I was sitting over lunch with a retired Karnataka DGP on that Thursday afternoon. He had at one time headed Prisons and also had a stint in central IB, so was serving up some macabre stories from the days when he headed one of the largest prisons of Bangalore, which held 5,000 prisoners—and for dessert, we scooped up a few heart-warming stories about hardened criminals. That was when the news broke: Vikas Dubey had surrendered at an Ujjain temple. We exchanged knowing glances. The police chief finally broke his silence. “It will be the stupidest thing for the police to kill him. But that will likely be his fate. In fact, protecting him from rivals or even allies who may want him exterminated and ensuring he doesn’t take his own life should be their utmost priority…so that they can investigate his modus operandi, his infrastructure, his informants, his nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and business associates, his money trail and so forth.” Barely eighteen hours later, there was another flash: Dubey had been killed. It strains credulity that a dreaded criminal who surrenders voluntarily unarmed will try to escape right after, grabbing a weapon from a policeman’s holster. The truth here is forever banished to the realm of conjecture. But what will stay even beyond the reach of that are the facts behind Dubey’s network: the powerful people under whose patronage he prospered, without whose help he could not have ambushed and killed eight policemen.
Among the many memories this dredged up, top of the pile is the still-vivid one of Andhra Pradesh cops killing all four accused in the Hyderabad gangrape-murder last year. The similarities are striking. At an obvious level, the mise en scene itself. The Hyderabad cops, incredibly, led the accused to the scene of the crime at 3:00 am without handcuffs. Now, the UP cops were transporting Dubey in a police van without securing him. The script thereafter seems so well-rehearsed that any kid could enact it blindfolded...an attempted break for freedom, and bullets shot from the back that often miraculously pierce the chest. So much for method and circumstances. The real underlying continuity, however, is psychological. It relates to the public validation, the sense of justice being done—indeed, even relief. People feel this is swift and well-deserved retribution for brutal, sadist criminals. Sure enough, social media was full of praise for the police both times. A blood-curdling, gory and unspeakable crime had been avenged.
Yes, like now, many had questioned the veracity of the government version then too. Among the sceptics were many distinguished retired police officers. Even in the Dubey case, one of the wives of the cops who lost his life in the ambush laid by the gangster said, “I feel happy Dubey paid the price, but how can you now investigate his nexus with people in power?” The sceptics mince no words: many civil society activists, lawyers, journalists and retired senior cops allege it was a stage-managed extrajudicial killing. Twitter is on fire with a flood of sceptical comments and jibes. Journalist Ravi Nair asked: “Why should a criminal who surrendered to the police try to escape? The story of Bal Narendra catching a crocodile is more believable.”
And yet, when I read the news, I heard myself saying ‘Thank God’. I was startled at my own reaction. There was a ghost lurking inside me too, a vigilante craving for the swift avenging of injustice! The sheer horror of the cruelty inflicted on the innocent girl in Hyderabad, the way her life was so wantonly extinguished, the inconsolable widows and children of the eight cops, the way they wept at the funeral…all this had shaken me to the core too, like everyone else. And the consequence, I could now see, was the rage rising in me presently. Though deeply aware that a crime cannot justify another crime, I found myself almost imperceptibly drawn to the edge, and couldn’t help feeling a sense of shame…and wonder.
What brings this about? Not too difficult to tease out this strand, really. After all, who has not cheered lustily when a John Wayne or a Rajnikant pummels his fists into the face of the villain, or when Clint Eastwood sprays bullets into the knees of the ‘Bad’ Lee Van Cleef or digs his cowboy boots with spurs right into evil’s face. In Sholay, when an enraged Dharmendra beats the ultimate villain to pulp and is about to kill him, the Thakur stops him: he has a spiked boot with which to dispense justice himself. A justice that’s inextricably bound up with revenge: coming from a retired policeman, this was vigilante justice at its best. The popular literary traditions of both West and East are embellished with vigilante heroes and stories of outlaws who do good. Always, the system itself is cruel, and you must step outside it to be good, to do good. It’s the staple of Indian cinema, in every language. Every road in our popular culture leads to that kerbside in Kanpur where jeeps overturn mysteriously, almost by force of public will.
Something about the jubilation of the crowds, the showering of petals on Hyderabad’s shooter cops and the open justifications issued by older ‘encounter’ heroes reminds me of the popular Netflix serial Dexter. Morgan Dexter, a forensic blood spatter analyst with the Miami Police, is an orphan—his mother was murdered with a chainsaw by drug dealers, and he grew up as an adopted child of a police officer. The double helix of revenge and the law is already formed. Dexter is a man possessed, on a mission to bring the most inhuman serial rapists and killers to justice. But sure enough, the apparatus of justice is weak and the baddies nearly always get to roam free again. No surprises from here on: he becomes a self-styled vigilante, egged on and counselled by his foster daddy. Blood samples and DNA tests offer a modicum of method, a self-validating trail towards extra-legal justice. Once having convinced himself of someone’s guilt, he executes them with cool, clinical efficiency and disposes of the body parts in the ocean. Dexter is an affable cop, a loveable hero, a normal guy with a nice girlfriend, a Robin Hood with a pleasing Yankee twang—you can’t help taking a liking to him. He caters to that deeply embedded demon in all of us. The one who wants the villain punished in this life. I found myself waiting with bated breath, almost desperate for Dexter to catch and execute the rapist-killer every time I watched the serial.
A smooth transition is offered to us—the cop as the nice guy, just like we like to imagine ourselves to be, one who’s moved by injustice and yet helpless because the justice system of which he’s a part doesn’t deliver justice. So the criminal must be made to bleed outside the system. But it’s never that simple. It’s actually injustice that bleeds across the spectrum. It’s crime that spreads. When a cop’s blood is on the hands of the gangster, the way they gang up and pursue him till he’s extinguished is right out of the feudal vendetta playbook—an ‘honour killing’. “Vigilantes often justify their actions as a fulfilment of the wishes of the community,” say studies. But ‘the wishes of the community’ are not necessarily driven snow. The patterns of social violence should be enough to make us vigilant about self-validating referrals to ‘community’ as the third umpire. It’s true that politicians, when in power, are loath to create robust, independent institutions. The answer can only be to bring enough pressure on them to act. Not to have that vacuum suck up all ethics in the rest of the landscape too. A grey world where we’re resigned to the fact that Hyderabad may take a decade in the courts. Where Dubey will become a file, or perhaps a Netflix series. To midwife the eternal rebirth of vigilantism in the public mind.
What we need is for the instruments of justice to fill the void. It’s about time institutions like the police and CBI are made truly independent of ruling parties. The BJP does not seem to be keen on this, nor the regional parties. And the Congress did little on this front either during its long rule since independence. We must force their hand collectively. And most urgently, we must audit our own emotions. Take Unnao, Nirbhaya, Hyderabad, the recent Tuticorin custodial deaths, and now the Dubey killing: we may be tempted to say, like John Bunyan in his novel, “Hanging is too good for him”. But we must beware. Howsoever cruel the crime, vigilante justice only leads to more abomination. A hazy trail transports us from there to the world of wanton lynchings, cow vigilantism, or mob killings on hearsay or driven by religious passions. The line between ordinary crime and mass social violence is pretty thin. Once the idea is instituted that the ‘public’ will deliver justice, it doesn’t stop at uniformed Rambos taking down a few baddies. While fighting monsters, we ourselves become monsters. There’s also the minor issue of innocence. Sometimes culpability is clear, sometimes not—even in a crime. In society, there are only innocents. As the retired police boss left my house, a shadow of sadness hovered on his face….
G.R. Gopinath is a writer and the founder of Air Deccan
