Betwa Sharma: UP Cop Booked Yogi Adityanath Under NSA, Spent 20 Years In The Wilderness
NB: Our 'patriotic' leaders treat upright policemen like dispensable objects. His treatment at the hands of various elected representatives shows that corruption is not merely a financial matter, but refers more grievously, to the ongoing perversion of the Constitution. Jasvir Singh deserves our thanks and a salute from all conscientious offices and citizens. DS
" I am an IPS officer, it should stand for something"
LUCKNOW: In 2002, Jasvir Singh took over as the Superintendent of Police (SP) of
Maharajganj district in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He was 34-years-old, unafraid
and an idealist, so the young Indian Police Service (IPS) officer looked into
the criminal cases pending against Yogi Adityanath, then Member of Parliament
(MP) from Gorakhpur, and booked him under the National Security Act (NSA). Singh said he refused
to withdraw his case for preventive detention against the sitting MP despite
pressure from politicians of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who were in
power at the Centre at the time, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which
formed the state government. Two days later, he was transferred to
the Food Cell of the UP police.
In a recent
conversation with HuffPost India, Singh said, “There can be no
compromises in criminal offenses. I am an IPS officer, it should stand for
something.” Sixteen years after
his sixteen-day stint in Maharajganj, Singh continues to float in the
backwaters of the Indian Police Service (IPS), and Adityanath is the chief
minister of UP. His government has withdrawn a case related to Adityanath
violating prohibitory orders in 1995, and has decided against prosecuting him
for making a hate speech in the midst of the communal riots in Gorakhpur in
2007. Singh, meanwhile, has
become a pariah of the IPS. The police officer says he has paid a price for
trying to hold politicians and ministers to account.
One year after he
slapped the NSA on Adityanath, Singh accused Raghuraj Pratap Singh aka Raja
Bhaiya, then food minister in the Mulayam Singh Yadav government, of corruption
in the Lakhimpur Kheri food scam. He was transferred out of the Food Cell of
the UP police. In his 26 years of
service, Singh has held posts - entailing actual police work - for only six
months. For the remaining 20 years, the IPS officer has been stuck in dead-end
postings, with little to do. Detested by his superiors, shunned by his colleagues,
he has been written off as a troublemaker.
If Singh is anguished
about the wasted years, the police officer does not let on. He does say that
taking a stand and sticking is better than being a “career bureaucrat.” “They want loyalty to
political persons. This is totally unconstitutional,” he said. “If we don’t
resist, things won’t change. Resisting is the most rewarding thing especially
when there is a big allurement.” Police officers who
“resist” risk committing harakiri on their own careers. Those who refuse to
accommodate the interests of politicians are shunted to nondescript postings in
remote corners of the country. Challenging politicians paves the way for indefinite
exile. A narrative of incompetence is forged around them. They are
dismissed as cranks and misfits in the bureaucracy.
A recent example is
Rajnish Rai, the IPS officer who arrested three other police officers in
connection with the 2005 Soharbuddin encounter case. Rai was suspended when he sought early retirement. When asked if he sees
himself as a role model for young officers who might be at the crossroads - agonizing over kowtowing to politicians for the sake of their careers - Singh asks why a big deal is made of something that should be “normal.” “You don’t need to be
a messiah to perform your duties. Normal duties demand that you act with
absolute integrity and total allegiance to the constitution,” he said. While some argue an
intransigent nature is antithetical to the government service, the IPS officer
bristles when he hears the term “middle path.”
“I became a police
officer to serve the public, not politicians. There is no middle path when you
are serving the people. You have no option but complete adherence to the rules
of the service,” he said. “You have got to be honest.” Under the present Adityanath-led BJP government, which is accused of
resorting to extra judicial killings to maintain law and order, Singh has no
work. Even if he did have a “mainstream” posting, the police officer
fundamentally disagrees with “encounter” killings becoming the norm. “You are killing
people in the name of democracy. How does that happen?”
Speaking of
“encounter” killings under any political regime, he said, “Only rival gangs are
eliminated. It is not even equitable elimination?”
Singh, who never
married, is also a civil engineer and a lawyer. His requests to argue cases for
the UP police, he says, were turned down. Singh is now serving
as ADG (Additional Director General of Police) Rules and Manual in UP, a post
that requires him to do no work. “I go attend office.
There is a small room. I sit there from 9:30 am sharp. I take my lunch like a
school boy. I have 40 to 50 books that I have got privately. I keep reading one
after the other and at 6:00 pm sharp, I leave without doing any work,” he said.
Initially, Singh had
refused to take up the position. The IPS officer told his superiors that there
was no posting as ADG Rules and Manuals and there was nothing for him to do.
