Police in India is no longer neutral, fair and unbiased. The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2025 finds that caste, religion and political affiliation often play a decisive role in shaping police perception and influencing their actions. This bias affects decisions on investigation, enforcement and legal proceedings, finds the study, which surveyed a broad spectrum of law enforcement personnel, including constables, upper subordinate officers ranging from assistant sub-inspectors, to deputy superintendents of police, and senior officials of Indian Police Service. The SPIR, published by the NGO Common Cause and Lokniti Programme of the Centre for the Study of the Developing Societies, is based on a survey over 17 states that covered, 8,276 personnel across urban and rural areas. The report finds varying degrees of partisan conducts of police from region to region and states. In this backdrop, one can ponder over the fairness of investigations of CBI, ED and NIA, the three premier national agencies primarily manned by police.
In addition to the SPIR, in common public perception, police continues to be a brutish, short and nasty force and at that the most corrupt agency of the law enforcement. It is used as instrument of state to oppress and repress the people, for third degree tortures of the accused, framing the innocent people, reprisal /vengeance against innocents, substandard investigations extracted under duress of life threatening tortures that lack evidentiary proof before the court. What people have been witnessing is the continuing perturbation in civil law and order, murders, rapes, assaults, frauds and so on, requiring effective civil policing. But what we are experiencing is the continuing instances of police torture, custodial killings, unleashing of state terror, and massive corruption.
In comparison to the million or so strong Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), like CRPF, BSF, ITBP, SSB, Assam Rifles, NDRF (National Disaster Relief Force) and so on, which are militarized forces that themselves tell a lot about policing in the country. The size of the civil police is about 2.1 million. Even here, half the civil police force comprises armed police of various kinds. The ratio of the police to the population of the country is 152 per 100,000 populations, as against the UN recommendation of 222 to 100,000 populations. But figures across states vary. The figure for UP is 134, for Gujarat 128, Bihar 75, and West Bengal 98, indicating India is under policed for law and order when it comes to the average citizens. A measure of how the police in UP in 2024 has laid out its activities and declared proudly that since 2017 the state police under the current government has killed 217 alleged criminals in various encounters and injured 7, 799. It is not anyone’s case that the state police have railroaded innocent citizens. The issue is whether the police have upheld the law of the country. The police, generally speaking, assume the rights of being the judge, the jury and the executioner in a country that has elaborate laws and a legal system where the death penalty is extremely rare.
The report of the UP government details the crackdown on gangs, mafias, drug pushers, and seizure of property of the bad guys. It also lists its modernization efforts like installing over one million CCTV cameras and special activities for women’s protection. But this appears to be with heavy hand. Certainly, there are no provisions in the laws of the country to bulldoze properties of alleged criminals for various infarctions or establishing anti-Romeo squads in the name of protecting women. By their figures as part of the anti-Romeo squads activity, 24,647,923 people have been checked from April 2022 to December 2024. In the same period, checking was carried out in over seven million places and some 39 million suspicious people were checked.
The union government admits that police reforms have been on the agenda for a long time. The basic legal framework of the police has been the Indian Police Act, 1861 with little or nil change thereafter. There have been several commissions or committees and recommendations for police reforms, prominent among them being the National Police Commission 1978-1982, the Padmanabhaia Committee of 2000 and the Malimath Committee on Reforms in Criminal Justice System 2002-2003. A committee headed by the super cop Julio Rebeiro was constituted in 1998 on the direction of the Supreme Court to suggest ways of implementing existing recommendations.
As a sequel to that a model Police Act was submitted to replace the 1861 law and circulated to the states. In September 2006, the Supreme Court in its judgment on a petition by Prakash Singh on issues of police reforms issued a set of directives for the states and the union government. The implementation is still ongoing. These directives included separating law and order and investigative roles, establishing fixed tenures, forming Police Complaints Authorities (PCAs) and so on. Implementation remains incomplete. Only 17 states have set up PCAs so far and even those do not meet the requirements set out by the apex court. District level PCAs are virtually non-existent. The normal way of dealing with complaints is internal inquiry and oversight lacks teeth. PCAs are manned by police themselves with no independent members representing public are there thereby police judging police unto themselves. There are considerable evidences that third degree methods continue to be used by the police notwithstanding the fact that India is signatory to the .1984 UN Anti-torture Convention.
The Indian Justice Report points out that since 1969-70 states have been eligible for conditional Central financial aid for modernization of police. But Central government’s share has been declining. To quote, over one year, the Central government’s share of modernization grant witnessed a drop from Rs.683 crore in 2020-21 to Rs.562 crore in 2021-22. Twelve states, among them, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand got no modernization funds in 2020-21, while states like Haryana, Tami Nadu and Goa got grants but reported zero expenditure.
In sum, the picture is of severe under-staffing of civil police and massive gaps in infrastructure. The institutions for public accountability remain dysfunctional and political interference is the order of the day. There is little investment in training and poor capacity for specialized activity like forensics. Half the sanctioned posts remain vacant. The lack of forensic support plays into weak investigations, delayed trials, wrongful acquittals and wrongful convictions.
There is a chain linking our laws, its administrators, the judicial system and prisons. There are problems in each of those links. Despite regular enactment of progressive laws, their implementation is poor. As for the judicial system, it is clogged with a pendency of over fifty million cases, a major factor for prisons being over crowded by under trials to the extent of 76 percent. Here, indiscriminate arrests play its role, as do barriers to bail despite the Supreme Court’s repeated directives that “ bail is the rule, not the jail” being unheeded or flouted with impunity by the High Courts, district courts and subordinate courts. The result is, they breed criminals, not reform them. It is time the political class took concerted measures to make police accountable to the people to restore the rule of law based system of constitutional democratic governance!
Md Yunus Siddiqui is a columnist. He has a great experience of Media Space.