A boy is tortured at the police station, escapes, is chased into a pond where he dies.

Two policemen are ordered by the court to take a child to jail instead of remand. The policemen refuse the order, beat up the child and extract money from the relatives.

A man is brought from outside Dhaka and then beaten by the police at the interrogation cell for having defied the police in an earlier political era. He has to be flown in and hospitalised.

Welcome to the present tense.

IT was a typical scene of mob culture in the 1970s.

The boys lie half naked on the pavement, their bodies pounded beyond recognition. With two others they have been caught stealing money from a passer-by. They fail to escape and are caught. The crowd, swelled by the rising waters of rage, engulfs them. They are wiped away by its fury as fists and kicks land on them like the proverbial hailstorm. Soon they are dead. Soon, there are only dead bodies on the footpath and the unsatisfied rage looks for bodies to pour their anger. Blood, dirt and hate are all mixed together and the dead bodies, no longer recognizable, become symbols of a society gone mad with the pain of its own failure.

Did the police create the killer crowd?

Did the killer mob generate the unaccountable fury of the police?

Or is it that the state always kills them all?

WHEN the political agitation was peaking in the streets of Dhaka in the early 1990s, the situation would turn dramatically volatile every other day. Near the Pir Yemeni Market, it erupted one such March. Bullets, bombs, brickbats all flew in a furious relay of violence. Some of us were forced to take shelter. I sat close to a wall atop a running drain holding on to a pair of shivering scared shoulders. I looked up to try to find who was shooting and saw civilians fire from the top of a house.

I looked at the man who was hiding and saw the terrified face of a policeman.

That evening in my BBC broadcast, I mentioned the fact that the police hadn't fired at the crowd. For that broadcast, I was attacked a number of times by the activists. And as expected invited by the police to lecture them on behaving with the media when there was violence in the street.

At such meetings I saw that the police are probably the most traumatized people on earth, forced to do the state's dirty work. They ultimately become pawns in a game they don't understand. They are their own prisoners.

DURING the first innings of the Awami League under Sheikh Mujib, violence occurred at an unprecedented level. This party has always claimed that this was inevitable in a post-war society. Others have called it collective arrogance. But I do recall one incident that illustrates the mood of the era.

In the 1970s, Dhaka University was full of poets and bohemians. One such person - actually stoned at that moment - made a remark which could only be called a joke and impossible to be taken seriously. Sadly for him, a sycophant poet went and told those who mattered including "the HIM" who mattered and they came to teach him a lesson.

I remember seeing a dozen of them descend on him at Sharif Mia's canteen and start beating him. The only one who tried to protect him a bit was Sharif Mia himself, a socially marginal man. They started to beat him from where the Public Library now stands and beat him all the way to where the Aparajeyo Bangla stands. There, they made a circle and beat him some more. They went on long after he felt no pain and left him there to be picked long after everyone had gone home and smuggle him away outside Dhaka by his friends where he went up mad.

Everyone remarked that it was very charitable on the part of the people who beat him up. After all, they could easily have killed him.

They are all dead now. Not just the protagonists but even Sharif Mia of the canteen.

WE are shocked that two policemen violated all norms of rights and went for a young boy who was apparently innocent and then killed him. Is this something new? Has there ever been a regime in this country where the police haven't gone and killed the innocent?

Does anybody remember Rubel? The police killed him in front of his parents and the case is still on, one supposes.

But do you remember the rickshaw-puller who was shot while democracy agitation were on in this city?

Of the boy in the Sabujbagh thana who too died in custody?

Of the hundreds of others who have died in custody and never had a headline to support their cause?

Isn't this a system that we established when we became independent and now have turned it into a tradition?

Would we have been so shocked if the boy had been guilty?

I remember the day Ershad fell. We were at the Press Club that had become the centre of all activities. In Bangladesh, no governments fall unless the state pillars fall and that means the Secretariat. We were hoping that it would because it was critical news.

An impromptu cultural mancha was on and Fakir Alamgir went up after a few others had sung their homage to democracy. Suddenly someone shouted, "He is a traitor. He is pro-Ershad. He went on a cultural mission to...." The words didn't end. There was a sudden attack and he was brought down and beaten up. You didn't need to try him and even find out if he was guilty. An accusation was enough to get someone a beating, even death.

Did the victory for democracy justify the attack?

Was it democratic? If democracy-loving citizens can beat a fellow cultural activist on the grounds of having gone abroad, then why shouldn't police chase and do what they always have done?

That is, beat people, sometimes to death.

THAT day was still on. By this time officers from the foreign ministry began to congregate and declare their denial of allegiance to the old government. Suddenly there was a shout from inside the Secretariat. It seemed things had begun to move inside. Many journos rushed in, all excited. By the time we entered through the gates, which for the first time had no police barring civilians from entering, we found that activist journalists had taken charge of the procession. Thus the independent members of the media who were there to report objectively actually led the processions of anti-government Secretariat staff. They saw no contradiction in their roles? Is it because there are always good partisans and bad partisans?

If the media takes sides, can it ever report with the same freedom? Where is the integrity space?

THE defining moment was probably one of the more bizarre incidents I have ever seen. By that time, it was clear that victory had been won. So the boys and girls who had assembled here after the processions had converged got hold of a dog and put a placard with the word "Ershad" on it.

Then they stoned that dog to death.

What was the dog's crime? What role did it play in the democracy movement? Or is it that dogs don't deserve democracy?

How was the killing of the boy in Kapasia by the police any different from the argument in spirit that moved to the killing of the dog in Dhaka?

It was killing an innocent in both cases.

OUR democratic instincts are rooted in denials. There is only one side, my side and my side is the right side. The police are also a side and more, I think, deliberately brutalised by the system so that when need arises they can go for it without holding back. The recent beatings have sent a strong signal that the police can ignore the court and the reins of law. Kapasia isn't outside that. As someone who has followed what the police have done over the years, I see them as the most necessary part of keeping the state alive. If we can accept that remand and torture are part of the essential structure of the police system, as we have, what are we arguing against? We ourselves take up arms when we feel cheated and safe enough to do so.

Will I say that I am against torture if that is directed against a santrashi? I am not going to be a liar. I am not against it because torture is part of the policing system and I don't think torture is wrong. It's bad luck that at Kapasia the chase reached the pond and the death happened there. Everyday, police regularly send requests for money to avoid beating. They beat children regularly. I have documented them and have no confusion about it. But are we really against it?

CHILDREN and adults all have a right to a life free from torture. Democracy belongs to all, and not just to people from my side. If you protest you must protest for all and whenever that happened, now and before.