'Degree's of deception

 

Why do politicians lie about their education so much? Many of their degrees seem shrouded in differing degrees of deception. 

I first saw it in my cadre, West Bengal. Back in 1991/1992, Mamata Banerjee was with the Congress and a fiery politician. Suddenly she decided to write Dr. Mamata Banerjee on all posters and wall graffiti. The then ruling party, CPM used their formidable machinery to check the records of all possible places where she could have obtained a doctorate, even an honorary one and came up with a blank. Then they went to town with it. So much so that Chief Minister Jyoti Basu used to mention it in derogatory terms in almost every single speech of his, even long after Mamata Banerjee dropped the Dr. bit from her name.

 

Hers was not a case in isolation.

 

In her election affidavit, Sonia Gandhi had claimed to have passed from Cambridge University. The affidavit stated that she holds a "Certificate in English from Lennox Cook School, Cambridge University, completed in 1965." She was grossly economical with the truth. She did attend a language school in the town of Cambridge but it was not part of Cambridge University. In May 2007, the Supreme Court of India dismissed a petition seeking a criminal case against her, ruling that her affidavit did not mislead voters and accurately described her language course rather than an advanced degree.

 

Then came a supreme Irani irony – Smriti Irani. While contesting for the 2004 general elections, her affidavit with the election commission stated that she had graduated with an arts degree in 1996 from Delhi University's School of Correspondence. In 2011 and 2014 affidavits, her highest qualification came down to Bachelor of Commerce (B. Com) Part-1 from the School of Open Learning/Correspondence (1994). In a “masterstroke,” she was appointed as the education minister. When the education bit became an issue, she doubled down saying, “In that kitty where people call me anpadh, I do have a degree from Yale as well… which I can bring out and show how Yale celebrated my leadership capacity.” It turned out that the Yale “degree” was a completion certificate for a six-day India-Yale Parliamentary Leadership Program for Indian MPs.

 

AAP law minister, Jitender Singh Tomar was arrested by Delhi Police on June 9, 2015 after an investigation by Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University in Bihar revealed that his provisional law degree certificate was fabricated and non-existent in university records. Some MLAs of AAP also faced scrutiny.

 

Gopinath Munde, former Minister in Maharashtra faced scrutiny when records indicated discrepancies in his claimed law degree from a college in Pune, which opponents pointed out was established years after the date he claimed to have graduated.

 

In his Lok Sabha affidavits for the 2009 and 2014 elections, Nishikant Dubey of BJP claimed to have a part-time MBA degree from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University in 1993. However, he dropped this claim in the affidavit for 2019 elections. In a written reply to RTI query, Delhi University has clarified that no candidate named Nishikant Dubey was ever admitted to or graduated from their MBA program in 1993. He continues blithely as an MP and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology. Given his proven capacity to misinform, he may be a shoo-in to be the Information and Broadcasting minister in the not-too-distant future.

 

The biggest mystery has been about the degree/s of the biggest person in India now – He Who Is Above Us All (HWIAUA). The entire matter has been cloaked in secrecy, misinformation and stonewalling. In 2016, Central Information Commission directed two universities to provide details regarding HWIAUA’s graduation and post-graduation degrees. However, instead of a simple compliance, the universities have tried everything to block the same. The documents purported to be photocopies of the degrees, presented by two Ministers in a Press Conference invited ridicule because there were serious anomalies and impossibilities in them.

 

Here’s the thing. Even if a lowly official in any government office gives any false declaration and it’s found out, he loses his job. And here are people declaring all kinds of things in their election affidavits and otherwise. Obviously, for the election commission, there’re separate rules for separate beings. A bigger question is, why do the Netas do it? There is no educational qualification requirement for becoming an MP or an MLA or a Minister. In fact, many people with humble educational backgrounds have turned out to be excellent leaders and administrators. I think, the Netas inflate their education probably because of some capability-anxiety.

 

It took me six years of very hard labour, hundreds of hours of poring over thousands of pages of material, hour upon hour of desperation and anxiety as to whether anything at all was coming out of all that, very generous help from the IIT Delhi academic ecosystem and so on to “earn” my PhD. It makes my blood boil to see some Netas casually appending a Dr. to their names. Such things should be prosecuted hard. Also, this entire scam called honorary doctorate, etc. should be banned.

