By Aflatoon
A police party in Lahore had information about a house. They went to the house next to it.
That is the whole of the mistake, and I want to say plainly that mistakes of this kind are not remarkable. Addresses in our cities are approximate. Lanes are unnamed, numbers repeat, and an informant’s description of “the house with the green gate” is a description that fits eleven houses. Any police force conducting raids will occasionally arrive at the wrong gate. This is a known failure mode, and it is not, by itself, corruption.
What happened next is the part I want to look at.
According to the Attorney General’s driver, the station house officer climbed over the gate. Only household staff were inside. The police then took away the CCTV system, and later returned the digital video recorder with the footage deleted.
I should be careful here: that is the driver’s account, reported as his allegation, and the police version of the entry has not been set out in the same detail. I am not in a position to say it is established. But I notice that it is a specific and internally coherent allegation, and I notice what it describes — not a wrong turn, but a tidying-up.
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Within days, an FIR. The station house officer of Sarwar Road and eleven personnel charge-sheeted for exceeding their authority.
I want to be glad about this. Institutionally it is the correct outcome: officers who raid the wrong house and interfere with the evidence of having done so should face a case, and here they do. If this is what accountability looks like, then accountability worked.
Except I have read a great many stories about raids on the wrong house in this country, and I cannot readily recall the others that ended in twelve charge-sheets inside a week.
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So let us hold the mistake constant and vary only the address.
Suppose the raiding party had climbed the correct wrong gate — a house in Shahdara, say, or on the edge of Kasur — and found only household staff, and taken the cameras, and returned the recorder empty. What would have followed?
An application, perhaps, if the household knew that applications exist. A visit to a police station where the officers being complained of are colleagues of the officers receiving the complaint. Possibly a compromise. Probably nothing. Certainly not an FIR naming twelve serving officers within days, because the FIR is written by the institution being complained about, and institutions write them at a speed proportional to the complainant’s ability to make the writing unavoidable.
The house they entered belonged to the Attorney General for Pakistan. He is the government’s own senior counsel. He arrived from a meeting to be told what had happened at his gate.
The system worked flawlessly. It worked flawlessly because the person wronged was the one man in Lahore best positioned to make it work.
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I do not think anyone should be criticised for this. Not the Attorney General, who did nothing but be raided; not the officials who registered the case, who did their jobs correctly.
The uncomfortable thing is not that justice was done here. It is what the speed of it reveals about the ordinary case. The machinery is clearly capable of moving quickly. It has demonstrated, this week, that it can identify twelve officers, establish that authority was exceeded and produce a charge sheet in a matter of days. That capacity exists. It was not built this week.
It simply is not usually deployed.
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There is one detail I keep returning to, and it is the recorder.
If the allegation is right, somebody in that party understood, in the moment, that a record existed and that the record was a problem. That is not the reflex of a man who thinks he has made an innocent mistake. An innocent mistake is explained. It is not deleted.
And if that instinct was present at the Attorney General’s gate — where the odds of consequence were as high as they get — I invite you to consider how it operates at every other gate in the province, where the odds are close to zero.
The cameras are the only part of this story that were doing their job properly, and they are the part that got taken away.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
