POLITICAL VIOLENCE & POLICE IN INDIA Part II
.
Referring to the colonial Irish Constabulary which
became the model for the Indian police system, with the state even
emulating it in the creation of the centralised paramilitary
organisation.is brought out in the book and asserts that the CPMF has
repeatedly failed to fulfil its specified tasks in various situations,
.
Still, he laments, the legacy of the system, its shortcomings, and the
failures caused by these shortcomings have not been examined seriously in
independent India. and thus makes out a strong case for the removal of the
paramilitary and the repressive political-organisational features of the police
structure.
The historical perpetuation of the colonial legacy and the manner in which
it strengthened the urge to centralise. are analysed and points out that the
perpetuation process started right from 1947 on account of the imagined,
motivated or real fear of fragmentation of India. An important revelation is
that it
“was during the counter-insurgency operation in Telangana that the I.B. first
emerged as an all-India agency for the collection of political intelligence”.
There is also the revelation that the Central Reserve Police Force was formed
in 1949 as an organisational continuation of “the Crown’s Representative Police
raised a decade earlier for the protection of law and order in the princely
states”.
This process got further strengthened as the Congress, under the leadership
of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, initiated manoeuvres to undermine the
growth of Opposition parties.
He points out that the role of the I.B. as an instrument of political
disruption was developed during this period.
In this context, it records
the I.B.’s role in the deployment of the Army in the Naga areas in 1955
against the advice of the Army, the State Governor and the Ministry of External
Affairs,
the unconstitutional dismissal of the E.M. Sankaran Namboodiripad-led first
Communist party government in Kerala in 1959,
and the imposition of Emergency in 1975 by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, as
cases in point.
The use of the police for propagation of communal violence led to another
form of centralisation. Referring to the Gujarat police strikes of 1979-86, he
says that fascist tendencies in Gujarat had their beginnings in the
socio-political climate of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
He refers to the study by an Uttar Pradesh Police Officer, Vibhuti Narain
Rai, who analysed the role of the police during 10 Hindu-Muslim riots between
1931 and 1993 and came to the firm conclusion that the police DID NOT ACT as a
neutral law enforcement agency but as a “Hindu force”.
In recent years, the book says, the government’s counter-terrorism
initiatives have become instruments to advance the process of centralisation.
With particular reference to the naxalite movement, he points out that in
spite of the talk of addressing the socio-economic conditions of the socially
and economically deprived people in order to wean them away from the influence
of Left extremism,
the I.B. and the State governments continue to be the main official sources
of information.
Given the “historical evolution of its organisational and political
structure”, the intelligence system, the author says, has an inbuilt tendency to
view militant struggles of the rural poor “as attempts at ‘incipient insurgency’
threatening the existing political order”.
He also points out that in their approach these agencies do not take into
account the fact that “naxalite violence is, in part, a retaliatory violence
against the increasing violence against Dalits and Adivasis”.
Subramanian recommends a “mutual symbiosis of state and society” approach in
order to address the problem of Left extremism.
Significantly, he laments that “neither the implementation of the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes – S.C. and S.T. – (Prevention of Atrocities) Act,
1989, nor the S.C. and S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities), Rules, 1995, came up for
discussion in the high-level meetings convened by the Ministry of Home Affairs
to discuss the issue of naxalite violence in several States, which is rapidly
growing with the support of the S.C.s and S.T.s.”
He has no doubt that " reform is the only way to correct the maladies in
the system. “However, he does not find the delineation of a correct line even in
the eight-volume report of the National Police Commission in 1980 on police
reforms. In his view, such Commissions would be of no use if the system
“continues to thwart internal mechanisms that could help develop a social
perspective”.
The winding up of the research and policy division in the Ministry of Home
Affairs is a case in point.. With its closure “additional inputs of knowledge,
skill and vision from multidisciplinary research and policy analysis” were no
longer available.
several concrete steps to address some of the issues are raised in the book.
One suggestion is the creation of a National Commission of Violence in India
on the model of the one set up in the United States after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The recommendations made in the book as well as its narrative and analysis
will certainly take forward the public debate on police reform.
Undoubtedly, this work is a kind of primer for any student of the
Indian police system. However, the author himself can think with a more
elaborate study of the issues and problems he has addressed through the present
volume.
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