The Hindu : New Delhi News : A sad commentary on police affairs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 10, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

A sad commentary on police affairs

Prashant Pandey

THIS PAST week in the Capital, a detenu allegedly committed suicide in police lock-up and a head constable was suspended for allegedly demanding and accepting bribe from a man for releasing him. While the two incidents are unrelated, both point to the fact that despite all the talk about community policing and about sprucing up the police stations, the situation on the ground has not changed much for the Delhi police.

To begin with, the suicide of the detenu, Parmod, in the Sabzi Mandi police lock-up on Monday night was a sad commentary on the state of maintenance of the police station. According to the police, the detenu hanged himself at a time when the police station was plunged into darkness. The station remained without power for nearly two hours and there was no power back-up. Apart from the fact that the police are responsible for taking care of the safety of the detenus, it certainly reflects badly if the police personnel are forced to work in candlelight. No wonder the police have been put in an embarrassing position despite no harsh treatment being apparently meted out to the deceased.

The incident becomes all the more serious if seen in the wake of the fact that a Station House Officer (SHO) was suspended on the spot for not having a proper power back-up last year. The previous Delhi Police Commissioner was on night patrol and happened to visit the Sarojini Nagar police station where power supply had been disrupted and the generator was found to be defunct.

Already, the police have been trying several methods to deal with infrastructure related problems. While there has been a constant improvement in the past couple of years and some others are proposed in the future, there seems to be a lack of monitoring on the basic, existing facilities.

If Parmod's suicide was embarrassing enough, the case of the suspended head constable was "the same old story". In fact, the manner in which the accused policeman handled the case suggested that he might have been aware of the prospect of making money after he reached the spot at Preet Vihar in East Delhi on Wednesday. The fight was said to be of a non-serious nature. Also, the victim, Ankit Gupta, was a small-time businessman. It was probably with the expectation that he was likely to cough up money, if pushed to the wall, that the head constable decided to detain him. On the other hand, he did not even record the statement of the other party.

In the recent past too, there have been more than a couple of cases where policemen have been caught accepting bribe within the police station premises. One of them was even caught within the office premises of a senior police officer.

It might be argued that the action against the accused in the Preet Vihar case was immediate. Also, in the other case, the police may maintain that the suicide was not really their fault because custody deaths are usually associated with the use of third degree measures.

But, the police would do well not to close the issues with these rather simplistic explanations. It does not reflect well on the image of the police if a person is able to kill himself taking advantage of the darkness in a police station. Also, the police will have to monitor the behaviour of policemen closely, at least within the police station premises, if they want the people to shed their cynicism about entering police stations.

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A sad commentary on police affairs