Police: Fighting for the Rights of Goons
On 19th February, in New Delhi, at an Urdu festival Jashn — e — Rekhta a few hundred participants who took offense to the mere presence of Fatah Ka Fatwa host -Tarek Fatah, shouted abuses (Modi ka Kutta, ISI Agent), waved shoes, poked and kicked him. This shocking intolerance happened despite the fact that in India, Urdu is associated with high culture and impeccable sensitivity and this festival was graced by Gulzar and likes of him who walk and talk with grace wearing Achkan and Shalwar –Kurta.
Unafraid of the mood of the violent crowd, Tarek Fatah stood in their midst and kept arguing calmly. After a few minutes, police came and tried to remove him from the premise on the pretext of his safety and restoring the law &order situation. Tarek Fatah realised that he might have angered people who don’t like him for his views, but he did nothing wrong except debate with a few of them. So, he refused to leave the premise demanding that people who are taking law and order in their hands, people who are abusing and shouting and are angry by his mere sight should be removed — not him. Yet, a few police inspectors out of their age-old habit of taking the uniform they wore as a symbol of power (and complete lack of any reason) tried to intimidate Tarek Fatah and abused him further. They threatened him that if he refused to leave, they would lock him in a van and take him away. But Tarek Fatah stood his ground saying that by removing me you are fighting for the rights of the mob and not of a man who was out just for a stroll, who also has a right to a free and safe space in a democratic country like India, that too in the heart of the capital city of New Delhi. Eventually, a DCP of the Delhi Police had to come and apologize to him and also made the belligerent police inspectors do the same.
This is not new in India. A few months back at Jaipur Literature Festival, hundreds of police came to remove just one person, Taslima Nasreen from the premises because there too some people objected to her presence. This week again, at Ramjas College in New Delhi, police instead of removing the rampaging ABVP activists tried to remove the students who just wanted to hold a talk by a student leader from JNU.
The age-old practice of Police department in India is this — that, in the name of law and order and safeguarding the person against whom a mob erupts, they always remove the person from the scene and not the mob and so the mobs always stand vindicated. This sends a message to any and every one who can gather a mob to shout and abuse that they will get their right to intimidation protected by none other than the police themselves!
One wonders why Police — which is one of the largest and integral institution of a civilized society, responsible for maintaining law and order for everyone be it poor or a rich, powerful or a weak –fails to understand its role on such a clear philosophical line? Also, one wonders why the Police Commissioner cannot explain this to his department, that is, if he himself understands this glaring anomaly in the functioning of his institution.
We are not even discussing the beating and physical intimidation — which police departments across the country practice as its fundamental right — of anyone who comes across the police.
Despite the many good work done by the police — ask anyone about the police department and you will get a reply that it’s a callous brute force that is highly corrupt and has no understanding of a common citizen’s rights or dignity except when it comes to anyone who is either rich or powerful. They treat common people with utter indignity but surrender their own dignity when it comes to the rich and powerful, and friends when it comes to dealing with habitual criminals.
The police department is considered corrupt and callous despite the fact that it’s populated by both classes of people from society- the rich and highly educated at the top and the poor and moderately educated at the bottom. Not to mention from both urban and rural areas, but again the top tier is always from sophisticated urban sections while the bottom tier is from both rural and urban.
Then, what is it that homogenizes these two kinds to create a single grand narrative that police are corrupt and callous and sycophantic.
The top tier of the police department is occupied by postgraduates (rich or poor) who go through national-level competitive exams of IPS along with rigorous training. Not to mention that they are made to study philosophy, ethics, and management apart from the general knowledge to have an idea about every state, culture, and religion in India since they will be posted anywhere in the country. This top tier is also supposed to be cultured because most of them come from rich and so-called cultured families. The middle and especially the lower tier of the police department are not only moderately uneducated but also come from a poor or lower middle-class family, a perfect candidate that can look upon their superiors and at the institution itself for its advancement.
But ironically both the rich and poor, the educated and barely educated join the institution for economic advancement and give their own character to it. How is it that an institution that is carefully conceived and designed with a set of guidelines — which is impeccable on paper — is tarnished in practice? It is because the top tier not only fails to maintain the ethical standards of this institution but also fails to educate the ones who are below them.
Of course, constables and inspectors come from backgrounds where they may not have an idea about justice, equality, and freedom for everyone, and forget about having knowledge about what’s happening in advanced societies of the world even in the age of Google. Who should make them better? Who should teach them and train them to become an embodiment of the guiding principles their institution stands for? Of course, the institution and the politician who are considered to be custodians of it.
A corrupt, inefficient, and ignorant policeman is not the one who is to be blamed but the institution that not only fails to see the inherent conflicting behaviours of its smallest entities that are not in sync with its need but also fails to instill correct values in the ones who join it, with the hope to become better constituent or citizen even if they join it as a mean of employment.
A society is composed of many things; people, natural resources, institutions, and ideas that are in some way glued to its religion and culture. People are either rich or poor, educated or uneducated, but institutions that are based on ideas are the domain of either the rich or educated population of society. Ideas that are central to creating institutions are more or less guided by the dominant cultural traits that may or may not be based on guiding philosophies of the religion or culture of the land. Basically, everything that society creates — that either governs or guides the society either in the form of institutions be it politics, bureaucracy, law and order, education, urbanization, or economic policy, or in the form of amorphous ideas like freedom, justice equality and secularism — is conceived created and implemented by the rich and educated of the society. Because the poor and uneducated masses are busy in existential strife, they are the people who look upon all these above aspects not only to make their lives better but also to learn how to conduct themselves while where they are or if and when they move out of their class.
So, a deficiency in a society reflects the mentality of its rich and educated who either rule or guide the society. An institution demonstrates the character of a society and a society gets an institution it deserves or is comfortable with.
If India or any other country the society is bad and degrading is not because of its poor, and uneducated but because of its educated and rich, elected leaders and selected bureaucracy including the self-made entrepreneurs and well-connected businessmen. It’s beyond the capability of even the likes of Gandhi and Nehru alone to guide a country or to make better citizens of its populace, that’s why there are ideas and institutions. Institutions that are the sum of ideas and capabilities of their individual entities are one of the greatest tools societies have devised to plan, monitor, and disseminate correct behavior patterns important for its well-being.
And what have these institutions achieved in India? They have created systems that create, abate, and perpetuate corruption, nepotism, incompetency, and inefficiency. Above all, they not only completely disregard the objectives they are created for but also fail to innovate and make themselves relevant in the face of a rapidly changing society in this globalized world. It would be unfair to say that there are no sane, rational, and forward-looking progressive people in any institution in India let alone the Police department, there are, but a majority of them like first-timers, are so afraid to lose their grip on the power that they have got just by being associated with an institution, that they have twisted it and stabilized it for their own gain. They have extended their dishonesty and corrupt practices to the lowest cadre of the institution so well that it has become the character of the institution itself.
Unless they, who are at the top don’t consciously think about changing the nature of their institution and put the ball in motion for change, no matter how slowly, most of the institutions in India are going to remain the same no matter how much money we earn and no matter how much technology or ideas we buy from the money that we earn and no matter how ‘educated’ we become.
The logo of Delhi Police says, Shanti, Sewa, Nyay — Peace, Service, Justice and has a mammoth graffiti of the embodiment of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi himself on one side of its headquarter building. Ironically, just like the uniform they both are mere outer symbol, yet to be internalized.
This article was originally published in New Delhi Times web edition on February 27, 2017.
