Delhi’s Servile Top Cop Bassi Wore a Different Shade of Khaki

Former Delhi Police chief B S Bassi, who retired recently, chose to crawl when asked to bend, writes Ajoy Bose.

Delhi Police Commissioner Bhim Sain Bassi, who retired on Sunday, is certainly the most controversial police chief the national capital has ever had. Over the past several months he has become even more notorious than DIG (Range) Pritam Singh Bhinder, who as Sanjay Gandhi‘s hatchet man during the Emergency regime, threw the rulebook out of the window. Bhinder was known for backing his political master’s sterilisation and demolition campaigns in the city.

Many feel that Bassi has surpassed even Bhinder in his desperation to please those in power, first by his systematic harassment of representatives of the elected AAP government in Delhi and now with his excessive zeal in the JNU row.

Low Profile Cop

Interestingly, for most of his career Bassi remained clear from controversy. Although his duties brought him close to cataclysmic events such as the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the Mandal agitation and communal tensions caused by BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani’s rathyatra, Bassi never came into the public limelight. The low-profile cop was considered very compliant to his superiors, which was an asset while lobbying for the Delhi Police chief’s job in 2013.

It was Home Minister Sushil Shinde then who chose him over his rival, the more outstanding but independent Kanwaljeet Singh Deol, although she would have been far more appropriate as the capital’s first woman police commissioner in the wake of the horrific Delhi bus gang rape just a few months ago.

The Metamorphosis Phase

In the first two years of his three-year-long stint Bassi’s only remarkable feat was to change the catchy Delhi Police slogan -- “With you, for you, always” to an archaic “Shanti, Seva, Nayae”.  It was only in his final year in office and in the wake of AAP’s sweeping return to power in February 2015 that his metamorphosis began.

By that time the BJP was in power at the Centre and the police chief, who had no previous link with the RSS or BJP, is believed to have assiduously used his Shriram College of Commerce background to cultivate the powerful Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who also went to the same college.

Not surprisingly, Bassi along with Delhi Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung was swiftly sucked into the no-holds-barred BJP crusade using the Centre’s control over the police to hobble the Kejriwal government despite the latter’s overwhelming majority in the state assembly.

To the shock and amazement of many of his predecessors in office, Bassi, with the help of local magistrates, arrested AAP legislators on the flimsiest of complaints. Perhaps never before has ruling party legislators anywhere in the country faced such police persecution.

Bringing Ignominy

Had the police commissioner limited himself to facilitating the Modi regime’s charge against the Delhi government he may still have retired quietly since the Congress spurred by its own local rivalry with the AAP happily went along.  But by spearheading a witch hunt against JNU students on the basis of dodgy evidence, including doctored videos and fake tweets, Bassi lost all sense of proportion. 

The police’s abject failure to protect the undertrial JNUSU president, JNU academics and journalists from lawyer-cum-goons inside court has only tightened the noose around his neck.

By rushing to arrest a student leader on such serious charges as sedition and criminal conspiracy without proper investigation, then blithely declaring a few days later that he can get bail and once again a few more days later change his stance, he has not only made a mockery of the law but shamed the Delhi Police.

A Former Delhi Police Commissioner

Losing The Plot Completely

Moreover, Bassi’s penchant to shoot his mouth off, even suggesting that the arrested students would have to prove their innocence instead of the police first, before establishing their guilt, has made him the target of much ridicule and derision, particularly across social media platforms.

So what made this quiet sober cop become a ludicrous caricature in his final year in office? “The only explanation can be that in his eagerness to carry out even the most arbitrary orders from political bigwigs he completely lost the plot,” commented an Indian Police Service colleague. Paradoxically, the controversies he generated while trying to please his superiors denied him a promised post-retirement job.

The sad story of Bhim Sain Bassi is a cautionary tale for those bureaucrats who overreach themselves as they jostle to get ahead in the corridors of power.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist)

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