09 January 2013, 04:22 PM IST
This is a true story. Some years back in Orissa a man who had either been murdered or had drowned was spotted by some villagers floating in a river. Alarmed at the sight some of them rushed to a nearby police station clamouring for the unfortunate soul to be fished out for his last rites. But the cops there debated so long and so hard about it, protesting that the stretch of river didn't come under their jurisdiction, that by the time they agreed to reach the spot the body had floated further down.
Officers in the next police station repeated the same argument. "The body was found upstream," they said. "Not under our jurisdiction." As villagers tried to convince the police the dead man traveled a few more kilometres, covering, finally, five police stations in all.
Is there a moral in this poignant, if pathetic, tale of callousness, inhumanity and disgrace?
Let's talk about a few other, more contemporary incidents. Some days ago when a woman went to complain to the Mumbai police about sexual assault from her live-in partner, the officer, Jyoti Bhopale, reportedly said, "Your face doesn't merit a rape FIR (sic). If you loved him truly, you would not lodge a complaint against him. Go marry someone else and stay happy."
Elsewhere, in the outskirts of Lucknow, as large groups of people went out in angry protest against the gang-rape of a young woman in Delhi last December, a poor family was fighting its own desperate battle to trace their little girl, all of 11. A TOI report that detailed the case said: "Around midnight of December 31, Kallu Rawat and his family of five were busy searching for their daughter Shalu, who had disappeared from their home at Kursi Road in Bahadurpur. Kallu, a daily-wage labourer, approached the Gudamba police but was rebuked by the cops and asked to wait for a day. The illiterate family reached the police station again on the morning of January 1, once more to no avail. Finally the police registered an FIR under sections relating to kidnapping (IPC 363) on Friday morning though the matter was brought to their notice on Tuesday. Moreover, till late Friday night not a single cop from Gudamba police station had visited the family."
Now, cut to Ranchi. A 38-year-old medical representative was beaten to death by a group of men when he tried to stop them from harassing a 29-year-old mother of three on January 1. Srikant Bhardwaj, the man who was murdered, had made two desperate calls to the local police station. Some reports said he had even called up – four times – the officer-in-charge of the relevant thana. But the policemen, all local residents of that area, apparently "lost their way" as they set out to help Srikant. By the time they got to him, Srikant was dead.
Back in Delhi, Nirbhaya's friend told a TV news channel that three police vans reached the spot where they were battered and thrown 45 minutes after he'd first called the control room. And even as the two of them lay there, naked and shivering in the cold with both pain and humiliation, the cops wasted precious time wondering which thana should handle the case.
I have often wondered why the police in India are the way they are – corrupt to the core, unwilling to work, ill-tempered, ill-trained, and dismissive of people they are supposed to serve. Go to them with a complaint – be it of sexual assault, murderous intimidation, robbery, graft, anything – and the first thing they'll do is ask you to go home, or reach a compromise with those very people harming you. If you have connections or enough money to pay them to lodge an FIR, which is something no thana in this country readily wants to do, they'll delay investigations, or do such a shoddy job of it that it just won't withstand the scrutiny of law. That and the delay in trial proceedings once it reaches the courts stop millions of Indians from reaching out for justice. It needs tremendous amounts of courage and patience in this country just to go to the police and then to the courts when we are wronged.
I have also wondered how this nation would look if we had a force that was honest, committed, polite, sensitive, and hard working. India would be a different country. First-world almost.
In a country where corruption and sloth are almost institutionalized, where criminality is tolerated as if it were the half-brother of spirituality, where inequality is explained away by karma, where breaking law is the default setting in probably every individual citizen, we need the police more than most countries do. But it is here that we are failed and abandoned like nowhere else. Ironically, though, while the common man is scared to approach the khaki-clad guardians of our lives and livelihood, criminals, aware that a little greasing of palms will always do the trick, roam around unfettered, unafraid.
Behind the façade of a democracy, India, at least large parts of it, is basically a banana republic. Here, below poverty line families pay bribe to be called below poverty line-families. Sometimes Members of Parliament whip out a gun when asked to pay toll tax. Millions spend each waking hour thinking the sarkar is not there for them so they better quietly bear all the indignities heaped upon them for being women, dalits, minority, poor. The list of disenfranchised communities in both Bharat and India is endless.
Of course, these things – so deeply ingrained, so endemic – will not change overnight even if we have a zealous bunch of cops suddenly out on the streets to make India a better, safer nation. But it will help. We can start by paying them better, having more boots on the ground, empowering the brass and freeing them from the stranglehold of their political bosses. Some of the lower-ranked personnel live in miserable conditions – bad housing, bad salaries, bad infrastructure. Give them a little dignity and perhaps that'll translate into some respect given to people who come to them for assistance.
At the end of it, however, nothing can be a justification for bad behaviour and worse practices. Every institution, after all, is under-paid, under-staffed, under-equipped in India. Just take a look at our government hospitals and schools. Does that mean the doctors are entitled to put up a signboard that says 'The public is advised not to fall sick'? Or can teachers request parents to send not more than one child to school? No. The police of this country, therefore, cannot and should not be allowed to let its people down any more.
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