The punishment came before the trial - accused men dragged by their hair, beaten with lathis, marched through their own neighbourhood in full public view, under the direct supervision of a Deputy Commissioner of Police.

The Officer Who Ordered the Parade

You are Rajdeepsinh Nakum, Deputy Commissioner of Police in Surat. Your officers have arrested men with a track record of intimidating their own neighbourhood - extortion, threats, the quiet terror that makes ordinary residents afraid to file complaints.

You have watched, case after case, how slowly the courts move and how easily a case built on frightened witnesses collapses long before conviction. You make a decision: march the accused, handcuffed, through the very streets they terrorised.

Let the neighbourhood see. Later, defending the decision, you will say exactly this - that it was done so people would know such behaviour will not be tolerated. There is no ambiguity about what you did. The only question is what it costs and who pays it.

THE FRAMEWORK

Two things are true about this decision and neither cancels the other. The consequentialist case for it is real: public parading may genuinely deter and communities living under years of local intimidation may feel a version of relief watching it happen.

But deontological ethics asks a different question entirely - not "did this produce a good outcome" but "did this respect the accused as a person, regardless of outcome." And on that test, the answer is unambiguous. Article 21's guarantee of life and personal liberty has been read by the courts to include the right to live with dignity - a right that does not switch off the moment someone is arrested and does not depend on whether they turn out, at trial, to be guilty.

The D.K. Basu guidelines exist precisely because Indian constitutional law drew a hard line: the power to investigate a crime is not the power to punish for it. Punishment is what a court decides, after evidence, after defence, after judgment - not what a police officer decides is efficient on the street the same afternoon.

What makes this a genuine ethical failure rather than a mere legal technicality is that Nakum's justification is not ignorance of the rule - Gujarat's own DGP had circulated instructions against exactly this conduct months earlier.

The choice here was not between two goods with real costs on both sides; it was choosing visible, popular deterrence over a constitutional guarantee that exists specifically to protect people at their most vulnerable, when the state holds all the power and they hold none.

THE RESOLUTION

The Constitution does not leave room for "it worked" as a defence once due process has been bypassed this deliberately. An officer who believes deterrence requires public consequence has other paths - faster prosecution, public disclosure of case outcomes, transparent conviction records - that achieve visibility without substituting the officer's own judgment for the court's.

Choosing the parade over those paths was choosing convenience over the presumption of innocence and that is what accountability must now address: not merely disciplinary action against one DCP, but an honest reckoning with why this keeps recurring in Gujarat despite repeated judicial censure - because a rule that is issued but never enforced is not really a rule.

The cost of insisting on this position is real: some genuinely dangerous, locally feared men may feel briefly emboldened by a process that looks, to a frightened community, slower and weaker than the parade did. That cost is worth naming honestly rather than waved away - but it is the cost of a rule of law that protects everyone equally, including the next accused person who turns out to be innocent.