Khaki, khadi, lathi

To the more senior citizens of London who might have lived through the Blitz, the recent scenes of fiery devastation in the capital perhaps revived childhood memories. For their contemporaries in India, some in faraway Kolkata, the images of London in flames brought back memories of Kolkata during the Great Calcutta Killing of 1946.

The two are of course totally diverse, but what is interesting is the response of the British police to a situation which was catastrophic and took them totally by surprise. Much has appeared in the British media since, about the “British way of policing” through restraint rather than confrontation even against angry mobs of hooligans bent on mindless looting.
Street policing is manpower intensive, and the London Metropolitan Police has a force strength of just 6,000, with plans to reduce these further as part of the Conservative government’s drive to reduce public spending in social sectors, including policing. With such inadequate resources, there was no way that any police force with responsibilities extending over an area and population the size of London could have managed a timely or effective response.
The initial impressions of race riots turned out to be misleading. In fact, race did not play any significant part in the incidents. Rather it was primarily a confrontation between street gangs of lawless young vandals and the police, about which the latter did not seem to have any warning or prior information. The riots could be controlled only with additional reinforcements — 16,000 policemen arrived from outside the city. At the end, it all added up to an “intelligence failure” on a massive scale. But in all this what needs to be taken note of is that the British police wasn’t armed, nor was any lethal action to quell the rioters ordered at any stage, and even the proposal for use of non-lethal dispersants like water cannon required clearance at the level of the home secretary. As a result, though five persons were killed during the riots, none of the deaths were attributable to any form of preventive or deterrent police action. This can be construed as either superhuman restraint on the part of the police, or total ineffectiveness and lack of initiative on their part which constituted a collective failure to carry out the primary task of protecting the British public held hostage and traumatised by rampaging mobs which raged unchecked over four nights.
India and Britain inhabit two separate universes. Nevertheless, if placed in perspective, in the infinitely more complex and volatile Indian socio-political milieu, the London riots — whatever their magnitude and impact in the British domestic context — would constitute just one single, though major, incident, whilst many such erupt periodically in this country. The constitutional responsibility for maintenance of public order in India lies with the state governments and their police forces. These are accepted to be inadequately trained and deficient in professional and political leadership, with a mindset still fixated on the “lathi culture” of a bygone colonial era. As a result, police responses to law and order situations in this country are generally harsher, and often counterproductive.
This state of affairs is due almost exclusively to the vitiation of the Indian political system by the machinations of all political parties, which seek to exploit every opportunity for electoral gains and other parochial objectives.
The Indian political culture evolved during the agitations and civil disturbances of the freedom struggle, but the agitational mode continues even 64 years after Independence. The methods used against the foreign rulers are now being turned against political opponents as also elected governments. Encouragement and incitement to street violence on any and every issue has become almost an integral part of contemporary politics, and police forces have become desensitised over the years. It should be remembered that in its time, political violence touched even the peaceful non-cooperation movement led by Gandhiji, as shown in the Chauri Chaura incident of February 4, 1922, in which a police station was set on fire by demonstrators and 23 policemen burnt alive.
Restraint is a cardinal principle for police forces, but its overall dimensions also have to be understood under the conditions prevailing in India. From the perspective of the police, their models of behaviour are conditioned by the historical background of policing in the country, the internal dynamic of police forces, as also the external public environment within which they are required to function. The public, and the political leadership, particularly at the local level, all have a significant role in the creation of a positive working environment for the police. The country’s legal and administrative systems provide firm constitutional foundations if these are adhered to, which unfortunately is the exception and not the rule.
Though police forces in India come under the state government, it is precisely here that local political influences on the police are at their most negative. Recognising these ground realities, and realising the slim chances of any worthwhile improvements in political behaviour or police training in the foreseeable future, increasing reliance has perforce come to be placed on paramilitary and central police who are less likely to be influenced by local pressures and can be relied upon to act impartially, though often with a heavy hand, sometimes resulting in the use of excessive force. But this is a price to be paid for operating within a flawed system and a flawed environment.
However, notwithstanding its many systemic shortcomings, the Indian police system would certainly have reacted in a much stronger manner to control the situation if riots like those in London had occurred in any Indian city.

Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former member of Parliament