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Book Review
Order not justice
ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE POLICE IN INDIA: K. S. Subramanian; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B-1/I-1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area, Mathura Road, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 350.
In this clear and highly-informative book, K. S. Subramanian, a former police and intelligence officer and an accomplished scholar, shows how, from the very moment of Independence, the new political bodies swiftly ensured that law and justice were replaced by law and order; order, namely established power, wealth and authority, was to be maintained by any means and at any cost. The new rulers rapidly turned from colonial victims into users of repressive colonial bodies against their own political adversaries, in particular communists and many other groups thereafter. The very idea that official bodies exist to uphold the law and are answerable to the public who legitimate the politicians has almost vanished from Indian public space; legitimate grievance, dissent, and protest are, for the Indian Republic, criminality and subversion almost by definition.
Therefore, the police as investigators of crime are still, with a few exceptions, recognisable in the 1859 colonial description of them as “all but useless for the prevention and sadly inefficient for the detection of crime,” and “unscrupulous in the exercise of their authority,” with a “very general reputation for corruption and oppression.” It follows that official statistics on crime are totally unreliable; the “dark figure” of crime unreported, unrecorded and uninvestigated is estimated at thrice the official figure. Crimes against women, within or without the home, are especially neglected, as are those against Dalits and religious minorities, in respect of whom the author documents shameless and vicious Hindu communalism by the police and almost all administrative bodies in many regions of India; one senior police officer has concluded that the police are a “Hindu force”. To India’s lasting disgrace, several public-service officials who should — and constitutionally could — have rejected illegal ministerial orders have offered no resistance.
Functioning
In addition to the police, a plethora of paramilitary forces and intelligence agencies now exists, and many are used in ways which make a nonsense of the Constitution. Law and order are state responsibilities, but few state governments have hesitated to call for central paramilitary forces, now a “parallel police”, when faced with significant dissent over almost any issue. Inevitably, the Indian state has vastly expanded the paramilitary forces, some of which have become a byword for brutality and political repression. The state has also, as happened crucially at the Babri Masjid in 1992, failed to use its paramilitary forces to uphold the law and the Constitution when one order to the commanders would have been enough.
Most of the intelligence agencies operate with no parliamentary oversight, despite evidence from other democracies that oversight generally restrains such bodies from the worst illegalities and can improve their functioning. In India, the agencies’ creation and maintenance solely by the executive guarantees the abuse of power.
While all the services Subramanian describes are tainted by political partisanship, interference, and illegality, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) is particularly disturbing. A direct descendant of two colonial agencies, the IB is a state within a state, and an uncontrolled and possibly uncontrollable one; not answering to its nominal superior, the Union Home Secretary, it holds direct access to the Prime Minister and Home Minister and is covered by neither statute nor charter of duties. It writes no annual reports, and is now the major if not the sole source of information for the Home Ministry. Recommendations for the specification of its powers were sidelined by the incoming Congress government in 1980 and remain sidelined.
Impact of the IB
The impact of the IB on major issues facing India is bewildering. For example, B. N. Mullik, IB Director from 1950 to 1964, seems to have decided in 1953 that Sheikh Abdullah be arrested, in 1955 that the army be deployed — against all other agencies’ advice — in Nagaland, in 1959 that China would not attack India’s forward positions on the North-East Frontier, and, also in 1959, that the elected Communist government in Kerala be dismissed. Mullik “plainly relied on extra-sensory perceptions rather than the regular disciplines of intelligence collection and assessment”, and told the politicians exactly what they wanted to hear.
In effect, the Indian state has centralised tremendously its means of control, repression, and surveillance, and has all but obliterated any space for reasoned dissent and protest. This is the conduct of an oligarchic dictatorship, not a democratic republic, and suits India’s social and financial elites perfectly. Fortunately, Subramanian is one of a small but growing group of public servants who are no longer prepared to keep silent.
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