Courage was not in short supply on the morning of 22 October 1947. Raiders backed by Pakistan crossed into Jammu and Kashmir and fell on Muzaffarabad. The state’s forces were small, scattered across a difficult frontier and short of communication, intelligence and coordination. In Jammu and Kashmir, this date is remembered as a Black Day. At Uri, Brigadier Rajinder Singh brought down the bridge and bought Srinagar precious time, a stand that ended with his life on 26 October.

Valour without capacity buys time, but it cannot buy security. What the state lacked was the system behind the man at the post: numbers, equipment, connected intelligence and a force built to hold a frontier, not merely occupy barracks. The breach of 1947 left a long shadow of insecurity – one that took new forms over decades. For the Indian policeman, sacrifice has never been an abstraction. It has been an obligation of the uniform. A day earlier on the calendar, India observes Police Commemoration Day, marking the ten police personnel killed in an ambush at Hot Springs in Ladakh in 1959.

The two dates offer a telling juxtaposition: one honours those who have spent decades holding the line; the other recalls the day it was breached. At a time when abusing the police has become easy social-media currency, it is worth asking what we actually demand of them. The Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D), the government’s institution dedicated to research and development in policing, has found a system under considerable strain. Its national study on an eight-hour shift found that nearly 90 per cent of police station staff work beyond eight hours a day, while about three-fourths cannot take even one weekly day off in a month. A separate study of the CAPFs found a similar pattern: leave, family separation and living conditions ranked among the biggest sources of stress. They are indicators of the obligation carried by the people expected to be first at the scene, last to leave and available whenever the system calls.

Nowhere is this burden more visible than in Delhi. Since June, a series of protests has required sustained police deployment for crowd........

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