Thugs and the goddess

 

[Disclaimer: This piece is not about the current controversies about different portrayals of Goddess Kali; it’s about cops and robbers. As usual.]

 

During the IPS training, we are attached for a spell with a Police Station, to either function as the SHO or work closely with the SHO. In the premises of the Police Station I was attached with, there was a temple of Goddess Kali. Later, I found that most of the Police stations had temples devoted to goddess Kali, the goddess of Time, or alternatively, the goddess of destruction and renewal. It is customary for many Police officers to offer prayers before the Goddess before embarking on dangerous raids or missions. The SHO explained that Goddess Kali is believed to imbue a devotee with superhuman powers, required in the conquest of good over evil.

 

I further quizzed the SHO as to who was the revered God or Goddess for the other side, i.e., the criminals. He sheepishly admitted, Goddess Kali again. Reason was the same – they also wanted superhuman powers to overpower their victims and to escape or outwit the cops. Although on opposite sides of the fence, we pray to the same god(dess) to achieve opposite outcomes. Well, some people believe that cops and robbers are two sides of the same coin but that’s another story …

 

When I was a district SP, I found that the Kali Puja committee of the Kali temple in a town was headed by the local SHO. I was a little against Police officers getting personally involved in the religious affairs of the town so advised my officers against such involvements. However, many prominent citizens of the town sought my appointment to persuade me against the diktat. What I learnt was that the Kali temple in the town was an extremely cherished place of worship, social activities and general congregation. It was started long before through the energetic and strenuous efforts of the then SHO of the Police station who went around collecting donations in the form of cash, kind and land for the construction of the temple. The best part was, the SHO was himself a Muslim. This had struck a very poignant chord amongst the general populace and the temple not only became a place of congregation for people of all faiths, it also served as an all-faith syncretic bond amongst people. Since then, it was the tradition of the place to have the SHO as the Chairman of the Committee and the general population could not conceive of the temple and all that it stood for without the involvement and active participation of the Police and the incumbent SHO. In that one Police station area, I never had to bother about the communal fabric coming under any strain.

 

Goddess Kali also featured prominently in one of the most successful Police operations during British times.

 

In Indian folklore, mentions of a very secret organisation, specialising in cheating, robbing and killing unwary travellers were common. However, not much was known about this organisation or even the fact that there was an organisation. The gang members were called Thag or Thaga (Thuggees by Britishers, later), sometimes considered the world’s first Mafia, which operated from the 13^th to the 19^th Century.

 

The word "thug" has its roots in the Hindi and Urdu word thag, which means thief or swindler, originally derived from the Sanskrit verb “sthagati” (to conceal). These robbers were adept at concealment and distraction. A common method used by them was to distract their targets while attempting to strangle them from behind, usually with a piece of cloth. They were such experts that the killing would occupy nano seconds. They used a secret language called ‘Ramasee’ (intimations of J.K. Rowling’s Parseltongue?) to disguise their real intentions from their targets. They also used certain signs by which the members recognised each other in the most remote parts of India.

 [Two thuggees pointing upwards to the sky to distract their

victim, while another creeps up behind to strangle him.]

 

Thugees' preference for garrotting might have originated from a law during the Mughal Empire under which, for a murderer to be sentenced to death, he must have shed the blood of his victim. Those who murdered but did not shed blood faced imprisonment, hard labour and penalty, but not execution.

 

Here is the interesting part. The gang members were both Hindus and Muslims but worshipped Goddess Kali, considering themselves as the Goddess’s children, having been created from her sweat. They would eat separately but smoke and drink together. Thugees actually believed that they were saving human lives by offering the human blood of their victims to the Goddess who needed to subsist on blood because of divine command. Without this offering, she might destroy all mankind because she needed to feed on blood because of the divine command. They believed that each murder prevented Kali's arrival for one millennium. Muslim thugs did not pray to Goddess Kali but worshipped her and assimilated her in their religion as a spirit subordinate to Allah.

