Law Vs Lathi: Former DGP Abhayanand Writes On Policing Bihar During Jungle Raj

Year 2008. Month January

Police firing in a law-and-order situation had resulted in a few deaths at Kahalgaon in Bhagalpur district of Bihar. Tension had been brewing for close to three days.

It was a holiday, and I was teaching my students when I suddenly got a call on my mobile from the chief minister (CM) himself. Quite succinctly, he informed me that the state government had directed a helicopter to take me to Kahalgaon to handle the situation. I had to leave immediately.

As per the protocol, the additional director general (ADG) (Law and Order) is supposed to handle such situations; I could not understand why I, as ADG, Headquarters (HQ), was being asked to look into this. Nonetheless, I left immediately, since the orders came from the CM himself, and landed on Kahalgaon National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) premises. I didn’t even get time to change into my uniform. There was no policeman to receive me at the landing ground; it seemed as if nobody was informed about my arrival. I requested the chief of NTPC to drop me at the local police station, which was about 4 kilometres away. He gave me a rickety jeep for my ride. There was hardly a soul to be seen on the roads. The driver alerted me that the situation was especially tense, and the local people were furious with the police. He dropped me at the police station and drove off. The chopper that had brought me to Kahalgaon had also taken off.

I arrived at the police station to find that all police officers, up to the rank of inspector, were not on duty; they had all been suspended. The superintendent of police (SP) was not present, the deputy superintendent of police (DSP) was not present, the range deputy inspector general (DIG) was perhaps on leave, and the zonal inspector general (IG) Bhagalpur was also not to be seen. Only about 25 armed men and a few press reporters were huddled together in a corner, fear writ large on their faces. When I checked on the policemen present there, they told me that they hadn’t even had a meal for the entire day because the people of Kahalgaon had instructed all the hotels to not serve any food to any policeman. I asked the journalists, and they said, ‘We dare not move out of the police station for fear of being thrashed by the locals.’ I enquired if there was any way of having a dialogue with the local populace, but I was told that the gap between the police and the people had become so wide that a dialogue at this stage seemed next to impossible.

I sat down in the police station, not understanding what to do next. I was sure that if I did not establish communication fast enough, the situation might escalate within a few hours. If that happened, and the people attacked the police station out of vengeance, I would be left with no option but to order firing. The use of lathi, which I loathed throughout my policing career, would become inevitable.

I do not know what prompted me, but almost impulsively, I came out of the police station with folded hands and started walking towards a house with an open window, right across the road. I could see a person peeping out of the window. I went up to him and said, ‘My name is Abhayanand, and I have come from Patna to talk to the people of Kahalgaon.’ He did not say a word and closed the window. Within about half a minute, I saw him coming out of the house. He came up to me and said, ‘Come along with me.’

The two of us started walking on the roads and went to one house after another. In the next five minutes, there was a group of about 25 people accompanying us. I was leading this group on the roads of the Kahalgaon market, where about seven armed policemen had been held captive for a ransom. The crowd behind me had started to swell. On the way, I could see four-five police jeeps that had been overturned and burned, and there I was, a man from the same police department, leading a crowd of angry local people.

I reached Ganguly maidan, next to the Kahalgaon railway station. It had become dark by then. All I could see was a sea of people that had already gathered there from before. A local leader was standing on a slightly raised platform that looked like a makeshift stage and was addressing them. I went up to him, introduced myself and expressed my desire to move around the town and talk to the people. I received an abrasive reply, ‘No need. If you want to talk to the people, come to the stadium, and we will have a meeting there.’

I accepted that proposal instantly. I reached the stadium and stood in front of around 10,000 angry people, all by myself. Somebody got a battery and a microphone was arranged. The people started shouting at the police officers, and their demand was to hang the district magistrate (DM) and the SP of Bhagalpur. I was at my wit’s end about what I could do in that situation. I knew that I did not have any police support and I was facing an extremely violent crowd. I quickly made up my mind on how I wanted to handle this.

(Excerpted from ‘Unbounded: My Experiments with Law, Physics, Policing and Super 30’ with permission from Rupa Publications)