TORTURE: ASIAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES | JUNE-AUG 2013
the system, their own self-image undergoes a transformation. They have to slap, beat, torture people in order to be good at their job, and this is the way they get to be a successful police officer. This is what is told to the rookies by their seniors. It is a police force that cannot actually be part of a sane society in any way. It cannot talk without violence; it cannot talk without slapping or hitting. A police force that cannot talk properly is a very sick police force. What we are actually confronted by in this book and other evidence is the need for a complete shift of orientation in the policing system. In other words, it is not about crime investigation that you have to first agree on. First they must ask, ‘What is this for? What are the social objectives this serves?’ When those objectives are changed, then new kinds of models develop, people are trained and people operate within that model. But we have created a certain model years ago, maybe by accident. Maybe they couldn’t run a system – when these systems were introduced by the British, they were a colonizing power and they had limited resources, and their own thinking was limited in their own countries, where there wasn’t policing as it is today. We should approach this problem by searching for what the cultural model is here and why, rather than to find a few patches of this or that solution. What is first needed is a societal discussion. In India, there are two kinds of police stations. Some are old police stations, and some are new. How do you separate the two? The old ones only have police barracks. Why? Because during the British times, colonial times, and after, it was felt that it was best to separate the police from the local
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people as much as possible. If they were closer to the local people, they would be more compassionate. That was not allowed. Changing that idea in India has been a very tough issue. We still have some who say, ‘No, it should be separate, they should not be allowed to meet.’ Even today, some think that police are not supposed to mix and deal with people, except for the purposes of spying and collecting information. They are not really supposed to try to understand because that is supposed to make you very subjective and weak inside. You have a situation in the whole of South Asia in which there is a very deep-rooted malady, where the police force is trained to produce only fear and psychosis in the population. That is what needs to be attacked in order to create a sane society. The longer it remains, the longer society remains unable to heal. This book goes further than the police and goes into insights into the overall society. There are things that, in the modern sense, would be called ‘insanity’ and we somehow pretend to accept them, pretend not to notice, and we carry on. There is something sick and deep, and this can be the beginnings of a discussion with this kind of evidence placed in front of people. This requires very serious thinking about the society itself. When the police is unable to discharge its functions, society is one step closer to a cracking up again, closer to anarchy, tribalism, baying for the blood of people, like what you see happening in Dehli recently with all the mass demonstrations taking place. Nobody trusts the police; everybody sees them as corrupt. Dr. Rajat Mitra is an internationally reputed Indian Psychologist working as a Senior Mental Health Consultant with the Asian Human Rights Commission