S & M

 

My brother lost an almost brand new bicycle. It had six gears – the big thing then. It was stolen when he was tutoring a kid for some pocket money. We went down to the nearby police station to lodge an FIR. We waited and waited near the Duty Officer’s desk for about three hours before we were attended to. The Duty Officer was a young guy, very pleasant. He told us ki stationery nahin hai, humein hi lana padega. My brother went out and got back with a few sheets of white paper after about an hour because there was no stationery shop nearby. The Duty Officer laughed. He said minimum one ream was required – how did we think police stations ran! Another one round, another one hour. This time, with a bond of one ream of paper forged between us, he decided to be frank. Chhota case hei, lekin sau rupaiya toh lagega. I had just joined the service and did not know the ways of the world. I bristled and told him I was an IPS probationer. He apologised and said, “Saab, aap IPS hain toh pachaas rupaiya mein ho jaayega.” 

This is a true story.

 

After thirty odd years in the job, I ask myself, has anything changed? Yes. We have big and great management experts at the top “doing” digital policing, sensitisation, proactive, community policing, CCTNS (that never–ending policing digitisation initiative) and so on. On the ground – will a police station be my first port of call if I am in distress? Not at all. It will pretty much be the last on the list.

 

Why should this be so? The default option for police is not crime investigation. The default option is S&M. No, it’s not Sadism/ Masochism – it’s the two most revered words in the police lexicon that outsiders never hear about: Suppression and Minimisation. This is possibly the best kept secret of the force since early British days. What are they, exactly?

 

Like most police officers in a supervisory capacity, my days as a zonal Additional Superintendent of Police used to begin with a perusal of the daily Situation Report (sitrep) delivered at my house at six A. M.. It contained all the cases registered during the previous 24 hours in various police stations under my watch. The first column contained the Special Report (SR) cases. These were cases pertaining to heinous crimes like murder, dacoity, etc which merited close supervision of the senior officers and which could be “closed” only with the approval of the Deputy Inspector General of the range. One morning, I checked through the sitrep and found no SR case and breathed easy. Later in the morning someone informed me that in one of the police stations under my watch there was a brutal dacoity with murder the previous night. As far as crimes went, this was the top of the tree, ranking the highest in SR cases, way above anything else but the sitrep was clean as a whistle. I went down to the concerned police station to investigate my investigators.

 

No SR case was registered in the previous 24 hours. So I opted to go through all the cases. The only case was a minor one of someone trying to misappropriate some abandoned property. On closer examination, I found that the property was stolen from a dead body. A minor case, still. What about the body? There was no case because it was filed under “Unnatural Death,” the same as when someone drowns or is bitten by a snake. So, a brutal dacoity when the inmate was murdered was reduced to an unnatural death and misappropriation of abandoned property. The figures look good on the floor of the Parliament and the state Assembly. They look good when the SP or the Additional SP reports to his superiors. Do they look good to the family of the victim? Do they look good to their neighbours? Do they look good to the society at large? This is the second part – Minimisation.

 

The first part – Suppression – is something else. This is when nothing happens. This is where art and human ingenuity meet IPC and Cr PC (Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code, respectively). Throughout my career as an underling, as a supervisory officer and as that all powerful figure called SP and DCP, I found that crime is what the SP/ DCP deems it to be. Unlike in other services, cops do not hold too many meetings. There is a monthly Crime Conference by the SP/ DCP where he declares what his objectives and guidelines for the force are. If he decides that dacoities should not exceed 10 in a particular month, the number of dacoity cases across police stations under his watch for that month stop at 9.99 or whatever but do not exceed or equal 10.

 

A citizen is “entitled” to register a case under proper section/s of law. Must this “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” regime continue? What will happen if one DGP in one state will one day wake up and say, no – henceforth, all complaints will be registered under the proper section of law? It happened in West Bengal – possibly under judicial duress, in Jalpaiguri district because of judicial wrangles regarding siting of a High Court and was called the Jalpaiguri experiment. But why be forced? Why not be proactive in this regard?