Let’s not kill Govindachami nor the dogs but rather...

We are a benevolent nation not merely by virtue of our constitution. We were so since time immemorial. If this is not a fact supported by historical facts, at least it is one that has the backing of our collective rant and histrionic feats. This is a nation where a mad dog can bite anyone from a kindergarten child to a mighty minister and still get protection under law. If you need any further proof of our adherence to the spirit and letter of the law, you might as well say: this is a country where even a rapist and murderer will not be sent to the gallows unless his guilt is proven beyond an iota of doubt. There is no doubting this as the events that recently unfolded demonstrated.

However, is our country benevolent to all and always? If Manisha Sethi, author of Kafkaland is to be believed, this is a country where law itself has become a mockery; a hostage to vested interests, self-seeking bureaucrats and police officials; not to mention, the politicians who act as their godfathers.  Her book is not one that you can forget in a hurry. It is a book of blood-curdling horrors that would not fail to strike a chord with anyone who cares for this country.

It chronicles the way our law-enforcement machinery deals with young promising men and women: How it pulverizes them and their careers, annihilates their dreams and their families’ futures so that a few officers can court glory, earn promotions and win laurels. After you are through with the book, you will be left wondering whether the world created by Kafka is actually as horrifying as the one painted by Sethi or is her title something of an undersell.

For in Kafka, you don’t come across law-enforcers who first manufacture criminals and then arrest and maim them and finally pad up their CVs flaunting the skeletons of their victims. Probably they remind you of the wise rich king who imported wild animals from Africa to his farm only to hunt them for sport.

It was a former judge of the Allahabad High Court who described India’s police force as the largest criminal network in the country. To get a glimpse into the ways in which this network operates, one need not read Sethi’s book from cover to cover. One of the appendices in it, written by a certain Irahad Ali, would do. Irshad Ali is no ordinary chap. He was an inmate of the high security ward of Tihar jail, where the most dreaded criminal are housed. In a letter written to the then Prime Minster of India, Manmohan Sing, he sketches the modus operandi of the IB which, though notorious for its failures to nab the real culprits behind terrorist attacks, never fails to find scapegoats.

Irshad Ali himself was a scapegoat. He had worked as a police informer and hence knew a thing or two about their evil machinations. But nothing had prepared him for the worst that happened in 2006. Being a police informer, he was given the task of infiltrating the Kashmiri separatist organization under the guise of a terrorist belonging to an outfit known as Al-Badr (Indeed many of these outfits themselves are phoney bodies spawned by the security agencies). But in dramatic circumstances, he was arrested by his very employers belonging to the Special Cell of the Delhi police. His arrest was heralded as big event and trumpeted in the press and on channels. In his letter to the PM, he delineates how the IB functions:

They often hire a pious looking man with long beard and matching costumes. He is sent to a Muslim locality where he either finds a job in a mosque or a dwelling in its neighbourhood. Through his pious manners and religious knowledge he builds himself up as a local cult figure. He soon surrounds himself with a handful of pious and gullible young men. His task is now to intoxicate the youths with spurious Islamic and anti-nationalist rhetoric. Once he succeeds in brainwashing these youths he tells them of his links with one of those numerous Lashkars. He distributes minor weapons provided to him by the intelligence agencies and lures them to a plot the way Tom Sawyer led his band of child bandits to their escapades. The intelligence forces, well informed of ‘behind the scene’ activities, wait in ambush and ‘heroically’ foil the plot to murder everyone from Modi to Bedi! The bearded Maulana in the meanwhile manages to slip past or rather is helped to slip past the security dragnet. The newspapers lose no time in splashing streamers about the heroism and daredevilry of security forces with stray references, if at all, to the terrorist who managed to give the authorities a slip.  The striking thing is that there was such a man, a sixth one besides the slain five, even in the 2001 parliament attack. What happened to that mysterious man? Where did he disappear? How did he manage to vanish even after the CCTVs picked up his mug—these questions still remain unanswered.

According to Sethi, there is no limit either to the funds available to the intelligence agencies or the means to which they can resort when it comes to ensuring national security. She talks about the secret detention centres in Delhi -our own Guantanamos- where barbaric punishments are inflicted upon the victims to extract confessions. As Irshad mentions in his letter, the main job that the intelligence agents do is imaginative. Like professional story-tellers, they churn out stories and pass them onto the Govt and the media. These stories will be about LeT and Jaishe Muhammad terrorists who descended on strategic locations in major cities. But when real terrorists cross borders and do their dirty jobs as it happened in 2009 in Mumbai and recently in Uri these intelligent men are caught snoring.

The book also contains bits of what can be termed dark humour. For instance, Sethi wonders how those ‘terrorists’ who fall victim to the bullets of security agencies never fail to carry with them clear identity cards mentioning their nationality and address plus documents written in Urdu stating their murderous intentions and philosophy. In some instances, such documents were found on bullet-ridden and blood-soaked bodies of slain ‘militants.’ But as a judge sarcastically observed there wasn’t even a single blood stain on the letter retrieved. Indeed, Bollywood will have to take lessons from our security agencies! In another instance, a letter in Urdu was found on the body of a man who could neither read nor write Urdu.

But be patient! It is not merely the Bollywood that has to take lessons from the Indian police, says Sethi. Even our well-trained army would do well to sit up and pay for lessons from the cops who specialize in encounter killings like Ravinder Tyagi and Sanjeev Yadav. If there are any doubters, they just need skim over some figures. In independent India, there have been more than a hundred encounter killings. In all these instances, the police managed to annihilate the ‘enemies of the nation’ without suffering a single fatality. On the other hand, in most instances when the army came face to face with terrorists, they suffered casualties. How come the police are more adept at handling armed militants? Sethi points her fingers at the dubious nature of the encounters.

The book concludes with a chapter on the evolving nexus between industries specializing in security and surveillance equipments and hawks clamouring about national security. It contains the grim prognosis that in a world where a feeling of insecurity provides lucrative business for corporates, fear is bound to be produced on a mass scale on war footing. The question the book poses without stating it in as many terms is will anyone pursue the ‘who done it’ question in the context of countless terrorist attacks in our country from the logic of ‘who profited from it.’ Till we find definitive answers to this, our hunt for the enemies of the nation will remain a wild goose chase.         

(Dr. Umer O Thasneem teaches English at the University of Calicut. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)