How can we tackle corruption more generally when it’s so widespread within our police?
How can we tackle corruption more generally when it’s so widespread within our police?
India has the highest level of corruption in Asia, according to Transparency International’s 2020 report.
Fighting corruption has been high on the list of government priorities for years, but little seems to change. Perhaps because the main tool of justice – the police force – is one of the main perpetrators.
The survey showed that 42% of people who had been in contact with the police in the past year had paid a bribe, while 39% had had to make use of personal connections.
If you can’t pay, and if you don’t know the right people, the police are unlikely to be of help.
The state of India's police
"Truth alone triumphs"
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“Truth alone triumphs”: this is the noble motto of India’s police force. Those are the words you see in pride of place on the wall above the superintendent’s desk – as you hand over a bribe, because it’s the only way to make him take your case seriously.
These days, at the police station, corruption and violence often triumph over truth.
The police are known for their brutality, sometimes to the extent that people are killed while in custody – such as the case of Jeyaraj and Benicks in July 2020, a father and son who were beaten to death by police officers after being arrested for a minor infraction of lockdown restrictions. Or they take justice into their own hands, lynching suspects in the street in encounter killings before they can be brought to trial.
The violence takes place in broad daylight, as part of everyday life. The violence of police corruption is more insidious, but equally harmful. The result is that many Indians fear the police rather than trusting them for justice and protection.
Police officer guilty of extortion and murder
In September 2020 an Uttar Pradesh businessman, Indrakant Tripathi, sent a video appeal to the state’s Chief Minister, asking for help. He claimed that the local police superintendent was extorting money from him, and had threatened him and his business partner with false charges if they refused to pay protection money of 6 lakh rupees per month. He was unable to pay, and feared for his life. He named the officer in questions – Manilal Patidar – and the video went viral.
The following day he was dead – shot by unidentified attackers. His allegations were investigated and found to be true, and Patidar was arrested on the charge of extortion and suspected murder.
It was a rare case of police corruption being brought to light. And it only happened because Tripathi’s business was struggling and he was unable to pay the money demanded of him. In the months before, he’d paid up.
Most people do: there isn’t much option, if your persecutor is a police officer. There is nowhere to turn for help.
The challenge of tackling corruption
Low-level extortion has become part of the system
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The police know that they can get away with it, and in some areas it seems to have become standard practice. The above case in Uttar Pradesh was not unusual in the state, which has a particularly bad record.
There are some signs of hope that this may be changing. The Chief Minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath, has made it a priority to crack down on police corruption and announced a “zero-tolerance policy towards crime and corruption in the state.” In 2020 a total of 263 policemen were convicted in police misconduct cases, compared to only 106 the previous year.
Yet cases of police misconduct that are reported only represent a tiny minority of what goes on, the perpetrators acting with impunity.
It’s about the small, everyday corruption. If you want your case investigated, you have to pay. If you want an update on how it’s going, you have to pay. If you’re tired of the whole thing and want them to close the case, you have to pay – even if they’ve never done any work on it in the first place.
Most infractions go unreported. Most police officers don’t feel there’s anything wrong with low-level extortion: everyone else does it, after all. It’s simply become part of the system.
The way forward
The main problem that is crippling any efforts to reform the police force is its interconnection with government. The political elite benefits from police corruption, because they themselves are deeply corrupt.
They rely on a police force that can be bought: they need officers to be compliant and defend the actions of the state government, regardless of justice.
Any real reform must come from above – but Modi, like his predecessors, has failed to act.
