Police Reforms: Outrunning the past

Organized policing in India started with Charles Napier, who, in 1842, at the age of 60, was appointed to command the British Indian army of Bombay Presidency.

An army man, Napier had spent many years in the beginning of his career fighting Napoleon’s legions on the Iberian Peninsula. In 1843, Napier marched to Sindh at the head of his army, to put down rebellions by the local chieftains. He did so, and then went further.

Blatantly disregarding treaty obligations with the independent Sindhi chieftains and technically being insubordinate to his bosses, he ended up conquering and annexing the entire province to British India.  After the job, he dispatched to his superiors the short message, "Peccavi", Latin for "I have sinned" (a pun on I have Sindh).

Proponents of British rule over India justified the conquest thus: "If this was a piece of rascality, it was a noble piece of rascality!"

An army officer towards the end of his career, Napier was then burdened with the job of administering an ill-gotten possession. Concerned with subduing rebellious chieftains and keeping the disgruntled native population in check, he got together disbanded and retired army officers to form a provincial constabulary.

He improvised on his job, with an ad hoc approach.

A story for which he is noted deals with Hindus complaining about prohibition of Sati: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; [then] beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

Napier’s perspectives on policing are shown through the following comments:  “The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed” and "the human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear." His model was successful since “fear” and loathing are the key emotions that Indians felt regarding the police.

The policing system in the provinces of British India, instituted then, and which unfortunately has continued till date, was marked by the imperialist prerogative of maintaining control by a relatively small constabulary over large native populations. The police became the important tool of the state for keeping an oppressed native population in submission. It was not the priority of colonial rulers to administer the Criminal Justice System for the common man, let alone bother much about the niceties of protection of human rights of their native subjects.

The beginning made by Napier in Sindh was later codified into the Police Act of 1861 and the Indian Penal Code of 1860.

Maja Daruwala and others of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative wrote: “The Police Act, 1861 was legislated by the British in the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857 or the First War of Independence. The British, naturally at that time wanted to establish a police force that would suit the purpose of crushing dissent and any movement for self government.”

Intelligence gathering to forestall moves towards independence was an important job of the police.

Sir John Hunt, leader of the successful 1953 British Expedition to Mount Everest, was a Military Intelligence officer in the Indian Army, and was seconded to the Indian police. Hunt worked undercover, gathering intelligence in Chittagong whilst dressed in Indian clothing. This was just after the Chittagong armory raid, an attempt in 1930 to raid the armory of police and auxiliary forces, by revolutionary freedom fighters led by Surya Sen. “Hunter sahib” contributed to the arrest of many revolutionaries for which he was awarded the Indian police medal.

The emergence of India as an independent nation state was long and rough with the price being paid in blood. Predictably the Imperial Police played a noteworthy role in trying to stymie the legitimate struggle of the Indian people.

The Dandi March and the ensuing Dharasana Satyagraha drew worldwide attention to the Indian independence movement through extensive newspaper and newsreel coverage.

In 1930 the Indian National Congress chose satyagraha as their main tactic for winning independence from British rule and appointed Gandhi to organize the campaign. Gandhi chose the 1882 British Salt Act as the first target of satyagraha. The Salt March to Dandi, and the beating by police of hundreds of nonviolent protesters received worldwide news coverage.  United Press correspondent Webb Miller reported that:

“Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down.”

Vithalbhai Patel, former Speaker of the Assembly, watched the beatings and remarked, "All hope of reconciling India with the British Empire is lost forever."

Following attempts by the British to censor Miller's story, it eventually appeared in 1,350 newspapers throughout the world, and was read into the official record of the United States Senate. Time magazine declared Gandhi its 1930 Man of the Year, comparing Gandhi's march to the sea "to defy Britain's salt tax as some New Englanders once defied a British tea tax."

It is strange that those at the receiving end of the lathis and bullets of the Imperial Police did nothing to change the repressive nature of policing after India became free.

The Midnapore region of West Bengal, of Lalgarh and Nandigram fame, does have a history of parallel governments. Such a parallel government, from Tamluk town in Midnapore, functioned from 1942 to 1944 as part of the Quit India Movement.