According to Thuggee legend, Kali once battled a terrible demon which roamed the land, devouring humans as fast as they were created. However, every drop of the monster’s blood that touched the ground spawned a new demon, until the exhausted Kali finally created two human men, armed with rumals (handkerchiefs/scarves), and instructed them to strangle the demons. When their work was finished, Kali instructed them to keep the rumals in their family and use them to destroy every man not of their kindred. This was the tale told to Thuggee initiates.

The nature and extent of the organisation came to light when one member, Syeed Amir Ali (also called “Feringhea”) was captured and, based on his confessions, a mass grave with a hundred bodies was discovered. One British officer, William Henry Sleeman who had arrested Feringhea in 1835, made it his life’s mission to eradicate the scourge of these brigands. As far as hardcore investigative Policing was concerned, Sleeman was way ahead of his times, even by European and American standards. What he found was that this form of robbery was not an episodic occurrence but the doings of an extensive and fairly well-organised network spanning a very large swathe across much of India. A new department was created and was called the Thuggee and Dacoity Department. Sleeman was its first Superintendent. This Department lasted till 1904 when it gave way to the central Criminal Intelligence Department (CID).

 

Sleeman built a formidable intelligence network and infiltrated the top-secret network of Thuggees. He also played one faction against another and reaped rich dividends. Through relentless operations by him, more than 1,400 thuggees were hanged or transported for life. One of them, Birham confessed to having killed more than 900 persons with his turban. Within seven short years, Sleeman managed to extirpate the formidable organisation which had operated in lethal secrecy across the length and breadth of India for six centuries.

 

Sleeman himself survived three assassination attempts on his life. He was also against British expansionism in India, repeatedly pleading (in writing) to leave the local kingdoms alone when there was no anarchy or disintegration of law and order. He wrote about wild children who had been raised by wolves with his notes on six cases. This discovery inspired Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli character in The Jungle Book. There is a village, Sleemanabad, in Madhya Pradesh, named in his honour.

 

There has been some dispute about the Thuggees, or at least the British portrayal of it. After reading up on them, the disputes and the stories I grew up with, I believe a very secret and very extensive cult did exist and the members specialised in strangulation killing with the help of just a piece of cloth and nothing else. The dispute should be more about how cohesive and how organised the cult was.

 

Durga Pujo

 

Durga Puja (Durga Pujo in Bengal) is drawing near. When I was in Kolkata Police, I used to be in charge of the Police arrangements in one of the biggest pandals, at College Square. This was physically exhausting. The duty used to start around 4 PM every day. The crowds that throng the four big Pujas in Kolkata, College Square, Md Ali Park, Deshapriyo Park and Santosh Mitra Square are to be seen to be believed. Even at 3 AM, I used to see young mothers with 3/ 4 month old babies pandal – hopping. Also, the tension – so many separations, so many near stampedes, so many serious incidents just a hair’s breadth away. In big Police arrangements there is usually a “stand down”. At this command, the persons on duty are to wind up for the day/ duty until called again. For these four Pujas, no “stand down” command was ever given. We used to wind up when it looked like daylight coming on, then went home to sleep through the day to take up the duty again at 4 PM the next day. One was young then … 

Sitting with my officers under the open sky, night after night, amid all the noise and haste, I sometimes wondered why Durga Puja was so popular in Bengal. I read up about it and learnt a few things.

 

Every Oriya like me goes a little crazy about and around Rath Yatra. The reason is, the Jagannath temple is in Orissa. Mahabharat touches a chord amongst all Indians but a particular one amongst north Indians because many of the places mentioned are still known by their mythological names and strewn around the area – Indraprastha, Kurukshetra, Gurgaon (originally and recently ‘Gurugram’ – the village the Pandavas donated to their Guru, Dronacharya as Gurudakshina) and so on. However, in the entire mythology surrounding Durga Puja, Bengal did not feature. Why then? The reason probably was the British empire.

