The Wire
A look at the week that was in terms of news, politics and rights.
This week has been both interesting and scary in terms of news. In addition to the Uttar Pradesh police’s brutality, there is also the issue of namaz in Gurugram and ‘topi’ politics in elections. Meanwhile in Madhya Pradesh, preparations are on to remove Urdu words from the police dictionary.
Faiz Khan’s twin brother Faraz alleged that the police beat him with lathis when he tried to take his brother’s body.
Rampur: On the night of Friday, December 20, Faiz Khan took his 14-year-old niece Samia to the hospital for the doctor to look at her, as she had fallen ill. He was with his sister in law, and had driven them there since he was the best driver in the family. Soon, he would be leaving them to go to work in Dubai, in February in the coming year. The next morning, he left the house to finish up some of the paperwork remaining for his trip, between 10 and 12 pm.
On that morning, a large protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act was being held on the streets of Rampur. He had not gone for the protest itself, his twin brother Faraz said, adding, “If he was going to the protest, I would have been with him. I was at home at the time.”
Faiz saw a crowd standing in the street, beside the Hathi Khanna crossing. The ulemas of the main masjid in Rampur had put out a call for a protest on Saturday earlier in the week, but on Friday morning, a meeting had taken place between them and the police, and by Friday night, a message had been put out that the protest had been cancelled. While the call for the protest had spread like wildfire through the community, news of its cancellation had not.
There were thousands of people on the streets across Rampur – at the Hathi Khanna crossing itself, there were at least two thousand, Faiz’s uncle told The Wire.
Barricades were erected by the police when the crowd started – which was not being allowed to march toward its destination – grew restive. That was when the police started to fire tear gas into the crowd to get them to disperse.
Faiz was in the crowd, watching while this was happening. When the tear gas started to choke the crowd, he saw an old man fall to his knees, and collapse onto the street. He darted out, and grabbed him, trying to pull him away from the stampede that was gathering, to take him to safety.
Also read: Ground Report: Families of Two Young Men Felled by Bullets in Bijnor Contest Police Claims
That was when a bullet hit him bang in the middle of his throat – right between his clavicle – breaking through his oesophagus, and lodging into his neck.
Faiz fell to the ground.
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Faiz Khan. Photo: Faraz Khan
Faiz was a man who was quick to help at the cost of his own time and health. In the past three months, he had donated blood twice, for neighbours who had been in surgery who could not afford to buy blood. Between him and his twin brother, he had been the first to come out – he was older by one minute. He had graduated from 12th grade and had worked ever since.
Four years ago, he had gone to Saudi Arabia to work as a salesperson for a chips company. He only earned enough to eat and live there – not enough to send back home, and in conditions that were so miserable that in four months time, he wanted to come back home.
When he told his employers that he wanted to go back, they took his passport and phone away, and confined him to his quarters – without his phone ahd without enough food to eat. After a flurry of requests from family connections, he was released when his father sent him his return ticket with enough money to come back home.
He worked with his hands after he returned. His family lives together with three families, whose main source of income is a sweet-shop in Rampur – there’s just enough to get by, without luxuries, but with enough food on the table.
His mother has a condition which causes her legs to hurt – if Faiz was around when she would ask his brother Faraz to press her legs, he would jump with alacrity to do it himself.
“When our nani died, he cried for weeks,” Faraz told The Wire. “He still kept all her things in his drawer. They are still there.”
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“Public mein se kisi ne goli nahi chalayi, (Nobody from the crowd fired a bullet)” his brother said. “Public unarmed thi sabh (The public was unarmed).” Faraz, who did not witness this, said every single witness who spoke to him at the time told him the same story.
When he fell to the ground, Faiz was not yet dead. He was still breathing.
Bystanders rushed him to the district hospital. When they reached, the hospital staff loaded him onto a stretcher, and inquired about what had happened. The bystanders said that he had been shot. The hospital staff then drew back, refusing to treat him. The bystanders said that they were screaming, asking where the hospital staff was, begging for them to see to him.
Also read: In Bijnor, Children Give Harrowing Accounts of Beating by UP Police After CAA Protest
“We reached there an hour after he reached the hospital,” his brother says. “We waited for another hour and a half. For two and a half hours, nobody in the hospital would touch his body, saying they had been given orders not to attend to the victims of any bullet injuries.”
By that time, Faiz was dead.
“We asked them to just come and check if he still was alive, to confirm his death,” says Faiz’s father. They would not.
