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Journalism of Courage
MARCH 20: The first thing that makes the Kerala government’s much-hyped People’s Police Scheme controversial is the nomenclature itself. The Marxist prefix "people’s" has, alas, come to connote much that is anti-people after decades of East European "people’s democracy" that has met its inevitable doom. Add to this the common image of the police, anywhere in the country, that can hardly be considered people-friendly. And the only surprise is that the E. K. Nayanar regime’s current pet scheme has not elicited an even more uproarious protest than it has. The Chief Minister’s familiar foot-in-the-mouth disease has not helped matters, either.
The leader, whose `anti-imperialist’ crack about rape being as common in the US as tea-drinking once caused much laughter at his expense, has not made his a sure-sell scheme by citing an American model for it. It is not, however, in its name alone that the scheme is flawed. Its critics are not merely scoffing at the idea of a popular police or adding yet another to their collection of Nayanar jokes. They have a point to make that can just not be dismissed as prejudice.
Avowed popularisation of the police, they argue, can all too easily be reduced to its increased politicisation in the scheme’s actual implementation. And who who but those nursing touchingly naive notions about both our political and police forces will disagree?
The argument is hardly answered anyway by the official outline of the scheme. A "people’s committee", presided over by the local head constable, in every area will be the core of the scheme. There is little doubt that political parties will try to pack the committee with their own "people’s representatives". It is even less doubtful that, in Kerala, the CPI(M) will succeed in capturing most of such committees in this characteristically clever manner. It is far from uncertain, too, that the representative of the police force of the specified rank will be no more than a figurehead of the committee. A near-certainty, in fact, is the prospect of the head becoming a briskly wagging tail.
It is not as if the police has not been taking and carrying out political orders all along. Many people will see it as nothing but institutionalisation of the practice. It is the Marxist reputation in such matters that has elicited for the scheme sharp opposition not only from the state Congress but even constituents of the LDF, including the CPI.
The scheme does not become good for the people, because it is bad for the non-CPI(M) parties. The police as part of the administration does need to be brought close to the people, but scatterbrained schemes of this kind won’t achieve the objective. Experience indeed is that politicisation of the police or political interference in its functioning takes it away from the people and, often, even imparts it an anti-people image. The Emergency produced quite a few extreme instances (though there have been examples enough at other times), and Kerala had its share. True popularisation of the police can only result from its fuller professionalisation, through better training and other steps recommended in the dust-gathering reports of many an expert body. The Nayanar government cannot initiate the process more credibly than by shelving the scheme forthwith.
