Colour of fear

Colour of fear

UP must ensure there is no repeat of the Lucknow and Meerut crimes by men in khaki.

The lone eyewitness to the Vivek Tiwari killing, Sana Khan, has revealed that Tiwari tried to protect her from the two assailant cops by driving his car forward despite the bullet wound. This is a sad, stark and damning testimony of how Uttar Pradesh police’s lawless and moralising streak haunts the citizen, even in his dying moments. If fear of being seen by cops with a member of another sex and religion is the new normal in UP, the Meerut moral policing incident – so fresh in public memory – may even have caused the Lucknow tragedy. It would be truism to say that criminals must fear the police. But when law abiding citizens develop mortal dread of the men in khaki, democratic freedoms reveal their limits.

By encouraging encounters and moral policing, UP government has freed police from their constitutional constraints. After the Lucknow killing and the Meerut moral policing, it behoves that senior officers pay a price too for the indiscipline of juniors to prevent a repeat of such incidents, which are becoming all too common. Enforcing command responsibility is an effective strategy. But when police are just following dubious mandates of political masters, there is no incentive to fix culpability.

Chief minister Yogi Adityanath can study Mayawati’s success in 2007-12 in bringing law and order back on the rails after Mulayam Singh’s disastrous tenure. She did not project extreme measures like encounter killings – which extract a disproportionate toll on the poor, lower castes and minorities – to send a strong signal to police to shackle politically connected criminals and send them behind bars. Unfortunately, political control of the police force causes it to swing between extremes – excesses or inaction. A professional force – as envisaged by the Supreme Court guidelines on police reforms in the Prakash Singh case – is nowhere in sight.