Bihar | A story in bullet points

Scene 1 could make it to a gritty web series. Diwali was five days away when the wrong kind of fireworks lit up Balirajgarh, in Madhubani district. Villagers had confronted Assistant Sub-Inspector Chandra Mohan Singh inside a woman’s house. The cop allegedly took his service pistol and fired scattershot style. One villager, Ashok Yadav, dead; three injured. The ASI fled, and stands suspended, booked for murder.

Scene 2 was readymade for the next episode. Same landscape. On Dhanteras, in Sherpur village of Maner block near Patna, cops killed three alleged criminals in an encounter. The official version had it all sewn up: these were wanted men and had fired on the joint Special Task Force (STF) and Patna Police posse on their tail. But that did not stop the real-life series from getting a title. Bihar’s commentariat called it: Who Will police the Police? An old question, being revisited under a new chief minister.

THE SHERIFF CHECKS IN

When Samrat Choudhary became CM on April 15, he kept Home. His message was plain: criminals who challenge the police get an answer within 48 hours. The first test came within a fortnight. On April 28, three armed men stormed the Sultanganj Nagar parishad office in Bhagalpur and shot executive officer Krishna Bhushan Kumar and chairperson Raj Kumar Guddu. The alleged mastermind, Ram-dhani Yadav, was dead by early morning on April 29. Police said he had tried to escape during a weapons recovery operation, after his associates opened fire. A high-noon shooting, answered before sunup.

More followed. Between April 29 and November 6, at least seven people died in five encounters across Bhagalpur, Siwan, Masaurhi, Bhojpur and Maner: Ramdhani Yadav; Sonu Yadav, prime accused in a BJP leader’s nephew’s murder, in Siwan on May 3; Haider, accused of attacking police, in Masaurhi in June. A separate tally counts 25 alleged criminals shot in the legs and arrested, among them Nandan Yadav, main accused in a September incident of molestation of two Class 10 students in Jamui.

To a public tired of the lawless getting free rein, this looks like the sheriff finally turning up in a bad town. The question is: does the law know how to stop?

Samrat has indeed given Bihar Police a kind of confidence it has not always had. It has raided illegal gun factories, made interstate arrests, and gone after nasty contractors who are not unfamiliar with murder themselves. But gauged against the more sedate style of former CM Nitish Kumar, the encounters have not found favour with all former police brass. Says Abhayanand, former Bihar DGP: “I believe police should be an agency with grey matter, not brute force. Policemen do have the right to defence. But Parliament should create a law regarding encounters.”

The June 17 killing of 28-year-old Bharat Bhushan Tiwari in Bilauti, Bhojpur, raised the gravest doubts. He was no gangster, and civic protests about roads, drainage and flood relief had taken him to a moment of aberration: an FB Live, pistol in hand. A later video showed him throwing the weapon away and offering surrender. Siwan, on July 25, was more clear: a constable firing an AK-47 at Gen Z protesters. To be fair, Bihar suffers with about 93 police personnel for every 100,000 people, against a national average of around 153. But crowd control with “a platoon-level weapon” is too quick on the draw.