Two drunk schmucks get horny in a bar, and try to fiddle around with a woman. (Commonplace behaviour, we might say, in a bar at least.) When they are asked to behave themselves, they turn violent. (Just as commonplace, we might agree too.) They are, thankfully, apprehended and detained at a nearby police station. And after a while, all hell breaks loose. For, a gang of their armed, pillaging, comrades land up at the police station and thrash the policemen black and blue.
The script might sound all-too-familiar; only that it isn’t from a sleazy Bollywood potboiler. This happened for real, and the schmucks in question are squeaky clean officers of the venerable Indian Army. Hmmm. Why am I not surprised?
The incident isn’t very shocking in itself. One can expect only such things from such people. Those who take up killing and fighting for a career and a life know only one form of self-expression: show that might is right. Any other form of humane conduct cannot quite germinate in their primal, embryonic minds.
The incident, yet, was outrageous. One shudders even to think that such a thing could happen in the heart of a bustling metropolis, on New Year’s Eve when this upmarket hotel seemed to teeming with the rich, the sophisticated, the influential. If army officers and their johnnies can do such things in full public glare, we can well imagine what repugnant atrocities they perpetrate in conflict zones where they fight to save the territorial integrity of the country. Aaah politicians, and their lackey armymen.
The incident happened in Kolkata/Calcutta.
A quick recap
It would be a good idea to round up what happened that night. Naah, no one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, for all we know. (Ok, I admit, sordid joke, sordid pun.)
The Telegraph reported:
Soldiers in uniform, led by a lieutenant colonel, rampaged through Park Street police station last night and freed two army officers arrested on the charge of misbehaving with women at a New Year’s Eve party, police said today.
The soldiers allegedly forced the police to open the lock-up at gunpoint, beat up all the 11 policemen and vandalised the building. Nine other detainees slipped away in the confusion.
The police, who said one of their injured was in hospital, have registered two cases. “We have told the army to hand the accused over. We may move court for arrest warrants,” said special inspector-general (SIG) Kuldiep Singh.
Army officers visited the police station twice. “A three-member inquiry committee is looking into it. Nothing more can be said now,” said Colonel M.C. Baruah, head of the probe team.
The two officers at the centre of the storm, Major Chandra Pratap Singh and Captain Mahesh, belong to the 3rd Madras Regiment, stationed in Salt Lake. The unit had returned from a high-stress tenure, manning Siachen and then battling militants in Kashmir, just six months ago.
Invited to a party at a Park Street hotel, Major Singh had reason to feel celebratory. He was recently promoted and was attending a year-end bash at a peace posting after several hardship tenures.
Around 11.30 pm, a woman guest is believed to have told hotel security that Singh was misbehaving with her.
“I requested him not to disturb the other guests,” said security guard Gopi Jha. “But he attacked me. When I returned with my colleague Dinesh Roy, he beat him up, too.”
Another version says the major was taken to a room and roughed up by the bouncers before the police were called. The hotel said in its complaint it had “tried to restrain” the officer. Captain Mahesh had slipped out but was arrested as he crossed Park Street.
“At the police station, they were asked to sit on a bench. But they kept threatening the police and misbehaved with a woman who had come to lodge a missing person case. We had to put them behind bars,” the SIG said.
The army raid was led by Lt Colonel Pratap Singh, an officer who sports the army chief’s citation on his breast pocket and has two bars to show on his medal-ribbons. He was in army fatigues and was accompanied by a Major Kavi in plain clothes, the SIG said.
About 20 soldiers arrived in three vehicles around 12.45 am. They beat up the policemen, smashed glass panes, overturned furniture and ransacked several rooms, deputy commissioner (south) Ajay Kumar alleged. “An officer, Bimal Khatua, hit with a rifle butt, needed six stitches.”
Two vehicles left with the arrested officers and most of the troops, but Lt Col Singh stayed back with some soldiers to meet the officer-in-charge.
