The Police must uphold the Rule of Law

The recent incident in the Kheda district of Gujarat where the Police apparently took the law in their own hands and publicly flogged some young men accused of disturbing a Garba event, has led to country wide outrage. If the suspects were indeed guilty of such an act, they should have been booked under the appropriate sections of law and placed under arrest. The Courts would then have taken a final view on the matter. However, instead of doing that, the local policemen thought of teaching them a lesson. They publicly flogged them in the open with a large number of people watching the beating with glee. The accused were then made to apologise to the participants of the Garba event. The incident which went viral on social media as well as television channels, has been condemned by virtually everyone including retired officers who are wondering why no action was taken against the erring policemen pending an inquiry,. The Gujarat DGP has initiated an inquiry and has assured that the guilty shall not be spared. Several TV channels gave a twist to the flogging and made a comparative study with what happens in areas controlled by the Taliban. The comparison is unnecessary since Taliban is an outlawed organization which believes in fundamentalism. India is a constitutional democracy and has a set of rules and laws in place. The police is dutybound to uphold the Rule of Law and cannot resort to acts which are also unlawful. The Indian police has to imbibe a new work culture which makes our forces have a modern outlook. Such acts do happen worldwide and delinquent cops like to use extra judicial measures to set situations right. Even in Delhi, a long time ago, whenever a new Station House Officer took over, he would get all the bad elements, classified as Bundle A’ and BundleB’ rounded up and tell them firmly that they should behave if they had to stay in the area. It was not a rare sight when a Bad Character (BC) would be made to sit on a donkey with his face blackened and paraded in the entire police station area. Encounter killings are also often used by the police to eliminate notorious elements. A couple of years ago, Vikas Dubey was killed while trying to escape from police custody’’ near Kanpur. During the Emergency, Sunder Daku, who had allegedly threatened to kill Sanjay Gandhi was caught by the Delhi police and forcibly drowned in the Yamuna. Several police officials including the then DIG (Range), Pritam Singh Bhindar (who later became Delhi’s Police Commissioner) were arrested and sent to Tihar jail. Delhi like virtually every state has had cops who were known asencounter specialists’’. They would round up the hardened criminals and then kill them in public spaces claiming that they had either attacked a police party or were trying to escape from custody. This would make them eligible for out of turn promotions. The Kheda flogging in Gujarat is most condemnable and cannot be defended under any circumstances. The police should be conscious of their responsibilities and the IPS officers must ensure that the message of what is right or wrong should reach the constabulary level. The Gujarat administration as also administrations in other states must ensure that such acts do not happen in the future.