Odisha police station fiasco: Questions in the aftermath

Separation of the investigating branch from regular police services is a prerequisite for reviving our crippled criminal justice system, writes Mohammad Wasim.

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"The law should not be seen to sit limbly, while those who defy it go free and those who seek its protection lose hope." Jennison versus Backer (1972 (1) All E.R. 1006)

ANY common citizen who has approached a police station to file a first information report (FIR) must have experienced a Kafkaesque impossibility in turning the bureaucratic machinery, a feeling of utter helplessness and dejection in the face of an impervious monolithic authority.

Whether the trial of the accused ever begins or not, the complainant is on trial the moment they decide to take recourse to the legal machinery. The trial in the head begins even before one enters a police station.

Recently, a couple as privileged as an army officer and his lawyer fiancée approached a police station in Bharatpur, Odisha to lodge an FIR and seek help against miscreants who had waylaid them at night. What was to follow at the police station was much worse. The woman was allegedly physically tortured and sexually assaulted.

It is possible the woman may have asserted enforcement of her rights and held the police personnel to their duty, but that is something every aware citizen ought to do.

Indeed, such torture and assault are not common at police stations, but refusal to register complaints or provide succour in any other manner is the order of the day. If one insists on the same, the least one has to experience is the uncomfortable glare of the police 'force'.