Jan
11
Police reform for the new year?
January 11, 2005 | Comments Off on Police reform for the new year?
Ranjit Bhushan wrote a column in The Indian Express regarding the failures of India’s criminal justice system. In it, he points to failures by the police preventing victims from obtaining justice.
These are not ordinary quirks of the justice process. They are evidence of a rotting criminal justice system. The trouble is that the lawmakers, judicial bodies, bar associations, police and human rights activists have failed to reach a consensus on how to achieve this.
Although the National Police Commission (NPC) submitted eight reports in 1979 recommending changes to the role and procedures of the Indian Police Service, the government has done little since then to put these recommendations in o practice. Especially relevant is the eigth report, which focuses on the lack of administrative control by the executive over the investigative wing of the police. In that eigth report, the NPC proposed a re-examination of the role and performance of the police.
It felt that “a fresh examination is necessary of the role and performance of the police both as a law enforcement agency and an institution to protect the rights of citizens enshrined in the Constitution”. In order to make the investigative functions of the police independent of any ‘‘extraneous influences’’, it proposed that the police chief be given a statutory minimum tenure. To defeat the blackmailing tactics of politicians, it suggested that changes be brought in to stop rampant and whimsical transfers of police officials who don’t toe the government line. In some states, the average tenure of a district police chief does not exceed six months.
But since the report was first submitted in 1979, the prospect of reform has become only hazier, the political class more divided and the police force more amenable to manipulation and graft.
The police have turned into handmaidens of the political party in power.
Behind this ineffective police force is a government that is slow to pursue investigations. Besides the NPC, there were other attempts to reform police functioning: the Kerala Police Reorganisation Committee, the West Bengal Police Commission, the Punjab Commission, and the Tamil Nadu Commission. All these commissions pointed to political interferences as a serious threat to police functioning, and their recommendations paralleled those of the NPC.
Solving these problems is even more difficult in the face of the lack of consensus. In 2003, the Malimath Committee proposed radical changes to Indian jurisprudence, including easier convictions, reducing the threshold of evidence, reversing the burden of proof, and making admissions before the police admissible as evidence. These changes have many critics, however, and the Law Commission’s reservations about these changes makes their realization unlikely.
In May 2003, the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP) released the first volume of its Final Report, titled Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab. This 634-page volume contains extensive documentation and analysis of hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killing of victims by the security forces in Punjab during the political unrest of the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as an analysis of legislative, judicial and administrative impunity. Included in this first volume are more than 500 testimonies by the families of the victims describing 672 cases of extrajudicial executions by the police in the district of Amritsar alone. Chapter 4 gives an extensive description of the range of abuses perpetrated by the security forces in Punjab. The report demonstrates the extent of impunity for perpetrators of systematic human rights violations in Punjab.
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