Opinion For a besieged Punjab, lessons from Bihar

Heading a rainbow social coalition, Nitish Kumar made law and order the centrepiece of governance and empowered the police administration to act with autonomy and effectiveness. With the backing of senior civil service leadership and in close coordination with Abhayanand, the Bihar Police introduced innovative measures that reshaped both operational capacity and the state’s socio-psychological climate.

A central pillar of Bihar’s turnaround was the institution of speedy trials, which processed thousands of criminal cases with unmatched efficiency and swiftly dismantled the entrenched impunity long enjoyed by mafia dons, kidnapping operators, and caste militias. Once a crime-prone and weak state, Bihar emerged as a national example by institutionalising fast-track courts, resulting in the conviction of over 50,000 criminals — including several bahubali politicians — between January 2006 and August 2010, a record unmatched in Indian policing.

Another key intervention was the recruitment and professionalisation of the constabulary. Abhayanand, who later became Bihar’s DGP, also introduced the hiring of former Army personnel as Special Auxiliary Police (SAP) to address acute manpower shortages. This disciplined, professionally trained force proved vital in confronting organised gangs, suppressing Maoist insurgents, and neutralising caste militias and entrenched criminal networks. More recently, Nitish Kumar’s recruitment of over 35,000 women constables through job quotas has introduced a pioneering dimension of gender justice. As of mid-2025, women constituted approximately 28.5 per cent of the total police force, marking an unprecedented development in Indian policing.

This transformation was not merely administrative but cultural too. It laid the foundation for Nitish Kumar’s widely praised women-led welfare architecture and reoriented Bihar’s public imagination towards development. While occasional killings and shootouts still unsettle the public conscience, crime has been decisively delegitimised in a state now emerging as an aspirational, cosmopolitan Bihar.

Punjab’s trajectory, by contrast, reflects the opposite direction. Here, crime has been normalised and glamorised. Social media videos, gang-affiliated music, and cross-border digital networks have elevated the figure of the “shooter” into a seductive cultural archetype. Reeling under the agrarian crisis, young people, particularly the unemployed, are drawn to a stylised world of violence, fame, and diaspora patronage. Compounding the crisis is the Punjab Police’s legacy of corruption, political interference, and past human-rights violations. The excesses of the militancy period weakened institutional ethics of policing and eroded public trust — a reality antithetical to the sustained, trust-based environment required to dismantle modern criminal syndicates.

Global experience further illuminates Punjab’s crisis. In Latin America, where transnational gangs have long undermined state authority, decades-long experiments in law enforcement offer instructive lessons. El Salvador’s mano dura (iron fist) strategy of mass arrests initially won public support but backfired by overcrowding prisons and strengthening gang cohesion. Colombia’s intelligence-driven approach to dismantling the Medellín and Cali cartels — leadership targeting, financial disruption, judicial coordination, and leveraging civilian informant networks — proved far more sustainable than brute-force tactics. Brazil’s favela (slum) pacification programmes, which attempted to blend policing with community engagement, faltered due to inconsistent political backing and operational fatigue. Collectively, these cases show that while the police force may produce quick results, lasting success depends on community trust, intelligence systems, credible judicial processes, and durable institutional support from political leadership.

Punjab’s predicament is undeniably complex yet far from insurmountable. Avoiding military-style operations, the state’s path forward lies in a multipronged strategy that replaces episodic police raids with sustained, multi-layered interventions. The foremost priority is dismantling the narco-terror network that links domestic gangs with cross-border traffickers and foreign-based handlers. This requires seamless coordination between central intelligence agencies, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the Narcotics Control Bureau, the Intelligence Bureau, and paramilitary forces operating along the international border. Fast-track courts and coordinated prosecution, modelled on Bihar’s success, can effectively disrupt gang cohesion and restore faith in the criminal justice system.

Above all, drawing inspiration from Nitish Kumar’s leadership, Punjab must restore the moral authority of its police by tackling deep-rooted corruption, enforcing transparency, and rebuilding civic trust, without which effective targeting of shooters — both domestically and in the diaspora — is impossible. Indeed, Punjab’s challenge is more global, technologically sophisticated, and culturally embedded, but the core lesson from Bihar holds: no state can defeat organised crime without recalibrating governance to confront hybrid, cross-border criminal formations.

The writer is professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and author of Community Warriors: State, Peasants, and Caste Armies in Bihar. Views are personal