It was then that the police showed up, with the Rapid Action Force. The police force stopped family members from going into the emergency room, where they were desperate to find a doctor to see to Faiz’s body. There were around 10-12 of Faiz’s family and friends who had gathered at the hospital at that time, and soon, as more police began to arrive, there were at least 60-70 policemen.
The police then began to try to take Faiz’s body away, which the family strenuously protested. “A hospital superintendent was writing a referral for another hospital, and when I asked him why, he said that they would take him to another hospital to put him on a ventilator,” said Faiz’s father. “I asked him, do you put a ventilator on a live man or a dead one?”
Faiz’s family had put his body, laying on a stretcher, against the wall, and had formed a protective barrier between him and the policemen. The policemen tried to force their way through, and grabbing the stretcher, began to yank it away. The family kept a tight hold on it, pulling it back, and refusing to let them take it away. All they wanted to do was to take the body home. At this point, the police pulled out their lathis, and began to hit them, taking a hold of the stretcher amidst the commotion and rushing it out.
Faiz’s brother Faraz refused to let go. He held on to the stretcher amidst the police and his father screaming behind him to let them have it and to not get hurt. The stretcher made its way outside, struggling between the police and Faraz. They were lifting his body into the ambulance, shoving and hitting Faraz, when Faraz yanked his twin brother’s body towards him.
Faiz’s body fell, with Faraz beneath it.
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Faiz’s insistence on helping people was the stuff of family legends. He was an excellent driver and loved to drive – his friends would call him when they were going to the mountains, just so he could drive them.
A regular occasion, when his love for driving met his drive to help, was when people in his neighbourhood would fall ill, and had to be taken to the hospital. People would call him, knowing he would always get his car and come swiftly.
After his death, his brother said, “Zindagi mein itne nahi log mile jitne call aa gaye the. (One doesn’t get to meet as many people as the number of calls he got)”
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When Faiz’s body fell, Faraz held onto his brother tightly, and the police surrounded him.
They knew at this point that they were being recorded, he says, and they did not raise their lathis high to hit him as he lay beneath his brother’s corpse. Instead, in a tight circle, they began to hit him with their lathis, jabbing hard downward onto what parts of his body were available, with the same sharp movement used to spear a fish.
Also read: Delay of Medical Care to the Injured by Police Is Unconstitutional
They beat his hands with their sticks, and he says he was kicked on his back with their boots, trying to make him let go of the body. He showed this reporter his hand, which was swollen, with a graze scabbed over. The Wire has personally viewed the video footage which substantiates this sequence of events. The Wire was not given this footage to publish, because of apprehensions that it would be used to locate and punish the man who shot it.
Faraz said that in their attempts to hit him, they were hitting his brother’s lifeless body, which he could not bear. He let his brother go, he said, because he did not want his body to be mutilated any further.
Faiz Khan. Photo: Faraz Khan
They put his brother’s body into the ambulance.
Faraz stared out blindly into the darkness, his voice breaking. “If a dog dies, people with hearts handle the body with some tenderness. They threw him in like a football.” He is wearing the same tan leather jacket that he was wearing in the video of the police beating him.
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When Faiz was a child, one of his favourite things to do, when he saw his mother sitting down, was to run to her, put his head in her lap, and say, “Mummy, mere sir mein thoda khujli hai, aap tel lagao. (Mummy, there is itching in my head, put some oil.)” He used to do this even now, his father said, even when his head was never itching, just to get his mother to massage him. He would sit in his mother’s lap for hours as she stroked his head, and he would fall asleep.
Faiz’s mother could not speak with us. She is in no condition to speak with anyone, her husband said.
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The family wanted to accompany the body, as nobody would tell them where they were taking him, and they did not know what would happen to it. Faiz’s father begged to be allowed to accompany them, and they refused, starting to drive off. Faraz ran in front of the ambulance and lay down on the road, unwilling to move until his father was allowed inside.
In the melee, Faiz’s father dropped his phone, he said. They let him in, and drove off to the Moradabad district hospital, accompanied by two police cars.
A doctor at the hospital examined Faiz’s body, at which point he was sent to the mortuary. It was again put into the ambulance, as his post mortem would be done at another hospital, about 3 km away.
