Arresting SUV Driver is an Overreaction to Remind You That the State Exists

The police investigation into the three tragic deaths of UPSC exam students in a basement in Delhi's Old Rajinder Nagar has found an unusual and unlikely culprit.

The police have arrested Manuj Kathuria, the driver of an SUV that drove through the flooded road a few hours before the tragedy. The “waves” that resulted from the drive-by apparently damaged the gates of the coaching institute where the students drowned. Of course, the Delhi Police don’t allege that he was solely responsible for the deaths (they have also arrested the building owners for multiple violations) but it’s somewhat puzzling it would go so far to look for culprits for this tragedy.

One potential answer might be public outrage. Public pressure after a major incident such as this seems to cause India’s police to overreact in response.

This overreaction ranges from demolitions of the houses of the accused to targeted killings of entirely innocent persons in fake encounters. The victims of such disproportionate actions are usually India’s underprivileged communities - Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis. It is only in very rare cases, such as the drowning deaths of the three students in Delhi, or more recently in the Pune hit-and-run case, that the police take action against more privileged persons.

Someone like Manoj Kathuria is probably that rare privileged individual who finds himself facing the brunt of a police overreaction.

The disproportionate reaction on the part of the police in responding to public pressure is concerning. Such reactions are not an individual losing their cool in the heat of the moment. If it were, it would raise questions about their training and discipline but that would be a relatively easier problem to address. What these kinds of disproportionate responses indicate is a wider institutional acceptance of the need to react in this way. 

These are actions that only have a thin covering of legality. Laws allow for the demolition of buildings constructed in violation of the law but there’s a procedure for the removal of such illegally constructed buildings, but the procedure is only minimally followed. The fig leaf used is that it’s the municipal body that’s carrying out the demolitions.

Rather than making it legally justified, it only implicates the municipal authorities in the police’s disproportionate actions. The illegality, such as it is in these cases, usually exists in plain sight but demolition takes place immediately after some resident is alleged to have been involved in a crime.

On the other hand, there’s even less legal justification offered for targeted killings by police. The killings in Hyderabad of four men “accused” of rape and murder were justified in the name of “self-defence”. The Justice VS Sirpurkar Commission tore apart the justification in a detailed report after taking into account all the evidence, taking the view that the police involved should be prosecuted for murder. Even then, no action has been taken against any of the police involved, two years after the commission arrived at its conclusion.

How do we make sense of this situation, one where our country's police feel the need to engage in legally indefensible and disproportionate actions under public pressure? 

One answer possibly comes to us from Jinee Lokaneeta’s book, The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India. 

In Truth Machines, Lokaneeta tries to explain the motivations behind the police’s increased use of scientific and technological methods like lie detectors, truth serums, and narco analysis in the investigations. While the Indian police has historically been known for using custodial torture to extract confessions (with few consequences), Lokaneeta’s book asks why India’s police decided to change tack in the first decade of the 21st century. 

The existing models of how a state uses violence come from European philosophers (Weber’s bureaucratic state or Agamben’s state of exception) and do not always describe the Indian reality. Lokaneeta offers an alternative to how to think about the Indian state. She calls it the “contingent state” — one which has to go out and seek the approval of the people on an everyday basis.

When the state perceives that it has failed in a spectacular way, it does not respond with a lawful measure (as Weber would argue that it should) or simply do away with the law and do whatever it takes (as Agamben would argue that it might).

Rather, it takes up these thinly justified actions that are still disproportionate to the actual crime because it has to convince the people that it still functions and wields authority.

While public outrage over tragedies such as the one in Old Rajinder Nagar is justified, using that to goad the state into action is not always going to have the desired effect, and worse, may have undesirable ones as well. The state responds and overreacts to such outrage not to remedy the situation but to remind you that it exists and can use violence without consequences.

The courts are just as complicit in this behaviour as they see themselves very much as part of the same contingent state.

As the old saw goes — be careful what you wish for.

(Alok Prasanna Kumar is a Senior Resident Fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy in Bengaluru. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)