New Delhi, May 10: The Centre has asked the states and Union territories to post more Muslim policemen in areas with large minority populations so the force acts more impartially, especially in tense and violent situations.
The directive is part of a larger plan to have more Muslims in the administrative machinery at large, and to “sensitise” all government cadres to communal issues right from the training stage, officials said.
The states have been asked by the department of personnel and training to update it every three months on the progress made in recruiting Muslims in their police forces, where the community is poorly represented.
A minority ministry official said there was a view within the government that the low numbers of Muslims in the country’s police forces had led to an “institutional communalism” of sorts.
“The government feels a more representative force is necessary to ensure that the police act beyond religious lines,” he said.
Andhra Pradesh is India’s only state where the proportion of Muslims in the police (15 per cent) is higher than that in the population (10 per cent). In Jammu and Kashmir, Muslims make up 57 per cent of the police and over 70 per cent of the population.
Only 9 per cent of police personnel in Bengal are Muslims although the community accounts for 26 per cent of the state’s people. Muslim representation is among the lowest in the Delhi, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu police.
Activist-scholar Asghar Ali Engineer and others have been arguing that having more Muslims in the police would lead to better management of communal violence and post-riot situations.
But the counter-argument has been that having more Muslim policemen or policewomen does not necessarily lead to communal peace. Bengal and Kerala, for instance, do not have a very high minority presence in their police forces but have recorded the fewest incidents of communal violence in recent history.
The government, however, is determined to make the police forces more representative.
“It is sad but true that the proportion of minorities, especially Muslims, in government services is totally skewed against them,” the minority ministry official said. “We are planning measures to ensure better representation.” All central and state staff training institutes have been sent a training module, developed by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, to sensitise government officials to minority issues.
A similar module meant for sensitising civil servants, prepared by the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, has been incorporated in their training programme.
-Agencies