Two Decades After the Supreme Court Ordered It, Police Reform Remains Undone

In September 2006, the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in Prakash Singh versus Union of India, a case that had been in the courts for a decade, and issued seven specific directives meant to insulate the police from arbitrary political interference and build independent accountability mechanisms. State security commissions were to be set up to insulate policy decisions from political pressure. Directors general of police were to be given a minimum tenure of two years and selected from a shortlist prepared by the Union Public Service Commission. Investigation was to be separated from law and order functions. Police complaints authorities were to handle allegations of misconduct. Nearly two decades on, the honest assessment is that most states have complied with the letter of these directives while hollowing out their substance, and the pattern of non-compliance is remarkably similar across states governed by different parties.

What the Judgment Actually Required

The Prakash Singh case grew out of a petition filed in 1996 by two former police chiefs who argued that colonial-era policing legislation, principally the Police Act of 1861, gave state governments almost unchecked power over the force, enabling routine misuse for political ends, from transferring inconvenient officers to using the police to settle scores against opposition parties. The court's directives were designed as structural fixes rather than one-off interventions: institutions that would outlast any particular government's preferences. That was precisely the point, and it is precisely why implementation has been so resisted, since the directives asked incumbent governments of every stripe to surrender a lever of control they have historically found useful.

The Tenure Loophole

Fixed tenure for the director general of police and for officers holding key operational postings, superintendents of police and station house officers included, was meant to prevent the kind of politically motivated transfers that leave field officers unwilling to act against powerful local interests for fear of being moved within months. States have circumvented this by creating additional posts, appointing officers in acting or in-charge capacities that fall outside the tenure protection, or by simply transferring officers before completing paperwork that would trigger the protection. The Supreme Court itself has had to intervene repeatedly, including striking down state legislation that tried to dilute the tenure requirement, most notably in cases from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. The fact that the apex court keeps having to intervene against the same categories of evasion, years apart, is itself evidence of how determined the resistance has been.

State Security Commissions as Paper Bodies

State security commissions, intended to lay down broad policy guidelines and evaluate police performance while shielding operational decisions from day-to-day political direction, exist in most states today, but researchers and former police officers who have studied their functioning describe them as largely inactive, meeting rarely if at all, and lacking any binding authority over government decisions. Several states diluted the composition prescribed by the court, reducing the presence of independent members and retired judges in favour of a body dominated by serving officials answerable to the government, which defeats the purpose of an independent check.

Separation of Investigation and Law and Order

The directive to separate investigation from law and order functions, so that officers handling crime investigation are not simultaneously managing crowd control, VIP security, and other duties that leave little time or institutional incentive for careful casework, has seen the most uneven implementation of all. Where it has been tried, notably in parts of Delhi and a handful of other cities, it has improved investigation quality by allowing dedicated investigating officers to build expertise. But the reform requires additional recruitment and infrastructure that many state police forces, already understaffed relative to sanctioned strength, have not received, so most stations continue to function exactly as they did before the judgment.

Why Every Party Benefits from the Status Quo

It would be a mistake to frame police reform resistance as a failing of one political formation. Every state government, regardless of party, has found the current arrangement useful: control over transfers and postings gives the ruling party leverage over investigations into its own conduct and that of its opponents, and no government in office has strong incentives to give that up voluntarily. This is one of the rare areas of Indian politics where the National Crime Records Bureau data and independent assessments by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative show consistent under-implementation across states led by every major party, a bipartisan failure that reflects the underlying incentive structure of Indian policing rather than the preferences of any single government.

The Case for Patience, Fairly Stated

Reform advocates sometimes understate the genuine administrative difficulty of restructuring a force of this scale. India's police establishment runs into the millions of personnel across states, chronically understaffed against sanctioned strength, and asking such a force to simultaneously professionalise investigation, build new oversight institutions, and maintain law and order during a period of transition carries real operational risk. Some states have made partial, credible progress, Kerala's police complaints mechanism functions more actively than most, and this suggests reform is achievable where political will exists rather than structurally impossible.

An Unfinished Constitutional Promise

What the two decades since Prakash Singh demonstrate is that a Supreme Court judgment, however carefully reasoned, cannot substitute for political commitment when the reform in question asks those in power to relinquish control. Civil society groups and retired officers continue to push for compliance, and the court itself has kept the matter under periodic review, but the core diagnosis from 2006 remains true in 2024: Indian policing is still governed, in practice, by a colonial framework of political control that reform has repeatedly promised to dismantle and repeatedly failed to touch.