In a recent finding, it has come out that the encounter that took place in Gujrat in July 2004, in which five people died, was fake. The police had reported that all five people were terrorists and had come to assassinate the CM.  Well, this news is not new to our ears and not surprising either. This incident has once again brought to forefront, the ugliest façade of one of the most important organizations in India. The situation has become such that every time an encounter takes place, general public opinion is that it is fake. It is a common notion that the police force can only exercise its powers on the innocent people.

Among all the administrative departments, police department is one, which interacts most with the general public. It is one department which is supposed to instill a sense of confidence and security in the people. But this has become a system which is loosing its credibility very quickly. Common innocent people are afraid to enter the police station even to lodge a complain. When people see a police officer in uniform, they become as intimidated as they would get after seeing a criminal. As if all this is not enough to dissuade people from going to police, it is accused of doing fake encounters.

 Nobody can deny the fact that this criminalization and corruption has not affected all the officers in the police force. If this was the case, then things would’ve been much worse. But still there are so many of them, that it is not possible to trust the force completely. This is an extremely unfortunate situation because for a civilized society to function properly, it is very important for the public to trust the police force. Therefore it becomes the primary duty of the concerned authorities to punish officers accused of such hideous crimes. Only then will the moral of the anti social elements come down.

Lastly, to show how far the situation is from the ideal, it is enough to cite an old famous incident in which a foreign visitor compares the police of his country and India by saying that: “the difference between your police and our police is this that in our country we tell the kids to go to police if they are in trouble while in your country you tell them that if get near the police, you’ll get in trouble.”  We only hope that police force is able to flush out the corrupt and inhumane officers so that the general public can trust them more than they do now.