Opinion Honour among cops
Our sullen policing is generating a severe national security crisis
The all-party delegation to Kashmir will,doubtless,be hearing complaints about police and paramilitary forces. But the issue is wider than Kashmir. Nothing exemplifies the contorted character of our civic commitment more than our attitudes to our police. Our future depends on this institution. The state of our democracy will be measured by the safety of citizens in the presence of the police. In a modernising society,the nature of the police will determine whether society has crime and repression or safety and freedom. Indian society will occasion many protests. But whether those protests are artfully handled,or degenerate into violence,creating their own vicious cycles of resentment,will depend on the police. And as we have seen from Kashmir to West Bengal,policing has become our single biggest national security challenge.
There have been endless reports on police reform. But we need to more deeply diagnose the shamelessness with which we refuse to move on any of these reports. It was observed as early as the 1902 Police Commission Report that the nature and support for policing depends a lot on wider social attitudes. So what does our shamelessness reveal? First of all it reveals a warped and often paradoxical sense of nationalism. Strangely enough,we often loathe the police,but are also too often,under the guise of national interest,willing to stand behind its excesses. But the only thing we are not willing to do is create the conditions under which our contempt for the police and defence of its excesses both become unnecessary. And creating those conditions will require a measure of political commitment and investment in resources and thinking through new institutional architectures.
Second,the police,of all the state institutions,exemplifies the tenuousness of equal citizenship in India. The lives of policemen and paramilitary forces are cheap in every respect,as if they were simply an army of surplus labour. A state that does not take the lives of those who discharge its sovereign functions seriously is unlikely to be able to send a signal to anyone else in society that it takes their lives seriously. But the complex relationship between inequality and the police has another dimension. Recently,there was a horrendous incident of a female SP being dragged for almost a mile by two junior policemen when she challenged their bribe-taking. There was almost surely a gender dimension to this incident. But it also exposed a sociological fact that is going to make policing even more difficult in years to come.
Within the police forces,there is often pretty open class warfare. What we are not realising is the extent to which the standard police hierarchies of command and control can no longer be taken for granted. The idea that a senior IPS officer can give an order and it will be pursued by someone at the level of the SHO is simply gone. Part of this is due to the fact that,often,lower-level police officers feel more beholden to politicians than they do to their professional superiors. But part of this is also due to the fact that there is a growing sense of resentment at the social distance between senior IPS and rank-and-file policemen. Caste was always an issue in police-society relations,particularly as far as Dalits were concerned. But new forms of caste consciousness and conflict,now often exacerbated by the practice in some states of recording the castes of all complainants,is giving the lie to the idea that we have a unified police force,instead of a myriad social groups playing out their aspirations and resentments inside the force. Police reform that does not address the complex sociology of the police will not be worth the paper it is written on.
Third,like all institutions,the police have also become victims of self-fulfilling scepticism. It is difficult to maintain a sense of professional identity without social support. Many studies,including one by former IPS officer Arvind Verma show that the police are driven often by their sense of social norms. Encounter killings,for instance,draw succour from the sense that they have social approval. But this puts the police in a vicious circle: they often act indiscriminately because they are weak; we condone their excesses because that is a way of getting policing on the cheap; but once you condone excesses,it corrodes the whole professional structure.
On the positive side,a generalised scepticism often makes it hard to reinforce esteem for jobs well done. Think of numerous instances where the police have delivered,albeit not perfectly: controlling violent crime in Mumbai,facilitating social participation to prevent riots in Bhiwadi,or more recently,securing successful convictions against the Ranvir Sena in Bihar. But it is difficult to piece these stories together in any way that reinforces the positive self-esteem of the police.
Fourth,the state has treated the police in unconscionable ways. On any measure of state support,whether it is as simple a thing as buying reliable bullet-proof jackets,to training and providing for better means of crowd control,the state has failed. The CAG Compendium of Performance Audit Reviews on Modernisation of the Police Force catalogues every shortcoming you can imagine. In states like Bengal and Bihar,live training was not imparted to police forces,UP has slightly over a fifth of the required vehicles it needs for normal patrolling,the incorporation of new technologies was abysmal. States like Rajasthan took less than half of their Central allocation; many spent only a fraction of their allocation. The housing crisis for policemen is dire. A lot of this is the characteristic inefficiency of the state. But it sends a powerful signal about how cheap we think policing is,in both a social and a financial sense.
The debate on police reform has focused on simple institutional remedies. Supreme Court directives concentrate on professional control of recruitment and transfers,etc. But these are limited measures. They are not linked to any serious strategic assessment of police needs. It does not address the fact that the crisis of the police is symptomatic of a wider social crisis. You have two levels of challenge: convincing the people that the police can be made credible. But the police also need to be sent a signal that state and society are going to make credible commitments to them,or else they have no incentive to cooperate. Our sullen policing is generating more national security crises than any external power could dream of. All-party delegation on this,anyone?
The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi express@expressindia.com
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