Rampur at the centre

Introduction: Extremists are opening new fronts in their war against civilisation and the state. So what are we doing about police reform?

The brave men, and increasingly women, who serve in the CRPF have begun to read the acronym as the 'Chalte Raho Pyare Force'. It expresses their exasperation and fatigue at the heavy and persistent burden of internal security that the CRPF bears, rushing its companies across the country from one flash point to another. Railway platforms across the country regularly bear witness to these jawans struggling to catch up on sleep while dashing between one hot spots. With increasing commitments across the country, vital organisational norms of training and rotation are seldom observed and within the force, postings at group centres located in supposedly peaceful areas such as the one in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh are much sought after. Families are briefly united; children and other neglected responsibilities are attended to without fear of missing a train or dodging a bullet. Not any more.

The terror strike in the early hours of 2008 at the CRPF Group Centre has shattered the lives of all the families of the jawans and civilians who were killed, and a lot else. For the CRPF, the incident has very publicly raised embarrassing questions about how in spite of apparent early warning from different sources, security at the Centre was caught unprepared. But more so, the incident has shaken all of us - both within and outside the police - who are concerned about the safety and well being of fellow Indian citizens. Rampur is not Kupwara or Dantewara or Guwahati, places safely far away that routinely figure in the news and are normally permanent fixtures on the terror map of India. It is very much the heart of the Hindi heartland. And yet today it stands at the frontline of terror. What next? Pretty soon we'll be teaching our children new ways to learn the alphabet.

The lessons from Rampur are not that hard to understand. Faced with a bloody stalemate in Kashmir, the jihadi extremists have decided to open new fronts in their war against the Indian state and civilisation. Not just the CRPF, but all other agencies of the Central and state governments dealing with police and internal security need to realise that they too are now in the sights of the terrorists and they must raise their level of preparedness accordingly. But this cannot be done by issuing orders alone that remain unimplemented on the ground and are only useful to avoid responsibility for the next outrage. It would require amongst other things, substantial additional investment of human and financial resources in the police setup.

On paper, in absolute terms, our police and paramilitary forces are amongst the largest in the world. But if we look at the per capita availability of police forces, we look at the intelligence and detection capabilities of our forces, their level of operational preparedness, their stress and motivation levels, the skills we are able to give them versus the skills that are needed, and most importantly the unwillingness of our political and administrative elite to place internal security needs beyond the pale of political posturing and preserving bureaucratic turfs, and then look at the policing challenges facing India in 2008 it is clear that we are merely paying lip service to the needs of our country. Today, given the sorry state of the physical and intellectual capital of our internal security, the relentless political and administrative meddling it is subjected to - since 1991 the average tenure of the SP of Rampur has been less than a year - the systematic emasculation of upright police leadership at every level, it is no surprise that we are reduced to little more than working as goons of the ruling party and as gunmen of the rich and powerful.

Much has been said about police reforms in the recent past especially in wake of the Supreme Court judgment of September 2006 in the PIL instituted by Prakash Singh, a retired IPS officer. The judgment was only a starting point for all the things that we need to do and even that modest goal has been systematically undermined by a coalition of vested interests determined to maintain the status quo. Today a DGP in most states does not have the authority to sanction something as basic as a telephone connection, what to speak of anything more meaningful such as a police outpost or, heaven forbid, a police station. This is not to argue that the police leadership be given freedom to do as it pleases. But the time has come when the archaic system of financial and administrative controls that virtually reduce a state DGP to a supplicant before the home department needs to go. What prevails today in the name of accountability is an unresponsive and inefficient system that is completely oblivious to the vital public interest of creating and sustaining a professional and impartial police force.

We created the AEC to bring us the bomb, the DRDO to bring us rockets and missiles, and ISRO to take us to space, all outstanding examples of national vision and execution, but when it comes to attaining something that really does affect the everyday life of every Indian, a police we can trust and rely upon to do its duty without fear or favour, we are not able to create the right framework for one reason or another.

One does not argue that the problems of jihadi extremism, Naxalism or any other variety of violent struggles that challenge the Indian state can be dealt with solely by the police. The struggle has to be fought and our disaffected citizens engaged and embraced on a broad variety of political, social and economic fronts. But surely no set of counter terrorism policies can be effective without updating our legal and administrative frameworks and improving the overall police infrastructure. Sadly, incidents like the Rampur strike are still seen by the powers that be as an opportunity for playing the blame game. A political and administrative consensus on fast tracking police reforms and increased outlay for improving police infrastructure would be a fitting tribute to the CRPF men who could not see the dawn of 2008.

The writer is SP Crime and Law and Order, Uttarakhand

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