Two videos that have gone viral since yesterday are highly disdainful of the Meghalaya Police. They show an alleged offender – a woman who was brought to the designated police station for ramming into another car on Saturday night, ranting at the Officer in Charge of the Police Station while he finds no words to argue back. She charges the police officials present, of not doing their duty and tells them to shed their uniform and give them to her because she can do better policing. The woman in question is the daughter of a high ranking police official and her brush with the law has brought out the Achilles heel of Meghalaya Police – which is that they usually handle with kid gloves the powerful and affluent of society. It must be admitted that Meghalaya Police has some of the best in its fold. Traffic police are courteous even when you occasionally transgress traffic laws.
Meghalaya Police has handled militancy with elan and lost some of its cadres in the process. True, there are the black sheep that are a scar to the image of the force and who are used by masterminds of crime and business mafia to do their dirty work. But such are a small minority which is why Meghalaya Police is still able to hold its own.
The incident in question will be a serious challenge to those handling this case. Firstly, the lady was driving a police vehicle or one with a police number plate. That is an offence because it is misuse of official privilege to which her father a police officer is entitled to. The woman was out during curfew hours. We have no explanation as to why she needed to be out. Since the vehicle she used is an official vehicle it might not have been stopped at different places where police are standing on guard. Having violated curfew and other sections of the law, how can the person still insist she is on the right side of the law and the police who apprehended her are violating her rights? Clearly this is also a case of abuse of official privileges by a police officer who allowed his vehicle to be used by an unauthorized person.
However, this is not the first time that police vehicles have been misused by children of police officials. In the past also media had reported how the son of a senior police official was driving around in his father’s official vehicle. In a society that speaks of being classless and egalitarian these are new attributes of the noveau-riche class that makes up tribal society today. The public is keenly watching this case as it unfolds to see how it is being handled and whether the offender pays for her crime, which prima facie appears to have been committed in this case.