These days incidents of violence are happening all around us -all pervasive and yet invisible. Invisible because, we live in a society where low-level endemic day to day violence is normalized. We have developed blind spots that stop us from seeing what is sometimes right below our noses – sometimes, often in our own homes. To highlight this, an organization recently held a painting exhibition illustrating several instances of everyday violence in a prominent Delhi mall. A mall is a place where people come to shop, eat out or spend an evening with their families, not to admire paintings.
The choice of a mall was deliberate, it was to highlight to India’s rich and privileged mobile population like us with disposable incomes about the culture of violence that surrounds them; we are indeed hand in glove with this culture of impunity and general apathy. The several hundred visitors at the exhibition pointed questions to the artist while some indulged in self introspection about how they could do their bit towards a better society. A utopian society that is governed by the rule of law, where perpetrators of violence are deterred because of speedy and effective necessary measures.
Sadly, the police and other law enforcement agencies are generally considered inept by most people unless prodded by political authorities. Let alone investigating a crime thoroughly, in many instances the police will often decline to lodge an FIR, which at the very least, forces them to acknowledge that a crime has occurred under their jurisdiction. In recent incidents of mob lynching that have been widely reported, perpetrators have repeatedly said that they had to take the law into their own hands as the police were absent or unreliable.
When a seven-year-old boy was murdered in the bathroom of a private school last year, the Gurugram police forced the conductor of a school bus to confess and closed the case. Weeks later a court-ordered investigation used previously ignored CCTV footage to reveal that the culprit was infact an older student. While bad press coverage makes it easier to blame the police for everything, the reality is way more complex.
A chat with the police makes the reasons for poor performance very clear. Firstly, there are too few of them. India’s ratio of policemen per 1,000 people is just 1.2, about half the level recommended by the UN. By the government’s own calculation the country has 600,000 fewer policemen than required. Although the general impression is that, the police are lazy, but they tend to be overworked.
A survey in 2014 unearthed that 90% of officers worked longer than eight hours a day, and 73% got not more than a day off per week. The recent introduction of eight-hour shifts in Kerala and Mumbai has radically improved their morale.
The administrative edifice of the police has changed very little since the colonial era. Two-thirds of police personnel are constables, usually with little training, obsolete equipment and no powers to arrest or investigate. At the top of the pyramid stand the 5,000 members of the Indian Police Service, that before 1920 was staffed only by British officers.
Selected by the UPSC, these elite officers rarely stay in a post for more than two years but enjoy housing, transport, and other perks. Between them and the constables are the officers in various state police forces who hold full responsibility for everyone junior to them but enjoy no influence over the elite IPS Officers.
A 2018 report released by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative measured obedience by Indian states with six orders on police reform issued by the Supreme Court in 2006. Not even one state had fully complied with the orders. No wonder it’s been concluded that politicians are unwilling to reform the police because the force serves their interests very well. According to a state police chief, the top three problems are poor communications within the force, lack of manpower or resources—and intervening politicians. The whole system is a dire need of a reform.