JUST SPAMMING | Are we not encouraging police excesses?

Last week started with a viral video of a couple intimidating the police on Marina beach late in the night. It was interesting and intriguing, at the same time, to see the man, who also admitted on camera that he was drunk, telling the police that he will not move from the place and the woman mocking at the policeman shooting their act of insubordination by striking poses for the camera. Normally, no man or woman in their senses will dare to question a policeman in Chennai. So the couple’s performance before the camera with the gentle breeze wafting behind them was a pleasant spectacle for onlookers like me.

Sadly it was just a transience, as we were told the next day itself. Subsequent videos that rolled out on social media were not that pleasant. Those images, showing the couple being sent to jail or questioned in police custody or the man breaking down before the camera and apologizing for the mistake, particularly the act of name dropping – he had bravely asked the interrogating cops if he should request the Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin to come over – were not at all funny.

As those grim vignettes came out, self-styled anchors of YouTube channels broke into spiels with an air of authority, erudition and righteousness insisting that the couple were punished for a variety of reasons. One of them is not disobeying the police party that was patrolling the roads on the Marina beach and not leaving the place immediately and two, for committing the cardinal sin of talking back to the police. But the YouTubers were not asking if it was right on the part of the police to have taken the video of a couple on the beach without seeking their permission and to have leaked it to the media.

In our overwhelming glee over an unknown couple, who had crossed a line as per our standards, being hauled over the coals for not being subservient to the police and even dumped into a jail for two weeks, we applaud the quick and efficient crackdown by the police without bothering to think about the blatant human rights violations that had been committed in the process.

I know it is a long time since ‘human rights’ has become a dirty word. Even workers’ rights is frowned upon as we saw, during the recent standoff between the striking Indian employees of Samsung and the South Korean management, home spun intellectuals of the State, aided by television and YouTube channel anchors, enlightening the people about the bane of trade unionism and the concept of collective bargaining. Many people nodded in agreement when those upstarts said that trade unions will force companies to shut shop without bothering to tell us how many capitalists have thus gone bankrupt.

Ok, let me not deviate, we were talking about human rights here. So, is it right to leak – it was actually an opening of a floodgate – the videos of a couple to anyone? Be it YouTube channels or regular media channels. Does it not amount to breach of privacy? Please don’t think that an erring couple who cocked a snook at the police is not entitled to privacy. The law is common to all and the police or the YouTube channel anchors have no right to judge if they were on the wrong or not. Police can take legal action but it is for the court to decide if they were on the wrong or not. So handing out the video to others is as much a crime as not obeying the police.

But then, it has already become a trend or a regular practice for the police to leak audio clips and video recordings that they obtain from devices of people picked for questioning and other reasons and defame people they do not like. To put it otherwise, like some people who take the law into their own hands, the police purposefully hand over the responsibility of conducting the trial to media channels to character assassinate people whom they are unable to proceed against. So, if the couple caught on Marina sands for overstaying – I don’t know if sitting on the beach after a particular time is a crime according to any law but let’s not get into that now – had to be dealt with legally, the police should have presented them before a magistrate and sought punishment for them.

The police have no right to first defame them personally and then bring them before a judge, that too after torturing them. But we have been revelling collectively over pictures of men, who euphemistically slip and fall in the bathroom and end up with plastered arms. Shamelessly, the police have been touting the theory that the arrested person broke his limbs in the bathroom since they cannot legally do that to an accused or suspect or whoever they take into custody.

I don’t know how many of the social media and regular channels that exult over the pictures of persons with bandaged limbs for ‘slipping in the bathroom’ have dared to ask the police why their bathrooms are so slippery. Well, the point is that, as a society, we are encouraging the police to breach rules and norms in the treatment of human beings who land in their custody with our social media and other news channels cheering from the sides.