The police in West Bengal are unlikely to get first prize for intelligence. Police officers at the top can be shunted out and the Central Bureau of Investigation can go blue in the face inquiring into the extent of their interference in the lives of a married couple, but the millions of little grey cells seething in the brains of policemen throughout the state simply fail to make the connection. Even fathers learn. Ashok Todi targeted his son-in-law, Rizwanur Rahman, but Sweety Tater’s father went one better. He lodged a complaint of theft against his daughter when she ran away from wrongful confinement in his Mumbai home to be with her husband, Rakesh Sahu, in Howrah. So the daughter ended up with both the Mumbai police and the police in Howrah hounding her and her husband. Mr Sahu was detained and threatened once in Gamdavi police station in Mumbai, and again in Golabari police station in Howrah when he tried to inform the police of their situation.

The police have a thing for fathers of a particular type. That is, they must have an adult daughter who has married according to her will and not theirs, they must be blatant liars, abusers of the justice system and wasters of police time, and they must have pockets deep enough to be able to do all these with confidence. Mr Sahu has found that the pursuit of his wife by her father has not ended even after he submitted copies of their marriage certificate to the Criminal Investigation Department and had his wife give her statement on October 29. Nothing matters — not what he or his wife may put on record, not what seems to be happening in the aftermath of Rahman’s death. All that matters is that Mr Tater has charged his daughter with theft.

And theirs is not the only case that has come to light after Rahman died. Abu Salim Gazi and Ria Choudhury, who trusted the safety of the Special Marriage Act, have been in hiding since their marriage in June. The girl’s father has charged her husband with abduction, and the police have got into the act, smashing up his and his friend’s homes in Basirhat to hunt out the “criminal”. And Mr Gazi claims that he is being threatened from the police station everytime he switches on the phone.

Perhaps the police operate by a secret code that instructs them to refuse to register first information reports of molestation or rape, or to respond to complaints of boring burglaries and routine robberies. They seem trained to concentrate their energies on unlawful complaints by aggressive fathers. So hypnotic is this training that the recent upheaval in their own force is just so much vague background noise. In all likelihood, they would be genuinely surprised to hear that an individual actually has rights in this country, whether to marry or to live together with a partner of choice. What would they have left to do then?