About my family and some animals

My brother-in-law, a hotelier hitherto unknown for criminal activity of any kind, was arrested last week for alleged violation of the Wildlife Protection Act. What makes his story more than just a personal crisis for your columnist is the manner in which every right that should be fundamental to a citizen of an enlightened democracy was violated in pursuit of the supposed rights of a python.

What happened was this. A police party along with officials of the Wildlife Department was wandering about farmhouses in the Delhi area in what appears to have been an exercise to salvage the reputation of the Delhi police, damaged a few days earlier, because of a police bullet having killed a wild leopard.

In the course of their wanderings they stopped to ask domestic help and sundry other informants if they had spotted any endangered species imprisoned behind closed farmhouse gates. One of the people they questioned was a groom working on my sister’s farm who told them that there was a python on the premises. This was all the information they needed to ‘‘raid’’ my sister’s farm.

So, about 50 officials and policemen arrived in a cavalcade of official cars and said they were on a routine search for ‘‘a panther’’. In the course of this supposedly routine search they found not just the python but a pair of 50-year-old ivory tusks and a couple of cases of wine left over from a dinner party.

This was enough for my brother-in-law to be treated as a convicted felon. He was denied access to a lawyer and confined incommunicado under virtual house arrest while the search party informed various television channels to come and get their ‘‘scoop’’.

My brother-in-law tried explaining that the tusks belonged to his late mother and were more than 50 years old and that the python had been saved by his sons when it was attacked by the family dogs but nobody was prepared to listen.

Unless he could find registration papers for the tusks they would have to arrest him and that, they said, was that. If they knew their job well all they needed to do was test the tusks to establish their age but they were having none of this since what they clearly wanted was a media event.

As soon as the TV crews arrived they swung into action and arrested my brother-in-law, filmi style, in the full glare of camera lights. They then proceeded to use the media, both electronic and print, to find him guilty.

The next morning’s newspapers had headlines that shrieked ‘‘Farmhouse raid yields python’’. The only version of the story they carried was that fed to them by the police and even this was reported so inaccurately that some newspapers did not even bother to get names or details right. One newspaper not only got my brother-in-law’s name wrong but inexplicably came up with Nainital as his place of residence. Keep in mind, please, that media coverage cannot but influence magistrates in deciding matters of bail and keep in mind also that if this kind of thing can happen to more privileged Indians, what must happen to those of our citizens who have neither money nor connections.

We are so accustomed to ‘‘police raj’’ that not even our human rights activists have noticed that in a supposedly enlightened democracy neither the police nor officials should have rights of search and seizure. In Western democracies these can only be used when there are stated, valid grounds and serious action is taken against those who misuse these rights.

This does not happen in our fair and wondrous land and on a daily basis more and more organisations of the state are demanding and getting search and seizure rights. So the ‘‘police raj’’grows from strength to strength as do ‘‘raids’’ of all kinds.

With the additional help that the police now gets from the media the end result is that already shoddy police work has become shoddier. So, although there are still no signs of Veerappan being caught or of major international terrorists being brought to justice our criminal justice system seems to get better and better at going for soft targets.

Remember the Tehelka reporter who has been in jail now for more than six months because he was trying to expose wildlife poachers? Remember Shankar Sharma who spent three months in jail for an alleged offence that merited no more than a Rs 5,000 fine? Incidentally, his company First Global was absolved by the Joint Parliamentary Committee of any responsibility for causing the stock market crash but the state has spent two years destroying First Global anyway.

Sadly, in reporting the police version as the only version the media is allowing itself to become a tool of police repression. This is particularly frightening now that the media is no longer a handful of badly printed newspapers but a multi-channel, multi-lingual monster of immense power.

Write to tavleensingh @expressindia.com