Servants of violence

Vappala Balachandran

Ex-Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

IN 2018, I was asked to review a book, Provisional Authority, on the Uttar Pradesh police by Beatrice Jauregui, an American criminologist and researcher, published by University of Chicago Press after a 24-month field study (2006-07). She chose the UP police for her study as it was the ‘largest sub-national police force under a unified command in the entire world’. She received full cooperation from the lower ranks who frankly revealed their work related problems although senior officers were not that forthcoming.

The book is much more revealing than any Police Commission report. Anybody who had read it would not be surprised at the present state of affairs in UP. That slim, philosophical and empathetic work on UP police is set against the theoretical templates of Max Weber on legitimate force, Egon Bittner on coercion and David Bayley on accountability.

Jauregui says that in UP, violence is structured and demanded by the police and the broader public and routinised and openly visible. It is also defended as a means to prevent disorder and realise justice. As a result, police behaviour swings from hyper empowerment with marked brutality on occasions to disempowerment, when they abdicate legal responsibility under political or social pressure.

An example is the public’s ‘ambivalent response’ to encounter killings which is nothing but ‘carefully planned and collectively executed’ extra-judicial killings. The police are either praised or condemned for this. ‘This paradoxical condemnation-cum- valorisation relates to the specific ways in which the police may be figured as servants of violence’.

This is accentuated by the role multiplicity of the police as detective-investigator, guardian-protector, traffic director-crowd controller, dispute mediator-peacekeeper, law enforcer-interrogator and first responder. Together with extreme resource scarcity, this results in indeterminacy of legality and legitimacy in practices.

She questions the policy of using police for the morally and physically dangerous duty of maintaining social order through potential or actual use of violence and feels strongly about it since more Indian policemen die on duty every year than the coalition forces in the war ravaged Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet there is little public sympathy on the dangers they face or grievances they have, except ritual ceremonies like the October 21 Commemoration Day. She highlights the distance between senior officers and policemen, and the ‘slow violence of their own welfare being ignored’ by their government, which produce for them ‘vicious cycles of inability, instability, inequity and iniquity’.

I feel that this research by an unbiased yet sympathetic foreign observer should be a preamble for a realistic appraisal of the chaotic conditions now prevailing within UP police. Another prelude should be CM Yogi Adityanath’s announcement of the encounter policy in March 2017. This should be read with his government’s reference to the 3,026 ‘encounters’ resulting in 69 killings, 838 injuries and 7,043 arrests as ‘achievements’ on January 25, 2019.

We still do not know in the last fortnight how many were shot dead by the police or by the alleged protesters in UP during the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act movement. We can only imagine the extent of insecurity in the minds of minorities after the CM’s announcement of revenge on the same day to seize private properties of miscreants for which notices were issued even to the dead. We cannot ignore that young activist Sadaf Jafar and 77-year-old SR Darapuri, a former IPS officer, described by the BJP as prominent faces responsible for much of the anti-CAA violence, were released on bail on January 7 due to lack of evidence.

A spectre of administrative anarchy was raised on January 3 when some channels aired allegations of corruption on postings and transfers. It was officially announced that the DGP has asked his regional head to enquire into those allegations ascribed to an SSP. The question is, can the DGP alone deal with this situation affecting the department’s credibility.

Other countries have set up solutions to boost public confidence when similar allegations are made. In America, the Attorney General whose post was created in 1789 after its Constitution was enacted in 1787, is charged with enforcement of the 4th Amendment to oversee constitutional protection of civil rights by the state and county police systems. The 1991 public beating of Rodney King by some white officers resulted in the US Congress passing US Code No: 14141 in 1994 to combat police misconduct.

Since then, several police systems were put under ‘federal or court monitoring’ to ensure verifiable improvements by drawing up ‘consent decrees’. The first to be put under long court monitoring was the Los Angeles Police Department from 1996 till 2013 to recover from their ‘Rampart division corruption’ scandal. Several police systems were then put under federal monitoring. Although nearly 400 officers were charged for excesses, the stress has been on non-punitive measures like correctional training.

In UK, the Independent Office for Police Complaint, which replaced the Independent Police Complaints Commission in 2018, deals with such individual complaints. During 2017-18, they received 31,671 complaints. Structural police problems are, however, dealt with by Her Majesty’s Inspectors of the Constabulary (HMIC) during their mandatory inspection.

Such flagrant violations of the Constitution as in UP can be checked by our Central Government through Article 355 which casts upon it a duty to ‘ensure that the governments of the states are carried on in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution’. This exceptional provision was justified by Dr Ambedkar during the Constituent Assembly debates while defending draft Articles 278 and 278A.

Alternatively, one should move the SC to put the UP police under court supervision by appointing an expert body until their working improves.