While training for the IPS, probationers undergo mandatory district training for about nine months in a designated district. During that period we are required to spend a week as a beat constable living and working in the same conditions as an ordinary police constable. That was my first and best introduction to policing as it is practised across most of the cow belt and indeed the rest of the country. You go through that and come out with a semblance of dignity and mental equilibrium intact, and you have what it takes to be a police officer. This rite of passage remains with you and keeps resurfacing at the most unexpected moments of your career.

Earlier this week The Indian Express carried a lead story on the constables who were lynched by a mob agitating for the Gurjjar community’s right to be treated as a Scheduled Tribe. It did not bring tears to my eyes because after 10 years in the police service I am beyond expressing that level of rage and anguish. For what it is worth, it remains the most eloquent tribute to the trials and tribulations of

being a police constable that I have read in recent times. The irony of the situation is that Dungar Singh and Babu Lal were lynched by a mob that wanted nothing more than to be like them, in government service.

The mob was essentially arguing for the right to be poorly educated, for the right to be recruited for a job requiring low qualifications (the norm for constables is still 10th pass in most states and 12th in some), low pay (the Fifth Pay Commission classified a constable as semi-skilled labour for the purpose of pay fixation, hopefully the Sixth Pay Commission will not downgrade that), poor quality of training, and some of the most degrading and inhuman working conditions that can be humanly inflicted, in one of the most volatile and unpredictable

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