Author: Bharati Motwani
Policing The Republic is certainly not a light read, but it is surprisingly riveting for a book that is essentially a hard audit of hard subjects — crime, corruption, terrorism and political grift. The India of today is a difficult country to have a straightforward relationship with: you lurch between love and anger, pride and disillusion. To the country’s many intractable angularities, the author — a retired IPS officer, a former Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau, and former Central Information Commissioner — brings a piercing, gimlet gaze. Four decades spent within the system have given him a gut-deep understanding of what transpires in the murky innards of the institutions that hold sway over the lives of 1.47 billion citizens — a little under one-fifth of humanity. As a police officer, he was an enforcer; as CIC, an auditor. Between the two roles, he has seen power from both sides - how it is exercised and how it is experienced. It is from that vantage that he writes.
The Preface is evocative in its description of author Yashovardhan Azad’s growing years in the badlands of Bihar in the 1970s — a world of caste militias, criminal mafias, student uprisings, and gang wars. Yet Bihar in those turbulent decades was also the crucible of democratic mobilisation and passionate idealism. As the son of freedom fighter and former Chief Minister Bhagwat Jha Azad, Yashovardhan’s worldview was to a great extent forged by the churn of that era.
But Policing the Republic is no smug memoir of a retired babu. Yashovardhan Azad gives surprisingly little space to his own anecdotes; instead, the book veers towards the clinical. He approaches the problems of crime and corruption as one might approach a difficult puzzle: disassembling it, laying out the pieces, examining each closely, tracing their connections and patiently reconstructing the whole. He is less interested in recounting his own stories than in delineating and deconstructing the terrain - unravelling the tangle of history, institutions, politics and human behaviour to understand how the pieces fit together, where they went wrong, and what might be done to set them right. This is what makes the book an essential handbook for anyone who is interested in and invested in India’s future. Yashovardhan Azad likes to fix things — and has some very sound ideas about how they might be fixed. His prescriptions marry the constitutional with the practical. He is an idealist, but not a romantic one. For him, governance is the ethical art of closing the gap between what ought to be and what can actually be done —holding on to principle while reckoning honestly with the constraints.
The chapters on the criminal-politician nexus are a panoramic portrait of the seamy underbelly of electoral survival, where goondaism is mainstreamed and police are subverted to serve party interests. The material is not necessarily new, but Azad brings to it an insider’s eye and an unusually granular understanding of how these forces mesh with each other and, more importantly, how this meshing has become structurally embedded in the machinery of governance. The unsettling conclusion is that criminality in politics is not the system failing; it is often the system functioning exactly as designed.
The section titled ‘How India Fights Crime’ is perhaps a misnomer. It is, in large part, an anatomy of how India routinely fails to fight crime when the criminals are rich, well-connected or powerful. He lays bare the forces that perpetuate this failure: systemic political pressure, institutional inertia and wilfully archaic investigative frameworks. He writes powerfully about the bleak, interminable road to police reform — the protracted committees, judicial interventions, stalled legislation, weak implementation and stonewalling by the Home Ministry under which the police operates. He reserves some of his sharpest words for the administrative service babus who are invested in preserving the status quo and guarding the opacity of the system. Yet he ends on a note of guarded hope, quoting the legendary Prakash Singh, the prime architect of the movement for police reform in India: “Who knows, India may get a Robert Peel one day…”
The author’s keen sense of justice, so often thwarted during his years in the IPS, perhaps found expression in his post-retirement role as Central Information Commissioner, when he became an enforcer of India’s new sunshine law, the Right to Information Act. The RTI was then still young and vibrant. India has a remarkable capacity for producing enlightened responses to its deepest challenges — Gandhi’s method of non-violent resistance to Imperialism; a Constitution that gave universal suffrage to even the most impoverished and uneducated, putting them at par with the privileged; and more recently, the RTI Act, which sought to put information and power into the hands of ordinary citizens. And yet, having reached such heights, we seem repeatedly to turn on our own achievements, eroding and subverting them from within. It is almost as though we yearn for the highest ideals, only to recoil when they demand that we live by them. Azad chronicles the steady hollowing-out of the RTI, as a once — powerful instrument of accountability is progressively stripped of its teeth.
But Azad is ever optimistic. Written just before the CJP movement exploded onto our national consciousness, his writing was prescient: “India’s most consequential asset … is its coming-of-age generation. Impatient, connected and unwilling to accept the justifications that satisfied their parents, they are already demanding a different standard from their institutions. They symbolise the very argument this book makes — that India is capable of better.”
The chapter on the Pakistan cricket tour in 2003-04 is pure cinema. It is almost as if after having slogged over the hard stuff, the author has leaned back in his chair, poured himself a glass of Chivas on ice and allowed himself the pleasure of reminiscing about something we Indians never tire of — stories about Pakistan, about cricket, and about the thriller-style spy games played out across the border for the last 75 years.
Mr Azad, would you autograph my copy, please!
The author is an editor and writer; Views presented are personal.