On 13 Oct, Justice Manjari Nehru Kaul of the Panjab and Haryana High Court, made a statement suspecting the complicity of police and mafia. She said that while the police arrest drug addicts, peddlers, and smugglers, and file cases under the draconian Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, the police fail to appear in court as witnesses. In the past 20 months, the Panjab police has arrested 20,979 drug smugglers, including 3,003 bigger ones. 15,434 FIRs have been registered, of which 1,864 are related to a commercial quantity. Earlier in September, the police decided to implement Section 64 (A) of the NDPS Act that provides immunity from prosecution to addicts. The figures beg the question, if only 10% cases are commercial quantities, are the other 90% addicts and not peddlers or smugglers? Recall, during previous regimes, the SAD arrested 30,422 people and the INC arrested 67,081 people for drug related offenses. Another worrisome trend is – just as during militancy days when police officers were given targets to slay militants and thousands of innocents were killed – now in Faridkot, police orders reveal officers are given monthly targets to file NDPS cases. Faridkot Senior Superintendent of Police Harjit Singh later denied the targets and blamed them on a ‘clerical error.’ Clearly, arrests are no indication of the spread of drugs being contained, and courts are now seeing the police-mafia nexus. But making arrests to achieve targets and letting prisoners languish in jail shows the police’s role in society is, in the judge’s words, ‘a betrayal of trust.’
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