I was given this obscure novel by a senior jailor in Taloja Central Prison where I was imprisoned from April 14, 2020. I was quite impressed and decided to review it but it could not be published for obvious reasons and after my release it was lost in piles of papers at home. Since the subject matter is so relevant to our times that it needed to reach people.
Police officers writing spiced accounts of their adventures and exploits after retirement is becoming fairly common. Being privy to the nocturnal world of crime and politics, which are inseparably fused together these days, they have a sizeable section of the populace voyeuristically curious to peep into this world. These readers constitute their potential audience. However, many people may also be alienated by these exercises in self-projection, which are invariably contrary to their own experiences, and may not touch them with a bargepole. Yet, a police officer using the literary genre of a novel to reflect on his experiences with critical insight is certainly uncommon.
‘Cops in a Quagmire,’ Sunil Ramanad, Vishwakarma Publications, 2020.
Sunil Ramanand, an IPS officer not yet retired, has handled this feat not only with great competence but also with human sensitivity that is hard to find among his ilk. Cops in a Quagmire, the name of his maiden novel, published last year by a not-so-famous publisher, smacks of a fictional account of his own experience. Despite his attempts to camouflage people and places in the novel, readers may be able to identify key dramatis personae without much difficulty, which unbeknownst to him, adds contemporaneous realistic value to his fiction.
The strength of the book lies in his masterly grip on English, the language he chose to write in, his outstanding skill in sketching characters that come alive, his prowess in storytelling that creates a VR (virtual reality) like experience in readers’ minds, and most importantly, his muted observations on the intrinsic oddities of the system that he pitched his story in.
Police prejudice
The story follows a young IPS officer, posted in a district as the superintendent of police, who inherits a legacy of unresolved dacoities, particularly in jewellery shops. The dynamics of the police department target a poor tribal community called Bella, which was stigmatised as a criminal tribe during British times. Although the Criminal Tribes Act is formally repealed, the stigma faced by the Bellas and their stereotyping by the police continues. The squad formed to detect the dacoities and recover the stolen property – motivated by significant monetary rewards – casually picks up an innocent boy just because he is a Bella. They thrash him in illegal captivity and delve into the Bella world, seeing them all as deeply involved in crime, as the British did. They indiscriminately pick up people, take them for interrogation, which is essentially accompanied by physical torture, to extract further ‘leads’.
In one such lead, the police apprehend Gulatya, supposedly a ring leader of the Bellas, thrash him publicly through the bazaar, torture him further in captivity, and transfer him from one criminal case to another without a shred of evidence to file a chargesheet. The court ultimately sets him free. This unsavoury brush with the khaki and the criminal justice system, however, only hardens him into a more mature and seasoned brigand, enabling him to establish his criminal enterprise in a neighbouring state. In one of these torture sessions in police captivity, a Bella boy named Bholya lies to the police to escape his ordeal, making them dredge a well only to find nothing. During a surrender drama occasionally organised by the police, a surrendered Bella boy avers, “I was falsely named in a dacoity case long ago, and so I went into hiding. The court did its procedure and declared me innocent. Yet, the police kept looking for me for full 15 years. Now, I am arrested for no reason” (p. 49). The Bella may well be a metaphor for the tribals, Dalits, minorities, and dissenters of the government in many hues, who are typically charged as Maoists, terrorists, or anti-nationals and held in jails for years, misusing special draconian laws.
Although India flaunts itself as a nation, the basic unit of Indian society continues to be caste and community. Though they lost their colonial-era homogeneity, thanks to the post-colonial developmental process, the dynamics of these marginal communities are also ably captured in the book. Ambitious individuals (like Koyni Kunge), pretending to be the benefactors of the community but actually driving it to ruination for petty personal interests, are cynically exploited by the police and discarded when no longer useful.
Also read: ‘Most Disturbing’, Supreme Court Says of Caste-Discrimination Sanctioned by Prison Manuals
Crime is not a monopoly of any particular community, as aptly shown in a daylight dacoity at Wange Phata jewellery shop by a dominant caste robber. The existence of the goldsmiths, respectable people in society, as the buyers of stolen gold, may be said to be the prime factor behind these dacoities. The book makes a profound sociological point about the plight of reformed individuals in marginal communities in India – they are the hardest hit, “out of place everywhere, at home nowhere” (p. 31).
Political mafiosi
The author’s term “political mafiosi” depicts the nexus between crime and politics. The collapse of the legislature and executive in our Constitution arguably paved the way for this class to emerge. What gets attributed to the police as executors may, in reality, be due to this class. Speaking of his previous district, Bhir, the protagonist observes, “Though more than half a century had gone by, Bhir was none the better. Poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment and, more appalling of all, the vice-like stranglehold of the political class—the Politico Mafiosi—over almost every facet of human existence, were its distinctive hallmark” (p. 51).
It thrives on disasters, not unlike vultures. When Bhir was declared “drought-hit,” it came as a bonanza for this class. Government funds running into crores of rupees get spent on hiring tankers to ferry water. With the fudging of logbooks of water tankers and creating fake records of cattle camps, they siphon off much of these funds. The casualty is the common man, who is not only deprived of the intended relief but also subject to the higher incidence of crime that disasters engender.
