DailyPost 2788
POLICING THE POLITICIANS
Policing the politicians may sound like a basket of actions and norms to discipline them, make them follow the rule of law, treat them as any other citizen, chide them when they are not on the right side of law et al. What we are aiming at is to gauge how much of policing energy, resources, time, planning and strategy time is spent on the politicians and how they have a system where police become a permanent adjunct to them in all the tasks it performs. We can start with the most visible one in the current election scenario, the deployment of the paramilitary forces for the conduct of free and fair elections.
It also means safe elections. The state police is also involved in totality which primarily means that a large number of policing activities are dispensed with during this long period and whatever perforce is performed at a seriously truncated level. Elections are treated as wartime in this country and not a normal mechanical offering called franchise. Can we not make our elections free of over deployment of forces and complete lack of responsibilities on the part of the political parties. Don’t they have the duty to bring sanity into our election process. Catching liquor and cash used in elections can be called shameful acts which police have to perform.
Political parties go scot free with no blemish not even an entry in criminal records for the party. Then what about peacetime? The policemen who guard our elected representatives, leave aside ministers and other such dignitaries; it would be a humongous number. Then their movement, functions, rallies, and a variety of functions and what not? The local police seem to be endlessly tied up in this circus. The movement of ministers and what goes with it is another story. The endless political, public and governmental functions take a serious toll on the overstretched police. You would have seen the convoys and the cumbersome traffic arrangements. Everything takes time and resources.
In a resource scarce policing ecosystem, this means that resources get diverted to these dispensable / peripheral policing jobs leaving the core policing jobs unattended or partially attende. The orientation of the organisation also changes, which is very difficult to set right. Then the political and other criminal cases stretch the scarce quality investigators and technical investigation infrastructure available. Not to say that these cases have lots of pulls and pressures, which means a huge amount of energy is wasted. Then the anti-corruption cases and now tons of money laundering cases. With so many things happening under the carpet, you can gauge the effort which would be going for intelligence gathering, processing and making it workable. Humongous indeed.
HAS THE OVEREMPHASIS ON BEING AT THE SERVICE OF THE POLITICAL CLASS TRUNCATED THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POLICING IN THIS COUNTRY?
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.