Keeping India Safe: The Dilemma of Internal Security

INTRODUCTION

In November 1959, a group of forty-two formally dressed eager young men assembled in the central hall of the erstwhile Lawrence School in Mount Abu, a hill station in Rajasthan. They had qualified to be members of the elite Indian Police Service, which had replaced the British-era Imperial Police (IP). Sir Henry Lawrence, former British Resident in Rajputana, had established two schools at Sanawar and Mount Abu in 1847 and 1855 respectively before he was killed in the 1857 uprising.¹ The Mount Abu School was acquired by the Centre in 1948 to house the Central Police Training College to train senior police officers.

I was one of them. We knew nothing about the Indian police, how they work or what they do. None of us had any previous government experience. Our smugness at being members of the exclusive civil service soon disappeared when we were ‘welcomed’ by a tall, strikingly handsome and impeccably dressed officer in starched khaki uniform with all his insignia and medals. He was our commandant, the highly decorated Gopi Krishna Handoo, who was earlier Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s chief security officer. In his booming voice he disabused us of any notion in our minds that we would have a cushy life in the police force. He warned us that police work was a tough grind and not meant for those who are faint-hearted or lackadaisical. He firmly told us that those who wanted a laidback career could leave the hall immediately and he would be happy to book their return tickets.

The next experience which punctured our inflated egos was when their barber came the very same day to give us the regulation military-style crew cuts. Next morning onwards we were put through exacting outdoor exercises before sunrise, with junior drill instructors shouting at us to ‘fall in line and be disciplined’. We then underwent rigorous training for one year before being sent to different states. The training included classroom lectures on criminal law, police procedure, investigation methods and man management in addition to arms drill, physical training, horse riding, and rifle and revolver shooting.

The very first story we heard at Mount Abu was about the valiant sacrifices of policemen’s lives guarding our international borders. On 21 October 1959, a small group of policemen belonging to the Central Reserve Police were ambushed and killed by Chinese soldiers at Hot Springs in Ladakh, at an altitude of 16,000 feet. Since then, 21 October every year is observed by all police forces in India as Police Commemoration Day in memory of those killed on duty.

We reported to our respective states a year later where we were given practical police training for another six to eight months. This included a three-month spell at the state police training college. We understood that everything, other than perhaps the weather, was our responsibility! The Indian police were expected to do multifarious duties wherever they were posted. They were the only ones in government whose working conditions specified that they be on twenty-four-hour duty, if need be. These duties included investigating crime; maintaining law and order; regulating traffic; collecting fines; issuing licences to eateries, horse-drawn ‘tongas’ and bullock carts; locating missing persons; impounding stray cattle; killing stray dogs; disposing of unclaimed dead bodies; rounding up beggars; working as police ‘orderlies’; collecting political intelligence; protecting vital installations like offices, factories, bridges or water storage areas; escorting prisoners and important persons; undertaking counter-insurgency operations and defending international borders. In fact, for over a hundred years, the police in India had been performing duties that were a microcosm of what the entire government machinery was supposed to do.

However, the purpose of this book is not to focus on police duties. It is to focus on an astonishing feature: it is only in India that a system exists wherein the state police are the only legal instrument of maintaining internal security in peacetime without any concurrent responsibility lying with the Centre. It is to highlight how several of our state governments had adamantly refused central police advisories or intervention on crucial national security situations like communal riots or terrorist strikes purely because of partisan considerations without any regard for public safety. It is to narrate how the states had insisted on maintaining their total control on internal security, even when they were incapable of doing so, on the basis of a constitutional provision copied from a colonial law which should have been scrapped immediately after Independence. It is to recount how our legal system has been imposing further burdens on the police without realizing that such additional duties would render it totally incapable of performing even the basic police charter of prevention and detection of crime and maintenance of law and order. It is to describe how successive central governments have failed in their leadership role to convince the states of the need to share the burden of internal security with the central authority, as is the case in several other countries.

