The barbaric >attack on the Central Jail in Dimapur , Nagaland, on March 5, in which a prisoner, Syed Sarif Khan, was forcibly brought out, stripped, paraded and killed by a mob, is shocking and trumps all past raids on jails in terms of savagery. Breaking into jails is often done with the motive of getting an inmate released in an unauthorised manner from lawful custody. In Dimapur, however, the prisoner was under investigation for alleged rape, and was abducted, ostensibly, to secure instant justice for the rape victim.
Khan was originally described as an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh. But subsequent reports said he was a lawful Indian citizen. The mischievous propaganda to present him as an outsider had something to do with the violence inflicted on him. It is now known that Khan was, in fact, married to a Naga girl, and the victim of the alleged rape was his wife’s cousin. Khan had allegedly raped the girl on February 23 and was arrested the following day.
> Read The Hindu editorial: Vigilantism in Dimapur
Disenchantment The incident was unmistakably a reaction to the hard realities of the courtroom. It highlighted the popular perception that under the current dispensation a person charged even with a grave crime can easily get away, taking advantage of the impractical nature of the Indian Evidence Act which demands conclusive proof to establish the guilt of anyone arraigned by the state. There is the additional public belief that the play of money, muscle power and political patronage in a trial court cannot be discounted. In essence, the Dimapur incident was an indicator of the disenchantment with the way our system responds to crime and its perpetrators.
The objective of all public discourse in such matters should be aimed at plugging at least some of the many loopholes that enable manipulation of the legal process, before and after a court takes cognisance of a crime. This is especially in the context of the shockingly low percentage of convictions in rape cases. (According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were about 33,000 cases of rape registered in 2013. Only 27 per cent of these succeed in court. More significantly, there was a 35 per cent increase in the incidence of rapes over the previous year.) Barring a few sensational cases, rapes are about the most badly investigated cases. Trial is tortuous, extending to several years, and this is attributable to collusion between the police, prosecutors and defence lawyers. It is also common knowledge that victims are put to great stress and intimidation in coming out with all the facts. They are an easy prey for the defence lawyer. This is the pathetic state of affairs that drives even the mildest of crime victims to react the way in which the unlawful assembly in Dimapur did.
Even the most hardened of us will find it difficult to condone the Dimapur savagery. The prisoner was taken in a procession for nearly eight kilometres on a public thoroughfare. The unlawful assembly went unchecked until it reached a clock tower spot in central Dimapur where the victim just folded up.
It would be preposterous for us to describe this violence as merely mindless. Mobs do not have a mind; they invariably act on impulse. There is a report that there were a number of schoolchildren in the Dimapur crowd. If this is true, what kind of a new generation of citizens are we raising? Has not the nation failed here egregiously?
The whole incident smacked of a lack of civilisation that we normally associate with only a few regions in the world such as Saudi Arabia, where those guilty of adultery are stoned. But the Dimapur episode takes the cake for its cruelty, especially because some doubts have been raised about the genuineness of the charge against Khan.
There are two aspects of the incident that are intimately linked with the state of the current criminal justice system. At least a week had lapsed since Khan was arrested and lodged in prison before the attack took place. It is hard to believe that the incident was triggered by a sudden event. Resentment against Khan was probably building up over several days. This must have been known to the local police force, which could have initiated preventive action in the form of a further strengthening of jail security. Known trouble mongers, who were organising themselves for an assault on the prison, could also have been warned, and some key leaders taken into custody. First reports do not indicate either was done. This was, therefore, a failure of the intelligence and enforcement of law.
The second failure was that of the police who were clearly outnumbered during the mob violence. They resorted to firing in order to control the mob, during which one person was killed. There is no indication that the firing was either timely or effective. If it was, the damage could have been minimised and the life of a badly mauled prisoner could have been saved.
All this is in the realm of speculation now. The State government has >initiated an enquiry . Three key officials — the District’s Deputy Commissioner (District Collector as he is known in the Southern States), Superintendent of Police, and Senior Superintendent of Jail in-charge of the Central Jail — have been suspended. This is a normal knee-jerk reaction from a government that has been caught for its incapacity and failure. The objective of such peremptory action is to buy peace from an agitated society. Its value is almost nothing. It is not anybody’s case that Khan should not have been arrested and investigated. It is our case that in a constitutional democracy, one which is guided by the rule of law, the ultimate arbiter of destinies of those arraigned for crime should be the courts and courts alone. It is an entirely different matter that a large chunk of us is dismayed by a few recent happenings in the judiciary, especially at the grass roots level. The criminal justice system comprises not only the judiciary, but the police, prosecutors, the prison service, experts in the area of forensic medicine and public prosecutors representing the State. If all of them do not perform their roles together as a team and in a professional manner, but make themselves vulnerable to political pressure and personal greed, we have weak links in the system that are available for exploitation by those out of sync with law and its administration.
Preventing Dimapurs The Dimapur incident reveals chinks in prison security, especially in smaller towns. While there is an obvious need to expand prisons in the context of a permanent shortage of space, can we not build good technology to make jail facilities proof against mob attacks? Blueprints should be available for this exercise. But then States will have to find the resources. The Centre can definitely help, if it has not already done so.
Finally, it is the image of the criminal justice system that receives a battering from incidents such as this. Unacceptably low standards of investigation of rapes by a few incompetent and highly corrupt police officers, tendentious cross-examinations of victims and key witnesses by some defence lawyers with the purpose of destroying the credibility of victims, and a subordinate judiciary that is ever ready to pick holes in the prosecution story are all irritants which have destroyed victim confidence in the system. As long as this combination of factors remains, Dimapurs will continue to happen.
(R.K. Raghavan is a former CBI Director.)
