The news about the arrest of some senior Indian Police Service officers of the Maharastra cadre for their involvement in the Telgi scam, though tragic and depressing, does not come as a major surprise. This only confirms what has been distinctly noticeable over the last few years: the trend towards increasing criminalisation of the police force in this country.

The Padmanabhaiah Committee on Police Reforms in its report ( August 2000) admitted that the criminalisation of the police force was increasing and considered the existence of linkages between the policemen and the organised criminal gangs as the most pernicious threat to national security. Some evidence of this is seen in the Teligi case. This case also provides ample evidence of what Director, Central Bureau of Investigation had reported to the Vohra Committee on Corruption a few years ago: “ All over India, crime syndicates have become a law unto themselves.. ..….The nexus between the criminal gangs, police, bureaucracy and politicians has come out clearly in various parts of the country.” The Vohra Committee report mentioned that the nexus was “ virtually running a parallel government, pushing the state apparatus into irrelevance”. Telgi definitely succeeded in doing this by making the currency and postal departments of the government irrelevant to some extent. Till a few years ago, deviance was associated with only the lower ranks in the police. The general perception in the police as well as the public was that the senior ranks were by far above reproach. This is no longer true. To take examples from a small state like Haryana, the record of past few years shows an officer of the rank of Director General of Police getting caught red handed while accepting a bribe and another being accused of involvement in a custody death. A third one was accused of molesting a teen-aged girl who later committed suicide. An officer of the rank of Inspector General was arrested on a charge of getting a woman journalist murdered and another one was arrested for running a smuggling operation. Two officers of the rank of SP were sentenced to imprisonment for committing perjury by filing false affidavits. There is no use in multiplying such instances, which have come to notice in other states too. The process of criminalisation of politics that has occurred in this country so rapidly and on such a large scale has already shaken public faith in politics and politicians. The loss of public faith gets accentuated when the process of criminalisation engulfs the law enforcement officers too.