To set up such a government, members of the Indian National Congress planned to take over the various police stations and other government offices as a step to overthrowing the British. Matangini Hazra, who was 73 years at the time, led a procession of six thousand, mostly unarmed women volunteers, towards the police station in Tamluk.

The marchers were ordered to disband and then fired upon. As she stepped forward, Matangini Hazra was shot once. She continued to advance with the tri-color, leaving other volunteers behind. The police shot her three times.  As she was repeatedly shot, she kept chanting Vande Mataram and died with the flag held high and still flying.

The country was independent and Matangini Hazra was honored by a spate of road-naming and unveiling of statues. However, nothing was done to align the police forces, the hated instrument of oppression of the British Raj, with the needs of a self-governing people.

The country had to wait till 1977 for the first step towards police reforms until the first Janata Dal government was formed.

In the years of Emergency, the political opposition was subjected to unprecedented police brutality. Serving and retired officers of the Indian Police Service were appalled at the misuse of the police forces by the vested political interests.  Their clamor for police reforms was given a sympathetic ear by Chaudhary Charan Singh, the Home Minister. He instituted the first commission for Police Reforms.

The first Janata Dal government did not last long enough to implement the commission’s recommendations. Subsequently several other commissions submitted their reports on the same subject, which gathered dust. It seemed that the police forces were the instrument of oppression by the ruling class over the common citizen of India.

Panning to the first decade of twenty first century India, we find that a gentleman named Prakash Singh took up the cudgels for police reforms. Having been Director General of Police of Uttar Pradesh and thereafter having headed the police of ULFA-affected Assam, he had all the right credentials as a policeman.

He filed a PIL in the Supreme Court praying for implementation of police reforms. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, asking the states to legislate new police acts. Horror of horrors, some states passed acts which are even more retrograde than the earlier Police Act of 1861.

This leaves us today with a over-stretched police force with archaic infrastructure, training, manpower, equipment and mindset… ill-equipped to meet the needs of the civil society of the world’s largest democracy.

While a significant percentage of the country’s resources, and very rightly so, is devoted to the armed forces, one tends to forget that today wars are fought more often than not within the nation’s borders. It is the police which are charged with internal security.

Occasionally an Ajmal Kasab forces kneejerk reactions. But is it that we should depend solely on people of his ilk to reactively force us into modernizing our police forces? Can we, as a people, not muster the genius to devise the policing that we need and deserve?

These are questions we need to answer fast to decisively move into the era of Pax Indica that beckons us in the years to come.

(Originally published in "The Broad Mind - Opinions from the Takshashila Community" on 15.09.2010, 16.09.2010 and 17.09.2010)

An Indian’s daily experience of the Law

            India is the largest and probably the greatest functioning democracy in the world today and every Indian should derive legitimate pride and satisfaction from such a situation. 

The Indian citizen votes typically every five years.  Candidates are elected as lawmakers, and lawmakers from the political party getting higher votes occupy the executive positions.  The judiciary is independent from the executive and legislature and the Supreme Court does a neat job of upholding Fundamental Rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Despite the structural sophistication and robustness of the Indian state, the citizen’s daily experience of the Law is not so happy. 

The principal code of criminal legislation in India is the Indian Penal Code of 1860.  This code listed all possible criminal offences which could be committed in British India, in the years following the abortive First War of Independence.  The punishment for petty theft is imprisonment for three years.  This was probably an improvement over whipping, which was common at that time, but definitely too strict in these times.  Laws that seek retribution rather than correction, and impose harsh punishment, force the accused to fight tooth and nail for acquittal.  The jails today, which incidentally have been renamed Correction Centres in different Indian states, are full of under-trials and a few unfortunate members of the weaker sections, who did not possess the knowledge or funds to escape conviction.

