The law and order situation in Madhya Pradesh is no more "bad". It is frightening. The administration, the police included, is working hard to cover up its failures rather than trying to improve the situation. The media, it would appear, is a willing accomplice. The Congress, the main opposition party, which had exhibited signs of revival after Suresh Pachauri was appointed PCC president, has again become moribund after losing the Betul Lok Sabha by-election.

          The disappearance of a teenaged girl, a rape victim, from the chief minister's residence should have made, at least the media, sit up and cry foul. But all it did was to help the police cover up the crime and, thus, protect the image of the chief minister, as the sequence of events will show.

         The girl, belonging to a poor family of Indore, was gang-raped a few months back. The girl's parents met chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan during the latter's visit to Indore a little after the incident and the chief minister promised early arrest of the perpetrators of the heinous crime as well as some financial help to the family.

          Months passed and nothing happened. The family travelled to Bhopal to meet the chief minister and remind him of his promises. It was there that the girl disappeared. A Hindi eveninger got the wind of it and was told by the police that the girl was of unsound mind and she had "suddenly gone somewhere" when her family members were at Gate No. Six. (The petitioners are admitted to the chief minister's residence through Gate No. Six).

          There was a complete blackout of the news in the morning newspapers the next day. A day later, a small item was tucked in inside pages saying that the family was sitting near Bharat Bhavan when the girl, mentally deranged as she was, had disappeared. Bharat Bhavan is about a hundred feet away from the Gate No. Six and very much part of the high security zone. The following morning, a small report in some newspapers claimed that the girl's mother "was sitting with her children under a tree at Shyamla Hills area when her daughter went missing on Wednesday evening". (This information was not attributed to the police or any other source).

          The pattern is thus clear: the scene of this horrendous crime shifts from the chief minister's residence to near Gate No. Six (still part of the chief minister's residence), from there to near Bharat Bhavan, about a hundred feet away from the chief minister's residence, and then to "under a tree in the Shyamla Hills area" which is a vast locality of Bhopal. So, how can the chief minister or the security personnel guarding the chief minister's residence and keeping an eye on the visitors be held responsible for the disappearance of the gang rape victim who, according to the police, was mentally unbalanced? The police and the media have done their duty. Now even the girl's mother is also said to be "not at home".

          Around the same time the Bhopal police, from top to bottom, was working hard to protect a top level IPS official allegedly connected with the shootout at a private hospital. A homoeopathy student in her early twenties, who was a regular visitor to the hospital as part of her training, received the gunshot.

          Murders, rapes, loots, burglaries, and chain snatchings have become common. In Bhopal, which is the seat of the government, there have been 15 murders and over 60 incidents of loot since January this year. Hardly a day passes when there are not three or fours incidents of chain snatching – all this takes place mostly in the markets during the day. About the situation in the countryside, the less said the better. The people are feeling helpless before both, the gangsters and the police. It may not be difficult to imagine what will happen if the people lose whatever little faith they still have in the administration and start dealing with the situation on their own. While violent protests against the administration have already started, one particular incident deserves mention because it involved loss of life of a police officer in the Shivraj Singh Chauhan regime.

          A young pregnant Bhil woman, of Dhand village in Guna district, was raped by some youths belonging to the Meena community of Konyakalan village. Next day the family members of the victim went to Chachaura police station to lodge the complaint but the police shooed them away. The Meenas in the region are politically and financially influential people.

          It was only at the persistence of the Bhils, who have a substantial population in the area, that the police condescended to register the complaint five days later. The police named only two Meena youths in the FIR though the Bhils had claimed that the hapless woman was raped by four persons.

          The police, however, made no attempt to arrest the alleged rapists even after registering the FIR, leading to unrest among the Bhils. After waiting for over two weeks, the Bhils held their Mahapanchayat on the banks of a pond near Dhand village in which about 5000 tribals were said to have been present. Then they marched en masse to the Chachaura police station and attacked the police personnel with sticks and axes, killing Inspector Vir Singh Sapre and seriously injuring Sub-Inspector Mansingh.

          The significant thing was that the tribals wanted justice and not revenge. With their numbers and the alacrity with which they had moved, they were in a position to take on the Meena family. But the Bhil Mahapanchayat had ordained that they were not to go to Konyakalan village. Their ire was directed at the police which was supposed to ensure justice to the aggrieved family and punishment to the perpetrators of the crime. This was perhaps for the first time when an illiterate, rustic group had decided to stake their lives and everything for the sake of justice and not revenge. The chief minister, naturally, was prompt to eulogise the slain police inspector as a martyr and order registration of murder cases against Bhil leaders but he was unconscionably unconcerned about the failure of the police to help the aggrieved Bhils.