Rushdie row: Serving IPS officer calls Indian police cowards

By repeatedly erring on the side of reactionaries and enemies of free speech, the police in India betray their commitment to uphold the law without fear or favour.

MF Husain, Taslima Nasreen, and now Salman Rushdie. Another glorious chapter has been added to the history of Indian police in failing to uphold the rule of law and the dignity of the individual. The list does not end here. Be it Mumbai’s streets, Bangalore’s pubs, Delhi’s nightspots, Goa’s beaches, Valentine’s Day celebration, murderous khap panchayats, or the broader right of nearly half of our citizenry to dress, drink and eat as she pleases, the police in India, cutting across the otherwise significant north-south and rural-urban divide, irrespective of the political party in power, consistently come down in favour of forces of religious reaction and cultural conservatism. In doing so, they espouse an ideal of policing forever aligned with a moral code that is straight out of Khomeini’s Iran and Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan. As this incident again shows, we are no better than thugs of the party in power. For law-abiding citizens we are killjoys and cowards.

Few democracies around the world grant the kind of legal authority, especially pre-emptive powers, that the police in India continue to enjoy today. Our present statutes allow considerable latitude to police authorities in regulating public behaviour ranging from preventive arrest up to and including the extreme measure of use of legally sanctioned lethal force. Our colonial past and post-Independence internal security challenges have ensured that this legal authority enjoyed by the police in India is also backed by a broad and remarkably consistent consensus of public opinion. 

What then accounts for this equally remarkable and consistent display of cowardice by our police forces? Speaking from some experience, all it would have taken for Rushdie to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival was for a senior police officer in Jaipur to reassure the organisers and Rushdie of their support and issue a stern warning to all those threatening violence and take suitable preventive measures. Instead, we are told the local police leaned on the organisers to ask Rushdie to stay away and allegedly backed it up by encouraging rumours of paid assassins being dispatched from Mumbai, something the Mumbai police denied. What is beyond doubt is that the top leadership of Rajasthan police preferred to stay silent and the forces of bigotry and obscurantism had a field day. 

Ask any senior officer and they have a stock answer. ‘Our first priority is to maintain law and order.’ Even if it means turning a blind eye to illegal behaviour by gangs of goons paying lip service to some extreme ideology on the right or left of the political spectrum, or promoting some bigoted vision of ethnic pride or religious hatred? What is the point of maintaining such law and order? Contrast this apathy with the alacrity with which the police will respond if one tries to shout slogans or show a black flag at a rally featuring any of our political bigwigs. Regarded as a major ‘breach of security’ and a grave professional lapse, the offender will be quickly rounded up and made to feel the full force of the law, often quite literally while the police officers on duty may well face disciplinary action for this ‘dereliction’ of duty.

The prevailing policing paradigm in the country seems to consist of the following conventional wisdom: ordinary citizens can’t show black flags or raise slogans of protest to their public representatives for security reasons, women who wear revealing clothes set themselves up for rape, couples courting and marrying outside the bounds of caste and religion cannot expect any protection from the law, being affectionate in public is justifiable provocation for sexual harassment and violence, and in the present instance, the religious sentiments of any self-proclaimed defenders of any faith take precedence over any fundamental rights. And last but not the least, the political compulsions of the party in power get priority over the rule of law, anytime, every time.

We in the police leadership, me included, are often quick to blame the political leadership for interference, the IAS for obstructionism, the media for its biased coverage and the judiciary for its lack of appreciation for ‘practical constraints’. This is pure humbug. This fig leaf will no longer cover the IPS’s glaring failure to provide principled leadership to our police forces. 

The IPS was created with fond hopes by Sardar Patel and Nehru to serve as not just leaders of the police in a narrow rule-bound sense but as constitutionally protected guardians of national integrity and internal security and more importantly of the Constitution itself and the rule of law that it enshrines. The great grandson of Nehru maybe reluctant to speak up for his ancestor’s ideals, but we in the All India Services, are equally Nehru’s children and some of us must speak up when his legacy and our inheritance are being persistently violated with such impunity.

Events of recent times make me wonder, did I join the Indian Police Service or the Indian Ayatollah Service? I must have missed the fine print somewhere. I certainly did not sign up to be a mere storm trooper for the rich and the powerful and stay silent when the basic principles of the rule of law and equality before law are flouted with such impunity. A police force that will not act to do the right thing, that will dare not speak the truth to power, that will sacrifice the dignity of the individual to the baying of a frenzied mob, deserves neither public respect nor legal authority. We in the IPS would do well to remember these basic truths.

— The writer is an IPS officer serving in Uttarakhand. These are his personal views