Biryani Policing and the Leadership Crisis in the Indian Police Service BY BASANT RATH
Beyond the safety of
minorities and biryani policing in Haryana, the IPS are under an
obligation to act like leaders, not as mere passengers.
a few questions for the police leadership of this country – the members of the IPS. Which sections of the penal code and Criminal Procedure Code allow the police to enter kitchens of private citizens on information given by other private citizens? What if the complaint is found to be false? Who is responsible for what the ‘beef suspects’ and their families go through in the local communities? What about the hard fact of the police raids making them vulnerable to violence by politico-economically motivated cow vigilantes for life? How are police officials acting on politically motivated intelligence inputs and carrying out biryani raids punished in the event of their unsuccessful raids? Where are the laws and standard operating procedures to make the erring police officials accountable for their crimes?
NB - We owe thanks to this serving IPS officer for reminding citizens at large and his fellow officers in particular that gazetted officials of the GoI are not servants of the government of the day, nor obliged to act as promoters of any ideology. They are servants of the constitution, and if they disregard their oaths of office by bending the rules to suit the diktats of zealots they will be responsible for undermining the fundamental statutes of the Union of India. Keep that in mind, ladies and gentlemen. India is not the fiefdom of the Sangh Parivar. Thank you, Mr Rath. DS
Leadership Crisis in the Indian Police Service
Welcome to Haryana,
the state where the maximum sentence for a convicted rapist is three years less
than for a cow slaughtering offence and where molesting a woman is a lesser
offence than being in possession of beef. At the moment, that is. The state
comes in second – after Uttar Pradesh – in terms of number of police complaints
filed. The state has seen large-scale
riots (the Jat quota stir), rising
atrocities against Dalits (the burning of two
Dalit children), communal attacks against minorities (the Ballabgarh riots), female
infanticide and frequent attacks on women. It has been recording more than 67
cases per day against women. Here, crimes
against scheduled castes increased from 493 in 2013 to 830 in 2014.
This is the state that
requested Prakash Singh, the retired IPS officer who is a living legend of our
times, to head a fact-finding probe into
the Jat quota agitation last February, later asking him to stop working on his
second report focussing on “recommending reforms” in the system.
Singh’s first report indicted
a sizeable section of Haryana’s bureaucracy and its police, the mighty IAS and
IPS, and their blue-eyed and deep-pocketed men, for deserting their posts and
failing to respond to warnings from the Centre, which offended the alpha males
of the bureaucracy. Some ultra-powerful politicians in Haryana also took
umbrage because their butlers had been censured. The Haryana home department
letter said that Singh no longer needed to undertake the originally
mandated study of the police organisation and structures.
Haryana is also the
state that introduced biryani policing as a new wing of law
enforcement and added a new phrase to our vocabulary. Last month, just days
ahead of Bakr Eid, the Haryana police in the Muslim-dominated Mewat district collected samples of
biryani from street vendors to test the meat used. So the Haryana
police, equipped with its dismal record in tackling crimes against women,
Dalits and minorities and preventing massive riots, was tasked with the
all-important job of sniffing beef from biryani cooked for Eid in small street
stalls.
Not just Haryana: Haryana is not a stray
case. Let’s go national. Last year in September, in UP’s Dadri, a mob of cow
protectors entered 50-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq’s home after a local temple had
broadcast rumours that the Muslim family had killed a cow and consumed its
meat. They murdered Akhlaq and injured
his son. This incident was followed by a spate of public beatings of alleged
beef eaters and traders by cow vigilante groups, including the murder of Jammu
and Kashmir trucker Zahid, the hanging of two
Muslim cattle traders in Jharkhand, the murder of Noman (a 20-year-old
from UP) in Himachal Pradesh, the harassment of Muslim women in Madhya Pradesh
and the public flogging of Dalits in
Una, Gujarat, by cow protection gangs. Many such incidents of cow vigilantism
are reported (and many others go unreported) in the local and national
press, and most target minorities and Dalits in an attempt to terrorise them in
the name of the cow protection.
At the moment, 24 out
of 29 states in India have various regulations prohibiting either the slaughter
or sale of cows. Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala (animals above ten years), Manipur,
Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura are the states where there are
no restrictions on cow slaughter. Assam, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal allow the
slaughter of cattle with a certificate. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Bihar, Goa
and Odisha have banned cow slaughter, but allow the slaughter of other cattle
with a certificate. The rest of India bans the slaughter of all cattle.
Laws that criminalise
centuries old food and drinking habits give a lot of discretion to the police
officers working at the police station level. How many of them owe their
current postings and future prospects to the local MLAs and MPs is not a query
that needs a high IQ score to answer. How these police officials use their
rule-mandated discretion to serve the interests of their careerist police
leaders and investment-savvy political mentors can be seen in Gujarat and
Bihar. The political economy of prohibition ensures that smuggling and illicit
sale of alcohol are rampant in these states. ‘Folder’ is popular slang used in
Gujarat to refer to a bootlegger who delivers alcohol on demand. The corrupt
among the police in Gujarat owe a lot of their prosperity to these ‘folders’.
It is not for nothing that Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Mizoram and Tamil Nadu have
previously enforced but later repealed prohibition.
Enforcement of the
beef ban follows a similar political trajectory. In India, most cow owners live
in villages and on the fringes of cities. The poor cattle owners in India,
Hindu or otherwise, sell their old cows because they can no longer afford to
keep the unproductive cattle. What happens to these animals after their sale
can be gauged from the fact that there are more than 36,000 legal and 30,000
illegal slaughterhouses in the country. India’s $2 billion leather export
industry depends on 4,000 tanneries and leather-goods factories; they depend on
cattle, including cows, for their survival and prosperity.
