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THE report of the Justice Sadashiva Committee, set up to inquire into the allegations of encounter deaths, rape, torture, illegal detention and other excesses committed by the Special Task Forces (STFs) of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu against tribal people and villagers during their decades-long operation to catch the forest brigand Veerappan has indicted the STF units on three counts: the killing of 66 persons in encounters; detention of 121 persons under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act or TADA; and extraction of confessional statements from those arrested under the Act.
The two-member committee with Justice A.J. Sadashiva, a former Judge of the Karnataka High Court, as its Chairman had C.V. Narasimhan, former Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), as the other member. Copies of the report were made available to the complainants in October 2005.
Chapter V of the report, entitled "Encounter Deaths", provides a clinical analysis of the killing of 66 persons between October 3, 1990, and July 18, 1998. Of these, 38 deaths took place in Karnataka and 28 in Tamil Nadu. The panel, which obtained the "detailed opinion" of N.G. Prabhakar, Assistant Director, Forensic Science Laboratory, Bangalore, who is also a ballistics expert, classified the deaths as resulting from "contact range", "medium range" and "long range". A few persons were killed at point-blank range. In all the 66 cases, the injuries were concentrated on the front or back of the head or torso. This was evident from the location and description of wounds in the post-mortem certificates.
"... There is no indication of any firing at random in an oblique direction, which would normally have been the case if firing had been resorted to in a regular encounter involving rapid criss-cross movements of all the persons engaged in the thick of the encounter," says the report.
According to the report, Prabhakar found that in six cases the wounds had signs of firing within contact range, that is, within two yards from the skin of the victim. Twenty-three bodies bore signs of medium-range firing (between two yards and 200 yards from the skin) and three had signs of long-range firing (between 300 yards and 600 yards). Of the six persons wounded within contact range, the report found the cases of Putta, Mani alias Soudhamani, Papathi, Kumatsa and Kunjappa "very significant".
It says, "In the case of Putta, a gunshot entry wound was found on the roof of the mouth, indicating the likelihood of having been shot through the mouth at contact range. In the cases of Smt. Mani and Smt. Papathi, one entry wound had signs of firing at point-blank range. In the case of Kumatsa, one entry wound indicates likely firing from within three inches of the body. In the case of Kunjappa, one entry wound indicated likely firing from within nine inches of the body."
(Papathi was the wife of Sethukuli Govindan, who was Veerappan's companion until the last and was killed along with the sandalwood smuggler-turned-poacher on October 18, 2004, by the Tamil Nadu STF.)
Local officials inquiring into these deaths failed to ascertain the views of the relatives of the victims. "Non-examination of the close relatives of the deceased in all the 66 cases of encounter deaths listed by the two STFs throws doubt on the credibility of the entire process... ," says the report.
Justice Sadashiva and Narasimhan write, "We are of the opinion that the allegations made by some of the witnesses regarding the veracity of the encounters, as recorded by the police, cannot be totally brushed aside as baseless."
As many as 121 persons were arrested under TADA and detained at the Central Prison, Mysore. Seventy of them were able to secure bail and 51 languished in jail for several years until September 29, 2001, the date on which the cases were disposed of. All the accused were acquitted, barring 14, including one on bail. "The prolonged and unjustified detention of 38 accused persons could have perhaps been avoided if the State review committee for TADA cases had fully examined their cases," says the report. The panel recommended that all the 38 persons acquitted by the special court deserved to be compensated "for the enormous distress they had suffered by [their] prolonged detention in jail, whether or not they appeared before the panel, and whether or not they alleged torture by the STF".
The panel asked the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to fix the quantum of relief in cases where it recommended payment of compensation.
The report quotes from a TADA court judgment on the accused being "roped in" on the basis of their mere confessional statements, without any other evidence. Forty-six detainees were acquitted of all charges (including the charges under TADA), since their confessional statements, as recorded by the police, were the only piece of evidence against them and that was not held reliable. The TADA court's observations, the report maintains, "lend support to the general version given by most witnesses before the panel about their [detainees] having been taken into custody by the STF on a much earlier date than mentioned in their records, kept in illegal custody for a long period when they were subjected to humiliating treatment and torture, and later produced in court on a false charge under TADA, merely to legitimise their arrest".
The report reveals that the STF units had not been declared police stations. This means that they had no power to detain or arrest people. When the panel specifically asked the Directors-General of Police of the two States whether their STF units had been declared police stations with a duly notified jurisdiction covering the area of their operation, they replied that no such declaration had been made. The argument of Walter I. Dawaram, the then DGP of Tamil Nadu and STF coordinator, that he had the power of arrest throughout the State because his jurisdiction was over the entire State and, therefore, all the personnel under his charge also had this power of arrest, "does not appear valid", the report says.
"The two STFs, in this case, had merely functioned as armed forces and did not have formally notified jurisdiction for exercise of normal police powers of arrest, search, etc... . Both the State governments seem to have erred in this aspect when the STFs were constituted. Headquarters of each STF should have been formally notified as a police station under Section 2(s) of the Cr.P.C. [Code of Criminal Procedure] and its area should have been specified suitably to cover the entire area of Veerappan's operations... ," it adds.
