If police fails to maintain law and order, democracy fails: NSA Ajit Doval

National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval on Thursday (March 5) said that police will have to deal with evolving challenges and the rate of change has always been very high with security challenges increasing at an accelerated pace.

"Everything that happened in the past will change in the future.You are the officers who will be seeing 100 years of freedom. I am the only one in this hall who was born before independence," NSA Doval said while inaugurating the ''Third young Superintendents of Police Conference'' organised by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD), a police think-tank under the Union Home Ministry.

Doval asserted that the common man should see police as "credible and fair" and if the police fails to enforce the law, democracy fails. "Law-making is the most sacrosanct job in a democracy. It is not done by an imperial ruler or from the pulpit of a religious leader but by the representatives of the people and you are the enforcers of that law. You have to first identity the problem, define the problem, and find ways of solution, think how technology can be used," said the NSA, adding that if police fails to enforce law, democracy fails.

NSA Doval said it is the duty of police is to secure india and the police can do this by exploring and finding relevant technological solutions in partnership with research institutions, academics and industry.

He asked the police leadership to adopt the policy of transformational leadership which thinks about future and the solutions for futuristic challenges. NSA Doval also gave example of Shivaji to illustrate how leadership is essential to identify talent and provide training for realisation of the potential of people as Shivaji had done with Jiva Mallah. 

The NSA also asked the police to work for people in the society who feel "most neglected, unprivileged, those who feel there is lack of safety and security for them and who feel that their complaint will never reach the police".

"You should ''disabuse'' the people from the impression that police is only there to serve the privileged," he said at the event.

"Basically, we have been a society which has been enslaved for a very long time and an enslaved society always has a contempt for the people who are in authority and police is an instrument of government which has to enforce the law on the ground, which otherwise is only a scrap of paper," NSA Doval added.

"Police bring teeth to the law. Since they have to do that unpleasant work and since it is the mindset that the man who enforces the law is the ruler and we are the ruled or the slaves... that brings certain amount of aversion," he noted.