Guns in the wrong hands

NEW DELHI: This week, a Railway Protection Force constable murdered four people including his senior colleague in cold blood, on a running train near the Palghar railway station in Maharashtra. He was later arrested by Government Railway Police personnel, whose top officer claimed this was the first of its kind incident on a moving train. This jawan is said to have roamed the bogies of the train looking for potential victims — three of whom happened be Muslims.

Social media videos showed the perpetrator justifying his dastardly act, raising slogans against Pakistan, and hailing ‘Modi and Yogi’. Several questions are being raised right now — from the scant attention paid to the mental health of those deployed in public service, to the absence of a Plan B personnel to take charge in the event of such contingencies. As per reports, the constable used to suffer abnormal hallucinations and was diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder. He was also known to use antipsychotic drugs usually prescribed to individuals with an absolute diagnosis of mental disorder. He had been undergoing psychiatric treatment on account of events of aggressiveness.

Healthcare experts have expressed their shock and utter disbelief as to how personnel like him was assigned guard duty with a fully loaded weapon in a train full of passengers. Of course, such incidents are not rare in a country where law enforcement personnel are burdened with stressors of various kinds, from official to personal, financial and everything in between, and they are turned into ticking time bombs waiting to explode in the blink of an eye. This January, Odisha’s health minister fell to the bullets of a policeman who emptied his service revolver into the politician. Here in Tamil Nadu, the undue pressure faced by senior police officers came to the fore when the Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Coimbatore Range, killed himself using a constable’s service pistol. One could probably dismiss the incident as a case of suicide, and that there was no collateral damage. But we might be missing the bigger picture regarding the state of mind of those we trust our lives with.

In the aftermath of the killings in the train, the railway ministry has directed a high level committee to list out the precautions to be taken before issuing a weapon to any RPF personnel before deployment on duty. The panel will also offer guidelines on assessing the psychological condition of the staffers through medical tests, in order to gauge whether he or she can be deployed with weapons or not. The committee is said to comprise two principal chief security commissioners, principal chief medical director and the head of the railways’ HR division. The team will be led by the director general of the RPF.

There are no two ways about it. The leadership of the country can’t be complacent with minimal allocations made towards causes such as mental health and employee wellness in the law enforcement agencies. Trying to cut corners on such essentials under the pretext that those who enlist for such services hail from underserved communities where they would consider any inkling of a government job as a lottery ticket, is a recipe that will backfire. It’s time we paid serious attention to the job of protecting our defenders.