 There can be no doubt that we are at a moment of extreme stress in democracy. And this is not something that most people are likely to be disagreeing with today. But the different sets of people do have different reasons for thinking this. Some may think so because of the growing threat of terrorism and insurgency and disobedience to law and the churning itself. Some may think of democracy as being so much blatant violation of our civil liberties at the hands of the authorities. Other may think that democracy is under threat because of our crumbling institutions, both social and official, the institutions that hold up the pillars of democracy. Others may feel that we have never been more democratic than we are now. We have freedom, we are vocal, we are associated, we are connected. We are mobile as we have never been before. Women, Dalits, tribal folk and other traditionally discriminated against groups can have their say, they have their day. And the very phenomenon of our restlessness is a sign of the strength of our democracy. Our demands and our desires and our discontents also speak about our democratic credentials. Some would argue, of course, like the authoritarians do, that there is much too much democracy and it is this very licentiousness that is causing turmoil and must be curbed. Others would argue that in the face of so much inequality and asymmetry of power between the privileged and the deprived, democracy is yet a really distant dream. So it's up to you whether the glass is half full or half empty. I really don't know the answer, but I know that there is great contestation and a contestation for what? For both values and for power. And they come out of the contestation between the internal structure of society as it is lived and the constitutional values that we have. And the institutions of state that we see and particularly you see, we talked about the police. I could talk about the judiciary. I could talk about the bureaucracy, but the one that I know best is the police and the institutions of the state suffer from the same tendencies and the same tensions, one straining to retain power and privilege and the other one struggling to be true to the values of a liberal democracy. Even as it distresses me, this contestation should not surprise us. At Independence, we adopted a constitution that was radical, that set our minds and our face firmly towards modernity. At one stroke of the pen, the Constitution gave the Indian people several brand new basic ideas and concepts to live by. It said all people are equal before the law. That untouchability is abolished and outlawed. There will be special laws to ensure those who have been traditionally disadvantaged will have special treatment and nobody can challenge that. It created a system of governance which was completely different from the authoritarian governance that we find in our families. It created a different system where power was dispersed between legislature, judiciary and executive and human rights rule of law set the rules of the game rather than the traditional hierarchical system of status that we have and that which is the foundations of our social ideology and our social identities. And you find that these traditional norms have seeped into our institutions, particularly I could illustrate it as I said by looking at any of these these institutions of state, but I will look at the police. I won't rehearse what was wrong with the police or what is wrong with the police because you all know it and you've just heard Collins talk so passionately about it and I do agree with it all. Now what do we do about the solutions? Can we go for some poor Nakhranti? Will that change the police or will it make it more authoritarian? Can we go for radical change? You know in other jurisdictions where change has come to the police or reform has come to a corrupt and authoritarian police, it has come at certain moments of time. Social revolution is one. Constitutionalism is another. A country like Kenya coming to independence had made a big effort to change its police. It hasn't been that successful, but that is a moment. We missed every constitutional moment. We missed independence. We missed Punjab. We missed Gujarat. We missed the emergency. And we seem to continually miss moments that really require what Colin talked about, a holistic purge of the police. There is no appetite for it. There is no demand for it. And there is a huge resistance from within the police, within the bureaucracy, within the politicians. And why would it not be because their power flows from there? So what is the public to do about that? The public is between a rock and a hard place. It is also torn between that old culture and the new culture. They do not know the constitution. They do not know in village after village and town after town that you go to that they are equal, that they can actually take on the police. They simply do not know that. And if they did it, where would they go to for protection if they had a pushback? So that is the problem. So in the absence of that, in the absence, it has been our endeavor for many, many years to change that, to create a demand for police reform. But it has not happened still. But maybe the very vices of the police, their excesses, will create such an issue within the public that the public itself will revolt. However, when you actually talk to the public about what they think about the police, they will say in one voice that the police are ghastly and awful, but there is nowhere else to go. And so that is what holds them back. So we are left with this idea