A strange situation has arisen in Maharashtra where the crime reports are not about criminals but about officers of the rank of director general of police. Top cops hog the courtroom headlines as well. Last Saturday, both reports appeared side by side. One was about a fifth extortion case against deposed Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh and the other about the state accusing its former intelligence chief Rashmi Shukla of leaking official secrets. No Bollywood writer could have conjured up such a plot, which thickens with former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh facing arrest for allegedly ordering Mumbai cops to extort Rs 100cr a month.
His replacement Dilip Walse-Patil thinks the best damage control he can do is to not open his mouth. If the state wanted an upright officer to head the force, they have it in Sanjay Pandey but the man has not been confirmed as DGP even after four months of taking charge. It’s a sad state of affairs for a police force that has produced stalwarts such as Suryakant Jog, Julio Ribeiro, Satish Sahney, Ronnie Mendonca, Sanjeev Dayal... right up to Subodh Jaiswal two years ago.
This only shows the cynical manipulation of the police force even in a state like Maharashtra and the inability of the IPS leadership, civil society and the judiciary to set things right in the absence of political will. No wonder Ribeiro refused to head an inquiry into the Antilia case, saying that the mess was of the state’s own making and they had better deal with it.
And it is not as if there is no solution to it. After a long struggle, former IPS officer Prakash Singh managed to push police reforms through the Supreme Court but all political parties have ganged up to scuttle it. Maharashtra’s record in blocking and subverting the Supreme Court-supported police reforms is no better than that of the cow-belt states it looks down upon. There was not a word about police reforms in Walse-Patil’s first and only press briefing as home minister.
Take the Police Complaints Authority (PCA), which is an independent body to inquire into complaints by the public against police personnel, involving allegations of serious misconduct, corruption and abuse of authority. In Maharashtra, there is one PCA at the state level and six at the divisional level; in Nashik, Pune, Aurangabad, Nagpur, Amravati and Konkan. Except for the one at Pune, all others are non-functional. The state-level PCA comprises a retired high court judge, a serving IPS officer from the office of the additional director general (establishment), a retired IAS officer, a retired IPS officer and an eminent member of civil society.
According to the Public Concern for Governance Trust, whose interns attended its hearing for three months when it was functional, the judge never showed up, the police officer rode roughshod over the complainants and the civil society member was silent throughout. The report the authority was supposed to table in the assembly was never submitted. In any case, the report is not binding on the government. The new state PCA has not been fully constituted. Last heard of, the home department was probing allegations that Rajkumar Dhakane, a toll contractor who was named as the ‘eminent member of civil society’, was facing a charge of attempt to murder.
Had the PCA been active, the complaints against Param Bir Singh would have surfaced much earlier. Whatever the merit of the charges against Shukla, the report which she is accused of leaking is about police officers buying postings using politically-connected touts. Sharad Pawar himself had spoken disparagingly about the ‘transfer’ industry some years ago. If those appointed to key posts focus on recovering their investment, due process goes out of the window.
Due process or going by the rulebook is the old-fashioned way of doing things but in the long run, it is the best way to control crime, maintain law and order and improve the image of the force. It is in the absence of due process that we see episodes such as the Antilia case, the Telgi fake stamp paper scam where several senior police officers were arrested, the era of the ‘encounter specialists’, who, having amassed cash and clout through encounters (mostly contract killings on behalf of rival gangsters), became a force within a force.
To avoid political interference in police transfers, the Supreme Court had directed all states to constitute police establishment boards comprising senior police officials and headed by the additional chief secretary (home) for dealing with promotions, transfers and service-related matters of police personnel. It had directed the state government to “give due weightage to PEB recommendations and normally accept these”. It is apparent that the Maharashtra government, as other state governments, have rendered the PCAs and PEBs useless. Prakash Singh, former DGP of Uttar Pradesh, the original petitioner in the police reforms case, has filed a contempt petition before the SC for the non-implementation of its directives. However, the SC does not seem to be in any hurry now.
Courts give thunderous rulings but soon, it is business as usual. Ordering a preliminary CBI probe into allegations against Deshmukh by Param Bir Singh, the Bombay high court had remarked: “The Constitution envisages rule of law and not rule of goons having political support.’’ Now, if the case is allowed to meander, it will be forgotten, like the police reforms case and the 1993 Vohra committee report about the nexus between criminals, police, politicians and bureaucrats in India. Today, all fear of the law has vanished and it won’t be long before Vikas Dubeys surface in Maharashtra.
