Condemn the Kidnapping of Student Leaders Mandeep Singh and Pradeep Singh by theLawless AP Police! Release them Unconditionally!

COMMITTEE FOR THE RELEASE OF

POLITICAL PRISONERS

185/3, FOURTH FLOOR, ZAKIR NAGAR, NEW DELHI-110025

18/03/2013

Condemn the Kidnapping of Student Leaders Mandeep Singh and Pradeep Singh by theLawless AP Police!

Release them Unconditionally!

The lawless Andhra Pradesh Special Police in yet another act of impunity have kidnapped Mandeep Singh, a student leader of Jagruk Chatra Morcha, Haryana from Chandigarh. As reported by human rights fraternity from Chandigarh Mr. Mandeep Singh was illegally detained by the Andhra Pradesh Special Police on 9 March 2013 from Chandigarh which is not their jurisdiction.  He was kept in illegal detention since 9 March and was produced most probably at the court of Mancherial in Adilabad district, Andhra Pradesh only on the 16 March 2013. A false case was slapped on him under the draconian Andhra Pradesh Public Security Act. This has been the modus operandi of the Andhra Pradesh Special Police to kidnap people from other states and keep them under illegal confinement for days to torture so as to extract confessions from the detained. Given the criminal track record of AP Special Police it was inevitable that Mr. Mandeep Singh would have met with the same fate of the likes of others like Cherukuzhi Rajkumar (@Azad) or Hem Chandra Pandey who were similarly kidnapped and killed in custody. But for the massive protests and cases filed against the acts of impunity of the AP Special Police have to some extent curtailed the beast in them that this time they have decided to create a fanciful story of arrest of Mr. Mandeep Singh in one of the districts in North Telangana.

What had created more concern is the whereabouts of another student Pradeep Singh of Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh who has also been illegally detained by the notorious AP Special Police since 9 March. For some strange reason Pradeep Singh was released to one of his friends at Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. The AP Special Cell is answerable as to whether the law permit them to keep Mr. Pradeep Singh under illegal confinement for more than five days to be released in an intriguing manner at Bhopal to one of his friends. The more desperate fact is that the apex courts in India has time and again raised their concerns about the growing impunity and criminality of the police and paramilitary only to remain silent after that without any course of concrete action to stem the deep rot. Instead the order of the day is the police of all hues going unabated filing false cases and manufacturing evidence flouting all norms and procedures and last but not the least indulging in the worst forms of torture to extract the so-called confessions. Arrests based on third party confessions have become the standard operating procedure of the police with the AP Special Police leading the rest in this trade.      

CRPP condemns strongly the lawless, mafia-type conduct of the AP Special Police and demand a judicial probe be conducted into such criminal conduct and the culprits brought to book. Once again the media which sensationalise every criminal act of the police and indulge in blatant media trials towards manufacturing consent to implicate anyone under the garb of fighting ‘terror’ has maintained a criminal silence on this count wherein the role of the police in violating the law is evident. Only the vigilant and freedom loving people can uncompromisingly fight such fascist tendencies of the state and its police when there is already talks going on about the constitution of the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) despite several reservations and concerns raised from several quarters about the ravages such a body can create in the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent. Rather the modus operandi of the AP Special Police is a forerunner towards how an NCTC will actually operate at the ground level or even without such a body the notorious AP Special Police has already been performing that role of picking up people from other states not under its jurisdiction, keeping them in torture chambers for days and finally showing them either killed in fake encounters or if the detainee is a bit fortunate in trumped up cases in some of the districts in Telangana or Andhra Pradesh. We need to resolutely fight this!

In Solidarity,

SAR Geelani

President

Amit Bhattacharyya

Secretary General

MN Ravunni

Vice President

Rona Wilson

Secretary, Public Relations