Why the IGP’s mention of ‘crossfire’ is alarming

Every few days, we are reminded that our government, political parties, and institutions have learned nothing from past experience and remain incapable of abandoning their desire to repeat past mistakes. Our authorities repeatedly make it clear that they have no interest in making this state and its institutions citizen-centric. The recent remarks by the Inspector General of Police (IGP) provide ample reason for citizens to feel alarmed and for memories of past state violence to resurface.

On Monday, at the inauguration ceremony of the ‘Community Islamic Banking System’ in the capital’s Chawkbazar, IGP Md. Ali Hossain Fakir stated, “If crossfire is necessary, and if the government allows it, we will do just that. Accept that the police are needed from the cradle to the grave, and let me discharge my duties according to the law and the constitution.”

Debating whether police are necessary in society and the state is entirely pointless here. When we discuss that police must not violate human rights, steering that conversation towards the ‘necessity’ of the police serves only to sidestep our primary concern.

The ongoing discussion within civil society has never been about whether police are needed “from the cradle to the grave”; rather, it concerns how the police force exercises this role. The central question is whether they will construct a protective shield for citizens or become a lethal threat to them.

This brings us to our primary apprehension—crossfire. Since 2004, the question of how illegal, unconstitutional, or grave a human rights violation ‘crossfire’ or extrajudicial killing is has never truly been open to debate. From the outset, nearly all global human rights organisations have opposed and repeatedly condemned these practices. International bodies have even recommended banning RAB (which has now been dissolved and reconstituted as SRB) due to its involvement in extrajudicial killings.

Furthermore, the protests and resistance against such acts over the last decade and a half under the Awami League regime established a clear national consensus: the state cannot take a person’s life without due judicial process. Indeed, the right to life was one of the central demands of the July Uprising.

The IGP’s assertion that the police can execute crossfire if the government permits is, firstly, insulting to the country’s citizens. When an official paid by taxpayers’ money and sworn to serve the public expresses a desire to extrajudicially kill citizens, the reader can easily fathom how unconstitutional, humiliating, and terrifying that is.

Secondly, can he take a citizen’s life simply because the government desires it? Even if any law or constitutional provision were to grant permission to kill citizens in such a manner, why should citizens accept it?

Article 32 of the Constitution explicitly states, “No person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty save in accordance with law.” Nevertheless, certain loopholes persist in the phrasing of the constitution and the penal code, allowing state forces to attempt to ‘legitimise’ any extrajudicial killing. This explains why the language and logical structure of official press notes following extrajudicial killings remain identical under every regime.

This brings us to the second and most vital question—if a member of a state force commits an extrajudicial killing or a similar human rights violation, who investigates it? The IGP claimed that they possess internal “checks and balances”. In his words, “If one of our members commits an offence and we fail to take action, only then can you accuse us of failing to act against them.”

The IGP implies that action is taken whenever police personnel commit a crime. However, this assertion cannot be applied to instances of crossfire. While RAB’s name has been consistently associated with crossfire, the police force has also been deeply involved.

According to a report by the Centre for Governance Studies, between 2019 and 2021, the involvement of police forces, including the Detective Branch (DB), in extrajudicial killings stood at 48.05 per cent, exceeding RAB’s involvement of 31.9 per cent.

We have also seen evidence that crossfire incidents are not merely isolated “crimes” by individuals, but are systemic in nature. For instance, Pradip Kumar Das, the former Officer-in-Charge (OC) of Teknaf police station, was awarded the ‘Bangladesh Police Medal’ (BPM), the highest honour in the police force, in 2019 for encounters. All six outstanding achievements he cited to police headquarters to secure the award involved the death of suspects (Prothom Alo, 6 August 2020). In other words, as an institution, they do not even consider extrajudicial killings to be a “crime”. It is evident from the IGP’s statement that crossfire or extrajudicial killing is excluded from what they choose to classify as a crime.

If this is the stance of a force chief, the question of who investigates human rights violations becomes critical once again. It has been proven once more that they are fundamentally incapable of investigating events that their own chief does not view as crimes—and which he expresses a willingness to carry out if the government so desires.

Following immediate criticism of the police chief’s remarks, police headquarters issued a clarification yesterday, Monday. The explanation regarding the right to self-defence contained both the traditional phrasing of post-crossfire official press releases and a veiled warning. It served as a reminder that the police can take such actions under the guise of the “law” for self-defence.

Such statements from the head of a state force openly expose their mindset towards citizens. In many countries across the world, even when protests turn violent, police firing rarely results in fatalities. Yet here, our police chief publicly voices an interest for extrajudicial killings!

This remark proves that a colonial mindset remains deeply entrenched within the psychology and administrative structure of the force. In the wake of the mass uprising, a golden opportunity arose to fundamentally reform the police force into a citizen-friendly, service-oriented institution. Have we carelessly squandered it?

At a time when ensuring the protection of citizens’ lives and liberties ought to be the primary priority in post-uprising Bangladesh, we are instead forced to hear veiled threats of state-sanctioned violence coming directly from the highest office of a law enforcement agency.