Police reforms book a breath of fresh air

Arvind Verma’s book, The Indian Police: A Critical Evaluation, is well timed. It’s release coincided with a recent move by the Central Government which setup a narrowly conceived committee to re-draft the Police Act of 1861, still in force.

The misdeeds and oppression, characteristic of the inherited police structure in rural and urban India, came out sharply during the Emergency of 1975-77 and were duly documented in the Shah Commission report. A reform process was initiated in 1977 outlined in detail in the eight reports of the National Police Commission (1979-81) and in the report of the L P Singh Committee on the role of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). However, the Congress, which returned to power in 1980, rejected all these reports. In 1984, the anti-Sikh riots witnessed the participation of the police in the violence against the Sikhs.

Arvind Verma, The Indian Police: A Critical Evaluation (Regency Publications, New Delhi 2005) Pp. 287, Price Rs.750.

This was followed by its massive communalisation, leading up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Bombay violence in 1992-3 and the Gujarat carnage in 2002, which witnessed the active participation and facilitation by the police in the mass violence against minority communities. The criminal justice system had collapsed almost completely in large parts of the country but for some positive actions taken by the National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court of India, especially with regard to the horrendous Best Bakery Case in Gujarat. Governments led by both the major political formations in India have notably neglected action on the needed police reforms. The present government in New Delhi, however, made a symbolic gesture recently by setting up a narrowly conceived committee to re-draft the Police Act of 1861, still in force. This was a positive step, but it is well short of the comprehensive reforms that are called for.

Arvind Verma’s book, The Indian Police: A Critical Evaluation brings a breath of fresh air to discussions on police reforms in the country. The author served as a member of the Indian police Service (IPS) for a period of about 12 years in Bihar from the late seventies. Unable to accept the ‘abominable’ conditions of work, the politicisation of the service and averse to the ‘form of policing’ in India, he left for academic pursuits abroad, while still a Superintendent of Police in his state. He is currently associate professor of criminal justice at the Indiana University in the US. The underlying thrust of his study is far-reaching reforms to address the persistent crisis of the Indian police system.

Verma’s broad conclusion in the book is that working with grass roots NGOs, deployment of modern technology, replication of successful experiments abroad, and above all, recognition of the importance of ‘research as a vehicle of change’ are needed to modernize the Indian police. The emphasis on research as the core of policing needs to be especially noted as relevant research of the kind advocated in the book is conspicuous by its absence in India.

The book falls into three large parts. The first covers well trodden ground on the organizational history and model of colonial policing in India and argues that this ‘police system is the frame that has to be broken to make the police organization relevant to Indian society today.’ The second examines the managerial challenges of public order maintenance and the issues of crime, corruption, politicisation and training. The need to control ‘situational discretion’ by the construction of ‘relevant data sets’ and to eliminate the ‘cultural indoctrination’ that creates a gulf between the leadership and the subordinates in the police are underscored. Verma addresses the cultural roots of corruption and politicisation together with the problem of police accountability.

Arvind Verma on India Together

• To serve and protect

• Terrorism lessons from London

• A uniform betrayal

• Fighting crime on rails

• The FIR mechanism

• Rescuing the police force

The third and final part evaluates the work of the National Police Commission (NPC) in an innovative and interesting manner. It attributes the ‘failure’ of the Commission to accomplish its tasks to a variety of factors including its composition, methodology, neglect of research, neglect of cross-country experiences together with a flawed perception of the policy culture and politico-administrative environment in the country. Verma makes a positive contribution to police scholarship in this chapter in a way that has not been attempted in this country before.

Looking at the challenges of public order scene in India, Verma underlines the need for professionalism, technology and training but sees no evidence of the police forces trying to address the issue. By the way, the NPC, which had also gone into the issue of police discretion in public order situations, had called for detailed guidelines to be issued, which has not been done. The author’s analysis of crime, its measurement and the use and misuse of criminal statistics plus his call for better research and learning of lessons from abroad is well taken. The brief evaluation of the work of the National Crime Control Bureau (NCRB) could have been supplemented with a much-needed assessment of the work of the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D), the parent body of the NCRB.

