Straight Line
A stern and caring guardian for police
Shaikh Hasina, our Prime Minister of unprecedented popularity has indicated the two uppermost priorities of her government, that of providing economic relief to the common people and improving the law and order situation. This writer wishes to deliberate on the latter issue in the fond hope that our first ever female Home Minister, an activist politician and a daring advocate of considerable real life experience, gets a helpful insight into the working of police that have to shoulder a large part of the responsibilities of improving the law and order.
Looking back one would see that we have acquired omnipotent police who largely serve only those in power. Laws have been promulgated which give police wide powers to deny human rights, in some cases even the most basic civil liberties. Our police in such unwholesome environment have been corrupted and through degeneration are permitted to indulge in arbitrary conduct including torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.
Police authority has been abused in our democracy. Consequently, it has become more the master and less the servant. In the process it has snuffed out more freedom than it has protected. Our problem lies in control.
Abuses of authority have flourished on account of official negligence and acquiescence. Such a state of affairs places considerable moral burdens on upright police officials and well meaning politicians whose actions to check drifts of this kind are of paramount importance to the preservation of human rights.
Our experience, unfortunately, has been a reliance on punitive policing which in reality has meant control through suspended terror. It has worked on the assumption that provided the penalties for crimes, or police severities are sufficiently horrible, people will be deterred.
Every organization, whether public or private, can only perform well if founded on valid organizational principles. In the case of police force of Bangladesh, these principles were ruthlessly violated over the years, resulting in corrupt, inefficient and highly politicized police force. Increasingly, the police was rendered to act as agents of the political executive rather than as instruments of a democratic state.
Discerning observers and cynics are of the considered view that it is high time our society directed its attention towards the paramount need of changing the mindset of the people in authority, in particular, the political masters. For they are the policy makers and the public servants including the police are executioners. We are confident that the Honorable Prime Minister definitely wants our police in democracy to be a provider of service to the community, and not a force to subdue and subjugate people.
Our politicians know very well that policing in Bangladesh has been by and large a one-sided affair; with communities having little or no say in local policing plans and strategies that affect them most. The idea that police are people and people are police has not taken root in our country. Our politicians including legislators know very well that the police Act of 1861, the mother police law, is silent on the issue of community consultation. This law focused on the responsibility of communities to ensure order and should any member step out of line, the whole community would face vicarious punishment. The situation persists to this day.
Therefore, one may very logically ask as to why the politician-legislator is not demonstrably concerned about the necessary amendment in this law to facilitate organizational and operational changes entailing meaningful public-friendly ramifications? Is it not necessary to witness a change in the mindset of the politicians of our country to usher in a modern, progressive and forward-looking police service in line with the enlightened system elsewhere? Whose interests do we serve by remaining bogged down in an archaic Police Act?
The politician's mind has to appreciate that the Police Act, 1861 was principally aimed to administer a static, immobile and backward rural society living in villages and small towns. It envisaged exercise of authority without local accountability. It presupposed a society without any constitution, basic and fundamental rights, organized public opinion and mass-media projecting and agitating the public interest. The need, therefore, is to initiate informed debates and ultimately succeed in enacting suitable Act as has been done in a neighbouring country.
In Bangladesh we have to deal with the vexed issue of political interference in the internal administration of police. It is well-known that the leverage of causing transfer vested in the political executive often lower the morale of upright officers and affects the discipline of the service. In a neigbouring country there is an order that lays down a fixed tenure of three years for key police appointments but also requires the authorities to record grounds of premature transfer for independent scrutiny by the relevant public safety commission. Can we in Bangladesh adopt similar measures for a change in the mindset, to start with?
There are credible fears that the police image in Bangladesh will suffer a grave damage if politicization continues unabated. We already have the unfortunate spectacle of a police service in whose investigative fairness the major political parties and a sizable section of the civil society entertain grave doubt. Criminal cases relating to victims of diabolical and dismal murders that are considered as acts of political vendetta are not investigated properly.
There are persistently vociferous demands to arrange for proper investigation of sensational cases by external agencies including international organization. Without doubt, such appeals and petitioning indicate the deep distrust of the impartiality of the state's investigative apparatus. No sensible Bangladeshi would feel at ease in such an unsettling environment.
It must be appreciated very clearly that the regulatory functions of the state like maintenance and preservation of public order and investigation of criminal cases cannot be arrogated to private bodies. These functions cannot be performed through contractual arrangements either. Only persons with solemnly sworn loyalty to the state who have been examined, selected and verified in a constitutional process are expected to conscientiously perform the onerous responsibilities without profit motive. If this is accepted as an article of faith and conviction then a serious and sincere attempt should be made to recruit the best type of young persons at grassroots and intermediary levels of the police organization and train them appropriately.
Police officials at these levels come into contact with the common man. Recruitments at this layer, therefore, may be entrusted to a very broad-based committee as against the existing departmental arrangements.
Well-meaning persons and the media have voiced their concern about the devastating effects of the alleged blatant politicization on our body politic. In the not-too-distant past the saner elements of our society sought the intervention of the chief executive of the country to stem the rot and take corrective measures before the nation finds itself in an ungovernable state.
Ground realities indicate that all the appeals and entreaties of law-abiding citizens have fallen on deaf ears and the establishment was dead set to embark on its own plan, come what may and whatever the price. Under the circumstances, there is no alternative but to once again impress upon the paramount necessity of insulating our administrative and enforcement organs from political influence for ensuring the healthy growth of a democratic polity.
A politicized police force will not be able to ensure a sense of security in the community and will not succeed in enlisting the cooperation and participation of people in crime prevention programmes. Similarly, the political appointees may not appreciate that their job is not to encroach upon the rights and liberty of the individual and the premonition is that they may look upon themselves as mere pawns in the hands of governing elite.
They cannot be expected to be accountable to the real sovereign, the people. Such policemen will inevitably compromise the dignity of the individual citizen. In such a scenario, democracy will gather deficits at our peril.
Few things in the world of police service can damage the police image as much as police involvement in politics. Police in their professional capacity have to be apolitical and impartial in their application of law. Interference with the statutory duties of the police contrary to the provisions of law has to be deprecated at all times and more so when it impedes the performance of their duties in the maintenance of public order and investigation of cases.
A clear understanding of the dividing line between state and government/ party interests is one of the fundamental requirements of a democracy. Such realisation assumes heightened significance in polities that have been subjected to colonial rule for a long time. A people's republic ought to be different from the governance culture of dictatorship or the colonial administration and the same must be a manifest reality to emulate and to draw lesson from.
The question that should bother us is whether there was an unhealthy motive in the recruitment of more than usual number of officials in the penultimate year of a political government. Such premonition arises because the integrity of recruitment process of public services in the recent past was not above board. And now it has been seen that premature field exposure to a duty post without basic orientation has been dangerously unwholesome. The accusations of intake of partisan law enforcement officials have complicated an already fearfully polarized public life.
To be brutally frank, the profession of policing has to be salvaged from the morass of a politically and managerially incapacitated scenario. There is a pressing requirement of substantial injection of resources. The police needs to be organizationally accountable, operationally autonomous and neutral and functionally responsive. The question is, do we have the will to accord police reform the desired priority?
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