The thrill of the chase

Book review of BITING the BULLET: Memoirs of a Police Officer

From his memoir Biting the Bullet, it is often difficult to figure out if former IPS officer Ajai Raj Sharma  chased bandits or they chased him.
 
For the most part of his 36-year long career, Mr Sharma, a former Delhi Police Commissioner and Border Security Force director general, served in his home cadre of Uttar Pradesh. Each posting was in a new district and against the backdrop of — what else — a chase for a new dacoit in an inhospitable, testing terrain. There are many success stories and all of them are recounted well in the book, which tries to establish the author as a brave but smart cop who sometimes went beyond the set norms to wean away certain members of a gang and then plot its downfall with their help. The strategy is repeated often, but the means to achieve the end were different each time: Convincing someone’s mother on one occasion, staging the transfer of a subordinate on another. Each certainly makes for an interesting read.
 
For this reviewer, who spent six recent years covering the crime beat in Delhi and Mumbai, Mr Sharma’s recollections fill in on unexposed aspects of policing from a bygone era. A criminal fleeing on horseback, the author being forced to travel on a bullock cart during an operation, criminals using assault rifles within city limits — it leaves nothing to the imagination. There are also insights on crime detection methods that preceded the modern communication technologies that are now the default go-to option, and accounts of how organised crime and politics in the Hindi heartland were intertwined (and perhaps still are, but the book certainly shows how brazen that association was in the past).
 
Instances of planting an informer in a gang or a police officer highly regarded for his bravery screaming “A bullet to kill me is yet to be made” during a face-off with dacoits could be straight out of a Bollywood potboiler, but are purportedly real. The setting up of the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force to take on the Uttar Pradesh gangster Shri Prakash Shukla is arguably the biggest highlight of Mr Sharma’s CV, and he has justifiably reserved an entire chapter to recount the rise and fall of Shukla. However, besides the archived media reports available on this high-profile case, there have been many adaptations of the Shukla story from celluloid to OTT platforms.
 
The writer deserves praise for not turning this memoir into an auto-hagiography that captures his own deeds and relegates the role of others in his journey into footnotes. He has been fulsome in his praise for others — crediting former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kamalapati Tripathi for standing up to the mighty Indira Gandhi and preventing Mr Sharma’s suspension or in describing the valour of a UP Police inspector who sacrificed his life in a valiant effort to save schoolchildren from being abducted by bandits.
 
The chapter on Delhi consists of highlights such as the Parliament or the Red Fort terror attack cases, the assassination of Phoolan Devi or the match fixing scandal unearthed by the Delhi Police Crime Branch during his tenure. Although Mr Sharma’s pats his own back for swiftly solving most of those cases, the fact that these major incidents occurred on his watch points to intelligence failures at the very least.
 
The Parliament attack of 2001 was perhaps the biggest blip in Mr Sharma’s career, though he does not acknowledge it in this way. Over the years and even after Mohammad Afzal Guru’s hanging there have been questions on the fairness of the investigation and trial. The author steers clear of initiating a new debate by addressing those issues. As far as the probe is concerned, which Mr Sharma says was swift, the book does little more than publish a sort of extended press note on the arrests of Guru, who was subsequently convicted and hanged, and others.
 
A more updated reader would be keen to know why the probe agency (that is, the Delhi police once headed by Mr Sharma) chose not to probe the role of Jammu and Kashmir police officer Davinder Singh. Guru had mentioned Mr Singh, who was arrested last month for alleged terrorist links, in a letter to his lawyer and the latter had brought up the name in a media interview after Guru’s arrest. As an India Today  report points out, Singh, then deputy superintendent of police of Special Operations Group, had allegedly asked him [Guru] to “take Mohammad”, a co-accused in the Parliament attack case, “to Delhi, rent a flat for his stay and purchase a car for him”. Did the investigators miss this? Does this change the perspective of the case? These are some of the questions a reader may want to ask the author since the answers cannot be found in the memoir.
 
A little more on police reforms or the administrative control of the Delhi Police could have been welcome additions as well — especially when read in the context of its rank failure to control riots in the north east of the city in February.

BITING the BULLET: Memoirs of a Police Officer

Author:  Ajai Raj Sharma 

Publisher: Rupa

Price: Rs 495

Pages: 186