Also read: UP Govt’s Thinly-Veiled Attempt to Move Spotlight Away From Police Repression
At the other hospital, Faiz’s father begged someone from the police to give him a phone, so he could call his family. He said, “Mein akela, bilkul tanha tha dead body ke saath. Koi nahi tha mere saath, (I was alone, completely alone, with the dead body. There was nobody with me.)”. He said he joined his hands and begged them to just let him call his family to tell them where he was. Nobody gave him a phone.
By coincidence, another man from the same locality happened to see him, crying on one of the hospital benches. One of his relatives had also been injured in Rampur, and he recognised Faiz’s father. He did not go speak to Faiz’s father and see what was happening, fearing that the police would take away his phone as well. Instead, he called up Faiz’s family and informed them about his whereabouts.
After the post mortem had been completed, Faiz’s body was brought back, with his father, to the Rampur hospital where he had originally been taken, and after arguments with the police, the family was finally allowed to take him home to be buried.
The family is convinced that Faiz fell to a police bullet, but the police have issued a statement saying that he was injured by a bullet fired by protestors. The family says that they have no intentions of pursuing the matter further – they want no investigations and will be filing no FIRs.
“We don’t want them to catch another innocent, and put him in jail on our account.
“Ham ne toh Allah ke upar chhod diya hai, (We have left it up to God)” said Faiz’s father. “I have told the DM sahab as well, hamari bacche ki waje se aisa na ho ki koi fas jaye, galat, aur uska azaab hamare gale pe na aaye.” (Because of our son, no innocent should be trapped, and the wrath of that to come upon our necks.) “Ham apne taraf se koi FIR, koi karwai nahi karenge. God’s wrath will be upon our minds, and also with our martyred son,” he said.
“There will be more protests,” Faiz’s uncle said. “We are not afraid of dying anymore. It’s better to die here, than to die in a camp. We will protest peacefully, but we are no longer afraid to die.”
In the 2011 Ramlila Maidan case, the Supreme Court held that disciplinary action should be taken against police officers who resorted to lathi-charge and the excessive use of tear gas shells.
Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure must be one of the most well-known provisions under Indian law. “144 lag gaya hai (144 has been imposed)” brings cheer and dismay, depending on which side of the political divide you’re on.
The most popular conception of an order under Section 144 is that no more than three persons are allowed to congregate together publicly. This, however, is just one form of the order. Section 144 confers extremely wide-ranging powers that allow the district magistrate to order any person to “abstain from a certain act” or to “take certain order with respect to certain property in his possession or under his management”. It is expected to be an emergency power to be used to prevent public disorder and to protect human life.
In a system and country, where the concept of restrictions on executive power is considered a naive or arcane idea, orders under Section 144 are used to prohibit protests, block the internet and even cable TV services. Broad orders like those passed under Section 144 are most often enforced haphazardly and unnecessarily.
After all, the imposition of Section 144 would not mean that people would not be able to congregate to watch moves in cinema halls or to attend classes at school or college. What this order does is to empower the police to break up demonstrations or protests which they, in their subjective assessment, do not approve of. For instance, no pro ‘CAA-NRC’ protest has been broken up at India Gate and Mandi House, protests by the well-heeled have not been broken up.
This is the real danger posed by Section 144. You have a body, namely the police, which is not trained or known for its restraint in the face of the disadvantaged. The consequences of the violation of Section 144 have to be legal, including prosecution for wilfully disobeying a public servant and for any other offences which may be committed.
Also read: The Misuse of ‘Lathi Charge’ by the Indian Police
The imposition of an order under Section 144 does not grant authority to the police to become violent. The police can use violence to disperse an ‘unlawful assembly’ only if the situation warrants so. Otherwise, the procedure has to be the same as committing any offence under the IPC. File an FIR and prosecute.
2011 Ramlila Maidan incident
The Supreme Court was faced with the issue of police excesses for the purpose of enforcing an order under Section 144, when, in 2011, a crowd led by Baba Ramdev was removed from the Ramlila grounds during the night. While holding that Section 144 was rightly imposed, the court ordered compensation for the injured and noted that individual police officials had violated constitutional rights.
The court observed that:
“The police authorities, who are required to maintain the social order and public tranquillity, should have a say in the organizational matters relating to holding of dharnas, processions, agitations and rallies of the present kind. However, such consent should be considered in a very objective manner by the police authorities to ensure the exercise of the right to freedom of speech and expression as understood in its wider connotation, rather than use the power to frustrate or throttle the constitutional right.
Refusal and/or withdrawal of permission should be for valid and exceptional reasons. The executive power, to cause a restriction on a constitutional right within the scope of Section 144 Cr.P.C., has to be used sparingly and very cautiously.”
