As is true for any other area of our society, journalism and newspapers are also guided more by taboos and the easiness of sliding along age-old ruts than breaking out of these constrictions. Foremost among the taboos are Justice and police. And the habitual exercise in meaningless filling up of newspaper space relates most to printing infantile platitudes of politicians 365 days a year. Come to think that. Just for a change, newspapers decide on investigating corruption and malpractice tn the Judicial administration — not the dispensation of Justice, to be sure — or the mazy underworld that is called police, what will their pages read like. Imagine also the papers putting a ban on publishing the politicians' high-minded exhortations and fire-eating fulmlnalions most of both being mostly platitudes of a wide variety — and you will see the papers leaping into life leaving behind their spell of somnolent existence.

An unbeatable piece of news on a vernacular national daily the other day forcefully points to what a glorious mine could be the police. Rustom All. a constable, was arrested by a contingent of other policemen come from town on that very mission, while he was handing over a bundle to known miscreants of Galbandha. The bundle contained a rifle and rounds of live cartridges. Rustam was letting out on hire the gun. He has been doing this for some time, that's how the town police got an Inkling of that.

Can it be that Rustam's is a case of freak? Perhaps not. It is possible that the more brainy among the policemen will show a predisposition towards an innovative approach to the all- pervasive atmosphere of corruption they work in. And Rustam's hiring out firearms is not a brilliant piece of criminal inventiveness either. He was making good use of the policeman's first facility — intimate contact with his supposed quarry, the criminals. It cannot be that many do not fall for the same easy allurements.

As things are we can talk only of our suspicions and apprehensions. What we need is exact and broad knowledge of the individual policeman’s selling out to lucre and even organised criminal practices resorted to by groups of them. Dacoities perpetrated on trucks by policemen may be less rampant than the inescapable extortion of truck drivers or even drivers of passenger scooters by police — but they are not few and far between.

Rustam did not hire out his service rifle. That shouldn't mean the dacoits do not use service rifles. They get them by snatching. This fact Is not particularly nattering.

The police are plagued with problems. There Is little use calling them no'good and doing nothing about their malaise. They are also victims of a kind. A special kind of victims that are continually being pressured Into corruption from above by their coni rolling authority, namely, the state power and from beneath by the criminal and the vulnerable. One of the ways of helping them out of this could be a broader and deeper newspaper attention to their situation. Police must be a very open thing to be a healthy and clean thing.