There is a comment on the educational empires this class of politico mafiosi has created: “…all these impressive facades were a charade of underhand businesses of political heavyweights garbed in the sublime goodness of educational societies.”
Today, this class is sanguine over privatisation as though it were an indisputable panacea for the country, without answering the pertinent question of why, despite the promotion of their private educational empires over the last four decades, they have not produced a single IIT, IIM, or AIIMS. When it came to the prosecution of some policemen for the death of a tribal woman in police custody, the minister stalled the process by withholding the sanction required as per Section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Many such provisions were created as protective shields for the colonial executives against the natives’ threat of criminal or civil prosecution. But they became utterly incongruous with the ethos of the democratic republic created by the Constitution. However, this class not only preserved them but also grossly misused them for more than their colonial predecessors did, to protect their criminality.
Also read: ‘Framed in Drug Case’: Family of Pulwama Man Who Died in Police Custody Alleges Torture
Hypocrisy of the system
The book perceptively observes that in colonial times, the police were modelled after the army and called a ‘Force’. After independence, its tag was changed from ‘Force’ to ‘Service’ without effecting any change in its structure or content – “old wine in a new bottle,” as aptly observed!
For the common man, the police continue to stand as an evil incarnate. As Kuldip Nayar once wrote, the police interface with the common man starts with abuse and beating. This fact is also pervasively borne by the book. It is not for nothing that the first ever police commission in Independent India harshly termed the Indian Police as the biggest criminal gang in uniform. It is not the police alone – they are exposed because of their visibility – but the entire system is fraught with hypocrisy.
For instance, the protagonist in the book says, “We apply to the magistrates for police custody remand of the accused and they grant it. Reasons quoted – custodial interrogation of the accused and recovery of stolen goods or weapons used to commit the crime. Isn’t it implicit that we intend to beat the hell out of the fellow? Internationally, any person arrested for a crime has a right to silence, meaning he has a right not to answer any of the questions asked by the police. Even the Constitution of our country has a similar provision. Doesn’t that make police custody remand unconstitutional, especially if the accused has no wish to cooperate with the investigation?” (p. 274).
Nobody raises such questions anymore. Custodial torture, as such, loses its meaning when the summary police killings of so-called criminals are celebrated by our lawmakers.
At another place, the book indicates that the very basis of the business of goldsmiths and jewellers is perhaps the illegal procurement of gold. It argues that it is just not profitable if done strictly according to the law, like petrol pumps or ration shops, which have difficulty in recovering their investment unless run illegally (p. 33). Why beat around the bush – the very basis of our electoral politics, on which the entire edifice of democracy stands, is itself unviable if done honestly and according to the law. The person may never recover his investment in his lifetime. However, as a routine, he or she coolly declares in an affidavit at the time of the next election the tripling of his assets while serving the people!
Also read: In an MP Village, Trips to the Police Station Are Part of Wedding Preparations
Collusion of interests
As the constitutional collapse of the legislature and executive occurs in the echelons, the judiciary and the executive also collapse into one. The collector or a tehsildar are both executive and judiciary, merged into a single person. At the operational level, they have a parallel relationship with the police cadre. The book observes:
“Generally, such magisterial enquiries are a sham. The collector and the subordinates are not inclined to spoil their relations with the police. After all, we are colleagues at every level. The tehsildar and the police inspector, the SDC and the Dy SP, the collector and the SP, the divisional commissioner and the range IGP, you understand what I mean” (p. 247).
Even the lower judiciary does not tend to go against the police because it relies on the latter for its fringe favours. How these social relationships play out is illustrated by a doctor (Dr. Sankhe) obliging the policeman by falsely certifying that Zhelya was not dead when brought to him, thus saving the policeman from explaining one more encounter killing. The book cryptically observes: “It wasn’t said without reason that those who break bread together stay together; it also helps when you pay the bill.” Such local-level collusion of interests are starkly encountered in cases of atrocities on SC/ST.
The book is replete with such comments on the system that does anything but serve the people. It abhors its feudal core and slavish relationship across its hierarchy, entailing a colossal waste of public resources. The depiction of a policeman wearing a vermilion tika on his forehead and removing his police shoes while entering the superior’s chamber against the police code, or the display of crass sycophancy by everybody during the IGP’s visit or useless protocols, are dismissed as “high on theatrics, low on utility.”
Similarly, the attendance of the entire district administration at the Messiah’s place just to massage his ego in the interest of some political bigwigs is unprofessional. The protagonist recalls his experience as a police officer in the UN keeping force abroad, musing on the comparison of crime investigation processes there and in India, showing how backward our methods are. Leave aside sophisticated analyses by a team of experts abroad; even the crucial post-mortem examinations in India are not done by medical officers but by his menial sweeper. The police in the Western world would never agree, he muses, to bashing brigands or threatening people to retrieve stolen property. He exclaims that we are the third world where the police actually are friendless. Well, this latter lament may not exactly be true as the police do have numerous friends among wealthy criminals on quid pro quo terms. As for the third world comment, our megalomaniac present might not cohere with this self-deprecating assessment too, as we are now the Vishwaguru, the teachers to the world!
All in all, this is a fantastic book, worth reading by all, about our police system, written by one who is essentially its part but who appears to have preserved his soul unlike most of his ilk.
Anand Teltumbde is former CEO, PIL, professor, IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa; writer and civil rights activist.
