Law and Fury

When a child is raped and murdered, a state is tested not only on how it investigates, but on how it controls what follows. In Baruipur last week, West Bengal failed on both counts.The killing of an 11-year-old girl in Surjyapur should have produced an immediate, professional police response. Instead, it produced a sequence of violence: a mob lynching a man later called “innocent” by the chief minister, days of vandalism, and the death of prime suspect Prabhash Mondal in police custody during a crime-scene reconstruction. That we are now debating the second and third deaths as much as the first is the crisis.

Chief minister Suvendu Adhikari came to power in May promising a different compact with voters on women’s safety. The BJP’s campaign centered the issue precisely because public confidence in the Mamata Banerjee administration had eroded after high-profile cases from Park Street to Kamduni down to R.G. Kar with many in between and perceived administrative apathy in each investigation. Baruipur is therefore not just a crime story. It is the first major stress test of that promise. The state’s answer to Mondal’s death raises harder questions.

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Police say Mondal snatched a weapon and tried to escape, and that they fired in self-defence. Even if that account is accurate, the procedure matters. The Police Regulations, Bengal and training doctrine across India still govern use of force by the state. They require that force be used only when necessary, and “in such a way as to secure immediate effect with a minimum of injury,” especially when a suspect is in custody and surrounded by a police team. During reconstruction, Mondal was one man, with no reported accomplices, being handled by multiple officers. The question that now hangs over the case is why disabling shots at his feet were not attempted, why containment failed, and why lethal force became the outcome. The cost of that answer is not just one life.

It tells citizens that due process bends when public anger peaks. It tells the force that an encounter is the fastest way to close a case. And it tells victims’ families that justice may come, but on the state’s terms, not the law’s. West Bengal now has four men in custody and a six-member SIT. POCSO provides for fast-track trials and the severest punishment ~ and they should get it. What is missing is institutional credibility. The 18 people arrested for post-recovery violence, including two booked for murder in the lynching, must be prosecuted.

Any lapse in the initial response must be examined. The deeper danger is normalisation. When lynching and encounter bracket the same case, public debate shifts from “how do we protect children” to “who gets to punish.” That trade corrodes the rule of law. Baruipur will be remembered either as the moment a new administration drew a line against impunity, or as the moment it surrendered to it. The child deserves the former. Bengal cannot afford the latter.