New Delhi: Pellet guns should not have been used at all, former home secretary G.K. Pillai has said, adding that riot protocol does not seem to have been followed in dispersing the crowd last week during the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)-led protests.
In an interview with ThePrint, Pillai said that while it is difficult to make an assessment till one sees the entire picture, “but looking at the overall situation, it would look as though there is, I think, a failure of intelligence…They should have anticipated that these crowds were going to be very large, especially on 20 July”.
According to Pillai, the protocol for handling such situations was also not followed. For instance, he pointed out that videos showed tear gas shells falling right in the crowd, which should not have happened. “They should have been on the outside, away from the crowd, because the canister itself can cause very severe damage if it hits somebody on the head,” he explained.
Pillai said he was “surprised” to see pellet guns being used.
“Pellet guns, to my knowledge, were used in 2010-11 in Kashmir, Srinagar, and… they caused much larger damage than anticipated. There was a review in the home ministry, and it was felt that the use of pellet guns should be avoided, and alternate weapons to the pellet guns were recommended by various committees and put. So I was… surprised to see pellet guns being used, which should not have been used at all,” he told ThePrint.
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‘Mixed signals’
In the interview, Pillai also spoke about the midnight crackdown on Baba Ramdev’s protest in 2011, at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan.
Ramdev had started a fast and yoga camp at Ramlila Maidan, protesting against corruption and black money in India. The police swooped down on him and his supporters a little after midnight, resorting to tear gas shells and a lathicharge to end his day-old indefinite hunger-strike over black money. Pillai was Union home secretary at the time.
Pillai now said that that protest should have been handled differently, but blamed it on mixed political signals. “We had news of Baba Ramdev coming. We had instructions that Baba Ramdev was to be detained at the airport itself and sent back to his ashram in Dehradun. A Border Security Force plane was ready. The forces were ready at the airport to do that, and then, mixed political signals came in,” he recalled.
After Ramdev landed, however, then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and then HRD minister Kapil Sibal, among others, met Ramdev at the airport to dissuade him from launching a fast. Ramdev did not give them an assurance that he would not participate in the agitation.
“So if we had detained him at the airport and sent him back, all that little bit of chaos and confusion, which took place on the ground, including where he jumped off the stage and then was finally caught after a couple of hours wearing salwar kameez and so on, all that would not have taken place,” he told ThePrint.
“The protocol and the intelligence were there, but it’s what we call the confusing political signals which created this. Whereas from our point of view in the home ministry and [security] forces, we were very clear that he should not come in beyond the airport unless he gave it in writing that he was not going to participate in the agitation,” Pillai added.
He asserted that it was mixed signals that allowed Ramdev in the capital, and “which created all the problems”.
‘Minimum force’
Elaborating on protocol in riot situations, Pillai explained the graded approach that should be followed. “You got a peaceful protest in a particular area. Then there is a march which is taking place towards Parliament. That is again an area where there is a curfew imposed, and therefore there is prohibition on the movement of people to that area, so the police are within their powers to stop protesters from proceeding into the prohibited area.”
However, he said that once the area is a prohibited area and there are barricades, there is a protocol in place to defuse such a situation. “You (say) here is the barricade. Don’t cross this. So that is the warning to be given to the protesters. And if the protesters don’t follow that, they want to try to break the barricades and come forward, then it’s a violation of the prohibitory orders, and therefore you are allowed to use what we call as minimum force,” he explained.
Minimum force, he says, is the use of lathis, if necessary, and push back. “If that still doesn’t work, then there’s a warning that tear gas will be fired, and then you fire tear gas and so on. So there is a set of protocols, a graded response, and of course the worst case scenario is you open fire when all this fails, and the police are being overpowered… so there is a graded protocol that somehow doesn’t seem to have been applied,” he told ThePrint.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)