NEWDELHI: It is the experience all over the world that when a Government assumes arbitrary powers defiance of law and spread of corruption become second nature with the organs of administration particularly the police. It is only the degree of this arbitrary exercise of power-or the abuse of it that marks the borderline between a democratic order and Police state.
The issue has become a matter of urgency for us today as in substantial parts of our country normal administration of law and order has been replaced by the imposition of arbitrary rule in which inevitably the police raj has taken over. In the more difficult and unmanageable cases as for instance in Kashmir the Army has had to be requisitioned for a more prolonged stay. The Chief of Army Staff General Rodrigues has already publicly expressed in a widely debated interview in the Pioneer his misgivings about the wisdom of repeatedly calling up the Army for handling internal unrest. Of course in the case of the police it is acknowledged that the quelling of civil disturbances is a part of its responsibilities.
In the last seven years the question of internal security has assumed extraordinary dimension: in our country. No longer is it case of dealing with sporadic our bursts of violence. In some pat Of the country it has become a chronic malaise. And in other cases as in Kashmir Punjab and Assam open secessionist demands have been raised. Sophisticated firearms like AK-47s bombs and booby traps and even rockets are being used by militant opponents of the Government.
Gone are the days when the police used to be summoned handle communal riots in which tabbing and looting alone were the mainstay of the “disturbers of peace” as the official lingo used to describe them. Today it is a totally changed scenario. While the old-style riots do break out there and there though with more deadly effect than in the past one encounters very different types of challenges to civil peace.
For one thing there are bands of armed professional gangs available in many cases for hire. In fact leading lights of different vested interests maintain such private armies. They are nationally secret but the police are aware of their existence and their depredations but dares not touch them for the reason that they have powerful Patrons. Not only in villages in Binar but at many places particularly in the mega-size urban centers have these mafia gangs flourished. They were active during electioneering and in recent times few of them were themselves found to be involved in election polities.
More menacing for the nations integrity are the organized militant groups which keep up sustained armed guerrilla resistance against the State authority. At the moment these are confined to Kashmir Punjab Assam and pockets of the North-East. Secession is elements operate through them. It is to be frankly admitted that so far court political parties have found no solution whatsoever to deal with this problem except unredeemed police operation. So the militant’s violence is sought to be put down by means of the State violence. What is amazing is that the authorities still real these as just an extension of the traditional law and-order problem. The manner of combating them is just to use force and more free. Although on the formal plane the Government II the time talks of the need to restore the political process there is little evidence of such an approach being pursued with determination. Instead heavy reliance on the might of the police has become the order of the day.
Apart from the fact that resorting to unalloyed violence can by to never open up the possibility of political solution one has to take to account the serious negative impact of the over use of the police force in dealing with the armed militant operations. For one thing these militant groups at least the hardcore ones-are ideologically motivated and can hardly be cowed by any show of force.
Secondly they enjoy a certain degree of support at least tacit support from the people among whom they live and who provide them with food and shelter. A massive police bunt and indiscriminate repression not only against the militants themselves but all those non-combatants who provide them with food and shelter-inevitably result in intensifying We alienation of the local public against the administrative authority and to that measure helps the militants who gain popular sympathy
Thirdly protracted use of police Violence leads to a stage of irresponsibility where corruption flourishes. As the Punjab experience shows this leads to wide spread extort on and blackmail by the police Lastly indiscriminate use of police violence not only brutalizes the police force but corrodes its morally as well. This could also be seen very clearly Punjab.
The cumulative effect of all this to be measured by the decline in the standing of the police force in the eyes of the public. One hears of very distinguished personalities in Punjab (who are by no meat political opponents belong to the ruling Congress party) expressing grave concern at the police having now gained vested interest in keeping alive the Punjab crisis. They openly s that in Punjab there has to be settlement with the militants by this is bound to hurt those who have reigned for so long that in the police force which has exploited the abnormal condition to prevailing there to make them selves indispensable .
Power without accountability i the maxim of every arbitrary regime and that is precisely what the police force has today come symbolize in Punjab. The police raj has become so strongly embedded there that even after the election it is the police whose writ virtually runs and the elected ministry seems to take the cue from it.
There are numerous cases of continued police high-handedness in Punjab. One of the recent cases which deserve to be spotlighted is the ghastly treatment meted out to a former judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court Justice Ajit Singh Bains who after retirement has been actively associated with the human rights movement in the State.
A fact-finding teams report in this case has recently been placed before the public by the Independent Initiative whose president Justice Krishna Iyer a former member of the Supreme Court bench has strongly condemned the arrest and maltreatment meted out to Justice Bains by the police.
The newly appointed Congress Chief Minister of Punjab Beant Singh is reported to have stated that his Government had no intention of releasing Justice Bains and in defence of his stand the Chief Minister made the strange statement that during the Akali Ministry headed by Barnala Justice Bains as the chairman of a committee to review the cases of those under detention had “indiscriminately” ordered the release of a large number of detainees.
I’m other words the defence of human rights has itself become & crime in the eyes of the Punjab Government.
Article extracted from this publication >> May 8, 1996
