Asia-Pacific, Headlines, Human Rights

INDIA: Fugitive Heroes Highlight Need for Police Reforms

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 14 2005 (IPS) - Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi is a true blue nawab (prince), former captain of India’s cricket team and the husband and father of movie stars. For the last two weeks he has also evaded arrest by police on charges of slaughtering endangered wildlife.

Also on the run from police is Gautam Goswami, an Indian career bureaucrat who was named ‘Asian Hero’ in 2004 by Time magazine for supervising flood relief work in eastern Bihar state but is now accused of diverting more than five million dollars worth of relief funds into private accounts.

Two weeks ago police in Patna city, where Goswami held the powerful administrative position of district magistrate, announced reward money for information leading to the capture of the man whom ‘Time’ said in its Oct. 4, 2004 issue had the reputation for upholding the law that "improves the image of a civil service perceived by many Indians as corrupt or inefficient".

While absconding Goswami and Pataudi have been negotiating bail through lawyers, a luxury that is reserved for the rich and the powerful, although India’s 1950 constitution is emphatic that all citizens are equal before the law.

"The constitution is a fine piece of paper but in reality the police remain a feudal force that is completely subservient to the rich and the influential while earning for itself a reputation for being corrupt and partial and ready to carry out any atrocity on the weak and deprived," said Gangaprasad Joshi, a former police officer who now works with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) on police reforms.

Joshi pointed to the daily fare in India’s newspapers of rapes in custody, extra-judicial executions and large-scale bribery on the one hand and the apparent helplessness of the police in bringing to book mafia bosses – several of whom have even got themselves elected to Parliament to howls of "criminalisation of politics".

What Joshi is saying is equally true in the neighbouring countries of South Asia, some of which are, if anything, more feudal. And in most countries of the Asia Pacific region, controlling crime and violence without violating the rights of ordinary citizens presents a major challenge to good governance.

‘Can anyone hear us?’ a document that came out of a participatory survey conducted in 47 Asia Pacific countries by the World Bank and released in 2000 vividly showed the fears, insecurities and vulnerabilities of ordinary people when they had to deal with agencies of the state, in particular the police.

India’s National Police Commission has in its own reports acknowledged that "partiality, corruption, brutality and failure to register cognisable offences", were reasons why the police force has continued to have a poor image in the public eye.

Joshi traces many of the problems in the region to police systems that have evolved out of histories of colonialism (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) or dictatorships and cruel internal conflicts (Laos, Cambodia and Burma) or monarchies (Nepal and Thailand) and were expected to be loyal and subservient to the rulers of the day.

Across the Asia Pacific what followed decolonisation, said Joshi, was the growth of a nexus between powerful politicians, bureaucrats and the police, as exemplified by the experience of countries stretching from the Philippines through Indonesia to Bangladesh and Pakistan, where police are seen not as servants of the law but of the regime in power.

But what he and other experts and reformers find themselves up against today is a reluctance and even refusal by supposedly democratic systems to dismantle the colonial or feudal order, especially in South Asian countries.

Writes KS Dhillon, an eminent police researcher with the state-run Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla: "The basic character of the South Asian police with its twin legacies of servility to the ruler and oppression for the mass of the people" survived the past with "neither the political class nor the bureaucracy, and least of all the police itself, showing any anxiety to alter its established culture, ethos, role and functional styles".

Joshi however cautions that impunity and evasion of arrest by the rich and powerful is by no means the entire story of poor police functioning.

When arrests of high profile personalities happen they are often the result of political vendettas with the aim being to harass, humiliate or even hurt rather than to pursue the ends of justice, which does not boost the public’s faith in the police system, he said.

The high decibel arrest of the Shankaracharya, Jayendra Saraswati, regarded by many as the ‘Pope of Hinduism’ on charges of murder in November was seen as the result of a feud between the pontiff and the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayaraman Jayalalithaa, who was compelled to appear on TV to make denials and protestations, and to declare that what was happening was simply the law taking its due course.

In his bail plea forwarded through lawyers on Monday, Pataudi, who is related by blood to aristocracy in both India and Pakistan, said his arrest on charges of killing a black buck in the forests of Haryana state bordering Delhi, "would serve no useful purpose but his humiliation".

"I am a 65-year-old suffering from various physical ailments and undergoing treatment for severe atherosclerosis, a disease of the blood vessels," Pataudi, nicknamed ‘Tiger’ for his exploits on the cricket field, said in a plea that would have been insufficient to prevent most ordinary people from getting at least a night in the clapper.

Goswami, 38, who also forwarded a bail plea through his lawyers from his hideout on Monday, was more inventive. He attached a copy of the issue of Time that extolled his incorruptibility as one reason why he should not be locked up.