The circumstances are deeply unfortunate, but there is some joy in seeing the leftists hoist by their own petard. It has been the conventional wisdom among leftists that the police represent the oppressive arm of the state; and therefore the police always act to protect the interests of the ruling classes. To reverse this process, socialists, when they have come to power, have argued that the police force should be reformed and made to act to protect the poorer and the weaker sections of the society. The two positions are actually mirror images of each other, since both proceed from the premise that the police should act in favour of certain sections of society. In the latter case, by making the police act in favour of the poor, socialists and leftists aim to make the police an agent of social engineering. This opens up the space for the police to intervene in matters relating to personal and family matters. Under leftist governments like the one in West Bengal, the police have thus acted often not as upholders of law and order, but as the arm of this or that section of society — the ruling party, its supporters, its funders, friends and so on. What has thus gone by the board is the rule of law and even the cover of impartiality.

Against the socialists’ arguments to use the police, there has always been the liberal counter-argument — albeit somewhat muted in India. Liberals hold that the police have one duty and one duty only: to uphold the law and order of the country. The police have no right to intervene in the personal and family lives of individuals unless there has been a breach in the laws of the land. The police exist to protect the rule of law, not to break it. Thus the police should not act at the behest of any section of society or even the government. The police should act only at the behest of the law; it is this for which it is empowered. If this fundamental principle had been adhered to in West Bengal, then the present mess could easily have been avoided and the police and the government could have avoided having egg on their faces.

The mess is the outcome of the sanction, direct or indirect, given to the police to presume to be agents of social engineering. In the present context, the socialist argument has been turned on its head because the police, in a communist-ruled state, seem to have acted at the prompting of a businessman. In theoretical terms, what is important is that the actions of the police proceed on the assumption that it can act — and should act — in favour of this or that section of society. What society needs to debate is this assumption itself, and therefore the role of the police in a society that holds the rule of law to be supreme. In the hurly-burly that has inevitably followed the police’s apparent abuse of power and the government’s inactivity, this wider intellectual implication of the incident should not be forgotten.