| Friends,
Life is an experience and it often teaches us how incorrect we had once been. I got this lesson once again when yesterday I was coming back from Lucknow to Meerut. As those of you might be knowing, there is one room adjacent to the GRP police station at Charbagh railway station. This is used as a Guestroom and often IPS officers and other senior functionaries of the State government go there to wait either for their trains or their friends/relatives to arrive. In the same tune, I also went to the Guestroom while waiting for Nauchandi express. There I found the GRP Inspector of Charbagh through whose office we ushered in the adjacent guestroom.
There I and Nutan had just settled down that we heard a booming voice-"Saale, Madarc@#$". Even when this had not died down, there followed a heavy barrage of the choicest of the abusive words in pure Hindi. The person, possibly some policeman in the Inspector's room was continuously using these abusive words to someone whom he seemed to be interrogating. Even when the last abuse had not died down came the next one and it went on incessantly for nearly twenty minutes. In between a few words like Mobile, Sim, Gurgaon also came but the major focus was on those abuses. A sentence would start with one abusive word and would end with another, to be followed in some other sequence. It was as if the person speaking these words knew nothing else than these. Another thing was that he was using these words in such a loud voice that it must be getting heard in a long range.
When these abuses were going on, it also made me remember my own past. After having joined police, among the things I leant was the use of abusive words. Since there was no dearth of opportunity and others rarely opposed the use of these words, I became a perennial abuser. Whenever I used these dirty words, I used to feel myself very powerful and had a feeling that it was having a great terrorizing effect on the others. But somehow whenever my parents or my wife heard me using these words, they made very adverse comments about this. Then one fine day, when I was again using an abusive word my wife Nutan jetted in and said why I used such words unnecessarily. I reacted by saying that I would not use these abuses any more in the future and since that day, I have almost completely stopped using abusive words anywhere, in office or in my conversations.
I would say that this is certainly a most-commonly found feature in subordinate policemen in Northern India. Often their sentences, more so when they are on duty, would have one or two abusive words. They try to use these abusive words to deter and threaten the other side but from whatever I was observing at Charbagh railway station, I could possibly conclude that all these abusive words were only making the officer's mouth dirty because the person on the receiving end of these words hardly seemed to be reacting in any favourable manner. Thus while the police officer was using non-stop abuses, its impact and effect seemed also zero. The only persons possibly feeling the heat of those abusive words were me and Nutan. My position was that though I did want to go and request the policemen to stop this show but since I was nothing more than a passenger there, I thought it would have the potential of bringing the policemen to an unsavoury situation. The possibility of their reacting in a displeasing manner or considering it my transgression of rights or calling it an intrusion in their duty was also there. At the same time, I won't deny that someone might still call my act cowardly or improper. But one thing that I really found striking when we had later left this place and had boarded the train was the comment Nutan made-"The policemen were using the words "Madarc#$%" so many times that once I thought of going to the policeman and asking him if that person's name was actually "Madarc#$%."
The conclusion of this event is that we in India still possibly need a lot of training in behavioural aspects, possibly at the subordinate level. It is possible that they are so much under stress that abuses seem to them to be the shortcut to achieve their goals, but we need to ask ourselves- "Is it really working? Is it effective?" Equally importantly, we must also delve into the question- "Isn't such use of dirty language coming in the way of a better policing?" and "whether do we have an alternative to this culture of abuses?"
I lay special emphasis on this because all of us who got introduced to British police recently saw how coolly and decently they were behaving with the accused. Yet, possibly their conviction rate is not inferior to us in any way. Hence, isn't it also a need of India police that we change our emphasis from unnecessary abusive and discourteous language to more of scientific gadgets, better training capsules, more emphasis on behavioural tools and fundamental shift in the basic thinking of policemen? Therein lies the crux for a better policing and a better governance in India.
Amitabh
Meerut
# 94155-34526 | 
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