OUR NEW POlICE ACT: ONlY WRAPPER NO CANDY
The Cabinet has approved the draft Odisha Police Bill which will replace the 153-year-old Police Act framed by the British rulers in 1861. Actually, it has only tweaked the old act and heralds it as a groundbreaking reform in tune with the Supreme Court’s directive to improve police functioning. There is nothing in it to insulate the police from political interference, which was the real objective of the apex court’s decision way back in 2006 and the models it referred for achieving that goal. Our Government cunningly exploited the court decision of ‘no unwarranted influence or pressure on the police’ to introduce creeping controls over the force.
What is unwarranted and what is not has as many interpretations as there are self-serving, clever Governments in our country. The provision of a two-year fixed tenure for the Director General contains enough wiggle room for later deviation. Besides making a mockery of the functional autonomy for the police, the draft Bill flannels about separation of police’s investigative functions from their law and order duties which will, in reality, remain grounded without ever being implemented. The elephant in the room is our abysmal police-population ratio. The country as a whole has 106 policemen per one lakh people, less than half of the United Nations’ recommended figure of 222. In our State, that ratio stands at a pathetic 646. There are 65,000 policemen to serve a population of 4.2 crore in the State. Unless this wretched ratio improves substantially, enhancing police functioning through the new Act will be like watching Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
SOUMYA PATNAIK HAS RESTlESS SOUl SYNDROME
Those who are more charitable may say that Aama Odisha Party president Soumya Ranjan Patnaik is a talented maverick, a freethinker, a disorganised genius, an independent-minded rebel and an unorthodox radical or, perhaps, a bit of all these. But if he could enter and exit from as many as three mainstream parties like the Congress, the BJP and the NCP and finally float his own party, one can reasonably conclude that he has as much loyalty to a party as an alley cat to a home.
Patnaik has restless soul syndrome – ‘everything interests him but nothing holds him’. What hampers him is his inability or unwillingness to take a long-term view of a party and stick with it through thick and thin. For him to say that he didn’t leave the Congress party but was driven out of it, he is simply playing on the credulity of the common man. When he fell out with the then PCC President Jayadev Jena in the latter part of last year over organising ‘Sankalpa Yatra’, he was given due notice to discontinue his rallies as they were giving unmistakable signs of disunity within the party when elections were barely six months away.
But he disregarded the notices, persisted with his rallies and was naturally expelled. Anyone with even a modicum of fairness would agree that he was expelled only after all opportunities given to him to mend his rebel activities failed. Patnaik is no doubt a hugely talented public figure with a gifted capacity to mould public opinion, one way or the other, through his control over all branches of the mass media. But party discipline still ranks higher than individual talents. His plan to milk public sympathy for his victim status would even make a cat laugh.
WHAT DO HARICHANDAN’S STARS SAYIJ
On 15th December, Prasad Harichandan was appointed chief of Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) by Sonia Gandhi. He took over the charge but has decided to enter the Congress Bhawan only on December 28, full two weeks after his appointment and on a day considered auspicious by him. Tongues have started wagging about his faith in the influence of stars on his new job. Some say it is natural for someone born and bred in holy culture to keep in mind the positions of planets, constellations and configurations before taking charge of a job fraught with high degree of risks and mortality.
Tenures of his immediate predecessors were both short and disgraced. Even the doughtiest politico would baulk at accepting a job surrounded by such livewire enemies as are dime a dozen in the State Congress party today. This is further bedevilled by Harichandan not belonging to anyone of the known camps. Belonging to no camp means he has no hardcore supporters to fall back upon in case he trips at anytime in future. On top of all this, the ways of working of his immediate boss, Rahul Gandhi, are as mysterious as those of God. In such a situation, what other recourse poor Harichandan has than invoke divine blessings by consulting his horoscope! But if Rahul Gandhi comes to know that Harichandan is so horoscope-dependent that he idled away two weeks without plunging headlong into the job, he might be already writing his political obituary with the possible caption: From star-stuck to star-crossed.
WAIT FOR NEW ANTI-lAND GRAB lAWS; IT IS MERRY TIMEPASS
The State Government last week approved an Ordinance to punish land grabbers with sentences up to seven years and a fine up to Rs 20,000. Even, a special court will be set up to expedite the cases against them. Are the existing laws not enough to evict and punish these encroachersIJ We read daily about the holy trinity, BDA, BMC and GA Department, demolishing unauthorised roadside shops all over Bhubaneswar to widen roads. Why does this demolition triumvirate not tear down other encroachments alsoIJ Why wait for an Ordinance to empower them to actIJ There are hundreds of in-the-face encroachments in each area of the city crying for demolition.
Many house owners have constructed boundary walls that trespass right onto the public roads and are a serious obstruction to the traffic. In our city, people would rather put up with all kinds of inconvenience than muster courage to object to what is plainly objectionable. See, for example, the motorcyclists in the Unit 4 fish market. The goons and the rowdies merrily ride their bikes through the thick crowds of shoppers. Everyone grumbles, but no one protests. We all expect the police to take action against the hoodlums instead of discharging our civic duty of protest against them. When people can’t object to motorcyclists from running into them, it is too much to expect them to protest against the encroachers of public land. When people fail, the Government must intervene.
The executive triumvirate should summarily demolish all kinds of encroachments in the same way they are doing at present against the roadside shop owners. Just pull down the structures and the boundary walls the outlaws have erected. The land grabbers indulge in their criminal activity because they know the Government is too lazy to act and the people are too indolent to object. Under existing laws, unauthorised encroachments can be razed without waiting for another elaborate law to be enacted. The new law may provide for detailed penal action after protracted delays, but the real deterrent lies in instant demolition. We have the same laws as the developed West. But the difference between the First World and the Third World is in their implementation. Our law enforcers are well-equipped but not well-committed. Rather than moaning about the lack of an adequate legal framework, their time would be better spent by following Nike’s trademark slogan: JUST DO IT.
(saratpattanayak@hotmail.com. (M) 9437962121)