If we ever needed proof that allowing police to take the law into thier hands in order to fight terrorism or gangsters etc is wrong, we are now being given the proof in the unfolding shame in uniform that we are seeing in Gujarat.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  What we are seeing is how highly educated, highly intelligent officers - the creme de la creme, that comes through the UPSC exams to become IPS officers - have been corrupted by the absolute power they enjoyed because the politicians and society at large has allowed them to commit murder in the name of "encounter killings".   They started out staging encounters to kill terrorists and then diversified into a nice extortion racket and became mercenary "guns for hire".  

Refusing to defend human rights has been the greatest failure of our society.  Even without draconian laws such as MISA, POTA etc, the poor and oppressed sections of Indian society have suffered in the hands of police and the bureacracy.  Armed with draconian powers and a societal elite who are willing to look the other way because they want to fight terrorism, it has been very easy for police to call anybody a "terrorist", scare the hell out of an already scared public and stage "encounter killings".  There was an astonishing regularity with which people were being killed in Gujarat for plotting to kill Narendra Modi - now we know that they were fake encounters.

Even today, we dont know how many innocents were put in jail without trial, how many were tortured so that policemen could settle scores & dispense justices as "local dadas".  I remember seeing a scary hollywood movie called "Unlawful Entry" where a cop chillingly portrayed by Ray Liotta lusts after the hero's wife and abuses his powers to get rid of the hero and get his wife. Kurt Russel and Madeline Stowe play the terrified couple who are being prosecuted for drug possession (drugs planted in their house by the abusive policeman) and harrassed by Ray Liotta till the couple catch the cop trespassing their home and they shoot him dead.  In the US, right to defend your property and shooting a trespasser constitutes self defense and so the hero can get away with it - in India the hero would be in jail for killing in self defense.  The rights of a Indian citizen facing a cop who is abusing his powers and a cop who is empowered by draconian laws is zippo.   Remember the Marine Drive cop who could bully a teenage girl into rape in a police chowky after scaring away her boy friend... this could have happened to any of us.

The Mahatma was right when he insisted that means to the goal are as important as the goal. We need to fight terrorism, we need to fight crime but we have to fight them as a civilised society.  We allow the police to kill terrorists in staged encounters, then we are no better than the terrorists we are trying to defeat.  

The US has shown this so clearly in Iraq - they want to defeat Al Qaeda, they want to kill Bin Laden but they have adopted such uncivilized and cowardly methods such as Abu Ghraib, prisoner rendition (unlawful extradition - looks like India also did this with Nepal), Guantanamo Bay etc they have antagonised the world and reduced themselves in their own eyes to being worse than the terrorists.  We have to learn from this.  We cant make the same mistakes. Illegal methods make the terrorist problem worse. Yes - fighting terrorists will take longer if we operate within civilised methods, will be more painful and be difficult - but our cause is just and we will win.  But we have to be within the law and within the highest standards of civilised society - we take illegal short cuts, we may win a battle or two but we lose as a civilised society.