Last week started with a viral video of a couple scaring the police at Marina Beach late at night. It was interesting and exciting at the same time to see the man, who also admitted on camera that he was drunk, tell the police that he will not move from the scene and the woman mocked the policeman who shoots their act of obedience by striking poses for the camera. Normally, no man or woman in their right mind will dare question a police officer in Chennai. So the couple’s performance in front of the camera with the gentle breeze flowing behind them was a nice spectacle for onlookers like me.

Unfortunately, it was only a transience, as we were told the next day itself. Subsequent videos that rolled out on social media weren’t so nice. These images, showing the couple being sent to jail or being interrogated in police custody or the man breaking down in front of the camera and apologizing for the mistake, especially the act of name-dropping – he had bravely asked the interrogating officers whether he would request Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin to get over – were not funny at all.

When those grim vignettes came out, self-styled anchors of YouTube channels burst into play with a sense of authority, knowledge and righteousness, insisting that the couple be punished for various reasons. One of them is not disobeying the police who were patrolling the roads on Marina beach and not leaving the scene immediately and two, for committing the cardinal sin of talking back to the police. But the YouTubers did not question whether it was right for the police to have taken the video of a couple on the beach without asking their permission and to have leaked it to the media.

In our overwhelming joy at an unknown couple, who had crossed a line according to our standards, been hauled over the coals for not obeying the police and even dumped in a jail for two weeks, we applaud the swift and effective crackdown by the police without to bother to think about the obvious human rights violations that had been committed in the process.

I know it’s been a long time since “human rights” became a dirty word. Even workers’ rights are frowned upon as we saw, during the recent conflict between striking Indian Samsung workers and the South Korean management, the homegrown intellectuals of the state, with the help of TV and YouTube channel anchors, enlightening the people about the woes of unionism and the concept collective bargaining. Many nodded in agreement when those upstarts said that unions will force companies to close shop without bothering to tell how many capitalists have gone out of business.

Ok, don’t let me digress, we were talking about human rights here. So, is it right to leak – it was actually opening a floodgate – videos of a couple to anyone? Be it YouTube channels or regular media channels. Isn’t that a breach of privacy? Please don’t think that an errant couple who fooled the police has no right to privacy. The law is common to everyone and the police or YouTube channel anchors have no right to judge whether they were wrong or not. The police can take legal action but it is up to the court to decide whether they did wrong or not. So sharing the video with others is as much a crime as disobeying the police.

But then it has already become a trend or a common practice for the police to leak audio clips and video recordings they get from the devices of people selected for questioning and other reasons and slander people they don’t like. To put it differently, like some people who take the law into their own hands, the police purposefully hand over the responsibility of conducting the trial to media outlets to character assassinate people they cannot proceed against. So if the couple got caught at Marina Sands for staying the night – I don’t know if sitting on the beach after a certain time is an offense under any law, but let’s not go into that now – must be dealt with legally, the police should have presented them before a magistrate and sought punishment for them.

The police have no right to first defame them personally and then bring them before a judge, even after torturing them. But we have collectively reveled in images of men euphemistically slipping and falling in the bathroom and ending up with plastered arms. The police have shamelessly promoted the theory that the arrested person broke his limbs in the bathroom because they cannot legally do that to an accused or suspect or whomever they take into custody.

I don’t know how many of the social media and mainstream channels that cheer the pictures of people with bandaged limbs for “slipping in the bathroom” have dared to ask the police why their bathroom is so slippery. Well, the point is that we as a society encourage the police to break rules and norms in the treatment of people who land in their custody with our social media and other news outlets cheering from the pages.