RIGHTS-INDIA: Molestation Case Revives Calls for Police Reforms

  • by Ranjit Devraj (new delhi)
  • Inter Press Service

Rights activists are appalled that it took 400 hearings and 40 adjournments before Shambhu Pratap Singh Rathore could be pronounced guilty by a federal court of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Dec. 22, 2009 — or almost two decades after the crime was committed. The victim, Ruchika Girhotra, apparently unable to withstand the pressure brought on her family by Rathore and the Haryana state police — that allegedly included the arrest and torture of her brother on trumped-up charges of car theft and her expulsion from school — committed suicide three years after her molestation in 1990.

Rathore appeared immune to charges leveled against him by rights activists and even by the report of an internal inquiry instituted against him a month after the molestation, which had recommended the filing of a first information report (FIR).

In his internal report, which was not then made public, the then director general of Haryana police R.R. Singh had said: 'In this case I am of the considered view that whatever Ruchika, a small girl of 15 yrs, had stated about the molestation by S.P.S. Rathore is based on true facts.'

But Rathore’s clout in political circles was such that no action was taken against him. He was promoted to the rank of additional director general of police in Haryana in 1994 and as director general in 1999. He retired with that rank in 2002.

Eight years after the molestation the CBI, the country’s federal sleuthing agency, stepped in to bring the case to its special court, but this had no effect on the Haryana state machinery, which appeared to protect him.

'After 19 years, the criminal has been found guilty, but all he got as punishment was six months in prison. Within 10 minutes of conviction, he was out on bail. Is it not a shame for all of us?' women’s rights activist Brinda Karat asked in the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament) during a ‘zero hour’ discussion by members a day after Rathore’s conviction.

But Rathore, who came out of the court 'grinning like a jackass,' as Renuka Chaudhury, former minister for women and child development, commented during a television interview, had not reckoned with the storm of public protests that was to follow.

Candlelight vigils were held for Girhotra in New Delhi and Chandigarh (capital of Haryana), with protestors demanding that the politicians and officials responsible for Rathore’s rise to the rank of director general of police in Haryana state be made answerable for overlooking the blots in his service record.

Attempts to reform India’s policing laws and move it away from its autocratic, colonial moorings — including directives from the Supreme Court in 1996 — have pointed to the need to ensure that appointments to the job of director general are merit-based and made in a transparent manner.

Now with public pressure building up after Rathore’s December sentencing, the Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram and the Chief Minister of Haryana, B.S. Hooda, both promised support to Girhotra’s family in filing fresh cases against Rathore.

Accordingly, on Tuesday, the Haryana state police filed a case against Rathore for abetting Girhotra’s suicide after allowing an FIR to be filed by her brother, Ashu Girhotra.

'The question that needs to be asked here is, does it have to take assurances from the union home minister and the state chief minister for a simple FIR to be registered?' said Maja Daruwala, India’s best-known campaigner for police reforms and director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), which is based in New Delhi but has offices in London and Accra, the capital of Ghana.

Speaking with IPS, Daruwala said the Ruchika Girhotra case encapsulated everything that was wrong with the Indian police system, starting with repeated failures by local police to record the all-important FIR when inconvenient. 'What if the complainant was a poor Dalit? Would an FIR have been filed?’’

On Tuesday, addressing new entrants to the elite Indian Police Service to which Rathore belonged, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stressed, 'It is the right of every citizen, who has a genuine complaint, to have an FIR registered.'

In India, as well as in several other countries, the FIR — a written record prepared by police of a cognisable offence — forms the basis for setting in motion criminal justice proceedings. Singh also observed that in the administration of justice in India, there increasingly are complaints of high- handedness by police and other officials.

Daruwala told IPS that although the Girhotra case had stimulated a flurry of action within the establishment, there still remains reluctance on the part of state governments to institute reforms mandated by the Supreme Court in 1996.

Under India’s federal system law and order is vested with provincial governments, and while the states may enact their own police laws, most have chosen to adopt or adapt from the archaic Police Act of 1861, designed to serve the oppressive British colonial government.

'This [Police] Act and the kind of policing culture that has been allowed to flourish in independent India have led to countless abuses by police officers, a dysfunctional and corrupt service, and a force that is almost entirely divorced from the communities it is tasked with protecting,' notes a 2008 CHRI report on policing in South Asia titled ‘Feudal Forces: Reforms Delayed’.

While the state and central governments went along with the Supreme Court’s directions, actual implementation has been abysmal. The court directives, aimed at checking political interference with the police establishment, asked for the setting up of a board to decide promotions, postings and transfers. It also called for improvement of redressal mechanisms for complaints against the police.

Subsequent events, notes the CHRI report, indicate that state and central governments have 'chosen to blatantly disregard the court’s edict on this matter' and that 'most states have attempted to avoid, circumvent or simply delay police reforms.'

Thus, southern Andhra Pradesh state argued that the establishment of a Police Complaints Authority, as envisaged by the court, would demoralise the police while northern Uttar Pradesh said the creation of a State Security Commissions to prevent undue government pressure on the police would undermine the power of the elected government.

In Haryana’s case a Police Act was passed in 2007 in seeming compliance with the court’s directives but, according to Daruwala, it deviated from what the apex court had envisioned and did little to create distance between the political executive and the police.

Daruwala said the Girhotra case exposed the naked power exercised by police officers as well as the nexus between the police and the political system. Such nexus, she said, allowed Rathore to become the director general of police in Haryana in spite of the serious charges leveled against him.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service