Commentary/Vir Sanghvi
If a cop has planted evidence all his life to win cases, then
why shouldn't he plant evidence to save his skin?
This column is about
the encounter in which the
Delhi police murdered two innocent
people in cold blood. The murders raise many issues, none
of which seems to have been satisfactorily addressed.
The first issue is the behaviour of the Delhi police after the
incident. They have offered two explanations. Explanation one
is it was a genuine mistake -- the cops really thought the two were gangsters.
Explanation two is these innocent businessmen just happened
to keep a loaded pistol in the car on the off-chance that a Delhi
police party might turn up and try to murder them. When this
eventuality did in fact occur, the traders miraculously transformed
themselves into sharp-shooters and opened fire on the brave cops who had no alternative but to murder
them on the spot.
As any fool can see, these explanations are obviously contradictory.
If this is the best the police can do by way of an excuse,
then it is no surprise innocent people get murdered -- obviously
the level of intelligence is not very high.
But in the general outrage over the murders, we have lost sight
of two significant issues.
The first is the nonchalance with which the police planted a gun
on the dead men. Given the abundance of witnesses and the circumstances
for the murder, it is impossible to claim the police party
acted in self-defence. And yet, a senior official of the level
of assistant commissioner is sticking to this story. A gun has
been procured from somewhere and the official position of the
Delhi police is the dead men were not only armed but also
opened fire.
If you are shocked by the blatant falsehood, by the readiness
of the police to plant evidence, don't be: it happens everyday.
I have this on good authority. Four months ago, Vijay Karan, one
of Delhi's most respected former police commissioners (and a former
Central Bureau of Investigation director) told me on national television the system had
now got so rotten that the police routinely planted evidence.
Suppose a murder has been committed. The police will decide
who the murderer is and will then go about manufacturing a case.
If the victim had been stabbed, they will plant a knife. Suppose some jewellery has been stolen. Even if the police
catch the thief and find out who he sold the ornaments to, they
still have a problem: the buyer has usually melted the pieces
down. So they will ask a jeweller to make new jewellery, identical
to the stuff that was stolen and will then claim in court they recovered the jewellery before it had been melted down.
Karan's intention was not to run down his old force. He
claimed the legal system was such it took too long for
cases to come to trial, and the standard of proof demanded
was much too high. The police had no hope of securing a conviction
unless they resorted to fabricating evidence.
Karan insisted the police only manufactured evidence
to implicate the guilty, not the innocent. But this is a fine
distinction. Who decides who is guilty? A constable? A sub-inspector? A trigger-happy murderer
who hopes to be promoted by shooting people at traffic lights?
The point is once you allow policemen to believe that it
is perfectly acceptable to fabricate and plant evidence, you are
destroying the integrity of the system.
If a cop has planted evidence all his life to win cases, then
why should not he plant evidence to save his own skin?
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