Dr. Manoj Dash, Bhubaneswar, 24 September 2024
The controversy surrounding Bharatpur police station assault and harassment case in Bhubaneswar is refusing to die down. It is not very clear as of now exactly what had triggered this ugly situation. What is amply clear is, the police leadership abjectly failed to assess the gravity of the matter, communicate and engage with the stakeholders meaningfully to diffuse the situation. Their failure to do so has given birth to a sensational case and has caused irreparable damage to its reputation!
By saying so, I am not at all suggesting that the police have not engaged in any excesses or wrong doing in this case! The police seem to have at least fumbled on three counts. One, they did not have CCTV cameras installed in the police station in spite of submitting a declaration to the Supreme Court that all police stations in Odisha are fitted with the essential number of CCTV cameras. Two, they refused to take note of the presence of an Indian Army officer at the police station and his involvement in the case. Three, they avoided summoning the miscreants to the police station on receiving a specific complaint from the woman who promptly reported the matter of her harassment to the police.
In a matter of few days or weeks, this issue would gradually fade away from public memory like many other inglorious incidents of the past. But the root causes that put police reputation at risk would not have been addressed. Poor public perception of police and the aggressive behaviour by police would not have changed. Another incident may happen soon which would again raise a big storm and it would again hit the police organisation very hard and, in turn, would certainly hurt its reputation very badly too.
It would be useful to cite a few incidents of recent years that highlight how police have significantly lost their own credibility by not taking repeatedly suggested steps to reform and reboot themselves to embrace modernity. Not doing so would eventually make them turn largely irrelevant because they would find themselves at monumental odds with present realities because of fast changing societal expectations and gradual thinning of tolerance towards police aggression.
A senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, Pandit Rajesh Uttamrao was suspended in July 2024, on charges of ‘grave misconduct,’ after allegations emerged that he had forcibly entered the home of a married woman inspector and misbehaved with her.
Two police personnel of Jamda in Mayurbhanj district were arrested by officers of the same police station in connection with two rape cases involving minor girls in October 2023. The arrested were an Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) of police and a home guard.
In April 2023, the Orissa High Court directed the state government to pay Rs 10 lakh compensation to the next of kin of an alleged criminal Akash Mohuria who died due to “severe assault” by police in their custody in Jeypore in January 2017.
In January 2023, senior Minister of the Government of Odisha, Shri Naba Kishore Das, was shot dead by a junior police officer, Gopal, who had earlier served as his Personal Security Officer (PSO).
The district police of Balasore arrested a police officer at Gopalpur on charges of raping a woman constable who was engaged for cyclone Yaas duty in May 2021.
In July 2020, the Odisha Police arrested the former Inspector-in-Charge (IIC) of Birmitrapur police station in Sundargarh district on charges of raping a 13-year-old girl.
Banamali Kuanra, an ASI of Bargarh’s Sohela Police Station, was suspended in February 2019 for raping a minor girl inside his official residence.
Abinash Munda, a tribal youth of Bhalupali village in Sambalpur district, was detained over his suspected involvement in a theft case in February 2018. He was found hanging with a bedsheet inside the Ainthapaili police station. Following his death, local people set the police station on fire.
All the above cases are very serious in nature as they involve rape of women including minors, custodial death, and sexual harassment of a lady colleague. Involvement of police in such horrendous criminal cases could only have led to causing serious damage to its professionalism and capability to operate effectively.
Police need to know that a senior officer issuing a clean chit to his junior colleagues involved in some contentious issue is no longer accepted by members of the public as a fair decision. Similarly, assigning responsibility of investigation to a police officer, who has successfully cultivated a perception about himself of being a rogue officer who either saves people in power when they find themselves in conflict with law or saves criminals having close links with people in power, is not going to help resurrect the badly sunk image of the police organisation. Further, orchestrating solidarity by members of their association or gathering support through their family members offers a pretty bad solution.
Working on addressing the root causes is the only solution that would restore faith and trust of citizens in police. Otherwise, people may still continue to approach the police for issues that need solutions, but they would always carry at the back of their mind that they might not get a fair treatment from police. Several solutions could be tried out at two levels – government and police organisation.
At the government level, putting more people in the police force to address severe shortage of manpower, giving the police required autonomy to function with transparency and accountability, providing them with cutting-edge technology such as body cameras, installation of enough CCTVs, following a scientific approach to capture 360° view of a police station, setting up a local oversight and audit committee consisting of people from diverse backgrounds such as law, education, medical, social work, etc. for each police station, and setting up of a Police Complaints Authority to quickly redress complaints against police misconduct, aggression, wilful neglect and the likes.
At its own organisation level, police must consider themselves as service providers to people. They are the first level custodians of law. If they genuinely start treating members of public as their collaborators, the sorry situation of today would improve dramatically! Police at all levels do not treat common citizens with dignity, respect and empathy. People are never sure that they would receive a fair treatment from police. If the police organisation is aspiring to be more effective, they must engage with the public differently and utilise the power, resources and authority provided to them for advancing greater public good. Unless this sensitiveness is present in the police system, they would continue to invite constant trust deficit from the public.
Police at higher levels must treat their own people working at the lower rungs with care and respect so that the latter never feel as if there is no one to care for them. Police are always cleverly trapped by corrupt politicians who carry the nefarious desire to corner power to themselves, disempower general people and to foment trouble for their political rivals through unlawful use of police power. This ultimately hurts police reputation the most.
If police always keep public interest at the top, most of the problems that they encounter today would disappear automatically. For achieving this, customised training and constant coaching by appropriate professionals would be essential. Police must come forward and seek help from independent experts to learn communication skills, strategies for building wider social trust and ideas for effective conflict management. Use of force, foul language, aggression and issuing threats are of no use at all in the contemporary society. If they still continue with what they have been used to do, they could very soon experience incidents like Ainthapalli police station in Sambalpur in 2018 on a much wider scale.
Police must remember that all forms of power are vested in people and the Constitution in a democratic republic like ours. All other individuals and agencies are only temporary custodians of power and police would do themselves a big favour if they constantly remind themselves as humble and sincere service providers!
