RGV Blog

With the arrest of Pradeep Sharma the encounter cop and the suspension of Daya Nayak and the transfer and designation changes of various other cops who worked in the encounter squad, the encounter squad as we knew it and understood it over the years has been completely disbanded and as of now non-existent. The only thing that now exists are the enquiries that are being done by the various Government agencies on the squad’s so-called extra judicial killings.

The term extra judicial killing is very pertinent as the need for the so-called encounter killings comes only when the existing judiciary system completely fails to bring the criminals to book.

If and when the law and order reaches a state of high deterioration the existing judiciary system will fail which will put the police under duress from the political system and they will have no choice but to take extreme steps which will create extreme men and extreme situations. Then when things reach to a normalcy all those extreme men who rose up to the situation to save the system become victims of that very same system and this is the highly ironical cycle of the powers within.

The so-called encounter killings happen when the police strongly believe that an individual is definitely a killer but they cannot prove that in a court of law thus ensuring detention and punishment. But since they are under compulsion to save the society from those men, they are forced to kill them in the so-called fake encounters.

Rumour has it that they also do it sometimes to silence a guy from opening his mouth in the court which can cause harm to some higher ups both in the Police department and the Government with regards to their own individual connections with the criminal world.

It also is supposed to happen when a cop starts developing a nexus with one particular gang and either as a favour to it or because of being paid for it he starts eliminating members of the other gangs.

And lastly and most horrifically he could also be doing it for his own personal reasons in terms of his pride, ego and sometimes just for plain one-up man ship.

All the above reasons whether they are true or not, many among us readily believe them to be true and this is because we can connect to the mind state of those people who are put in those kind of positions and situations.

A Police Officer lamented to me how his department just uses him and officers like him when the going is bad and once done just wants to wash its hands off.

A senior Police Official told me that “Even though the judiciary fails, we just can’t fake encounters. A doctor is not supposed to treat the patient by over medication and also there is a difference between the police systems intention and an individual police officers interpretation of it. If a few police officers due to their ego and greed try to become bigger than the system they are bound to end up without their jobs or even in jails”.

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, said Bernard Shaw in the context of political leaders. But in spirit this is also true for both the underworld and the policeworld.

It is always the organizational difficulties and the politics within the organization which give rise to various complications between individuals in any organization.

Inspite of both the worlds working on different sides of the law, whatever kinds of problems exist within an underworld organization the same set of problems exist even within a police organization by the very nature of their functions.

If you read and hear the stories of Police Officers accusing each other of various crimes and when things reach even to the extent of the unprecedented incident of a Police Commissioner himself being arrested, we can clearly see that the lines drawn in between the men within the department are very thin.

Society at large wants to just have a peaceful existence, a criminal world is trying to disrupt it and a policeworld is trying to protect it. But ironically the forces of both the worlds are identical in nature with respect to their individual egos, ambitions and conflicts.

But then we have to realize and understand that they are all human beings at the end of the day just like any of us and they are all as vulnerable to any and every emotion that any of us can ever get and will be subjected to.

With my long understanding of both the psychological and logistical aspects of both the policeworld and the underworld through my various contacts and sources in and outside the Police department over the past decade, if in my film “Company” I dealt with the complexities of an underworld organization, I feel it’s high time I make a film on the complexities of the policeworld organization. The issue of the encounter cops will only form a small part of it and it would largely deal with the internal problems between the various departments of the police and more so with the internal problems between the people of the same department.

I decided to call this film “Company 2 – The other side”.