“Pakistan ka badsha kaun hai” (who is the king of Pakistan) is the question a colleague asks repeatedly during the police workshops and consultations that we do together. The answers are predictably cynical, differing only in terms of the names of the different presidents. Previously, the answer used to be Musharraf, now it is Mr Zardari. When my elderly colleague shakes his head to denote that the answer is wrong, other guesses follow, including but not limited to the army, the notorious establishment, the USA and now lately, the Chief Justice. As I slump in despair, my colleague remarks, “At least we are getting more variety in the guesses so at least there is some improvement.”
My colleague then asks another question. When did Pakistan become a republic? The answers vary from 1947 to 1977. It does not matter who the audience is. Whether it is a group of ‘learned’ media professionals or students or even the police, the disappointment is the same. No one knows when the word ‘republic’ came in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
What questions my esteemed colleague articulates is certainly not my focus today. It is the sheer disconnect that we are experiencing and reinforcing that plagues me. This disconnect takes on various forms and shapes through our days and lives. The chattering classes talk about the digital divide; the rural-urban gap but perhaps what is of far more concern is the divorce that we are experiencing from reality. Talk of empowerment and sovereignty is meaningless when we do not know the source of our power, and perhaps that is why our strategies and plans of action are disconnected and without any impact. This reality-disconnect sometimes takes the form of paranoia and persecution by the labels of Muslim persecution or military-civilian perception, and sometimes as mundane as the absence of any real shared understanding of our identity. For me, the reality-disconnect is also manifested in questions like, “Are you in favour of the Taliban’s or Quaid-e-Azam’s Pakistan?” The way this question is framed reminds me of General Zia’s Islamic state referendum question.
This same disconnect is reflected in not just policing but our perception of what policing is. This week’s papers reported the ‘revolutionary steps’ that the Islamabad police is undertaking by effectively implementing ‘community policing’. Excited by the headline, I was disappointed to know that community policing is really the setting up of a desk marked community policing at a few select police stations. Neither the journalists reporting nor the police implementing this community-policing model bothered to educate themselves as to what this jargon really means.
It has been five years that I have been working with the police all over the country. During this time, numerous consultations, trainings and citizen-police dialogues have been conducted, the latter reduced to shouting matches between the police and civilians. Political interference, a lack of accountability, corruption, etc, have all been discussed ad nauseam. The question of what kind of policing we need and how to go about getting it generates lofty sounding, policy-level decisions like ‘eliminate political interference’, etc. We as a nation are quite apt at reinforcing our disconnect by making such high plans that the most mundane ones do not get off the ground. For instance, while lamenting about the police for their lack of accountability, how many of us know that an overwhelmingly majority of the police serving in the provinces do not get their pay slips? Additionally, except for Islamabad and Karachi, the police mostly get their salaries in cash from the clerical staff. Every month, the man dispensing cash payment doles out the salary minus the change and a thousand rupees or two. When asked, he would say that the department has deducted the amount on one pretext or another. Since pay slips are not given, the individual has no means to double check.
Consider this also. If you are in Islamabad police and get sick, a daily amount of Rs 260 is deducted from your salary. In other words, not only do you have to foot your medical bills yourself since the procedure at a police hospital is but a sham, money is also deducted from your pocket
The police training centres do not give sufficient training time nor focus on service-oriented policing skills. The personnel who enter these training centres are sent off for VIP duty or emergency duties. These duties disrupt their training programmes and, most times, what they miss is never re-done. The instructors at the training centres are sent there as punishment so their interest level is also not much to write home about.
The police department spends public money buying police uniforms that are high quality on paper but low quality in real life, with the result that every man and woman gets his/her own uniform stitched with no accountability for the public money spent.
I could go on but the mantra is the same. There is a generalised feeling of despondency amongst the police, reinforced when they are met with cynicism from the public. The public, with good reason of course, feels that broader reforms are needed rather than focusing on issues like ensuring grievance redressal of the police. What we are failing to do is to understand that a police constable who feels disconnected from his superiors and the police administrative procedure, and feels persecuted by the media and public, will not be able to serve as he is mandated to do.
Including provisions such as mandatory salary payment through cheques, issuance of monthly pay slips, completing Annual Confidential Reports (confidentially and minus the accompanying present) in time by the superior officer before he leaves, provision of stationery and petrol to the police stations, suitable accommodation, in our call for police reforms sound rather petty. However, it is necessary that we are cognizant of the importance of such demands. For in the mundane, it seems, are the first steps towards reforms.
The writer is a development consultant and can be reached at [email protected]