The two ends of policing

Policing in India is a constant struggle between what it ought to be and what is expected of it. The two important pillars of our criminal justice system are Police and Courts. And surprisingly, neither of them are well placed to inspire confidence in citizens that justice will be met through them.

Police has a historical bad reputation of corruption, and misuse of authority. And the Courts have a historical bad reputation of being two slow. Both together, in their present form, are not invoking sufficient positive emotions which they should have been.

The absence of such reliance on the Courts, places police in a typical contradictory position, where people have to resort to it for dealing with other criminal elements of the society, and in that they sometimes desires police to work outside the boundaries of their authority.

We need to think why do people celebrate death of a criminal in a police encounter. In a nation where formal systems are working efficiently, this would not be a matter of want. So what do we expect from police in the existing state of affairs? Is the end of policing is to secure justice or the end is to protect rights of every citizen. When the both are aligned, the obviousness cannot be missed, but when they are not aligned, which one is ought to be?

The challenge however is that, in present India, justice can sometimes be instant, but rights cannot be protected without investing money and resources, which a majority cannot afford. A setup whose survival in its present form depends on it being broken, we have a fundamentally challenging situation where its beneficiaries would never want it to change. And this is not a new problem in history, various institutions have been overhauled in a short period of time, provided the majority of citizens agree that it is broken and needs repairing.

But do the majority of Indian citizens agree that it is broken. The answer may be overwhelmingly affirmative, but do they agree that it needs repairing. A thought then arises that it is broken by design, and the majority wants to either become a beneficiary of it or exit the setup.

And this reveals the thought pattern of Indian society, that invests more in reaping the tiny inherently inegalitarian benefits rather than calling out the obvious. We allow the river to be polluted as long we have a Reverse Osmosis (RO) based water filter at home.