I first heard about Badlapur when a film by the same name with its English translation, 'The City of Revenge,' written in brackets, was released in 2015. The film was a success, as it grossed nearly Rs 100 crore, though it did not have any big stars. It is difficult to narrate the convoluted story in a few words. Let me mention that the moral of the story is that revenge is not something to be promoted, as it is a futile exercise.

There is a city by the same name, Badlapur, on the banks of Ulhas river in the Thane district of Maharashtra. My etymological search of the name led me to a fascinating story. The town was famous for its rich horse breeds. Warriors of Shivaji Maharaj changed their horses at the town in anticipation of the difficult climb through the Konkan area. The word change ("Badla" in Marathi) was linked to the town, and it was called Badlapur (The Town or City of Change).

Badlapur hit the headlines in August last when reports came that two girls, aged three and four, were sexually abused in the toilet area of a preschool in the city. The news of the August 12 incident spread like wildfire, and people in thousands blocked the road and protested against the inaction of the police.

Initially, the management of the school denied that such an incident had taken place. The BJP was at that time at the forefront, fanning the protest against the rape and murder of a medical doctor at a hospital in Kolkata. Naturally enough, the people would have come to the conclusion that the party had a different position on rape in West Bengal, ruled by the Trinamool Congress, and in Maharashtra, where its own leader Devendra Fadnavis was in charge of the home.

Molestation of children is now treated as rape attracting the same severe punishment. The police took their own sweet time to file the First Information Report (FIR) and register the case. The part-time janitor, Akshay Shinde, employed by the school on a contract basis, was considered the rapist. It is not clear on what basis the police came to this conclusion.

I recall a private school near Sohna in Haryana with branches all over the country where a student was found murdered in the washroom about five years ago. The school bus cleaner was asked to clean the area. Then, the police arrested him and claimed that the murder case was solved.

I happened to go to this man's village, where all the people I met, mostly women, said in unison that he could not have killed the boy. The case was handed over to the CBI, which found that the student was killed by a fellow student to get the examination postponed. It took a few more weeks to release the bus cleaner. The killer boy was the son of an influential person. Thank God the cleaner was not "encountered!"

Be that as it may, Shinde was arrested on August 17, five days after the incident. Among those charged under the case were some directors of the school. They might not have any involvement in the incident, but they certainly played a significant role in trying to suppress the case and, possibly, destroying evidence. They reportedly went into hiding. Till the time of writing, i.e., nearly one and a half months after the incident, the police have not been able to arrest them.

Under the Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act of 2012 (POCSO), it is mandatory for the school authorities to complain to the police about such an incident soon after it occurs. The lapse of the management in this regard is too severe to be condoned. One has to understand the reason for the police to go slow on the investigation. The owners of the school were aligned with the ruling BJP.

As elections can be announced any time now, the party is scared of the political fallout of the incident. More so after a statue of Shivaji Maharaj, inaugurated by no less a person than the Prime Minister, collapsed within 10 months of its erection when the contractor had allegedly guaranteed that it would remain on its pedestal for at least 200 years.

There is certainty that the Opposition would cash in on the collapse of the statue and the rape in Badlapur. Narendra Modi, who never said sorry even when then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee accused him of failing in his duty (Rajdharma) to prevent the Gujarat riots, publicly apologised to Shivaji, who is in his heavenly abode, for what his Navy Chief and others did — hastily putting together a statue so that Modi could inaugurate it before the 2024 elections.

Once again, Badlapur caught the headlines when, on the evening of September 22, the police claimed to have shot Akshay Shinde in self-defence. It is the most fanciful story I have ever heard. Shinde was a janitor by profession. There is not a single criminal case against him. Home Minister Fadnavis claimed that his wife had complained to the police about him sexually abusing her.

Our learned judiciary has turned down the demand for the inclusion of marital rape as a crime. In other words, a man can rape his wife, and she cannot complain. Her wifely duties include suffering rape at the hands of her husband. So, she complained that he tried to have unnatural sex with her. This is a complicated charge as the definition of natural and unnatural sex varies from one person to another.

It is not clear when she filed the complaint. After Shinde was caught for molesting the school children or before. If the charges against him are true, he is a sexual pervert. It was claimed that the British-era Penal Code was insufficient to deal with many kinds of crime. That is why Home Minister Amit Shah introduced a brand new set of penal laws, which were given Sanskrit names. It is a different matter that it is old wine in a new bottle.

I am sure the new laws have provisions which can be invoked against Shinde. Instead, what did the Maharashtra police do? The police version has it that they were taking him from Taloja Central Jail to a hospital in Thane. If a person has to be taken to a hospital, he has to be in a serious condition. In other words, the medical set-up at the jail would have found that it could not treat him. This points to the seriousness of his illness.

