Protests can't succeed unless India's streets are well-policed and its courts are quick and efficient. Reuters/Danish Siddiqui
A few days ago, after news of the sexual assault case in Mumbai
broke out, someone on Twitter said something that got me thinking. A
female resident of Mumbai, presumably, lashed out after seeing the
umpteenth tweet asking women in Mumbai to “take care” and “be safe.”
Enough
of this patronizing nonsense, she said. Instead of asking women to
“take care” it was time that men actually did something to make the city
safer for women.
In
the days since that attack, such outbursts from men and women alike
have become common. And they have been part of a much broader collection
of discussion and debates about women’s safety. There are several
concurrent threads to these debates: How can we teach our men to respect
women better? Is violence against women an expression of social faults,
if so which ones? How can these faults be alleviated? How does the
portrayal of women, women’s issues and violence against women in mass
media play a role in making things better or worse? Should minors
involved in sex crimes be treated as adults? What can we do to make our
neighborhoods safer? More recently there has been substantial debate on
the trivializing of the idea of rape in the form of jokes and in other
contexts not directly related to sex crimes.
Essentially,
I suppose we are all trying to figure out how India can be made safer
and more empathetic for all women. And these lines of questioning are
legitimate. They might eventually help us make our cities, towns, and
homes safer. But not immediately, not right now.
Right
now, make no mistake about it, we need something that forms the
foundation of a safe society: a functioning law-and-order system. No
amount of soul searching, cultural self-flagellation, sex education,
local activism, and behavioral conditioning will succeed unless our
streets are well-policed and our courts function with speed and
efficiency.
And
this is exactly why I am afraid India will remain an unsafe country for
women for the foreseeable future. Now I know this is not the message
that many campaigners for women’s safety want to hear. Many of them are
optimistic that some kind of governmental or non-governmental
campaigning will make India safer. But as long these campaigns are
divorced from a substantial overhaul of law and order mechanisms, they
will not work.
Let us just take the case of of the city of Mumbai, arguably India’s most commercially important metropolis. Mumbai has a sanctioned police strength of approximately 45,000 officers. Around 3,000 of these posts are currently vacant. The effective number police on the streets are even lower. The New Indian Express recently said that Mumbai had a serving police force of 33,000 officers.
Earlier
this month, in response to a Right To Information request, Mumbai
police revealed that in the first two months of this year 27,740 police
personnel had been deployed on VIP security duty, generally meaning they
guard politicians. It is unclear if these deployments were short or
long term. But there is no question that this substantially reduces the
number of police officers the city actually needs on its streets.
An
optimistic estimate suggests that, on an ongoing basis, Mumbai police
has around 20,000 police taking care of its population of around 20
million residents. Therefore, Mumbai enjoys an effective police coverage
of approximately 100 police officers per 100,000. (This number can vary
somewhat depending on how you approximate police and population. But by
my reckoning, it gets no better than around 165 per 100,000.) The
United Nations recommends coverage where a population of 100,000 are
served by 220 to 250 police officers.
What about courts?
It is common knowledge that Indian courts have millions of cases
pending at any given point in time. Yet another Right To Information
request, filed by the same applicant in June, found 49,170 cases of
crimes against women pending in courts across the state of Maharashtra
(Mumbai is its capital). This number has increased by 40% between 2008
and 2012. Of the 14,414 rape cases tried in Maharashtra last year, 13,388 remain pending.
To be sure, better police and faster courts will not solve these problems alone, and columnist Praveen Swami explains this, but I can think of no conceivable solution that does not include better police and faster courts as key elements.
The
need for immediate intervention is staring us in the face. So why don’t
the people who run Mumbai, Maharashtra or India see this? What prevents
them from overhauling the police force and legal system? Why does law
minister after law minister lament about the masses of pending cases in
Indian courts … and then actually do nothing radical about it?
This
situation is doubly ludicrous when you consider that the government is
also struggling to create sufficient jobs each year to occupy its
exploding youth demographic. The nation is simultaneously drowning in
both unemployed youth and undelivered public services.
Is it because these reforms are overly complex?
Cleaning
up the courts is admittedly complex. But surely hiring a few thousand
policemen can’t be as complex as rolling out multi-billion dollar job
guarantees, food security or biometric identity schemes? Those are all
initiatives the government has somehow managed to undertake.
Is it too expensive?
One
estimate puts the annual budget of Mumbai’s police force at about 6
billion rupees (or $91 million). Almost all of this, around 85%, goes
toward paying salaries. Can Mumbai, the beating heart of India’s economy
afford to, say, double this? Given that the budget of the city of
Mumbai is 280 billion rupees ($4 billion), and the city has a GDP which is at least 10 times as much, an escalation wouldn’t break the bank.
Then why not?
Your
guess is as good as mine. But I think it is because overhauling
Mumbai’s police or drawing up a radical plan to create new courts and
hire new judges is exactly the kind of granular reform that, from a
political perspective, Indian governments find difficult to execute. And
unless these reforms deliver an immediate return (and one that can be
politically leveraged), most stakeholders aren’t going to be interested
in at all. In a given term in office there are only so many fights you
can fight. So why pick the tough ones?
This is perhaps why the life cycles of legislation such as the Food Security Bill are relatively short, while those of a politically unsexy but economically important nature such as a new Companies Bill take decades.
There
is a peculiar pattern that often pops up when “India’s problems” are
discussed on social networks or in the comments section of news
websites. Somehow while all of India’s problems are all universal—rapes
happen in the US also, corruption happens in China also, malnutrition
happens in Indonesia also—all the solutions to India’s problems become
unique and complex. Police reform is complex, education is complex, food
is complex, taxation is complex and on and on.
Not always. Some of India’s problem are simple things with simple solutions that unfortunately have no political capital.
I
am afraid efficient courts and more and better police are among these
problems. And I don’t think we should expect major reforms any time
soon. Of course I hope I am proven completely wrong and Mumbai, and
Delhi, and every other local administration immediately implements steps
to improve law and order. Volunteer action, social awareness campaigns
and neighborhood watch programs can all make marginal improvements. They
will not, however, make up for a law and order system that works.
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