The Supreme Court on October 30 deplored the tendency to introduce a communal angle to police action against criminals. “Criminals are criminals. This is the problem. Why should you identify them with any community,” a Bench headed by Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan asked an NGO which sought an independent inquiry into the Batla House encounter last year. The Bench made the observation after counsel Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner, said the incident had shaken the confidence of a large section of a community in the country.
Rejecting the demand, the Bench, which included Justice P Sathasivam and BS Chauhan, said ordering an inquiry would affect the morale of police officials. “Thousands of police officers have been killed. Inquiry will affect the morale of the police force,” the Bench ruled, pointing out that the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) had already given a clean chit to the police involved in the encounter. Two suspected terrorists and a police officer had been killed in the encounter.
Dismissing the petition of “Act Now For Harmony and Democracy,” the Bench also said the NGO had come to the court one year after the incident. Ordering an inquiry at this stage would only cause harassment to the police.
Prashant said the victims were in their teens, one of whom had sustained bullet shots on top of his head and another had injury marks on his back. All this raised suspicion. However, the Bench felt that the boy was perhaps shot while trying to escape through a window and in that case such injuries were possible. The court also felt the fact that one senior police officer had lost his life in the encounter lent credence to the incident.
The All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat expressed its pain, agony and dismay at the unwarranted and hasty rejection by the Supreme Court of India of the appeal against Delhi High Court order, thereby rejecting the request for a judicial enquiry into the fake police encounter at Batla House on September 19, 2008.
In a statement on October 31, The AIMMM President Dr Zafarul-Islam Khan said the apex court’s description of the victims of Batla House encounter as “criminals” and its statement that the enquiry into the episode will affect the morale of the police are baffling since no enquiry or trial has been held to date to establish those victims as “criminals” and there are umpteen examples of police personnel’s imprisonment and dismissal in similar cases of encounter as well as other crimes committed by the police. Hence the claim of the authorities that a probe into Batla House will affect the morale of the police only confirms our belief that the whole drama was premeditated and that the killing of the two young students was simple murder with the sole aim of terrorising the Muslim community in the name of fighting “terrorism”.
Dr Khan said that such behaviour on the part of our highest constitutional bodies only shakes the trust of the ordinary citizen in our democratic and legal system and this broken trust in turn leads the common man to take the law into his/her hand. It is still high time for the Indian State to overcome its hubris and order a judicial enquiry into the Batla House encounter by a sitting judge of a high court or the Supreme Court to establish the facts regarding this sordid affair.