Police Excesses in India
I cannot stop myself from writing about this. Here are 3 incidents:
1) 3 guys throw acid on 2 girls who died but police shot the three people down. Here is a link of the story in ToI.
2) A guy wrongly speed races on his bike at 1 am n Bangalore, police stops him. He runs away towards a house which turns out to be a brigadiers, makes a call from the roof top, in Urdu, and police shoots him down. Link.
3) The fracas began at 2.30pm in Kolkata, when 37-year-old Yadav was about to park his vehicle on the wrong side of Kiron Shankar Roy Road. Policeman Banerjee, who was on duty in front of the high court, spotted the taxi and signalled to the driver to stop. When he didn’t, the constable sprinted towards the taxi, witnesses said. “He was holding an iron clamp, which he tried to attach to one of the wheels to prevent the driver from fleeing. The driver alighted and asked Banerjee why he was using the clamp instead of filing a case of parking violation,” a bystander said. Banerjee allegedly replied with a slap. Link.
The three incidents are of varying intensity and if decided to judge individually, probably you may differ on the sides to choose on each. However, one thing is clear, on all the three incidents; the people who suffered from police violence were not clean. They all had committed some offense. But is this the way a responsible police should react?
However, I am surprised at people’s reaction. Yes there are people who think these are bad acts by the police but I thought that would be a unanimous decision. However, surprisingly people differed. One of the people I asked felt that Police did the right thing. That is why terrorism is on the rise. Nobody is afraid of the police anymore.
Here is what I beg to differ. The job of the police is to maintain law and order. It is not their job to convict people and make people afraid of them. If you see a police on the road, you should feel positive that aah, here is a man maintaining law and order. But the truth is different. We see police with either disgust or fear.
However slow the process of law may be, somebody else cannot take over it. Ideally in all these cases, police should have caught the convict and produced him in the court, but instead they chose to be the judges. When discussing with someone about the first case, I said, police should have shot him on the leg or put tear gas. The other person said may be the police wanted to do that but the shot got misplaced. Come on, why do you pay the police for if they do not even know how to shoot.
And this is precisely why I hate when people talk highly of the so called “encounters”. Yes, those people may be convicts, or may be we can even kill the dreaded terrorists in encounters, but that’s not the way things should happen. It should be for the law to decide these things. If the law process needs to be revived, let’s do it. But police taking over law is definitely not the way to go.
And this is what I think is the difference between first world and third world country. Till now, whenever people used to tell me that India is a third world country, I used to feel sad. But now I know why it is so. Police takes law in its hand because lawmakers take infinite amount of time. Digging deeper, somewhere it boils down to the fact that we do not have the money and resources to have a police which should have the decency to talk like a gentleman even to the most dreaded terrorist in the world. Wasn’t even Saddam tried in the court before being hanged?
3 comments:
On the lighter side -
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the FBI, and the CIA want to see who is best at catching perps. So a rabbit is released into the forest, and each of them has to catch it.
The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After months of extensive investigation, they conclude that rabbits do not exist.
The FBI goes in. After two weeks with no leads, they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit.
The LAPD goes in. They come out two hours later, dragging a bruised mountain lion behind them. The mountain lion's yelling, "Okay! Okay! I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!"
From Reader's Digests' 50 Jokes for 50 States - http://www.rd.com/clean-jokes-and-laughs/50-jokes-for-50-states/article111765.html
Jokes aside, I think law and order will prevail when people learn to respect it. The first hurdle in this direction is that the fence that protects the garden tends to eat more than the cow. Police should earn their respect and then preach righteousness. There are bound to be irresponsible and reckless acts by even the best and most admired police forces, but as you point out, they should not become an everyday event - mistakes should not and cannot repeat themselves.
As you have pointed out, our judicial system isn't so quick and robust that you can trust them to punish the offenders suitably and in time in this case. Before you make any of your bloated recommendations think about making the judiciary more efficient and reliable. Lets be practical instead of idealistic. A guy throwing acid on a girl's face is a pretty serious offense. An acid attack on someone leaves a lifelong scar. Even the father of one of the boys feels that justice was done. Given the current state of affairs, it's rather insensitive of you to suggest that the offender even be given a chance by producing him in a court of law as they exist today.
Regarding the urdu speaking boy, I might be inclined to agree that it was an excess and was probably unfortunate. However, please note that the sentries shot at him and not the police. Sentries at a military personnel's house are from the military and not from the police. Also, given the current security situation in the country, you need to consider what went through the minds of the sentries. Its rather unusual for anyone to run away from a traffic cop just cos of a traffic fine and climb into someone's house, especially a high ranking military officer's. While I agree that its incorrect for the sentries to have stereotyped based on language, had the boy simply followed the sentries' orders, he would have been alive. Unless he responded to them, there was no way for them to figure out what was on his mind. Had he been a real terrorist, it could have been something severe. Yes you could have gone to your slow courts after that for the next 10 years, but the damage was already done.
The Kolkata incident is actually bad and funny at the same time. These are the type of cops which need to be fired. He exceeded his limits even when there was no prevalent danger to life or property. These are definitely teh cheap kind who have no respect for others.
WRT encounter specialists, I have never and shall never agree with you. Encounter specialists are deployed to eliminate elements who you know are definitely creating a mess in the city but against whom you simply cannot gather evidence to provide in courts quick enough to convict them. Even if you put them behind bars, they operate from there and run their networks. If not, their colleagues find some way of releasing them via blackmail. If you already have strong evidence against someone, nobody uses encounter specialists. As I have said in one of my comments on another blog, there has hardly ever been a case where an encounter specialist killed the wrong person. No case has surfaced even with the kind of nosy media we have in India. Also, without the encounters, at least Mumbai would have been a much worse place. So I suggest you rethink your position on encounters until you can come up with another firm, effective and reliable judicial system which people are afraid of but respect and which can make people think twice before messing up things.
Until such a system is in place, India will fortunately or unfortunately have to rely on such makeshift means of justice.
Also, for the record, Saddam was a famous global personality and so its easy to find witnesses etc. against such people as against petty, insignificant terrorists like the ones who attack Kashmir or Mumbai. Just shooting Saddam would have made a big, big issue since the world media was watching. They had to offer him a trial to look good. They did not however offer the same treatment to others in the war (some were not even soldiers)
Talking of cops in the western world, I agree that they are more civilized. However, even they have their cases of excesses. There have been many incidents and youtube videos of people being unnecessarily tasered. One incident was of a student being tasered by the univ. police. Another was of an old man being tasered at the airport causing his death eventually. Cops here approach your car with guns or tasers when you just exceed speeds, something that does not happen in your very own "Third world country" as you like to look at it.
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