 

Rahul Dravid has actually achieved mindboggling excellence as a player, captain, coach and so on. He turned down Bangalore University's offer of awarding him an honorary doctorate, saying, "The thing about the doctorate is that my mom did her PhD and earned a doctorate at the age of 55. My wife’s a surgeon who studied seven years to get a degree in surgery. And I’ve always felt that if it was something I wanted, I would like to have earned it. I don’t mean that anyone else should have that feeling and I’m not trying to belittle anyone else. It’s just that I felt that way because of my own experiences.”

Lurching from government to government

 

With the recent change in government in West Bengal, I’ve been thinking a lot about political parties. Are they all really bad and/or objects of ridicule? Why do we have them then? Why do we vote for them? 

Some of us do vote for one party or the other because we just don’t have a choice. NOTA (None Of The Above) option has no meaning in the Indian context – it doesn’t change the outcome or cancel the poll. However, many of us do vote hoping for a change for the better, only to be disappointed.

 

Speaking from my 33 years of experience in the government and having closely observed the political parties and the politicians from close quarters, I feel, all of them individually and collectively actually do some good.

 

First of all, despite the greed and venality surrounding them, they haven’t bartered away India’s sovereignty. Look at our neighbourhood and any country which came out of the colonialist yoke. All of them either saw military coups or dictatorships or close alignment with one of the superpowers. India has been a glorious exception, with a fairly credible independence, civilian-military separation and stability.

 

Individually, each Party has done some good. Much of India’s post-Independence history has been dominated by Congress governments, both at the Centre and in many of the states. It gave us stability, an independent judiciary, an independent election commission, a disciplined army, high economic growth, educational and institutional excellence (IIMs, IITs, ISRO and so on) and some very progressive legislation like the 73^rd and 74^th Constitutional amendments to take democracy to the grassroots, the Right to Information Act, NREGA Act, and so on.

 

The BJP, currently the dominant party in the country’s political landscape, by a mile, has changed a lot of things for the better – elimination of Left Wing Extremism, taking the asymmetric warfare to Pakistan, amendment of article 370, abolition of triple talaq, and so on. The attempts at a uniform civil code are also a step in the right direction.

 

For much of my field policing career, I worked under the CPM government in West Bengal. Their big achievement was to give the destitute and the dispossessed a voice and to bring in ideological principles to politics. They also bridged the gap between communism and democracy and managed to keep Left Wing Extremism at bay. Under them, West Bengal saw landmark land reforms and cooperatives movements and also relative communal peace.

 

Mamata Banerjee is being vilified a lot today and much of the criticism is justified. However, she was actually a damned good administrator. She galvanized the creaking, status quoist bureaucratic machinery of West Bengal, made the babus work and enforced accountability. Her administrative review meetings were legendary, with everyone on her/his toes. She also started a lot of welfare schemes affecting the disadvantaged at various stages of their lives – Kanyashri, Laxmi Bhandar, Swasthya Sathi, Student Credit Card Scheme, Sabooj Sathi, Khadya Sathi, Taruner Swapno, Yuvashree and Samabyathi.

 

I have been working at the grassroots in Odisha. I am pleasantly surprised by the number, variety and depth of government schemes of Biju Janata Dal there.

 

When the parties do so much of good, why do we feel so disenchanted with politics and politicians? We vote for them with so much hope but after a few days get disgusted. The problem is, political parties and politicians come in bundled packages. When we vote for them, we look at only the good things they’re likely to do and have only a diluted awareness of the intolerable things that come in the package.

 

We vote Congress for a sense of inclusivity but along with that come dynastic politics, rampant reservation, appeasement and industrial-scale venality. We vote BJP for a muscular government but we also get attempts to change the Constitution and disturbance of the social fabric of the country and communal amity because of "other"ing the minorities. We vote CPM for upliftment of the poor and it comes with trade union militancy and resultant extortion, disrespect for our Constitution, ruthless bloodiness justified in the name of revolution and so on.

 

Regardless of party, all politicians also combine in that bundle enormous pettiness, a myopic 5-year horizon, winning elections at any cost-means be damned, and, above all, corruption – grand corruption.

