While on the one hand the Indian
state has a clearly understood and recognised objective of defeating warfare
against it, whether externally or internally, insofar as the non-military
aspects of this war are concerned, the current structure of the police and criminal
justice systems in India appears inadequate to meaningfully address the state of
war in which the nation currently purportedly exists.
For one, there are pros and cons
to being a terrorist/criminal organisation vs. a police one. In both kinds of
organisations, there is a difference between the ramifications of individual objectives
vs. collective objectives.
The following are disadvantages
in terms of individual objectives in a terrorist/criminal organisation:
- One is much more dispensable to the organisation than in other kinds of middle class jobs, or in police/military organisations
- One usually has a very poor life expectancy (for a Jihadist it may be as less as two years)
- One may lose all contact with family for long periods of time or even permanently
- Even though one is dispensable to the organisation, this is not as in-your-face as on the dark side – also, there is pension, bereavement compensation etc. for the family in case one dies
- One has a certain social esteem and acceptability, for the most part (not talking about Neanderthals like Kanhaiya Kumar who still take socialism as an economic doctrine seriously), and in some cases even power for those whose intellects find the concept real.
- Among friends and society members who understand the nature of the work and its constraints, there is a genuine appreciation for one’s contribution to the larger picture of society, and most importantly, social and economic order – this is a sort of appreciation that goes beyond social esteem and acceptability vide point 2 above.
The need to stress the difference
between points 2 and 3 above arises from the fact that most of the middle class
understands justice in a somewhat limited form of right vs. wrong and similar
simple concepts, and the evolution from there takes one to understand that any
meaningful manifestation of justice has social and economic order as its
starting point. The author counts himself as applicable to point 3.
However, if one were to look at
collective objectives, the picture becomes much more unsavoury, at least in
India. I cover collective objectives for both types of organisations together
in the following:
- The police systems are structurally consistent with the British Raj, in which the state and central police organisations had a primary role of maintaining a colony and serving their masters – the structures have been designed for officers to follow orders leading down from the Viceroy of India. Lack of imagination comes with the territory.
- Terrorist and criminal organisations do not lack governance through imaginative and exceedingly intelligent brains, nor subtlety. Police organisations often assume that terrorist organisations, in particular, act on behalf of a state or merely out of economic and/or religious interests. The bureaucratic structure of police organisations prevents them from seeing anything that does not come with physical evidence.
- When the terrorist/criminal organisations in question truly believe that their provenance of instructions/commands ends earlier than it actually does, it appears exceedingly unlikely that any sort of evidence making the connection will appear. When something doesn’t exist (as far as one can tell), it is impossible to either hide it or show it, right?
- While it is largely true that the intellects of members of criminal/terrorist organisations would be dull and unimaginative, the police systems are forced to replicate the unimaginative part for as facile a reason as it being a British legacy. It is no wonder then that the most subtle murders in India happen with not even a hint at meaningful investigation, a case in point being the systematic elimination of Indian nuclear scientists.
- Just because terrorist organisations consist largely of people of dull and unimaginative intellects, it doesn’t mean that they cannot be manipulated, especially by international cabals that have human resources endowed with exceedingly high IQs + the subtlety, sophistication and imagination that come with this IQ, unshackled by basic stupidities like British legacy that pretend to be reasons that the educated middle class in India is supposed to find acceptable. Add to it, neither are these cabals lacking in financial resources, nor are they constrained to not work with anybody willing and capable of working for them because of some silly and contrived reasons that any student of economics would clearly see as not simply fallacious and dangerous, but negatively disruptive to the social fabric, in addition.
To summarise, it is the absence
of rules that makes terrorist organisations and the likely cabals fronted by
Western intelligence agencies so dangerous for Indian police organisations to
tackle. While interrogating captured terrorists and myriad other types of
criminals and spies is groundwork that police duties must necessarily involve,
we seem to be completely missing the larger picture at work here.
We are most likely in a state of
war against the state, and yet we know that the enemy is necessarily human. Their
insidiousness appears dangerous because the police collective in the country is
too engaged with its bureaucratic somnolence to imagine that they exist. It
would appear less dangerous if we remember that it was our land that produced Chanakya, and are thus less
pusillanimous in acknowledging the existence of what is merely the highest
level in the geopolitical game.
A suspension of disbelief is
sometimes necessary if only due to the realisation that, when we think about
it, we do not lead our daily lives on the basis of our beliefs or disbeliefs. A
higher rationality, or wisdom, if one may call it that, is not necessarily as
confined to the intellect as one’s “beliefs” may lead one to think.
Three outcomes seem probable in this scenario:
- The extent of damage has gone far overboard before the existence of a collective of international intelligence agencies is even acknowledged, after which we go back to being a colony of a collectivist state, financially or even politically.
- Macroeconomic changes occur in the global economy that outweigh the consequences of the somnolent lack of imagination of the Indian police collective.
- Actors emerge on the stage that act meaningfully and yet entirely independently of the Indian state, and the state actors are not worse off for not knowing what could’ve hurt them and the state, but didn’t.
Only time will tell which scenario will play out
in the future.
