Respected Chief Minister, In a recent case of 11 year old girl child raped in Mandideep a week ago, the attitude of Bhopal Police was extremely defensive. The police knew that the minor girl had been raped, yet the information was studiously held back for more than 36 hours.
While we don’t not wish police to divulge info of on-going investigations, or other confidential facts, but we surely have a right to know about crimes committed.
And when in such cases the police hide facts, it is as bad as covering up for the culprits – it makes the police a culprit too.
With our long experience of working with Madhya Pradesh Police, this is the first time we have witnessed such skirting of issues and it is very disturbing.
Kindly note, under the present national scenario since Delhi gang-rape, like police all over India, Madhya Pradesh Police too is under tremendous pressure to book all complaints to get a tight rein on crime against women. However, your government expects crime figures to go down and that pressure leads to officers of Madhya Pradesh police to begin systematic ‘Burking’ or ‘Non Registration’ of complaints.
This internal pressure from your government (read from you, Home Minister, DG Police) holds the ground level police force responsible for mass rapes of young girls, crime against women in general, and so induces them to not register all complaints.
In the recent Mandideep case, this proved to be the reason why top zonal cops would not come out with details about the extent of crime. While cops have not done that crime, yet, your faulty supervision and wrong accountability-attaching techniques, made the top cops lie about the victim’s actual physical state or that of the crimes committed over her. This attitude of your government made Bhopal police go into a self-protective mode and though the police were not the perpetrators, they stood there as if covering up for the culprits and hence for a period of time, Bhopal Police was aligned with criminals.
Respected Chief Minister, the Women’s Rights Council takes great objection to this. To help you remove this anomaly, the Council advises immediate steps:
A
1. Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, rather than getting upset or defensive because of crime numbers, and in turn causing heart-burn for the police department, should feel proud that his police force did have the moral courage to file all cases. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister should announce thus – “MP is the only state that registers all crime – if we have registered 50000 crimes committed against women, I am proud that we caught 50000 women’s rights offenders and that in our state, they have no place”. This will have the kind of subduing effect upon criminals that nothing else would. It will actually bring crime down.
2. Give your police confidence to book all and any crime against women, whatsoever. Make them responsible in their own jurisdiction to prevent crime, register it duly when it does happen, apprehend the criminals as soon as possible. Yet, do not hold them responsible for crime statistics. Stop questioning them, holding them responsible for crime numbers.
3. Give the Police department the confidence that if the crime figures do go up, no Head (from the DG’s to the TI’s) would roll.
(The Chief Minister fully understands the fact, and so do those who quote those figures, that states like Bihar and UP are far ahead of Madhya Pradesh in crime, yet there being systematic ‘Burking’ in practice, the states show lower crime graphs.)
B
4. While there is great hue and cry from your office since Delhi gang-rape, have the police force numbers been increased for proper policing, proper patrolling? While adding almost 15000 policemen over past 4 years, a record for Madhya Pradesh, has the Chief Minister studied the police-population ratios of better policed states such as Maharashtra and Karnataka, and decided to further increase the force to give that kind of policing? Maharashtra and Karnataka, as you will see, have lesser of crime against women and women are more safe and confident in those states. It would be advisable to change state policing norms rather than changing the TIs for each crime happening.
(The Women’s Rights Council can provide you a comparative study.)
5. As advised time and again, have you divided your police into two segments – one to take care of Law & Order and the other for VIP duties? It is a well known fact that specifically Bhopal has a lot of VIP movement and the thana police that has to run for every ‘vyvastha’ cannot devote time to investigations and apprehending culprits. Kindly do that and you would do another great thing to bring crime against women down?
C
A very long experience with crime and justice has taught us, only and only when an offence gets punished, there are severe convictions, only then the future offenders get deterred.
6. The state judiciary is in a bad state. Under-staffed courts, irresponsible judges, erring Public Prosecutors, no time-frames followed for decisions, all combined have resulted in numerous cases of serious/heinous crime against women pending for justice and resulting in fearlessness of criminals.
7. The judicial infrastructure is so fraught with problems that if the Judges fail to deliver, then the fault is ours. Judges are made to sit and work like clerks. Neither the culprit, nor the Judge himself would respect, or be in awe of his judicial power.
8. Rather than pulling up the Home Minister, the DG or the cops on the street, why don’t you pull up your Law Minister and the Law Secretary? With the kind of budgets the Ministry has, why is an infrastructure not developed that brings more judges in to hear pending cases, more ease of operations into the system?
The Women’s Rights Council is ready to assist the government in all complexities of fighting crime and violence against women.
We also make a solemn commitment here – if the Chief Minister makes the police book all cases of crime against women, and if he can announce with pride that a very large number of crime against women’ culprits were booked and arrested by his state police, the Council will stand by him across India and show-case his dedication towards the cause of women.
Thanking you
Chandna C. Arora
Founder & President
9406991008/9755183801
Anisha Kaplish
Secretary
9826338713
