To the Mumbai Police Commissioner

My best friend sent this email to the Mumbai Police Commissioner:

Dear Sir,

I was very happy when I read your interview on rediff.com. I was happy to know that the government has finally spent some money to equip our policemen with modern weaponry. Though I am appalled to see that most policemen still carry vintage bolt action rifles that one would find only in museums in the western countries. But the courage that these men displayed during the terrorist attack was simply outstanding. I can definitely say that no policeman in the USA or any other developed nation would have even attempted to put up a fight with a .303 rifle. I have a few questions which I feel you may be able to answer. Please consider them as honest questions from a concerned citizen who travels by the local trains on a daily basis.

1. What use are the door frame metal detectors at Churchgate and other stations? People just walk through (sometimes they don't) and the poor machines keep beeping and making all types of funny electronic sounds, yet there is no one to check or monitor who is coming in and what is being carried into the station. I usually see a few policemen sitting on the desks nearby and chatting amongst each other. Also churchgate has so many entrances, not all of them have policemen. I have noticed this myself.


2. Sometimes I take my car to work on the 6 lane western express highway from Goregaon to bandra kurla complex. On an average it takes about 45 minutes for this 18 km drive. Sometimes I find that the traffic is moving very very slowly and I wonder why (the highway is so wide!!!). Then I come to the bottleneck which is usually a police blockade or Nakabandi where policemen park a van blocking a lane and place barriers across two other lanes, which leaves about a lane and a half for all the vehicles to pass by. I see that the policemen just keep looking at the vehicles. I don't know what purpose this nakabandi serves except that they just make me and a million others burn a few liters of extra fuel and increase our travel time to work by half an hour.


3. When you say that 2 men in the QRT have the ultramodern AK 47 rifles, the only question that comes to my mind is: Is the AK 47 an ultramodern weapon? Isn't it a 60 year old weapon? Isn't it one of the cheapest weapons used by everyone right from the Taliban to the civil war groups in Congo and Somalia? I mean, shouldn't we be talking FAMAS G2 and GALIL or MP5 or H&K G36 or the Benelli M4 Super 90 shotgun?

Sir, these questions are not intended to undermine the efforts being put in by our policemen. I can understand the pressures they go through, their working conditions. Being the son of a senior civil servant (My father was in the Ministry of Defence Production), I know that the citizens have become used to babu bashing and blaming the system and government servants for everything. These are just questions which came to my mind when I travel by train or car and while reading your interview.

Thank You

Regards,

Vikram Kaimal

PS: This is an excellent way to voice our concerns to the authorities on issues we face in our daily lives. If each one of us reciprocates this move, I am hopeful that there would be atleast one responsible soul in the sarkaari daftar who would ensure these pages do not pile up the waste paper bins!