The Decision To Order an Inquiry - Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab (CIIP)

E. The Decision To Order an Inquiry

The cases in which the court responded positively to the petitioners’ allegations provide guidelines for how the judiciary could have approached the other petitions. The judiciary either caught the police in obvious contradictions or evaluated the petitioners’ allegations in light of the police’s tendency to fabricate evidence, from FIRs, to post mortem reports, to investigations.

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In his court order in Ram Chand Singh v. Punjab, Justice M. L. Singhal scrutinized the standard police story of an encounter with militants while going for recovery of weapons with the detainee, and the detainee’s subsequent escape:

It is unbelievable that if there is an armed encounter and Gurmel Singh would try to flee, there would not be even a scratch so far as the police people are concerned . . . . It is not believable that the Constable who had handcuffed an accused person with the hook of the handcuffs attached to his belt could permit the detained person to escape without either receiving injuries himself or inflicting injuries on the escaping prisoner.[112]

Harjinder Kaur and Pritam Singh v. Punjab shows how extreme the police responses had to be to capture the judge’s attention.[113] In his inquiry report, the sessions judge wrote:

According to [Inspector Sanvir Singh], the [Constable’s] belt buckle was hit by a fire shot. Thus . . . the buckle was broken after the fire shot hit the same. It is also in his statement that Santokh Singh [the disappeared] and Harjinder Singh [Constable] were in a gypsy . . . that . . . was bullet proof. Thus when some unidentified persons had opened firing upon the police party, it is not understood as to why Santokh Singh who was attached to the belt of Harjinder Singh, was taken out.[114]

It was also unlikely that the constable would not have sustained an injury, and that no one was injured by the 400 to 500 shots allegedly fired by the assailants.

Some justices pointed out the irrationality of taking the detainee for recovery of weapons in the middle of the night. In his examination of a witness, Inspector Gopal Singh suggested problems in the police’s response to the alleged encounter killing: Did officers send a wireless message when the encounter occurred? Did they take photos of dead bodies? Did they inform the relatives of the deceased? Where were the bodies cremated?[115] Judges also cited the police’s failure to follow the Punjab Police Rules or to produce any proof identifying the victim.[116]

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