How Efficient is our Police Force? Tavleen Singh
On the day of the Mumbai bandh last week, it happens that I was jogging down Marine Drive when I saw a Shiv Sena mob attack a motorist who had dared disobey their call to close the city to protest the recent bomb blasts. In the presence of patrolling policemen they forced him to stop, surrounded his car and started breaking its windows and I - allergic as I am to goons and goondas of any kind - intervened. Mobs usually consist of cowards of the most contemptible kind so I knew I was at no risk of anything more than a bit of verbal abuse. While this was in progress - and even as I was giving back as good as I got - a police car drew up and my friend, DCP Himanshu Roy, alighted and asked if I needed rescuing. The mob moved along when they saw him, perhaps recognizing a senior police officer, but seemed completely unafraid of the ordinary policemen who had been standing by when they attacked the motorist. What intrigued me about the incident was that while the policemen made no effort to arrest any of the mob leaders they spare no effort when it comes to arresting street children. Marine Drive is a favourite haunt of street children and routinely they are picked up, bundled into police vans and taken off to some station or other where they are often beaten up and intimidated. Often I find myself so disgusted by police behaviour towards these destitute, desperate children that I intervene and stop the proceedings. The most recent incident came the day after the Shiv Sena bandh when there was some foreign 'VIP' or other staying at the Oberoi Hotel. As is usual, when foreign dignitaries arrive policemen swarmed everywhere and although they allowed our more middle class citizenry - plump housewives in diamonds and keds and pot bellied businessmen with mobile phones - to continue walking their dogs and feeding pigeons the sight of a street kid would galvanize them into action. They would swoop down on the hapless child and shoo it away as if it were not even human. When I asked what law the children were being shooed off under I was told they had a right to arrest vagrants. The children were eating breakfast, I pointed out, at a pavement idliwallah and this did not constitute vagrancy. "They spend the whole night here" said an officious young policeman "why don't they go elsewhere? Why don't they work". The children were no older than ten so I pointed out that if they did try working they would be breaking a more serious law than vagrancy since child labour is forbidden. Besides, I asked, did his own children work? And, so it went on and because it was my umpteenth altercation on the same subject I decided it was time to ask my friend, Himanshu, why his policemen seemed so unsympathetic to the plight of children who represented the most helpless, the most desperate of India's citizens. He gave me this cautious reply, "We are implementing archaic laws and archaic training methods in a society that is in transition. You should remember that the Indian Penal Code was written by Lord Macaulay in 1860." Macaulay, for those of you who may not have made the connection, is the same British Raj official who drew up the Indian education system and decided that English should be the medium of instruction because the Empire needed a nation of clerks. In that same infamous document that came to be known as Macaulay's minute he asserted that all the literature India had produced was worth less than a shelf in a British kindergarten library. So, there can be no doubt that when he wrote our penal code it would have been written in a manner that protected the interests of the rulers and not the ruled. Is it not ludicrous that nearly 60 years after we rid ourselves of the Raj we continue to have a penal code that was meant to serve the interests of our former colonial masters? Ludicrous that the mention of Ayodhya has Parliament in 'uproar' but there has never been an uproar over the fact that the Indian Penal Code remains unchanged all those years after Independence. Now, the interesting thing is that the police have themselves pleaded for change. There have been any number of police commissions that have recommended any number of times that laws and training methods need to be changed and all that has happened so far is that the reports have been dumped in some government office to gather dust. What is most puzzling about this complete disdain for de-colonizing our police force is that we are currently supposed to have a tough, 'Hindu nationalist' Home Minister, a man who models himself on the mighty Sardar Patel, and still there is no sign of change. Surely, a true Hindu nationalist should be ashamed that we have a penal code designed by the British? And, surely a perceptive Home Minister would have realized a long time ago that the fight against terrorism cannot be won as long as we continue to make our security forces operate under archaic laws and training systems. Is it any wonder that terrorism is no longer restricted to Kashmir and the North-east but finds its way into the heart of our commercial capital? In Mumbai bombs have been going off, with increasing frequency, on trains, buses and other public places. Afterwards, we invariably hear that it is Jamal or Javed or some other 'notorious terrorist' who is responsible. What we never hear is why the police never manage to catch these gentlemen before they commit their acts of terrorism or how they manage to find out so much about them so quickly afterwards. The police routinely get away with shoddy investigation and false claims because not only has the Penal Code remained unchanged but so has the Evidence Act. There have been amendments, of course, but they are inclined to be in keeping with the colonial spirit of these ancient laws. So, one of them, 124 A, introduces the crime of 'waging war against the state' and makes this nebulous crime punishable with death. It would be wrong to end this piece without admitting that the police are themselves victims of this absence of change. So, most of our armed policemen use weapons that have not been seen in other countries since World War II. Is it any wonder that they _______________________________________________ Assam mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/listinfo/assam
