8/9/2019 Kafkaland by Manisha Sethi: Dilip D'Souza's review

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ears ago, I happened to lookthrough some affidavitssubmitted by police officersin a custodial death case in West Bengal. It was oneeye-opening experience.They concocted a storyto explain the death of

this young man, saying he hung himself

with his gamchha, or towel. They mighthave got away with it, too. Unfortunatelyfor them, they had not cared to compareversions so as to get the details of theirfiction right. Times were mismatched,so were movements. I mean, therewere details that differed from one pageof an officer’s affidavit to the next page,or even paragraph, of the same affidavit.(“I proceeded to the District Jail at 7:30pm”, said one, followed in the nextparagraph by “I entered into theDistrict Jail at 7:15 pm.”) Theseinconsistencies alone told thetale of what had really happened:these officers had themselves beatenthe young man to death and then

decided to make up a tale toexplain the death. But if that’snot nauseating enough, even moretelling was that these men drafted andsubmitted these mismatched affi-davits, as is, to the court. Clearly theythought merely submitting theirversions would be enough for them toget away with their crime. Clearlythey simply assumed that nobodywould compare versions, realisetheir crime and actually seek topunish them.

The eye-opening part, for me, wasnot so much that they killed the poorman; after all, custodial deaths are hardlyunknown in this country. No, it was thatthey made that assumption. It was the

arrogance of that assumption.Now here’s a whole book that

speaks, in essence, of that samearrogance. Of people who carryout wholesale subversion of ourlaws, of the very idea of justice, inthe full expectation that they willnever pay a price. And perhaps theyare right in that expectation, becauseperhaps a lot of people really don’twant them to pay a price anyway.Manisha Sethi actually spells this ideaout on page 125: “Bias is not simply thebias of police and agencies. ... Rather, itrests on the knowledge of that bias inour society, polity and media, and usesit to its full advantage. [Two namedpolice officers] know that theycan get away with their jaundicedassumptions.”

Consider that one of these policeofficers, MN Singh, is on recordsaying: “[Terrorism] just doesn’texist in the Hindu pantheon.” Whatcan law and order possibly meanwhen a high-ranking police officer,faced with egregious crimes hemust tackle, rules 80 per cent of thepopulation out of consideration assuspects, purely because of theirreligion? If you’re wondering aboutthat, consider too that plenty ofpeople will nod their heads sagely,agreeing with Singh. Singh knowsas much, which allows him to say what

he did.And we’ve not yet come to the

real point here, which is that Hindusare every bit as capable of terrorismas anyone else. Nothing unusualor insulting in saying so. It’s justthe way of the world that ghastlycriminality knows no religiousboundaries. Since we’re talking aboutHindus, witness Maya Kodnani and

Naroda-Patiya, or the LTTE, or the1984 slaughter in Delhi, or the 1992-93 slaughter in Bombay, or the2002 slaughter in Gujarat, or nameslike Sadhvi Pragya and SwamiAseemananda. How does all thissquare with Singh’s claim of a pristineHindu pantheon?

In effect, Sethi’s book is one long,

credibility of witnesses [and] generalunreliability of prosecution”. Thetrial court, observed the HighCourt, had not properly understoodthe concept of “proof beyond areasonable doubt”.

Imagine: a court had decided to takethe lives of three men despite itselfremarking on the “unreliability” of the

double take at what the court saidnext: “It is not usually possibleto find such proof; one cannot infact expect or desire formal proof.”

One cannot? Funny, I thoughtjustice built on evidence was one ofthose fundamental precepts of demo-cracy. But now we must not “expector desire” it.

Elsewhere, in the case of the murderof police Inspector MC Sharma in theBatla House “encounter”, a sessionscourt convicted Shahzad Ahmed“despite the prosecution being unableto establish even his presence at the siteof the encounter”. Regardless, the judgeclearly had more persuasive matters onhis mind than the mere presence of theaccused at the crime scene, because heobserved: “[This] incident shockedthe collective conscience of the entirenation. This is also an aggravatingfactor against the convict.”

