Two weeks back, the Supreme Court asked the Manipur government an awkward question: “If you think it was a valid encounter then why are you paying compensation?” It was referring to the death of Mohammad Azad Khan, aged about 12. Family and neighbours say Azad was reading the papers with a friend on his verandah when he was dragged away by security forces. His relatives were reportedly locked up as he was beaten up and shot dead.


According to the Manipur police, officers of the Assam Rifles claimed they had information about armed militants hiding in the area. Security forces closing in on the house said they saw two boys fleeing into the fields beyond. When they were pursued, the boys apparently broke cover and opened fire as they ran in two different directions. So the soldiers returned fire. But an inquiry by a district court found an FIR had already been filed against Azad before his death. It accused the pre-teen of grave offences under the Arms Act and claimed he belonged to a banned militant organisation.


Azad died in 2009. Five years later the Manipur High Court ordered the state government of Manipur to pay Rs 5 lakh in compensation to his family. But no security personnel have been held to account for his death. The police reportedly refused to register a case against security forces.


As the Supreme Court told off the Manipur government on August 10, it asked if “payment of compensation was the end of the matter”.


Compensation as cover up

In the three major theatres of insurgency, the Northeast, Jammu and Kashmir and the Naxal-hit areas of central India, compensation occupies contested territory. In most cases, it is hard won, wrangled out of the concerned state government after a court order or action by the National Human Rights Commission. Even this recognition of loss is important. For the one case in which compensation was paid, there are about 22 cases where the government has been evading payment in spite of the NHRC's recommendations, says Babloo Loitongbam, director of Human Rights Alert, an organisation pressing for the prosecution of extrajudicial killings.  Whether it is an encounter death or an insurgent killing, the state is duty bound to provide financial relief for the victim’s family. But the doling out of compensation has also come to stand for a certain blindness on the part of the government.


The entropic potential of an insurgency arises from the fact that the state has lost its monopoly over violence in the affected area. As it reacts with force to attacks from non-state quarters, the laws that bind state violence also wear thin. This is not news. Judicial inquiries as well as independent investigations have pointed to this pattern in insurgency hit areas.


A report by the Asian Centre for Human Rights, published in 2006, observed that the brutalities visited on local populations in the course of the Naxal movement came from state as well as non-state sources:




“The ‘Guidelines /Procedures to be followed in dealing with deaths occurring in Encounters’ of the National Human Rights Commission of India were developed based on systematic extrajudicial executions perpetrated by the Andhra Pradesh Police with impunity. There has been little difference between the security forces and the Naxalites in terms of lawlessness and violations of human rights.”



The Santosh Hegde committee, set up by the Supreme Court in 2013 to investigate six alleged fake encounters in Manipur, found the use of “disproportionate force” by security forces in each case.


In spite of the growing evidence, this particular habit of violence has remained largely unacknowledged by governments at the state or the Centre. Compensation often participates in this cover up, with monetary relief being used to elide questions of blame, to avoid charges of criminal culpability on the part of security forces. There are several ways in which this deliberate blindness operates.


All the dead were militants

The terrains of insurgency are strewn with the bodies of “militants” like 12-year-old Azad in Manipur and 17-year-old Javed Ahmad Magray, last seen studying in his room in Kashmir’s Budgam district in 2003. With security forces under pressure to show results, with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act providing legal protection to the army in J&K and the Northeast, and with gallantry awards to incentivise the killing of insurgents, military and paramilitary personnel are not too particular about distinguishing between militant and ordinary civilian.


The court martial of five officers involved in the Machil encounter of 2010, where three Kashmiri youths were killed and passed off as Pakistani militants, was a rare acknowledgment of this fact by military authorities. Mostly, the state and security apparatus choose to look the other way. But it is an ill-kept secret. At times, to quell the public clamour over a particular incident, the government has been drawn into a bizarre process of paying compensation for the deaths of those it called Maoists and militants.


Take the case of 16-year-old Meena Khalkho, a tribal girl who was shot in an alleged encounter in Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district in 2011. The police had claimed she was a Maoist and a medical report produced shortly after her death alleged she had “habitual sexual contact”, an account supported by Nankiram Kanwar, home minister of Chhattisgarh. But then the state government provided compensation of Rs 2 lakh for her family and a government job for her brother.


It is only in 2015, four years after her death, that a judicial inquiry concluded Meena Khalkho was not a Maoist. She had been raped, tortured and shot at close range. Murder charges have been filed against 25 police personnel and last month the judicial panel’s report was tabled in the Chhattisgarh assembly. Now the Chhattisgarh government will have to answer the same question asked of Manipur: what exactly was it paying compensation for earlier, when it held the encounter was genuine?


All the killers were militants

If all the dead were insurgents, the official version of events would suggest all the killers were insurgents too. In Manipur and in Chhattisgarh, the police have simply refused to file complaints against security personnel. So the accused are never soldiers, police or paramilitary personnel. They are always Maoists and militants.


Take the case of Bheema Nuppo of Rewa in Chhattisgarh, shot and killed while he was out collecting twigs for fencing. Women from the village told a fact finding team of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties that they had seen security forces gather around the area in the morning and his wife says she saw them shooting Bheema. But when she went to file an FIR, the police advised her to say that Naxalites were responsible. That would make her eligible for a handsome amount in compensation, they reportedly told her. She stuck by her story but the FIR still claims murder by “unknown uniformed Naxalites”.


This refusal to recognise state violence in conflict zones has been institutionalised. Chhattisgarh’s  state policy contains elaborate guidelines for compensation in cases of Naxal violence – Rs 100,000 for loss of life, Rs 50,000 for injuries and Rs 20,000 for damage to property. But there are no provisions for those killed in firing by security forces or by the Salwa Judum, the vigilante armies once raised by the state.


Collateral damage

If neither the dead nor the accused can be proved to be insurgents, the story often handed out is one of collateral damage, civilians killed in the crossfire between rebel and security forces. In an area affected by violent insurgencies, such tragedies do occur. But the term crossfire suggests a rain of bullets that seem to come from nowhere and do not care where they land.  It does not account for more deliberate acts of violence, more precise culpability.


The Human Rights Watch records how, in 2004, soldiers of the Rashtriya Rifles summoned five boys in Kashmir’s Budgam district, including 17-year-old Zohar Ahmad Lone. They were taken to the village of Naslapora, where two militants were holed up in a house. Zohar and the others were told to go ask them to surrender. When the militants opened fire, Zohar started running and was shot by soldiers waiting outside, who might have mistaken him for one of the militants. The government paid his family compensation, as is the practice in crossfire deaths. But the soldiers’ role in involving the boys in an armed encounter and putting them at risk was never addressed.

While compensation is much needed, why is it that the way it's dispensed, the caveats that come with it, make it sound like hush money paid to cover up the excesses of security forces? Both Loitongbam and Sudha Bharadwaj, general secretary of the PUCL in Chhattisgarh, rue the lack of FIRs in the cases, most of which are not even recognised as crimes by the government. The armed forces involved, they feel, should be charged under Section 302, murder.

In areas hit by insurgency, the state needs to establish itself as a legitimate force that has earned its right to govern. The most important way to do so is to follow the rule of law and probe infractions by armed forces that are primarily there to keep the peace. Compensation, to answer the court's question, cannot be the end of the matter.