Daily Times

There is a widely known saying in Pakistan, “Apna ik banda police ich bharti karaa lao te jo marzi karde phiro,” which translates to “get a man recruited in police and do what you like.” Sadly, police have managed to create such an image of themselves in this country that makes people fear the very presence of a cop anywhere.

From mistreating Kainat Soomro, a rape survivor, and her family to opening fire on the Pakistan Awami Tehreek workers to killing parents in front of their children in Sahiwal to murdering Naqeebullah Mehsud in a fake encounter to torturing Salahuddin Ayubi to death for allegedly breaking an ATM machine, the police force has left behind a long list of disturbing incidents where it has acted not as a protector but a serious threat to public life, liberty and honour.

Kainat Soomro’s story, whose struggle for justice received international attention, illustrates the harrowing experience police make the people from lower socio-economic brackets to undergo. She says, “Instead of helping us, the police harassed us. False cases were registered against my brother in Hyderabad; they arrested him and kept him in jail for two months. We eventually managed to get him released on bail, but then they began to harass my other brothers.”

Salahuddin Ayubi had only recently shown us a mirror when he innocently asked policemen shortly before his custodial death, “Tusaan lokaan nu marna kithon sikhia aye? (From where have you learned to torture people?) A strong public reaction against police torture followed his death but it did not translate into any practical steps towards reforming police.

Covid-19 crisis has once again exposed the dehumanising behaviour of police. Ordinary people who broke quarantine rules have been subjected to demeaning murgha punishment (a corporal punishment in which people are asked to hold their ears through their legs), forced to crawl, and do frog-hops. And to the surprise of many right-minded citizens, police video recorded these disgusting scenes as if it was quite a normal way of keeping people from leaving their homes.

Our tendency to justify humiliating police tactics during the coronavirus crisis as extraordinary measures in exceptional times would end up making police violence reinforced and normalised

Some TV anchors seem to be presenting such videos considering them hilarious, while the majority of the people are seen to be making light of them by poking fun at those who are made to undergo such a callous treatment. There is, however, nothing funny about it. It only points to the fact that we as a nation have yet not accepted that the right to be treated ethically is a fundamental human right irrespective of the social, economic and political status of an individual.

As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was based on the idea that everyone is entitled to a certain dignity, and as the preamble to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) makes it clear that all other “rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person,”, making light of the infringement of this right means that all other rights also stand insecure.

Psychological pain inflicted on decent people through public shaming in the presence of friends, family members, relatives and neighbours for small transgressions of the quarantine rules may do long term damage in the form of instilling unnecessary and unreasonable fear of the state functionaries in their hearts. Feelings of helplessness and powerlessness experienced by the people who are baton charged on the streets may make them unlikely to approach law enforcement agencies for redressal of their grievances in future.

When people lose confidence in state’s protection or feel that state officials work only for the rich and the influential, they develop a socially and politically necessary patron-client relationship with local bigwigs. That gives them a degree of political power needed to shield themselves from the humiliation or denial of rights they may experience. In the absence of such a relation they opt not to invoke law at all.

In the first case, they enter into an unequal relationship of the kind that exists between a chaudhary and his riyat in Punjab or a wadera and his riyat in Sindh in which the client is exposed to all kinds of abuse and exploitation from the patron. In such a scenario, the client and his children remain preoccupied with serving the patron and his family and devote little or no time to their personal development.

In the second case, victims keeping the power asymmetry between them and their abusers in view do not report the injustice they are subjected to by the rich and the powerful. Thirty to fifty percent of crimes are considered to be unreported in Pakistan. Being unable to solicit state’s help in the face of injustice is itself a painful experience to go through. Consequently, some of the victims either resort to self-harm or take law into their own hands to avenge their injuries.

In 2014, Amna Bibi set herself to fire outside a police station in Muzaffargarh after police released her alleged rapists. Safdar Hussain set himself alight in 2017 inside the Athara Hazari police station when police released a man who had allegedly raped his wife. These disturbing incidents suggest that ordinary people already do not trust police to deliver them justice.

As majority of public complaints are ultimately addressed by police, it forms the basis on which the whole superstructure of the system of justice depends. Until and unless this basic institution is not reformed people would continue to seek help elsewhere such as from influential people from their locality. This would keep the exploitative patron-client relationship between those who need protection from police violence and those who guarantee it to go forever.

Our tendency to justify humiliating police tactics during the coronavirus crisis as extraordinary measures in exceptional times would end up making police violence reinforced and normalised. As a matter of fact, police use methods more brutal than frog hops and murgha punishment within police stations, but it is particularly worrisome that they have chosen to act the same way on the streets as they do within police station. This is a moment of truth for society as a whole and police in particular. It must be taken as an opportunity to transform police from a public frightening agency into a public friendly body.

The writer is a Lahore based lawyer