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Mainstream, VOL L, No 41, September 29, 2012

Police and Communal Violence

Tuesday 2 October 2012

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by Asghar Ali Engineer

It seems quite a stale topic as we know how the police behaves during communal distur-bances or even before and after that. Recently the Prime Minister too, during his inaugural address to a one-day conference of Directors General and Inspectors General of Police along with intelligence officers in New Delhi, expressed serious concern about increasing incidents of communal violence in the country. When the Prime Minister of the country expresses concern and draws attention to a problem it could not be anything but very serious indeed.

For the first four months almost no communal disturbances took place and I was feeling happy that, after all, this year may turn out to be my dream year, that is, a riot-free year. However, my dream was shattered when a series of riots began to take place in UP and elsewhere, especially after Mulayam Singh’s SP was elected to power. It once again proved that riots are politically motivated and these have nothing to do with religion. But for sure religious prejudices are spread for political purposes.

The police has to play a very crucial role from intelligence gathering to arresting the culprits before they can do harm; to quash the riots once these break out; to take effective legal steps to punish them so that they do not dare do so again. Apart from my experiences with the handling of riots by the police in the last several decades, the role of the police in disturbances this year until now has not been a wee bit different.

What was surprising was that even the UP Police has not changed in the least despite the change of regime in the State. One expected that under the Mulayam Singh regime which came to power mainly because of Muslim support, he will make the police behave. However, I was in for a great disappointment. The police behaviour, if Mulayam Singh had done at all anything to change it, was quite defiant and it openly helped the rioters. It appeared as if it was a conspiracy to discredit Mulayam Singh immediately after his election to power.

I reached one more conclusion that whatever the regime, the police behaves in the same manner. They have been too strongly indoctri-nated to change their mind-set under a compara-tively more secular regime. But then one can point to Bihar and West Bengal as both the States under Laloo Prasad Yadav and Jyoti Basu and then Bhattacharjee managed to have only a few minor riots in the last 15 and 30 years respectively. Bihar and West Bengal are still continuing with the same tradition even now under Nitish Kumar and Mamata Banerjee respectively.

Maybe Mulayam Singh Yadav does not have a strong and charismatic personality like the Chief Ministers of Bihar and West Bengal. It requires very detailed study to reach any definite conclusion. What can be said tentatively is that the police submit to only a strong Chief Minister who does not use them for his/her political purpose. And goes by certain principles and sends correct messages to them.

It is also important to understand if the entire police force from top to bottom has been communalised or this is at the bottom and middle rungs only. Once, during a discussion in the National Police Academy, Hyderabad, I expressed an opinion that those at the top rungs are less communal and casteist than those at the middle and bottom rungs. A top IPS officer, who had come to the Academy like me to deliver a lecture, strongly disagreed with me and maintained that the top officers are anytime worse than those at the bottom or middle rungs. I simply said: you are an IPS officer, so you know better.

But my experience shows it is a mixed bag. There are very secular officers at the top as there are rank communal ones. Gujarat is the best example for both. There were IPS officers who bended their knees before the Chief Minister and carried out all his orders and also those who took a stand and defied him and remained defiant despite tremendous pressures. I have shared platform with the latter in certain places.

It is not that they were Dalit officers, they were both from the high castes (even Brahmins) and from the lower castes. Also, I know of two brothers, both from top castes and of the rank of Director-General of Police, who have been, I would say, highly secular in their attitudes and have remained consistent throughout their career and showed exemplary courage in handling riot situations.

Well, one may argue they may be an exception and I have nothing to counter this argument. But I have seen more officers of the kind. In one of the workshops at the National Police Academy, Hyderabad, wherein IPS trainees from all over India were taking part, three batches were required to present case studies of riots and the role of the police. I and Prof Ram Puniyani were on panel of judges. Their presentations were so excellent that I told Ram jokingly—let us now take retirement as these young officers are so secular already and don’t need any further training.