Verma makes a fascinating analysis of the organizational features and the cultural and managerial practices, which promote corruption, brutality and politicisation in the police. He focuses on the elitist nature of the police leadership, the politicisation of the department, its unaccountability to the people and its outdated managerial practices, which have made corruption endemic. Politicisation of the police, according to him, is the result of lack of professionalism and accountability within the police organization. Political misuse of the police is the direct result of internal organizational problems and poor performance. When police indifference to citizen problems and personal misbehaviour of officers become matters of public concern, it becomes necessary for the politician in our democracy to intervene.

Independence brought no fundamental changes for the police but it has dramatically transformed the ruling elite. Empowered by democracy, people demand that politicians address their grievances. His analysis of the conflict between democratic politics and the authoritarian practices of the police leads the author to boldly state: ‘politicisation of the police is the price (paid) for the democratic functioning of the country’ (p171). The author’s analysis here is in sharp contrast to prevalent wisdom, which tends to put all the blame on the political class, ignoring the negative role of the police leadership, which, the author says, is the key to the situation.

Verma then makes an interesting typology of the forms of ‘political interference’ distinguishing between its public, general and special forms. The public form is seen when the citizen seeks political help to get some police action taken, which is neglected due to organizational mismanagement and police indifference to the legitimate concerns of the citizen. The special form is seen when the politician, with a vested interest or while seeking to make money, intervenes with the police for some favour or the other on behalf of his client. The general form is seen when the politician seeks to elicit the public support essential to win the next election or protect criminals and power brokers from police action or seeks to influence the internal management policies of the police organization. These interventions occur because of weaknesses and shortcomings of the police leadership.

Anecdote

That training in the police was neglected even twenty years after the report of the Committee on Police Training (1972) became clear to me while attending a training programme on social tensions at the National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad, in the mid-1990s.

During one of the sessions, a few ‘surrendered Naxalites’ who had been invited, were requested to share their experiences. They began with a description of torture in police custody. As the description became more and more graphic, the atmosphere in the training hall slowly became tenser.

The silence of the audience was suddenly broken when a senior woman IPS officer from the nearby National Police Academy, also a participant, burst out loudly and uncontrollably at the participating Naxalites: “When I hear you people talk, I wish I had brought my revolver!” With that, the session of the training programme came to an abrupt end.

— K S Subramanian

• Dialogue needed for reforms

In this analysis, the author neglects the detailed examination of the issue of political intervention in the NPC reports. Further, political intervention in police work in the recent period has been much more blatant and direct than the author might imagine. When the Babri Masjid was about to be demolished, Kalyan Singh, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh is reliably reported to have issued instructions to S V M Tripathi, the state Director General of Police, that no police firing should take place without his orders. Tripathi reportedly complied by issuing written instructions in this regard.

Again, late on 27 February 2002, the day before the anti-Muslim carnage in Gujarat was to commence, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat is reliably reported to have told a meeting of top police and civilian officials that a major ‘Bandh’ (agitation) was to take place in the state on 28 February to protest killing of Hindus at Godhra the previous day and that the administration should respect ‘Hindu sentiments’. The officials would seem to have complied as revealed by subsequent developments.

While the author’s study is largely based on his experience in Bihar including his evaluation of certain central establishments such as the NCRB, a critical study of the role of the police in India today would need to include a review of the role of central police agencies such as the IB, CBI and the central paramilitary forces, which are playing an increasingly important role in law and order management in the states. The role of the IB has come in for sharp evaluation in recent studies. Two of them, for instance, are M K Dhar’s Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled, Manas Publishers, New Delhi, 2005, and B Raman’s Intelligence: Past, Present and Future, Lancer Publications, New Delhi, 2002. The insights from these studies would need to be incorporated in critical evaluations of the Indian police.

Finally, it is clear from the record and from the observations of the British themselves that the Indian police was created as an instrument of political control and surveillance rather than as a mechanism for crime control and service provision. The British often repeated what they had stated in 1859: that the police in India are “all but useless for the prevention and sadly inefficient for the detection of crime” and that with rare exceptions it was unscrupulous in the exercise of its authority with a ‘very general reputation for corruption and oppression”. With some effort, the British could have changed this situation but did not. The Indian rulers who followed had, in turn, been ‘no more than faithful’ to their British predecessors in retaining intact and expanding further the political-repressive aspects of the legal and the police system in India.

On balance, Arvind Verma has done a service by writing this supple and scholarly book at a time when it is truly ‘now or never’ for Indian police reforms.