The Street Spectacle of Jammu

Public shaming of the accused is not justice, it's the slow undoing of constitutional order.

- Dr Ajaz Afzal Lone | Dr Ashwani Kumar

In a constitutional democracy like India, the legitimacy of the justice system rests not only on statutes and structures but on the shared belief that the law exists to uphold dignity, equality, and reason over impulse, vengeance, or spectacle.

At the heart of this democratic vision is public trust, an invisible but powerful thread that binds citizens to institutions like the police and judiciary.

But when these institutions begin to mimic the very anarchy they are meant to contain, the fabric of trust starts to fray. Policing, when carried out beyond constitutional limits, ceases to be a shield of justice and instead becomes a symbol of the state’s slide into performative authoritarianism.

What we recently witnessed on the streets of Jammu was not law enforcement, it was public theatre that humiliated a citizen and mocked both legal procedure and human dignity.

Socially, these acts are not isolated aberrations, they reveal a deeper decay. They show how the protectors of the law are normalizing public punishments that feel closer to feudal cruelty than to a modern democratic ethos.

When police officers parade an accused person with a garland of footwear, when they turn an arrest into a public spectacle with loudspeaker announcements, they are not just violating the Constitution, they are staging lawlessness.

The message this performance sends is dangerous: that justice need not follow procedure, evidence, or courts. In doing so, they erode the very legitimacy of the judiciary, reducing the law to a tool of shame rather than a pathway to justice.

On a recent Tuesday in Jammu, an individual accused of theft was subjected to degrading treatment by police officers outside a hospital. He was paraded through the streets wearing a garland of footwear, made to sit on the bonnet of a moving police vehicle, while his alleged crime was announced over a loudspeaker. This wasn't an isolated case.