A policeman may not be different in attitude from a common citizen but once he dons his uniform, he becomes an element of a dehumanised force, writes HAREKRISHNA DEKA. Excerpts:
The higher formations of the police, that is, the gazetted officers, have been formed into different services after Independence. Interestingly, the word service was not used by the colonial Government even for the higher formations. The Indian Police Service (IPS) was non-existent. There was only the Imperial Police (IP). It was no problem for the then Government to call the highest bureaucratic service the Indian Civil Service (ICS) but they were weary of calling the imperial police a service. It was as if they wanted to avoid a relationship between the police and the community.
The Police Act of 1861 put a lot of emphasis on calling the police a force. The term ‘police force’ occurs in the act no less than 10 times between Sections 1 and 17. Section 2 clearly says, ‘the entire police-establishment under a State Government shall, for the purpose of this Act, be deemed to be one police force’. A force is an organised body of people and to that extent there is justification in calling police a force. But the word has other connotations which not only includes power and exerted strength but also in some context coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence (Oxford English Reference Dictionary). Hence the negative connotations of the term ‘force’ should have been tempered by calling it a ‘service’ and its relationship with the community should have been established in a positive context, which is people’s security But this was desired by neither the colonial government nor the Indian government after Independence.
The force remained under the control of an impersonal administration and no attempt was made to give it a human face. The force has all along been used by the administration to police the people and not allowed to act as the people’s police. It was thought politically expedient to maintain an invisible dividing line between the police of the state and its people. Although in the Act itself the word ‘force’ was used to imply that it was an organised body brought under a discipline for the purpose of preventing and detecting crime and also to prevent disturbance, the absence of any reference to the people and its subsequent use in a coercive manner programmed the force to deal with only the negative social situations. Moreover, the police were called an ‘efficient instrument’ (preamble) and not a human agency and thus human concerns were not incorporated in the psycho-frame of the Indian police.
The Indian police acquired what was called the ‘third degree’, an inhuman practice of torturing suspects to elicit information. Despite conscientious efforts by several senior police officers, this practice refuses to die. I feel that two reasons for the persistence of this practice are, (1) the dehumanisation of the force in its constitutional makeup springing from the provisions of the Police Act, 1861 itself and (2) the political culture that made it an instrument of coercive use.
Security has a larger dimension than just preventing and detecting crime. It has a qualitative aspect as well. Those who are given security have to feel that they are being protected and are not exposed to danger. Today, people’s security is not in the vocabulary of police sub-culture-an inheritance of the colonial use of the force. When I say this I am speaking of the collective behaviour of a force always required to deal with the negative aspect of social behaviour and compelled to remain beholden to power-wielding political masters. Police sub-culture is not wedded to the society’s value-based culture. In dealing with a stressful social situation they are programmed to look for potential trouble-mongers and their mind reacts accordingly. Many of the mishaps caused while dealing with public disturbance are not deliberate acts of police mischief, but are the fallout of the dehumanisation of the force in the framework of the law regulating them. Outside the uniform, a policeman may not be different in attitude from a common citizen but once he dons the uniform and becomes an element of the force he acts within the dehumanised sub-culture acquired by it.
It is not that there was never an intellectual effort to give the Indian police a new culture and spirit that fit the democratic values of the nation. The National Police Commission (NPC) constituted in 1977 under the chairmanship of Dharma Vira framed a model police bill for consideration of the government and expressly incorporated community-consciousness in the preamble of the proposed bill. It said, ‘the police has a paramount obligation and duty to function according to the requirements of the constitution, law and the democratic aspirations of the people.’ The bill also required police ‘to be professional and service-oriented and free from extraneous influences and yet accountable to the people’. There was a clear attempt to incorporate the ingredients missing in the existing laws governing police functions. Unfortunately, the political mindset ruling the country has so far failed to transcend the political subculture it imbibed post-independence to serve narrow political ends and has allowed the proposed bill to go to oblivion.
The writer was formerly Assam’s Director-General of Police. He is also a Sahitya Acedemy Award winner. Excerpt taken from Security, Governance, and Democratic Rights, published by Niyogi Books.