Let me start with the police. They remain primarily an instrument of asserting state authority against whosoever is perceived by the Leviathan to be the most immediate threat. In return for servility and acceptance of the beast’s priorities, they are permitted to prey on the weakest and most helpless sections of society. A police station in India is a sordid monument to the worst in human nature. The squalor, the pressures, the often thankless nature of police work would all be bearable if one felt that the police were genuinely enabled to enforce the law and protect the weak and helpless.

At the level of the thana, the rot that led to Nithari is not hard to comprehend. Ensure that recruitment is skewed in favour of thugs loyal to the ruling party; ensure that postings in areas with greater potential for illegal gratification are earmarked for officers who are willing to buy them for money or for other forms of adjustment, such as the right to decide whose complaints would be lodged and investigated, who will be arrested and who will be let off, who will be protected and who will be left at the mercy of gangsters; ensure that upright officers are hounded by frequent transfers and threat of suspension; ensure that the local cadres of the ruling party will take over the day-to-day decisions at the thana and the picture that will emerge will bear a striking resemblance to Nithari.

A simple thing such as the registration of an FIR is regarded as proof, not of the urgency of distress of a common citizen, but of political clout. Sadly, the law imposes no obligations on the police under the IPC to investigate a case of a missing person unless prima facie a case of abduction is made out in the FIR. Under the CrPC the police are duty bound to record the complaint but that is usually done as a simple entry in the General Diary with a district-wide wireless message as a follow-up measure. In the daily calculus of operational priorities at the thana level, this does not accord much importance to such cases.

... contd.