The scene is surreal. It is straight out of Pulp Fiction. Someone is killed, there is a bit of a panic, a few phone calls are exchanged and abracadabra! The fixer comes and cleans up the mess in exactly 40 minutes before the wife comes back home.

The fixer is cold-blooded. Clinical. He has no emotions. He asks for a cup of coffee which he sips while giving instructions on how to make sure no trace of the crime is left behind. And the others execute, mafia style, without asking any disturbing questions.

The details revealed in the video posted by Top TV of the scene at the Wooton filling station are eerily similar. Except slightly worse as the protagonists are cops who are supposed to protect us from danger rather than be the danger themselves. And so a family man, Rohit Gobin, leaves his home in the morning as he must have done for the last few decades to go to his work place. Sadly, he does not go back home for dinner. What happened in the meantime is bone-chilling. Two cops driving at full speed lose control of their police car and sweep him away, dragging his colleague along in the same fit of road madness. While the victim who got hit the most was agonising flat on his back in the torrential rain, protected by a mere plastic bag which he was trying – in spite of his critical state – to adjust in order to avoid even more pain, the two cops were making phone calls to save their own selfish skin, totally oblivious to the suffering human being who was left unattended.

“A few phone calls later, the fixer and the cops were swept away to safety while the victim was still dealing with excruciating pain in almost total indifference.”

We soon find out that the phone calls, far from being an SOS to get help for the victims they caused through their own recklessness, were actually meant to get a fixer to come and clean up the mess. And lo and behold, the fixer – now known as the man in black – comes without delay. He naturally is even less interested in the victim who was still on the floor waiting for help that took 40 long heart-breaking minutes to come. He instead comforts the reckless cops and takes them to the back of the filling station to protect them from the gruesome scene they created. We don’t know if he had coffee but the cold-bloodedness of the execution is the same as the mafia scene described above – clinical, heartless, emotionless. A few phone calls later, the fixer and the cops were swept away to safety while the victim was still dealing with excruciating pain in almost total indifference. By the time he gets to the hospital, it is too late. The cop who was responsible for this scene will be able to spend Christmas with his family at the cost of a Rs30,000 bail. That is the price of a human life.

What saddens me even more is the ease with which we take such a horrendous scene in our stride. The police commissioner, when he finally deigned to make a statement, came up with an inane explanation: the footage we saw had nothing to do with the footage seen by the police! And he happily concedes, in the same breath, that he himself saw neither. He does not see it as his job to do so.

As for the prime minister and the minister responsible for the police, he has far too many important things to do to worry about insignificant matters like his cops injuring innocent citizens and leaving them to die in total indifference. When he is eventually forced by journalists to make a statement, he will probably come up with the same laughable line we have heard on so many occasions: “I have spoken to the police commissioner and he has assured me that there will be no cover up.” Why should we doubt that?

While we are having our Christmas dinner, I hope we all spare a thought for the Gobin family who will not have the heart to celebrate. Let’s also spare a thought for our police force that has been reduced to what it is today through wrong recruitments, promotions and demotions for the wrong reasons and being so nibbled away by political interventionism that it has reached a state where it is becoming more and more a liability than a real force. In other words, let’s spare a thought for our dear country.

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