Freeing the police

A policeman's lot, wrote Gilbert and Sullivan in one of their operettas, is an un'appy one. In India it is worse than un'appy, it is hellish. This is because every politician agrees with Louis XIV of France, who said "l'etat, c'mois" (I am the state). Thus, for the few policemen who take their jobs seriously, police service can be pulverising, with even ward-level politicians ordering them about for gaining private ends. And when criminals enter politics, as they have done in droves, it is only to be expected that the police themselves become a lawless force.

So it comes as no surprise that the Supreme Court, on a petition filed a decade ago by Prakash Singh, a former BSF director-general of police, and Common Cause, an NGO, has asked state governments to give a fixed tenure to senior officers, set up state security commissions, separate the investigation of crime from law and order, and establish independent panels that decide transfers and postings. In short, it wants the police to be made as independent as possible from the political part of the executive, and it has given a deadline of December 31. Whether what it wants will be done or not, the importance of the judgment lies in the clear recognition accorded by the highest judicial level""the bench was presided over by the Chief Justice""to something that all Indians have known for a long time: the police are suborned and demoralised, their questioning techniques confined for the most part to third degree torture, and used often enough as a private army by political parties in power to settle scores against opp onents, both political and others.

Whether all this can be set right in three months is debatable""the Court has taken to setting unrealistic deadlines for all manner of system correction orders (like demolishing illegal buildings in the Capital), and thereby invited a new kind of problem, in that the executive has no way of carrying out the orders. In any case, while independence from the politicians is a good thing, will that alone ensure a better police force? Ask any knowledgeable police officer and he will tell you how training is not what it should be, and routine procedures have fallen into disuse in places. A second question relates to numbers and duties. There are too few policemen, and an unacceptably large number are on VIP, prison and court duty. Third, there is widespread corruption, particularly in the day-to-day extortion that constables and sub-inspectors indulge in. Fourth, there is the issue of working conditions. Most policemen work exceptionally long hours, stretching often to 15 or 16, in gruelling conditions. Very little of all this has to do with subservience to political authority. In other words, while the Supreme Court's judgment is a blow for police reform, it is only one step in that direction. Senior police officers may have convinced the Court that, but for political interference, all would be well. If that were so, reform would be so easy.