The Man in Handcuffs, Paraded Through His Own Neighbourhood

When Deterrence Becomes the Punishment Itself

The Situation, Stated Plainly

Imagine you are the officer standing over four handcuffed men in their own neighbourhood, deciding to flog and parade them before anyone has been tried for anything. It works, in a narrow sense - the crowd watching sees consequence delivered instantly and word spreads that this officer does not wait for court dates. The easy answer would be to call this simple brutality and move on.

It is not that simple, because the officer's logic is not irrational - it is a real, if illegitimate, form of governance.

Two Goods Genuinely in Tension

On one side sits deterrence and visible order: a public that sees swift consequence for crime, delivered without the delay, cost and frequent failure of formal prosecution. On the other sits due process and custodial dignity: the constitutional promise, under Articles 14 and 21, that no person - however guilty they may later be found - loses their dignity or liberty except through law.

These are not equally weighted goods pretending to be equal. The Constitution has already made the choice: Article 21 protects dignity and life even against the state's own agents and the Supreme Court's D.K. Basu vs. State of West Bengal (1997) guidelines exist precisely because "efficient" policing had, before that judgment, repeatedly meant custodial violence.

But the officer's underlying instinct - that formal process often fails visibly and slowly while communities want protection now - describes a real institutional failure, not a fabricated excuse.

What Is Actually at Stake

If public flogging is tolerated even once as "efficient," it teaches every officer watching that visible punishment outperforms visible justice - that being seen to act matters more than being lawful. That lesson does not stay contained to hardened offenders; the same logic that flogs an accused man today can flog a wrongly-arrested man tomorrow, because summary punishment, once normalised, does not check itself for accuracy.

The 2022 Kheda flogging incident in Gujarat, followed now by this Surat case, shows this is not an isolated failure of one officer's judgment - it is a recurring institutional temptation that formal disciplinary notices have not yet been enough to break.

The Resolution

The state cannot permit deterrence theatre without conceding that constitutional protections exist for exactly these inconvenient moments - the moments when an accused person is least sympathetic and a crowd is most satisfied by summary punishment.

The correct institutional response is not choosing order over dignity or dignity over order, but building genuinely faster formal process (rapid trial tracks for high-visibility offences) so that lawful deterrence does not lose the "efficiency" argument to unlawful deterrence by default.

Anything less concedes that the Constitution's protections are conditional on convenience - which defeats their entire purpose.