LAW AND ORDER POLICING IN INDIA

Amidst the diverse functions the police perform, the plebeian identifies the
police with maintenance of law and order. He sees the police in uniform
intervening in the incidents of his everyday life beginning from a simple street
quarrel to mob violence. He sees them conducting raids on vice dens and
restricting his actions and movements in the name of public interest. He sees their
presence in well nigh all state and public gatherings, controlling crowd and
maintaining order; in beats and villages, checking history-sheeters. As a part of
the law and order staff, traffic police in white uniform are visible controlling and
regulating traffic during rush hours. The hoi polloi have learnt to see the law and
order police as their saviors in hours of need in spite of restrictions involved in
the latter’s methods. As far as public deals are concerned, help and support of
the law and order police have become sine qua non in the ambience of prolate
fruad and unruly tendencies in public life. Non obstante uncivil methods and mouvais
ton, ordinary citizens consider the law and order police as a necessary evil and the
pith of the public order. It enjoys a special place in the psyche of the people as
a hated savior and a constant compagnon in public life. The image of law and order
police decides to them the image of the police in general. The law and order
police steeped in corruption makes them believe that the police force en semble
smell rammish and its good performances earn their unqualified plaudit to the
entire force. The strategic position of the law and order police in crime scene is
patent from the fact that it comes to picture right in time of a crime to prevent
its commission as the true strain of law and order policing while other wings are
involved either too early as in the case of security police or too late as in the case
of crime police. The strategic timing brings them to the centre-stage of crime
management in the eyes of common people and wins them their trust and
confidence. Furthermore, the law and order police provide a rare praxis of
symbion with the law with each limiting and protecting the other unlike security
police ectogenic and crime police subservient to it. There cannot be laws sans the
law and order police and no law and order police sans the laws. This is the secret
of the matchless relevance of the law and order police to the orderly life of the
country.

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ABSENCE OF COMMON POLICY

Police stations are pillars of the law and order police reticulation with district
police offices in districts and police commissionerates in major cities at regional
levels and state police headquarters at provincial levels beholden to the
responsibility. Intermediary levels like circles, subdivisions and ranges coordinate
the work in-between. Armed forces are maintained as reserves at regional and
state levels in addition at the centre to assist the law and order police in highly
disturbing situations. These are striking forces, specially trained to handle serious
lacunae of Indian law and order police is that no special training facility is available
for its staff for actually dealing with the quotidian law and order issues. It is rather
crude to expect the police to depend on past experiences and untrained personal
faculties to meet professional law and order challenges. The lapse leads to
arbitrary handling of law and order situations sans sound and uniform policy
save peripheral measures to be adopted before and during use of weapons and
opening fire. The only help available to an official on the field is the general
guidelines of his seniors who are equally ill equipped to handle those situations.
This complicates situations during actual actions by depriving the elements of
mutual understanding among the police and the subjects as a natural and essential
factor of successful policing, and ipso factor creates chaos. The situation can
hardly be called as professional policing of law and order. The uncertainties of
each law and order issue added to it, make handling of law and order in India,
a pure maelstrom.
PULLS AND PRESSURES
Pulls and pressures are sine qua non in a democracy. Pressures of influential and
powerful blocs are an accepted phenomenon of the working of a democratic
government. This is patent in the working of Indian police. Police as an agency
that limits the liberty of the people pro bono publico and discipline those who
prevaricate, occupy a strategic position in the interpersonal and public life of the
citizens and makes success and failure or life and death differences to them and
their ventures. The strategic position of the police is more pronounced in law and
order policing. Sadly law and order policing in India imprimis is management of
pulls and pressures in the wilderness of rules and laws. Law and order policing
has become a contrivement of bending and interpreting rules and laws to the
convenience of rich and powerful who can pull strings at right places. This is an
irony of democracy. These prevarications go conspicuous in acts of political
avatars and subject the police to serve public censure. Otherwise, it is a mute affair
as the police algate are on the vocal side of the rich and influential against dumb
and helpless plebeian with none to fight the latter’s cause against the risk of the