 

After the battle of Plassey in 1757, the British became decisive and definitive rulers of Bengal and started expanding their empire rapidly. One of the local kings (Raja Nabakrishna Deb of Shobhabazar Rajbari) wanted to have Lord Clive as his guest of honour and a local festival would be a perfect occasion to host the dignitary. The Panji (calendar for Hindu festivals and dates) was consulted and the next big festival happened to be Durga Puja. Shobhabazar Rajbari has refuted this in 2011, in the 254^th continuous year of the Puja. However, the fact remains that many wealthy Zamindar families in Bengal made British officers of the East India Company guests of honour in the Pujas. The hosts vied with one another in arranging the most sumptuous fares, decorations and entertainment for their guests. This was deemed necessary since the Company was in charge of a large part of India including Bengal after the battles of Plassey and Buxar. Celebration of Durga Puja became an elitist thing with intimations of exclusivity and a feeling of having arrived by hosting a Puja and associating with the British dignitaries. It also must have caused a lot of heartburn and aspiration in those who were excluded.

 

In 1790, 12 Brahmin friends in Guptipara, Hooghly went around collecting subscriptions from friends and neighbours to institute a Puja. This was called Barowari pujo – Baro for twelve and wari was a corrupted form of yari meaning friends. This Puja was open to general public, sarbojonin. Thus was born a Puja of the people, for the people, by the people. It became hugely popular. One reason was, it was a long-suppressed utterance of a proletarian self – expression.

 

In a large Police force like Kolkata Police, on any given day 15 – 20 % of the force is on leave and another 10 – 15 % are off due to ailments. But, for some reason, during the Puja duties, hardly any of them goes on leave or reports sick. It is a matter of pride for them to be on duty during that one week.

 

Almost everything comes to a standstill. Or, more accurately, everything is imbued with a new life. It is the most beautiful time in the year for Bengalis, for anyone who has visited Bengal during the Pujas and for someone like me who went there as a stranger and calls it his home now. At least, the home cadre. When one gets up on the morning of Biswakarma Puja, the air feels different. Puja season starts. And lasts for a month, until Kali Pujo.

#HimToo

 

A few short years back, someone died in Kolkata. Let’s call him Koustuv Paul. He had retired from the IPS just a month earlier. The guy died by slitting his wrist. His wife found him in a pool of blood when she returned from outside. He had left behind a six-page suicide note.

 

Koustuv was a year or two junior to me in college but a batch senior to me in the IPS. I didn’t know him in college but met him first in the National Police Academy. We used to have a sandwich programme of basic training then. Called ‘sandwich’ because we used to have a Phase I of about a year, then go for district training in our allotted state cadres and return to the Academy for Phase II of three months. Two batches used to intermingle during the Phase II of the senior batch. That word ‘sandwich’ has had very unfortunate connotations for Koustuv.

 

In the Academy, we used to be extremely jealous of him. He was very good looking, an athlete par excellence (this is rated important by IPS guys, especially in the Academy days) and was always surrounded by a bevy of girls. During training, any type of leave is a strict no – no but Koustuv used to manage his leave easily because he was very popular with all the lady wives of the faculty.

 

In the cadre, he gave us more reasons to be jealous. He was very, very ambitious and managed the best first posting, SDPO of a sub division close to Calcutta. For the guys likely to reach the very top in the IPS, i.e., DGP, Director CBI, etc., certain posting points are indicative and Koustuv ticked them all during his first 6/7 postings. For the powers that be, he was the ultimate “bhalo chhele,” (golden boy), the man who could never set a foot wrong. Plus, he had pedigree – his father, Mr. Sujit Paul was a celebrated IPS officer of the cadre and was a Padma Shri awardee. But all this jealousy on our part was never very bitter because Koustuv was one of the friendliest souls on the planet and pleasant to a fault.

 

I had my first inkling that there was more than met the eye when I got posted to North 24 Parganas where he had just been transferred from. I heard tales of how he kept listening to and monitoring the Police wireless right up to the minute he reached his wedding venue, how he went for his honeymoon to Jalpaiguri, stayed in a colleague’s house and the colleague and his house got constantly rattled by his wife’s banging the doors all the time, how he would be visiting Police stations from 10 AM to 10 PM every day, mostly without reason, and so on. I put it down to (extreme) workaholism and consequent marital discord.

