THE OLD SCHOOL IN THE NEW AGE

The Chief was getting worried by the day. Times were "a changin'" for his khaki police force. The RoE or Rules of Engagement with the public were earlier so neatly laid out. Police regulated meetings and processions to the point of banning them, it enforced bans on some or the other book, newspaper or a political organization  and made a show of enforcement of the odd economic regulation pertaining to supply of essential commodities like rice or levy cement and the like. It also investigated cases when they were registered.

In the process it made a few arrests, did not discriminate between the sex of the protestors and evaders, nor between night and day. A bit of third degree was a given, disconnecting electricity and blocking newsprint supply to errant media elements was par for the course, and if the fellows on the streets became too uncontrollable , there was nothing what a good cane charge or even firing in the air , or for that matter even at the crowd , could not achieve. Besides, people were not expected to raise too much of hue and cry over missing persons. 

With the passage of time, quite a few practices of this Old School had changed but it had not rattled him much. Okay, you could no more allow people to go missing as courts were getting transfixed with this habeas corpus hocus pocus. The charm of the old handcuff was gone and he tried hard to recall the days when it was so easy for a mofussil police station constable to manacle and walk down the road with  two arrestees  or even carry them,  sitting on their haunches on the foot of the rickshaw, to the court . Arrests now entailed a lot of scriptural work , what with issuing of arrest memos and medical reports of daily check up. Conservatism had set in, and now male constables could not arrest women nor herd them together with the males in the same lock-up. You could not disturb a person's nocturnal privacy, privileges and pursuits and arrest him just like that, you had to wait till his body stirred and bowels moved.

The DoUF Directives of Use of Force had also undergone a change in the New Age policing .  No protest could ever be termed as violent because venting anger was a legitimate right of the public. The good old firing with muskets was now a big no- no -- whatever be the provocation. There was an Ucch Nyayalaya judgement which declared the  police regulation on procedure to open fire at an unlawful assembly as unconstitutional because the court refused to believe that the firing party commander could have  such an accurate and  telescopic vision so as to identify  the main instigator from a distance. As a result, police could now fire only in self defence which was not quite the same thing in affording legal immunity as would firing to disperse an unlawful assembly would. The new mantra was risk- averseness rather than risk -taking and the Principle of Minimum Use of Force was increasingly being sought to be replaced with one of No Force. 

But what had really got the Chief's goat was the emerging trend of PP or "photography policing", not insubstantially influenced by one of the new Western BPs or Best Practices . The police of a European country had decided that it was not quite worth it to open fire and maim or kill people when they burnt cars and shops because these things were insured and the victims could justifiably seek claim from the insurers. They just filmed these acts , started cases and requested the courts to issue summons.  One of his bright colleagues who had returned from a training course abroad and was now  heading the police force in a BIMARU state did precisely that when supporters of a caste leader went berserk during his funeral procession. Police restraint in the face of such expected and prolonged provocation was effusively complimented by various human rights groups and all criticism of police inaction was termed as reactionary, unfortunate and insensitive. 

PP made its way to police training curriculum and modernisation plans as more than riot drill, video recording of agitations came to be taught in PTCs or Police Training Colleges and more than riot drill equipment , video and other cameras came to be purchased  entailing such procedural irregularities that even the friendliest auditor could not help handing over a slew of paras in the annual audit reports. Soon a new brand of photographer policemen became the new poster boys of the department , filming violent protests rather than curbing them, and the more entrepreneurial ones, especially the Selfie experts,  took to filming couples in parks and seedy hotels, and became intrepid extortionists in the process. The Chief had intense dislike, and even morbid fear,  of PP because it had led to a sunderance within the department - all kinds of disgruntled and devious characters were shooting scenes of robust interrogation, extramarital dalliances in police quarters, pithhoo drills  and even colourful Mess parties that immediately made way either to the media or to the government.

But even these the Chief took in his stride. He knew that despite the New Age policing practices that had corrupted the majority and diluted the efficacy of the organization , he could still expect to gather around him a substantial number from the Old School  and stand in between violent, warring factions and rampaging crowds. But what was giving him sleepless nights were the activities of the  NWPs or the New Wave Protesters and the MORPOL or Moral Police , the restlessness also exacerbated by the gnawing feeling that these elements were infiltrating the police force as well which he also felt was due to extensive coverage given to them by the News Channels. 

Earlier, bans or sanctions were decreed and promulgated by the government , but now prohibitory orders could be passed by non- government actors like the MORPOLs. Some of them had  issued orders against kissing  and all forms of PDAs or Public Demonstration of Affection, some had started to raise awareness against the evils of indecent  dressing and also prescribed dress codes for women in line with Sanskriti, Sabhyata and Shariat. While many complied out of fear, a very large number borrowed from western forms of protests which were flowing freely on the cyberspace . Soon a train of hokchumban kisses hooted past the streets , the city promenades and boulevards  reverberated with footfalls of SlutWalk and when LGTB issues also got entwined like serpents in heat, colourful processions of NWPs with colourful placards and body paints and tattoos lit up the towns and energised the TV channels to become more of an audio medium than visual.

It did not end there. Novel protests  to raise awareness of gender issues  dotted the country and what were earlier whispered in hushed tones monthly  were now displayed as protest symbols almost daily. Protestors were writing slogans on sanitary napkins and hanging all kinds of linen on gates and walls of public buildings and lamp posts. The Chief particularly disliked asking his men to remove such objectionable items as these were converting dour faced cops into a bunch of teenage gigglers with all kinds of double entendres flying about, especially when there were women police also around. 

After one NWP went about wearing a bra written Khuli Khidki  during a protest against a Vice Chancellor , similar cup cards soon replaced the placards in most campus unrests . The Chief's police once had a particularly harrowing time when, to placate the MORPOLs, it intervened to stop an act of "bra obscenity" by a few boys during a campus protest.

When the police party reached to seize the objects of "nuisance and indecency", the girl students demanded, through rings of cigarette smoke,  of the police to show where it was written that men could not  wear bras, in which legal statute the bra was mentioned as obscene , and if wearing it was obscene, why were the policewomen wearing it, and if at all bras  were to seized, were the police trained to alphanumber, label and pack them. Finally, inspired by lofted notions of gender equality, the girls said that if the bras were to be seized from the person of the boys, they had to be seized from the girls as well, and inspired by TV footage of Jal Samadhi protests, they locked their elbows with the boys and formed a ring. Naturally the police, both male and female, not used to opening bras in public, bid a hasty retreat amidst raucous catcalls and wolf whistles from the girls and disappointment writ large on the boys.

Incidents like this were happening all too frequently, the Press ridiculed, the government fumed, and the PP poster boys increasingly upped the pressure to yield to their brand of "No Action, Only Photographic Prosecution" policing. Then one day one of his batch mates , now retired,  came over and asked him to hang up his boots and walk in the sunset.

" Yaar, why don't you opt for premature retirement. I am sure the police will also get a favourable OROP if they protest properly, which should not really be a problem for them," Gopu told him one day at the Mess  where a small batch reunion was in progress.

" No, let me just dig in and stay," he said to no one in particular, and just stared at this cellphone, an old one without a camera.