By TwoCircles.net News Desk,
New Delhi: Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Group and Association for Protection of Civil Rights have summarily rejected the NHRC enquiry report on the Batla House encounter, which gave a clean chit to the Delhi Police.
In the 30-page report the NHRC said that no human right was violated in the Batla encounter and that the police opened fire only in their self defence. The state human rights body said that on the basis of the “material placed before us, it cannot be said that there has been any violation of human rights by the actions of police”.
The JTSG and APCR has sought to know about the material on which the NHRC based its finding as the rights body did not hear the families of those killed in the encounter, the neighbors and civil and human rights organizations.
“Indeed, we would like to know what material was placed before the NHRC for inspection. The NHRC enquiry into the case, one will remember, came far too late, and that too at the insistence of the High Court. For months, the NHRC refused to take any initiative to independently enquire into the ‘encounter’ which several civil rights groups, including JTSG, deemed suspect. The NHRC enquiry was carried out in an inexplicably secret manner; even applications by residents of Azamgarh to depose before the Commission were not acknowledged by the NHRC. If people of Azamgarh, the family members of the accused and killed boys, civil rights groups who have been working and campaigning on the issue were never heard by the Commission, we wonder what was the material placed before the Commission,” JTSG leaders Manisha Sethi, Adeel Mehdi and Tanweer Fazal said in a statement. The group has been in the front to expose the loopholes in the police version about the encounter. It staged several protests and at times had to face the brunt of the police.
“It appears that NHRC, like the Lieutenant Governor prior to this, was satisfied by hearing the police version alone. The JTSG Report, Encounter at Batla House: Unanswered Questions, a damning indictment of the police version had been submitted to the Commission earlier this year. By ignoring all contrary voices, the NHRC has proved itself to be a brazenly partisan body, and damaged its own standing and independent credibility,” the group added.
APCR’s national coordinator Mahtab Alam also condemned the NHRC report, saying the rights body has been biased in its finding. The report just echoed the police theory, he maintained.