A few good officers

Julio Ribeiro

Just as I was beginning to feel dejected for having been a former member of the IPS, a whiff of fresh air floated into my drawing room! Sanjay Pandey, the recently appointed Police Commissioner of the city in which I was born, has reached out to the citizens in an attempt to ameliorate the quality of their lives.

Rules permit the government to pension off those whose integrity is in question, but this provision has only adorned the statute books and is never used.

Sanjay, an engineering graduate from IIT-Kanpur, uses technology to interact with as many people as he possibly can, once a week, to find out what ails them in the realm of policing. On learning that chaotic traffic troubled almost every citizen, he decided to concentrate on this aspect of Mumbai’s life. Driving a two-wheeler, and sometimes even a car, on the wrong side of the road is a major cause for worry for a traffic regulator. I have travelled extensively abroad. I have not seen this phenomenon anywhere else. It obviously has the potential of causing severe traffic jams, besides deaths on the road.

One evening, before Covid struck, my wife and I were being driven from our residence down the main road to a church round the corner. As the car prepared to negotiate the bend, a car approached our vehicle from the wrong side, taking us by surprise. Our chauffeur was upbraided by the offending motorist for ‘not looking out for approaching traffic’!

Sanjay has decided to make these potential killers see reason by facing the rigour of the law. He has ordered the traffic police to pay special attention to these irresponsible citizens and stop wrong side driving. May he be successful in his mission.

Every day the newspapers tell us about the innovations that the new police chief is introducing to make living easier. Earlier, the same newspapers would highlight the demonic capers of a former Police Commissioner, who appeared to be engrossed with collecting money from law-breakers to enrich rogue politicians and policemen.

The politician in question is lodged in jail. The policeman, one must admit, is far cleverer! To avoid culpability, he has contrived to help one set of politicians to get even with their opponents by painting himself as a ‘whistle-blower’, instead of an accomplice, which he obviously is. At first, he disappeared from public sight. The ignominy of being dubbed an absconder by a court of law was soon pinned on him.

If the sordid details of a police chief under the scanner were not enough, the newspapers reported the shenanigans of another directly-recruited IPS officer, a Deputy Commissioner of Police with a degree in medicine, who is alleged to have demanded Rs 10 lakh every month from a bunch of ‘angadias’ to permit them to continue with their business.

‘Angadias’ are trustworthy carriers of rough diamonds to the diamond cutting and polishing centre in Surat, Gujarat. It is an age-old arrangement, time-tested and almost crime-proof! I do not know if greed and its attending venalities have recently affected the ‘angadia’ community. It may have, just as it has affected the new breed of officers selected for the IPS and the IAS.

When senior IPS officers are bitten by the money bug, the formations reporting to them go on the rampage. When complainants come with their grievances, people fall back on those officers who keep the IPS flag still flying.

Pundi Rajgopalan Parthasarathy of the 1958 batch was my Assistant Superintendent in Sholapur when I headed that district’s police in 1962-64. He had published a delightful vignette of his experiences in the service of the people titled ‘Neither Cloak Nor Dagger’. Hurt by the stories of misdemeanour of the disgraced Mumbai police chief and later of a Deputy Commissioner belonging to the IPS, I retrieved Parthasarathy’s 20-year-old booklet from my library and re-read the 43 stories he had recounted.

The National Police Academy will be well advised to make such recollections mandatory reading for all probationers. Young officers must understand that they are the servants of the people, not their masters! How does an officer deal with tricky situations? ‘Pat’, as I was wont to call him, can teach them a thing or two! Truth, justice and compassion, even to those who have offended, should guide our behaviour and actions. And, of course, honesty and integrity.

Dr Pradnya Saravade had qualified as a Master of Surgery before she took the plunge and appeared for the Civil Service exams. Today, she is a senior officer in the Maharashtra cadre. As ADGP (Railways), Pradnya introduced the ‘Beyond the Call of Duty Program’. The railway police has numerous opportunities to help lost souls. There are those who approach the track to commit suicide. Young girls and boys who have run away from home after fights, and young girls forced or lured into the flesh trade. All these victims of circumstances can be helped by railway police personnel who are fired by a conscience and motivated by a caring leader, like Pradnya. In her role of ADG (Admn) in the DGP’s office, and also in the earlier part of her career, when she introduced cyber safety weeks in association with Nasscom, Pradnya had made her intentions known.

The All-India Service Rules permit the government to pension off those whose integrity is in question or are so ineffective that supplicants shy away from approaching them for relief. The weeding out is legally permissible at ages 50 or 55. But this provision has only adorned the statute books but never used. This is unfair to the public which is the end user of the poor service provided.

The time has come for the people to submit a list of misfits, especially of officers of doubtful integrity to the government of the day, even at the cost of unpleasantness to themselves.

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