Cycle of complicity

Police allege­dly castra­te a man after he refuse­d to comply with orders to bark like a dog.

Recently in Multan, police allegedly castrated a man suspected of being a gambler after he refused to comply with police orders to bark like a dog. Such acts of police torture make it easy for the general public to believe that the police was complicit in acts such as the Sialkot lynching, since this reinforces the existing perception that the police is a good-for-nothing force and does its job only if a bribe is paid. This is to say that people in the Sialkot mob lynched the two boys not because they believed the police would not act, but because they thought that they had the implicit support of the police, since many personnel were present on the scene and stood by and did nothing to intervene.

Seen from the other side, one argument — and it may have some merit — is that the police represent the society that they serve, since its members are members of that society. Hence, they represent the values, flaws and shortcomings of that society, but perhaps these flaws are accentuated because there is no check really on the police as such, other than perhaps the media. An analogy of the police’s tendency to break rather than uphold the law of the land is reflected in how some others in a position of power act. Take the case of the chef de mission of the Pakistani contingent to the Commonwealth Games who saw nothing wrong with stealing the well-deserved moment of glory of a national sporting hero or of an MPA from Faisalabad who recently sought to humiliate over two dozen people by having their heads, beards and eyebrows shaved — their crime was to not disclose who had stolen wheat grown on the MPA’s lands. What our society needs is leaders and some worthy role-models — the only issue is that where do we find such people.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 11^th, 2010.