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Instant Justice By Police – Compulsions of India’s Societal Realities

Dr. N. C. Asthana, IPS (Retd)

One unverified video is being shared on social media in which it is claimed that
Gujarat police beat up some Muslims on their bottoms with belts. The caption
of the Free Press Journal report reads, ‘Gujarat Police Publicly Flog Muslim
Men Involved in Rioting and Arson; Visuals Surface’. It goes on to add “The
public flogging of members belonging to the minority community in Gujarat is
not an isolated incident. In October 2022, a group of Muslim men who were
accused of disrupting a Navratri Garba event in Kheda, Gujarat, were subjected
to public flogging, and the incident gained widespread attention after a video of
the incident went viral.”

Though it is not confirmed as to whether the video is related to the Junagadh

incident, it is being projected on Twitter as yet another instance of the partisan
behaviour of Gujarat police. In this article, I will show that things are not as
simple as they seem.

The Junagadh Incident

The incident in brief, as described by the district SP Ravi Teja Vasamsetty was
that on June 14, the Junagadh Municipal Corporation issued a notice to a dargah
near Majevadi Darwaza to produce documents regarding the ownership of land.
Agitated over the notice, on Friday (June 17) night, around 500-600 people
gathered near the religious structure and blocked roads. DySP Junagadh and
other staff present at the site, tried to convince them. That did not work and
eventually, they attacked the police party shouting slogans and pelting stones.
To control the rioting, police had to lob tear gas shells and lathicharge.

What Do The Liberals Expect The Police To Do In Dealing With Public

Order Situations?

Being a legal expert myself, I cannot support any extra-judicial act of the police,
including beating up of people. However, with my background of having been a
very senior police officer, I must educate people that policing in India is an
extremely complex job and prejudiced criticism of the police without proper
appreciation of the societal and professional realities and constraints is not just
patently unfair but unadulterated chicanery.
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The criticism by the liberals is much more severe when Muslims happen to be at
the receiving end of the police as the real intent is to project the government as
anti-Muslim. In such criticisms, they very cleverly conceal what almost
invariably precedes that beating. In this case, for example, the rioting, as
Economic Times reports, had left one civilian dead (apparently due to stone
pelting), one vehicle torched, and one DySP, three SIs and two other ranks
wounded.

How should the nation deal with such lawless behaviour by a section of the
people and how justice should be done?

Do the liberals mean to say that the Muslims have a ‘right’ to get angry, agitated
and violent over whatever grievances they might perceive and, in the process,
they have a ‘license’ to indulge in rioting, vandalism, arson, stone pelting and,
perhaps, some murders, etc. on the side?

They give the very same argument when the Muslims indulge in violence on the
issue of music played before mosques, even as there are judgments (Manzur
Hasan; and Sk. Piru Bux) which clearly held that there cannot be any blanket
ban on playing music before the mosques. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar wrote in his
book ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’ in 1940 itself: “Music may be played
before a mosque in all Muslim countries without any objection. Even in
Afghanistan, which is not a secularized country, no objection is taken to music
before a mosque. But in India the Musalmans must insist upon its stoppage for
no other reason except that the Hindus claim a right to it.”

Do the liberals mean to say that we must become a country where a section of
the people has a ‘license’ to be as lawless and commit as many crimes as they
wish, but the police must be straitjacketed in the sense that they must not even
touch a lawless man with their little fingers and yet, by some unknown magic,
be able to maintain public order at all times as mandated in judgments like
Ramlila Maidan?

Do the liberals expect that when the police find crimes like rioting, stone
pelting, vandalism, arson, stabbings, hackings, mob attacks, looting, firing, use
of country-made bombs, molestations or rapes of women, etc. by a riotous mob,
they should go up to the criminals and address them, “Extremely sorry to
interrupt your pleasure, sir, but this seems to be a crime in progress! May we
have the honour of requesting you to kindly desist from it? Would you be so
kind as to cooperate with law enforcement and oblige us by accompanying us to
the police station, please?” If attacked instead, should the police turn the
proverbial other cheek?
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Instant Justice Is Important In Ensuring Deterrence

Every Indian rioter, whether living in metros or in countryside, knows it very

well that, given the long track record of extremely poor rate of convictions in all
sorts of cases of riots and mob violence since 1861 AD, they have an excellent
chance of getting away scot free. Then, please do enlighten me how should the
State deter them from rioting or committing crimes?

The Indian State or society does not exist or function in any vacuous liberal
Utopia. The State exists for the people at large and it is under an obligation to
perform in a manner so that people trust the State to be their protector.
Otherwise, its very credibility to exist and govern is undermined. If the State is
not able to deter people from rioting or punishing them after rioting, such an
affront to the ‘Rule of Law’ would make people lose faith in the ‘might’ of the
government and its capability to provide security and justice to the people. That
would eventually open the floodgates of anarchy, which we cannot tolerate.

