SCOTLAND YARD

But Cressida Dick, the first woman to head the Met Police, has a tougher role

FOR ONCE, IT’S not about Bond — James Bond — but rather, M. Or, Scotland Yard’s version of M16’s fabled tough female chief. Cressida Dick is the first woman to head Britain’s 187-year-old investigative agency Scotland Yard. And, like M, she’s no wallflower. Dick has headed Britain’s national police counter-terrorism operations, murder squad, gun team and child abuse inquiries. She’s had vital breakthroughs; her dogged re-investigation of the Stephen Lawrence racial hate crime, which roiled Britain in 1993, finally secured convictions for two of his assailants 20 years later.

Dick’s journey to the top of the investigative tree has been far from smooth. Scotland Yard has been the centre of several legends; in popular perception, the 19th century onwards, it’s been the home of bumbling inspectors, trumped by sharper “private eyes”, including the iconic Sherlock Holmes and Hercules Poirot. These worlds — of cops, robbers, detectives and crimes — have been famously male ones, where the voices of women were reduced to frightened shrieks in a fog, their ideas patronisingly patted away as Poirot petted, “pauvre petite fille”, “poor little girl”. Later into the 20th century, Scotland Yard became famous for racism too, an almost entirely white British police frequently accused of racist attacks. In 2005, in a nervous London reeling from deadly bombings, Dick herself faced a scandal when, under her charge, a Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, was killed by forearms officers mistakenly suspecting him of terrorism.

In today’s more fraught world, where many consider it legitimate to look at the vulnerable, the different, with hate, Dick’s work is cut out for her. She will need to balance urban security with urbane empathy and modernise a traditional police force, while keeping its spirit of rigour and vigour alive. Sit down, Bond. This is a job for the boss. FIRST, TWO PAKISTANI players fixed a cricket match in the Pakistan Super League being played in the United Arab Emirates. The Pakistani media reaction was: India did it, through its bookies. Second, a teenage suicide bomber blew up a protest in the heart of Lahore, killing 13, injuring 80. Since terrorist Jamaat-ul-ahrar, who owned up to the attack, is based in Afghanistan, and since Afghanistan is “eating out of the hands of India”, this too was done by India. For good measure, since America is getting chummy with India to Pakistan’s cost, a finger was also pointed generally in that direction.

The Pakistani mind is Islamic — but it can’t avoid the South Asian touch. Deep down, Kautilya guides the mind through his doctrine of rajamandala (circle of states) in the Arthashastra: “Hostile states are those that border the ruler’s state, forming a circle around it. In turn, states that surround this set of hostile states form another circle around the circle of hostile states. This second circle of states can be considered the natural allies of the ruler’s state against the hostile states that lie between them.”

So, India has invested in Afghanistan and advises a much-threatened-by-pakistan Kabul closely — the sort of thing Pakistan would do with Bangladesh when ruled by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) under Khaleda Zia. You can dismiss Kautilya today as too Machiavellian, but both India and Pakistan are following the “rings” theory