Indian Police: ‘A Gang of Organised Criminals’

Asok Chattopadhyay
Recently a police inspector of Kasba Police Station, Kolkata, publicly kicked a protesting teacher. He was one of those ill-fated 26000 working teachers who lost their job due to a controversial verdict of the Supreme Court. Following such a humiliating incident, a renowned scribe in an article in a major Bengali Daily, a few days ago, condemned such police action. However, this condemnation never stops or restrains the police from practising such inhuman behaviour. People in Bengal know how the police behaved in the seventies, to forget of the last century? Or can the role of the police in the days of the monopoly of the left rule in West Bengal, which lasted for almost three and a half decades from the late seventies, be easily forgotten?
Nowadays, various judges from the Allahabad High Court are giving some judgments in the context of very sensitive events, which are inhuman and which are difficult to accept. However, almost six and a half decades ago, in 1961, a judge of this same Allahabad High Court, A N Mulla, said:
‘I say with all sense of responsibility, there is not a single lawless group in the whole of the country whose record of crime comes anywhere near that of the organised gang of criminals known as the Indian Police Force. He took responsibility and condemned the Indian Police Force as a gang of organised criminals.
But did his condemnation or rebuke teach the Indian police force any lesson? Did it give any necessary and valid message to the minister in charge of the police and the government, or the administration? There is only one answer: it did not. The police are the guards of the state. They are obedient followers of the government’s orders. Therefore, if one tries to give credence to what a poet and judge (A N Mulla) said about this police, the question arises about the character of the state itself.
Marx, in his Gotha Programme, wrote:
‘…it is possible to speak of the present-day state, in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off’.
But the chapter of the present-day state is so unending and hazardous that peeping into the future, having the state die off is now hard to discover. Indian leftists have been eager enough to save this present-day state system with a healthy and sane life to afford good to the masses of the people of the land. Electioneering politics is now the cry of the day, and the question of capturing state power in peaceful and legal means has become the pivotal point of political business.
Lenin, in his book State and Revolution, has referred to the police force as the ever-vigilant armed force of the state. Naturally, this state force will be creative in its own way of the practical exercise of its power. In addition to vulgar abuses, assimilation of the language of anti-socials, it will use sticks as well as hands and feet as an element of its power. And these are all forced, not spontaneous, and police brutality is usually justified under the guise of self-defence due to being attacked by the agitators. Despite the violations of all limits in the field of brutality in the seventies, how many brutal police officers have so far been punished in the past? On the contrary, there are many examples of them being rewarded by those in power who brought charges against them while in the opposition.
Here too, it has been seen that despite the agitating teacher being subjected to humiliation like being kicked by a police sub-inspector and despite the general outcry against this police misdeed, a section of the police is trying to cover up the crime of this police officer in various ways. Just saying that this was a completely unwanted incident or that it would have been better if such an incident had not happened does not make the lightness of this unfortunate incident acceptable. It is important to remember that the state and the government will also continue to try to cover up this police officer and, in some way, legitimise his actions unless the intensity of the protest movement forces the government to step down.
The aforementioned scribe writes that every job has certain mandatory conditions, some dos and don’ts. These conditions naturally apply to police jobs as well. And these do’s include any movement or gathering that is illegal and violent, and lathi-charges, slaps, punches, or kicks to the protesters or agitators. These are called light or minor actions taken by the police, and on the contrary, the angry protesters will say that there have been incidents of brutal beatings by the police. These pressure-ups are eventually resolved in the process of the movement becoming more orderly. The questions of police crimes are also settled. But here, this scribe writes:
‘But kick? In public? A protester? Whose professional and social identity is ‘teacher’?’
Here are a few questions: (1) Would it have been better if the kicking had not been done in public? (2) Is this incident of police kicking condemned because it is a teacher? (3) Isn’t it condemnable for the police to kick any other common man or protester in public? — These odd questions arise in the light of the aforementioned scribe’s statement. Police atrocities, whether committed secretly or openly, are a violation of human rights and are undoubtedly crimes. If crimes committed by common people are considered punishable by law and the judicial process, then crimes committed by the police are also crimes and should be considered punishable according to law and subject to trial.
Rabindranath’s notion of the police was not very good. In his Jivan Smriti (Memoirs of life), he wrote:
‘I had a very rough idea of the duties of a policeman. I knew that as soon as a person is handed over to them as a criminal, just as a crocodile impales its prey in its serrated teeth and disappears under the water, similarly, it is the natural duty of a policeman to hold the unfortunate person and hide in the bottomless dungeon of the police station’.
His idea of the police did not change in later years either. In the article Chhoto o Baro in his book Kalantar, Rabindranath again wrote:
‘A sapling, on which the police have once set even a little tooth, never flowers or bears fruit. There is poison in its saliva…. There is no need to explain their process of beating; their very mere touch is fatal…. As soon as their breath touches it, the young shoots of life begin to wither.
This police establishment is the guard of the state, the shield of the government, the armed force under command, whose job is to prevent the government from being exposed to protests, discontent, and unrest by the angry public. Naturally, behind this shield, the power, strength, and support of the government and the state system are concentrated. When a policeman is attacked or killed by the angry public, police brutality readily becomes rampant in response. In the post forty-seven 1947 West Bengal, no matter which government was in power, police attacks had repeatedly occurred during mass movements. Numerous students, youth, and ordinary people had been martyred by police attacks. In the 1959 food movement, eighty innocent people were reportedly killed in police attacks in Kolkata. Nurul Islam, Anand Hait, and others were killed in the 1966 food movement.
The government has been changed many times due to its anti-people policies and the extreme nature of police attacks raining down on the agitating masses. A new government has come to power. And this new government’s shield has been the same old-fashioned police. The demands for justice of the countless martyrs in police firing and torture have been ignored, and guilty police officers have been promoted. This has become the rule of the system.
The aforementioned scribe wrote in the last part of his write-up: ‘Only one of the police had kicked. The others did not—in this way, is he not trying to bring this incident of kicking by only one police officer into the limelight in comparison with the totality? At the same time, the police are trying to publicise that this kicking police officer himself was also abused by the protesters! Therefore, his kicking is not unnecessary and unnatural; that is, it is not such a heinous crime! The good deeds of this kicking uniformed police officer done in the past are tarnished by this incident, which seems to have caused the scribe’s pain. Even the current Kolkata Police Commissioner Manoj Verma, who was once a dangerous chaser of Maoists in Lalgarh and used to carry a rocket launcher on his shoulder, seemed to be in a state of considerable emotional distress as he sighed at the behaviour of the sub-inspector on duty at Kasba police station.
The doldrums of drum petting shrouding the ensuing General Assembly Election in 2026 are not too far. Almost all the right and left of different hues are busy preparing themselves for the fray to get into the power seat of West Bengal. Then Lenin’s famous utterance: ‘While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no State. Courtesy: Frontier issue May 18 – 24, 2025