It was
8.30 pm and i was heading home from my office, when the wireless set in my car
started calling for me saying that there has been an accident of a child and
there is a grave law and order problem developing with people of the locality
out on streets in large numbers arsoning and pelting stones,and as a result jamming
the highway. I too asked station officers of the nearby police stations to rush
to the spot with force. It took me around twenty five minutes to reach
the spot. There were around twenty policemen including me at the spot and there
was an agitating crowd of around 300 people with stones jamming the road with
burning tyres and trying to burn the truck which was involved in the accident.
I got down from my vehicle with my body protector on, a polycarbonate shield
and a polycarbonate lathi in my hand. The duty was to protect the life and
property, the job at hand was to save the truck from arson, protect the life of
the truck driver and to remove the dead body of the child from the road and
send it for postmortem and also disperse the crowd so that traffic could
resume. It was a indeed a very bad accident where the body was completely mangled with all the organs strewn on the road and any person other than a doctor
or a policeman was bound to have lost it for a moment.
Not something unusual for us, we have got used to the ‘petty local
leaders’., ‘social workers’, who take up the cause of accident victims every
other day and on the pretext keep the dead body on the road and jam it to get
their share of cheap popularity. Nobody ever asked them as to what they
achieved by this ,other than causing inconvenience to people who are stuck in
the jam and showing utmost disrespect to the dead body by putting it in the
middle of the road and doing politics over it. Anyways the situation was brought
under control as we tried to reason with people there. We tried to convince
them to register a case, we caught the driver who was hiding from the crowd and
brought him safely to the police station.....and who would have been killed or
at least beaten up very badly had the crowd found him before the police did. We
enquired the people there about the child and about his parents.
We needed the guardian to
register an FIR of the accident and also so that further formalities of the
inquest report and the postmortem could be carried out and road opened for the
traffic, the agitated crowd decided not to cooperate and started accusing us of
being insensitive, refusing to tell who were the child’s parents…….. they all
started claiming that the child belonged to all of them and that all of
them were his parents. This went on for a while and we kept on arguing with
them and tried to make them see reason in whatever way we could. We told them
that there could be an ambulance stuck in the jam and that some children might
be going home from tutions....anything that would defuse the situation. On the
other hand I kept getting calls from the people stuck in the traffic jam saying
that the police was useless and it has not been able to resume traffic even
after two hours and that the police doesn't do anything except for taking
bribes and harassing people.
Well all things come to an
end and so did this..... we got them around and had to now send the body for
the postmortem..... one of the constables started to pick up the body parts and
put them in a sack and asked for people to help picking up those parts which
were strewn all over the road alongwith blood and flesh.And all those men who were
claiming the boy who died to be theirs a few minutes ago, backed out and spread
out twenty feet backwards . We picked up the body, sent it for postmortem and
put sand over the bloodspots and resumed the traffic and I came back home
wondering ....
