Sensitised Police for Empowered Society (Samvedi Police - Sashakta Samaj)

The old image of colonial police must yield to a people sensitive profile. It is not just the learning of the skill that is crucial in any police training, but the conditioning or the mind-set of an average police-person which plays even greater role. Even though the duties of an average police-person involve majorly interfacing with law abiding citizens, s/he is normally conditioned to deal with criminals and extremists only. This is a huge paradox.
Samvedi Police is the way to complete the journey from colonial policing to democratic policing. In this context ‘Sensitised Police for Empowered Society’ has been adopted as the watchword to define the training philosophy.
‘Sensitised’ means ‘Positively Conditioned’. A sensitized police would be essentially conditioned to –
(a) Democratic & Constitutional objectives;
(b) Legal & Rights-based transparent procedures;
(c) Policing by Legitimacy.
Man is a social animal and, consequently, a cultural animal too. Therefore, it would be logical to sensitise police persons through cultural ensembles involving literature, drama, film, music, dance, folklores, biographies, ballads etc. Equally pertinent would be to expose them to the multi-cultural diversity & plurality of Indian society through heritage tours. Experience-sharing would be yet another effective medium of sensitization.
A perception gained through teaching-learning interface may leave only a skin-deep impact, the imprints of a training experience could reach flesh or bone deep, but a sensitized acquisition through cultural forms would have the potential to become part of individual’s DNA. It is, because the culture defines a society and itspeople in the same way as the DNA defines any living organism.
‘Empowered’ means ‘Self-relient’. Consequently, we believe, only an empowered society shall pave way for good policing. And hence police has a stake in being a catalyst to the process of social awareness and legal empowerment of society in order to inculcate democratic values and constitutional pride in its own members as well.
The most effective way of empowering the society would be by supporting and strengthening the twin process of social awareness and legal literacy. Being a natural overflow of the core policing segments, a regular social awareness/legal literacy campaign in the neighbourhood of the training institution would be in order, and would fit in aptly as part of the applied training protocol.
The trust deficit that police faces in dealing with the minority/dalit/advisasi/gender related incidents has always remained a cause of concern. In a sense this deficit mirrors the personal, social and professional handicaps of an average police functionary. There are two critical dimensions at the root of it, which the training interventions must address –
i. Post independence, police is not adequately sensitized to appreciate the positioning of minority/dalit/advasi/gender in the secular and democratic framework of Indian nation;
ii. The police is mainly conditioned to view the minority/dalit/adivasi/gender issues in terms of conflict situations, and usually undertakes no institutional role during other times.
The worse scenario for police occurs when the planners and perpetrators of conflicts assume political legitimacy or display claims to social legitimacy, and agitate through inciteful words, rough demonstrations and choreographed violence. A strong legal action of police in such a scenario would be possible when the police can bank upon a legitimacy reservoir of public-trust gained through their sensitized initiatives among various communities during peace time.
Once it is conceded that the police activities indeed have a social purpose, as the Gore Committee on Police Training (1971-72) had so emphatically brought out, it would mean that the individual sensitization, social orientation and professional competencies, all three domains that a police officer would need to master, are to be conditioned to that end, through a process of structured training. In this regard the core areas of focus, to be handled through a matrix of de-conditioning and conditioning during police training, are not difficult to identify–
i. Minority, Dalit, Adivasi;
ii. Gender;
iii. Other Vulnerable sections i.e. Children, Juvenile, Unemployed, Elderly, Mentally Challenged, Trafficked etc.;
iv. Constitutional goals, Pluralism, Shared Heritage, Diversity, Democracy;
v.The people empowering legal Acts and processes, such as, RTI, Right to Service, Right to Employment, Right to Education, Forest Rights, Human Rights, Panchayati Raj, Elections, Constitutional Equity, Fundamental Rights, Community Policing etc.
The training institutions will be required to design for the trainees appropriate workshops/seminars coupled with experience sharing and field visits in order to unburden their burden of ignorance and indifference, biases and prejudices (de-conditioning) in regard to above areas. The extent to which an individual suffers from this burden is measurable by using suitable questionnaires, and a follow up led by experts would facilitate them in gaining the required constitutional/ humanistic/sociological insight. Thus sensitized, space should be provided to trainees to practice/observe/strengthen in field situation the application of people empowering legal acts and processes (conditioning), and the roadmap of sensitized police for empowered society shall start unfolding.

- Director, SVPNPA Hyderabad.