Julio Ribeiro

As 2020 nears its end, old policemen like me must take stock of the progress of the politicisation of the police since it should worry every citizen. First and foremost are citizens prepared to use the word ‘progress’ to trace the pace of politicisation of such a vital instrument of governance as the police? Every citizen must know that such politicisation is a negation of the ‘Rule of Law’, of good governance.

Let us take the Delhi Police. They were in the news when students of the JNU and later, the Jamia Millia, took to demonstrations and some violence to protest against wrongs, real or imagined. The Delhi Police were extremely tolerant of the antics of the right-wing Hindutva students and very hard on the left-wing unions. That is not how a police force should approach law and order situations. But the level of politicisation of a constitutionally-appointed body has gone up more than a notch or two! That does not augur well for the impartiality that is expected of the police. Public respect for the police increases in proportion to its impartiality.

The police moved swiftly against the leftist students and rightly so. The president of the left students’ union was seen on camera welcoming hooded men who entered the campus and beat up the rightists. The police then allowed the rightists to enter the campus by slipping through police cordons and allowed them to create mayhem without intervening to stop the hoodlums. It is not expected of the police to take sides, but take sides they did!

Any unbiased independent observer would conclude that the orders had come from the top echelons. In India, the police chiefs of different states and the police commissioners of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, report to the ministers in charge of the Home Department of those states. In Delhi, the commissioner reports to the Lieutenant Governor, who in turn reports to the Union Home Minister. The power of appointments and transfers rests with the respective Home Ministries. The misuse of these powers is the genesis of the politicisation of the police forces throughout the land. This politicisation is now embedded in the system.

The ambition of the senior IPS officers to occupy posts of importance is a major contributory factor to the politicisation. The appointment of subordinate police officers is in the hands of their seniors. When the seniors surrender their authority by complying with requests from politicians, corruption increases and the investigation of crime in sensitive cases are based not on facts and law but on the wishes and interests of the politician in power.

Proof of the politicisation of the Delhi Police was available when they refrained from prosecuting the BJP leaders who spewed venom on the anti-CAA protesters. Their threats came alive during the communal riots in northeast Delhi in February 2020, but the Delhi Police took no cognisance of the real cause of the riots! Instead, it concentrated on the young students, most of them women, who participated in the anti-CAA demonstrations!

The Delhi Police were well regarded nationally as a professionally competent force. They did a marvellous job of the investigation into the Nirbhaya rape and murder case. Their present chief was also well-spoken of as a competent officer. The Delhi Police have fallen victim to politicisation. They seem to be impotent when dealing with the political leadership. The long-term consequences of this runaway decline will be felt in future years.

The politicisation process has been more marked in Delhi’s neighbouring state of UP. The Adityanath government started off by summarily executing a number of criminals, mostly small-time, to the great delight of the middle-class. But the atmosphere of criminality continued to flourish, leading to the ambush and massacre of a police party, especially deputed to arrest a notorious gangster who had continued his depredations despite the fear generated by the police assuming the role of judge and executioner. Finally, the UP police were compelled to deal with the gangster through the very methods they used to despatch the small fry!

Presently, the UP police are busy rounding up Muslim bridegrooms who dare to tie the knot with Hindu girls, an event that is intensely distasteful to the Hindu Right. This, in spite of the views of the Allahabad High Court and assorted High Courts outside UP. The police top brass are too timid to advise the Chief Minister, a man averse to such marriages, that falling in love is a normal manifestation of human longing and desire.

In Maharashtra, my home state, where I was born, lived, worked, the bad blood between the BJP and the Shiv Sena after their divorce, has spawned a comedy that soon descended into a tragedy. A budding actor had committed suicide. He was a Rajput from Bihar. A foolish calculation that a love affair gone awry could influence the course of elections to be held shortly in Bihar prompted the government at the Centre to send in its shock troops, the ED, the CBI, the NCB, to embarrass the Sena chief and his young unmarried minister son. The plan boomeranged when no charge could hold! A young, struggling actress, a live-in partner of the dead actor when he was alive, was sacrificed as a pawn with the help of an obliging TV anchor.

The Sena leaders, in retaliation, got the local police to resurrect an old suicide case where the deceased had named the same TV anchor as responsible for his (the deceased’s) decision to take his own life! Political one-upmanship led the police on a path it should have feared to tread. But tread it did because of the politicisation which we are discussing.

Instances of harm caused by the politicisation were apparent in the police handling of the Delhi riots of 1984 and the Gujarat riots of 2002. The investigations into the 2020 Delhi riots are headed in the same direction!

The police are trained to enforce the law impartially but that rarely happens. Politicisation of the police in India has crossed all boundaries. If not checked, it will spell doom for good governance and the country’s prestige in the world.