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wrath of the police save isolated cases of courage and commitment. The situation
is to the benefit of the police as the shocks of possible disturbances by the
prevarications are always absorbed by the powerful on whose favour the police
acted and the interests of the police are safeguarded avec acharnement by them.
This is a tacit arrangement between the police and the powerful wherein the
police are really lower partners in the high-stake game played for the benefits of
the powerful bloc. The police with their little statute and easy contentment, trade
off their high powers to the mighty people for the limited gains of the easy
process of policing, career promotions, peaceful life and lucre. In the process, the
police sacrifice the sacred objectives of its profession.
UNDUE STRESS ON PLAYING SAFE
The current abracadabra of Indian police in managing law and order issues
is letting sleeping wolves sleep and avoid further troubles. Who meet the
requirement is hailed as the best law and order hands. Sine dubio, management of
law and order issues anywhere requires handling situations without inviting
gratuitous problems. But, the matter seems overstretched in Indian ambience.
Not ruffling feathers unnecessarily is indubitably a priority. But, this should not
be in shape of a compromise, at the cost of law and justice, at the cost of
professional objectivity like in extant Indian law and order machinery which
believes in calm at all costs; those who are adequately insensate to go to that length
by placating powerful trouble-makers only win races for coveted law and order
posts in Indian ambience. The consequence of the apostasy is that the law and
order policing in India has become progressively a nest of playing favoritism
with utter contempt for professional character. Those with a sense of objectivity
and professional probity self foot the bill as their professional uprightness falls
foul with powerful lobbies who in tune with the thoughts and fears of the higher
echelons of the law and order police, create troubles to those who dared not to
favour them. The sleight leads to a vicious circle that perpetuates the wily interests
of the powerful at the cost of weak and dumb in the hands of the law and order
police by hoisting corrupt and lither elements in key law and order jobs. The
conundrum is whether being a part of such a vice system is as inevitable to the
law and order police as it appears. The answer definitely is in negative. An
understanding of the trickery en train in the system and a little toughness and
resolve to stand up to the challenges of the powerful certainly help to solve the
riddles. The real question is whether the law and order police really want a
solution to the riddles or is it contented with what is there as its own making. All
available data point to the fact that the law and order police of India enjoy what
is there as its own making that provides them security and patronage.

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INTOXICATING POWERS
Important responsibilities of the law and order police include prevention of
crimes, enforcement of laws, maintenance of public order, controlling rowdy
activities, checking the spread of vide dens, regulating meetings, processions, and
other activities in public places in the interests of the maintenance or order,
controlling crowds, quelling mob violence etc. The police are invested with a
spectrum of powers which include powers to arrest, detain, search seize
impound, prosecute, levy collective fines, enter and take possession of private
places and buildings, use weapons to hurt and even kill to force compliance etc.
Most of these powers save in specified emergent circumstances are
circumscribed by the need of obtaining appropriate magisterial orders for
exercise. The maintenance of law and order in large cities is facilitated by investing
the magisterial powers with police commissioners, often delegated up to the
level of DCPs in charge of law and order. The powers enjoyed by the law and
order police amate to their enormous responsibilities and perhaps rank first in
range and the width vis a vis other wings of the police setup. Unfortunately, the
importance and the width of powers of the law and order police per se are its
real bane. The dependence of the common man on this wing of the police and
the fear, the police inspire prompt him to gratiate the police by all his means. The
incessant rush of people on the doors of the law and order police for patronage
creates farthing power-centers at lower levels, giving an image of feudal lords
to the chiefs of police stations who dare to preside over and pass judgments on
small local disputes irrespective of their relevance to maintenance of order and
other police duties. Marriages made in Police Stations are not uncommon in
states like Karnataka and Tamilnad. Favoritism abounds and rules and laws are
sidelined at will in these arbitrary arbitrations. This in itself creates angry
frustrations among wronged people and leads to group rivalries and clashes.
Thus the police are integrated as an inseparable component of a deteriorating law
and order situation.
TOOLS OF PATRONAGE
Powers enjoyed by the police to control and contain vice dens and rowdy
activities provide a new dimension to the importance and maneuverability of the
law and order police. Powers are two-sided weapons employed for punishment
as well as patronage. Human nature being what it is, the police use its wide
powers more as tools of patronage than as tools to check rowdyism and vice
dens in absence of professional commitment and motivating factors to guide
them on right lines. Organized crime syndicates vie inter se for the favour and
patronage of the police that ensure the smooth sail of their anti-social activities

