Television stars in police uniform?

The job description of the police does not include becoming media personalities

By now you may have heard of Riyaz Bhatkal. He goes under the alias of Roshan Khan, and he is said to be one of the founding members of the Indian Mujahideen. He is also alleged to be the “master-mind” behind all the recent bomb attacks in the country. Apparently he is holed out in Mumbai, and the police are confident of arresting him soon. How do I know this? Because the joint commissioner of police Rakesh Maria said so at a press conference last week.

Maria has a reputation for being an excellent investigating officer so one assumes he knows what he is doing. But common sense suggests that if you are on the trail of a criminal, you want to catch him by surprise. The very last thing you want to do is alert him that you know his whereabouts. By announcing you are going to catch him, you ensure that you won’t. Since Maria isn’t that kind of policeman, the conclusion you draw is that the police have no clue where Bhatkal is, and are engaged in a game of double bluff.

There is another possibility of course, though I am not necessarily putting it forward in this case. Which is that policemen always want to stay in the news and will feed the media with the snippets it craves.

The worst possible example of this is what happened in the Aarushi murder case in Delhi. Her reputation after her death was sullied by the investigating police officer who propounded theories about an improper relationship with a male servant which were later found to be without any basis at all.

Worse was to come. Clueless about the murderer’s identity, the cops accused the girl’s father of killing his daughter and kept him in jail for weeks before shame-facedly releasing him because of lack of evidence. While he was in jail, they fed the media salacious details of an affair between the father and one of his associates. In short the cops didn’t find the killer, but they put two families through  trauma and effectively destroyed their lives.

A more recent case was the “drug bust” at a nightspot in Juhu, Mumbai. To recap, police informers told the cops that a party was in progress at a local hang-out for young people, and that drugs were being bought and sold and inhaled. A raid followed. Everyone in the nightclub was bundled into vans and taken to the police station for blood tests.

Is this acceptable? If you go to a party tomorrow along with 50 others and five people are doing drugs, should everyone be arrested? Chances are that 90 per cent of the people aren’t aware of the illegal activity. Why should they be humiliated? To take another example, suppose you go to a bar and the group at one table is drunk and getting out of hand, should everyone in the bar be rounded up? In the Juhu case, the police called in the media, so that everyone present was hounded and photographed as if they were criminals.

It’s about time that the police were told to get on with their real job. Which is to keep law and order, catch transgressors of the law and carry out investigations. That job description does not include becoming TV stars or media personalities. Since the problem occurs all over the country, the Union home minister should convene a meeting of top cops and lay down the law is no uncertain terms. A rule should also be formulated permitting only an authorised person (say a police press officer), to speak to the media.

That might be a bit harsh on the police in some cases. After all, the Rakesh Maria press conference had another aim in mind. Which was to tell the world — particularly Riyaz Bhatkal’s associates and possible future recruits — that Bhatkal was diverting money meant for his organisation to his personal account. That kind of information is certain to put off potential recruits who want to die for their cause. But the police commissioner could surely authorise this kind of publicity when situations call for it.

The police should be seen and not heard. The sight of cops is always reassuring; to hear them prattling about future arrests is not. In any case, if some of them have a heart set on a TV career, they have a real option: they can always apply to Prannoy Roy.

The writer is a scriptwriter based in London