The People vs the Police

Ten dalits died when police fired on a crowd protesting the desecration of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s statue at Ramabai Nagar colony in north-east Mumbai on 11 July 1997. The incident deepened the dalit community’s sense of discrimination and its disenchantment not only with the main political parties but also its own faction-ridden leadership in Maharashtra. H owever, 12 years later, on 7 May, only Manohar Kadam a subinspector of the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) who ordered the firing was sentenced to life imprisonment by a special sessions court. The Mumbai High Court has granted him bail.

The then Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (SS-BJP) government had appointed the Justice S D Gundewar Commission of I nquiry to probe into the firing and also accepted the report that was submitted in December 1998. But follow-up action was not prompt. The commission dismissed the police’s “tanker theory” which claimed that the firing was inevitable as the crowd was a ttempting to set alight two oil tankers on the Eastern Express Highway. The police evidence of a three-minute long video tape allegedly shot by a resident of a building overlooking the scene and showing the crowd rushing towards the two tankers was dismis sed as doctored evidence. The Gundewar Commission r eport held Kadam responsible for “straightaway” opening fire without warning or even attempting to disperse the crowd through other means.