Rioting Khaki

‘Untold story of Riots’

This headline in today’s Indian Express was again a stark reminder about the biased functioning of the men in Khaki. Bharatpur riot is not the first & surely not the last where bullets fired from police guns have the names of only one community written all over them. Cases of police inaction & ‘action’ litter the annals of Indian policing history & each time it is just one community which is at the receiving end. As it happens after every act of atrocity, an enquiry commission has been set up to find the ‘truth’. The truth which is as obvious as the hatred of the policeman who was pictured stomping the face of a rioter ( from the same community, obviously) in Forbesganj.

What makes the people in Khaki, the very people who have been entrusted the task of protection become perpetrators of the worst kind of violence?

The answers to this questions are two fold. The first & foremost is the underrepresentation of minorities especially Muslims in armed forces of any kind. Police in all states of India are grossly under represented by Muslims to proportion of their population.

There are well-known historical and sociological reasons that explain why Muslims are under-represented in the country's police forces, the Central Reserve Police and crucial gendarmeries like UP's Provincial Armed Constabulary. Obviously, we cannot infuse a significant number of Muslims into these forces overnight.

But it's obvious that we need to enhance the recruitment and retention of minorities in the police forces and to conduct police outreach to minority communities. Such an approach would simultaneously reduce a major source of grievance in the Muslim community, increase the trust between the police and the people they are policing.

We also need to recognize that if we want under-represented Muslims to compete effectively for police jobs, they need to feel the police is part of them, rather than an external entity. It's clear we need to: actively solicit applications from minorities for the police at all levels (including the Provincial Armed Constabulary and the Central Reserve Police); offer special catch-up courses open only to members of the minority communities that will prepare them for the entrance examinations; at the moment few feel qualified to take the exams, and fewer still pass; and require police officers to work with community organizations, mosques and madrasas to encourage minorities to apply.
In other words, instead of more "reservations", with the resentment that breeds, let us make it easier for minorities to join the police. But let's not stop with recruitment: we also need to focus on the retention and progression of minority officers. Unless young people from minorities see that the police service offers real career opportunities and a good quality of life in the workplace, they will not overcome their negative perceptions.