 

Given the foregoing, I no longer approach or vote in any election with any hope for substantive change. What I look for is frequent change of government so that these guys have a fear of consequences when the dispensation changes. Else, they run amok.

The Silicon-chip meets the SHO

 

Let’s see what will happen if a citizen meets an AI-enabled robot instead of a human being (Duty Officer) when he first appears at the police station. At the very least, he’ll get a patient hearing, almost immediately, no sitting around waiting indefinitely, no lunch-ke-baad-aana. Whatever he says will get recorded in the General Diary verbatim but in a legible manner. If the matter is merely informatory in nature, a receipt with General Diary number, date and time will be automatically generated for him. If the matter indicates a cognizable offence, an FIR will be drawn up in a legible manner with correct sections of law without any discretion and escalated to the SHO for taking a decision as to whether to investigate or refuse investigation and allotment to an Investigating Officer. Refusal to register complaints, the long-standing bane of the police, will now be a thing of the past. This one measure, in itself, will transform the functioning and image of police no end.

Further, AI can reduce the humungous documentation burden that police stations grapple with. In 2024, around 59 lakh cognizable cases were registered. Each such case involves a First Information Report, the spot maps, witness statements, arrest memos, forensic reports, seizure lists, medical examination records, report in final form, and so on – documents numbering in hundreds. All documents in local language need to be translated in English when a case goes to the High Court or the Supreme Court. Manual translations for a single case can take up to 15 days which can now be done in an hour or so, while retaining specialised legal/ local terminology like surathal, panchnama, khatian, zimma etc. and also retaining page-for-page parity so that it is acceptable in the court. AI enabled digitisation can read handwritten FIRs in multiple languages with high accuracy. It can also process low-quality scans and faded documents by intelligently reconstructing the degraded letters. Most importantly, all the documents will become searchable.

Another big help from AI would be when the investigation is transferred to another officer due to transfer, etc.. Rather than the new officer having to go through the entire case file word by word, he can go through a structured summary, a chronological timeline of events, evidentiary gaps and inconsistencies, all generated by AI. AI can listen in to interrogation of accused, correlate everything and point out the inconsistencies in the statements.

AI can also generate the chargesheet index, cross-reference evidences and biometric data, witnesses and the sections of law and check for completeness of the case diary and the chargesheet. It can also create a draft prosecution narrative to be used by the Public Prosecutor and the Investigating Officer. My back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that AI can free up to around 30 officer-hours per day at a mid-size police station on documentation alone.

Both at the police station level and beyond, AI can also help in mapping crime hotspots, connect FIRs and Modus Operandi and help in identifying repeat offenders.

Police station inspections by senior officers are the backbone of police administration. Usually, it’s an annual affair preceding which there is a lot of activity to compile statistics and cover-ups so that the inspection goes off peacefully. Then things are forgotten for a year until the next inspection which may be by a different officer or the same officer who may not remember much of what all he’d instructed the previous time around. When one goes through successive inspection remarks, one sometimes sees the same instructions having been passed from time immemorial, without any substantive changes in the performance. AI can enable a GPS-enabled field visit tracking system which will have a digital record of every inspection. This will enable continuous performance monitoring and accountability rather than having a lot of sound and fury once in a year, signifying nothing. During every inspection, all previous instructions and their compliances would be available to the inspecting officer so that repeat issues will be highlighted. GPS tracking will ensure that the supervising officer actually visits the police station rather than churning out reports sitting in his office.

A module can be carved out for the public representatives to send their recommendation and escalate to higher-ups, if need be. Further, there can be a chat bot for the public to obtain any information regarding their application for permission, licences, various fines, applicable sections of law, etc. in any Indian language and English.

Finally, the performance of officers will now face automatic and systematic evaluation based on objective parameters like average response time, detection, preventive action, tasks performed, compliance metrics, pending cases, escalation frequency, etc. so that high performers can be rewarded and encouraged suitably while underperformers will be caught out and earmarked for skill and performance augmentation.

Despite all the foregoing, it is important that there must be human oversight and intervention because AI makes mistakes and sometimes, the mistakes in policing can make the difference between life and death, literally. Even if the Duty Officer may become dispensable, there must be some supervision of the robot doing that job too. Because many things about policing are confidential, the AI systems must be based on a dedicated self-hosted Large Language model, end-to-end encrypted and with restricted access to certain parts and trained on all the criminal laws, police regulations, Government Orders, SOPs and circulars.

