POLICE REFORM NOW MUST BECOME AN IMPORTANT ELECTION ISSUE
The general elections are only a few months away. It is time for political parties to draft manifestoes, decide strategies and choose contestants. The civil society must discuss what should dominate the agenda of the major parties. What type of governance do the public want?
Of the various challenges to governance being faced in our country, two are major – ensuring sustained development of the economy at a brisk pace and providing a sense of security to the public by controlling crime and violence in society. The two, in fact, are closely linked. A developing economy requires a climate of peace and stability. It is important for the political parties to realise that if development has to take place, crime and violence must be controlled. Crime causes not only immense social and economic loss; it produces tremendous individual human suffering too. That is why the UN Commission on Crime Control and Criminal Justice maintains that to feel safe from crime is as important to a person as access to food, shelter, education and health.
Controlling crime and maintaining internal security is dependent upon the establishment of a police force, which is efficient, honest and professional to the core. Do we have such a police force? Not, if one goes by the media reports, studies done by expert groups and the responses of the common men.
Many, including the Supreme Court, have voiced the need for police reform. Two recent incidents, though divergent in nature, have further put it in sharp focus. One was the incident of terrorist violence that raged in Mumbai for about 60 hours and brought out the deficiencies in the training and equipment of the police force and the conditions, including the type of political leadership, under which they serve. The other was the murder of PWD engineer Manoj Gupta in UP by the BSP MLA and the response of the local police. The fact that some policemen were also a part of the extortion racket and complicit in murder shows that in many parts of the country policing has become as crimialised as politics. In fact, criminalised policing is as much a result of criminalised politics as its cause and both are a great danger to the continued existence of our democratic polity
Police reform therefore becomes important not only for achievement of economic progress but also for the survival of our democratic system. The police can be a great support as well as a major threat to democracy. They support democracy when they function to serve the rule of law and they threaten democracy when they become a part of a corrupt spoils system to serve the wishes of a powerful leader or party and when they become a law unto themselves.
The Mumbai incidents also revealed that the police, despite their inadequacies and shortcomings and despite being constantly reviled, can be highly heroic and valorous in times of emergencies. The police in this country are a sizeable force, more than 2.3 million strong. This huge reservoir of manpower can do enormous good to society, provided they are utilised to serve the community and not merely the interests of the elite class and people in positions of power.
Presently, the public do not trust the police. This lack of public faith not only affects the performance of the police force in controlling crime and in maintaining law and order, but ultimately gets translated into lack of goodwill and support for the political party which is wielding power. This happens because the police are the most visible and ubiquitous of all the government agencies and it is their acts of commission and omission, which determine to a considerable extent the public perceptions about the quality of governance being provided to them. . A professionally efficient and an honest police force can give far better returns in terms of winning public support for the political party in power than a force, which is misused for selfish purposes. A misused police force gets corrupt and brutalised and in turn abuses its powers. The victims in such cases are mostly the common poor persons who constitute the vote bank.
The politicians must realise that ultimately it is in their own interests to reform the police. The police right since the Emergency days have been easily and conveniently used as a stick with which to beat one’s opponents into submission. What the politicians in power forget is that the same stick can be used against them too when they are out of power. The chief ministers may come and go but the police go on forever. If it is easy for one chief minister to misuse the police for narrow selfish considerations, it is easier for his follower to do the same. What is not realised is that till the police are reformed, nobody in this country is safe
The need for police reforms is self-evident and urgent and the resolve to reform such a vital organization must figure prominently in the agenda of political parties in the coming elections. Public must make it clear that the existing system is unacceptable to them; they want a reformed police force and would support only the parties which promise to reform the police within a fixed time schedule.
