Treat with respect, and justly

Last Monday, I wrote an open letter to all IPS officers, pleading with them to resist the pressures to wangle postings through political patronage because that makes their future dependent on pleasing their benefactors. The benefactors extract their pound of flesh, reducing the officer’s stature in the eyes of his men, and ultimately weakening the officer’s ability to command.

I appealed to them as a former proud member of the fraternity who had served the people in six different rural districts of Maharashtra, followed by the cities of Pune and Mumbai, and later the states of Gujarat and Punjab. In each of these postings, I discerned that what the ordinary citizen yearned for was justice in its rawest form. Officers who served the people and dispensed justice were appreciated and never forgotten.

I was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 1987. I was delighted when it was conferred on me. But 33 years later, I realise that no one cares, or even knows about the honour. But those who were recipients of justice from me have not forgotten that I treated each of them with respect and treated each justly. It was my foremost duty as an officer to give justice to each person who approached me. It was my duty. But they never seemed to forget and that was my true reward! Much, much greater than the Padma Bhushan!

Till 1985, I dealt with democratic governments and crime and criminals operating in the democratic polity. Some criminal leaders bribed police officers and succeeded to befriend them. At the same time, they obtained the patronage of politicians in power by the offer of money and muscle to fight elections. Corruption enabled them to operate and even expand their areas of operation. Then in 1986, I was asked to tackle terrorism in Punjab. I had no experience of terrorism until I took over the reins of the Punjab Police. I found that the terrorists were a different breed altogether. They did not accept the authority of the Indian State. They operated on the premise that they owned the land and were fighting to oust the ‘occupiers’. They never bribed, they just pumped bullets into those they considered their enemy, like the police.

It was a different type of war that the police had to fight and the rules were different. Even High Court judges in private conversations told me not to bring the culprits before the Magistrates as the risk to the lives of the judges and their children was more than one could imagine. The frontal encounters with terrorists when identified and spotted, and simultaneously the befriending of the community from which they hailed was pursued with utmost success. This was the classical method of facing the ‘nationalist’ form of terrorism. It worked.

While tackling crime and criminals who thrive by bribing policemen and political bosses, the same methods as applied to the hard-boiled brain-washed terrorists have to be shunned. The solution here is of dismantling the nexus built on corruption and weaken one leg of the three-legged stool of politicians-criminals-police that constitutes the nexus. You can do very little about politicians, but you surely can weaken the police leg of the stool. That will destabilise the cosy arrangement. If through respect for you, officers are cajoled to desist from taking bribes from gang-lords, the assistance to them from the police will taper off, which will translate into the end of their reign.

The politicians will not openly pressure you to let the crime-lords continue their depredations! They may try to replace you. But a discerning public will prevent that from happening, as I have personally experienced in Mumbai.

The recent ‘fake encounter’, where a notorious ‘don’ Vikas Dubey was shot dead must be the starting point for us to ponder. Earlier, another obviously ‘fake encounter’ of four young men for the rape and murder of a young woman near Hyderabad had ‘disturbed’ many of us. In that case, the evidence to nail those young men, from poor families, for the crime was not even convincingly revealed to the public! Yet, most people applauded. Their own sense of well-being and security triumphs when ‘criminals’ are despatched in this fashion. The cruel manner in which a son and his father were killed in police custody in the Tuticorin district of Tamil Nadu has made old policemen like me hang their heads in shame. In this last case, there was no justification for even their arrest. Their crime was to have kept their shop open beyond Covid’s closing hours!

Reverting to the fake encounters, even if there is public approval for such uncivilised methods, the transfer of the power of adjudication from the judiciary to the police, and installing the latter as investigator, prosecutor and judge — three separate entities into one — is a very dangerous proposition that releases unalloyed and uncontrolled power to those who already enjoy impunity mandated by law to those in uniform. The authority to kill will not only embellish that impunity, but also convert those policemen into criminals in uniform. Do ponder over this and decide for yourself if this is where we want to go. We will march relentlessly towards a Police State.

A true nationalist, who truly loves his country, can neither be anti-national nor ultra-national. He should understand the dangers involved in releasing encounter specialists, in particular, on unsuspecting populations. Creating Frankenstein’s monsters from ordinary criminals is also equally dangerous. A Vikas Dubey could not have grown into a monster who dares to kill those who have created him unless he was allowed to bully ordinary folk under the very eyes of those who needed to nip his ‘career’ in the bud.