Pakistan Police horror

The Frontier Post
Editorial:



As a freak flash flooding is wreaking horror on our land and on our people, the police force is wreaking its own on them terribly. Two recent episodes alone should be sufficiently illustrative, both caught on camera. In one, the police let a lynching mob beat to death with sticks two young boys, both brothers, right under its eye and later string up their bodies on the pole in the square of the Sialkot village where this horrific killing occurred. Not that this is the first act of its kind. Incidents of vigilante justice have lately been surfacing increasingly, indicating worryingly that the polity is getting violent. But this is perhaps the first vigilante murder that took place under the police force’s very nose. Some media reports suggest that the lynching took place in the presence of a police posse and as many as 14 police cops are among the 17 persons booked for this murder. The footage put out by a private television channel shows at least one clearly-identifiable uniformed police official in the mob, moving about unconcernedly, if not indulgently, making no move at all to save the victims, and thus holding out the frightening spectre of law-enforcers’ collusive role. The other episode sends the creeps in the body all over chillingly, so shocking it is. It relates to the police savaging of a Bahawalpur medical college students, protesting against a whopping increase in their fee. A photograph, splashed by the national print media, shows a jovial danda-wielding police official, who seems holding a high rank, pouncing viciously on a female student while she is scurrying haplessly to shield herself from his stick assault. This could happen only in a wild, lawless polity where prevails the law of jungle, not a civilised society that at least we profess to be. The attacking cops are so bold in roughing up the protesting students that they are least pushed that their assault is being filmed. The photograph clearly shows a photographer taking snaps of their charge. It appears that they were rather happy being photographed as if they were performing some heroic deed by raining their danda strikes on students, unsparing even the female students, and that they would rather have their feat visually covered for record. The Supreme Court has, commendably, taken promptly the suo motu notice of the terrible lynching and has ordered a high-level investigation. Surely, the culprits will be held to account and will have to pay for their criminality. And there is every hope that the police roughing up of female students would not evade the judicial notice, either. It is the superior judiciary that indeed has been taking notice of official malevolence that often goes unnoticed by the executive branch whose job actually it is to deal sternly with official misconduct but it fails to do more often than not. In fact, over these times the police brutalisation of the hapless is coming to the public fore increasingly, thanks to modern communications technologies, indicating that there has been no change in police culture and in police psyche, notwithstanding all those assertions of the nation’s top echelons regarding having changed the force into a people-friendly apparatus. It may have become anything, but people-friendly it has become not. High-handedness, torture, savaging and extra-judicial methods still stay its preferred tools unrelentingly. Not once but many a time over these days footage showing cops leather-flogging the accused has made appearance to a horrified public. More terribly, police cops have been caught on camera beating even the flood-ravaged people, who need compassion not savaging. Starving, hungry and thirsty as they are, a certain amount of unruliness can naturally be expected from them while struggling to lay hand on some relief supply from a truck or a relief camp to mitigate their suffering. With sweet persuasion and mild reprimand, they can be brought to orderliness. But the police force, evidently, is not initiated in this art. It has been groomed only in employing the muscle power, although this force is often the first to lose all grit and make a hasty retreat with the tail between the legs if the challenge is severe and strong. The increasing waywardness and misconduct of the force telling tells that its internal mechanisms of vigilance and monitoring are very feeble. After all, how comes the top echelons of the force and their political bosses learn of a police savagery from media reports, not internally? It is only then that the top comes into action, and not infrequently after the superior judiciary has taken suo motu notice of it. The real snag, however, is the outside interference not only in the police working but even in its recruitments, postings, transfers and promotions. Unless merit in inducted decisively at every tier of the force and outside interference and patronage are outlawed completely from it, no good could be expected from it. Police cops would keep watching lynching and keep beating female students. That’s that.
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Dated: Sunday, August 22, 2010, Ramadan 11, 1431 A.H