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Giving the police a human face

Syed Badrul Ahsan mulls human rights and law enforcement
POLICING has regularly been a difficult proposition in South Asia. That the police are ruthless or inefficient or corrupt or all of these has never been in doubt. That governments in the region have traditionally sought to exercise partisan political control over policemen is another reality from which there is no escaping. You travel to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, your objective being an attempt at understanding the compulsions under which the police operate and the difficulties that the police often subject citizens to. And dien, of course, there is that overriding wish in you to come by the measures that may have been taken by the governments of these countries to bring the police level with their counterparts around the world. Disappointment would be staring you in the face.
And such disappointment would be there because of the fitful or halfhearted moves that have over time been made in South Asia toward reforming the police. The beginning of the process of reform, as this excellent survey notes, has generally been one of enthusiasm more than anything else. But then has come the gradual, unabashed dilution of the very reform proposals which earlier cheered citizens. Take, for instance, the Police Order, 2002 in Pakistan. For all the notoriety associated with his unconstitutional seizure of power in 1999, General Pervez Musharraf seriously made a move to reform the police service through 'incorporating some norms of democratic policing into a law governing the police.' The goals were noble, no question about it, for the Police Order envisaged a
system that would function under the terms of the constitution, the law and in line with the democratic aspirationsof the people.
But much of the enthusiasm relating to the Police Order would soon be found to have been misplaced. As in nearly every instance of governance in South Asia, the Order would go through a considerable degree of dilution, obviously as a direct consequence of political and bureaucratic misgivings about an application of the Order in its original form. That being the case with Pakistan, there remains the matter of how the police have been operating in Bangladesh. A caveat here is that for much of the subcontinent, the legacy of the police being a component of the state derives from the Police Act of 1861, a document as archaic as any that could be conceived of in these increasingly sensitive, certainly more transparenttimes.
It is that old legacy which has appeared to govern the working of the police in Bangladesh, where law enforcers have by and large been regarded as instruments of fear used at will by the state. Feudal Forces notes the numerous abuses of human rights committed by the Bangladesh police, especially during the period of the recently departed caretaker government. The survey takes into cognizance the Odhikar Report of 2007, which documents the deaths in extra-judicial manner of as many as 64 individuals at the hands of the police. When you add to that the 94 people killed by the Rapid Action Battalion through its questionable 'crossfires', you get to have a composite picture of the law enforcing
agencies in Bangladesh being pitted against the very people they are expected to provide protection to.
And yet it would be unfair to ignore the other side of the picture. And that is the high decibel pressure under which Bangladesh's police operate. Sanjay Patil draws attention to two instances here. In Daksin Khan thana, or police station, the Officer in Charge is 'overburdened
and overstressed' because he must police 700,000 people with a mere inspector, 13 sub-inspectors, 12 assistant sub-inspectors and 40 constables. At what is euphemistically given out as Uttara model thana, Saiful Alam Chowdhury, the Officer in Charge, has jurisdiction over 150,000 people with one inspector, 20 sub-inspectors, 28
assistant sub-inspectors and 62 constables. The police are thus burdened. In their turn, citizens worry about the corruption that undermines the police and by extension the overall administrative system in the country.
Not even India, a state far ahead of its neighbours in terms of democratic attainments, is quite free of the usual constraints citizens suffer from owing to the presence of archaic, even colonial-era policing methods. India's federalism is a significant factor in any deliberation of how the police will conduct themselves. That again tells upon the nature of reforms, or supposed ones, that need to be brought in. Patil sheds good light on the many attempts in India to bring the police service in line with modern-day public expectations. Beginning in 1979, the government has constituted a number of commissions tasked with suggesting the modes and modalities of police functioning. But perhaps a decisive step was taken in 1996, when two former director generals of police asked the Supreme Court of India to issue directives upon the central and state governments regarding the need for measures aimed at plugging the holes in police administration. And then a decade went by, litigation and all. In 2006, in Prakash Singh and Others vs. Union of India and Others, the Supreme Court issued a set of seven directives the central and state governments were expected to comply with. What followed was a series of state government acts clearly at variance with the directives. As Patil notes, 'the Gol and many of the states have used every
opportunity to avoid enacting substantive police reform instead of complying with the directives.'
Sri Lanka makes dismal reading. With the Tamil insurgency (which was recently crushed by the military) in place, various administrations in the country have used the opportunity to enhance the powers of the police and thereby undermine the rights of citizens. A culture of impunity has been at work, with state forces such as the Special Task Force becoming notorious for a whole range of human rights violations. The STF has been particularly ruthless against Tamils. And that is not all. Provisions such as Regulation 23 have made sure that Tamils are under constant harassment at the hands of the police. Patil makes reference to an incident in Colombo on 7 June 2007, when police and army officers evicted 376 Tamils residing in lodges or boarding houses in the capital. The Tamils were given less than half an hour to pack up and leave, all because the inspector general of police had made it known that no Tamil could live in Colombo without a valid reason.
The police in South Asia, notes Feudal Forces, are yet to transform themselves from a force into service. Reform has at best been incremental and at worst non-existent. And the casualty has been democratic government and human rights. This work should open a door to the imperatives that must come in if the police are to go through a makeover.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantarea@yahQo.co.uk.