I Will Do Yours!

According to a news report, the SHO of Harrapa and his staff were snubbed by a local judge for insulting, torturing and publicly denuding the innocent girls and other family members of an alleged drug peddler.

Such news report normally make the inner pages of a newspaper and are rarely noticed by readers who concentrate more on the political scene and sometimes on sports and showbiz scandals. Regardless of our preferences such news is very serious affair and must make us stop and think.

Such events are extremely discomforting in many ways. They wake us to the bitter reality of what our society has transformed into. We completely ignore our religious moral and legal obligations while seeming to follow some rules that are incomprehensible to anyone watching and probably equally incomprehensible to ourselves.

I think one of the main causes of this sort of behaviour is our mindset, our habit of forgetting our own duties and taking it upon ourselves to perform the obligations of others. The police force is only responsible to the extent of arresting an alleged criminal and conducting investigations. It is the duty of the Courts to judge him and if found guilty, punish him. However, the members of the police force regularly act as judge, jury and executors, all combined in one uniform. They catch the accused, judge them to be criminals and quite often punish them with torture, insult and sometimes even death (in fake encounters). If you privately ask a police official, he will justify his actions by blaming the corruption and inadequate judicial system for all these actions, an argument which is irrational, absurd and cruel.

And let’s not single out the police force. We are all guilty of the same sort of behaviour. All of us must ask ourselves, are we performing our duties perfectly? If the environment is not conducive for this, it should make us try harder. It does not, under any circumstances, give us the right to take it upon ourselves to do what we are not allowed to, by religion or law and thus harm the delicate balance of rights and obligations on which any society stands.

Whereas we have the right to judge people to the extent to which they directly affect us or others around us, this right is limited to helping us decide how to act in relation to those people. We do not have the right to pass judgement on other people. Unfortunately, we are extremely fond of doing just that.

Consequently, we have become a nation where everyone is interested in doing everything except his own job. The police judges people and gives punishments, the judiciary plays politics, the military is more interested in civilian departments, the religious people conduct bombings, students indulge in crimes, sportsmen are unfit and on drugs, lawyers spend more time on the street than in the courts, judges are more interested in hanging on to their seats than in providing justice, doctors run businesses, quacks prescribe medicine, intelligentsia just discuss stuff in their drawing rooms, journalists blackmail people, the list could just go on and on.

We must realize that the stature of a person depends on his own actions and thoughts. Proving the others to be worse than us and trying to show that we can do someone else’s job better, only degrades us. As long as we, as a society or as the human race, do not start respecting ourselves and each other and minding our own business, we just cannot criticize the police or any other small group of individuals for not doing the same.

Once we acquire the habit of respect for all, the law enforcing forces would have to mend their ways too. I dream of the day when events like that in Harrapa will become a rarity and when they do happen, they will make the front pages of the newspapers, and the judges won’t be satisfied with just snubbing the culprits.