‘Any aggrieved person is the police’s client’ ……Prafulla Marpakwar and Nina Martyris I TNN
Mumbai: Tall, rake-thin and soft-spoken, Mumbai’s new commissioner of police has a reputation for gloving steel in satin. On the face of it, Hassan Gafoor is polite to a fault, quick with praise, ready to concede a point and modest about his accomplishments as a police officer. But this is the same officer who was posted in the most sensitive areas of the city during the Mumbai riots on 1992-’93 and faced flak from the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna. He has also begun his stint by walking his simplicity talk—he has rejected the security cover given to CPs and travels without even the red beacon flashing.
The Hyderabad-born Mumbai-bred son of a bureaucrat, Gafoor says that he will spend the first three months studying the nuts and bolts of the situation in the force before making any radical changes. The priorities of the police, he says, will be to tackle terrorism, maintain law and order, initiate measures for the protection of senior citizens, women and children and crack down on corruption and groupism within the police force. Above all, he wants to create an atmosphere of respect for the law.
In an exclusive interview to TOI, Gafoor made it clear that tackling terrorism is his top priority. Intelligence reports, he says, were key in the fight against terror, and for this the police would need not just the agencies but the active support of citizens. “The police will act (on tip-offs of suspicious activity) but not harass,’’ he says. “Just because a neighbour has guests staying over doesn’t mean the police will land up and harass them.’’
An automobile engineer from VJTI, Gafoor is an IPS officer of the 1974 batch. His 30-year career has seen him tackle many different challenges—from traffic (“where I gave my blood for seven years’’) to the riots and bomb blasts to the Datta Samant mill strike in 1982. As DCP Headquarters he was in charge of all departments. No matter how different each situation, the common aim in every case was to maintain law and order, and Gafoor underlines this point. “What is law and order? It is order on the street. During the Emergency there was respect for the law. People knew that if they did something wrong they would end up behind bars. Baba, kay kela, was the feeling,’’ he says, breaking into Marathi as he frequently does. “Whether it is honking, obstruction by hawkers and other seemingly petty things, they affect daily life and need to be looked into.’’
The last ten days have been expectedly hectic—200 calls on his mobile a day and stacks of files with pink slips mark Urgent on his massive desk. His yoga-swimming-evening walk regimen have taken a beating. In a break with protocol, Gafoor says he has encouraged his senior inspectors to send him text messages of major events in their area, rather than wait for the information to be bumped up to him through the several layers of khaki hierarchy. It is very important, he says, to educate the force into thinking of itself as a “service industry’’. “We are not selling a product but we are rendering a service,’’ he says, speaking as much with his fingers. “Any aggrieved person is our client and his or her grievance should be attended to within the framework of the law.’’
Gafoor takes charge at a time when the Mumbai police has not exactly covered itself in glory. Public trust in the force has been pummelled not merely by the offhand response to the New Year’s Eve groping incident but to the blind eye turned by the police during the recent violence to north Indians by Raj Thackeray’s men. Within the house too, all is not well. There are also a worrying number of suspensions, 300 in a force of 40,000. “It is a matter of shame that the figure is so high,’’ says the CP.
Gafoor says he will make it mandatory for all deputy commissioners and additional commissioners to visit their police stations every day and that he will pay surprise visits and make calls on the various police helplines to check if they are being properly run. On a lighter note, when asked if he had any plans to go on these visits in a burqa in the manner of a 19th-century police commissioner Hartley Kennedy, Gafoor smiles and says, “No, not in disguise but certainly by surprise.’’