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and protection to the gang. The gang that gains upper hand in the race rules the
roast till the key figures in the police responsible for the patronage remain in
power with the tacit understanding that the gang operates within certain limits
to save the police from undue embarrassments plus a subterranean arrangement
to share the res gestae. The importance of the police being what it is for the survival
of these organized crime syndicates, the importance of having right police
officials in key positions for these gangs cannot be overemphasized; this leads to
huge amounts changing hands to ensure that particular police officials are posted
to particular law and order jobs. The end-result is happy and secure crime
syndicates in highly lucrative vice business under police patronage at the cost of
unassuming citizens and a contented and richer law and order police running the
show without a fluster of major law and order scene. The hoi polloi too are
contented because there are no major disturbances and crimes with the
underworld crime lords on the right side of the police. Only they do not know
how they are looted ab intra and their unsuspecting character is taken advantage
of and ravaged by the conspiracy of criminals and criminal-baiters namely the
law and order police.
LACK OF CONCERTED DRIVE
Any shakeup in key positions of the law and order police leads to the
problems of maladjustment among the crime syndicates for superiority and
between the police and the crime world with gang-wars and ascensive criminal
activities creating real problems to the police. Once the police come to terms with
the crime gangs again, situation returns to normalcy. Refusal by a four square
official in a key law and order slot to cooperate with crime syndicates invariably
leads to further disturbances till the official is either brought to heels or
transferred out to placate the disturbed powerful gang-lords. It is a rather triste
affaire of Indian police that the resolve or the killing instinct to go tough with the
crime syndicates that play the police by their little fingers is just not present there.
More distressing is how upright officials who choose to fight powerful crime
syndicates without yielding to the temptations of easy and comfortable life feel
isolated when seriously let down and compromised by their own organisation
by denying support at the behests of the powerful crime lords on the mendacious
plea of maintaining peace. In a case more than a decade old, a young Deputy
Commissioner of Police in the port city of Calcutta in West Bengal fell foul with
a powerful crime syndicate operating from the port area and patronized by a
powerful politician in power in the state. He was lured by the gang to pursue a
criminal into the strongholds of the gang in the port area; caught, horrendously
tortured in captivity and later lynched. Though criminal cases were registered

