Vivek Tiwari’s killing raises some searing questions on police accountability. The two Uttar Pradesh police constables who shot Tiwari, an Apple executive, dead for not stopping on their orders claimed that the act was done in self-defence as Tiwari tried to run their bike over after they asked him to stop. But some news reports on Monday claimed that the CCTV footage indicates the constables’ version of the incident may not hold. The state government has offered Tiwari’s grieving family some solace, in the form of monetary and non-monetary compensation and a promise of prompt action, including a CBI probe.
However, Tiwari’s killing was not an aberration. The UP police’s official apology indicates as much—even as it terms the killing “deviant, criminal behaviour”, it also stresses on a commitment to “wean out such rogues in uniform”. It recognises the need for action at a wider, perhaps systemic, level where trigger-happy cops are brought to book to discourage abuse of authority.
Many commentators have linked the Tiwari killing to the spurt in encounters in Uttar Pradesh—the quasi-official endorsement of encounters as an appropriate crime control response, they have argued, precipitates a killing like Tiwari’s where cops shoot even at the mere assumption of criminal conduct. Whether or not it is the “encounter culture” that is to blame for the killing, it is clear that cops need to be held to greater accountability for their action.
In the Rakbar Khan lynching, it emerged later that the police took Khan to the police station first before taking him to the hospital which was a stone’s throw from where Khan had been fatally assaulted by a mob, stopping for tea on the way. In the Meerut case that ruled the headlines recently, cops assaulted and flung insults at a girl who had sought police help for herself and a friend. Such disregard for the role as protectors of civilians, and an utter lack of sensitivity towards responsible policing, is not just a UP police syndrome; chances are, it is endemic in the other states as well. Tiwari’s killing is perhaps a reminder for policymakers of the urgent need to make cops accountable.
