> The police remains firmly in hands of the state in India. No matter the party in power. They don’t serve people, they serve politicians.
The statement is confusing to me. Usually, to say they serve politicians means that they serve a party, not the state.
They should serve the state, which is a creation of and responsible to the people. Serving a political party is corrupt and not serving the people; for example, in totalitarian and authoritarian countries, the police and other state institutions often serve the party.
Regardless, is there evidence of the police doing such things for other political parties?
All institutions by design implicitly have a core, if unspoken "prime directive": self-preservation.
You could start an institution with the best intentions known to mankind, but if that institution doesn't preserve itself first and foremost, then all other stated official objectives become mute.
Now, if you have an institution that has a clearly stated objective (in addition to the core, unstated objective of self-preservation) like, "We discovered a cure for cancer and want to get it out to as many people affected by cancer in as quick and cost-effective manner as possible" ... this is all well and good.
But what if you have an institution with vague and seemingly implied but not technically-stated objectives that in effect are more of a "free to imagine/interpret them as you wish" sort of deal – for example, what are the "objectives" of the Indian government/law enforcement arm of the government other than the vague and practically-useless-for-being-held-accountable-for-performance, "We want to govern shit"?
What if you somewhere find on some Indian document an objective like, "To preserve law and order"?
What laws, written by who, for whose benefit, and what order, and again, for who?
Sounds like the caste system all over again.
Now what if they got more specific like, "To preserve law and order in order to encourage social stability" ... again ... stability FOR WHO?
Does the majority of the Indian population want "stability?"
Obviously not as they would most likely indicate they want social mobility to rise out of poverty.
The problem is ... their social mobility = overall social instability, especially for those aspects of Indian society who are "at the top of the social hierarchy" who also tend to correlate with "those who govern."
It's relatively easy to govern when you have state-provided homes and vacation homes and so on and the majority of the population lives in shacks.
Not so easy when the majority of the populace is relatively well off.
This then introduces the theory that George Orwell addressed in 1984: that tyrannical states, as an institution, eventually degenerate into doing nothing but attending to their "core objective" of self-preservation at all costs, and will purposely do things to keep the majority of the population perpetually poor so that the discrepancies of relative wealth can be used as a power mechanism (most people won't be bothered to think about higher-order abstract social constructs like "government" if they're too busy worrying about job stability or even worse, where their next meal will come from).
In furtherance of this "1984" approach to subduing the population, consider Modi's (and other politicians in that general area) constant "Oh no, another border skirmish with "the enemy" ... right around the times of internal political turmoil – basically, a convenient excuse to distract the internal populace and redirect it's attention to external "threats" to cultural homogeneity.
So then, as (for example in this case, but not at all exclusive to, as this tends to happen to ALL institutions – for example Universities of "Higher Learning" that wind up hoarding donations intended to help students in increasingly massive investment funds that sometimes rival professional Wall Street institutions) the Indian government degenerates into simply securing the primary (if unspoken of) directive of "continual self-preservation" ... the very subject of the government's "governing", ie, the general populace ... becomes a factor external to the Indian government itself (as well as its law-enforcement mechanisms).
Now, what is that "external factor" of the general populace itself most likely to be viewed as?
1.) An external aspect of the internal reality of government and it's mechanisms that needs to be further integrated
2.) An external oddity that can be viewed as an item of curiosity during times when the government has no particular urgent matters to attend to, or ignored when it does have other, more urgent matters (such as self-preservation) to attend to
3.) A possible threat to the continuity of "keeping things as they are"?
I HIGHLY doubt that that segment of Indian society had ANYTHING to do with the writing of any laws.
Likewise, it's doubtful they were minded as the intended primary beneficiaries of such laws when they were written by a minute segment of the remaining 3/4 of Indian society, keeping in mind that many members of that remaining 3/4 ALSO complain of systematically-rampant corruption.
