A STICKLER FOR RULES

 A beneficiary deposited with a respected Friend of mine, some papers as security, in return for legal consideration he sought and was given. Appropriate legally binding instruments of deposit were signed and witnessed. 

 
Later this fellow illegally sought the return of those papers, without returning the consideration he received, and started intimidating my Friend. The Friend issued a legal notice against the culprit, and also informed the police. 
 
While the matter was pending, suddenly one day the police came to the Friend, shouted at him and orally asked him to return the said papers, He agreed to do so, provided they advised so in writing. 
 
Angry and abusive, the Police returned but overnight issued an FIR charging him with 'extortion', seizure etc. and sought his arrest. 
 
This was wholly a civil matter and multiple evidences testify that the deposit was valid, legal, made of own volition and for valid consideration received. This he learnt when the next morning the story was prominently published by four newspapers ruining the Friend's reputation of two decades. 
 
Although my Friend was not arrested, he is technically under High Court's protection, but remains an accused. And the case is not likely to be heard before five years. The papers have had to be returned for the sake of this interim protection, without return of the consideration. That is where the matter hangs. 
 
My Friend - a stickler for rules and a law-abiding person to the core, widely respected for his transparency and humanism, but an outspoken critic of the administration, remains bewildered. Dejected he says: we are no more living in a law-abiding society. 
 
I am seeing what is happening in the matter of Chidambaram. I don't know the truth, any more than you do. But the way the CBI personnel climbed down the wall of his house, arrested him on a Friday evening, did not wait for one day, until he moved his bail application though the case has been pending for seven years...is enough indication of wanton intimidation and harassment at the orders from up above. 
 
Don't lecture me, therefore, on the rule of law in our country, and on police professionalism. These are things of the past. I know a thing of two of our world and won't buy the police narrative easily. 
 
It is totally and unabashedly Might is Right, and vendetta.