Prolonged bad practice often has one disturbing fallout. Correction, when it does come, tends to be overly rigorous. Anyone who has had the misfortune to go to a police station with a serious complaint knows that getting the police to register a first information report usually means engaging in a verbal duel likely to be crowned with defeat at the end. With the Ruchika Girhotra case blowing wide open, the traditional reluctance of the police to register FIRs is being seen as a crucial step in the years-old cover-up. The Union home ministry has therefore decided to instruct all states and Union territories to ensure that each police station registers all complaints as FIRs. So far, the police have tended to register FIRs only when they chose, even when the offence was a cognizable one, in which the police are empowered to investigate and make arrests without orders from the court. Registering an FIR means immediate action of one kind or another, and that seldom suited the police, maybe because of lack of personnel, or the reluctance to move, or simply the political, social or economic clout of the person being complained against.

The home ministry has reacted only after a particular case became a national scandal. That is a pity, for it is impossible to count the number of complaints, especially from women, about molestation, abuse, violence and rape, that have gone unregistered. Numerous women have been turned away or treated with such suggestive contempt or rudeness that many baulk at having to complain at all. The ministry’s directive implies a long-deserved admonition; it suggests that the police have misused their powers of discretion, and makes the station-in-charge answerable with regard to the registering of cases. Even if a complaint is false, the police are free to drop the FIR only after initial investigation. Yet the police’s discretion in the matter, properly used, was a positive feature of the justice system. Besides smoothing the course of natural justice, it could help complainants understand their rights and decide on the course they wished to take. A blanket transformation of all complaints into FIRs may become a new way to harass the innocent and the powerless apart from being wasteful of the police’s time and resources. And do the police have enough trained personnel to carry out the numerous investigations that would immediately become mandatory? Over-correction, in spite of its undoubted good effects, can also generate problems.