The Hindu Business Line : Lethal firings in free India

It is strange and tragic that in the year of celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of India’s Independence, instances of firings by police in which large numbers of protesters and demostrators are killed should keep occurring as a familiar staple of the national scene.

The ones recently at Khammam and earlier at Nandigram, to cite but two examples, out of the many that media prominently put out now and again are bound to plunge old timers who, like the columnist, have lived the earlier and impressionable part of their lives in British India, into a melancholy state of deja vu.

During the freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi and other stalwarts used to declare that once the country became Independent, the Government would rule with the people’s well-being as its sole aim, and firing on free India’s citizens by the personnel of their own police force which was meant to be their protector and guardian would become a thing of the past.

The most unnerving part is that the dismal scenario and the supporting script follow a pattern identical to what used to happen during the British days; actually, in some respects, worse.

It goes like this: Some omission or commission by authorities engenders a sense of grievance among a section of the people; officialdom neglects to address it, and most of the time even fails to take notice of it, despite its attention being drawn by letters and visits to government offices by the aggrieved persons.

The simmering grievance takes the form of complaint, complaint takes the form of protest which is initially peaceful, protest when not attended to turns into demonstration, demonstration when ignored into agitation, agitation into a situation in which the persons concerned take the law into their own hands — the entire, eminently avoidable, concatenation of events culminating in confrontation with the police.

Brutal beatings

These days, because of the inadequate training of the police in the sensitive handling of an angry crowd, the force that faces the agitators loses its cool and gets into a sadistic mode. There can be no other explanation for the brutal beatings witnessed over the TV during student-demonstrations over the reservation issue or while dealing with young boys and girls engaged in some harmless frolic in a public park in Meerut. It is doubtful whether even mass upsurges against the colonial rulers during the British regime were visited with such beastly ferocity. When its own cruel provocation brings the confrontation to a flashpoint, the police is only too quick to resort to firing.

Surely, the country did not win freedom from the British only to continue to be looking upon the people demanding redress as enemies to be put down ruthlessly. It is a fair bet that every time there is a flare-up and lethal firing, the blame lies with the political and governing classes for failure to keep their ears to the ground and take anticipatory steps to nip the people’s discontent in the bud. The following, briefly, are the measures which would enable them to discharge their responsibility in this respect as befits people’s servants in a free country:

Officials holding senior positions looking after services such as public distribution, water supply, health care, education, electricity, sanitation, sewerage and drainage, should be people-friendly and give no room for complaint that they are indifferent or callous;

The police, in particular, should be given intense training, buttressed by refresher courses, to be friends of the people and behave with them with politeness and sympathy;

The elected representatives from panchayats to Parliament should be earnest and effective in acting as the bridge between the people and the government.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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