Unicorn

Noun: unicorn 'yooni'korn An imaginary creature represented as a white horse with a long horn growing from its forehead. Though the popular image of the unicorn is that of a white horse differing only in the horn, the traditional unicorn has a billy-goat beard, a lion's tail, and cloven hoofs, which distinguish him from a horse. Interestingly, these modifications make the horned ungulate more realistic, since only cloven-hoofed animals have horns.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Of encountered gangsters and disgraced encounter specialists

JCP Suchak: Aaj kal tho aap hero ban rahe hain
Sadhu Agashe: Inkaa kyaa hai Sir, Press waale tho kisi ko bhi hero banaa sakte hai ...
JSP Suzuki: Iam glad that you know
-From a scene in the movie "Ab Tak Chappan"

There are always cases of real life aping "reel" life. Cases of reel life being inspired by real life are also not unusual. Just like the protagonist in the movie gets disgraced, deserts the force, flees the city at the end of the movie, the inspiration for the movie - an encounter specialist too was disgraced and went underground. The only difference is that the cinematic version was seen by us and we knew the real reason why he left the force ...

What ever may be the reason - Is keeping trigger happy encounter specialists in the force a good idea? As in the case of the mumbai cops what if the specialists out grew the force? Who will reign them down? They are like a double edged sword. They can swing either ways. But don't we have any other ways to reign in dreaded criminals except commissioning special squads that "encounter" criminals?

Sadhu Agashe:(to a Rookie in the force) CI kaa kaam kyaa hotaa hai?
Rookie: Sir, underworld ke logon ko control mein rakh naa ...
Sadhu Agashe: Control mein nahin ... Unhe maarnaa ...

Perhaps not ... Is an eye for an eye the only answer? There is a rot in the system. The rot leads to rise in organized crime. Instead of cleaning the rot and breaking the nexus we bestow more power upon the police (The top cops in the department are always bashed publicly by the politicians for rising crime rate) to gun them down. Who then has power to control the cops? You are unleashing demons to counter demons. For controlling the specialists we need another balancing force which unfortunately is absent!

Rot in the system is very large. No two ways about that. While poor constables wield the unwieldy SLRs gangsters/terrorists use semi-automatics. Police need to be given special training to counter that too. Again no two ways about this. The real problem arises after they are successful in curbing the criminals (They killed at least 300 gangsters in between 1998-2000 and that is really huge!) So after killing 300 criminals there were hardly anyone left! The Mafia big wigs have fleed the country. Then what? The cops who wielded unquestioned authority have nothing much to do except for flexing their muscles on the "common" man or helping the corrupt people in the system there by leading to more rot. This became a vicious circle. It is high time that we start a department with in the police force to police the police! On the lines of Internal Affairs in the US! Sadly because the ACB which is already in place has limited scope. Even the most feared cops in the US fear the "Internal affairs"!

Note: Ab Tak Chappan happens to be my all time favorite Hindi movies