From suicides, social fault lines, and institutional distrust to restoring order, confidence, and public faith in the khaki uniform—how the Haryana DGP O.P. Singh’s brief tenure was defined less by time and more by temperament.
A late-night message—“All the best”—is an odd way to inherit a storm. It arrived not like a summons, but like a shrug: a polite, almost casual send-off into a job no one wanted to describe in full. By the time dawn had burnt the mist off, the meaning was clear. A Director General of Police was out, a new one was in, and the transfer of command had been triggered not by routine rotation, but by a suicide note that named the system itself as culprit.
An Inspector General had taken his own life, accusing the hierarchy of harassment. For a state that lives close to the skin of caste and pride, it felt less like an individual tragedy and more like an institutional confession. The government staggered onto the back foot; the police, usually the state’s spine, suddenly moved like a body without one. Barracks and briefing rooms filled with anger, denial, whispered I‑told‑you‑so’s. The force that claimed a monopoly over violence now found itself unable to make sense of a violence turned inward.
The new chief walked into this atmosphere not with a new doctrine, but with a simple bureaucratic ritual: signing a charge report. Even that could not be completed without the script darkening. Another suicide—this time a police officer tied by rumour and speculation to the earlier case—turned a single catastrophe into a pattern. Two deaths, one hierarchy, and a warren of insinuations in between. In a culture addicted to narrative, the story wrote itself long before the facts could.
It did not help that India has, in recent years, perfected a cottage industry around outrage. Rabble-rousers sniffed opportunity in the air. The deaths were swiftly draped in caste flags, paraded as proof of persecution, then folded into the familiar template of historical grievance. Career agitators arrived with ready-made slogans. Television tickers discovered a new alliterative crisis. Central agencies, schooled by past flare-ups, began making quiet enquiries about whether paramilitary forces might be needed. When a state loses faith in its police, the republic reaches instinctively for more uniforms.
In such moments, the temptation in uniform is to shout louder than one’s critics. Instead, the new DGP did something counterintuitive: he ordered silence. “Not everyone will speak on everything,” he told his officers. The line sounds unremarkable on paper; in practice, it was a coup against institutional panic. Communication, so often treated as a right of rank, was recast as a responsibility of function. The officer in charge of law and order would speak to the ground; the one supervising administration would coordinate with New Delhi. The rest would work.
The next morning, he went to a memorial.
The Madhuban Police Memorial is, like many such structures in India, both over-designed and undervisited. Granite and gunmetal, wreaths and inscriptions—an architecture built to house memory in a country that too quickly forgets. Standing there, laying a wreath, the new chief performed a kind of civic jujitsu. He took an institution associated, in that week, with accusations and despair, and tied it back to sacrifice and continuity. Grief was not denied, but reframed: regrettable, sobering, and yet incapable of suspending the obligation to fight crime. In an age of digital theatrics, this was analog symbolism at its most deliberate.
Funerals followed. At one, for an assistant sub-inspector, the DGP found himself not as commander but as spectator to the raw arithmetic of loss: the widow’s uncomprehending stare, the children’s half-formed questions. The uniform, for all its authority, has no answer key for such moments. What it does have is posture. He stood, he listened, he did not promise what he could not deliver. No “justice will be done” thunder, only a quiet insistence on process—post-mortem, inquiry, cremation. Law, even when the law is the accused.
Then, a twist worthy of a lesser novelist: a video suicide note that contradicted the earlier written one. A dead man’s last words were now two texts, out of sync with each other, each susceptible to selective quotation. Families suffered through the forensic parsing of grief; political entrepreneurs clipped and circulated whichever version suited their script. Tragedy became content. The dead were not allowed to rest; they were monetised in attention.
Against this, the DGP chose ink.
He wrote open letters. The first was to citizens: a promise of fairness, a commitment that the force would not become anyone’s private militia, nor anyone’s punching bag; that public safety, not prestige or patronage, was the product the police would offer. The subsequent ones were to his own people: a reminder that they were not feudal lords in khaki, but producers of a public good. In these letters, a subtle inversion occurred. Instead of asking people to trust the police, he made the police accountable to what people had long wanted them to be.
Words, though, cannot live in emptiness. He used the Police Commemoration Parade—normally a ceremonial obligation—as a live classroom. Facing rows of men and women in uniform, he argued that the police had only one caste: the colour of their clothing. In a state that has seen caste turn tractors into tanks and highways into borders, the assertion was less moral truism than strategic stake in the ground. Later, in the post-event press conference, he repeated the point for cameras that prefer conflict. The soundbite, surprisingly, held.
