If the rampant violence unleashed on the streets of Kaliagunj in Uttar Dinajpur district on Tuesday afternoon were disturbing enough to draw inferences about law and order spiraling out of control every now and then in Bengal, images of policemen getting mercilessly beaten up in a room right behind the local police station were downright shocking.

The tell-tale visuals appeared on social media on Wednesday. These showed four bleeding policemen, lying on the floor and cornered to the wall, getting thrashed by their attackers with iron rods even as their pleas for mercy and heart-wrenching cries of pain fell on deaf ears.

The torture, led by a mob of about 30 people ostensibly protesting against police inaction over a suspicious death of a teenaged girl, reportedly went on for about half an hour until the victims were stripped of their uniforms and allowed to run for their lives. Some 15 other policemen, who took shelter in an adjacent bedroom, saved themselves from the same predicament by posting a cupboard to the door which the attackers failed to breach. A few others, holed up in the adjacent kitchen, managed to escape by breaking open a window.

But that wasn’t the only incident at Kaliagunj that shook the people’s conscience. An unarmed civic volunteer, 20-something Mizanur Rahaman, was dragged out of a house in the Thanapara area where he took shelter to escape the wrath of the so-called protesters, and brutally assaulted with sticks and stones in full public view. Rahaman is currently undergoing treatment at a private hospital in Siliguri where his condition is stated to be critical.

The arson at the Kaliagunj thana, slated to be among “model” police stations of the state, and the torching of some 50 vehicles parked inside the premises left the atmosphere in the area sizzling with fear and panic even a day after the mob ran amok.

Some 15 policemen suffered grievous injuries during Tuesday’s violence. As many as 33 suspects have been arrested so far and section 144 of CrPC, restricting public movement, have been imposed across four wards of the Kaliaganj municipal area even as strong underlying tension prevailed on the ground.

What’s more disturbing is the fact that Kaliagunj happened to be the third major incident within a month in Bengal where the police seemed to have been selectively targeted by irate mobs and the men in uniform helplessly found themselves at the receiving end of public ire, at least during the initial phases of violence. None of these was, strictly speaking, incidents of political violence.

On March 27, a large crowd, protesting the death of a minor girl allegedly killed by her neighbour on the advice of a tantric, went on a rampage in the Tiljala police station area in east Calcutta, that too on a day when President Droupadi Murmu was in town. Police vehicles were torched, stones were endlessly pelted at the police and police kiosks were vandalized. It took the security personnel a good few hours to restore some normalcy in the Bondel Gate and Picnic Garden areas adjacent to the Park Circus railway station.

During the communal violence at Rishra, Hooghly on 2-3 April the police again found themselves hopelessly outnumbered by rioters who not only torched a prison van, pelted stones and glass bottles at them, but also hurled crude bombs at the men in uniform forcing them to initially retreat.

Are these attacks on the police isolated incidents? Or is there something organically brewing amongst angry masses against the police?

A section of former top cops attributes the “loss of morale” of the state police force in the wake of stiff law and order challenges to a “systematic destruction of the force which began during the previous political regime”.

“The degeneration of police in the state began during the Left Front rule and Mamata Banerjee inherited that rot which continues to spread its tentacles to the very foundation of the police system,” said a former IPS officer requesting anonymity. The officer referred to the brutal killings of DCP Vinod Mehta and his bodyguard Mokhtar Ahmed Khan in the Port area of Calcutta back in 1984 as the first major targeting of cops during the earlier regime.

“The police force continues to remain hands tied and are more keen to please the political bosses than serve the public. There is also a leadership crisis among the forces,” the former top cop added.

“People are not only losing faith, and steadily so, with the thana-level officers which makes them avoid visiting the police stations unless it’s unavoidable. The criminals are having an extended honeymoon under the present regime and it pains me to say that this system is now like a quick sand with no hope of recovery,” the officer said. As someone who served the intelligence department, the former officer attributed “total intelligence failure” to the under-prepared manner in which the police attempted to stop the protesters in Kaliagunj.

“One cannot ignore the pent-up anger that a significant section of people have started harbouring against the police. The partisan manner in which the police act more often than not and their lackadaisical approach to investigations in sensitive cases have only added to the people’s anguish,” said Arindam Acharjee, a former police officer of the state while explaining the impunity involved in the attacks against the police in recent times.

“The police have to establish its independence and impartiality in Bengal to re-establish its role as guardians of people’s rights and liberty,” Acharjee added.

During an administrative meeting at Nabanna on Tuesday chief minister Mamata Banerjee reportedly pulled up the state’s top cops for the forces inability to retaliate in the wake of the Kaliagunj assaults. “Were the police wearing bangles?” she reportedly lashed out.

Banerjee, who doubles up as the state’s home minister, also reportedly expressed her disappointment with intelligence gathering ahead of the protests and underlined the need for the police to deal with dead bodies with sensitivity even during violent circumstances. Alleging BJP’s hand in conspiracy behind the Kaliagunj violence, she later told reporters, “The party brought in people from Bihar to carry out the rampage”.

With elections round the corner, it remains to be seen how much of the body blows to people’s confidence in police which Kaliagunj has thrust, the chief minister can restore in the days ahead.