Police in India serves the elected powers, always. The Indian state has always been authoritarian, more so in recent times. Given the nature of how power is shared and exercised at different levels in India, it’s easy to call Prime Minister a fool and get away with it - and many do. But you dare not publicly call your local municipal councilor that, or these days, the Chief Minister.
A great recent movie exploring this aspect of the police and the state in India is Nayattu, available on Netflix: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayattu_(2021_film)
This movie was scripted by an ex-cop and makes a sympathetic case for the sort of daily negotiations the cops are involved in. The “hunted” from the title are literally other cops.
Many Tamil movies have been exploring the police-politician nexus for a few decades now. Sathya (1989?) comes to my mind.
I just gave you a bunch of examples of the politicians using the police to restrict or restrain the Indian people in some manner in contravention to constitutional principles over the past few decades.
Sure, India is not a fully authoritarian state, but the folks elected have always had such tendencies. The current government still has to contest elections (and still loses them at state level), but you wouldn’t deny they are authoritarian. And many state governments (controlled by different parties of different political persuasions, as I have listed above) display the same tendencies: authority exercised via coercion and arbitrary rules.
Democracy and authoritarianism are not opposites. They occupy a spectrum - democracies can display authoritarian characteristics and vice versa.
Sounds like you have watched too much bollywood. Talk to one of your relatives or friends of friends who's in the police force and come back.
For those who are unaware: one of the forces with big political interest in India is the middle east. The middle east runs a shadow government in India; its two arms are bollywood and the Indian mafia (look up D-company[1]). Before the rise of Modi, they used to churn out shitloads of bollywood movies where the mafia is humanized and police and politicians were always the bad guys... which serves as a recruiting tool for the mafia and demonizes the police and the government.
While the Modi government has tried to take action against this, even as of 2018, movie like Sanju[2] was made which is based on the life of a bollywood actor who was charged for his involvement in the 1993 Bombay Bombings[3]... but the movie shows him as a good guy. In real life, the actor has served the mafia with various mafia-protagonist movies such as Munna Bhai MBBS and Vastaav and is one of the Indian superstars who has deep links with the mafia.
It might be helpful to back up your perspective with data, or better frame your argument. As it stands, your comment doesn’t add much to the conversation.
A few things in particular:
- Crime is a problem in India. The Wikipedia article has a decent overview (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_India). But so is police and government corruption. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India)
- To call a criminal organization a shadow government is hyperbolic. Similarly calling the romanticizing of crime — a common entertainment trope — a conspiracy, seems a bit much.
- The actor you use as an example was convicted for acquiring weapons from people involved with the Bombay Bombings. He was never accused of being involved in the bombings himself (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Dutt). I’m not sure I follow the accusation of serving the mafia by acting as a criminal in a movie.
Yes, primarily by the mafia and drug cartels, run by the middle east.
> But so is police and government corruption.
One of the reasons (among others) is the mafia which corrupts the police.
> To call a criminal organization a shadow government is hyperbolic.
What does that even mean? The Indian mafia has been killing businessmen, politicians and police... and uses threats, violence and bribes to run things their way in goverment and the police force. That is exactly what shadow government is.
> He was never accused of being involved in the bombings himself
I almost never watch Bollywood. Some of the reasons why I hold the opinions I do can be explained partly by the references listed here: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=31795739
You do realize that you say that you are not influenced by Bollywood movies but the comment you refer to here references Bollywood movies as sources, right?
I refer to Tamil and Malayalam movies, not Bollywood (and these are only one among many sources I mention). Like I said, Tamil movies have been exploring criminal-politician-state nexus for a few decades now, although that doesn’t stop the Tamils from electing famously authoritarian governments themselves.
I don’t buy the argument that mafia or middle eastern emigre have influenced these potrayals in Tamil cinema since the 70s and 80s. It’s the local politics that did.
Maybe there’s merit to the argument about Hindi films (I don’t know), but not Tamil.
You couldn’t be more mistaken if you confuse the South Indian film industry (then centered around Madras/Chennai) with the Hindi film industry (Bollywood, centered in Bombay/Mumbai).
