Lungnila, the girl killed at Ngariyan, the two boys of Senapati and now the ghastly killing of Chinglenkhomba.

How can one expect the Police to resolve the Senapati and the Ngariyan incidents when they could not give appropriate response to Lungnila and Chinglenkhomba!!

The latter two have happened within five kilometres of the Police headquarters and the seat of State administration. Now nobody’s life is safe, and nobody can expect the police to resolve any crime. I have been calling these governance failures and absolute degradation of the Police.

The State Police have so long been used to acting on and for “remunerative” issues that they have lost their spine. The police administrations have not been of any help either in this regard. Imagine it is a force which has been under the direct charge of the leader of a ‘most stable’ government for at least the last five years. But where is the proof of the pudding?

Kudos to RPF:

Before I proceed, I would like to congratulate the RPF for various reasons, failed as the Police have been.

First, the speed with which they have resolved the crime is just laudable. They have reacted spontaneously and acted on the ethos of the society; unlike police they did not wait for rents to arrive before acting. They have completed the entire process of operation during such a short period when the Police might still be in slumber.

Secondly, they have proved their greater effectiveness and reach of intelligence than the regularly and handsomely paid (besides the regular rents they forcibly extract) Police personnel.

Thirdly, unlike the absolutely unethical cover provided to the Luningla suspects by another insurgent group, they have acted in a way putting them above board.

All the King’s Men:

Let us recall the metaphorical statement of Willie Stark, the Governor in All the King’s Men:
“[The law] is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for humankind.”

Replace law by Police in this quotation, and the result is quite interesting. But two questions are to be asked.

First, who gets covered, if covered at all, by the Police? Who are those lucky ones? Does their protection go beyond those who can bribe them, or, who can do them a favour?

Secondly, what has happened to the conventional role of Police in a society?

I am afraid the answers to these questions would not be to the favour of the people and society in general, and would be something the Police would not like to admit in the open.

Uncertainty:

Everybody understands that there are uncertainties in every stage and in every society. It is exactly to address and reduce these uncertainties that the state exists and the police created.

But unfortunately, for all of us, the State Police have over the years become so degraded due to gradual embedding of political and personal aggrandisement. They have just become a part of the governance morass in the State.

What Next:

The legitimacy the RPF has acquired in this single episode is directly proportional to the credibility and legitimacy the Police have lost. But the issue is how long we should continue to bear with this non-performance and inefficiency of the Police. Or have the Police tacitly surrendered the administration of law and order under the rule of law to non-state agencies?

The failures of the Police in connection with the latest incident are three-fold.

First, given the live background of non-solution of child killing and kidnapping histories behind them, they should have been particularly fast in cracking this problem. But they did not.

Secondly, there is an absolute failure of the Police intelligence both in not identifying the culprit and in not stopping the culprit being taken by the insurgent group.

Thirdly, and this one is even worse, the house belonging to the family of the culprit has been allowed to be completely dismantled. In other words, the Police are marked by both ante- and post-facto failures.

What is needed today is a no-holds barred reform of the State Police, and definitely not the so-called modernisation under which the department has been enjoying budgetary support for so many years.

Here I would only recall a real story which is now cited as an example of stake-holder institutional reform in Institutional Economics. During the 1980s Marbella was a mundane Mediterranean seaside town of Spain known for crime, drug addiction and an absolutely corrupt police force. But it underwent a complete change during the early 1990s after Jesus Gil y Gil became Mayor in June 1991. It is now known as one of the cleanest and safest cities in Spain.

What Gil y Gil did was dismissal en masse of local police officers and founding of a new academy to train 200 new officers with no corrupt past. Much more significant in the whole transformation was that Gil y Gil was himself a resident of the city, and so he had his stakes fully in the city.

Similarly what we need today is a complete shake-up of the State Police force and put it under the charge of someone with a genuine stake in Manipur; luckily for us, we do not have to go far looking for this person.

This and only this change can serve the cause of state and people if the administration sincerely desires the Police to do so.

** This piece was written before the recent change of DGP