Opinion Rough justice

By trying to bypass police procedures, inviting contempt for them, AAP betrays vigilante leanings.

January 17, 2014 02:55 AM IST First published on: Jan 17, 2014 at 02:55 AM IST

By trying to bypass police procedures, inviting contempt for them, AAP betrays vigilante leanings.

Two ministers of the new Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi, Rakhi Birla and Somnath Bharti, have publicly locked horns with the state police and administration. While Birla sat on a dharna, accusing the police of dragging its feet on a dowry harassment case, Bharti, who happens to be the state’s law minister, decided to lead a raid on an alleged prostitution and drug ring. He claims that people had complained to him about “Nigerian and Rwandan nationals involved in sex trade and drugs”, and decided to catch them red-handed. Then, he tried to get the police to forcibly enter a house that, he said, bystanders described as a den of vice. When the police suggested that warrants may be needed for law-enforcers to search the premises, Bharti got into an altercation with them, and told the media that if the police could refuse him, the law minister, how could they be expected to respond to citizens? It didn’t seem to occur to him that the police is meant to obey the law, not the law minister, and that they need some substantiation of a claim to break into a house. Apart from the highly problematic assumptions revealed by his hostility to “Nigerians and Rwandans”, who he said, were “not like us”, Bharti seems to believe that being on the side of the people involves a reflexive hostility towards the police.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, meanwhile, confirmed the worst suspicions about the AAP’s simplistic worldview and its troubling vigilante leanings when he defended his ministers’ actions and declared the Delhi police “compromised”. If police officials have not taken action so far, or are reluctant to rush in without warrants, that means they are complicit, he said, and demanded that both SHOs be suspended immediately. He said he was warning Delhi Police that all of Delhi would “interfere with their work” if they did not take action on drug and sex rackets, adding darkly that “rape tendencies” started from such things. The Delhi chief minister may well have grounds to believe that Delhi Police is corrupt or inefficient or both, and it is understandable that he should flail against the fact that it does not report to the Delhi government. But he evidently needs to be told that arrest procedures and thorough investigations are not the excuses of a corrupt police, they are foundational to due process and to an individual’s legal rights vis-a-vis the state.

Having first invited citizens to “sting” public officials, the AAP has now moved its ministers into a similar vigilante mode, in an effort to either by-pass or entirely supplant a system they see as slow and compromised. They don’t seem to be aware of the scarred history of these impulses. Whenever vigilante values have won over due process, we have witnessed arbitrariness, cruelty and a breakdown of public accountability.