On 17 September 2009, Shamima, the mother of a 19-year-old woman killed by the police just over five years ago, reached New Delhi. She had set out from her home 2,000 kilometres away in a low-income suburban neighbourhood in Mumbai to file a petition before India’s Supreme Court. On 15 June 2004, a police raiding party had shot Ishrat Jahan, Shamima’s daughter, before dawn in Ahmedabad, the capital city of Gujarat state. The police claim that Ishrat and three men they killed that night with her were terrorists of a Pakistani outfit. Travelling in a car, these ‘terrorists’ had fired when the police challenged them. The police said the group planned to assassinate Narendra Modi, a politician who runs the government in Gujarat. Modi is widely accused of allowing his administration to stand by and permit – or even actively connive in – the killings of more than 2,000 Muslims in early 2002, during one of the worst-ever instances of ethnic cleansing in India by rightwing Hindu mobs.
Ishrat’s case is one of the thousands that represent what has gone horribly wrong with India’s counterterrorism strategy, which is now undeniably driven by nothing more than an alarming propensity in the State and its various arms – certainly the police and even the judiciary – to target the Muslim community and randomly brutalize its members. In Ishrat’s case, a judicial officer in Ahmedabad reported on 7 September 2009 that, based on the findings of the Government’s own forensic agencies, the police were lying. The judge stated that Ishrat and her companions were not terrorists killed in an exchange of fire, an act widely known in India as an ‘encounter’. Instead, the judge said, the police had murdered Ishrat and the three men ‘in a systematic manner, cold-bloodedly, mercilessly and cruelly’. In short, there had been no ‘encounter’. They were simply killed elsewhere and their bodies brought to the location, where, hours later, reporters and cameras were brought in.
