The shocking case of Mohammad Rafiq Shah, a Kashmiri Muslim youth who was accused of carrying out the 2005 bomb blast on a bus in Delhi’s Govindpuri area only to be acquitted of all charges 12 years later, exemplifies the pathetic state of law and order in this country. Rafiq was a student of MA (final) at Shah-i-Hamadan, Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, when on the midnight of November 21, 2005, his world plunged into darkness.

He was picked up by officials of Delhi Police’s special cell and Special Task Force (STF) of Kashmir Police. Two days later — after allegedly subjecting him to torture and humiliation at an STF camp — they brought him to Delhi. He was alleged to have planted a bomb in a DTC bus in Govindpuri on October 29, 2005, which injured many people.

Twelve years later, the court found the entire case against Rafiq to be false. The police had ignored Rafiq’s alibi at every stage of the investigation. Rafiq’s claim that he was in class during the day of the blast and that he could prove this was simply ignored. On the contrary, the investigation proceeded on the assumption that Rafiq was guilty. And the police tried to produce evidence that bolstered its conclusion.

As a result, Rafiq lost 12 years of his youth, had to go through extreme trauma and humiliation, and was made to prove his innocence through a process that no innocent person should be subjected to. Given what he has been through, can anyone really blame Rafiq if he loses his faith in the Indian system?

Rafiq’s case leads me to two observations. First, we can’t fight terrorism or emerge as a moderately developed society if we don’t reform our law and order system. The latter is simply not up to the mark. The judiciary is excruciatingly slow. The police and law enforcement agencies are inefficient at best and downright venal at worse. This is not to say that there are no good police officers. Of course there are. But they are few and far between. The law and order system as a whole is decrepit. And there is a strong perception that the law only protects the rich and powerful. The weak have little recourse to justice.

Second, Rafiq’s case is also a strong counter to all those who want to try terror accused on the basis of guilty until proven innocent. Given the state of our law and order where security personnel can pick up innocent people and implicate them with flimsy or no evidence, guilty until proven innocent is certainly not the direction in which the criminal justice system should proceed.

If we want to ramp up our law and order mechanism, we need to reform and upgrade our judicial and police systems. Without modern policing and faster judicial adjudication of cases, tough laws simply don’t work. We need to focus on basics such as integrating police databases and filling up vacancies for judges. Otherwise, like in Rafiq’s case, justice in this country will not only be delayed but also perverted.