Boy Dies When The Police Guards

I was moving back to Hyderabad from Bhubaneswar. The journey entails a long trivial story that needs lot of patience to describe and right emotions to be expressed and that means more time, which right now I don’t have.

I had not considered checking the headlines in these 7-days. So, as I hopped into my berth and scooped the newspaper lying on the small table top, the headlines caught me off guard.

A 10 Std boy who was going to give his final board exams this march could no more attend the same because he was cruelly beaten up right outside an IAS officers’ gate which means ‘men with guns on guard duty could not leave the gates ajar’. How do you react when you learn that his elder sister had actually yelled and begged for help and had been turned off decisively without slightest interrogation?

She works in a call centre and as always her younger brother came down to pick her up in his cycle when three drunkards ambushed them and coerced the boy to allow them on his sister. He tries to protect her, but is kicked, beaten and badly bruised in the process. The girl runs bangs the officers’ gate for help, is refuted, runs back and finds the attackers gone but her brother lying helpless amidst the blood-stream oozing out of his body, who later succumbs to his injuries. But his life could have been saved and heroism justified if the police people hired by the govt. were abled enough to care. Two men in uniforms who claim to ‘guard’ another bureaucrat do not have the damned sense to save a life 100 metres away. I must have sworn a hundred times when I read the entire article. I cried because I could not imagine myself in lieu of that poor girl. She must be so desperate to save her brother, and then a flickering hope when she finds men in uniform and arms. And how anguished she must be when they shoo her away because they could not leave their duty? !! Even if it was a planned ambush to break into the officer’s house, atleast one of the guards could have seen to the commotion. The boy could have been alive!

The only thing that has occupied my mind right now is that he could have been saved. I would never want to compare, but in US, a single dial to 911 and the next moment the nearest police station is on move. When the system in our country is so nauseatingly uncared then who do we go to? The DM says the entire allegation is a farce. So the girl wanted revenge from one of the guards and may be the officer, so she sent thugs to kill her brother right? Come on. If you don’t have the ability to stand your uniform, then better shut up and follow the show. Or just change the system. Make stricter rules and demand sincerity for the money you pay. Because it can cost someone else’s life, which might not be as aimless as yours.