Nepal’s administrative and
police structures were grafts from the British imperial model.
Deepak Thapa
As a child studying in India, I remember
hearing about these very important individuals—“the DC” and “the DM”. Even
though I was told that “DC” and “DM” stood for the portentous-sounding “Deputy
Commissioner” and “District Magistrate”, to my young mind their importance
sprang from the fact that they went around with red beacons flashing atop their
cars. Much later I figured out that the DC and the DM were the same person and
who also sported another “DC” title, that of “District Collector”.
In essence, it was the same guy (was always a
guy) with three different hats: as the Deputy Commissioner, he was the chief
executive of the district, as the District Magistrate, he was the person
responsible for maintaining law and order, and as the District Collector, he
was the chief taxman. This personage literally had power over life and liberty
of everyone in the district. With just around 350 districts in all of India at
the time, the domain he controlled would have been pretty substantial.
That was the administrative structure dreamt
up by the British colonial administration to keep Indians under its thumb. For
the express purpose of subjugation, assisting the DC-DM was another important
official, the Superintendent of Police, who headed the district police force.
British imperial model
It has been said that to keep a check on its
far-flung territories, the British Empire had the choice of either setting up a
civilian police force with unarmed personnel such as the bobbies of the London
Metropolitan Police or an imperial one like the para-military Royal Irish
Constabulary, created specifically to put down Irish separatists. For obvious
reasons, the colonies received a police force that had worked for Britain so
well in Ireland, and India was no exception. In fact, there was no hiding their
intent with Sir Hugh Rose, the commander-in-chief of the Indian army in the
mid-19th century, being attributed the words: “No system of police has
ever worked better for the suppression of political agitation or agrarian
disorder than the Irish constabulary.”
Unfortunately, for Nepal, as it transitioned
into the modern era in the 1950s and transformation from a feudocracy to
liberal nationhood, both our administrative and police structures were grafted
from the British imperial model upon the recommendation of Indian advisers.
Thus, our Chief District Officer has shades of the authority granted to India’s
Deputy Commissioner-cum-District Magistrate (the role of the Collector seems to
have been withheld because the Ranas had a pretty effective system of tax
collection in place). It is for the same reason we have a police force that, as
a top Indian police official, KS Dhillon, has said, “is there for the protection of…the rulers, the
establishment, it is not there for the protection of the people”.
Apart from the imperial police orientation
itself, another factor that contributed to the wide distance between the police
and the people in Nepal is that for the first two decades and more, the Nepal
Police was headed by a succession of Gurkha veterans from the British Army.
They had no reason to take issue with the national police undergoing
regimentation akin to an armed force. Echoing Dhillon, a ranking former
official in the Nepal Police, Govinda Prasad Thapa, writes “the police was established with a
revolutionary and military culture, with the primary objective of supporting
the political regime or government in power. Service to the people was a
secondary concern”.
Do we not know it well? Protection of the
rulers often takes that most innocuous form, the “transfer”, the tried and
tested trick for use by the government of the day as and when required. Witness
the recent transfer of 18 Superintendents of Police in
the run-up to the upcoming local election. Who would believe that these 18 were
shuffled around since the government wanted to ensure a free and fair election?
Not that there have not been efforts to
project a more friendly face of the police with campaigns such as “community
police” and “Prahari Mero Sathi” (My Friend, the Police). Recalls Thapa,
community policing included getting involved in programmes such as women’s
literacy, public health, environmental preservation and youth activities. But
there were naysayers within the force because they “failed to realise that it
is possible to be community-friendly while simultaneously being an effective
police officer”. As for the second attempt, I cannot imagine there being many
takers of the possibility that police behaviour could change overnight with
just a snappy slogan but no concrete action against any violation of trust in
the touted police-public friendship.
As I have pointed out previously, one reason for the inability of
the police to be more people-friendly could be because they are grossly
overworked. A 2016 internal police document found that under the authority of
44 different acts, the Nepal Police are burdened with 1,008 different tasks,
having to do with gambling, essential services, the civil code, donations,
forestry, passports, and so on, besides fighting crime. That does not appear to
be so uncommon. Take the British government white paper on police reform in
England and Wales which says that the police face a lot of demands and that
although the “main job of the police is to catch criminals…only about 18% of
calls to the police are about crime”. Basically, policing involves a lot more
than playing cops and robbers, as our own police would know very well.
Fake police officers
Despite these overwhelming responsibilities,
what is amazing is that some police officials still find time to engage in
“extra-curricular” activities. A sure indication of the kind of weight the
police throw around is the arrest of “fake police officers” that makes it to
the news regularly. Without the involvement of the actual police in all sorts
of nefarious dealings, it would not make sense for crooks to pretend to be
cops. A Google search for “fake police 2022” (in Nepali) showed the following
on the first page itself: “Two arrested for cheating in the garb of fake
police”; “Eight arrested for looting by impersonating police”; “Fake police ASI
arrested from Bhadrakali”; and “Fake police arrested with drugs”. And, we are
just in the third month of the year.
Police reform that had started after the end
of the Maoist conflict did not go anywhere. But change it has to in order to
tackle the many problems ailing it, and it needs to start at the very top. A
good example what is possible comes from Robert Mark, who headed the London
Metropolitan Police in the 1970s. Asked what he hoped to achieve, he is
reported to have said “arrest more criminals than we employ”. As his obituary noted: “His achievement…was to
make corrupt officers within the Met—and there were literally hundreds of
them—feel like outsiders themselves.”
Any takers in the Nepal Police?
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