Vikas Dubeys of India: The bad, the ugly, in good measure

Ira Pande

As we hurtle from one hysterical TV channel to another, I can see that the top of the pops this week is going to be the nexus between politics and crime. Suddenly, all the defence experts and retired Army Generals sporting bushy moustachios and outrageous opinions have been vanquished by the gangster from Kanpur. China and corona have been put aside by our own bahubalis. Jai Mahakal!

For those who have seen the chilling crime serials Paatal Lok and Mirzapur on Amazon Prime, life seems to be imitating art. The murky and dark underbelly of our law and order system was long known. Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the pot-bellied SHO at the local thana will instantly bond with stories about the close nexus between crime, the police and politics. The story of Vikas Dubey, therefore, is not that of one state: his clones have captured power in every state and we all know exactly how police encounters are staged and covered up. The judiciary is another aspect of this massive scandal: criminals escape while being escorted to a judicial magistrate’s court, revolvers are fired in full public view inside courtrooms as the rogue criminal escapes to fight another day.

All this is well known and so deeply embedded is this state of affairs that the public has begun to accept that there is no justice for the poor and innocent unless they have ‘pull’. While people have deep respect for those brave police officers who have tried to stand up and bring this rogue system to heel, one has to confess that such officers are rare and seldom given a chance to complete their terms. But does the blame rest on the state and politicians alone? What about those wheeler-dealers, fixers and so-called businessmen who have risen to dizzying heights of success within a few years? The land-grabbers, the money-launderers and the drug peddlers — the list of these criminals is long and disgusting. I doubt if any politician today can justify how their fortunes have multiplied manifold within a generation of their winning an election. Look at any political party and probe their leaders’ family fortunes to the time when they started their political careers. So while the top of the political pyramid (the so-called Lutyens’ gang) is occupied by the entitled dynasts, their satellites (and those who do all their dirty work) are small-time hoodlums and goondas who have bought respectability for themselves by becoming legislators and parliamentarians. Many have not cleared school exams, few can read and write clearly, while some have swung straight from riding cows to driving expensive SUVs.

The police have always been treated as the private vigilante army of the political party in power. In the ’50s, the Allahabad High Court had some outstanding judges. Foremost among them was Justice Anand Narain Mulla, a leading criminal lawyer who was elevated to the Bench. A friend recently sent me a long judgment the learned judge had passed in 1961, where he had categorically stated that there is no greater body of organised crime than the Indian police force. So it is perhaps not right to say that this criminal nexus is just a few years old: it has been steadily building up since the early years of Independence, becoming not just more powerful but more brutal and brazen. Just recall the death of the hapless father and son a few weeks ago in Chennai at the hands of the police inside a thana. The gory incident led to a wave of protests (some even called it our George Floyd moment) and then, quietly faded away as other, more exciting events took place. The gruesome details that are being revealed about the investigation into the riots that took place in NE Delhi, soon after the Shaheen Bagh protests, send a chill down one’s spine. In state after state (don’t even speak of J&K), police brutality and its brazen cover-up by politicians and the state machinery are an everyday occurrence. Whether it is fake encounters, custodial deaths or rape and intimidation, there is simply no area where the record of the police is clean and inspiring of trust.

I used to say that films have the uncanny ability to predict social events, I will now have to revise that and say that the serials being aired on our digital media are probably the only windows to the reality of our law and order machinery. We have been failed by all the arms of our democracy, including the human rights and minority commissions that were set up to protect the marginalised from exploitation and injustice. Fiction is the only mirror held to truth now, however perverse that may sound.

So where do we go from here? There is no easy answer, as even veteran police officers with distinguished careers behind them will tell you. Detailed reports on police reforms submitted by some outstanding commissions headed by the upright have been buried and never revealed, let alone been acted upon. There is a sinister conspiracy of silence between our political parties to keep the dirt firmly under the carpet. All I can think of is public pressure and civil society initiatives. So instead of baiting the government of the day on trivia and cracking stupid jokes and puns, our Opposition needs to embarrass the government of the day into finally cleaning these smelly Augean Stables.

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