Most police forces are reducing use of lethal force — and shedding communal partisanship.
Six months ago, the police raided an apartment in New Delhi’s Jamia Nagar. Two alleged terrorists and a police officer died. By the standards a violence-scarred nation has become accustomed to, the event was unremarkable. But the Jamia Nagar deaths had an exceptional impact, precipitating charges that police forces across India were operating a large-scale shoot-to-kill policy directed at Muslims: a communal project, it was claimed, that was being camouflaged as counter-terrorism.
Participants at an October 2008 convention in New Delhi, for example, declared that there was “a concerted effort by the Indian police, intelligence agencies and certain political parties to portray all members of the Muslim community as ‘terrorists and extremists’ — to be arbitrarily arrested, tortured and killed in fake encounters.”
Members of the Coordination Committee of Muslim Organisations — an alliance made up of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the All-India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, the Jamiat Ullema-e-Hind, the All-India Milli Council and the Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadis — went further, demanding that during a “search operation in any Muslim locality, at least one-third of the raiding force must consist of officers belonging to the minority community, and minority elders of the affected area should be taken into confidence.”
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