The police is as good, or bad, as the govt it works under

There was a time when Holi and Muharram coming together any year was a particular headache for the police in Maharashtra. A procession could go past a temple and some slight occur that would flare up tempers on both sides; or colour could be thrown on the procession and there would be a full-blown riot.

And this, at the time, usually involved Bal Thackeray's Shiv Sena. There was one particularly fractious year when supercop Julio Ribiero was the police commissioner in Thane where there were substantial Shiv Sainiks as well as a large Muslim population.

The militant Shiv Sainiks—six of them in a delegation at the time— were pretty adamant that the juloos would not pass by their locality, a demand that was nearly impossible to manage. They stormed into Ribiero’s office and said they were prepared to die in their bid to stop the procession because they hated Muslims. They loved their country and they would not allow Pakistan to overtake the country with such nonsense even after causing the Partition of India, they raged.

Ribiero had some fast thinking to do to defuse the situation as the procession was already on its way and would be passing by the local temple soon.

“Now why do you want to die like flies on the streets where no one will remember you?” he asked the Shiv Sainiks. "If you want to really rid the world of our enemies, you should fight on our borders with Pakistan. We need brave soldiers like you in the Indian army.”

Then Ribiero did something very inspired. His wife and family were away on vacation, so he picked up the telephone on his desk and dialled his home number, confident no one would pick it up and it would ring off automatically.

After a pause for a few rings, he asked to be put through to the local army commander. Pretending he was connected, he said, “Colonel, I have six brave men in my office who hate Pakistanis and want to die for their country. I am sending them across to your office. Please admit them to your command for a short service and post them on the borders. They will do very well.”

Ribeiro had judged the Shiv Sena and their leader well. They were nothing but common bullies and, like all bullies, they were cowards. So even as Ribiero was pretending to exchange pleasantries with the colonel, he could see the air going out of the Shiv Sainiks and they were already beginning to slink away.

One had aged parents to look after, so could not go to the borders, he said. Another had just got married, the third had young children to raise and so on and so forth. The outcome of the entire episode was that the crowd of Shiv Sainiks outside the police headquarters soon melted like snow under the sun and the Muharram procession concluded peacefully.

***

The fact that most Hindutvawadi bullies are cowards was brought home to me again some years later when they were haranguing some small shopkeepers, mostly those running chicken and meat shops, in some South Mumbai lanes. The Muslim butchers bore up patiently for some time but then their tempers snapped.

I was around to witness this personally and I will never forget the frighteningly dangerous butcher knives these Konkani and Malabari Muslim men picked up, folded their lungis to their knees, and in just vests chased after the Shiv Sainiks and Bajrang Dalis. I still remember how the bullies ran for their lives, darting into any open door way, finding their way to the backs of those shops and under the tables and desks and refused to come out even as their potential attackers called out to them to come and face them like men. Maa ka doodh piya hai toh... and all that.

I do not think the Muslim men intended to shed any blood but it was a lesson that needed to be taught. The police were soon there in large numbers, they rounded them up and pulled the cowards out of the woodwork they had hidden themselves in and took them all away.

The people in the vicinity jeered and sneered at those who had run away and were even now protesting against their detention while the Muslim men marched stoically behind the cops. But there was never another disturbance of the peace by the Hindutvawadis after that.

So as this week there was the highly unusual disturbance of Ramzan prayers at mosques and even private homes during the simultaneous Ram Navami celebrations took the terrifying form that Lord Ram had never intended in his worship. I could not help but think that it is the policing, or rather the lack of it, that is causing India to turn into a lawless society today.

But, then, it is also true that police forces of the day take their cue from current political dispensations. Ribeiro was policing under law-abiding secular regimes, so were the cops who hauled up the butchers and the Shiv Sainiks with equal disregard for their antecedents and with equal application of the law.

Closer home, last year, during Ramzan, as the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi ruled Maharashtra, Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, instigated by the BJP, tried his best to disturb the peace by insisting his supporters would chant Hanuman Chalisa in front of mosques if azaan on loudspeakers was not disallowed.

The police came down on MNS workers like a tonne of bricks, mantras were not allowed to be chanted 15 minutes before or 15 minutes after prayers at the mosques and the chanters had to stay clear by 100 metres of any mosque. Ramzan passed off quite peacefully and the designs of those who would disturb the peace fell, literally, by the wayside.

That the motives of governments play a crucial role in maintaining law and order is also best illustrated from Maharashtra chief minister A.R. Antulay, the state’s only Muslim chief minister to date, in the 1980s. Communal riots had broken out in Nashik over a procession but were swiftly brought under control.

When the police commissioner of Nashik called the chief minister to say, “Sir, you will be glad to know we have controlled the riots,” Antulay snapped back, “No! No, I am not happy. In fact, I am very disappointed that the riots broke out at all. It means you’re really not doing your job properly. If you could not prevent it from happening and are happy only about controlling a riot you are not aware of what is happening in your city. There is no room for the police to be so clueless.”

The man was transferred out. There has never been a communal riot in Nashik ever since.

As a bureaucrat told me, wryly, once, “We, as administrators and policemen, are only as good or as bad as the government of the day. We are as honest or as corrupt, as true to our jobs or as incompetent as the ministers allow us to be.”

How many honest officers have we seen battling against corrupt governments in the past decades? But now the situation is even more excruciating as the central and most BJP-ruled state governments in the country scale the heights of communalism, corruption, dishonesty, mismanagement and maladministration. A whole generation of Indians is thus doomed to know no better.