Assumed Guilty

As human rights activists and the Muslim community demand a probe into the September 19 Batla House incident, in which two alleged terrorists and one police officer were killed, some tough questions emerge: Do accused terrorists deserve the same rights as everyone else? Should we deny the liberties of a few to protect millions? And, perhaps most importantly, do we trust the government to make those decisions for us? History has taught us that perhaps we shouldn’t. Consider the more than 1,00,000 Japanese-Americans who the United States government forcibly locked in “war relocation camps” after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attacks. The fear of disloyalty turned out to be unfounded, and based on “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”, as the government admitted 40 years later. But you can’t turn back the clock on the countless lives that were destroyed in the process. With increasing terrorist attacks around the globe, it’s natural for us to feel that the world is more dangerous now than it’s ever been. In the United States, the threat to security seems real in a way it never did before September 11. Terrorist attacks used to be the news of faraway countries — news that most Americans could conveniently ignore. The attacks on American soil were a tragic reminder that the United States is not immune. And in India, where over 400 people have been killed since 2006 in a series of bomb blasts across the country, “the scourge of terrorism gets worse by the day”, in one resident’s words. Whether the world is actually a scarier place on the whole now than it was, say, 200 years ago, we can’t pretend to know. It would probably depend a lot on who you asked. The threats — real or imagined — facing each generation always seem more pressing and dangerous than anything that’s come before. And that’s what has always motivated us to make exceptions to the rules — the sense that this time, it’s different. When fear and power combine, things get even scarier. That’s the climate that led to the atrocities at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where prisoners have been subjected to a variety of cruel and unusual punishments since the US government opened the detention centre in 2002. The Batla House shoot-out in Delhi took place out of the eyes of the public. And that’s exactly why it deserves to be investigated. It could be that the police report is 100 per cent accurate: Six officers stormed an apartment in Jamia Nagar, a shoot-out ensued and two of the masterminds behind the September 13 New Delhi bombings were killed in the crossfire. Those demanding an impartial judicial inquiry into the incident say the police story doesn’t make sense. Some say it was a governmentorchestrated execution. It’s been widely reported that “encounter killings” are a common extrajudicial tactic for dealing with the problem of terrorism. The police officer who died that day, M C Sharma, had reportedly killed 35 terrorists and 40 other criminals in his 19-year career. (Which begs the question: Doesn’t Sharma’s death prove that a shoot-out took place?) Government must be transparent in its response to terrorism. The public has a right to know what happened on that day. And even the worst among us — the alleged criminals and terrorists — have a right to due process. That includes the right to a fair and speedy trial, the right to a proper defence and the presumption of innocence until a person is proven guilty. It is these safeguards that give a democracy its backbone. The shoot-out no doubt came as welcome news to many, who thought, “Good. Two less terrorists.” But that’s an emotional response to a problem that we must approach rationally. It’s in our darkest times — and it doesn’t get much darker than wartime — that we are most susceptible to error. We cannot allow our fear to cloud our judgment. We cannot accept this fatally flawed notion that the ends always justify the means in the so-called “war on terror”. Or we will doubtless be judged by history for our mistakes.