How did a young man like Shinde suddenly become ill? His parents allege that he was tortured in police custody to extract a confession. Whatever the case, the police claim that while escorting him in a police vehicle, Shinde suddenly took out the pistol from a police officer's holster.

Anyone who knows something about police uniforms knows only too well that the pistol is placed securely in the holster, and it is almost impossible for another person to take it out. Minister Fadnavis claimed that Shinde fired in the upward direction. Such a behaviour does not stand to reason. The revolver the police use weighs nearly one kilogram.

A sweeper who could never have handled a weapon of this sort would not be in a position to, first of all, take it from a police officer's holster and use it. The police claim that he was able to injure a police officer. There were, in all, five people in uniform, and there was one demoralised, physically unwell person who was just a sweeper. In retaliation and to protect themselves, one of the police officers, Sanjay Shinde, shot him point black. He could aim his forehead with precision.

Sanjay Shinde is not an ordinary policeman. He was senior enough not to be included in the duty of escorting a first-time criminal. This raises the question who ordered him to be included in the escort party. Sanjay Shinde had once worked in the unit headed by IPS officer Pradeep Sharma, who is alleged to have killed about 300 "criminals" in encounters.

Sharma was one of the top five "encounter specialists" in Maharashtra. Having worked under Sharma, Sanjay Shinde knew all the tricks of the trade. He knew how to shoot to kill.

The government has, to pacify public opinion, ordered an inquiry. There is no certainty when the report will come. There is also no certainty that the guilty would be punished. Shinde's parents believe that there was no encounter and that their son was killed in cold blood. Far from condemning the police conduct, the government has been trying to argue that justice was done in the case. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde says the rapist had four wives to justify the encounter. Yet, why was he employed by the school?

Every BJP leader has been criticising the Opposition for using the encounter as a political weapon. There was one person caught by the police who killed many people in Mumbai. He was Ajmal Kasab. The police did a great thing in arresting him and putting him on trial. Finally, he was given capital punishment and hanged to death. Thank goodness he was not killed in an encounter, as it would have shown our law and order situation in a poor light.

We say we have the rule of law. The rule of law is not the rule of Modi or Fadnavis. A criminal like Shinde should have been tried and punished under the law of the land. The government knows that there is a small section of the people who believe in instant justice. That is when the victim is not one of their relatives or kinsmen. In fact, some of them expressed solidarity with the police officer by bursting crackers in some places.

Why is instant justice meted out only to those who are poor? Take the case of the person who executed the Shivaji statue project. Will the Navy Chief who wanted to please the Prime Minister ever be punished? Ditto for the persons who sanctioned money for the project. Now, the Maharashtra government is in a hurry to build another statue at the same place for which it has earmarked Rs 20 crore.

It wants to start the project before the election is announced. Again, what matters to the government is political gain.

Unfortunately, Maharashtra is not the only state where encounter killing has become the order of the day. In UP, a study found that 37 per cent of the extrajudicial killings were of Muslims, who constitute less than 18 per cent of the population. The trend is fast catching up in Tamil Nadu, from where, too, reports of encounter killings have started coming. It began in Punjab in the 1980s.

In the name of containing terrorism, thousands of men were picked up by the police, killed and buried. The standard practice was to kidnap the suspect and at night ask him to run to safety. When he is running, he is shot from behind and then buried. An acquaintance, the late Ram Narayan Kumar, with the help of Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrawaal and Jaskaran Kaur, produced a voluminous report titled "Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab".

The report documented with photographs hundreds of people who had just disappeared from life, only to be found buried deep in the ground. If anyone thinks that it was the extrajudicial killings that brought peace to the state, they are wrong. It was the initiation of the democratic process that restored peace in the state.

The book mentions the fact that the British never resorted to such killings. True, their laws were harsh, but nobody was punished beyond the law. There was not a single case in which a freedom fighter's or revolutionary's family members were arrested and harassed. On the contrary, the first thing the police do when a person goes absconding is to pressurise his family so that he surrenders.

Prof TJ Joseph, whose hand was cut for alleged blasphemy, went into hiding. According to his own admission, he did not tell the family about his whereabouts. The police arrested his only son and tortured him to extract information about his location. When he himself did not have any information, how could the police extract it from him?

Today, the police have shot an alleged rapist. While this may seem like swift justice in the eyes of some, it sets a dangerous precedent. What happens when the lines between justice and vengeance blur? If the police can act as judge, jury, and executioner in one case, what stops them from doing the same in others?

The danger here isn't just in the action taken today, but in the unchecked power it grants for the future. In a society that values law and order, we must be careful not to sacrifice justice at the altar of convenience. Because when the law becomes arbitrary, safety becomes an illusion.