WHY WAS THE DELHI POLICE SO INEPT IN ITS RESPONSE?
THERE’S A REASON THE DELHI Police is called the country’s most pampered police force. The Union home ministry foots its Rs 8,619 crore annual budget for a force of over 80,000 policemen. For comparison, consider the Rs 3,656 crore neighbouring state Haryana spends on its 56,747-strong force. An August 2019 study by nonprofit agency Common Cause and Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a New Delhi-based think tank, found the Delhi Police to be the India’s best when it came to ‘staffing, infrastructure and use of budget’. None of these were visible when it came to handling the national capital’s worst outbreak of Hindu-Muslim clashes in 70 years. The police failed to anticipate the steady build-up to the four-day orgy of violence which led to 49 deaths in Northeast Delhi’s communal tinderbox.
Among their early failures was not preventing the sit-in at the Jafrabad metro station by anti-CAA protesters on February 22. This was compounded by the lack of action against BJP leader Kapil Mishra the next day as he fulminated against the protesters. In fact, Mishra served an ultimatum to the Delhi Police on having the protesters removed from the Jafrabad and Chand Bagh areas and he did it with the DCP of Northeast Delhi district, Ved Prakash Surya, standing next to him. Within a few hours of Mishra’s rally, violent clashes erupted in Northeast Delhi.
Why did the Delhi Police, supposedly India’s finest, fail? “It’s a failure of the police leadership,” says Prakash Singh, former director-general of police of Uttar Pradesh. “Police commissioner Amulya Patnaik has gone under a cloud at the end of his career.”
Other police veterans are equally unsparing of the role played by their former colleagues. Former Delhi police commissioner Ajai Raj Sharma accused the force of allowing the situation in Northeast Delhi to snowball and turn into a riot. “Even the Shaheen Bagh sit-in should not have been allowed in the first place. Once it continued, it generated communal feelings, which escalated during state elections. This communal situation culminated in the riots,” he said in a TV interview.
Most senior police officers, even those who believe in Patnaik, concur with the assessment. “It was a monumental failure on the part of the police commissioner,” says another serving officer of DGP rank. “He displayed indecisiveness, inaction and sheer lack of leadership qualities in not having the moral courage to protect Delhi’s citizens. He was always a submissive character, submitting to political authority, never leading from the front.”
Patnaik, who retired on February 29, defends his record. He commends his officers for preventing the riots from spreading through the city. “The Delhi Police contained the violence within 12 police stations of Northeast Delhi and prevented its spread to the other 194 police stations. But for the Delhi Police’s action, the situation could have been worse,” he says.
The police, Patnaik says, dispersed the mobs on the night of February 22 and 23 during pro- and anti-CAA protests and deployed special commissioner of police Satish Golcha to monitor the situation on the 24th. On February 25, the police used teargas a lathi-charge. “I was present in Northeast Delhi on February 24, 25 and 26. By that time, the situation had begun to return to normal.”
If, as he says, the police was doing its job, where did the violence break out? “In the initial two days, the police were manning the main streets and intersections where the crowds had gathered. The bylanes of Northeast Delhi are very difficult to penetrate. It was here that the maximum violence happened,” says Patnaik.
The police themselves were targeted by the mobs. Head constable Ratan Lal was shot dead and, in another incident, DCP Amit Sharma sustained serious injuries on February 24 after being beaten by a mob. A 26-yearold IB staffer, Ankit Sharma, was murdered after being repeatedly stabbed and his body dumped in a nearby drain. These attacks, as policemen point out, might have been a result of their losing the monopoly over coercion and violence in controlling public disturbances. It
should have resorted to prompt action in what clearly were extraordinary circumstances. “The police should have resorted to disproportionate use of force to quell the violence,” says former IPS officer Uday Sahai.
When faced with a clear case of communal riots involving two communities, as happened in Northeast Delhi, the police have to resort to maximum possible force to quell the violence and change the course and direction of the situation. “The police have to face the violence and crush it so that further outbreaks of violence are prevented,” adds another serving commissioner-rank officer of the Delhi Police.
Delhi follows the comissionerate system of policing, where senior officers—say an ACP or DCP—do not need permission from a district magistrate to take a policy decision such as using teargas or a lathicharge, carrying out arrests, or even firing shots. This system works well during normal times, but it can completely collapse in times of a major crisis such as a communal conflagration. This is because it does not have the mechanism of checks and balances the magisterial system in states has, explains a chief secretary-rank officer in a key Hindi heartland state.
EXPERTS SAY TOP POLICE OFFICERS DISPLAYED INDECISION, INACTION AND SHEER LACK OF LEADERSHIP AND MORAL COURAGE
WHY WAS THERE SUCH “WEAK HUMAN INTELLIGENCE” WHEN THERE WERE FEARS THAT A COMMUNAL CLASH WAS BREWING?
Patnaik, the city police commissioner since January 2017, was due to retire on January 31 but was given a one-month extension in light of the Delhi assembly election. But it was hard to miss the steady erosion in the public image of the Delhi Police in recent months. Last November, after lawyers in the Tis Hazari court thrashed their comrades, thousands of uniformed policemen led a protest march to their own police headquarters shouting, “We want justice”. In December, the force failed to evict the protesters at the Shaheen Bagh sit-in, allowing the situation to become communally charged. On December 15, the police were accused of high-handedness in clashes with students at Jamia Millia Islamia University. On January 5, they were accused of inaction after goons went on a rampage in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Then, in the run-up to the assembly election in Delhi on February 8, a divisive political campaign hardened sentiments along religious lines. And yet, the Delhi Police, which has direct links to the Union home ministry via the lieutenant governor, the home secretary and the home minister, were caught unawares when the communal cauldron began boiling on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s visit.
A deputy commissioner of police acknowledged that they had “weak human intelligence about the (anti-CAA) protests”. The police also had little clue about the pileup of arms and illegal ammunition. Local area DCPs, SHOs, ACPs and the special branch of the Delhi Police are supposed to gather human intelligence by networking with the local community and religious leaders from both communities, especially when there are fears of a communal clash brewing.
Beginning March 1, the Delhi Police had a new chief, S.N. Srivastava. By March 2, the police had registered 369 FIRs and arrested or detained 1,284 people for the violence. New officers have been posted in Northeast Delhi whose main job is to fight rumours, reduce the trust deficit between the communities and also the police. Trust can be broken in a matter of minutes, rebuilding it takes forever. It could be equally true of Delhi’s Police’s dented public image.