Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh:
Recently, at a meeting of top police officers in the capital, Home Minister P Chidambaram had said that police officers in states are being kicked around like footballs.
In Uttar Pradesh, premature transfers of police officers have become a rule rather than the exception.
Soon after Bahujan Samaj Party's (BSP) poor show in the Lok Sabha elections, heads began to roll in the state police. 34 police officers were transferred in one go, punished for not helping the state government deliver better results. The transfers had the Supreme Court intervening.
"We have been seeing officers being transferred practically every day. When a large spat of politically motivated transfers came then it was necessary to bring it to the notice of the Supreme Court and that's why we filed the writ petition there," said S N Shukla, a petitioner.
The Mayawati government has a history of such arbitrary decisions, ever since she took charge in 2007.
In the last two years, 287 out of the 340 officers in UP have been transferred. Six of them have been transferred more than ten times. At least 32 of them have been transferred more than six times in the past two years. The average tenure for 97 officers has been only two to five months.
Only DGP Vikram Singh and the SSP of Sonbhadra, which a naxal-hit district in UP, have managed to serve uninterrupted at the same post for at least two years.
"Under the existing dispensation, where DGP's are being handpicked not for their professional competence but for their amenability, their pliability, you don't expect them to resist. Even if they resist, it will have no effect, because the very next day I think he will be shunted out," said Prakash Singh, Former DGP of UP.
Meanwhile, the UP government is yet to tell the court why it transferred so many policemen in one go.
In a letter to the home secretary, the state chief secretary said that "non availability of officers" was the compelling reason.
The matter will now come up before the Supreme Court on September 29.