There should be a unified gateway for all officers. Any FIR should be possible to be generated at any police station with automatic transfers to the police station of jurisdiction. The heinous crime cases (SR cases) which are supervised by senior officers can have almost instantaneous passing of instructions with deadlines and automatic escalation in case of non-compliance.

While predictive AI hasn’t been much of a success, it can still be used for “now-casting” – i.e., predicting the present or very near future crimes, riots and traffic issues using real-time data. AI can’t judge context or the nuances of social situations and does not have the emotional intelligence required of an SHO. As of today, AI can’t become an SHO but use of AI can make for an unimaginably better SHO. By several orders of magnitude.

The Silicon-chip SHO

 

Today Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. It’s in the smart-alec student’s assignment paper; it’s in the Income Tax officer’s financial forensics to catch tax dodgers; it’s in the dystopian scenario of the doomsday soothsayers; it’s in the ongoing attempts at self-driving cars; most importantly, it’s in the adda-intellectual’s morning discourse – he calls it Chai GPT (Genuinely Pure Tea) enhanced with AI (Adrak and Ilaichi). Has the time come then for AI to replace the SHO (Station House Officer), the pivot around which the entire policing system in India revolves?

Let’s see what all the SHO is expected to do.

The SHO supervises all the work of the police station including work allocation, general management, discipline and all the administrative work. In turn, he is the most supervised officer in the Police or in any governmental set-up, with at least six layers fairly closely supervising his work. This includes the senior officers and the judiciary to whom all his crime-related work is accountable.

Under the Indian criminal jurisprudence, he is the de jure Investigating Officer of all crimes in his Police Station area. All the investigation is carried out by officers of the Police Station under powers delegated by him. A senior officer takes up investigation under powers of the SHO assumed by the former.

The SHO is also responsible for maintaining public order in his jurisdiction. He arranges both preventive and mitigation actions in this regard. Preventive actions include patrolling, keeping an eye on evolving situations, surveillance of known offenders, lookout for suspicious or unknown faces, predicting disturbances and so on. When a major disturbance occurs, the SHO is usually the first one on the firing line and has to meet fire with force.

The SHO is expected to deal with situations and persons with empathy and emotional intelligence. He is called upon to treat people with a rare nuance which distinguishes between a crime of malice from the same crime born out of desperation or mortal distress. He navigates with resourcefulness (mostly illegal) demands from political parties of various hues, ever alert to the fact that today’s no-hoper opposition may be tomorrow’s king.

The general citizenry has huge expectations from the SHO. Frankly speaking, there is not a single other agency of the government which is open and responsive to the public 24 x 7 x 365, come hell or high water. When everything else is shut in the odd hours or during major depredations, there’s at least a sentry and mostly an officer available at the police station – in that sense, it is always the governmental arm of the last resort. 

Apart from all this, there’s a huge social role thrust upon the SHO. All government offices have a person who is called Bada Babu or its equivalent in various languages. In the housing department office, for example, the Section Officer is called Bada Babu. However, to the general public, Bada Babu usually means the SHO. So, amongst the Bada Babus, the SHO has an outsized eminence, he is primus inter pares. This is because of the influence he and his work wield, touching everyone at a very basic level.

Given such a complex job description, can he be substituted by AI? Let’s look at what AI can or cannot do, as of now.

The term AI is being used as THE ONE BIG THING which is turning everything topsy-turvy now. Well, it has been disruptive but it’s not one single thing. It’s an umbrella term comprising at least three categories: Generative AI, Predictive AI and Content moderation AI.

Generative AI has had the maximum success and has caught the popular imagination and also filled people with a lot of apprehension. However, what it actually does is basically recognise patterns in data, words and pictures and correlate them through layer-by-layer iterations so well that its output comes across almost as human. All that it’s doing, based on its training, is choosing the most appropriate words, picture patterns, etc. to give the most suitable response as per its algorithms. Since it has been trained on a very large amount of data and has had some moderation built in, its responses have been very impressive but not always accurate. It doesn’t have sentience, i.e., consciousness, regardless of the hype and the claims. However, its speed and abilities have been formidable.