The legislation which provides the police forces its power and organization is the Indian Police Act of 1861.  The aim of this act was to empower a limited constabulary to control a large and potentially restive native population.  The  colonial police had carried out some of the harshest attacks on civil liberties at that time.   Independent India has retained this piece of legislation, which defines policing today.  The police infrastructure envisaged under this act has absolutely failed to keep up with growing population and changing crime brought about by economic growth, technological change, urbanization and internal migration.  Both individual police officers and other stakeholders are unable to bridge the gaps in internal security and law and order which results from such strain.   Growing insurgency in different parts of India forces the central government to provide paramilitary support to the state police.  It is probably an easier solution to empower and strengthen the police to an extent that they can effectively ensure the citizen’s access to criminal justice and also effectively ensure internal security.     

The criminal justice system of the country is dependent on the Criminal Procedure Code of 1898 for the administration of criminal justice.  This nineteenth century dinosaur was supposedly substantially revised in 1973, but the author doubts if it has fully metamorphosed into a creature of the twenty first century.  The CrPC 1973 empowers the Station House Officer (SHO) of each Police Station with draconian powers of search and arrest and expects the SHO to be an avatar of Solomon in terms of his discretion in ensuring justice and fair play.  Prior to independence, per chance if the SHO fell short of such expectation, surely the colonial rulers were not too perturbed with resultant human rights violations and injustice meted out to the colonized.  In independent India, the public continues to fear and misunderstand the SHO, while the SHO, in spite of best efforts, often falls short of expectations owing to constraint of resources and the bindings of archaic procedures.  The author feels that free citizens of India do not require such a situation to continue.

The Indian Evidence Act of 1872 provides the legal background for acceptance of evidence.  Since there was no e-mail, facsimile, world wide web, X-rays, scanners or cameras... still and video, in 1878, this act is technologically obsolete.  This obsolescence has led to the Indian law courts being the most congested in the world.  Justice delayed is justice denied... that’s the reality of the justice system of India today. 

The civil courts depend on the Civil Procedure Code of 1908 to administer civil justice.  The Constitution of India enjoins the courts and law enforcement officers to follow the “procedure as laid down by law” and not “due process of the law” as is the case in the United States.  The complicated procedures make Indian civil justice one of the weakest in the world.  The judge may also intuitively know that the accused is innocent, but has to pass a sentence of conviction, because as per the procedure laid down by the law the accused is guilty.

The above are the five pillars of the civil and criminal justice system of India, as well as the basis for the enforcement of law and maintenance of internal security.  Combined with such systemic weakness, is the lack of effort in educating the citizen about the law.  An Indian school child’s education starts and stops with a study of the hallowed tenets of the Constitution.  However the citizen is impacted by the important pieces of legislation in daily life, which is not part of the educational curriculum of the ordinary citizen.  Highly educated people in India are completely ignorant and confused about how the law works for or against them in daily life.

Unless the pivotal pieces of legislation are reframed and reshaped in keeping with the requirements of a free people of the twenty first century, “rule of law” will continue to be compromised in India.  The Constitution of India will remain the palatable icing on a cake whose crust comprising of five principal pieces of legislation has gone bad a long time back.  Important twentieth century developments such as the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” of 1948 have bypassed India, since the most important pieces of legislation were drafted before the enlightened proclamations of the last century. 

It is time that just, good, clear and well publicized laws are crafted through the democratic process.  Only then will Indians truly enjoy the Indian state’s contract with its people as promised and envisioned by the founding fathers of the Constituent Assembly of 1949.

(Originally published in "The Broad Mind - Opinions from the Takshashila Community on 10.02.2011)

The Principal-Agent problem in governance

            It is time that Indians wake up to the fact that they are quite far from enjoying real personal, economic and political freedom.  Realization is the first step to rectification. 

Typically a lot of care is taken in appointing and supervising our agents or vendors in different facets of our life.  Imagine the kind of effort we take when recruiting, appraising and promoting or dismissing at our workplaces and maybe more so at home.  But, paradoxically, in appointing the people who run our governments, and even less so in monitoring them, we have little teeth.  Principles of people management, so pervasive in all other aspects, go out of the window when it comes to appointing and running our governments.  