None of this should have happened. It was understandable that the British colonists and princely states imposed several responsibilities on their police that had no relationship with their basic charter of prevention and detection of crime and maintenance of law and order. Being an occupying power, the British did not replicate their homeland police philosophy in India. When former British prime minister Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, the charter focused on primary police functions of prevention and investigation of crime as well as maintenance of law and order. Public approval of police performance was also an important factor. That was not so in India. This was understandable in colonial India since the rulers had no public accountability. Also, they did not have any other coercive force apart from their army. That was why twenty-two extra responsibilities were imposed on the police under the 1861 Police Act, such as cattle impounding, killing of stray dogs and detection of street dirtying. When the Independence movement started, the police were also made instruments of domestic spying without legal mandate.

Why then did an independent India continue with the same practice? The reason is that it suited our politicians to keep the police under their control. Ambitious politicians always wanted to supervise the home department. In Maharashtra, policemen were appointed as telephone orderlies to ministers in addition to police guards. Simultaneously, all states started prescribing ad hoc police priorities based on local political expediency or vote bank politics. In Tamil Nadu, priority attention was given to video piracy since successive rulers came from the film community. The Mumbai city police started becoming a moral police under a fastidious home minister in the previous Congress–NCP administration, giving overwhelming priority only to checking dance bars at night. Large posses of policemen would be engaged in detecting ‘obscene scenes’ at such bars, neglecting public security in the streets, traffic or detection of crime and other regular police duties. This policy has been continued even by the present National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, which, in addition, wants the police to detect ‘beef crimes’ on top priority. Local expediency also requires the police to give priority attention to influential people rather than the common man. In February 2010, almost one-third of the Mumbai city police was deployed for several days to ensure that theatres were open for the film release of a politically connected film star. IPL matches run by political leaders also involve huge deployment of police forces.

Another peculiar feature in India is a practice whereby state police are charged with the responsibility of investigating breach of social laws in addition to criminal cases. The burden on the police was further increased by several state police acts and hundreds of minor acts. For example, fourteen additional responsibilities including municipal functions were imposed by the Bombay Police Act 1951, which included tackling infectious diseases and offensive odours. Hundreds of new laws were passed to penalize certain activities which were detrimental to social equality, health or clean business practices, such as the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955, the Dowry Prohibition Act 1961, the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act 1954 or the Copyright Act 1957. Unlike in other countries, no special enforcement machinery was set up to prosecute those who violated these minor acts. All these were entrusted to the state police for enforcement on the grounds that all investigations should be done by them. Things reached such a stage that the police, under pressure from aggressive visual media, social reformists or business lobbies, started prioritizing these over basic crime investigation. The burden on the police became unbearable with the onslaught of terrorism. Politicization affected the police force’s ability to act according to the law in dealing with all these situations.

The casualty in this process was our internal security and basic police functions. The police ignored discipline, neglected physical fitness, arms drill and rifle-firing practices.² Detection and prosecution were neglected. The Maharashtra Police, for example, lost 84 per cent of their criminal cases in 2009. Nine of the twenty-three gangsters deported to Mumbai during the last decade were acquitted.³

Successive governments in New Delhi have been egotistical and desultory about this situation. They have never acknowledged that public security resulting in a peaceful ecosystem is a vital ingredient for development. After the 1999 Kargil War, four expert task forces were constituted by the NDA government to examine the weaknesses of all facets of our national security. Their reports were examined by a high-powered Group of Ministers (GoM), which found that the management of internal security through the police was quite unsatisfactory. In February 2001 they made far-reaching recommendations. Years later it was found that hardly any recommendation was implemented. The NDA government, which was in power till 2004, did nothing. Nor did the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which succeeded the NDA, show any interest in reforming our security system. Then came the 26/11 terror attacks in 2008, exposing gaping holes in our internal security architecture. Now NDA-II is in power since May 2014. Although they chant the development mantra, they have also shown no interest in effecting basic internal security reforms.

The public are the worst sufferers in this situation. Had the Centre assumed direct interest in correcting the distorted implementation of internal security measures by the states, some of the worst situations in our history could have been avoided. I am giving below an analysis of two situations by two different countries. In one, decisive action by the central government prevented ugly race incidents. In the other, horrendous massacres took place because of the vacillation by the central government. Its repercussions are being experienced even today. It is sad that the second country is India.

