The babus in police uniform

IN 1987, I joined Gujarat as an IPS probationer and called on the state DGP. He asked me why I had left my job of an SBI officer to become a cop at a substantial salary cut. I avoided mentioning the real motives — power and glamour — and said I did not want to do a desk job all my life.

He retorted sarcastically, ‘And what do you think we are here? We are also babus and I am the burra babu of the Gujarat Police!’

Apparently, he hated the excessive paperwork that had crept into police procedures; even he had not been able to do anything about this because the government and the courts wanted it that way. Perhaps it was a legacy of the Bombay state, of which Gujarat was a part before it became a separate state in 1960. However, while the DGP himself rued it, other officers took pride in the length of reports and the thickness of the bundles of investigation papers they produced.

One document was talked about with awe in those days. It was a near book-length affidavit of the Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad, which he had filed before the commission of inquiry looking into the communal riots of 1985. In the affidavit, he had traced the history of communal riots in Gujarat since the Mughal period. It is another matter that his academic knowledge had been of little help in controlling the violence.

As I settled in the job, I found that most documents — FIRs, statements of witnesses, panchnamas and all kinds of reports — tended to be unusually lengthy. I tried to impress upon my staff that a statement before the police had little evidentiary value and the more details it had the greater material it supplied to the defence counsel to contradict the witness and demolish his credibility. But I did not succeed much. Needless to say, not many officers read the lengthy documents and much of the voluminous record was created only for the records.

I was serving as an ASP in a rural subdivision when the General Election of 1989 was announced. One day, I received a wireless message running into several pages from the Inspector General (Law and Order). It had been circulated down to the police station level and required officers to visit all villages in their jurisdiction to ensure that there were no issues or disputes that could threaten the peaceful conduct of the election. In the message, the IG had reproduced an entire chapter of instructions from the Gujarat Police Manual (GPM) and sought officers’ compliance with it.

Later, when I met the IG, I made him recall his lengthy radio message and suggested politely that instead of reproducing the entire chapter of the GPM, he could have just quoted the chapter number and sought compliance. His reply was, ‘In my 25 years of service, I had not read that chapter. When my reader police inspector drew my attention to it and I read it, I realised that there may be other officers like me. I reproduced the entire chapter in my message so that officers would at least go through it.’