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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Power or pelf? | | It?s important to know why Indians join the police, or even the Maoists |
| Sunanda K Datta-Ray / New Delhi Feb 13, 2010, 00:12 IST |
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At the height of the Naxalite troubles, a much younger and fitter I accompanied a Rajput regiment on a week’s combing operations in West Bengal’s Birbhum district. Reading of attempts to tighten internal security, I am reminded of those seven days of exhaustion and exhilaration, of tramping all night through waterlogged paddyfields while the accompanying policemen complained like petulant children being unfairly punished.
West Bengal is unique but no effort to improve police performance can succeed without focussing on the human element. More money, incentives, specialised training, better infrastructure and additional recruits — all promised during the recent chief ministers’ conference — will not achieve much unless we know who joins the force and why. P Chidambaram regrets that only nine states have intelligence cadres. Judging by my two experiences in West Bengal, even those nine shouldn’t be taken seriously.
A scruffy sub-inspector in a crumpled uniform came to see me the day before a foreign envoy from Delhi who was also an old friend was due to call on me. “Please don’t mind,” said the sub-inspector in Bengali with a strong east Bengal accent, “but please let us know if he says anything”. Playing dumb, I replied that surely my visitor would say something, he couldn’t sit in silence. “I mean if he says anything important,” said the policeman. Resisting the temptation to ask if he would recognise what was “important”, I sent him packing with a blunt refusal. The sequel was alarming. When I mentioned the incident to a senior police officer, he rebuked me for being hasty. I should have humoured the sub-inspector and told him something. “Otherwise, he’ll make up all kinds of things. He has to submit a report!”
The second encounter was over the plainclothes guard the police commissioner gave me because militants were expected to attack newspaper editors. No one was supposed to know the man’s identity. He told me he would sit among the peons outside my room, mix unobtrusively with the staff and extract information without anyone even being aware of saying anything. But as I walked to my room every morning, the plainclothesman would jump smartly to his feet and boom out, “Good morning, sir!” He did that every time I stepped out of my room.
The firing episode outside Calcutta’s American Centre was less innocent. Far from shooting back, the police locked themselves and their weapons inside their black van, leaving a hapless comrade outside to be shot dead. So was my Birbhum experience of policemen complaining bitterly all night and accusing (among themselves in Bengali) the military of deliberately victimising them. I thought it was Bengali lyricism surfacing when they burst into song before dawn. But, no, I was advised they were warning Naxalites lurking in the distant huts. Collusion was common in those days. It might still be.
So might the tactic of branding anyone with a grievance a Naxalite. Reports of Bihar’s Arrah district being infested with ideological rebels took me there in the mid-seventies only to find illiterate and inarticulate landless Musahar peasants paid far below the minimum wage. The burly mustachioed worthies who stalked me as I tried to talk to the supposed rebels were Yadavs, owners of their fields. I should write of their right to own guns, they demanded. I imagine policemen everywhere are more likely to be recruited from their ranks than from Musahars.
I am intrigued by the additional one in the 204,021 police posts that UP created at the end of 2008, pushing up the number of vacancies countrywide to 394,000. Was this on a rational assessment of needs or for some political or pecuniary reason? Money is never far from the surface. As the police contingent, pot-bellied and multiple-jowled, stumbled past in a Calcutta Republic Day parade, a group of watching little boys chanted “Chowanni! Chowanni!” A boy explained that policemen demand and get much more than four annas nowadays, but the old nickname has stuck.
Do Indians join the police for the pay, sense of power or money to be made on the side? Do Indians become Naxalites — Maoists since the Maoist Communist Centre and Peoples War Group merged to create the Communist Party (Maoist) — to overthrow authority, enfranchise the poor or loot, murder and extort? The two are often two sides of the same coin. Though Buddhadev Bhattacharjee claims poverty has nothing to do with Maoism, barring a few Kopad Ghandys, most of our Maoists, tribal and non-tribal, are struggling to escape destitution. So are our paharawalas. Neither cares much how they do it.
sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
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