Rioters and Criminals Must be Made to Pay Damages for the Properties Destroyed

 

  As the age-old saying goes 'take the sting of deterrence from the law and the order will go haywire'. That is what has happened in Bengaluru on 11th of August, a day before the Janmashtami when an unruly and violent crowd of nearly two thousand persons destroyed the property worth crores of Rupees and three persons lost their lives. Criminals always think many steps ahead of the law enforcing agencies and therefore they will need to have modernized with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to effectively deal with them. In this context the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Aditya Nath must be thanked for his novelty to recover the damages from the criminals. If the criminals have the fear that they will have to pay through the nose for the damages they have done to the properties, in addition to facing criminal charges of rioting under the IPC, then they will think many times before taking the law into their hands.  If there is no provision for recovery of damages, it can be introduced immediately by the Ordinance later enacted by the Assembly because Law and Order is the state subject.

    Bengaluru riot was, without doubt, a pre-planned one otherwise, how could thousands of determined rioters assemble in less than an hour and broke all the hell loose? These rioters had made many groups and allotted the task among themselves. One group was tasked to block the arterial roads to prevent the movement of police, security forces, firefighters, and ambulances etc. Another group was given the responsibility of breaking and disabling the CCTV cameras and other electronic monitoring devices. The third group went for killing, burning of the properties and creating blood-curdling mayhem. The fourth group came with reinforcement of petrol, diesel, and other incendiary materials. Women and children were also engaged to create a human firewall, as it was done in Kashmir while pelting stones on security forces. So, if they got injured then they could be used as a victim card to garner the sympathy of the people. Photographers were kept ready to shoot such snaps to feed the obedient and anti-national media, which obliged them with their usual echo system. 

  The biggest smokescreen of deception was created by another group of rioters, who made a human chain to show to the whole world that saner among them worked for the restoration of peace at the risk of losing their lives.  

   This is very shocking and speaks volumes of the pathetic condition of the police that it is often caught napping on such occasions and starts for locking the stable doors after the horse is stolen. This cries not only for the modernization of the security forces so that the criminals of all hues and shades can be smoked out (to borrow the famous phrase of George Bush) and severely punished. But more important is that after identifying the criminals they must be made to pay at least two times more damages than the value of the properties they have destroyed.