Christmas confessions

I am grateful to the police officer who taught me what a journalist ought to know. “What kind of a reporter are you,� he exclaimed, “that you don’t know we can detain whoever we want and whenever we want!�
The surprise in his tone was too sincere to question. He seemed to believe in what he said, and thought it was his duty to inform the scribe about that.
It was my problem that I could not tell him he was under a false impression, an impression created by unbridled power.I could not afford to get involved in an argument on the legality of raiding a woman’s house, without women police at the dead of night, and abusing all family members to arrest her at that moment when I was chasing a deadline.
And no, I am not talking about one of the recent swoops on alleged “dreaded Naxalites�. The person concerned was a Chhatra Parishad activist who had taken part in a students’ demonstration against unemployment and had been available throughout the day for arrest, if anybody cared.
Yesterday, I got a mail from the Human Rights Watch of the USA reflecting on the year that was. It was a bad year for those who value individual freedom, all over the world.
The war against terror has turned into a war on civil rights. Yet, there was some hope for human rights. Nowhere was the onslaught of the state power on the civil society being taken lying down. It was not easy though.
Someone who fought with a tiger in the Sunderbans the other day said that the trick was to always keep the head up and look at the beast eye to eye. He survived, but was badly mauled. Frankly, I was scared. I was made to feel the scare each time I tried to see straight and to help my readers see straight. Threats were too thinly veiled. And advices laced with warning.
There were days (and nights) my family and my colleagues worried about me when I went to cover some incident and was not coming back to office in “reasonable� time. Things were not in my hands often.
Like the night I was stuck at a police station as the officers were not releasing the body of an aged woman who came for a rally in Kolkata organised by alleged Naxalites and died after being injured in a police lathi-charge. To make matters worse, the police had detained a youth who had taken her to hospital.
Or during my visits to Belpahari for my ‘Inside Midnapore’ series. How could I look at the watch while hearing the tribal women and men recollect the ghastly experience in the hands of the lawkeepers, which anybody would try best to forget, only for me?
How could I cut short the girls visibly reliving the pain to narrate how they were stripped to make sure they were not “Naxalite boys�, or just to humiliate them into submission, only because I asked?
I did not mind facing flak for all those “unnecessary� delays and risks. But it hurt me when colleagues and friends I like, commented, “You didn’t make it up? Is it possible — in West Bengal?� I am trying to get used to that.