Law & order must be separated from probe

Chief minister Mayawati’s decision to hand over the Noida double murder case to CBI must have come as a huge relief to the UP police, which for the last 15 days had been working more on scripting new theories than making any headway in the probe. The last of the attempts by UP police to support its "honour killing" theory was to leak excerpts of Aarushi’s e-mails to her parents. In these e-mails, she appears to be confessing to something she did, which was apparently not to the liking of her parents and for which she was seeking forgiveness. The excerpts fitted in perfectly with the police’s earlier "objectionable but not compromising" aspersion on her character. More damagingly, it led to public conjecture that something was so gravely wrong with her deed that she preferred an e-mail rather than telling it to her parents. By clinging to the apologetic e-mail to fan the "we told you so" canard about the girl, the police has laid bare its insensitivity and lack of understanding about the psychology of a teenager. Between 1882-1885, when Mohandas K Gandhi was of Aarushi’s age, he had written a somewhat identical letter to his father making a clean breast of how he sold off a piece of his brother’s solid gold armlet to clear a debt. A teenaged Mohandas had indulged in eating meat, a sacrilege in the Gandhi family. He had stolen money from servants to meet the expenses of his inquisitive smoking needs. He had also visited a prostitute, got tongue-tied and frigid before her, only to be thrown out with an avalanche of abuses. The persistent lying to parents to cover up all these, which even in today’s society are considered sins, gave intense moral pangs to Mohandas. Clearing a debt by selling a piece of armlet made the guilt unbearable for him. Despite living under the same roof, he decided to write a letter to father Kaba Gandhi. There was no e-mail, so he personally handed it over. "I was trembling as I handed the confession to may father," Gandhi wrote in his autobiography ‘My Experiments With Truth’. "He read it through, and pearl-drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper. For a moment, he closed his eyes in thought and then tore it up." Mohandas too cried, vowed never to repeat it and stayed true to his promise throughout his life. No one expects the cops to read Gandhi. But they are surely expected to consult psychologists to understand the guilt pangs of a teenager and legal experts before brazenly violating the right to privacy of a dead girl by making public details of e-mails. It could have submitted the e-mails to court in sealed cover if these were any evidence linked to the crime. It is for this reason that one needs to stress over and over again on the Supreme Court judgment in Prakash Singh’s case directing separation of investigation and law and order duties, each a specialist police job. In this 2006 judgment, the SC had quoted a letter written by the Union home minister on April 3, 1997, to all state governments imploring them to understand the "great national importance" in insulating the police force from "growing tendency of partisan or political interference in the discharge of its lawful functions of prevention and control of crime including investigation of cases and maintenance of public order". Almost all police reform commissions as well as the Law Commission had, in the past, suggested separation of investigation and law and order wings of police. The latest committee, headed by former attorney general Soli J Sorabjee, in its report suggested establishment of an autonomous Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) in each state. It is imperative in crime investigation, especially homicide cases, that the police has sufficient forensic skills to lift all possible evidence from the crime scene at the earliest before TV crew and others run over the place. A TOI reader and student in forensic science wrote, "Why is the police not taking help of forensic scientists to help collect vital evidence in every crime? Why should these scientists be confined to the laboratories alone? Why do the the police not discuss with forensic psychologists to understand the motive behind the crime, rather than float theories?" These are certainly relevant questions for the states as well as the Centre to consider and proceed in a direction of equipping the police force to investigate a crime methodically and scientifically. dhananjay.mahapatra@timesgroup.com
2 Jun 2008, 0032 hrs IST, Dhananjay Mahapatra,TNN
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