In the chapter entitled "Relief to victims", the report notes that there was no acceptable evidence to pinpoint the identity of individual STF personnel who had committed the misdeeds and that it would be impossible to fix their identity at this stage and distance of time. However, it says, "there is absolutely no doubt about the suffering and distress undergone by the victims". The panel recommended payment of substantial monetary compensation to all the victims for "all the harm, distress and damage suffered by them on account of the excesses committed by the STF".
The Karnataka and Tamil Nadu STFs were set up in April 1990 and August 1992 respectively, with specially trained police commandos, to catch Veerappan, who operated in a forest area of a few thousands square kilometres, bordering Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Of about 140 persons Veerappan murdered in the 1980s and 1990s, 44 were personnel of the Forest Department, the police forces and the STFs. One victim was a Border Security Force jawan. Veerappan and his gang attacked police stations (at Ramapura in Karnataka and Vellitirupur in Tamil Nadu) and looted firearms. Twenty-one persons, including two STF commandos, police informers and forest watchers, were killed when they detonated a landmine on April 9, 1993, near Palar bridge in Erode district of Tamil Nadu. The blast tore apart two buses (Frontline, November 19, 2004). Veerappan also resorted to abductions for ransom.
When pressure mounted on the two State governments to capture Veerappan, they set up separate STFs and later a joint command. Soon after the two units began their operations, tribal people living in and near the area of their operations and human rights activists brought up several complaints. They charged that STF personnel had arrested and detained many innocent persons, committed rape on women, tortured men and women in "workshops" at the M.M. Hills camp of the Karnataka STF, administered electric shocks at various parts of their body and beat them up badly on the mere suspicion that they were helping Veerappan in his activities or supplying him foodstuff. The NHRC also received complaints that many innocent persons were killed by the STFs in the name of "encounters" and many more were detained under TADA without trial.
In November 1997, A. Mahaboob Batcha, managing trustee of the Society for Community Organisation Trust (SOCO Trust), Madurai, Tamil Nadu, transmitted a letter to the NHRC from Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, retired Judge of the Supreme Court, containing allegations of violations of human rights by the two STFs. V.P. Gunasekaran, general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Tribal People's Welfare Association (TTPA), wrote to the NHRC in November 1997, alleging torture of villagers by the STF and registration of cases under TADA against people belonging to a certain caste. Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) founder Dr. S. Ramadoss, three Members of Parliament and two legislators from Tamil Nadu wrote to the Commission in November 1998 on the plight of the 121 TADA detainees.
It was in this context that the NHRC set up the panel on June 28, 1999. The panel examined 243 witnesses, most of them tribal people and illiterate villagers living in interior forest areas. Twenty-eight officers of the two units deposed before the panel. The committee submitted its report on December 3, 2003. It was, however, made available in October 2005 following demands for nearly two years that it be made public.
In their response to the report, the STFs questioned the authority of the panel to conduct the inquiry. They argued that since the complaints were not filed within a year of the atrocities being committed, neither the panel nor the NHRC could inquire into the allegations because of the legal bar prescribed by Section 36(2) of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993. The STFs pointed out that while the complaints to the NHRC were preferred in 1997-98, the alleged acts of violation of human rights had taken place in 1993-94. Some members of the Karnataka STF challenged in the State High Court the constitution of the panel. The High Court, on November 20, 2001, dismissed their petitions.
The Tamil Nadu government, in its response, pointed out that since the report itself said that there was no acceptable evidence to pinpoint the identity of the individual STF personnel who had committed the misdeeds, "it would be well nigh impossible to establish any rationale for payment of compensation". The report "has gone far afield in recommending compensation even though its terms of reference were mainly to first establish specific liability which the panel has not been in a position to set out", it claimed. Besides, because of the passage of time and the change in the circumstances ending with the death of Veerappan and his gang, "most of the recommendations cannot be related to the present state on the ground and [they] lack application", it contended.
The Karnataka government claimed that there "is absolutely no evidence to show that the encounters were fake". Prabhakar was not called upon at any time to examine either the weapons or the wounds to suggest whether the persons were killed in fake or genuine encounters. It also claimed that any award of compensation to the families of members of the Veerappan gang killed in encounters would be "grossly unjust". It would set "a wrong precedent" and encourage terrorist and heinous criminal activities, it claimed.
The PMK, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) were quick to demand that the two State governments pay compensation to the victims as recommended by the panel. Ramadoss said the report had come up with "startling revelations"and that "it was painful that the Tamil Nadu and Karnataka governments are trying to dodge their responsibilities". N. Varadarajan, Tamil Nadu secretary of the CPI(M), demanded that severe action be taken against the STF personnel who violated human rights and sought compensation and jobs for the affected people. CPI State secretary D. Pandian praised the efforts of all those who had exposed "the excesses committed by the STFs". He insisted that the victims should be paid compensation.
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