Train journeys in India can be nightmarish for a variety of reasons. But what some security personnel did on board a train in Assam was simply horrific. Allegedly inebriated, they first molested some of the girls who had boarded their coach. Then, when a crowd protested by stalling the train, they opened fire on it, killing four of the protesters. The men of the India Reserve Battalion had gone to Assam from another part of the country to restore law and order in one of the state?s worst violence-prone areas. The grisly incident at Kokrajhar shows how unfit they are for their assignment. Police and other forces routinely face charges of blatant human rights abuses in the North-east. The horror on the train is a different matter, though. It exposes a systemic malady that is different from the excesses committed during battles against armed insurgents. It shows the criminal streak in sections of the police and other forces. Even if only a small number of men in the forces thus turn delinquent, they shake the people?s confidence in the law-keepers. Despite the recommendations of several national police commissions, not enough seems to have been done to weed out criminal tendencies from the policing system.

The trouble often is with the government?s reaction to such incidents. Predictably, the Assam government has ordered a judicial probe. The IRB too will have its independent inquiry. But these probes usually end up doing too little too late to inspire the people?s confidence in the system. It is not that the guilty are not punished. The problem is that the inquiries rarely address the larger issues relating to systemic failures. While it fights the militants, the army in the North-east takes pains to lay out a code of conduct for the jawans, especially in their interactions with the common people. Such codes are not enforced half as strictly in other forces. Yet, this is of crucial importance in northeastern states where the ethnic militancies pose complicated challenges to the security forces. It could take these forces some time to repair the damage done by some errant colleagues. The least that the IRB should do is identify and punish the guilty quickly. Neither Dispur nor the IRB should do anything that could remotely look like a cover-up. The incident evoked anger and shock all around. It could be much worse if the probes are seen to be farcical exercises.