In Women We Trust by Naim Haron Sakhia

Author:Naim Haron Sakhia [Sakhia, Naim Haron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Acrobat Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2021-09-20T22:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

BEHZAD KHAN WAS the Station House Officer of the only police station within a sixty-mile radius. The area was remote. With its administrative center in the small town of Ahmadabad, the greater district under his watch was home to about fifty thousand people, and the police force to serve these people was very small and for all intents and purposes impoverished.

He was a proud servant of the country’s historically ill-equipped, ill-trained, ill funded but very influential and highly profitable police department. Profitable for those who joined the force and were posted in affluent areas, not something he had experienced in his fifteen years. For the most part, the police department was rife with inefficiencies and corruption, but his station was slightly less corrupt than others. Not because of a lack of desire, but due to a lack of opportunity. The spread of corruption was like water. Just like heavy rains do not cause a flood in all areas, heavy tendencies of corruption did not corrupt everyone in the force. Just as water flows downstream, the spread of corruption mostly occurred in the areas which were populated and more developed, allowing for more possibilities of graft and personal gain.

Places like Ahmedabad were for the most part quiet. Not much happened, and the economic standing of the community was fairly low. But in such places, abuse of power and influence was a problem much greater than corruption. When Behzad Khan joined the force he didn’t have any desire to play the dirty game of influence, power, and all things illicit. He wasn’t political. His goal was to stay clean and to rise above all things that led to immense gain, illegally. In the initial years of his service with the force, he was transferred to many places in very quick succession, but since he did not jockey or push for a posting in well-endowed, desirable areas, he ended up in Ahmadabad and ended up serving here for the last ten years.

While the police force as a whole was strapped for resources, those who were serving remote areas like Ahmadabad were strikingly starved. In the last eight of ten years, conditions had deteriorated even further. However, due to the shortage of funds, nobody bothered him either and he maintained law and order in his own peculiar way. Behzad Khan was not unhappy, quite the opposite, he was simply content.

There was an obvious shift in the local dynamic that could be attributed to a particular superpower next door flexing its muscles, its mighty military force and accompanying resources were hard to compete with. In order to keep an eye on the cross border movement of undesirable elements, the so-called superpower suggested that local police should be provided additional support and equipment. When the new budgets for police resource allocation came through, it felt as if a floodgate of money had somehow opened. In his fifteen years on the force, he had never seen such a dramatic influx of accessible cash.

The money was not the

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