Sir — This refers to the editorial, “Needless brouhaha” (November 2). I don’t agree with your opinions. The extra-judicial killings of eight undertrials who ‘escaped’ from a prison in Bhopal show India’s human rights record in a poor light. The camera cannot lie and the images captured by it cast doubts on the official version of events, in addition to making uncomfortable viewing. There is no way the Madhya Pradesh Government can justify pumping of bullets into unarmed SIMI activists when they could have been apprehended and produced before a court of law for the law of the land to take its own course.
The sequence of events leading to the killings is still shrouded in mystery and needs to be unravelled by a judicial probe. The nub of the matter is that the encounters of the past few decades are inseparably entwined with religious fault-lines running deep in the Indian subcontinent. It is significant that the victims of fake encounters are invariably members of a particular religious community. It is a stark reminder of the absence of separation of politics from religion. We must not fall into this trap.