The law makes it imperative the police to prevent crimes, particularly with
respect to public order. Deterrence plays and important role in it. Fact is, the
socio-cultural conditioning of the people of this country has historically been
such that ‘instant justice’ has always had both demonstrative as well as potent
deterrent effect. Our traditional systems of dispensation of justice that served
the people admirably for thousands of years were based on dispensation of
instant justice only. It is only the colonial rulers who, to discredit them,
supplanted them with a terribly cumbersome system that has left hardly a single
person satisfied in 162 years!

Is It Practicable To Dream of a ‘Prosecute Only’ Scenario?

Do the liberals expect that the role of the police should be limited only to
prosecuting the criminals after they have committed their crimes totally
unimpeded by any interference from the police?

The liberals do not have the faintest idea that, if prosecution for the pettiest of
the crimes were to become the norm, the entire criminal justice system
including the police and the courts would simply crack irretrievably under the
workload. The ignoramuses do not have any knowledge of the tremendous
effort it takes to prepare charge sheets. Starting from visiting the place of crime,
preparing scene records, collecting material and forensic evidence, identifying
witnesses, recording their statements, and writing case diaries, it is so much
work that even for a relatively insignificant case, the charge sheet runs easily
into hundreds of pages and, in cases like the 2020 Delhi riots, into some 15,000
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pages! We simply do not have enough police personnel to do that and courts to
process them.

If the liberals’ expectations were to be met, we would have to expand the police
and the judiciary several hundreds of times, something the country cannot
afford.

A Case Study of Rioting In Patna Following the Murder of Brahmeshwar

Singh

In situations, when police decide that they would not act to prevent crimes
taking place right in front of their eyes, but watch and may be make a video
recording of the crime so that they may prosecute the criminals with ‘solid
evidence’, they are severely criticised for that too.

I cite from the “Prakash Singh Committee Report on Role of Officers of Civil
Administration and Police during the Jat Reservation Agitation (Feb. 7 - 22,
2016)” submitted to the Government of Haryana. Prakash Singh writes: There
have since then been a couple of instances where police showed reluctance in
using force in quite a few states. In Bihar, when Brahmeshwar Singh, the
founder of Ranveer Sena was killed, Patna City was held to ransom on 2 June,
2012 by his 5,000 supporters, who indulged in acts of hooliganism during the
funeral procession. About 50 vehicles were torched and several journalists and
policemen were roughed up. The police played a very passive role…It was well
known that the political masters did not want any action to be taken against the
Ranveer Sena supporters.”

He further informs: “The Director General of Police, Bihar, is said to have

suggested at the Annual Conference of Directors General of Police in 2013 that
in riot situations, it was better to avoid confrontation with the rioters and that
the best option was to videograph the entire sequence of events and, later, after
the riots subside, use the photographic evidence to identify and prosecute the
rioters.”

Livehindustan also reports that the DGP had claimed that the police had
deployed as many as 15 cameramen to collect evidence regarding rioting,
vandalism and arson, and that bike riders had been identified from the
registration numbers of bikes published in newspaper photos. However, I am
not able to find any report in the public domain regarding convictions of people
charged for rioting on the basis of such video and photo evidence.

The DGP had told The Lallantop in an interview that had the police
lathicharged, they could not have handled the situation thereafter and that he
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had to choose the lesser of the two evils. The Telegraph reports that in a detailed
report submitted to the Governor, the government defended the police strategy
to deal with vandalism and claimed that “Had the police acted tough against the
vandals, the police action would have triggered a caste war in the state. It was a
decision taken by the police according to the situation.”

The People of the Country Must Decide How the Police Must Behave

The professional, legal as well as moral issue is that such a plea of ‘tactful
handling’ can be taken by the police anytime to justify their inaction. Who can
question their wisdom? Would it be practical to appoint thousands of judicial
commissions to question their wisdom? On the contrary, the settled legal
position in a catena of judgments (Pancham Lal; Akhilesh Prasad; and Manoj
Sharma etc.) is that the officer on the spot would be the best judge of the degree
of force which would be required to control a particular situation.

Personally, I do not have any problems if the country adopts a system that the
police will only try to record evidence of a crime and do nothing else, much less
to speak of beating up people. However, in that situation, the very same liberals
who are livid today over the Junagadh incident, must not criticize the police of
inaction or complain when their own properties are vandalized or looted by
rioters, men murdered and their women molested or raped (as it had allegedly
happened at Murthal during the 2016 agitation in Haryana). They should be
happy to wait for the rioters’ cases to be decided by the courts! Incidentally,
why did the Muslims in Junagadh not choose to go to the court over that notice,
instead of rioting?