Annie Zaidi: A quiet, leisurely stroll to the 'thana'?

Imagine you’re walking down a dark, lonely road. It is past midnight. You see a shadow up ahead, and stop. You are now scared.

What are you scared of? Of being hurt, assaulted, carried off, exposed? By whom? Ah! That’s an interesting question. It could be a mugger or a psychopath. Or it could be a cop.

This is one of our saddest truths — on a dark, lonely road, meeting a cop is almost as scary as running into the bad guys. Not because we have much to hide. We are scared because we are powerless against the law. We can be picked up by the police any time they like. At a recent meeting held to protest the wrongful confinement of citizens, retired Justice Hosbet Suresh explained that Section 151 of the CrPC (Code of Criminal Procedure) gives the police the right to arrest anyone on suspicion. Essentially, you could be hauled off to the nearest police station if a cop thinks you are going to commit an offense, and you could be kept there for 24 hours.

A lot can happen in 24 hours. You could be forced to perform acts that leave you scarred for life, but which we cannot prove in a court of law. Or you could be obviously broken but the fractures and bruises which may be explained away as an ‘accident’ — slipping in the bathroom, for instance.

Now, what is one to do about slippery bathrooms? What should we say to a woman who was seriously injured immediately after being handed over to the Chhattisgarh police? Apparently, Soni Sori, accused of being a Maoist, has managed to hurt herself while in custody — she slipped and fell, it is being claimed — after she was handed over to the Chhattisgarh police.

Her family — including her father and her nephew Lingaram Kodopi — has been hurt and hounded and the whole business has already been reported in the national press. Soni had appealed to the judiciary in Delhi, saying she fears for her life. Now what does one say to the honourable judges who saw fit to hand her over to the Chhattisgarh police?

And what does one say about octogenarians getting manhandled? Activist Kavita Srivastava’s 87-year-old father was pushed around when the Rajasthan police came calling while helping the Chhattisgarh police find Soni Sori. If Mr Srivastava was hurt, I suppose we’d have slippery bathrooms to blame.

But these are anti-Naxal operations and there are more draconian laws involved. For now, I’d like to just focus on the fuzzy terror of Section 151. What it means is that you could be strolling aimlessly, or protesting some innocent’s murder, and you can be arrested without a cop having to come up with any reasonable evidence against you. You might be set free and then arrested again. The poet Varahara Rao was arrested about 15 times. Arun Ferreira, who spent four years in jail as an undertrial, was acquitted but the police re-arrested him before he could even meet his family. His lawyer Surendra Ghadling says that other people too have been put on trial more than once for the same alleged crime. This is a violation of the law, but it happens.

It happens because we do not question police procudure. Section 151 exists because we do not question how much power the police should wield, nor insist that the smallest police action be open to public scrutiny. Mostly, it happens because we forget that we aren’t any different from Soni or Arun. We are lucky. For now. Tomorrow we might want to protest something, and then, who knows? 

—  Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)