 

His career flourished. He continued to be a pet of the Chief Minister, the Police Minister, the stalwarts in the ruling Party and went from celebrated posting to celebrated posting, as SP of coveted districts. We did not know much about his personal life except that he had had a son and both husband and wife used to run minithons and subsist on some fancy salad diet. Suddenly, there was a divorce petition by the wife and the newspapers went to town. In the petition, the wife had detailed all her problems in the marriage, the chief one being that Koustuv had no business marrying her despite having a different sexual orientation.

 

The name, Koustuv, went into local Bengali expressions – “are you normal or Koustuv?,” and so on. We all had to rejig our past envy, etc. – all that ladies’ man bit being blown to the winds, the world started revolving again for mere mortals like us. The divorce came through but the career continued to flourish.

 

Disaster struck when there was the first, and so far possibly the only, allegation of sexual harassment of its kind lodged with the Human Rights Commission. The alleged predator was Koustuv Paul. And the victim was a Constable. Male. Soon the tales started tumbling out. How he used to spot young male recruits and “attach” them to his house on various pretexts, how he had ruined the marital lives of several young Constables, and so on. In the investigation that followed, Koustuv tried to show that he was on leave and out of station on the relevant dates. Unfortunately, he had signed and sanctioned leave to some of those same Constables on the dates concerned. He was found guilty and the Human Rights Commission imposed punishment which also led to suspension and Departmental Enquiry against him. Subsequently, there was another Departmental Enquiry against him for gross financial irregularities. Ever since 2009, he was put on “compulsory waiting,” i.e., no assignment.

 

I knew the story thus far when I left the cadre for my second deputation. When I came back after six years, I heard that Koustuv had been languishing without a posting for all these years and the Departmental Enquiries were still going on. He had adopted a spiritual path, called himself Yogi Brindeswar Paritran and was attached to a Math. Plus, he had married again. To a female – yeah, another Yogini!

 

Well, there you have it. A really tortured soul, sandwiched between overwhelming ambition and desire for acceptance on the one hand and, on the other hand, the extreme difficulty and loneliness of having a different sexual orientation, especially in a high – visibility job like the Police. He brought a few of the misfortunes upon himself but all these enquiries should have had a sunset clause rather than dragging on for a decade. He should have been punished and paid whatever remained due, if anything, at least after retirement – his suicide note talked about dues of more than Rs. 55 lacs but the government stated that all dues had been paid.

 

A very, very unfortunate and tragic end. I tell it to you because stories of despondency and despair should also be told. Also because, I feel, despite Koustuv’s misfortune and foibles, the preciousness of life should have somehow found a way to triumph over the desolation of death.

  

[Names, places and a few details have been altered to protect identities.]

Lies, damned lies

 

A few days back, some media reports and WhatsApp groups made much of the fact that as per NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau), Kolkata is the safest city in India for the second year in a row. The reports stated that the total number of cases slid from 18,277 in 2020 to 14,591 in 2021. A report like this should have made me feel good. It scared the daylights out of me. 

Years ago, in Delhi, while I was fresh in service, I received a call from a University Professor’s wife who was a family friend. The Professor was out of station and she wanted to lodge an FIR regarding a theft in her house. She was in raw panic over going to a Police Station. Even when I offered to send my brother to accompany her to the Police Station, she was reluctant. She wanted a Police officer she knew to accompany her so that she would not be harassed. Most law – abiding citizens think several times before visiting a Police Station.

 

An MIT study in an Indian state found that more than 70 per cent of crime victims never reported incidents because many felt that the police would either do nothing or ask for a bribe to file a complaint. More than 80 per cent said no constable had ever visited their neighbourhood. This is despite a 24/7 work hour for most police officers and fairly safe neighbourhoods. Rather than playing victim, we, the Police and ex-Police should acknowledge that there is a problem. People just do not trust us. One of the main reasons is the almost absolute impossibility of lodging an FIR under the appropriate sections of law without “contacts.”

