On a lazy afternoon over three decades ago, I was reading a book when there was a knock on the door. I opened the door to find a middle aged man I knew panting profusely. It was clear he had come running for quite a distance. “Saheb achhan kaaen?” (“Is Saheb at home?”), asked the man between gasps for breath. “Han achhan” (“Yes, he is in”), I said and immediately went in to inform my father, the local tehsildar, realizing the gravity of the situation. As my father came out, the man literally fell in his feet and started crying. “Save me, Saheb. I have been robbed,” he said. My father comforted him, asked me to get a glass of water for him and urged him to get his breath back first. He did and then started narrating his tale. As I listened to him, I could scarcely believe what he was saying.
The man, the owner of a grocery shop in the village, was looking for some transport to go to the Hemgiri railway station nearly 11 kms away for his onward journey to Raigad, the nearest town in neighbouring Chhattisgarh, to buy his monthly stock when the IIC of the local police station said he was going that way and offered him a lift on his bike. The man readily agreed and thanked him for his offer because there was no other transport available to go to the station all day. The lone government bus from Sundargarh, the district headquarters, came late in the evening and returned early next morning. Thus one needed to hitch a ride with someone driving a bike (there were very few of them in those bygone days) or walk the 11-km long stretch of road hemmed in by forests on either side to reach the station. Walking on the road was hazardous even in daytime because there was always the possibility of a wild animal appearing from nowhere. No wonder the road remained deserted for the better part of the day.
What happened next deserves an entry in ‘Ripley’s Believe or Not.” At a particularly desolate place midway through the road to the station, the IIC apparently stopped his bike, asked the man to get off and hand over the bag containing the money he was carrying to buy his stuff in Raigad! When the man hesitated, he even fished out his service revolver. That did the trick. The man quietly handed over the bag containing about Rs 12,000 to the officer, who left with it towards the station. Terrified by the ordeal, the man came running back the 5-6 kms to the village and headed straight for my father’s official residence even before informing his family about it.
It was clear why he decided to approach my father. Had it been someone else, he would have gone to the police to lodge his complaint. But how he could go there when it was the IIC, no less, who had looted him at gun point? My father called up the SP on the recently installed phone at home and apprised him of the whole incident. The IIC was suspended and an investigation initiated against him. I don’t know the exact course the investigation took, but the suspension was revoked a year and a half later and the officer was posted to another police station. [I later heard that he ‘welcomed’ the suspension since it provided him the much needed time to construct a house on a piece of land he had bought in Sambalpur!]
Memories of this bizarre incident came flooding into the mind when I read – and heard - about the chilling details of the torture bus conductor Ashok Kumar had to undergo at the hands of Gurugram police that made him ‘confess’ to murdering Ryan International School student Pradhyumn Kumar on Tuesday.
In the time since the Hemgiri incident, numerous committees have been set up by both the Centre and state governments to recommend police reforms. The most important of them was the committee set up under former Uttar Pradesh DGP Prakash Singh, which went into the working of the police in great detail and recommended a slew of measures to usher in professionalism and ensure the integrity of investigation and prosecution. Had these recommendations been accepted and acted upon, the framing of an innocent in a murder case would have been well nigh impossible. For all one knows, he could well have been convicted and sentenced to a life term for a crime he did not commit had it not been for the Haryana government’s decision to hand over the probe to the CBI. [I have a sneaking suspicion the officers responsible for his harrowing ordeal would get away with a temporary suspension at the most like the Hemgiri IIC did.]
And it is not as if the Ashok Kumar case was an aberration. Only days before the Ryan School murder, the Delhi High Court had acquitted Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, the Noida doctor couple convicted by a CBI court for killing their 14-year old daughter Arushi, while castigating the police and the trial judge for their shoddy work. Hundreds of Muslim youths have been jailed on false allegations of terrorist acts. Thousands of innocent tribal youths have been dubbed Maoists, dumped in jails for years together without trial or killed in cold blood.
The basic principle supposedly guiding criminal jurisprudence is this: “Let a thousand criminals get away, but let not a single innocent person be convicted.” But going by actual experience, this maxim appears to have been turned upside down by an inept, corrupt and utterly diabolical police force that has acquired formidable skills in framing innocents over the years. The worrying part is even the courts, the last resort of the average wronged Indian, have tended to happily go along with the police in such brazenly criminal acts. After all, the grounds on which the Delhi High Court ruled the Talwars ‘not guilty’ should have been obvious to the trail judge too. But that fact that he chose to go along with the CBI despite the gaping holes in its version of the events suggests that courts, especially at the lower levels, are all too eager to help the police in ‘fixing’ someone or finding a scapegoat in high profile cases.
It is not difficult to see why governments have stubbornly resisted implementing the eminently sensible recommendations of the Prakash Singh committee, which have been gathering dust for decades. Doing so would minimize, if not stop altogether, their ability to twist a case as per the political interests of their parties in connivance with the police. Like everything else in this country, it is now up to the people to unite and send out a clear, unambiguous and loud “Bring in police reforms or vacate” message to the government – at the Centre and in the states.