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| Indian police |
By Sanhita Ambast
An extraordinary admission highlights a serious problem.
Thounaojam Herojit Singh – a police officer from Manipur – made an extraordinary statement to the media recently. He said that in 2009 he was ordered by his superiors to kill Sanjit Meitei, an unarmed man suspected of being a “militant.” Meitei and a pregnant woman, Thokchom Rabina, were both killed in the incident, one of many such unlawful killings in Manipur over the past decades.
These killings provoked great outrage at the time they happened, and are currently the subject of a formal investigation. However, Herojit Singh’s statements point to a much larger problem: the lack of accountability for the large numbers of “fake encounter” deaths in Manipur.
The nomenclature of “fake encounters” serves to mask what these deaths really are: extra-judicial killings by security forces – police, paramilitary and the army, in the name of “national security,” resulting in the deaths of people suspected of being “militants,” “terrorists,” other criminal offenders, or for political or other reasons.
Statistics regarding numbers of such killings are hard to come by. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs claims in its most recent report on Northeast India that there sere 3867 incidents in Manipur between 2007 and 2015, in which 1205 “extremists” and 486 “civilians” were killed. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), there were no encounter deaths in India in 2014 and only two in 2013. In a judgment on this issue – the 2014 PUCL v State of Maharashtra case – even the Supreme Court raised doubts about the accuracy of the NCRB figures. A petition currently pending in the Supreme Court alleges that over 1500 civilians have been extrajudicially killed in Manipur since 1979. And these are just the cases that were either reported or documented. The full number remains unknown.
Read the full story at The Diplomat