Free-ranging criminals

A low-life criminal roaming the streets of Punjab on bail has served to demonstrate once again the dissolution of the entire structure of governance as well as breakdown of the social fabric of the state. His gang of five shot down an associate in full public view in Longowal, Sangrur, and put up on social media videos of them celebrating the ‘kill’, also issuing a challenge to the police to catch them. The audacity with which these and other ‘gangsters’ before them have dared the police suggests a certain kind of intimidation and timidity they have been able to achieve among the force. Most of such criminals have been in and out of prison, but rarely are they convicted of any heinous crime. The main reason is want of witnesses, who do not have the confidence they’ll live to tell the tale after deposing in courts.

However, there is more than a simple policing failure. To become a gangster — or drug smuggler or ‘terrorist’ — is only the culmination of a long process of disenchantment with society as well as the system. Children not getting a regular education, and subsequently going around unemployed, is the recipe for the making of a criminal. It may be noted that such lawlessness was not what the SAD-BJP alliance inherited in 2007. Their first term passed off relatively better too. The undermining of established governance norms for two consecutive tenures started to bear fruit more towards the end of the second term.

The task for the new government in Punjab will be to re-engineer all governance priorities. For what we have today is a study in contrast — massive toll roads and flyovers, versus broken roads connecting small towns and villages. A few farmers driving SUVs, while the majority struggle for survival. A surfeit of private universities, but few schools to feed them as the public education system today serves only the near destitute. The foremost task to restore public confidence in government, however, cannot be accomplished unless policing is handed back to the professional policeman.