Dr N. C. Asthana

Police is one of the most important instruments of governance. When this instrument fails to deliver, people start losing faith in governance itself. Therefore, a higher standard of morality and performance is expected of the police. Unfortunately, the exact opposite of this has taken place, especially since independence. Even as the nation has spent heavy amounts to ‘modernise’ the police, its mind and spirit remain the same.

What Ails the Indian Police?

Far from being the most important ‘service arm’ of the State, police have become the most ruthless ‘coercive arm’ of the State—often the biggest tormentors of the common man in general and the minorities and the underprivileged in particular, thereby eroding the faith of the most vulnerable in the criminal justice system.

Application of laws by the police has become highly discriminatory and is loaded heavily against the minorities and the poor or anybody who is perceived as dissatisfied or disagreeing with the regime. Law has, in fact, been ‘weaponised’ by the police as the most preferred tool of persecution of all those who dissent.

In a police state, as its definition goes, the government abuses its legal powers over its citizens. We have, however, become worse than a police state because the legal powers are used to ‘selectively’ target and persecute a part of the citizenry.

An analysis of the functioning of the police since independence shows that, far from upholding the law, police have been acting as the agents of communal forces and a partisan State. Majoritarian narrative is seldom questioned, and majoritarian violence is seldom punished. Riotous behaviour and hooliganism in the name of religion are taking place with increasing frequency because they know that they will perhaps never be punished.

In almost every communal riot of this country, whether it was Delhi (1984) or Delhi (2020), police have always been found to let the minorities ‘suffer’ at the hands of the majority, or ‘punished’ them by implicating them in false cases. As far as the conduct of the police is concerned, nothing at all has changed all these years, even as the country came to be ruled by political parties of different ideologies! This means that the police per se are more blameworthy than the parties in power.

A large number of judgments of acquittal, particularly related to charges of terrorism, show that innocent Muslim youths were falsely implicated, and they could get justice only after their lives, families, li