The Hindu : Protecting the leaders... from the people?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 16, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Protecting the leaders... from the people?

There is something slightly obscene about a state that is obsessed with securing the mighty when ordinary citizens remain exposed to increasing levels of insecurity in their everyday lives, writes Anjali Mody.

INDIA'S LEADERS, according to the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, are the most threatened in the world. And he should know. For, each week the intelligence services, which form part of his Ministry, assure him that but for good luck they would all be dead.

Yet, this unmatched danger does not keep them cowering in their fortified homes. They are constantly on the move. Travelling around the country and the world, transacting business of state in Kuala Lumpur or of their political parties in Ahmedabad, inaugurating an ashram in Bangalore, taking a family holiday in Goa or dining out in Singapore with a mobile phone moghul. And from each of these outings they return home unscathed.

But apparently it is more than luck that helps them survive. For our leaders are also among the most protected, or perhaps the most visibly protected, in the world.

Armies of security men, in grey or khaki or black, from the SPG, the NSG, the CISF, the ITBP, the state police forces, pretty much any security force available, costing hundreds of crores of rupees a year, are dedicated to ensuring that our VIPs and VVIPs live.

These are the shove and shoot brigade who, with automatic weapons, sirens and flashing red lights, are part of a world where political worth is measured by the size of the proximate security a person is entitled to. The more impenetrable the layers between the elected representative and the electors, the greater is the power he wields.

In more innocent times there were no gun-toting policemen, no cordon sanitaire, separating the Prime Minister and the people, the MP, the MLA and the masses. But as the afterglow of Independence faded and the democratic deficit grew so did the reasons for the personal security of politicians. Indira Gandhi dealt with the first serious physical assault on the person of a Prime Minister, ending up with a broken nose in Bhubaneshwar in 1967, when irate people at an election meeting hurled stones at her.

Even this was seen simply as part of the rough and tumble of democratic politics, the flip side of being garlanded by enthusiastic supporters.

It was only many years later, with the rise of militancy in Punjab, when stones and country-made shotguns were replaced with lethal weapons such as the AK-47 assault rifle that the need for the head of government to be protected by something more than the local police was felt. And it was only after Indira Gandhi was killed, by her own security guards, that the decision was taken to create a dedicated cadre of security personnel (SPG) to protect the Prime Minister.

The blanket extension of SPG cover to all former Prime Ministers and their families happened after Rajiv Gandhi (who had been attacked twice, in Sri Lanka and in New Delhi, while he was Prime Minister) was killed. This decision, made amidst accusations that had Rajiv Gandhi been better protected he may have lived, was typical of the illogical expansion of the personal security regime created by the state.

For, Rajiv Gandhi's assassins did not want just any former Prime Minister. They, in fact, did not even want a serving Prime Minister. The dry run they conducted was on V. P. Singh, Prime Minister at the time and a man protected by the SPG. And instead of holding the security regime and the intelligence babus accountable for what was an enormous lapse on their part, the issue became a political stick to beat the Government with and a justification for bleeding the exchequer.

The annual cost of securing the increasing number of former Prime Ministers and their families, for the stipulated 10 years after they leave office, is about Rs. 85 crores. The cost of securing dozens of other so-called VIPs is around the same amount.

In other democracies, except in thoroughly exceptional circumstances, former Prime Ministers become ordinary citizens the moment they cease to hold public office.

The children of serving Prime Ministers are private individuals unless they hold public office themselves. But in our very unique democracy, the perks of being in power include special privileges for the whole family. And although the Government claims to want to change the security regime, this is simply not a priority. After all what would our political leaders and their children do if they had to deal with the real world, as we do.

Not to put too fine a point on it, there is something slightly obscene about a state that is obsessed with securing the mighty when ordinary citizens remain exposed to increasing levels of insecurity in their everyday lives. The state even extends its already stretched resources to protect those who should be in jail from the consequences of their criminal actions.

High on the list are the big names in the 1984 massacre of Sikhs. While the courts denied justice to the victims of the massacres through the expediency of delays, the state has provided commandos from the specialist anti-terror squad, the National Security Guard, to protect Congress `leaders' Sajjan Kumar and H. K. L. Bhagat. Leaders of the VHP, an organisation involved in countless acts of violence and bloodshed, also enjoy the protection of the state.

They travel around the country carrying their messages of hate, challenging the basis of Indian democracy, and threatening mayhem, from under the protective shadow of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police commandos.

But, ordinary men and women are gunned down by police and warlords, whom the police protect, on the streets of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

In Jammu and Kashmir, entire villages are wiped out by the terrorists whom our politicians are protected from or in revenge attacks by the security forces supposed to protect them. In New Delhi, life is thrown out of gear every day because of the movement of VIPs, but the state cannot even ensure that ambulances and fire engines get the right of way guaranteed to them by the law.

The iron-man designate of India, and the man in charge of our internal security, L. K. Advani, has recently found himself pondering the relative merits of a hard state versus a soft one. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin's use of poison gas against his own people to get a handful of terrorists, or George W. Bush's approval to blow up a plane full of civilians to prevent another WTC are seen as signs of a hard state.

But while the Home Minister and his mandarins contemplate sacrificing ordinary citizens for the so-called greater good, they might want to chew on the fact that they already do. India is not a soft state because it won't blow up a hijacked plane, but because it protects the powerful and treads heavily on the rest.

The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister zip through life on emptied streets at over a hundred miles an hour. But everyday someone dies because the ambulance carrying them stays stuck in traffic despite wailing out its distress siren.

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