Tariq Mahmood Awan
An Excerpt from my book, The Bureaucratic Coup and its relation to the Chakwal incident
I was posted as Assistant Commissioner in a sub-division when a new SHO was transferred to my area. He was an experienced officer, intellectually alive, professionally active, and possessed of a personality that made him easy to engage with. Over time, as official business brought him regularly to my office, we developed a relationship that went beyond the transactional. We talked about governance, about society, about things that had nothing to do with files or orders.
One afternoon he arrived and something was visibly wrong. He was restless in a way I had never seen. He kept rubbing his palm. His face carried a particular kind of inner disturbance that is difficult to name but impossible to miss. This was not his character. He was ordinarily a composed man. I asked him directly what the matter was.
After a silence, he told me something that has stayed with me ever since.
He said that in the early years of his service, he had watched criminals walk free repeatedly. Arrests were made, evidence gathered, cases filed, and then somewhere between the police station and the courtroom the whole thing collapsed. He had seen widows without justice, children without fathers, poor men crushed by those with influence. Over time, a thought embedded itself in him: the formal system cannot deliver for everyone, certainly not in time.
Then came what he called the decisive moment of his life.
A young girl went missing from a rural area. He reached the scene, spoke to the family, spoke to the village, but felt that the full truth was being withheld. His suspicion settled on a close relative. During a second round of questioning, under considerable pressure, the man confessed. He had killed the child and hidden the body at a specific location.
When the SHO arrived at that location and saw what remained of the child, something broke inside him. He did not use those exact words but the meaning was unmistakable. In that moment, he said, he could no longer hold the line between his professional role and his human rage. The accused was later killed in what was recorded as an encounter. At the time, the SHO told me, he felt he had delivered justice. Only later did he understand that something had shifted inside him permanently, and not for the better.
He said: “Sir, the problem is not that one incident happened. The problem is what that incident did to me afterward. Gradually I came to believe that maximum force was the most effective path to justice. Whenever operations of that nature were planned, I was called. Over years, it stopped being a professional responsibility. It became a psychological habit.”
Then he said something that I have turned over in my mind many times since: “Today, if I go too long without being part of such an operation, I feel genuinely anxious. I feel incomplete.”
That sentence is worth sitting with. Here was a man trained to uphold law, telling me that the absence of extrajudicial violence produced in him a sensation of withdrawal. The habit had become the need.
There is a principle in psychology, well established and plain to observe in ordinary life, that any repeated action gradually becomes habit, and any entrenched habit eventually becomes character. When a behaviour is performed repeatedly, the mind stops evaluating its moral or legal content and begins treating it as normal procedure. This is how authority and violence fuse into a single reflex, and how an officer stops being a servant of law and becomes something considerably more dangerous.
The question I could not escape after that conversation was this: is the real problem the individual or the institution that shaped him? This particular SHO was not a sadist when he joined the service. He was, by his own account, a man disturbed by injustice. The system did not correct that disturbance. It channelled it. It rewarded certain behaviours, deployed him selectively, and over time produced a man who could not function without the very thing that had originally troubled his conscience.
This is what happens when law enforcement institutions are never humanised. Civil servants are human beings. They carry trauma, develop patterns, and respond to institutional incentives in ways that are predictable if you care to look. When the institutions they serve do not attend to their psychological condition, when mental health support is absent, when violent habits are allowed to consolidate without intervention, the consequences arrive eventually and they arrive publicly.
Departments like the Crime Control Department require serious and sustained work on the mental health of their personnel. Not as a concession to softness but as a requirement of effective and lawful governance. Humanising these institutions is not a luxury. It is what separates a constitutional state from one that merely wears its uniform.
The tragic incident in Chakwal, Pakistan, where a private family in a private car was brutally fired upon, and a nine-year-old girl was killed, is a shattering reminder of what police impunity costs. Hania Ahmed, from Perth’s suburb of Kewdale, was travelling with her parents and brother when officers mistook their car for the vehicle of armed robbers and opened fire, killing her and injuring her father and brother.
When police encounters become habit, those who execute them no longer carry guilt. Even in literature, there is a term the Czechs use — “Gestapo” — to describe the killing of innocent people by the state. Commentators note that in Israel, the occupation forces have developed precisely this habit: killing innocent people with diminishing reluctance. They kill innocent Palestinians because impunity has made killing effortless. This is what habit does. When there is no accountability, even the killing reflex disappears.
We need to humanise our civil law enforcement agencies. The mental health of police officers must be assessed and reformed. This is a stark reminder. Pakistan needs a lawful state, not a hard state.
The best-selling books of Republic Policy Think Tank, including the landmark book The Bureaucratic Coup, are available at Vanguard Books, Liberty Books, Readings, Kitab Sarai, Sang-e-Meel, Saeed Book Stores, and others across Pakistan. Contact for home delivery: 0300 9552542.
