Policing reforms

Last week, in this column I wrote that Manmohan Singh would be remembered in history as the Prime Minister who reinvented governance in Indi...

Last week, in this column I wrote that Manmohan Singh would be remembered in history as the Prime Minister who reinvented governance in India if he could do just two things: administrative reform and judicial reform. After reading Arun Shourie8217;s brilliant series of articles on national security in this newspaper last week, I would like to alter the nuances of my advice and put judicial and police reform before administrative.

Administrative reform can wait. It is likely to take a very long time and, as many of you informed me via e-mail, may never happen because the Indian bureaucrat detests change and knows precisely how to prevent it. While reading Arun8217;s articles I realised that police and judicial reform were easier to implement and needed more desperately because no amount of administrative reforms are going to get us anywhere if two new districts become affected with Naxalite violence every week.

Arun in his first article quotes terrorism expert, Ajai Sahani, as saying that official figures for October 2003 counted 55 districts in nine states as being affected by Naxalite violence. By November 2004 the same official figures said that the violence had now spread to 156 districts in 13 states which makes it two new districts a week. This is terrifying information and even more terrifying if you look at the map and notice that the violence cuts a widening swathe through the centre of India.

It is politically incorrect to mention radical Islam as a threat but this column prides itself on breaking the rules of political correctness. Radical Islam is a serious problem in India and has to be confronted. It becomes more serious by the day because we are now ruled by a 8216;8216;secular8217;8217; coalition that dare not mention Islamic terrorism for fear that they might be charged with being no different to the 8216;8216;communal forces8217;8217; they 8216;8216;saved8217;8217; us from. Speaking of which, if Naxalite violence has risen so dramatically in the past year we need to ask what the Hindu nationalists who claimed to be the only buffer between Bharat Mata and disintegration were doing? Was Advani sleeping through his tenure in North Block?

When Islamic terrorists struck in Kashmir or at the Akshardham temple in Ahmedabad, our former Home Minister was famous for rushing to blame Pakistan and leaving it at that. As if laying blame was a solution and would deflect attention from his own abysmally ineffectual record in the ministry directly responsible for national security. Unhappily, it did deflect the government8217;s own attention and there was a lot of blabbing on about India Shining without our former Prime Minister noticing that there were whole regions of India where young men and women were turning to violence because nothing was shining and there was nobody to stop them.

Once our politicians become national leaders they never get to see what a police station looks like in the districts where the Naxalites operate or they would have realised long ago that our police cannot take on modern terrorists. The average rural police station, especially in poorer states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, consists of a crumbling one-room tenement furnished with a desk, a couple of chairs and a picture of Gandjhiji. In this airless cubby hole are crammed the men responsible for fighting our civil war. They work 18 hours a day, often sleep at night in the police station8217;s verandah which becomes a makeshift dormitory at night, and are armed with nineteenth century weaponry. With their battered 303 rifles they are expected to take on men armed with automatic weapons. Is it possible? Our politicians are such a cynical bunch that the only policemen who are trained in counter-terrorism and equipped with modern weapons are those that protect them and not us. Why are these trained forces not deployed in the Naxalite districts instead of in the drawing rooms and gardens of New Delhi?

Improving our intelligence agencies is easier because here we are dealing with management problems. There are too many agencies and often they appear to work without coordination or strategy but there is no shortage of funds.

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Quite the opposite. There is so much money oiling the wheels of intelligence gathering that we have bred fat cats who sometimes become double agents and flee to foreign lands leaving vast properties behind for their families. Remember Ravinder Singh of RAW now happily ensconced in a safe house in some foreign country? Even if he were here, though, he would probably not pay for his treason because the case would take years and years. Which brings us to judicial reform. The best policing and intelligence gathering cannot be of any use as long as the justice system remains in its present state of atrophy. What justice can we expect from a system that will take more than three hundred years to clear its backlog? And, have you been in a court recently? What justice can there be from courtrooms that are nearly in as much a state of decay as our police stations?

Bibek Debroy, who works in Sonia8217;s very own Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, suggests that the problem can only begin to be solved if an entire session of Parliament is devoted to it so that procedures and infrastructure can be modernised and hundred-year-old, irrelevant laws chucked out.

Is this too much to ask? Surely, a special session on judicial reform will have the support even of the Communists? As for the BJP and its allies, they should be so ashamed of the state they left national security in that if they do not cooperate they could find themselves becoming totally irrelevant to Bharat Mata.

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