New Delhi: In an unusual move, the Gujarat State Police Accountability Complaints Authority (SPCA) had found only one among 839 complaints it had received during 2022 within its jurisdiction, Right to Information (RTI) replies have shown.
A recent report by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), which collated RTI replies from various SPCAs, has highlighted that such an action by the Gujarat SPCA was “surprising, given that its mandate includes broad terms like ‘misuse of power’ or ‘dereliction of duty’ without specifying actions or complaints to be covered by it.”
“Yet, only a small portion of complaints are being accepted for inquiry,” said the report titled ‘Police Complaints Authorities in India – Status Gaps Challenges’. It underlined that the SPCA’s action indicates “a restrictive approach” towards fulfilling its mandate as directed by the Supreme Court.
In 2006, the apex court, in order to inject accountability into police forces, had asked all state governments to set up police complaints authorities, thus fulfilling a longstanding recommendation for police reform. The court’s directive had laid out broad standards for the composition, mandate and powers of such authorities, leading as many as 17 states to have passed new police Acts and/or amendments to the existing ones to implement these directives.
While Gujarat enacted the Bombay Police (Gujarat) Amendment Act, 2007, it set up a state police complaints authority only in July 2013. The report underlines that in a significant departure from the Supreme Court’s order, the amended Act allowed the state government “complete control over the selection and appointment process” of the SPCA by ensuring that two of its three members “are serving ex-officio”; “no set procedure for the selection of the chairperson”; and that there is no transparent process to nominate the third member, a person of eminence.
In complete violation of the Supreme Court order, the Gujarat SPCA is also led by a retired Indian Administrative Service officer (Balwant Singh). The 2006 directive had explicitly stated that it should be headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court/high court to be chosen by the state government from a panel of names proposed by the Chief Justice of the high court.
“The composition of the district authorities is also in complete violation of the court’s directive because the district superintendent of police, the additional district magistrate, two members of the Gujarat legislative assembly elected from the concerned district and the deputy superintendent of police make up the membership of the district level authority,” the report pointed out.
The CHRI report deduced from the RTI replies of Gujarat SPCA that even the mandate of the authority “is also unclear”. This is also because the amended Act “failed to define” what “serious misconduct, dereliction of duty, misuse of powers” are, leaving the SPCA in a grey area as to which complaints to consider it to be within its jurisdiction.
While in 2022, only one out of 839 complaints it had received was seen by SPCA as within its jurisdiction, data of the last nine years provided by the authority to CHRI has held up that the percentage of complaints that it considered to be within its purview has reduced drastically. “From 55% in 2014 to less than 1% in 2022.”
“In other words, the (Gujarat) SPCA has increasingly shunted complaints out of its jurisdiction to the police department for inquiry instead of looking into the matters itself.”
What was significant was also that no information was provided about the types of complaints SPCA had received or action recommended by the authority in cases which it inquired.
The report recommended amending the state police Act in order to re-establish the state and district complaints authorities and allocate it sufficient funds and human resources and also expand its mandate to be able to follow the Supreme Court mandate.
This article was first published by The Wire.
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