Off with Them to Gadchiroli

The Maharashtra home minister’s latest bright idea is to punish oversexed policemen by posting them to this Maoist bastion

Last January, Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil took a round of the Naxal-affected Gadchiroli district, riding pillion on the motorbike of a political worker. It was his first tour of this Maoist bastion in the state. His purpose, he said, was to hold frank and free discussions with villagers to acquaint himself with ground realities there.

A whole year later, Patil seems more than a little keen to put his hard-sought learnings to good use. And how? He has ordered Maharashtra’s Director-General of Police D Sivanandan to prepare a list of policemen involved in extramarital affairs. The wayward cops on the list are to be transferred to Gadchiroli and other Naxal-affected places in that region.

We kid you not. The noble objective of the exercise is to ensure that policemen learn such a stiff lesson that they behave themselves sexually. Maharashtra police circles are already abuzz with feverish gossip and snide jokes on who may or may not make it to the ‘amoral activities’ list. Sources say that compiling the list is proving to be a daunting task for Sivanandan. He is in a fix over how to actually go about gathering data to meet the minister’s orders.

Home Minister Patil, meanwhile, is said to be gloating over his wisdom on how the state’s social ills and insurgency problems are best tackled. He reportedly had his brainwave after an assistant commissioner of police, Baburao Gaikwad, shot himself recently with his service revolver in his office. This cop apparently pulled the trigger on himself after an extramarital affair went horribly wrong, with his mistress turning extortionist. He was due to retire in July this year. In another scandal in uniform, a senior inspector and former encounter specialist Arun Borude committed suicide after he was accused of raping a minor girl. The stigma of these highly publicised cases sent the police scrambling for spiritual refuge, and a series of gurus were invited over to inculcate the force with the virtues of marital loyalty. However, it’s now evident that such babagiri has not proved up to the challenge, and the control of libidos is now being entrusted to methods far more familiar to the police.

Punitive action is presumably something cops tend to swear by. Being packed off to areas like Gadchiroli, Chandrapur, Gondia and Amravati and thus placed at the bleeding edge of Maoist mayhem, they know, is not a prospect to relish. “Every policeman knows what these postings are,” Patil recently said at a police function while mentioning a series of  departmental inquiries underway on the sexual fidelity of policemen.

Heads, naturally, have been shaking in gentle sympathy with Sivanandan. Even though the supercop has had the honour of having his exploits mirrored on the silver screen in Ram Gopal Varma’s film Company, coming up with a list of cops flouting the minister’s monogamy ideals is a task that could stretch anybody’s abilities. For a start, he has asked every police station in the state to send in names.

This could set off another crisis—if not a flurry of extortion demands (or worse) from suddenly jilted/closeted lovers, then a fitful round of internal corruption within the ranks of the police. Guilty or not, cops may find in bribery their best strategy to keep out of harm’s way.

“This is really shocking,” says a senior police officer on condition of anonymity, “On one hand, the Centre is saying that it is very serious about curbing the Naxal menace, and on the other, Patil is making sure that a transfer to Naxal areas is seen as a punishment posting.” A former state DGP says that once it is tagged as a ‘punishment’, even effecting regular transfers to these areas will become difficult, worsening the problem there. As it is, many police personnel ordered to such tough places escape by taking long leave and then lobbying politicians to secure themselves a safer posting. The state government has special incentives for cops taking up the Maoist challenge; those who serve their term without flinching are put on a fast track for promotions, and given the liberty to pick a posting or police station of their own preference. But that is of little help in raising morale.

Oddly enough, Patil’s diktat comes soon after Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s own visit to Gadchiroli, where he expressed his worries about police reluctance to engage Maoist guerillas. The force needs to battle the rebels, he had asserted. But the high casualty rate suffered by the police has kept morale low. “How am I to ask a policeman who has been transferred like this to strategise against Naxals?” asks a senior police officer serving in one such area.

Maharashtra’s Maoist belt is of vital importance to their movement. Gadchiroli, for instance, is part of Dandakaranya, a so-called ‘liberated’ zone that spans several states where their writ runs and their forces train. By itself, Maharashtra has a police-to-population ratio of 141 for every 100,000 people. This is among the best of all Naxal-affected states. However, a bulk of the state’s 149,571 police personnel are deployed in Mumbai and other cities like Pune and Nasik; only 9 per cent of the state force is armed and thus equipped to engage threats of the magnitude that the area’s Maoist guerillas represent.
Police officials maintain that philandering policemen spell trouble for the force’s effectiveness, since many of them end up as lazy liars with compromised consciences that can be bought cheaply, but still, sending them off on such punishment postings is ridiculous.

Also, clamping down on the sexual behaviour of a workforce is a pointless exercise in many other ways. According to sources, commercial sex workers, bar dancers, female witnesses and fellow policewomen offer more sexual diversions than authorities can possibly keep an eye on. As for depravity, some cops are known to run their own pornography and sexual service rackets on the sly, and they get away with it too.

Straying police officers are perhaps just more common and thus that much more likely to attract public scrutiny and political interference. That does not mean that tightening the screws on such ‘errant’ behaviour will deliver Maharashtra from everything that bedevils its law enforcement mechanism, let alone solving the crisis out in the jungles of Gadchiroli.

For law and order to prevail, better sense must first.

About The Author

Haima Deshpande