As far as the predictive part is concerned, AI hasn’t worked well so far. In Police-related work, it has been tried out for criminal risk prediction (i.e., whether to release an accused on bail with low risk of his committing crimes again), hiring (whether the person will do well on the job), face recognition and crime prediction, with indifferent results and racial/ gender/ economic biases. So far, it has been somewhat satisfactory only in “predicting the past,” which is of no use to anyone.

Content moderation has been used extensively by social media platforms but has shown large and grave mistakes. So much so that one can’t even search for “gorillas” in Google photos or Apple photos apps now – blocked by the apps themselves because it identified all black people as gorillas.

At the present stage of development when AI is more of “Microsoft Excel than The Terminator,” it is not feasible to replace the SHO with a robot. Things might change when AI becomes capable of judging the context, cultural and political nuances and is able to do AI research itself, i.e., progress to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). That would require AI agents to self-improve through interacting with the physical world and the social world. To my mind, that is still some distance away.

That said, there’re still tremendous benefits to be had if we adopt AI for a lot of automation in policing, specifically at the police station level. I think, the utility through automation and not the hype of a sentient SHO-replacing-AI, is the part worth sitting with. That calls for another blog. Next week.

[To be concluded]

Let's go TACO

 

So, after spending USD 200 billion, losing 13 U.S. defence service members and causing world-wide disruption, what did Trump get from the US-Iran war? To see it in perspective, I prepared a comparative chart and juxtaposed the outcome with that of Obama without firing a single shot.

 

What Obama had in 2015	What Trump got in 2026
Iran gave a written commitment never to seek a nuclear weapon.	Iran gave a written commitment never to seek a nuclear weapon.
Tight ​limits on Iran's efforts to produce weapons-grade uranium, aimed at extending the "breakout" time it would need to produce a bomb.	Only a general path, no specific commitments from Iran.
Forced Iran to ship 98 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country.	Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium is to be diluted inside Iran — not destroyed — contingent on what may prove to be years of difficult diplomatic negotiations.
Extensive international inspection of nuclear enrichment.	Not mentioned in the MoU.
Unfroze tens of billions of Iranian monies held overseas and lifted crippling economic sanctions imposed by the United States and EU. Freed Iran's central bank to operate in the global economy. Also included cash transfers of previously seized assets amounting to $1.7 billion.	Lifted oil restrictions, promised to help create a $300 billion reconstruction fund in Iran with regional partners, and dangled the promise of sweeping sanctions relief if the two sides could reach a broader nuclear deal. But most of the sanctions relief is contingent on future negotiations that haven't yet materialized.
Allowed Iranian oil exports only after Iran shipped its enriched uranium out of the country and was verified to have dismantled core elements of its nuclear program.	Allowed Iran to immediately restart exporting oil — roughly 90 percent of which is sent to China — which will bring in a flood of petrodollars, directly funding the Iranian regime.
In exchange, Iran agreed to reduce its nuclear centrifuges by two-thirds, committed not to build new enrichment facilities for 15 years, significantly reduced its stockpile of enriched uranium, disabled a major heavy-water reactor and agreed to IAEA inspections.	In exchange, along with the lifting of the naval blockade by the United States, Iran  agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz.   Point 5 of the 14-point MOU states the strait will be toll-free for 60 days, but after that Iran will work with neighbouring Oman to “define future administration and maritime services” in the strait. That means tolls are not ruled out down the road.
Allowed Iran to enrich uranium up to 3.67 percent for 15 years – enough for developing a nuclear power programme, but well below the 90 percent needed to produce nuclear weapons.	The memorandum does not mention whether Iran will be allowed to enrich uranium at all or for how long.
Had very specific terms for sanctions in the event of non-compliance.	No such details are in the memorandum.

 

Trump claims to have obliterated ALL nuclear facilities of Iran. According to him, he has sunk its navy. He has killed its leadership and Iran no longer has an Army. So what exactly is the MoU about and who is it with?

 

If one is to believe Trump (like many of his MAGA supporters do), the United States didn’t wage war against Iran so didn’t need Congress approval, either before or after expiry of 60 days as mandated under War Powers Resolution. Nobody knows when this non-war began. Either it began in June 2025 when he didn't bomb Iran’s so-called nuclear sites “beautifully obliterating” them or it began on February 28, 2026 when Trump again “did not” start a non-war so that Iran couldn’t build the nuclear weapon with the totally obliterated Uranium that they didn’t have.

