PHILLAUR: Embarrassment and irritation, on Jan.30, marked the second police-student interface which left both the school-going students and Punjab police chief K.P.S. Gill dissatisfied.
Gill was grilled by students of high classes and appeared many a time unable to answer their questions and tried to hedge or make the student sit down. He was so irritated when some students pressed him with questions that he snubbed a girl as a nag when she insisted to know why he was not in uniform.
During the one-hour long session students mainly wanted to know why policemen had no respect for law and the common citizens, why they indulged in corruption and not bothered to pay at a snack stand or a peanut sellers. A student divulged that they had been brought to the PTC in a private but hijacked by policemen.
At one point, he appeared to condone such acts when he remarked that these were minor, trivial acts which were often blown out of proportion. Then, he said, cops not paying for eating was a world-wide phenomenon which was common even in Washington and London as they had entered into an arrangement to make a lump sum payment at the end of the month.
He answered, in a similar refrain, when pointed out why police escorted vehicles showed no respect for rules of the road. “When I was in London I was given two consumables and a vehicle and we jumped traffic lights for reasons of security. The same thing happened when I was in Sydney the other day,” he candidly boasted.
However, Gill admitted that public image of police was not a misconception, but based on the actions of the force. He said efforts were on to improve this. He exhorted the students that whenever they came across an aberration by a cop, they must report and protest so that corrective action could be taken. “When we tolerate a violation, it lends to its repetition,” he said.
Reaching strongly to charge of dishonest policemen, he shot back there was dishonesty everywhere and when a young man joined the force at over 20 years of age he had already picked up many skills of a dishonest person.
Asked if he was going to expand the police mass contact drive to other sections of students also, he replied in the negative saying they were politically motivated and had fixed ideas about the police which they would not transform. They would only condemn the police, he said, adding there were low complaints against the force now.
The 500 students from Ludhiana along with their teachers spent one full day at Police Training College escorted by three SSPs and a DIG and other officers. They were taken round the college and shown its workings.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 3, 1995
