Economy of language, as we know, is vital in an era marked by the proliferation of too many words. So my plea is that we stop using the phrase ‘fake encounter’ because encounter will suffice. Fake encounters somehow seems to posit a difference between a real encounter (that’s the one in which the police go on an investigation and the assailants open fire and the police gun them down in self defense) and a fake one (that’s the one in which the police go on an investigation and the assailants open fire and the police gun them down in self defense). A difference, which has clearly escaped my comprehension. In India we have got used to accommodating words that don’t really serve a purpose, or where their meaning has been displaced, and they serve almost as empty pronouns. The names of shops like Zevar Jewelry, Chitra Pictures serve as good examples. Fake encounter is a good addition to the list.

In most popular usages of the term, the word encounter appears as it is or sometimes cloaked within the doubtful embrace of quotation marks ‘encounter’. You can almost see someone saying the word with their two index fingers making an imaginary bracket in the air, signaling the temporary expulsion of the word from the truth of ordinary language. Rather than recycle the difference between fake and real encounters, it would be more useful to think of the word encounter as belonging to a particular genre of state speak, and I like to think of this genre as ‘the wink’. The wink consists of all words which are used to convey a truth which cannot be stated for official and administrative reasons. Thus in the absence of an ability to admit to extra judicial killings, the wink serves as useful manner of bypassing the inconveniences of the truth.

The use of the phrase ‘fake encounter’ somehow seems to support the theory that cases like Vanzara’s is an aberration, and it will be useful for us to return the word to its more honest singular form. The constant repetition of ‘fake encounter’ becomes a performative act in which a particular truth is produced through constant acts of misrecognition. Referring to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes, Zizek says that the little boy’s proclamation of the nudity of the emperor did not reveal the emperor’s nudity, since every one knew he was nude anyway. What it did reveal was the collective silence or untruth that everyone else was participating in. He says that if “somebody were publicly to pronounce the obvious truth that ‘the emperor is naked’ . . . —in a sense the whole system would fall apart”. Fake ecnounter seems to lie in the domain of the collective lie that Shuddha has documented.

Popular culture on the other hand seems to have solved this problem, there is never a mention of ‘fake encounters’, despite the fact that the films carefully show you the careful staging of the act of extra judicial killing. In the opening sequence of Ab Tak Chappan for instance, Nana Patekar shoots a gangster point blank, and the next scene shows a TV report of the same which is narrated in the standard narrative of encounters (yes, the same one in which the police go on an investigation and the assailants open fire and the police gun them down in self defense). Films like Ab Tak Chappan, Kaagar, Encounter: The Killing etc pick up on the wink far better than news media and invite us to reflect on the truth producing effects of these winks.

As of today Vanzara has admitted to the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kausar Bi, and he stands by the opinion of the government that Sheikh was killed “because he was a terrorist”. Since we have been discussing parables, it worthy to end with a parable for Vanzara.

Two policemen were doing the rounds in a city in which curfew had been declared, and there were ‘shoot at sight’ orders against any person walking outside after five in the evening. It was Four thirty and as the policemen were walking around, they noticed a man on the opposite side of the street. One of the policemen takes his gun out and immediately shoots the man. The other policeman is a little startled and says “ Why did you shoot him, it is only four thirty”. To which the first policeman says “Oh, I actually know that man, he lives in my neighborhood, and I know that it will take him much more than half an hour to get home”