Need for Police Reform

Pick up any issue and there is muck beneath. The digital media has picked up crime against women and police atrocities these days as the new TRP booster, and of course these are issues with no dearth of reportage on these issues. More so these days, when you can capture events real time on your camera phone.

The reportage is tossed across channels on prime time. You return after a hard days work, and all TV channels are indulging in a high-pitched debate amongst people who actually have neither a connection with the issue, nor the competence to comment on it.

Yesterday, my son 15, spoke upto a cop who was roughing up an auto driver for apparently a reason that the auto driver was not aware of, and demanded to know his name, identity number. Well the cop walked away in a huff, but imagine, this incident happened not in any mofussil town but in Gurgaon near a busy Metro station. Police needs to adapt to changing times.

I must have roamed the streets of close to 100 countries. I think the best police that I have come across was the London Police-extremely polite and extremely responsive. Even they are undergoing massive reform process. But in India, where the police is a highly politicized and parochial force, pandering historically to the party in power, there is no sign of reform.

Most Indian Laws are archaic, amended ad-lib with adhoc notifications, but the basic structure remaining of Colonial vintage. In the case of the Police, the organization still functions on the 1870s Police Act authored by the British. Under the British and before them under the Mughals, the police had always been used against the people. How then can we alter the DNA of such a force in just 60 years, and that too in the absence of credible effort and sincerity of purpose.

Media also merely engages in chest beating, clueless on what needs to be done, besides anchoring debates in which it invites some retired police officers who all their lives have hypocritically enjoyed all the power and pelf possible, tweaked the system for postings and transfers and now come on TV propounding all that they never stood for though out their career.

The exception being – one retired officer Prakash Singh, an Ex DGP of UP, who appears to be extremely sincere. In fact he lead a 10 year-long fight in the supreme court vide a PIL through his lawyer Prashant Bhushan for implementing the salient recommendations of the National Police Commission. After a long and harrowing legal journey, the SC did order compliance of the key recommedations : State Security Commission, min tenure of 2 yrs for Officers, setting up a Police Complaints Authority, Setting up a National Police Commission.

Prakash Singh’s home state of UP curiously is one where the recommendations have been given a complete go by.