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later, nothing came out of the case. This way a living lesson to upright police
officers that dare to take on powerful crime syndicates.
SIDING WITH THE PRIVILEGED
A major cause of law and order disturbances is the absence of objectivity,
fairness and sense of justice in the police in handling important issues. The police
tend to favour the rich and privileged few in interpretation and exercise of
powers to the disadvantage and outrage of the weak and dumb majority. This
in the long run, leads to resentment and breeds resistance against the
establishment and the system that conspires to perpetuate the weak and
unprivileged position by denying just and legal dues. The lex non scripta of the
police that whatever the rich and powerful do is right convince the poor and
disadvantaged that the extant system is not for them. The situation prompts
wronged people to meet the system by its own coin by going rich and powerful
by means outside the system to force the system and its police crawl before their
riches and power for their pro-rich slant, en revanche. That is why the ranks of
rowdy gangs and organized crime syndicates surface almost everyday in India
to go rich and powerful at the earliest. They soon learn that riches and powers
have no laws and morality and the police bought with it have no weaker legal
and moral authority; that the police patronage is pro rata to the riches they earn
and share. The notorious Chambal dacoits are the makings of the social evils and
the police patronage to its privileged perpetrators. The fact that Indian electorate
send ex-dacoits and criminals as their representatives so state assemblies and
parliament show the sympathies the criminals enjoy with the people who are in
touch with field situations and know how weak and helpless people perforce run
away from the society and go hors la loi by the outrageous acts of rich and
powerful with the police licking boots at their feet and letting loose brutality on
whoever dare to oppose the feudal lords. This by no means is justification of
lawless life and meant only to show how police by their greed and irresponsible
handling of situations add to the growth of crime and lawlessness in the society.
Phoolan Devi and her associates from the Chambal valley and UP and Bihar
maifa gangs proved that criminality pays in India; it pays wealth and fame as well
as political power and love and respect of the people. If there is a reason for this
highly deplorable moral degringolade in the country, it is the highly irresponsible and
most detestable handling of the law and order situation by its corrupt police,
which the hoi polloi find worse than the Chambal dacoits and Bihar and UP
mafia gangs.

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POORLY ORGANISED
All said and analyzed, the impact of Indian police on the management of law
and order scenario cannot be called satisfactory. The Indian scenario is based on
a few age-worn clichés devoid of professional expertise, academic input and
creative genius; the methods employed are rude at best and arrogantly
provocative at the worst. The whole range of law and order management
techniques of Indian police can be formulated in a few crude catchwords like
mediations or warnings followed by use of force. Indian police have no in-build
advantages of researches to various types of law and order situations,
psychological variables of divergent law and order issues their social and political
potentialities and group dynamics, law-breaking tendencies and identification of
and communication with potential law-breakers, stratified use of police powers
at differential situations, application of latest psychological techniques to field
situations or rehabilitation vectors. Nor their performances are up to the
expectation in traditional contrivances like effective use of weapons, strategies
and tactics of operations and techniques of mediation or warning. The riot
control weapons used by Indian law and order police are yet age-old lathi and
tear-gas shells; such common weapons like water jets and plastic bullets are
beyond the reach of police in most parts of India. Nor is there a perficient
machinery to gather information and intelligence pertaining to law and order
issues. The district and police station level machinery devised for the purpose are
ill equipped for the enormous job because of their limited size, resources,
expertise and professional training. The law and order police often depend on
the state intelligence unit that with a scope different from the local law and order
needs may fail the law and order police. The intelligence failures of the law and
order police contributed for eruption and spread of law and order disturbances
in many instances. A striking example of such a failure of intelligence is the
Veerappan case wherein the combined forces of Karnataka and Tamilnad police
failed to humble and bring to book the notorious forest brigand Veerappan who
operated from the forests bordering the two states. Though the operations by
no means were easy, the failure of the efforts for nearly two decades till he was
finally killed speak volumes about the strengths and weaknesses of Indian law
and order police.
The most precious aes triplex of a law and order police is its professional
honesty and commitment to the objectives of the profession. The selflessness,
impartiality and the sense of justness and fairness bred from such a professional
commitment endear the police to all including its friends and foes. The trust and

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respect ensue from this, take the police along way to success in its professional
endeavor and protect it from enormous professional hazards and risks common
to the job. Once this trust and respect are breached by immoral and illegal slants
in discharge of responsibilities lucri causa and other selfish causes, the police are
exposed to the wraths of the public and the assaults of its foes and those crowds
wronged by it. By prevarications, the police are protecting neither their job
interests nor the interest of the country and its people; nor are their personal
interests protected as no gains made at risk to the life are worth the trouble. Indian
police seld book so long and open eyes to look around. Once they stop to shed
their professional arrogance and see the minefields underfoot, they realize the
bevue they commit and may pursue a path befitting the dignity of their own
profession.

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