A complete and effective plan for dispersal
More specifically, and pertinently, regarding the behaviour of the police in the current protests, the court held that:
“It is not only desirable but also a mandatory requirement of the present day that the State and the police authorities should have a complete and effective dispersement plan in place, before evicting the gathering by use of force from a particular place, in furtherance to an order passed by an executive authority under Section 144 of the Cr.P.C.”
Policemen aim their guns during a protest against a new citizenship law, in Mangaluru, India, December 19, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Stringer
The first requirement for the police then is a “complete and effective dispersement plan”. It is clear that the authorities did not abide by this at Jamia or at Aligarh, or, for that matter, any of the other places in Uttar Pradesh which have witnessed police action.
Also read: Fair and Unbiased Policing Still a Far Cry in India
Chasing people into their hostels and homes is no part of the enforcement of Section 144. In the Ramlila incident, even when the imposition of Section 144 was upheld, directions were passed to prosecute the police officers responsible for the assault on the people. Section 144 is not, and cannot, be a cover for unchecked police action.
In fact, the Supreme Court, in the case of the Ramlila incident, apart from criminal cases against members of the police and public who indulged in violence against persons and property, also specified that disciplinary action must be taken against “all the erring police officers/personnel who have indulged in brick-batting, have resorted to lathi charge and excessive use of tear gas shells upon the crowd, have exceeded their authority or have acted in a manner not permissible under the prescribed procedures, rules or the standing orders and their actions have an element of criminality. This action shall be taken against the officer/personnel irrespective of what ranks they hold in the hierarchy of police”.
Another category of police personnel singled out for action by the Supreme Court included, “the police personnel who were present in the pandal and still did not help the evacuation of the large gathering and in transportation of sick and injured people to the hospitals have, in my opinion, also rendered themselves liable for appropriate disciplinary action.”
The incidents of the past couple of weeks show that the police seems to have learnt no lesson from their previous experiences. The same acts, for which action was ordered by the Supreme Court in 2012, have been repeated in 2019.
Sarim Naved is a practising lawyer in Delhi.
At least 16 people, including an eight-year-old, have so far lost their lives in the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in Uttar Pradesh.
New Delhi: While the Uttar Pradesh police have been vehemently claiming that not even a “single bullet” has been fired even though anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 protestors have sustained bullet injuries, a new video has emerged which shows a police officer wielding a revolver and opening fire.
WATCH: A video that nails the claims of UP Police that it never fired a single bullet! The video is of yesterday from Kanpur. pic.twitter.com/O4RazguIM2
— Prashant Kumar (@scribe_prashant) December 22, 2019
At least 16 people, including an eight-year-old boy, have so far lost their lives in the protests against the CAA in Uttar Pradesh. Several of them have bullet injuries, but top UP police officials have vehemently denied that they have fired even a single bullet.
UP police chief O.P. Singh had told NDTV on Saturday, that cops “did not fire a single bullet“.
The Indian Express reported that Singh had claimed that all the deaths were due to “cross firing”. “All the deaths have been in cross-firing and this will become clear in post-mortem… Women and children were used as shields by protestors…We are clear on this. If anyone died due to our firing, we will conduct a judicial inquiry and take action. But nothing happened from our side.”
Also read: CAA Protests: UP Police Detain, Threaten, Beat Up Activists, Journalist in Lucknow
However, the emergence of the video has shown that this claim may not be entirely accurate.
A policeman is seen in the video holding a revolver and a baton, walking towards a street corner. He then takes aim and shoots in the direction of the protesters. There are at least two photographers following him, who are apparently taking photos. In the backdrop, someone can be heard saying, “Maaro saalon ko (Kill them).”
The UP police have claimed that only protesters are using firearms, asserting that 57 policemen have been injured.
“Over 400 empty cartridges have been recovered across UP. It proves that protesters were firing with country-made weapons and that those who died in their fire were either innocent by-standers or part of the mob themselves,” Uttar Pradesh inspector general (law and order) Praveen Kumar said, as per NDTV.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, passed earlier this month, makes religion a criterion for giving fast-track citizenship to persecuted minorities from three neighbouring countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The protesters have claimed that the Union home minister Amit Shah has repeatedly made connections between the CAA and National Register of Citizens which shows that there is a more sinister aim behind the entire exercise. The government has claimed that there is no link between CAA and the NRC process, which BJP ministers have said will be implemented nationwide.
