Yeh Mera India: Police and the Common Man #3

Why Police Officers Become Handmaidens of Politicians?

Everybody knows that the police in India and their leadership have not been able to deliver the goods. I have yet to find an adult person anywhere in the country who would testify that he is happy with the police.

What went wrong? How did the rakshak become the bhakshak?  How come those who were supposed to be protectors of the people, turned into oppressors and tormentors? Who allowed them to become the beasts they are?

Where they fail?

The blame lies principally and squarely on the police leadership! They could have served any useful purpose for the nation if they had appreciated two things. First, that while the elected governments are transient, they constitute what is permanent in the system and hence their responsibility as the guardian of peoples’ interests and custodian of public resources is onerous.

Second, that they are supposed to discharge the duties of what the ‘mantri’ in ancient Hindu polity was supposed to do. In modern Hindi, the word ‘mantri’ means an elected minister. Earlier, when the word came into existence, it was not so as there were no elected ministers. Etymologically, a mantri was one whose job was to give ‘mantrana’, that is, advice to the king.

The ancient Hindu king was called raja because etymologically, a raja was not one who merely ruled over his subjects and kingdom (rajya). A raja was one who did ‘ranjan’ for his praja or subjects. That is, the primary task and responsibility of a raja was the welfare of his people. As employees of the raja, the primary task and responsibility of his mantris were also the same, that is, the welfare of the people.

All the advice that they tendered or had to tender, should have had only one prime objective—the greater good of the people. The advice had to be given in a purely professional manner without any fear or favour.

Tulsidas ji has commented beautifully on this in the Ramcharitmanas. The context was the moment when news was brought to Ravan in his court that Bhagwan Ram had crossed the sea with his army. All the sycophants in the court laughed at it and said that Ravan who had conquered the devatas, need not bother about humans and vanaras. Only Vibhishan and another mantri Malyawan advised Ravan that a war with Bhagwan Ram would neither be proper nor fruitful.

Commenting on this, Tulsidas ji says that if there is a kingdom in which three categories of persons, namely, the mantri, the vaidya (physician) and the guru (mentor), out of a fear of displeasing the king, or in the hope of gaining some favours from him, advise him things which he wants to hear and not those which are really good for him, that king stands to quickly lose his kingdom, his dharma and his life, everything. Ravan exiled Vibhishan upon hearing the unpleasant truth but eventually ended up losing everything.

The Romans had said the same thing but in a slightly different way: “Salus populi suprema lex est”, that is, “The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.”

How they fail?

With the civil servants in India, the exact opposite of this lofty ideal has taken place. Instead of advising the rulers for the benefit of the people; instead of cautioning them against immoral deeds; and instead of taking a principled stand, they have been pampering to the vanities, the capriciousness, and the insatiable greed of the rulers.

The Indian civil servants have all along actively colluded with the rulers in all their misdeeds and have thus failed the people whom they were supposed to serve.

After 1857, the British were obsessed with controlling the Indian people and keeping them subjugated. Every single thing they ever did in respect of administration reflected and resulted from this desire only. While the civil servants could perhaps be pardoned for enduring that under the British, how can one explain their conduct since independence?

It is proof of the imbecility of the police leadership that all these 74 years they never made any attempt to ‘modernise’ the police in this regard. Why? Why did they not ever demand that the powers of the police in India be on a par with those in other nations of the world? Why did they quietly, almost surreptitiously allow a decadent colonial legacy to continue?

Can they afford to argue that their duty was just to obey the law and not question it? Certainly not! The crooks amongst the police leadership do not tire of speaking of the lack of political will—very cleverly, they never speak of a bureaucratic will which they should have had! The real reason is that they purposefully allowed this colonial legacy to continue because wielding enormous powers suits them and they enjoy it.

Geoffrey Ashe, the famous British cultural historian, in his book ‘Gandhi: A Biography’ narrates a horrible incident that took place in Patna in 1930 in the wake of the Dandi March. Dr. Rajendra Prasad had led a huge crowd towards one of the new salt depots. The police, as usual, blocked the road. The protesters staged a sit-in satyagraha and stayed right there for full 40 hours ignoring police orders to disperse.  Eventually, the police leadership decided to trample them under the hooves of the mounted police! In Ashe’s words, “The mounted police galloped furiously, the crowd lay flat, the horses shied and pulled up, and the demonstrators had to be hoisted bodily into trucks.”

The point to be noted is that the police leadership could take such an inhuman, abominable decision. The horses flinched, the riders did not—the beast turned out to be more human than the human beasts in khaki! Sadly, even now, the police leadership can be equally dumb, equally insensitive because little has changed over the decades.

Servility, Their Motto, Their Creed

Anybody in India who has his eyes and ears open and who has not buried his head deliberately in sand like an Ostrich must have seen in his life that it is not only the much-maligned ‘netas’ who have looted this country for the past over six decades—it is the well-known nexus of ‘netas’, bureaucrats (including police), criminals, businessmen, industrialists, and all those ‘brokers’ of power including the media houses and influential media persons which have systematically gang-raped this country and its wealth. Servility is the fuel that keeps this machine running.

Police officers who do ‘bad’ or ‘unprofessional’ things do so not because they are compelled to do so by the politicians; they do so because they serve their own interests by doing those things

On February 6, 2011, a TV grab had shown a Personal Security Officer Padam Singh, formerly a DySP, cleaning the shoes of a chief minister in UP. Someone had commented satirically that it would go down as ‘The moment’ when all the policemen wearing Khaki would have realized the path to their tryst with destiny, which is to protect the person of the masters and their cronies from the petty inconveniences of everyday life, and safeguarding their ill-gotten gains from the public gaze.

The mechanisms of snuggling and cuddling with the politicians are many—to list them all would involve some gory details and faint-hearted readers might feel scandalized. It is only an extension of such behavioural traits that makes the police leaders commit such ghastly crimes as fake encounters at the behest of politicians or protect the kith and kin of politicians even if they are involved in heinous crimes like rape. 

Also Read:

Yeh Mera India: Police and the Common Man #1

Yeh Mera India: Police and the Common Man #2

Sycophancy and the art of maintaining the nexus—manipulation of the system in general for their benefit—have been raised to such a level that descriptions like ‘crawl when asked to bend’ sound like school kids’ clichés.

In British playwright Christopher Marlowe’s 17th-century drama ‘The Tragic History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus’, Dr John Faustus decides to sell his soul to Lucifer in order to obtain power over the demon Mephistophilis. I do not think that there is any hope of redemption for a system that has a Faustus in every corner. And mind you, the politician is not the Devil; the Faustuses in the IAS and IPS are jumping to sell their souls to anybody who could further their selfish interests. The problem concerns the individuals, not the system per se; trying to blame the system is to deny the obvious truth.

Even an outdated system can deliver results provided the men charged with the system have a desire to deliver and strive hard to deliver it. This is not to suggest that an exercise in optimization cannot or should not be attempted within the boundaries of a given system. Yes, it can be done, but the point being made is that it would remain a largely academic exercise only. The desire to deliver is more important than the means to deliver.

Police officers who do ‘bad’ or ‘unprofessional’ things do so not because they are compelled to do so by the politicians; they do so because they serve their own interests by doing those things.