His superiors told him to do “research” and write a paper on his any topic of
his choosing. Singh said that he
wanted to study why the Rules and Manual cell was created in 1984, the duties
of previous officers assigned to the cell, and why it continued to function. “You are paying salaries to people for more than 24 to 25 years. What
public interest has been served?” he said. His proposal was
blocked.
It is a travesty that
in a vast and lawless state like UP, which needs all the policing it can get,
officers like Singh are given no work. Taxpayers also deserve to know why the
state government is spending public money on the salaries of officers who sit
idle all day. Singh says that all he
required to do is sign the paperwork marked to all the ADGs in the state. “I’m
being paid whatever an ADG is entitled to without any public job being done.
This is the most unbelievable thing,” he said.
Singh says that
inconvenient officers like him are made out to be either inept or impractical,
but this is a myth propagated by the polity, the government service and the
media. In 2007, when the
Mayawati government came to power in UP, Singh was posted to Muzaffarnagar,
which was then in the throes of gang wars and burglaries. Initially refusing
the position, Singh told his superior officers that he would go only if he was
allowed to work in the same post for at least three years. Singh says he brought
the gang wars to a halt and solved 40 burglaries in 38 days. He was however
transferred out for arresting the district head of the BSP.
Singh recalled that
his junior officers were afraid to say anything to the BSP district chief, who
was drunk and blocking traffic in the middle of the day. “I went and held him
by the hair, put him in the gypsy, put him in jail, and imposed the NSA on
him,” he said. Around 25 Assembly
lawmakers told Mayawati that BSP would not win a single vote if he was allowed
to continue in Muzaffarnagar, Singh recalled. “Their definition of
competence is that I should have gone to the district commander of the BSP with
folded hands and touched his feet and offered him a cup of tea,” he said.
Singh says it is
impossible to work in a “system” that allows politicians to bully officers. “You have unleashed a
bunch of goondas on people. They are committing all kinds of
crime and the duty of an IPS officer is to protect them and then only you will
be given a posting,” he said. The Supreme Court has
time and again called for an end to political interference in transfer and
postings of government officials. In Prakash Singh versus Union of
India, a historic judgment on police reform delivered in 2006, the Supreme
Court said that Police Establishment Boards (PEB), comprising senior officers,
would decide on transfer and postings.
“Even in the face of
the Supreme Court judgment, there is no transparency around postings. We know
that arbitrary and frequent transfers with political motivations are still
going on,” said Devika Prasad, Coordinator of the Police Reforms Programme at
the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI). “The resistance of giving up
political control over the police is so strong. It is entrenched.”
In addition to the
PEBs , Prasad said the Supreme Court had underlined the need for security of
tenure. The 2018 CHRI study on compliance of the Supreme Court judgment
said, “all states have constituted Police Establishment Boards on paper.
However, Arunachal Pradesh is the only state which partially complies with the
directive on compliance.” “Can you tolerate a
system where political protection becomes the mainstay of public service? Is this
democracy?” said Singh. “There should be a system that promotes honest people.”
Treading the straight
and narrow can be lonely. It takes a toll which is not just professional, but
personal as well. His seemingly stubborn attitude has cost Singh his friends
and the support of the tight-knit circuit of government officers. His
interaction with his colleagues are limited to superficial greetings. “My own batch mates
whom I like, they don’t like to talk to me. They have become part of a system
which they think Is the standard, which is mainstream, and they want to know
why I am out of the mainstream,” he said. “You lose a lot of friendships. I
really regret that.”
Singh, who has a
passion for bhangra rap, finds solace in music, and taking
care of his mother, who teases him about his “honest ways.” “She says the sepoy
across the road has made a house worth two crores and you cannot make two rooms
after working for 26 years,” he said. His father, who was a
Lance Naik in the army and then a farmer, had a high regard for police officers
and wanted him to be one. “He was very impressed by police officers, he wanted
me to be one, but an honest one,” he said.
Singh believes his
stubbornness is rooted in his farm boy upbringing. He recalls mornings when his
father would wake him up at three in the morning and take him farming.
These early mornings spent ploughing fields, he believes, “thickened”
him. “There were several
court cases and departmental inquiries against me, but a departmental inquiry
seems a small thing,” he said. “It’s easier than waking up and ploughing the
fields at three in the morning.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/up-cop-booked-yogi-adityanath-under-nsa-in-2002-spent-next-16-years-in-the-wilderness_in_5c507926e4b0d9f9be697049?vh&utm_hp_ref=in-homepagesee also
Terrifying
implications of the SC's Staines Judgement
RSS and Modi brazenly intimidating the Supreme Court
1948: Supreme Court, RSS and Gandhi
RSS and Modi brazenly intimidating the Supreme Court
1948: Supreme Court, RSS and Gandhi