The nomenclature “Representation of the People Act” is puzzling.  It appears that the people being one of the major stake-holders; are being represented in the process of appointment of governments.  It reads as if, and probably is, that the powers that be have benevolently given representation to the people also among other stakeholders. 

A casual Google search throws light on this matter.  “The Representation of the People Act” was given the royal accent of His Majesty George V, King of the United Kingdom, in 1918 to enfranchise a greater number of his adult subjects as part of the fourth phase of electoral reforms.  This was a grateful monarch’s largesse to his subjects for loyally defending his crown and realm from the Huns.    

This action seems to have been copied by the new rulers of India when the President signed into law “The Representation of People Act” of 1951.  Universal suffrage was granted to the entire adult population, which allowed them to vote in elections periodically on the principles of “one man one vote” and “first past the post”.  We find that a number of people, particularly in urban areas, did not vote, treating election dates as forced holidays.  Such people intuitively may have realized that the voting process is more an exercise of legitimizing the regime’s authority.  It is far from being a clear and robust process of appointment of agents by the people, who are the principals.

One would much rather propose that we give ourselves an “Appointment of the Government Act”. This change in terminology would put the principal-agent relationship in the right perspective.  The paramount authority of the people over the government may thus be made clear.

It is the thesis of this article that currently the people are ruled by the government, which legitimizes its position periodically through a balloting process.  Elections have been used in every time and country to legitimize authority.  Hitler was the elected leader of Germany, as also were several other heads of government of dubious distinction.  Democracy clearly is essential, but not enough.    

There is an entity called the government of India, with vast land holdings, majority shareholding in massive corporations, owning almost all infrastructural assets, conducting foreign relations and engaging in deficit financing by printing money.  In effect, ruling India.  Besides the politicians, the civil services - modelled on that of the imperial Chinese bureaucracy, crony capitalists, family members and friends are beneficiaries and stakeholders of this setup.  The system of extraction of resources from this country has been fine tuned over two centuries of British rule and was pretty much taken over lock stock and barrel when they left.  In terms of cash flows, while earlier the bounty from the colonies used to flow to the metropole, nowadays the same is placed under custody of crony capitalists or moves into the international private banking system.  Such an arrangement is detrimental to the national interest.

Coming to the accountability and expectations from our agents, the principals, that is, Indians, do not have oversight over the conduct of their agents, once the election process is over.   

We do not have a “Monitoring the Government Act” or a “Appraisal and Dismissal of the Government Act” to do exactly what the wording suggests, that is, watch over and guide the working of the agents, at every step, and possibly asking them to step aside if they do not make the mark.  It is unthinkable for Indians, used to millennia of servitude, to even imagine that they have a right of oversight over those who rule them.  So far, post elections, it is pretty much a free run for law makers and that small group who comprise the executive.  The work and workings of government is opaque to the ordinary citizen. 

There is little effective supervision of the actions and motivations of the executive by institutional watchdogs, other than an occasional CAG report or a CBI enquiry, or judicial activism.  All these actions, if they happen in some cases, are post-facto, after the damage to the national interest has already been done.  Criminal proceedings against the guilty, does not even begin to recover the socio-economic cost of their actions. 

It is a cosy situation for the bureaucracy, colloquially referred to as Indian Automatic Service.  They enjoy job security time bound promotion and enjoyment of resources far in excess of their contribution, irrespective of the outcome of elections or the state of affairs in the country. 

 Large numbers of educated and skilled Indians, who have chosen, or could not become part of the establishment, have immigrated to other countries, apparently in search of a better quality of life.  In their home country they may have found the lack of freedom stifling.

This is a diagnostic, no solutions are proposed. 

To hark back to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."  Indians have a long road to travel, difficult choices to make and radically change long-held attitudes and assumptions.  Until and unless the people proactively appoint, guide, monitor and dismiss governments, those in power will continue to extract and exploit.  It is right and essential to upgrade and professionalize governance, so that the people of India finally become free. 

(Originally published in "The Broad Mind - Opinions from the Takshashila Community on 05.06.2011)