This is true but unfortunately it is not the whole truth. Anytime it would remain a partial truth. For every secular officer, there are several communal officers at all the levels of the force. Their casteist and communal prejudices become quite raw. I have seen and experienced these raw prejudices especially during the Bombay riots of 1992-93 and also in Meerut (1987), Gujarat (1985, 2002) and Bombay-Bhiwandi riots (1984).

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This, I must confess, was at lower levels but it was not very different at the top also, again with some honourable exceptions. This was more due to the fact that most of the policemen (especially at lower levels) read Marathi Samna everyday and spoke that very language about Muslims. Who could dare take action against Samna for writing in such provocative language?

What was the stuff of the Chief Minister, Mr Naik? When a delegation of eminent citizens from Mumbai met him urging him to control the riots, he asked these citizens to meet Bal Thackeray as he was provoking the riots. In other words, Mr Naik had surrendered his functions to the Shiv Sena supremeo. How can such a weak Chief Minister ever control riots? And shamefully especially in Maharshtra (elsewhere too) those police officers who failed to control riots and were subsequently repri-manded by Commissions of Inquiry, were pro-moted, rather than being punished.

For example, the then SP, Police during the Bhiwandi-Jalgaon riots of 1970 was reprimanded by the Madon Commission for false arrests and releasing the real culprits; but he was promoted instead of being punished and ended up as the Director-General of Police of Maharashtra. Another example that comes to mind is that of the Joint Commissioner of Police, Mumbai who shot dead eight madrasa students saying they were rioters and was severely reprimanded by the Srikrishna Commission; but he was pro-moted as the Commissioner of Police, Mumbai during the Shiv Sena regime. An arrest warrant was issued against him after his retirement but he got admitted into a hospital on the pretext of having a heart attack and managed to obtain bail from the court. Thus he never went to jail even for a day.

Many more examples could be furnished. And recently one got the opposite example of a CP, Mumbai punished for handling a riot situation in an exemplary manner. Mr Patnaik deserved kudos for handling a rally of 50,000 people in the most peaceful manner. Instead of rewarding him, under pressure from Raj Thackeray of the MNS who also took out a rally of 45,000 people to demand action against Patnaik and R.R. Patil, the Home Minister of Maharashtra, the authorities removed him (Mr Patnaik) and posted him as the Director General of Road Transport, a post where one can do nothing. R.R. Patil, however, saved his neck.
Raj Thackeray, who so far consolidated his position by keeping quiet on the Muslim question and even supporting them, has, in view of the 2014 elections, opted for the Hindutva card and hence took out a huge rally, investing a lot in it, and has killed two birds with one stone. He came closer to the main Shiv Sena (maybe with a view to form an alliance in 2014) and also increased his clout in Maharashtra politics (even if he goes with the Congress). But in this political game an exemplary officer like Patnaik, who handled a very serious situation so well, has been sacrificed.

That is why I hear many police officers saying during my workshops: what can we do, we are pawns on the political chessboard. It is true in many cases, even in the case of Gujarat, many good officers tried to resist pressure but did not succeed; but this is not always true. Police officers have in-built deeper prejudices. For that not only the school syllabuses but also the police training courses have to be drastically changed and policemen given high-pressure secular indoctrination and much more.

Also, what is needed is judgments of the type delivered in the Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad wherein a Cabinet-rank Minister was given 28 years in prison for provoking communal riots by violating the secular Indian Constitution. This will discourage these politi-cians to get elected in a cheap way by playing with raw communal passions of their consti-tuents. We must salute the courage of Justice Jyotsna Yagnik.

Dr Asghar Ali Engineer, who runs the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS), Mumbai, is the patron of the All India Secular Forum set up in 2002 when the Gujarat pogrom in particular and the communal forces in general were threatening the secular fabric of society; the Forum had rejected the Communal Violence Bill drafted by the Ministry of Home Affairs as it gave the police draconian powers to handle communal disturbances without any accountability, and organised a campaign for an alternative legislation. He won along with Swami Agnivesh the Right to Livelihood Award in 2004 in recognition of his steadfast commitment to promote the values of coexistence and tolerance.

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