The air is once again full of police reform ideas and once again the end result is likely to cause disappointment. The reason for the recurrent failure of police reform initiatives is the tendency to expect good policing from bad rulers. Even now there is no indication that police reform is being sought in a framework of good governance.

Since independence nearly 20 commissions and inquiry committees have tried to grapple with the task of ending police oppression and corruption and raising its efficiency in managing crime and guaranteeing the people peace and security. These commissions were headed mostly by experienced police officers though a few were chaired by military officers and civil servants, too.

In most cases, the reports of these commissions were ignored. If some recommendations from their reports were accepted they were approached much too casually to create a significant impact.

The main reason for the failure of these reform proposals was that while the conduct and behaviour of the police were sought to be changed for the better no parallel attempt was made to transform the colonial state into a democratic one. Of efforts made in the wider context of systemic changes two deserve special notice -- the Police Act of 1861 and the Police Order 2002.

The Police Act of 1861 came barely four years after the uprising of 1857 when the Indian colony came to be administered directly by the British Crown. The colonial authority needed a police force that could not only suppress the criminals but which could also secure the vast population’s submission in political, social, and cultural spheres. But the lessons of 1857 also made it necessary to give the tyranny of alien rule a benign face.

Thus, although the police force was modelled after the Irish constabulary, whose main task was to further the colonial designs against the Irish people, the authors of the Police Act also benefited from the debates that had gone into the drafting of the Penal Code of 1860, the Evidence Act of 1872, and the local council schemes of the 1880s. Thus, while fashioning a strong tool of coercion an attempt was made to offer the subjects some protection against abuse of power and corruption.

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Further, the police was put under the supervision of the District Magistrate, the little viceroy and lynchpin of the British-Indian administration -- collector of revenue, head of executive magistrates in the district and supervisor of police and district branches of all other administrative departments. He could use his wide powers to subdue the people and he was also able to provide relief from administration’s excesses.

For these reasons, the Act of 1861 remained in favour with the Pakistani rulers, who made little attempt to disown their colonial ancestry, till the beginning of the 21^st century. Two provinces, Sindh and Balochistan, are still so enamoured of it that they have revived it after disposing of Pervez Musharraf’s law of 2002.

The Police Order 2002, regardless of its merits and demerits, was also conceived as part of a new scheme of governance. The main plank of General Tanvir Hussain Naqvi’s scheme, as adapted by Omar Asghar Khan and Gen. Musharraf was devolution of the authority vested in divisional and district officers to local government leaders.

The offices of Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners/District Magistrates were abolished. At the same time, the police officers’ powers were increased (by transferring quite a few of the District Magistrate’s powers to district police officers), the rank of the provincial police chief was raised (by making him secretary to the provincial government) and his security of tenure was guaranteed. However, the police force was brought under public oversight at all levels, from the district to the national.

Whether the proposed changes were good or bad is not the issue at the moment. The point being made here is that the authors of the reform ignored two ugly realities.

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First, they underestimated the strength of the police culture. They were dealing with a police that had not been allowed to shed its colonial character. The Pakistani rulers had been using the police exactly the way the colonial power had done, indeed somewhat more crudely and with less respect for the letter of the law. The police found it impossible to grow out of its colonial mindset.

Secondly, growing out of colonial mindset was even harder for the political authority. By 2002 the rulers’ colonial mindset had been consolidated with the addition of three elements with similar properties -- the feudals’ instinct for possessiveness, the clerics’ obsession with tradition, and the authoritarian regimes’ hunger for absolute power. Thus the political elite was equally averse to yielding power to local government institutions and giving up use of police for factional and individual gain.

As a result, the Musharraf-Naqvi-Omar scheme was sabotaged at the first opportunity: the local government laws were thrown out of the window, the Commissioner-Deputy Commissioner model of the Viceregal system was resurrected, and the Police Order was robbed of its healthier features through a series of amendments without ever being debated in the parliament.

Two provinces have discarded it, one has retained it subject to changes, and one has replaced it with a 2016 law that is believed to be an improvement on the earlier model, a claim yet to be proved in practice. The Police Order 2002 failed to achieve the desired result because it was out of sync with the ruling elite’s interests and more pressing material needs.

The Arabic saying نّاسُ علیٰ دینِ ملوکہم (people adopt the ways of their rulers) applies to the state-police equation, too. Only the other day, Human Rights Watch observed in its exhaustive report on the police’s working that colonial era police laws enable local politicians to frequently interfere in police operations, sometimes directing police officials to drop investigations against suspects with political connections, including known criminals, or to harass or file false charges against political opponents. And the whole world is familiar with the unwritten law that if a policeman abuses his authority at the bidding of a wadera or a legislator (to say nothing of ministerial dictats), he will soon learn to do so for himself.

That the police takes the cue from the government’s choices and presumptions is no secret. If the police in one part of Pakistan is more efficient in carrying out extra-legal killings than elsewhere that is only one indication of this rule.

The state treats the people as subjects and not as citizens. It does not consult them while making laws, or drawing up policies. It does not allow the civil society space to contribute to efficient and pro-people management of public affairs. And whenever it is in trouble as a result of its own follies it encroaches on the people’s rights as the first option and not as a last resort. The police treats the citizens in the same manner and serves them by torturing them supposedly in their own interest.

The state does not treat women equal to men, non-Muslims as equal to Muslims, and the poor equal to the rich, and the police does the same.

The government does not follow the Constitution and the laws, the police does not accept its code of conduct or the rules of superintendence.

Under the colonial system, the government took good care of the officers (many of whom originally came from the United Kingdom) and left the force to live off the people. That this was written in at least the police code of Bahawalpur state was recently disclosed by Mr Tariq Khosa, whose knowledge of policing is matched only by his integrity and felicity of expression.

Where the police does not have to live off the people (e.g. the Motorway Police) or where an honest police officer manages to survive it generally enjoys credit as well as public respect, but by and large the politicians and policemen enjoy excelling in pillage and plunder and it is difficult to say who is more avaricious of the two.

This does not mean that nothing should be done to improve policing till we start having fair elections, politicians in power learn to abide by laws and within their means, peasants are freed of the feudal yoke, workers start getting their due from employers, the religions activists withdraw from the political stage -- till we have good governance in the modern sense.

What this means is that state-building, national integration, social reconstruction, moral uplift and reform of services are not separate projects that can be taken up one after the other, they are like threads in the hands of a weaver who should know how to weave them into a fabric strong and attractive. Reform measures must run concurrently and not consecutively.

Since, at the moment, there is no sign of a plan to raise governance to a decent level, not much will be gained by cosmetic charges in the police, such as changing the policemen’s uniform or their designations. In fact, a model police force could cause great anxiety to the ruling elite and quite a few might be in danger of losing their jobs and profits. Why would they want the kind of police the people need?