Certainly the murder shocked thenation: the killing of a police officeron duty will do that. But since when

did such shock itself become moreevidence against a man? Besides, is ajudge supposed to interpret and applythe law? Or pay attention to someephemeral “collective conscience”? Where have we come to if in this landof ours – if I may paraphrase Orson Welles as the lawyer for the defence inthe film Compulsion – our courts of lawcannot help but bow down to publicopinion?

I could go on, as this book does.There are men supposedly arrestedwhile getting off a bus, but the bustickets the police produced are for adate different from their arrest. There’sthe transcript of an investigation inwhich the asked question “What comes

after six?” becomes the transcribedquestion “How many bombs wereplanted?”, which allows the proferredanswer, “seven”, to take on a ratherdifferent meaning. There’s the manwho is routinely mentioned on talkshows and by security experts as being“involved” in Haren Pandya’s murder;only, he is not named as an accused inthat case. There’s the particular witnesswho has clearly witnessed all kindsof activities relevant to a case, at leastas spelled out in witness statementsproduced in court by Maharashtra’sAnti-Terrorism Squad. Except that twoof those activities – the recovery ofsome clothes, and the recovery of fakebombs – happened at the same time, sohow was he a witness to both?

Few of us like to hear that there’ssomething rotten in the state ofDenmark, in this case India. It is muchbetter to lose ourselves instead ina web of self-congratulatory rhetoricand euphoric hosannas to thelatest messiah.  Acche din  (betterdays) are coming, we think. Yet Sethireminds us that for many Indians,there are no prospects of betterdays. More than that, the hosannasmask an ugly reality that is alsoIndia: that justice is too often tooremote, even nonexistent for toomany of us. We may choose to turnour faces away from that, or pretend

it’s not true, whatever. But overthe years, as this book so clearlytells us, our pretence has allowedfor a formidable cache indeed ofsuch injustice.

And until we are able to lookthat cache in the eye and address itsimplications, we will remain whatthis book calls India. Not Denmark,okay, but Kafkaland.

Kafkaland: Prejudice, Law and Counterterrorism

in India

By Manisha Sethi

Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon, 2014, 216 pp., Rs 350

ISBN 978-93-83968-00-8

There’s somethingrotten in the state

of India

D I L I P D ’ S O U Z A

Y

One police officer,

MN Singh, is on record

saying: “[Terrorism] justdoesn’t exist in the Hindupantheon.” What can

law and order possiblymean when a high-rankingpolice officer, faced withegregious crimes he

must tackle, rules 80 percent of the populationout of consideration assuspects, purely because

of their religion? If you’re

wondering about that, consider too that plenty ofpeople will nod their heads sagely, agreeing with

Singh. Singh knows as much, which allows him to saywhat he did

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detailed analysis of conundrumslike this, seen via various cases andsituations. It is a passionate, strongly-felt and thoughly depressing book.There is case after case of injustice,lies, persecution, you name it. Allperpetrated by ordinary Indians,winked at by ordinary Indians. All inall, you have to wonder what kind ofjustice we have managed to deliver,even what kind of society we have built

for ourselves, in nearly seven decades. Where do you start? Several men

were put on trial for bomb blasts inDelhi’s Lajpat Nagar in 1996. Thelower court sentenced three of themto death. The High Court later acquittedtwo of them and commuted thethird sentence to life in prison,observing that the trial court haditself made note of “lack of

case against them. And this happened,explains Sethi, because the “anti-terror” discourse and the apparent“urgency of national security” justifiesthe “lowering of the burden of proof”.In times when that burden should befelt most seriously of all, our courtschoose instead the easy way: overlooka shoddy prosecution, because this isabout terrorism.

In Madhya Pradesh, a court ack-

nowledged that prosecutors had failedto produce any evidence against theaccused that proved their involvementin the Pithampur case of 2008.But this lack of evidence was nohindrance to their conviction. Theabsence of evidence, observed thecourt, “does not have an adverseimpact” on the prosecution. If you’remarvelling at that, you’ll do a