A late night drunken brawl between complete strangers in the royal city of Patiala on the night of March 13, has spiraled out of control and is now being termed as a “conflict between the police and the army”. It was never like that.
According to the eyewitnesses, it started with an altercation between a young man in his twenties, who later turned out to be the son of a serving colonel, and a cop who was in his civvies, over wrong parking.
The incident happened outside a ‘dhaba’ (food joint) where the son of the colonel was reportedly having a drink inside his car. He had allegedly parked his vehicle not at the designated parking space, apparently because it was quite late in the night and the entire place was empty.
In the meanwhile, a police officer in his civvies reached there, probably to have food. The cop was part of a team, which had just returned from an encounter with criminals where they had recovered a child from the kidnappers.
The cop reportedly objected to the young man (colonel’s son) having parked his vehicle wrongly. The young man countered the cop asking him who he was to object. The cop without telling him who he was asked the counter question as who was he (the young man).
He introduced himself as the son of a former OSD of the former Punjab Chief Minister, also a retired military officer.
The cop (in civvies) reportedly knew the former OSD and his children and pointed this out to the young man and reportedly told him that he was lying about his father.
This apparently infuriated the young man who allegedly punched the cop, without knowing that he was hitting a police officer.
In the meanwhile some of the colleagues of the cop also arrived and beat up the young man. By that time his father, the serving colonel, also reached the spot. Then, according to the eyewitnesses, it was free for all.
The father(colonel )-son duo were outnumbered by the cops, and were brutally manhandled. It was during the scuffle that the colonel disclosed his identity. Everything, reportedly, happened in the spur of the moment and within a span of a few minutes only.
Initially neither the cops knew that the person they had got into the scuffle was a colonel’s son, nor did the colonel and his son knew that they were fighting with the cops.
It was like any other late night drunken street brawl where the rivals did not know each other and did not have any premeditated intention to attack each other. As it later turned out that one group was that of the cops and the other two persons were a colonel and his son, it was made into a “police-army” conflict.
The media blew it up terming it as high handedness of the police. Some of the opposition parties have also said that Punjab has turned into a “police-state”.
Given the natural soft corner of people for the defence personnel, the cops are being blamed for abusing their authority. One of the cops has reportedly admitted to beating up the colonel and his son and apologised to his (colonel’s) wife also. He is heard saying that he never knew that the person he was fighting with was an army colonel.
While there is a lot of pressure on the government to take action against the cops, there is also growing support for the cops among the general public. The Punjab government has adopted a balanced course of action. It only erred in not naming the accused cops in the first FIR. Now that has been corrected as some cops have been named in a fresh FIR. A high level Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by an Additional Director General of Police rank officer has been set up.
Punjab government has rightly not succumbed to the pressure from some quarters, like the opposition parties and the ex-servicemen organisations about dismissing the cops. The FIR has been registered and investigations are going on. Summary dismissal of cops will be uncalled for as whatever happened, happened in the spur of the moment.
Still the investigation has been started and any action that needs to be taken must be taken only after the due inquiry and due process of law and not through public pressure and media trial.
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