On 4 September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the deployment of his state’s National Guards to physically block nine black students from attending the integrated Little Rock Central Public School even after the US Supreme Court had ordered desegregation. He was defiantly supporting his electoral base among the white segregationists. The sight of burly white uniformed troops blocking a small group of black students polarized the nation, creating a tense atmosphere. President Dwight Eisenhower intervened and appealed to Faubus to obey the Supreme Court orders and de-escalate the situation. Yet, it had no effect. In order to avoid escalating race tensions and mob rule, the president ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to move into Little Rock on 24 September to enforce desegregation. He also took the 10,000-strong Arkansas National Guards out of the governor’s control and made them work under federal control.⁴ This prompt and firm action calmed the race tensions in Arkansas temporarily, although the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in April 1968 caused severe race riots in 110 cities.

In India, on 26 November 1992, central paramilitary forces numbering 20,000 were ordered by the Union home ministry to be moved into Uttar Pradesh for deployment in Ayodhya. This was a precautionary measure as a tense situation was developing there because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) call for the assembly of kar sevaks to build a Ram temple at the same location as that of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid. Dr M.D. Godbole, then Union home secretary, described it as the largest mobilization of such forces for internal security duties to a state since Independence. The BJP government in Uttar Pradesh objected to the positioning of central forces and did not utilize them when nearly two lakh kar sevaks demolished the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. This incident provoked countrywide communal riots apart from large-scale arson and looting.⁵ It is commonly understood that the Babri Masjid demolition and the 2002 Gujarat riots after the Godhra train burning were directly responsible for increasing jihadi terrorism in India, the casualties of which form a major portion of the total terrorism-related deaths in our country, estimated to be 65,712 since 1994.⁶

The two contrasting situations described above would help in analysing how a direct initiative of a central government to enforce internal security is possible even in a country known for its federal system, and how it is not rendered possible in India, which is only a ‘Union of States’. America is a ‘federal, democratic republic, an indivisible union of 50 sovereign states’⁷ with each state having its own constitution,⁸ while India is only a ‘Union of States’ and not a ‘Federation of States’.⁹ Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of our Constitution, had further illustrated this with dramatic effect: ‘Subject to the maintenance of the republican form of government, each state in the USA is free to make its own constitution whereas the Constitution of the Indian Union and of the states is a single frame from which neither can get out and within which they must work.’¹⁰

The purpose of this book is to analyse how this incongruity crept into our Constitution, its pernicious effects on our internal security and how it is not too late to remedy it.

1

THE INITIAL YEARS

‘This violence brought home the lesson that local law enforcement and local—even provincial—government could be frail reeds in time of great distress, that the Centre must have the power to preserve order and the processes of government.’

—Granville Austin in

The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966)

THE DIFFICULTIES OF MAINTAINING SECURITY IN INDIA

On 3 May 2010, I was invited to deliver the keynote address on India’s homeland security problems to the annual conference of homeland security professionals of a leading American defence firm. The venue was Disney Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Orlando. The other speaker was Fran Townsend, who was homeland security advisor to President George W. Bush. Nearly 200 professionals were present. The assembled officials were fascinated but alarmed when I listed out the governance problems in India: one-sixth of the world population belonging to over 2,000 ethnic groups and 645 tribes which spoke twenty-two ‘scheduled’ languages, 122 ‘major’ languages and 1,599 ‘other’ languages. India had achieved remarkable cultural and religious synthesis over the years which had also permeated into music and classical dances. Yet, we were beleaguered by four streams of insurgencies after Independence which had taken more than 63,296 lives since 1994. I explained to them that this was due to an institutional drawback since the Indian central government was not given a pivotal role in preserving our internal cohesion through a centrally guided security architecture.

