The Indian Express | 1 week ago | 18-03-2023 | 01:45 pm
An IPS officer from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, declared a “misfit” from the get go, finds himself fighting the government all the way to the Supreme Court to retain his place in the service. The odds are stacked against him, but he wins, and is then assigned to the Tamil Nadu cadre, where he is posted in a deceptively slow paced southern district, first as an Assistant Superintendent of Police and later as the Superintendent.Tuticorin by V Sudarshan is about Anoop Jaiswal’s journey of discovery through 1980s Tamil Nadu as he comes to grips with violence and the many forms it can take in the sleepy villages of one of the most crime-prone districts in the state, surprising both his junior and senior colleagues with his counter-intuitive understanding of crime and punishment.Sudarshan, an expert story-teller whose has authored two other works of non-fiction, including The Anatomy of an Abduction: How the Iraq Hostages Were Freed (2008, Penguin), weaves Jaiswal’s story skilfully with tales of the everyday situations that confront the police officer in his role as the most senior police officer in his jurisdiction. Sudarshan is an able narrator, but the voice is Jaiswal’s. The myriad characters that people the book come to life through Jaiswal’s recollections and Sudarshan’s reconstruction, keeping the narrative smooth and easy.Among the cast of characters are a foul-mouthed “HO” , Habitual Offender in police jargon, who Jaiswal turns into a loyal informer, discovering a chilling back story years later from his wife after he had died, and a “KD” (Known Desperado), who was praying at a church during the Eucharist Mass, the Thursday before Easter when he was spotted, and asked to be allowed to sit through the mass before his arrest. Then there is a woman who helps in the capture of a most-wanted gangster, when every man in the area was running scared despite a reward of Rs 25,000 for information about him, and a flower-seller whose drunkard husband had stolen all her cash and who threatened to take up prostitution if the police would not loan her some money.One of the stories in the book is about how Jaiswal cracked down on the local moonshine, called “Tincture Ginger Berry”. It was sold at chemists’ and men lined up all day long in orderly queues outside these shops. As each person reached the counter, he would slip over the money wordlessly to the salesman, move on to a corner where a shot of the brown coloured “inji” was poured into a glass for him. He would gulp it down and make way for the next one in line. The 86 per cent alcohol would hit the customer before he took the few steps out of the shop, grogging him out. No one bought a bottle because just a shot was enough to do the trick.Jaiswal’s sting operation sounds almost like a comedy show, but it led to a farmhouse where the alcohol was being brewed in underground tanks, to be bottled and transported out. The raiding party found a lakh bottles. When the politically well-connected kingpin was arrested, his son called the inspector in the raiding party “nanrikatta naye” (thankless dog). The police wanted to arrest the boy too, but Jaiswal agrees, at the father’s request, to leave him out of the chargesheet. Later, the kingpin invites Jaiswal to the son’s wedding, and despite telling him he would not attend, Jaiswal goes for it. Afterwards, he learns about the clamour against him in Madras, where some politicians were ready to pay Rs 20 lakh to have him transferred out, but then chief minister MG Ramachandran goes by the DGP’s opinion that Jaiswal was doing a good job and should stay on.The longest chapter is about the massacre at Punnakayal, a gory episode of caste violence that erupts in Tamil Nadu every once in a while. In this village, higher caste fishermen had burnt homes of Dalits, who retaliated by ambushing the jubilant fishermen as they returned home, killing several of them. Jaiswal decides to suppress the news for a while in order to deploy adequate forces to prevent the clash from engulfing all of coastal Tamil Nadu, then goes to the church at the fishing village and in his less than fluent Tamil, before an assembly of restive villagers, takes the blame for the killings on himself. The village calms down, buries it dead, and the violence ends.Through the book, Jaiswal comes across as a humane cop, never quick to arrive at black-and-white conclusions about the alleged criminals that he comes face to face with on a daily basis. In one incident in which a woman murdered her husband to protect their daughter from him, Jaiswal argues with his deputy that no case was made out against the woman as she had acted in self-defence. When the DSP is not convinced, Jaiswal gives the example of a policeman firing at a mob that attacks a police station. “Once you accept self-defence, where is the prosecution?” He asks for a Section 302 case to be registered, and for the FIR to state that as per the sequence of events no murder was discovered, only preventive action by a mother to save her daughter’s life. His superior officer gave him a cautious go-ahead. “Within a week, the case was closed. No crime had been committed”.When Jaiswal recommends a family pension for the 87-year-old homeless widow of a policeman who had died pre-Independence on the basis of a penny postcard from her husband that the woman had preserved, the government dismisses his letter with contempt, asking how the SP could make such a recommendation. He writes back to the official that “no crook could have forged such a document in 1923 to cheat the government in 1988”, and that it was not the woman who came to him with it but something that was accidentally discovered by the area inspector.Days later, the DGP would call Jaiswal to congratulate him, and inform him that MLAs thumped their desks in the Assembly in his name. The government had sanctioned the pension, and taken the credit, and Opposition legislators joined in the appreciation of the police officer that had made it happen. Later, the DIG would call him and ask him to organise a public function to hand over the pension arrears cheque to the woman. When Jaiswal tells him he just sent over the cheque to the woman, the DIG says: “Oh Jaiswal, what have you done? How can you be so thoughtless? This was such a good opportunity for some good publicity for the police.”In this highly readable book, Sudarshan gives readers a good flavour of the Tamil Nadu badlands. Tuticorin gives the reader a glimpse into the complexities of policing in rural India. In his own way, Jaiswal proved that he was no ‘misfit’. The 1980 batch officer retired as a director-general of police, and since then, teaches students in Tamil Nadu science — his first love — for free.
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