of gradualist change. And the gradualist change has been thought about by commission after commission, if you go before independence, after independence, during all the commissions that have come and gone. And you end up with the last bit, which is Mr. Prakash Singh's case. Mr. Prakash Singh is a police officer. He comes to the whole case from that point of view. Nevertheless, it has some very good points. It gave six directives to the state as well as to the center. And it is worth understanding those in order to see what you can build from that foundation. What is the edifice you can build? The police are said to be completely with the control of the police by the political executive is the phrase that is always used is illegitimate interference in the everyday working of the police. So they created an institution, the Supreme Court created an institution called the State Security Commission. It had the role of putting down policy, looking at performance and provisioning the police. And it was a bipartisan mechanism which every state was to create. They also then gave back the everyday administration of the police to the police supervisory cadres. And the third thing that they did in terms of accountability was to create a police complaints authority, a police complaints authority. It is not enough by any means, but it would have kick started. We hoped it would throw a pebble into a very still and feted pond. Now has there been compliance with this? Not even one state has complied with this. States have done two things. Either they have not complied or they have complied in a way that makes a mockery of the thing through executive orders. And the third thing they have done is legislated their way out of it. So after Prashant is one of the councils, I think one of the senior council, not senior council, but the most important councils in this case. And he has been walking the walk with Mr. Prakash Singh. And the issue of how do you bring things to be more in tune with the democracy lies in this illustration that for 10 years this case has gone on, 2006 to now. 12 years this case has gone on with aren't disobedience, but there is no contempt of court petition being heard. There are contempt of court petitions being placed before the court, but nothing has come of it. One wonders whether the court itself is not uncomfortable with the idea of actually making obedience happen. So one of the things about all of this ideology of reform in my view and a problematic has been that everything has been based on the notion that the structure itself is okay. The structure of policing itself is based on a militaristic point of view where the police is a law, it is called the police force. In a democracy you need it to be and to be called a police service. It is premised on the idea that the police will enforce the law rather than uphold it. And the basic idea of a police in a democracy is the change of its purpose. The purpose under the British and one that we have adopted in our authoritarian democracy is that there should be law and order, there should be control over the population. I want to leave you with the thought that actually the purpose of the police is to create an environment within which we can securely enjoy all of our human rights. That is the role of the police. The police has to be part of the community and yet we are doing everything to isolate the police from the community. We are giving it privileges, which the community does not have. We are creating a superman with privileges and even those privileges laughably are not based on hierarchy. You see the IPS officer with his car and his flag and his pips and his uniform and you see the poor old constable knocking around for 12 hours, 14 hours without training, without equipment, without accommodation. So what do you do? Stop. You say okay we'll give you beautiful accommodation and we keep you away from the public. So the accommodation becomes a privilege which keeps him apart from the community. Police reform has to start at the police station. There has to be actionable things that has to be done at the police station level. And the failure of the supervisory classes is enormous in that they are waiting. They are not asking. They are asking for legislation. They are asking for tenure. They are asking for everything. But with the money they have, with the power they have over their constabulary, they are doing nothing. So you see the same hierarchies. Finally, the police station. I also want to leave you with this thought. The police station is a place which is a public place of service just like a hospital or a fire station. But actually it has become a sort of guarded and with those sandbags and a fortified place. So what is the signal from that? The signal from that is we the police are going to keep ourselves safe from you. We are not going to take the same risks that you are taking. And we are going to leave you open to those risks while we have the comfort of being looked after by the authoritarian regime of who we are the servants. And this is what we need to change. It will not change without the popular voice. So if you are looking at the future of police, given the UAPA, given sedition, given TADA, no longer, given the NSA, given the Gundas Acts, and given now the revival of this notion that the Malimath Commission will solve everything. And given the fact that the MHA is even at this moment looking at a new law for the police. It may go the way that none of us wanted to go, but there are very, very few advocates who are talking about a democratic police for a democracy.