Jim Crow policing needs checks and balances

Vikash Narain Rai

Former Director, National Police Academy, Hyderabad

That the amended Unlawful Activity Prevention Act (UAPA), enabling the targeting of individuals, independent of their membership of any unlawful organisation, is now competing to be India’s communal version of America’s racist Jim Crow laws, is amply demonstrated by the indiscriminate arrests by the Delhi Police into the events marking a winter of violence in the national capital, of student activists and political leaders of Muslim faith. The prejudices of the ruling BJP at the Centre have surfaced on the policing agenda of a premier criminal justice outfit, working under Union Home Minister Amit Shah, as never before, in effect and magnitude.

Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalised racial segregation which existed for about 100 years, until 1968, and were meant to marginalise African-Americans by denying them the rights and opportunities. The ignominy of the southern states in the American civil war, resulting in the abolition of slavery (1865) and reconstruction, had provided the backdrop for the Jim Crow legislations, whereas the shadow of a bloody partition in 1947 and the failure to create a Hindu nation mirroring a Muslim Pakistan, historically source a communal narrative against the reality of a secular Indian nation.

Ironically, the present juncture in both the democratic nations is also marked by the presence of a ruling political leadership, which is willing to thrive on the divisiveness in their respective societies. Nevertheless, the difference in popular and institutional response in the US and India is not to be missed. The cry for police reforms has perhaps never been louder in the US since the Rodney King episode in 1991, but the notoriously slow criminal justice system in India has proved to be, except in the era of Emergency, never so tardy.

US Attorney General William Barr admitted mistrust among the African-American community. The perception is that in a gun-wielding society, a black suspect was more likely to be dealt with as a danger to the law enforcing agents. Police leadership in the US, in spite of individual policemen suffering from deep rooted racial bias, still comes out resolute in balancing the constitutional values, because institutions in that country are able to act on inherently strong footing. A video is viral of Houston police chief reminding President Trump on behalf of police chiefs across the country, to shut up when as a leader, he had nothing constructive to say, “It is not about dominating, it is about winning hearts and minds.” Trump has been severely criticised by several of his ex-aides and openly dissented by a few of his present key team members for

threatening a military response against own violent citizens.

All nine judges of the Supreme Court opted to collectively address the issue of George Floyd’s death: “The devaluation and degradation of black lives is not a recent event. It is a persistent and systemic injustice that predates this nation’s founding. We continue to see racialised policing. Our institutions remain affected by the vestiges of slavery: Jim Crow laws that were never dismantled and racist court decisions that were never disavowed.”

In contrast, in the absence of a strong show by institutions in India, and tasked to authoritatively policing a much weaker society, a regimented and politically subservient police body can wreak havoc on the general sense of justice nurtured by the citizens by letting the communal bias of an individual policeman brazenly dominate the streets. Without timely checks and balances, the hideous mix of complicit policing and Jim Crowe policing appears politically insulated and professionally institutionalised.

To such a police instinct, it would look routine to treat any Muslim suspect as not just a violator of law but anti-national per se. No less confounding than the sight outside the Minneapolis store of an unarmed and handcuffed black man repeatedly gasping, ‘Please, I cannot breathe’ while slowly succumbing under the eight minutes plus knee lock applied on his neck in public view by a white policeman, was the spectacle of the forced chanting of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ by badly assaulted Muslim young men lying on the ground with broken limbs for a much longer duration, and in the presence of rioters and onlookers, at the nudging and prodding of the khaki clad perpetrators during the peak of Delhi riot. One of them died the next day in a hospital.

There is a linkage between street policing during these riots and the subsequent Delhi police investigations, begging to raise a banner of ‘Muslim life matters’, in the same trend as ‘Black life matters’. No other way to sham the combining of JNU and Jamia Millia student-police clashes during their march to Parliament against fee hike and CAA and the aftermath thereof, with an exceptionally peaceful and historic Muslim women’s anti-CAA dharna at Shaheen Bagh and further linking of a number of Muslim student activists with the widespread communal riots in Northeast Delhi, unfolding and intensifying in the presence of the police by way of deliberate provocations, group skirmishes and counter attacks, and upgraded by the same police during the subsequent corona lockdown, to the level of an UAPA conspiracy.

All through, the Delhi police probe has echoed the Jim Crow regime by not following certain obvious on-camera leads to logical conclusion— that being inconvenient to the ruling party. In their address, the US Supreme Court concluded: “The legal community must recognise that we all bear responsibility for this ongoing injustice, and that we are capable of taking steps to address it, if only we have the courage and the will. The injustice has its roots in the individual and collective actions of many, and it cannot be addressed without the individual and collective actions of us all.”

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