The Turkish lure

Remodelling Punjab police force

The PML-N leadership’s obsession with everything not Pakistani, except for perhaps Pakistani cuisine, seems to grow by the day. It seems the Sharifs either do not trust the indigenous solutions or find them incompetent. Either case makes their preference of the foreign solution over a local one prone to criticism, and rightly so.

The newest gem puts everything else to shame: it has been decided in a high-level meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, that our very own Punjab police force will be re-organised on the pattern of Turkish police force. While the step has its merits and will certainly find its takers, not because it could improve our police system but because our police’s performance puts them right at the last rung of the ladder and that people are fed up of them. The problem of making our police more disciplined and efficient is not that of how it is organised, it is a problem of how it is managed and how lacunas in law governing police operations, management, postings and transfers have been left, intentionally, to help political and bureaucratic forces intervene and influence, often to their own agendas. Policing is more of a public service but where as many as 760 police officials were appointed at security duty of the Sharif family only three months ago, and at a time when they didn’t even have a government at the Centre, how can one expect that the process to re-invent police in Punjab will be carried out for the betterment of the public? It seems the irony that all this is being done in the name of good governance hasn’t yet dawned on them.

Comparison of our police force with any professional police force is ludicrous. Take Turkey for example: it has a budget of over $7.5bn per year for a police force of 200,000 personnel whereas Punjab police gets a meagre $0.75bn for 177,000 personnel. Theirs is used to police a total of 60 million people while ours has to police around 100 million people in Punjab. Their well-established democratic traditions allowed them to arrest 40 army generals for plotting a coup, a feat none of our civil law enforcement agencies can even contemplate. Thiers is a police force trained mainly to manage a peaceful nation, ours would have to be trained to handle terrorist, extremist, sectarian, ethnic and hate-spewing religious outfits, hardened criminals and of course the white collar crime that is so rampant here yet goes mainly undetected by our police.

Yes, our police force needs to improve but no foreign solution can offer us what we need. We need indigenous solutions that resonate well with the province’s economic situation, end the notorious thana culture, stop political and bureaucratic influence on police and provide them modern technology if we want them to compete with any reasonably advance professional police force.