The day the stampede occurred in Puri, five Japanese women were allegedly molested and robbed of their valuables right under the cops’ noses. The five were among 27 visitors from Japan who had arrived in Puri on July 2 to witness the festival. Junko Kabaya, one of the members of the group, recounted how she and her friends were surrounded from all the sides before being pushed and squeezed. “Though there were policemen, nobody helped us,” she said. Their utter lack of faith in the police was revealed when the Japanese tourists refused to lodge any police complaint as they said, “it happened before the cops”. “We will think twice before attending any Indian festival in future,” they added.

Director General of Police Gopal Chandra Nanda, however, likes everyone to believe otherwise. “Despite the best arrangements possible, accidents can happen. But we are learning from our mistakes,” he told The Indian Express.

Going by the assertions of the Orissa police’s top official, one would think that the cops here are eager learners. But the sheer number of incidents involving police laxity shows the state’s cops as a bumbling army of students who flunk each and every examination they take.

In the recent Maoist ambush of the ferry carrying Greyhound commandoes in Malkangiri, the Orissa police had booked the vessel three days in advance letting everyone know that it would be used by the elite force to cross the Balimela reservoir on Sileru river. That helped the rebels nearly wipe out the commandoes, forcing intelligence expert Ajai Sahni of New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management to comment: “You can’t have a first-class counter insurgency operation with a third-class police force. In Orissa, the police have been totally incompetent.”

The high-profile abduction case of Keonjhar businessman Rashmi Ranjan Mohapatra last year, the Maoist attack on Nayagarh’s police establishment in February this year, where not even a single Maoist was caught, and the manhandling of cricketer Greg Chappell are further glaring examples.

The nexus between top cops and criminals constitutes another characteristic of the force. Early this year, Bhubaneswar-Cuttack Commissioner of Police B K Behera came under the Lok Pal’s scanner after a criminal named him as his “saviour”. Last year, the Inspector-General of Police, Sanjeev Marik, a 1981-batch IPS officer and the first police officer to face such disciplinary action, was suspended for allegedly helping a group of criminals from Bihar meet members of a gang of bank robbers lodged the Bhadrak jail.