Siddique, who has confessed to his involvement in a truck robbery in the Vernama police station area in Vadodara district, is brought to the court for remand. He is handcuffed; the handcuffs are removed just before he is produced before the judicial magistrate first class, fourth court. As soon as he is out of the court, the handcuffs are placed right back.

Just half-an-hour later, a City police station jeep arrives with a youth similarly handcuffed. He was picked up in an inebriated condition from Fatehpura. The familiar drama with the handcuffs follows as he is presented before the judicial magistrate and whisked away.

Anyone witnessing the above incidents -- and they are not exceptional cases -- would be forgiven for believing there are no strictures against the use of handcuffs on petty law-breakers. But in 1988, the Supreme Court, ruling in the case of Altemesh Rain vs the Union of India and others specified that the police had to obtain court approval before handcuffing even dangerous criminals.

The circulation of a copy of the ruling by the State Home department recently appears to have had little impact. When the three policemen escorting Siddique were asked why the prisoner was handcuffed, their only justification was that they couldn't take any risks.

Asked if they had obtained magisterial permission, they replied that the process was too cumbersome, that they would have had to explain the reasons, and even then, their application could be rejected. The same vague explanation was the only one forthcoming from the City Police Station policemen who were escorting the drunken youth.

Handcuffing of accused is so common that police escort parties allegedly do not even lend an ear to advocates. Recently, Hanif Shaikh, an advocate, had to file a suit in the court of the judicial magistrate, fourth court, for an order barring the police from handcuffing his client, arrested for kidnapping a child. The police complied only after the order came through.

According to senior advocate and Baroda Bar Association president Narendra Tiwari, handcuffing of non-habitual criminals amounts to a violation of human rights. ``It is completely illegal, unconstitutional and violative of individual's fundamental rights to handcuff an accused person unless instructed by the court'', he says.

While admitting that handcuffing was a ``brutish'' action on the part of the police escort parties, police officials claim that it sometimes becomes necessary to do so to prevent the criminal from running away.

A senior official, however, says that some policemen use the threat of handcuffing to extract some money from the accused. ``So it is always the poor who are handcuffed because they can't grease palms'', he says.

Refusing to go into the controversy, Police Commissioner J Mahapatra had only this to say, ``Why should the police always be disbelieved? It is now time for society to start trusting the police, because if you trust a man, he rises to the required standard''. The same argument could apply to the petty criminal.