Justice N. Kirubakaran of the Madras High Court on Wednesday went hammer and tongs against higher officials in the police department for engaging their subordinate policemen to do household work such as washing clothes at their residences and misusing official vehicles allotted to them to drop their children in schools.
During the hearing of a case related to the abolishment of orderly system, the judge said the police officials should impress upon the government to pay them allowances for engaging private staff for performing their domestic works instead of using policemen to run errands at their residences referred to as “camp offices.”
The judge pointed out that the term ‘camp office’ was a colonial introduction used during the days of the British when the territorial jurisdictions of every district were very wide, and the police officers, in charge of those districts, had to camp at different places at different points of time to perform their official work.
Now, that the territorial limits had been considerably reduced due to bifurcation and trifurcation of the districts, why was the term still used to refer to the residence of the police officers in each district, he wondered. The judge said that policemen were being used for performing domestic work in the guise of posting them at the so-called camp offices.
Empathising with the policemen in the lower ranks who had to undergo tremendous work pressure, the judge also made a veiled reference to a recent visit paid by Information Minister M. Manikandan to a hospital in Ramanathapuram for meeting ‘Kokki’ Kumar, who was accused of assaulting a sub-inspector of police.
Morale matters
“How will the morale of the police be retained if Ministers happen to visit the accused who assaulted them?” the judge lamented.
He took a dig at human rights activists who raise their voice only against the atrocities committed against the accused and not against those committed against policemen. “Policemen too are human beings. They should be condemned when they go wrong and appreciated when they perform well. They cannot be seen as enemies all the time,” the judge said before adjourning further hearing on the case to June 27.
