Lessons from a killing in lucknow

Lessons from a killing in lucknow

Encounter killings produce abhorrent results.

The killing of Vivek Tiwari, an executive of Apple, by a policeman in the early hours of Saturday in Lucknow, raises a number of troubling questions whose import goes far beyond the immediate circumstances of the shooting. At the core of the incident is the nature of the relationship between the citizenry and the police, in general, and specifically in Uttar Pradesh. It is not inconceivable that policemen on patrol would hail a vehicle parked on the road late at night. But such is the trust that the average citizen, meaning someone who cannot immediately establish his VIP status or a link to a VIP, has in the police that he or she would rather run rather than submit himself or herself to the orders of a cop. Vivek Tiwari tried to flee and one of the two-man patrol on a bike shot him.

As he lay bleeding in the car, the policemen fled, instead of taking him to a hospital and taking his companion into custody for the questioning allegedly for which they had confronted the two in the car in the first place. It was half an hour later that another police team found the two and took the bleeding man to the hospital, where he died. If these two trigger-happy UP cops had acted as policemen are supposed to, Vivek Tiwari would not have died. Was Tiwari’s reluctance to follow the policemen’s orders an idiosyncratic reaction? Or did it have something to do with the reputation cops in Uttar Pradesh have acquired after adopting their ‘encounter’ strategy for crime control? How come the police in Uttar Pradesh determined their foot soldiers’ guilt in a jiffy and dismissed them from service without a formal inquiry?

The incident shatters the illusion that the middle class tends to nurse, that strong-arm efforts to rein in crime using violence outside the ambit of the law affect only the sort who deserve what they get, while the good guys hold their nose and hope for an early end to the phase of strongman tactics. When policemen are encouraged to behave like killers, the innocent, too, suffer. Due process might be slow and boring. Shortcuts in governance will produce collateral damage and no lasting gain.