The emergence of
biryani policing as a new wing of law enforcement shows that India has a
structural problem. What is legal in Kerala can be illegal in Haryana. Beef
eating was legal in Haryana in 2014. It is illegal in 2016. What has changed?
With the numbers on its side, a ruling dispensation can criminalise an act that
is perfectly legal in some other parts of the country. Muslims, even if they
account for 77% of the population of a district (as in Mewat), can’t eat beef
because of a politically motivated law. The discretionary powers of the police
make them unaccountable when they act upon malicious intelligence inputs about
what is being cooked in private citizens’ kitchens. The leather export industry
in India that uses cowhides is thriving. But private armies of cow vigilantes
can harass, humiliate and kill citizens of this country.
The concept of
citizenry, the constitutionally mandated relationship between the state (as
different from the government of the day) and an individual citizen of the
country (minus the intermediate identity markers of religion, region, caste and
gender) is what makes this young country and old civilisation what it is. This
relationship is the foundation of our constitution in the context of democratic
governance. This is the foundation of the idea of India. Biryani policing as a
model of governance has exposed the fragile nature of this relationship in
Haryana and other places afflicted with the twin diseases of private policing
and unfettered discretionary police powers.
The IPS’s
involvement: Now a few questions
for the police leadership of this country – the members of the IPS. Which
sections of the penal code and Criminal Procedure Code allow the police to
enter kitchens of private citizens on information given by other private
citizens? What if the complaint is found to be false? Who is responsible for
what the ‘beef suspects’ and their families go through in the local
communities? What about the hard fact of the police raids making them vulnerable
to violence by politico-economically motivated cow vigilantes for life? How are
police officials acting on politically motivated intelligence inputs and
carrying out biryani raids punished in the event of their unsuccessful raids?
Where are the laws and standard operating procedures to make the erring police
officials accountable for their crimes?
How do the IPS
contribute to this mess? Let’s count the ways.
One, India’s policing
system is collapsing under the burden of rule-based, but unaccounted, discretionary
powers available to police officials at the police station level. In case of
politically motivated police raids and arrests, the lives of innocent citizens
and their family members get destroyed beyond redemption and nothing happens to
erring police officials. The IPS play ‘office-office’ and claim sainthood for
themselves, individually and collectively. They ask for legally mandated police
reforms, but refuse to stand up to the criminals among the police.
Two, the police in
India has a math problem. Our police organisations are definitely majoritarian
in their demographic profile. The all-India figure (minus Jammu and Kashmir)
for the percentage of Muslim policemen and women is four, for Delhi it is
two, for Maharashtra it is one, for UP 4.8, while for Bihar
it is 4.5 and Rajasthan it is 1.2. Apart from having a low representation
of Dalits and Muslims, most police organisations are divided along caste lines.
Police organisations in the country are characterised by a low representation
of women as well. The national average is less than 5%. The IPS claim they are
helpless in these matters. But the usual mad-rush among the alpha males of the
IPS for the post of the police chief shows that they believe they can add value
to the functioning of their respective state cadres. The tragedy is that their
optimism doesn’t extend to the diversity of the workforce.
Three, more often than
not, police leaders perform their duties in politically strategic ways over
what is necessarily legally correct. Conspiracies between police officers and
their political mentors are a hard fact. The IPS lobby ensures that criminal
elements among the police don’t get punished for their commissions and
omissions. Attesting to this is the fact that no police officer – IPS or state cadre
– was punished for dereliction of duty in cases like the 1984 Delhi riots
or the 2002 Gujarat riots. The latest addition is the Haryana Jat agitation in
which the state lost properties worth Rs 20,000 crores as state police leaders
stood idle on the sidelines and were busy protecting their chairs.
Four, the police
organisations in the country are caught between two misdirected segments of the
polity. They have to bear the brunt of the increased might of the mob and
anti-social elements, backed either by the establishment or by those opposed to
it. The former uses the police to remain in power, while the latter want the
police to fail so that they can use the resulting chaos to damn the government.
When the former and the latter belong to the same political dispensation, they
use the police as match-fixers. How the police handled cow vigilante groups in
various states is a case in point. In the process, police accountability
becomes a pipedream in our democracy. And the IPS are a part of the problem.
Five, the IPS refuse
to realise the fact that police organisations of the country, in their present
compositions and structures, are not capable of giving the masses a secular,
democratic policing-related delivery system. And that the conventional
‘unity-in-diversity’ model tom-tomed by the National Police Academy believes in
an India dominated by its majority community, the Hindus. All other religions,
the argument goes, must “assimilate” to India’s Hindu core, accepting as a
matter of first principle that the Hindus are the chief architects of the
Indian nation and also its superior citizens. Let’s take a specific example.
For Hindu nationalist ideologues, the 2002 Gujarat communal violence was an
ideological victory. In a formal resolution, the RSS, the ideological and
organisational centerpiece of Hindu nationalism, said: “Let the minorities understand that their
real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority”.
Beyond the safety of
minorities and biryani policing in Haryana, the IPS are under an
obligation to act like leaders, not as mere passengers. Their credibility is at
stake, both on the crime-ridden streets of New Delhi and in the 33% of
districts that face some sort of armed conflict against the state.
Accepting
this will be a welcome start. Beyond the world of badakhana and darbar and
Powerpoint presentations. Ameen.
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