He travelled. In Rohtak, a district that knows agitation as seasonal sport, he presented a police that would not cave to “ransom-seekers” and extortionists of all kinds—those who held the state hostage in the name of community, compensation, or ideology and citizens in threat of violence. In Gurugram—Gurgaon to those who remember its older, more agrarian self—he spoke a different language. Here, he said, policing had to recognize the city’s role as a magnet for talent and capital, a node in global networks, not merely a dot on a domestic map. One size of khaki would not fit all.
Internally, he flattened the conversation. In place of only top-down memos and stiff circulars, he opened horizontal channels: WhatsApp groups, short messages, three-part prompts—what to do, how to do it, why it mattered. This was not an embrace of digital faddishness, but an acknowledgment that a force as large and layered as a state police cannot be run solely on the fumes of fear and hierarchy. To be effective, authority must also be intelligible.
He ordered district police to ensure that state security provided to citizens were need-based and not objects of show-off.
Inside police buildings, he began rearranging the furniture—literally. Heavy colonial-era desks that turned offices into fortresses were replaced or moved, chairs and layouts adjusted to make rooms less forbidding, more hospitable. The transformation was modest in budget but radical in signal: this was not a darbar, it was a workplace; not a durbar hall, but a service counter. The architecture of intimidation was asked to make room for the ergonomics of conversation.
The logic extended to how complainants were received. Conference halls, once reserved for senior briefings and PowerPoint presentations, were turned into waiting rooms for citizens who had come to tell the state that something had gone wrong in their lives. Canteens were opened to them. Instead of being pushed back down the hierarchy—told to go to the thana, then the circle, then the district—they were connected directly to commissioners and superintendents through video conference. The instruction was simple: deal with the matter at your level, while the complainant watches you own the responsibility.
Throughout, he returned to a narrative triad: why people expected something better from the police, what exactly that “better” looked like, and how his force was supposed to deliver it. His open letters to the ranks spelled this out without romance. They were not motivational posters; they were operating manuals in prose. And when opinion-makers or critics challenged him in public, he did not retreat into vagueness. He spoke numbers. He countered sentiment with data—on crime, on arrests, on response times. Facts became his most understated form of argument.
Then, operations.
Two campaigns—one against violent criminals and absconders, another to dominate known crime hotspots—gave the tenure a grammar of action. Names were given to initiatives, numbers to results, faces to previously faceless gangs. Crime, which had briefly receded behind the drama of institutional meltdown, returned to where it belonged: in FIRs, court dates, and custodial remand. A grand passing-out parade of thousands of constables, overseen by the Union Home Minister, added spectacle to substance—a reminder that recruitment and training, too, are forms of public reassurance.
If the memorial was analog, the new policing language was emphatically digital. Public safety videos and advisories went out on social media. They had none of the usual government stiffness; they were short, pointed, sometimes even wry. They travelled. Crores watched, liked, shared. Approval ratings, that dubious currency of online life, soared. Somewhere between a reel and a regulation, the police discovered a tone people did not immediately recoil from.
Soon, another digital campaign emerged—not from headquarters, but from the amorphous “people”: extend his tenure. The DGP, suddenly, had become a character in a public serial. This, too, he met with studied calm. No lobbying in Delhi, no dramatic interviews about being “ready to serve”. He kept working. The state, as always, moved on its own timeline.
On 30 December, he convened a strategy session in Madhuban—not to memorialise the year, but to dissect it. What had 2025 taught about crime? How could 2026 be less reactive, more anticipatory? In policing, prevention rarely earns headlines; it is, by definition, the story of things that did not happen. Still, the attempt to learn, to iterate, was made.
The next day, 31 December, he attended his own farewell parade. The imagery was almost too neat: a year ending, a tenure closing, a man in uniform saluting and being saluted under a winter sun. He signed the charge relinquishment report with the same pen that had signed the assumption one not so long ago. Between those two gestures sat suicides and funerals, letters and press conferences, operations and parades, silence and noise.
In a country that often mistakes longevity for legacy, his brief command is an argument for something else: that sometimes the most durable reform is born not of endless tenure, but of concentrated clarity. For a season, at least, khaki remembered what it could be. Whether the institution holds that memory is, as always in India, a question not of one man’s will, but of a republic’s attention span.
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