Not by autonomy alone

Opposition politicians talking about autonomy for central agencies are hypocritical when they discourage it in the states they govern

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wants agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to be made autonomous. Her call has been backed by several opposition parties and politicians. She is, no doubt, right in her demand, but has no moral authority to demand the same. State politicians have done nothing to free their own police forces from political interference, including Ms Banerjee’s own West Bengal police. This is true of almost all states, where police forces are highly politicised and do the bidding of the ruling party on most occasions. It is only when courts ask them to follow the law that they reluctantly do so.

The previous article briefly examined how and why the judiciary is largely incapable of enforcing the law, and one reason is that it has to act through a highly politicised police force, both at the Centre and the states. Worse, both the judiciary and the police infrastructure we inherited from the British are deeply colonised entities that cannot enforce the law without draconian powers. Let’s exclude (for the time being) the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which is meant to be used only in areas affected by armed insurgencies, but almost all our basic laws are draconian in design.

From the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act or UAPA to even social legislation like the anti-dowry, anti-domestic violence and SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, each one of them presumes a degree of guilt on the part of the accused. And there is political consensus on these provisions. When the Supreme Court tried to dilute some of the trigger-happy clauses of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, there was a huge political outcry and the law was amended to make arrests compulsory if any offence is alleged. This implies that fair application of the rule of law does not even have a political consensus behind it, even if judges and high-flying lawyers make a huge fuss about it. Even company law is replete with clauses for imprisonment of offenders. The Observer Research Foundation recently published a report indicating that there are 26,134 clauses in various laws that call for imprisonment of corporate offenders.

The multiple cases of vigilante justice suggest that faith in the police force’s ability to deliver on law and order and justice is weak. This country witnessed a hue and cry when lynchings were reported over the possession of beef or smuggling of cows. This was widely put down to growing communalism under the Bharatiya Janata Party. Even if some of that is true, just do a Google search using phrases like “goat theft”, “chicken theft”, “child lifting” or even “pedestrian run over by vehicle”, and you will find enough cases of mob lynching. Mobs and crowds sometimes tend to take the law in their own hands because they do not expect the police to do their jobs with diligence. A survey conducted by Lokniti in 2018 found that less than 25 per cent of the 15,000 people who responded across 22 states said they had trust in the police.

None of this is a great revelation, but suffice it to say that apart from judicial reforms, we also need deep police reforms. But even before we talk of reforms, which are politically difficult to ensure, we need to underline a simpler fact: Many things can be done even without these reforms, but these aren’t being done. Our police forces are simply not equipped to be effective. They are underfunded, understaffed and incapable of doing their jobs even when they want to. While opinions and the norms on the ideal police-to-population ratio vary widely, the UN-recommended number is 222 per 1,00,000 population, when India’s is well below 150. In the poorer states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and even West Bengal, this ratio is lower, below 100 per 1,00,000 population.
 

Illustration: Binay Sinha

India probably needs at least one million more men in uniform, but, once again, democratic politics is indirectly the reason for this. Most police forces are underfunded and poorly equipped precisely because politicians seeking to get elected choose to spend more of the state resources on freebies and “private goods”, and not “public goods” like policing and law and order. So, even while no politician may actually want a weaker police force, they do not have the tax resources to fund this expansion since re-election comes first.

However, it would be a mistake to presume that the problem is mostly about inadequate personnel or funding. The real solutions lie not in just expanding the numbers, but in reinventing the methods of policing. While technology — drones, street cameras, bodycams, monitoring of social media websites, and facial-recognition software — will play an important role, the key to effective policing lies in developing deep information linkages with India’s multiple communities of caste, religion and tribe.

Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, after studying groups of non-human primates, theorised that humans too have limits on how many relationships or acquaintances they can have meaningfully. He then arrived at the magic number of 150, though this number needs modification for the digital age, where we can theoretically have many hundred “friends” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter or Instagram.

What the police really need to do is to develop an information base that organically uses the Dunbar principle to gather intelligence on smaller, homogeneous groups, and use artificial and human intelligence to predict where trouble may be brewing or which communities are likely or less likely to house trouble-makers. It can take proactive action to prevent trouble, or deal with it when things boil over, only if it can monitor smaller groups effectively.

Put simply, it means the police will be better served by having deep information on smaller groups in the population rather than just blindly relying on numbers or technology to do their jobs. The fact that acts of terror don’t need more than a handful of people to perpetrate tells us why monitoring small groups is important.

While de-politicisation and the reform of police administration and staffing are important long-term solutions, in the short run successful policing depends on deep intelligence. This is possible only by dipping a thermometer into the population in hotspots and hot populations. This brings me to the larger issue I want to raise in the next article: Much of the policing has to be done by the communities themselves, and not just by the men in uniform.

The writer is editorial director, Swarajya magazine