff. Of course, butter isn’t the only thing hands and mouths are smeared with in our dark times.
This “pre-planned conspiracy” is of a piece with that other tell-tale linguistic oddity which has become normalised in our midst: the “encounter specialist”. Now, an encounter is a necessarily accidental meeting, and one cannot have a “pre-planned encounter”. In fact, a “pre-planned encounter” is called an ambush, and the so-called “specialist” is actually a murderer. Pace Arun Jaitley and the other geniuses of the BJP, have our sensibilities become so coarse that we can no longer see that killing a person who may — as may not, given our police, but may — very well be accused and even guilty of horrible things, is still murder? Because — back to those law books, Jaitley! — a presumption of innocence and a right to due process is integral to our Constitution.
It is still murder even if the murderer is a policeman, in or out of uniform. And ordinary people have already understood this, although it seems to have eluded the bright young things who populate the media. Thus, “to counter” someone — the tadbhava form of encounter — is already available as a verb, “to kill, with state immunity”. Thus, “counter karvana”, “kisi ka counter ho jaana” are all current linguistic forms which embody the ordinary citizens’ understanding of what the gentlemen of the state apparatus are up to. And if we put the hon’ble justice Nanavati’s “pre-planned conspiracy” together with the “encounter specialists” beloved of the media — until they are discovered to be the singularly unlovely creatures that they have always been — the juxtaposition gives us a chilling insight into the moral desert in which we find ourselves today.
The peculiar horror of terrorist violence derives from its indiscriminate, random nature. Irrespective of whether the anger that motivates people to commit such acts is legitimate or not, the consequences are undeniably condemnable, regrettable, deplorable. But, and this too needs to be said in the desert of the now, to ask if there may be legitimate causes for grievance and anger is not to condone acts of terrorist violence — it is to take one necessary step towards the condition where such acts do not happen. This is the “root cause” investigation that the anti-terrorist ideologues would like to forego altogether, in favour of a purely police response, a further stiffening of the laws — as if there weren’t already laws in existence that criminalise violence of all kinds. So what will these further laws that Advani and his boys are lusting after—POTA and its clones — achieve?
Oddly enough, the further police powers that are being sought are in fact precisely to enable the police also to commit random acts of violence upon whole communities — deprivation of liberty, and worse, much worse. (They do so anyway — the list is a long one — and I have yet to hear a coherent defence or even acknowledgment of these numerous acts of police terrorism from the advocates of POTA.) Except of course, that with laws like POTA in place, police terrorism could happen with the sanction and immunity of the law. The only difference from the other kind, attributed to shadowy Muslim fundamentalists who may or may not be acting under sanction from divine law, would be that the gentlemen of the police would then be acting under sanction from secular law. And now I know what the ‘P’ in POTA stands for: it is the Perpetration of Terrorism Act. |
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