O.P. Singh: Rewriting The Police Playbook

Police reform in India is often reduced to a familiar litany—colonial-era mindset, political interference, manpower shortages. Culture, the invisible glue that holds institutions together, rarely gets the attention it deserves. Yet it is precisely this cultural core that O.P. Singh sought to reshape during his tenure as Haryana Director General of Police, attempting something more ambitious than procedural reform: a reset of how policing is imagined and practised.

Singh’s starting point was the citizen-facing edge of the state. He repeatedly reminded officers that the police station is not merely an enforcement outpost but a public service space. Behaviour, he argued, was non-negotiable. Officers were instructed to be polite, attentive and professional while receiving complainants. To reinforce this, Singh called for changes in police station infrastructure to remove the colonial imprint of dominance—raised platforms, intimidating layouts and physical barriers that signalled power rather than assistance. The objective was to dismantle fear without diluting authority.

This recalibration of tone toward the public was paired with a harder stance against violent crime. Singh consciously altered the language used by the police when dealing with hardened criminals, making it sharper and more confrontational. For a public long unsettled by crime and intimidation, the shift was reassuring. For criminals, it was clarifying. Ambiguity, Singh believed, only emboldened violence.

He also took aim at informal power structures that thrive in the grey zones of enforcement. Local hegemons, accustomed to flaunting armed gunmen as symbols of status, were called out. By recalling such gunmen, Singh punctured these everyday displays of extra-legal power and reaffirmed the state’s monopoly over force.

Perhaps the most visible shift came in how Singh inhabited the office of the DGP. Traditionally a largely administrative role, it was recast as that of an operational commander. Singh remained publicly visible, closely associated with major operations and clear priority-setting. His active use of mass and social media allowed him to speak directly to citizens to allay fears and, equally, to issue public warnings to criminals. In a media-saturated environment, Singh understood that silence could be mistaken for indifference.

Internally, communication within the force was stripped of bureaucratic excess. Singh wrote short, direct letters in Hindi, addressed to all ranks, spelling out specific do’s and don’ts. These were not advisory notes but clear instructions, making individual officers responsible for implementation. The use of Hindi ensured accessibility and reduced the distance between leadership and the rank and file.

Discipline and cohesion were treated as cultural foundations. Singh insisted on proper turnout and revived institutional practices such as roll calls, Monday parades, orderly rooms and bada khana. To critics, these measures appeared militaristic. Singh, however, saw them as essential to restoring pride, unity and a sense of collective purpose in a force under constant strain.

Taken together, these initiatives amounted to a deliberate attempt at cultural transformation. Singh’s tenure suggests that reform in Indian policing does not always begin with new laws or commissions. Sometimes, it begins with changing how authority speaks, behaves and presents itself. Whether this transformation endures will depend on institutional continuity. But the attempt itself marks a rare moment of introspection in the long, unfinished story of police reform in India.