The British had also felt that India was difficult to govern. William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), former British prime minister who occupied that chair four times, had written a column in a Calcutta (now Kolkata) weekly which was noticed to be critical of the British. Gladstone, a liberal and anti-colonialist, had in 1878 also contributed an article in the Hindu Patriot when he was the leader of the Opposition. Patriot’s editor was Kristo Pal (1838–84), a brilliant speaker and a member of the governor-general’s council. His weekly had boldly exposed the oppression of the peasants by indigo planters in Bengal, some of whom were English. V.P. Menon, constitutional adviser to the last three viceroys during British rule, quotes excerpts of this article in his landmark book The Transfer of Power in India: ‘It [India]embraces from one-fifth to one-sixth of the human race…over this population and the vast territory it inhabits, we hold a dominion entirely uncontrolled, save by duty and by prudence, measured as we may choose to measure them…at home still less provision is made for the adequate discharge of a gigantic duty. It depends upon a Cabinet which dreads nothing so much as the mention of an Indian question at its meetings…’¹

India is a huge country. Governance problems in India can be gauged from the following details: India is perhaps one of the most ethnically diverse countries with three main races (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Mongloid). Its population speaks 1,652 languages although it has only twenty-two official ones. India has over thirty main ethnic population groups with more than a thousand subgroups. Manipur alone, for example, has more than twenty ethnic subgroups.

India is home to a population of 124 crore people (1.2 billion). According to the 2001 Census released in 2006, India’s population was expected to increase from 1 billion in 2001 to 1.4 billion by 2026, which would push up population density from 313 to 426 per square kilometre. The population in the age group 15–24 years was expected to increase from 195 million (2001) to 240 million (2011) and then to decrease to 224 million in 2026. The urban population, which was 28 per cent in 2001, was expected to increase to 38 per cent by 2026, leading to more urban congestion.²

Traditionally, inequality and intolerance have been built into India’s social structure. Despite the pious intentions of our freedom fighters and Constitution makers, social inequality has not been eradicated nearly seven decades after the adoption of the Constitution. Dr Ambedkar had said long ago, ‘On 26 January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.’³

Kancha Ilaiah, a leading social reformer, had said in 2014 that a school in Kuppegala, 35 km from Mysore, where Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had studied, still practised untouchability because upper caste parents including those belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) did not want their children to eat the food cooked by a Dalit.⁴ Even in the more developed Tamil Nadu, a riot took place on 25 April 2013 at Marakkanam near Chennai when supporters of the Pattali Makkal Kachi (PMK) clashed with Dalit villagers, leaving two dead.

INTERNAL SECURITY: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

With such a background, it may seem strange that our Constitution makers thought of entrusting the responsibility of internal security to our fragmented police system placed under twenty-nine state governments and not to our central government. It is like going to war under twenty-nine independent generals. Constitutional debates indicate that the framers had no clear idea about internal security as we understand it now. It was synonymous with public order. For the framers of our Constitution, the situation had to be either war or mere internal disturbances. When internal disturbances or insurgencies turned grave, our governments handed over the situation to the army.

Almost all serious internal security challenges since Independence were tackled by the armed forces and not merely by the state police. This practice continued for a long time until Central Armed Police (CAP) forces were able to replace them for routine internal security duties. Despite the presence of the CAP, our armed forces had to assume lead roles later too. They were used in the north-east ethnic unrest, the Khalistan turmoil, the Jammu and Kashmir insurgency and during serious communal riots or volatile situations like the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition and in the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat.

Internal security measures during the Mughal and British eras through the police were fragmented and unable to maintain peace. Nothing illustrates this better than the description given by W.H. Sleeman in his book Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. He describes the situation in princely states and British India in the nineteenth century. He recounts an incident that took place on 26 January 1836 while he was visiting Farruknagar (now in Haryana).⁵ The local police officer told him that he was unable to prevent depredations from Begum Samru’s territory. Begum Samru, a former nautch girl, who was the ruler of Sardhana (near Meerut), used to wield power through a mercenary army once belonging to her European husband Walter Reinhardt Sombre of Luxembourg. She was the only Catholic ruler in India. Her mercenaries regularly visited neighbouring areas to commit murders and dacoities. The Mughal practice of entrusting the responsibility of crime prevention and maintenance of order to local zamindars and their staff had generated disorder.

