A sudden decision for a lockdown for 21 days from the Centre cannot be easy for anyone. But that is no excuse for the police to wield their canes and rods; aggression should not be the reflex whenever there is extra pressure. This is not to suggest that police throughout the country are behaving badly — not at all. They are, in general, doing their best, functioning as an essential service should at the time of a pandemic unprecedented in this generation. At the same time, in West Bengal alone, for example, the chief minister has had to declare “closed” those policemen against whom 12 complaints of wrongful behaviour towards members of the public have been made — against people conducting other essential services such as delivering food, perhaps, or householders returning from basic shopping. The confusion caused by the lack of systems meant to be put in place before the lockdown has most affected wage labourers, migrant workers, small shopkeepers and the most underprivileged sections of the population. The police need to be especially patient and helpful with those left in the lurch, not force them to hop like frogs as a group of young men were made to do on their way home in Budaun, Uttar Pradesh, or lathi-charge people at the vegetable market as in Gorakhpur, again in UP. It is the same state where no lockdown prohibition held back the chief minister from not only conducting a religious event — a direct violation of the Central order — but that too with a group of people with no social distancing — another violation — as he attended a Ram Navami event.

There is a serious problem about law enforcement in the country; this critical moment is laying it bare. Reports of the police caning or lathi-charging ordinary people, making them squat and hold their ears or even roll on the ground when they are going to the hospital or to the shops to buy food, or to deliver essentials, have surfaced from Assam, Tripura, Delhi and other places. One reason behind this is lack of training: the difference between a curfew and a lockdown may not be clear, apart from the fact that at certain levels, wielding the lathi is the only language the police know. The West Bengal chief minister has warned against the abuse of power. The police, it can be emphasized, have been given the power of protection: that is what they should exercise.