There are circuits of violence in a society grounded on inequality. A young fruitseller, a policeman and a random crowd of ordinary people recently got taken up into such a circuit on a Calcutta street. The policeman took a banana off the boy and allegedly went off without paying him. When the boy went up to him and demanded the price of the fruit, the man beat him up. This was a crowded street and when the people around them got to know from the boy what had happened, they pulled the policeman out of his picket and gave him a sound thrashing. The inevitable inquiry followed, and it has been established that the policeman did beat up the boy, but it is not certain whether the boy had been deprived of his two rupees, which was the price of the banana the policeman took from him.

Brutal inequalities of power separate as well as bring together the people involved in this situation. And it is violence that bridges these gulfs and solidarities. Two equations have operated in this case: first, the relationship between the policeman and the fruitseller, and second, that between the policeman and the crowd. These are the gulfs. The solidarity lay in the crowd identifying with the boy’s plight and taking action against the policeman. In each case, there was an abuse of power resulting in physical violence. Yet, any humane bystander would be able to make a principled and sympathetic distinction between the policeman beating up the fruitseller and the crowd beating up the policeman. Most of India’s streetlife exists outside the ‘protection’ of the law, yet depends upon the lawkeepers for the fundamentals of its existence. The poorest and the most disempowered, the least ‘organized’ and represented, make up this open and precarious life of vending on the streets. Hence their vulnerability to police brutality and mercy is absolute, and becomes an immense source of income and power (often of the most perverse kind) for the police. Streetchildren, child labourers in the ‘unorganized sector’ and young adults (like this fruitseller) are particularly vulnerable to such abuse. But the role of the crowd, mostly passers-by and office-goers who had come out to grab something to eat, is also significant here — the instant identification with the powerless that leads to an eruption of collective rage. Even beating people up can elicit conflicting judgments.