Efforts to organize police forces with countrywide standards began to be made by the British only after the 1902–03 Police Commission report. The Police Commission found that the village watchmen, the heads of villages and even higher officials connived in crime and harboured offenders in return for a share of the booty. Former Indian finance minister John Mathai, in his book Village Government in British India (1915), says that criminal tribes were used for village policing. In many places, village policemen used to double up as street sweepers too.⁶ During this period, armed forces were always called in to quell internal disturbances, a practice independent India also followed. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s efforts to create All-India Services after 1947 were meant to help internal security and ensure the unity and integrity of the country. This did not have the desired effect since the police were placed under the states’ control.

When India won Independence, no central police worth its name existed except in the north-east. In 1835, the imperial government formed the Cachar Levy with 750 men to protect the British settlements from tribal raids. It went on to become the Assam Rifles in 1917. Currently, it consists of forty-six battalions. The Rifles were used in World War I in Europe and the Middle East and in Burma during World War II. They were also used to quell the Mopla Rebellion in the Malabar district in 1921. Since 2002, they are being utilized to guard our borders along Myanmar (Burma). Although they are administratively under the Ministry of Home Affairs, operationally they work under the army for counterinsurgency duties.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) is our second oldest central police force. It was raised in 1939 as the Crown Reserve Police. Initially it had only one battalion of men. It was supposed to protect British residents in sensitive places and its expenses were borne by the viceroy’s political department. It became the CRPF after a law was passed in 1949. The late V.P. Menon mentions an attempt by the outgoing British administration to weaken India’s internal security as we were nearing Independence. The political department wanted to distribute the Crown Representative’s Police Force among the various states although this force was maintained from the revenues of the Government of India. When Menon took over as the secretary of the Ministry of the States on 5 July 1947, he stopped the disintegration of this force. He says, ‘This was the only effective force which the States Ministry had at its disposal. It was very well trained and, but for the discipline, efficiency and devotion to duty of its officers and men, we would not have been able to maintain order, particularly in the small states and in the border areas, during the crucial period following the transfer of power.’⁷ Now, the CRPF has 207 battalions.

Our Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and Border Security Force (BSF) were raised in 1962 and in 1965 respectively, to become centralized units to guard our international borders, which until then were manned by the State Armed Police. Similarly, eleven armed police battalions were raised in 1971 as ‘India Reserve Battalions’—a temporary measure by four state governments, funded by the central government, for internal security duties to be deployed in states needing them. Until today, all these central police forces and the army are provided to the states as assistance during grave internal security problems. However, they work under the directions of the local police to quell disturbances and have no independent enforcement power except in notified disturbed areas.

INITIAL SECURITY PROBLEMS AFTER INDEPENDENCE

Partition Riots

While analysing the horrendous massacres that followed the hurried Partition of India, what strikes me as very odd is the glaring mismatch between the promises made by Lord Louis Mountbatten and his deeds. Lord Mountbatten, born to Prince Louis of Battenberg and his wife Princess Victoria of Hesse, had royal pedigree but no experience in administration except serving in the navy. Even in the navy, he faced controversy for being involved in the disastrous Dieppe Raid in 1942 which annihilated nearly 500 Canadian commandos. He was then the chief of combined operations during World War II. He was appointed as Viceroy of India on 20 February 1947 and the first thing he did was to advance the date of Partition by ten months although he was given time till June 1948. American author Stanley Wolpert once said: ‘Britain’s shameful flight from its Indian Empire came only ten weeks after its last viceroy, Lord Louis (‘Dickie’) Mountbatten, took it upon himself to cut ten months from the brief time allotted by the Labour government’s cabinet to withdraw its air and fleet cover, as well as the shield of British troops and arms, from South Asia’s 400 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.’⁸

Mountbatten’s letter to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad on 14 May 1947, which I found among the British archives, indicates this mismatch: ‘At least on this one question I shall give you complete assurance. I shall see to it that there is no bloodshed and riot. I am a soldier, not a civilian. Once partition is accepted in principle, I shall issue orders to see that there are no communal disturbances anywhere in the country. If there should be the slightest agitation, I shall adopt the sternest measures to nip the trouble in the bud. I shall not use even the armed police. I will order the Army to act and I will use tanks