 

Following this, Iran closed down the Strait of Hormuz with weapons they didn’t have and its navy which was sunk. So, the United States had to continue waging its non-war to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Everything has now panned out beautifully due to Trump’s charismatic leadership and "Art of the Deal" and lo and behold, he has achieved unprecedented success which no other President was able to achieve, in reopening the Strait of Hormuz which was open before his non-war. For good measure, he has kept a provision for Iran to charge tolls in the future.

 

Glory be!

 

P.S. My take: Trump just couldn’t bear the economic pressure generated by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and caved in. TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

The straight and narrow

 

While Police academies and MBA classes have courses and lectures on how to be ethical or how to build an ethical organisation from scratch, not much emphasis is accorded to how to intervene in an unethical organisation. My thoughts on how to go about it crystallised over a long time. I feel, while individual situations vary, there are five essentials one should think of when suddenly parachuted into a situation of endemic and pervasive high-corruption.

First, define the transparency goals and see what level of corruption and indiscipline one could live with – sometimes, complete transparency or 100 % diligence to rules and regulations may not be feasible. As a DIG, I went to a lot of trouble to collect the transfer policies of organisations similar to mine, analysed and tried to improve upon them, prepared a draft policy for my organisation and got the same approved by the government. After this, I stuck to the policy to the letter. However, my DGP got increasingly annoyed at not having any discretion, not being able to oblige anyone and being helpless against a lot of pressures from different quarters. Finally, he changed my assignment and also revised the policy. My successor, a very good officer and senior to me, once advised, “Look, it’s important to be practical. If a transfer policy is implemented to even 70 %, that is a big achievement.”

 

Along with defining the ethical goals, it is important to keep the leadership on board and get them to have a buy-in. In my last assignment, I was face to face with rank indiscipline and corruption of one particular unit, WWCD. In the name of a ruling-party supported union, they had become a law unto themselves. I heard from my predecessors that whenever they’d tried to impose any discipline, the WWCD guys used to march up and down the corridors shouting slogans against the authorities in an aggressive manner. The Commandant used to quake when their union leaders threatened.

 

I compiled a list of their misdemeanours. A new location with modern buildings and facilities were constructed for them at a distance of 120 kms and government had ordered them to shift. However, in defiance, they’d refused to move, primarily because of the vested interest of some of the union office-bearers. I went to the Cabinet Minister, appraised him of the situation and told him that I was planning to shift them forcibly and I needed his support. He was hemming and hawing but I told him that it was not possible for me to work in such an environment and I was prepared to resign over the issue.

 

One day, in a coordinated operation, under heavy Police deployment, I organised the shifting process to start at 9 AM from the five locations of the wing, well before the personnel used to roll in casually at 11 AM. When they came and saw what was happening, they rushed to meet the Minister and other bigwigs of the ruling party but thanks to my prior efforts, they didn’t get to meet any of them. They tried to involve the press but didn’t get any purchase.

 

The second thing I learnt over time was that, rather than trying to attack corruption piecemeal, one should start with “frying a big fish.” In that WWCD unit, there was a constable rank person who was actually running the show because he was the head of the union. I mapped him in my mind as “The Don.” He used to decide who will get what duty, who will attend office and who will “work from home” [this was all way before Corona times], who will never be given any duty, who will get the contracts and so on. He himself was always on office duty and used to hold court after office hours to “decide” on everything for small and big considerations and distribute the day’s collections.

 

I decided to start with him. During the monsoon season, I put every single person on the field with water boats and rescue gear. The Commandant came to me in a panic and repeatedly asked whether the Don would also be sent on field duty and I asked why not. Then the Don walked in with his entourage and asked me how I’d put him on the field when none of my predecessors had dared to do so in the previous 26 years. He mobilised the entire wing to “boycott” the duties. In my research into his conduct, I’d found that he had kept a died-in-harness employee’s dues and benefits pending while processing applications of much later vintage. Based on this, I placed him under suspension and started the Departmental proceedings. I also threatened to start a Police case against him for criminal breach of trust. That broke the back of the revolt. When the office was moved, 123 empty liquor bottles were found in the room where he used to hold court.

