When cops turn extortionists

PAYING HAFTA TO POLICEMEN IS WAY OF LIFE FOR MANY VENDORS

Fruit seller Bittu recalls a bad month about three years back. Business was really down.

 But a fellow vendor working for local policemen still came to ask him for Rs 150 – collected every week for allowing him to place his cart at an unauthorised location. The two had a fight.

 “I had paid him for two weeks before that despite running losses. This time I requested a couple of days more but he was adamant and hurled some abuses. I pushed him away in anger. Within minutes there were three policemen dragging me to a nearby police post on the pretext that I had stolen a motorcycle,” says Bittu.

He was badly thrashed there, his cart confiscated and his spot allotted to a new vendor. The same policemen allegedly continued harassing him even as he tried to restart his business on a new cart in another part of west Delhi's Uttam Nagar.

When survival became difficult, Bittu, now 24, changed his home and began driving an autorickshaw to get away from them. Fear of harassment by traffic policemen continues, but Bittu says he makes every attempt to stay within the law.

Rajat Manjhi understood the system the very first time he was beaten up for refusing to pay protection money, notoriously known as the hafta. 

He had arrived from Bihar to seek a future in Delhi about 14 years ago. The day he set up a pani puri stall in north Delhi, he was approached by a policeman.

“They told me it would cost me Rs 100 every month. I protested and was thrashed. I have never negotiated with them after that,” says Manjhi.

He claims that paying hafta is such a part of his life now that when no one approached him for its collection during the two months of Arvind Kejriwal’s rule in Delhi, he himself went to the policemen meekly asking them if they were offended by him.

Currently running a snacks stall at a popular street food market in west Delhi, Manjhi says he thinks about his own profits only after putting aside Rs 1,200 every month for policemen and another Rs 3,000 for a shopkeeper for being allowed to run his business in front of the shop. This is one of the factors why Manjhi pays a comparatively small sum as hafta.

A foreign-returned chef who has started his own roadside Italian cuisine stall shells out Rs 18,000 every month. “I pay a higher price than some other stall owners nearby because I don’t pay rent and they consider my business to be yielding more profit,” says Jainendra Singh.

Everyone pays a different amount to policemen for ignoring illegalities: the size of the hafta depends on the area of operation, the number of customers you attract, the extent to which the business lies in the grey and how educated and aware you are.Rahmat Khan was coughing up Rs 12,000 every month for running a snacks stall on pavements near Dhaula Kuan in southwest Delhi. 

Being the only one selling that particular snack for quite some stretch of the road, he was drawing way too many customers as compared to some others nearby. “Others paid five-six times less than what I was paying,” says Khan.

Very recently, circumstances forced him to move his stall some distance away and to the other side of the road. “My business has dipped by four times at least. I am barely managing to save anything after the operational cost and paying a couple of employees. I told the policemen that I can’t pay them a penny till my business bounces back,” he says.The policemen have not harassed him yet and are unlikely to, he says. This is because he has been able to prove his lack of profits to them. 

“Also, they make a lot of money from me. I am anyways in trouble as I have lost my permanent customers, so I could shift anywhere else. They don’t want to lose me,” he claims.

While those with shops and stalls for long are asked to pay on a weekly or fortnightly basis, the newer ones are approached every day for fear that they might shift their base.

No personal visits

Unlike a few years ago, policemen usually no longer pay personal visits for hafta vasuli. “They dare not. They send their tax collectors who are not goondas. They are mere vendors like us,” says Khan.

Even when policemen came themselves, they had tricks up their sleeves to avoid being booked. 

“On the collection day, that policeman would look straight into my eyes and signal with the movement of his eyes towards an isolated location for a meeting,” says a vendor in Jhandewalan area. He claims that since that policeman was transferred two years ago, the menace ceased.

“Since the advent of audio and video recorders, policemen have begun relying on other vendors to collect money. These vendors receive a small amount and are well protected by policemen,” explains a senior Delhi Police officer on the condition of anonymity.

“Systematic” collection of protection money is limited to the level of the station house officer (SHO). Officers of the rank of assistant commissioner of police (ACP) and deputy commissioner of police (DCP) indulge in it, if at all, at their personal level, the officer explains. Lower-level officers often have to be part of the system, or face isolation and even harassment from their colleagues.

The officer points to several FIRs being filed every month by policemen against vendors and shopkeepers who are allegedly found encroaching into public space. 

“I think most such FIRs are means to harass those who did not agree to pay up,” he says.A few months ago, in an informal chat with this reporter, a DCP-level officer had estimated that “not more than 40 per cent” of Delhi Police personnel indulge in such activities and had claimed that these are encouraging figures as compared to other states. This was meant to be in defence of the force.

The system works wherever the `victims' and the policemen are both beneficiaries.  Also, illegal exchange of money takes place whenever there is an overlap of authority – say, between police and municipal corprorations – or if the law is not clear enough, another officer says. 

Unauthorised construction, illegal parking and encroachments on streets are examples. Apart from policemen, municipal officers also seek bribes from vendors and those indulging in unauthorised construction. 

Chanderprakash Lal says he has so far paid Rs 50,000 to civic officials as he goes about extending a portion of his three-bedroom ground floor flat in Laxmi Nagar – without approval, which makes it illegal.

“I was surprised to see how they operate. They did not approach me directly. Instead, the engineering department sent its office boy to collect the money,” alleges Lal. When he asked for the boy’s identity proof, police were summoned and Lal had to cough up more money.

Sex workers are the easiest targets for bribe-seeking policemen, says an officer. It is then comes as no surprise that traffic policemen are often found deployed in at least three places on a small stretch of the GB Road, notorious as the red light area of Delhi. “Would you argue or inform your contacts if you are told to shell out money by policemen in this area? They find lame problems with vehicles and extract money from the most innocent persons,” says Roshan, a pimp operating in the infamous area.

While most cases of corruption by policemen relate to squeezing money for illegal activities, there are several instances of policemen encouraging crimes such as drug peddling, gambling and smuggling of illicit liquor.

Recently, a youth approached police alleging that a policeman forced him into theft even when he wanted to quit the world of crime: the cop wanted to continue extracting the hafta from him.

Now, Delhi Police’s Vigilance department has provided a platform, using social networking app WhatsApp, through which audio and video recordings of policemen seeking bribes can be sent in for action. 

According to a senior officer, it has had an impact in the sense that they have received reports of policemen at some police stations banning the general public from carrying mobile phones inside. 

Yet,  the hafta vasooli business continues.