There we are.
For the record, I believe the Madras Regiment is one of the oldest in the country. Quite a legacy, eh?
A law unto themselves
Face it – armymen are a law unto their recalcitrant selves. Well, for starters these uniformed ruffians are not supposed to be subject to most of the (relevant) laws that we are supposed to be. They know it (as less as we do) and they exploit it to the hilt. As was evident that night.
Before we tarnish their spotless uniforms, there are a few things we need to know.
We know the police can only detain an army officer on ‘active service’. (I am not sure, what kind of service they were rendering the nation on New Year’s Eve.)
We also know that once the officer concerned identifies himself, the head of his commanding unit should be informed. (I cannot answer this right now on behalf of the police.) Until, the military police arrives, of course.
Our laws do not apply to them. Then, what the hell are they doing on our turf anyway, huh?
The haughty army folks have a way of an inimical condescending identifying us – they call us ‘civilians’. No, nothing wrong with that. But if you have dealt with this particular specie, you will know how pejoratively this term is used to depict us. These ‘civilians’. Chhee chhee.
Well, perhaps these super-civil specie must leave us civilians to ourselves and confine themselves to their malodorous incestuous barracks. They are certainly not fit for civil society. Well, at least, we are not that civilised enough to conform to their august standards and norms of demeanour.
Hey faujis, why don’t you let us ‘civilians’ rust in piece. Ok, make that ‘rest’. You can make that ‘rusticate’ also, if you want. Armymen wouldn’t know the difference, anyway.
Too bad
It is just too bad for these officers that the disgusting and deplorable incident happened in full public glare. The army has this nauseating habit of brushing everything under its torn, stinking carpet.
I have been dealing with the army directly or indirectly for 15 years or so. Not because I am overwhelmingly enamoured by this specie, but because professional obligations while writing (unfortunately, as a journalist) about insurgency in the Northeast left me with little other alternative.
Not once, not once in all these 15 years have I ever come across one army officer who has conceded that they have committed even one human right atrocity. Leave alone rapes and other macabre crimes as indiscriminate firings on ‘civilians’. It is always either a malicious propaganda by the scum-of-the-earth militants, or their overground nefarious partners (read, human rights activists). If at all they (the over-decorated army officers) are cornered on an incident, they assure us that the army has its own way of dealing with such happenings. If you keep track of such incidents, you will know this is unadulterated bunkum. There is no deterrent factor anywhere.
And when they operate under the prophylactic security blanket provided by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, they ruthlessly execute atrocities with impunity. They do so, because they know for certain they can get away with anything. They always do. Worse, everyone knows but no one admits.
When the Union government constituted a panel to look into the Armed Forces Act, the army was just not elated. Of course, it is difficult to fight an insurgent/terrorist with one hand tied behind your back. But then how they do it (grapple with militants) is none of our concern. And demanding the abrogation of such Acts is very much our concern, especially if we are to face the brunt of marauding armymen. The insurgents/terrorists get away with everything, anyway. ‘Civilians’ are always collateral damage.
An officer and a scoundrel
There are many things that I pathologically loathe about the army and its individual constituents – but nothing more than their disdainful posturing towards us ‘civilians’.
Someone needs to tell them that being an officer does not make you a gentleman even if you might have imbibed all the gentlemanly traits at either the National Defence Academy or the Indian Military Academy or whatever. You may have learnt to behave in a gentlemanly fashion with the wives of your senior officers (or even their nubile daughters, for that matter) . But then, the schmuck in you always comes out in the Park Hotels. Especially, if your pecker is threatening to leap out of its zipped confines at the sight of one haute woman.
To be a gentleman you must be a human being first. And I am not sure how a man who kills for a living can ever have a human element still lurking inside somewhere.
Also read these:
» The Army wages war on cops
» Military crime, police punishment
» Midnight mayhem: cops plead and cower in the line of army fire
» Lady luck in lock-up