 

The third important means of taking an unethical organisation towards an ethical culture is to incentivise ethical conduct and disincentivise unethical acts. Incentivisation in the Police context includes generous rewards, glowing testimonials, favourable appraisals, medals – even a pat on the back works wonders. Disincentives must be harsh for unethical acts. In Police, many unethical acts are punished through minor punishments like a “censure” or “warning.” The most stringent punishment is usually a suspension and a Departmental Enquiry which meanders on for years. These are not very effective nor immediate. When I was SP of a district, I learnt that the night patrolling was a major source of illegal income for the Thana personnel. Against a specific complaint, I went to the Police Station and got the concerned persons arrested. That served as a chilling effect throughout the district.

 

The fourth thing I’ve tried to do was encouraging whistleblowing. However, this is a delicate step. The whistleblower runs serious risk, not only of his life and limb but sometimes his family members’ too. While encouraging whistleblowing, one must make sure that the potential whistleblower is fully protected. His identity should be guarded.

 

Fifth and finally, sunlight is the best disinfectant. When I joined the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), I found that corruption was rampant. There had been several CBI cases against the personnel and even very senior officers. The main way of extortion was through delays. Many permissions and licenses needed to be obtained by airports, airlines, concessionaires and so on before they could operate in the aviation environment. A single day’s delay meant losses of crores of rupees for them. What I did was put everything on the website. All permission/ licensing processing were put up there right from the application stage through each of the stage of processing with details on where it was pending and why, with names and designations of the official concerned. It was now easy for any applicant to track his application on a real-time basis. It was also easy for me to continuously monitor. This put paid to the delays. Further, in the teeth of severe opposition from my staff and their contrary counsel, I put up my mobile phone no. on the BCAS website. Sure, there were a few crank calls but I received such quality information that the organisation and I could respond to developing situations promptly and robustly. I think, these two measures contributed immensely to India hitting the top spot in terms of civil aviation security across the world.

 

Unfortunately, some of these telephone calls still come, despite my having left BCAS and even retired from the service long back because the no. is somewhere on the net. I don’t mind. At least, I managed to keep some people on the straight and narrow.

Maximal leader, minimal bureaucrat

 

I don’t think many people outside Bengal have heard about Mira Pandey. 

Everything about her was quiet, understated, minimal – soft-spoken, never bothered about posting and lurched from insignificant post to insignificant post without ever being a District Magistrate and retired from the “lowly” post of Principal Secretary, Cottage and Small-scale Industry in 2008. The Left Front government was on the lookout for just such a person for a sinecure job of State Election Commissioner and thought she fit the bill perfectly. Lucky for them, they never knew how badly they had miscalculated.

 

Unlike the Central Election Commission, the West Bengal State Election Commission does not enjoy untrammelled independence. The state deliberately passed an Act where the dates of polls etc. were to be decided by the government. In fact, unlike the high-profile Central Election Commissioner, the West Bengal State Election Commissioner’s job was considered a dead-end.

 

There was just a minor skirmish between the Left Front government and Mira when they wanted a single-phase rural polls and Mira opposed. The government budged and that was that. When elections are held in a single phase, the Police force gets scattered. Many of the booths get manned by unarmed Home Guards or even temporarily recruited volunteers who are ill, fragile, overage and singularly incapable of tackling any disturbance. This helps the Party with numerical strength, usually the ruling Party.

 

Then came Didi riding on a Tsunami of a mandate in 2011. There was nothing quiet about her. She rode roughshod over everything and everyone, even micro-managing Casual Leave applications of DMs and SPs. Every single bureaucrat from the Chief Secretary to the Constable felt the heat. Supreme leader. Maximal absolutism. Most heads of departments and institutions panicked, and then gave in. Even initiating a case or arresting someone required Didi’s permission.

 

Something sleepy called a State Election Commission must have been just a gleam in the eye for Didi and Trinamool Congress in the initial days. In 2013, the Panchayat elections fell due.

 

The State Election Commission requested for 400 observers. It recommended polling in three phases. It also pointed out that the existing strength of Police force was inadequate to meet the requirement hence central forces be requisitioned. In response, the state government provided 266 observers. It unilaterally declared a single Poll date as they had the power as per the West Bengal Panchayat Elections Act. They said that there was no need for central forces.

