Editorial Board Contents - Bureau of Police Research and ...

including the Panchayati Raj and villagerevenue administration apparatus, village schoolteachers, and development workers, have losttheir integral and close linkages with the Thana,and information flows upwards have becomefitful and unreliable. This is often even morethe case where such intelligence flows are mostneeded, in regions of violence and disorder.An illusion of ‘intelligence’ may be created bymonitoring urban and political gossip centresand such ‘intelligence’ may even be quite usefulin drafting general risk assessments — but thereal substance of operational intelligence flowsfrom the grassroots, from rural and mofussilconcentrations, or from the most degraded andneglected areas of the urban complex.The enormity of what can be achieved by thePolice is illustrated by an interesting case in thelate 1960s, when the Naxalites were trying toestablish a foothold in Assam. In Kamrup, wewere able to break the emergence of Naxalism,because an alert constable, who was getting hisslippers repaired, saw a pair of shoes, wrapped ina Naxalite poster, which had also been given tothe same cobbler. A trap was laid and the ownerof the shoes was arrested. His interrogation led tothe arrest of others, and systematically, the entirechain was broken, with a number of inter-Stateoperations and arrests also resulting from thisvery humble beginning. Ironically, the constablewas almost illiterate, and we had to exempt himfrom various requirements to promote him to thepost of ASI as a reward.It is the sensitivity and responsiveness of thisgrassroots apparatus that creates intelligencesuccesses of the highest order. Unfortunately,the problem, in substantial measure, is that thesystem, today, has come to be dominated byPolice and intelligence bureaucrats; what it needsis leaders. The efficiency of an organisation canoften be judged by the frequency at which its topleadership visits its most remote outposts, and bythis measure, it is unlikely that most State Policeand intelligence organisations can presently bejudged very positively.Effective Police leaders in some of the worstinsurgency-afflicted areas have, nevertheless,established highly efficient networks of listeningand operational posts across their jurisdictions.Here, significantly, the internal-externaldichotomy is also found to be substantiallyfalse, and such leaders have been able to createlinkages across borders essentially through thepopulations that inhabit the border areas, oftenamong those who are notionally ‘sympathetic’to the insurgent cause. Through the extendedperiod of terrorism in Punjab, it was alwayspossible to keep very close tabs on the terroristleadership across the border through a numberof intermediaries and informers. Among thosewho will betray their country, you will alwaysfind some who will betray their cause as well.I was, moreover, personally able to establishcontinuous contact with several of the terroristleaders holed up in Pakistan. I recall, also, thatin the early Sixties, as SP Naogaon, I was able toidentify and process the deportation of as manyas 300 illegal migrants from what was then EastPakistan (now Bangladesh) on the average day,and an overwhelming proportion of intelligencerelating to these came to me from other migrants,who had long been settled in the area. Crucially,there was also ample intelligence coming fromacross the border, regarding the resettlement ofthese expelled groups along the border, and theviolence that was orchestrated by them, at thebehest of Pakistani State agencies, against Hindusin those areas. Other Police leaders have beeneffective in doing as much, for instance, G.M.Srivastava in both Assam and Tripura, in the mostcrucial phases of the counter insurgencies there,had developed excellent capabilities both withinand across borders. Similarly, the Andhra PradeshPolice has been instrumental in generatingeffective intelligence on the Maoists virtuallyacross the country, leading to arrests of topMaoists in the most widely dispersed locations.The ‘home advantage’ that a State Police Forcehas, and the linkages these can create evenbeyond borders, cannot easily be replicated bya central agency.These are not aberrations or deviations.There are imperatives of modern policing andintelligence operations, dictated by the verynature of contemporary security threats, and willbe ignored at terminal risk to the authority andcapacity of the Indian State. With our proclivityto look westward for our ‘models’, it is useful,in this regard, to notice the response of the NewYork Police to the new challenges and threat88The Indian Police Journal, October - December, 2012, Special Issue