The City & the CP

With the change of guards in the Commissionerate of Police, the citizens of Guwahati are looking forward to better days. This, however, does not in any way mean that the tenure of the immediate past Commissioner of Police was dissatisfactory. In fact, while outgoing CP Diganta Barah is one of the finest IPS officers in Assam in recent times, the new CP, Partha Sarathi Mahanta, too has an amazing track record. A highly decorated police officer, Mahanta, as chief of the Assam Police Special Task Force, had recently not only dismantled a major fundamentalist terror module but also arrested ISIS India head Haris Farooqi, thus breaking the major Islamic terror group’s backbone. During his long innings spanning a little over three decades, he also conducted a number of strategic operations against drug trafficking, counterfeit currency rackets, and rhino poaching. Guwahati has been growing in the most haphazard manner since the state capital was hurriedly brought down from Shillong to Guwahati without any concept or futuristic outlook in the early 1970s. With it has grown the city’s crime graph, which has been best depicted in a recent comprehensive analysis of crimes in the metropolis covering the last half a decade. The wide range of crimes in the city includes land scams (some allegedly also involving government officials and policemen), cybercrimes, thefts, burglaries, murders, abductions, snatching of valuables like mobile phones and gold chains, encroachment on government land and water bodies, and crimes against women and children. It is encouraging to note the outgoing CP’s claim that there has been a significant drop in crime registrations in the city in five years. But then, there exist some major gaps, like complaints about the refusal of the police to register cases (as was reported in the case of a recent murder of a woman committed in broad daylight close to Dispur) in the city itself, which tend to tell another story. While Barah moves to an office with bigger responsibility covering the entire state, his successor Mahanta, immediately after assuming office, has opened his new innings with the introduction of a dedicated WhatsApp helpline for the city’s residents to submit their complaints and queries. Guwahatians must accept Mahanta’s assurance that the city’s policing efforts would continue to focus on crime control, apart from laying greater focus on curbing day-to-day crimes like chain snatching, mobile thefts, and traffic-related issues. What is most important is that the citizens must feel safe round the clock, whether at home or outside. And only a strong, effective, and community-friendly police force can ensure this.