 

As per law, even if there is a false or frivolous complaint, police is duty-bound to lodge an FIR. Only after registering an FIR, they can refuse investigation with written reasons; they can file a report as complaint being true but sufficient evidence could not be collected (FRT); they can file a report that there was a mistake of fact in the complaint (FRMF); and they can file a report that the complaint was false (FRF) and prosecute the complainant. Absent the above, the Police officer should, and must, submit a Charge Sheet (CS). The option they just do not have is not to file an FIR.

 

On the other hand, all over the country, much energy and ingenuity is spent in avoiding the registration of the FIR. Remember the film, “Pink,” where the victims were given a royal run-around as to where to register the FIR? Even that is illegal. Any complainant, approaching any police station, should be able to lodge the FIR there. It is the Police station’s duty to transfer the case to the appropriate police station, after registering the FIR.

 

Why does this happen? Part of the reason is reports and inferences like this NCRB report. NCRB has reported the data as has been received by it. There is no way of knowing how authentic this data is, given such rampant suppression and minimisation. As such, there is no way the data of a city can be compared with the data of another city as the rates of suppression (non-registration of case), minimisation (registration of case under a diluted section of law) and non-reporting of cases vary from city to city and state to state. It cannot also reflect any trend because the rates do not stay the same over time in any place – it depends on the attitude of the leadership, both political and Police, active citizenry demanding accountability, judicial activism and so on. From NCRB figures which are based on such spurious inputs to concluding that a particular city is safe, safer or safest is a gigantic leap of faith. Unfortunately, such headlines and chest-thumping create their own hangover and the figures become sticky upward. Thus, the Police of a city gets hoist on its own petard and will try its level best to keep the figures below previous “achievement,” even if artificially, by simply not recording the cases or by diluting the sections of law.

 

Even without NCRB report, because of the obsession with crime data, every officer would like to keep the figures below his predecessor’s. This is inherently flawed because, if things are transparent, there is no way the crime figures would come down. The population is increasing. The basic reasons behind crime, greed, depravity, economic conditions, police-population ratio, etc. – none of it is showing any improvement. Real justice keeps getting more and more distant, given the burgeoning backlog of cases with the Courts and the Police. Conviction rates remain abysmal.

 

There is also the fear of the system being overwhelmed. The number of Police for 1,00,000 population in India is one of the lowest amongst comparable countries in the world, 152 against the UN norm of 222. The ratio in some of the countries are: Italy (456), Mexico (465), France (422), Germany (336), Pakistan (182), Singapore (810), USA (239), UK (212) and Belgium (334). Many Police officers fear that registering the FIRs without filtration would lead to too many false and frivolous cases being registered, further depleting an already stretched out police force. 

Are these assumptions correct?

Partly through force of circumstances and partly through personal commitment, in 2007, a young SP did something radical in his district, Jalpaiguri – it became known as the “Jalpaiguri experiment.”  In the teeth of severe opposition by his subordinates and superiors, he mandated that all complaints be registered, whether true, false, debatable, whatever. He also started taking action against officers who tried to suppress or minimise. As apprehended, the crime figures in the district shot up immediately, by more than four times, from a monthly average of 249 cases to 1060 cases. However, guess what, the heavens didn’t fall! The disposal of cases doubled. Contrary to apprehensions, there was no significant increase in the number of false or frivolous cases. The court cases reduced drastically. People used to approach the courts because they were not getting the desired remedy at the Police station. When FIRs were registered freely and properly, there was no need for them to go to the courts. The number of persons who surrendered in the Courts went up from a monthly average of 113 to 496. This, in fact, led to a slight decrease in the number of arrests. This indicated that there is a natural tendency for accused persons to submit to the majesty of law unless the eco-system is vitiated by suppression and minimisation. Finally, the conviction rate doubled.

At most, if by some miracle, Police becomes suddenly super-efficient, the rate of increase of cases might come down. Actual reduction in the absolute figures may indicate that there is “efficient” suppression and minimisation or there is gross under-reporting. This would lead to smugness on the part of policy makers, lack of respect of the citizenry for rule of law, apathy, goonda raj and complete vitiation of the fabric of society. After a point, this leads to the public taking law unto their own hands, public lynching, etc.. Decline in absolute number of Police cases scares me.