 

The significance of this: In Bengal Panchayat elections, there is a tendency by the ruling party not to allow any candidate to stand against the ruling party candidate. CPM had developed this into a fine art. In the 2003 elections, in many villages where anyone dared to stand against the CPM candidate, the intellectual giants of the party visited the rival and gave him long and cogent arguments regarding Karl Marx, Lenin, the intricacies of dialectical materialism, etc.. If the fellow got convinced, it was good. If he did not get convinced, the leaders politely withdrew, called a small child in the neighbourhood and gave him a white saree to present to the rival candidate’s wife, with their compliments. In sheer terror, many candidates withdrew and 2003 saw an unprecedented number of seats where the CPM candidates won unopposed. Didi didn’t have time for the intellectual bit. Any rival candidate was beaten up mercilessly on his way to the BDO office or SDO office to file his nomination and he was not able to reach. Mira Pandey sent observers for the nomination phase also and cancelled the election wherever there was intimidation. Hence she needed more observers and hence the state government was not willing. Single poll date and avoiding central forces had similar logic.

 

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of the matter. As mandated by the Act, the State Election Commission had made its recommendations. The state government was not mandated to follow the recommendations and had done their own thing. Even though everyone knew the reality, the farce called Panchayat elections would have been gone through. Hardly any State Election Commissioner, much less a quiet, unassuming lady like Mira Pandey would go public with it. Most civil servants would have reread the Act, swallowed the prickling of their conscience and bitten the bullet.

 

Not Mira Pandey. She did something extraordinary. She filed a case in the Calcutta High Court against the State government. All hell broke loose. This was unheard of. No Election Commission had ever filed a case against the government. In West Bengal the concerned Act favoured the government. There were dire threats to the person of Mira Pandey from public platforms and through letters. She did not respond to anything except forwarding all such intimidation to the DGP. The state government was still confident that they would carry the day because as per the Act, they had the power to do what they did. What they had not bargained for was that Mira Pandey would challenge the constitutionality of the Act itself. She did, with devastating effect.

 

In the High Court, she pointed out that during the previous Panchayat polls, the polling booths numbered 47,731 which had now increased to 57,012. The voters had increased by almost a lakh. She pointed out that she had asked for 400 observers and the government had provided only 266. She had asked for 800 Companies (80,000 personnel) of Central forces and the state government had refused. Most importantly, section 42 of the Panchayat Election Act was ultra vires (i.e., incompatible) with section 243 K of the Constitution which envisaged a neutral and impartial conduct of elections. The High Court ordered that the Commission would issue the dates, the state government would supply the balance observers and get additional forces as required by the Commission.

 

The state government decided to play the (wo)man and not the ball. They tried to discredit Mira Pandey. Many leaders openly and covertly threatened her life and limb. She never spoke to the Press. When cornered by some media as she was entering the car, she merely said, “The Commission cannot make irresponsible statements.” This must have hurt. The state government also indulged in dilatory tactics so as not to comply with the High Court order. All Mira did was quietly file a Special Leave Petition in the Supreme Court regarding the dilatory tactics.

 

I don’t think there have been many angrier judgements by the Supreme Court. In fact, one of the judges told the open Court, “We will show West Bengal government how elections are conducted.” Instead of the three phases asked for, they increased the schedule to five phases, fixed timelines for provision of observers and central forces and virtually made the State Election Commission the final authority for everything for that period. 2013 saw the fairest Panchayat elections in West Bengal. There were the least number of seats won uncontested. Mira Pandey became and still is a household name in West Bengal.

 

In fact, she terrorised Didi so much that there was a rumour that Didi used to check whether she had left her office for the day so that she could not take retaliatory action and then gather her papers and talk to the Press regarding anything to do with the elections.

 

On her last day in office, Mira Pandey reluctantly agreed to a rare interview by the Telegraph. Her answers were extremely banal and non-controversial. Deliberately so. When goaded to comment on Didi, she said, “I have all due respect for the Chief Minister’s chair.” Then she got into her car and rode off into the sunset.

 

Till date, when agitated about anything to do with elections, many Bengalis still murmur, “Alas, had Mira Pandey been there today …”