Batla House: Through a filter

The film Batla House endorses uncritically any police action to ensure the nation’s safety and discredits civil society’s demands for institutional accountability.

A still from the movie ‘Batla House’.

T he latest addition to John Abraham’s long list of “national security” movies is Batla House , the dramatic presentation of the controversial real-life police encounter in a stereotypical Muslim ghetto in South Delhi. What happened in this operation on September 19, 2008, by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police in the L-18 building in Batla House has been shrouded in mystery, with a lot of questions by civil society activists remaining unanswered. For many, the operation, done in the wake of the serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008, symbolised the institutional scapegoating of Muslims in encounters or through incarceration under anti-terror laws.

While the jury is out on the degree of factual precision and neutrality in the film, it is certainly a shade better than the unidimensional propaganda films that have come to define the nature of political cinema these days. Still, it is very different from the critically acclaimed Article 15 , which courageously portrays inconvenient social realities. It is clear that the film takes a stance that favours the police. Notwithstanding the disclaimers of not intending to prejudice the administration of legal justice, the whitewashing of contentious incidents attempts to vindicate their subjects in the court of public opinion.

In the climactic courtroom scene, John Abraham’s stoic character (Assistant Commissioner of Police Sanjay Kumar, modelled on operation head Sanjeev Kumar Yadav) counters human rights lawyer Rajesh Sharma’s narrative that picks holes in the police investigation and questions their intention. The courtroom defence is full of patriotic punchlines, and nuance appears to be a definitive casualty.

The triumphant applause amongst the courtroom audience (and the cinema audience) signifies that it is not a Rashomon -like investigation of many truths. Clearly, Sanjay Kumar’s rhetorical statements such as “ Hum nahi kehte ki woh students nahi the. Magar kya woh beqasoor the ?” (We do not claim they were not students, but were they innocent?), show a concerted attempt to highlight a skewed version of facts that defends the legitimacy and necessity of the police encounter.

“In passive voice”

Ultimately, this is another example of a courtroom drama in a “passive voice” which omits critical facets of reality and narrates facts in a skewed manner. It is in passive voice as it conveys fixed assumptions to the members of the audience instead of engaging with them in a critical dialogue and letting them draw their own meaning.

The fact that the Independence Day release fared well at the box office means that the movie has appealed to the popular sentiment that wants to stand behind the beleaguered policemen.

The film forays into the aftermath of the police encounter in Batla House and shows how the righteous police personnel persist in their endeavour to ensure the nation’s safety despite all the resistance from “self-serving” civil society activists, “misguided” Muslim community members or opportunistic “secular” politicians. The central message of the film is that the grateful citizenry should not question the motives of the security agencies as they bear a huge human cost for their patriotic duty.

The attempt to highlight the human and emotional side of policemen’s lives seems limited to the rather underdeveloped role of Nandita, the wife of Sanjay Kumar. In a bid to arouse sympathy for the khaki-clad policemen by celebrating their unmeasured sacrifice, the film highlights the various survival and identity crises policemen face when they are under public scrutiny for their acts.

Sanjay Kumar’s speech in court justifying the violation of legal procedure in order to protect the rule of law, “ kanoon todkar kanoon ko bachana ”, does betray the sentiment that the police should be a law unto themselves.

It is important to underline the questions that the film fails (or ignores) to ask. There is also an urgent need to question the narrative that discredits any attempt to seek accountability from the police. The fact remains that much of the hardships and challenges, such as difficult living and working conditions that the police forces face, are because of the inordinate delay in implementing the 2006 Supreme Court directives on police reforms.

In fact, even the international non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch has criticised this legislative inertia and political indifference towards police reforms. In a report it documents the failings of State police forces that lack sufficient ethical and professional standards, are overstretched and outmatched by criminal elements, and are unable to cope with increasing demands and public expectations. The report explains how the systemic stratification between low- and high-ranking officers leads to lack of professionalism.

The film presents the cleavages between the street-smart Inspector, K.K. Verma (played by Ravi Kishen), and the suave senior, Sanjay Kumar. However, the film does not elaborate on how this leads to a hasty operation by Inspector Verma before he is ordered to do so by his superior. Had the film-makers chosen to delve deeper into this aspect of police management and asked serious questions, it might have put the spotlight on the long-pending demand for police reforms which include instituting sound accountability mechanisms, providing comprehensive training especially for lower-ranking officers, strengthening the crime-investigation curriculum at police academies, and providing better working conditions.

Encounter killings

The uncritical endorsement of “encounters” is alarming at a time when the police act with impunity. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, on an average, four encounters were reported every day in 2018 and the State government publicised this as a huge achievement despite strong criticism by the National Human Rights Commission. In 2012, while hearing a case involving encounter killings, the Supreme Court equated encounters by trigger-happy police personnel with state-sponsored terrorism.

Somehow, for a film released on Independence Day, the freedoms and procedural safeguards enshrined in the Constitution seem to be perverse externalities that impede national security efforts. This is in direct contravention with B.R. Ambedkar’s appeal to hold fast to civil liberties by having “paramount reverence for the forms of the Constitution”.

Constitutional citizens must be critical of the hyper-nationalist narrative of justifying the means by which the ends of national security are achieved. In a constitutional democracy, the ends do not justify the means, and the means are as sacred. In times when our liberal democracy is under threat, Justice H.R. Khanna’s statement in the Emergency-era ADM Jabalpur case holds true: “The history of personal liberty is largely the history of insistence upon procedure.”