Embedded years: A reporter among the cops

Between 2016 and 2019, journalist Rudraneil Sengupta followed the Delhi police to observe from close quarters how they worked. His impressions shaped his debut crime novel

We were on Wazirabad Road. The sun was beating down like an apocalyptic ball of white-hot fire over the wide, almost treeless avenue on the eastern edge of Delhi. Inside the unmarked police hatchback, even breathing was difficult. The sub-inspector sat in the driver’s seat, sweating, silent, watching. He shot a nervous glance at me but was reassured to find that I was slouching low, almost hidden from view.

A few metres from us, across a sidewalk, stood a three-storied, unfinished building, left to crumble. Its topmost floor was just pillars jutting into the open. An old, abandoned movie hall stood next to it, before the street was consumed by a line of squalid, greasy car repair shacks.

Inside the abandoned building was a member of one of Delhi’s most notorious gangs, handing over a consignment of drugs to a dealer who had snitched on him. The dealer wanted revenge — a few weeks earlier, the gangster had raped his sister and threatened his family with gory death if they retaliated in any form. But the dealer couldn’t just stand by and swallow this injustice, even if his life was at risk. And who was to say that the gangster wouldn’t be back for more?

Four policemen, all in plain clothes, lounged at various points outside the unfinished building. The gangster’s car was parked a few feet from where we were. “If there’s shooting, stay low, exit the car, and run in the other direction,” the sub-inspector said to me, for what seemed like the 10th time.

“Yes.”

“Inshallah, we will grab this m*******d before he can pull out a weapon. You see Ashish (name changed) there? He is good at grabbing people. He is like one of those big, fat snakes — once he has grabbed you, you have no chance of escaping,” the sub-inspector continued.

The next few minutes felt like seconds. The gangster came out of the building, a tall, muscular man dressed in a white shirt and blue jeans, sporting dark glasses — indistinguishable from the cops hunting him down. He started walking towards his car. Just as he reached his vehicle, the four policemen emerged out of the shadows and descended on him, and the sub-inspector swerved the car at nauseating speed and screeched to a halt in front of the gangster’s car.

Ashish slammed the gangster’s head against the car door twice. He could have stopped with one slam — he already had the man in his boa constrictor grip!

Later, as the policemen walked into the station with the gangster, the criminal’s face hidden by a white klu-kux-klan style hood with eye-holes (to prevent other criminals on the premises from identifying him), I felt a wholly undeserved sense of elation. I had just been an observer, like in the opening line of Christopher Isherwood’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

News to fiction

As a journalist writing longform articles on society and crime, I had convinced various officers in the Delhi police to allow me to spend time with them while they worked, with the caveat that they would have a say in what I could write and what I could not. Since I was not doing straight crime reporting — I was writing about various aspects of a society plagued by crime — this was an acceptable deal.

I was embedded with the Delhi police between 2016 and 2019, and the above incident took place in 2017. I went into these assignments with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there was the excitement of being a civilian privy to the world of an armed, uniformed force. On the other hand, there was my own idea of what the police in Delhi, or for that matter, anywhere in India, were: nasty, brutish, inept and misogynistic.

As I spent time with the police, these generalisations became harder to hold on to. Yes, there were nasty, violent people. But there were also many who retained an acute sense of empathy and humaneness against all odds. Very few of us outside the force are exposed to the ugliest, most violent side of humanity as closely and frequently as they are. Yes, there were plenty of inept policemen with little inclination for any real work. But a lot of the blame should go to the poor and outdated training they receive, and to the huge workload they are saddled with. I met many officers who worked with great diligence, driven by some unshakeable inner conviction (or so I would like to believe) to pursue investigations to their logical end, even if it meant sacrificing a lot in their own lives.

And so, with the exception of a full-blown shootout, I witnessed the drudgery of routine investigations, which involved sifting through hundreds of pages of call data, watching hundreds of hours of CCTV footage, driving for hours to visit crime locations and to meet possible informers, and chasing criminals on foot, on bikes, and in cars. I saw suspects being beaten up for information, policemen facing riotous mobs, locals venting after a crime (the way people vandalise crime scenes is a crime in itself), bodies being cut open in morgues, and calls being received in the control room, where an almost all-women force answers them non-stop. When a building was ablaze in a lane too narrow for fire engines to enter, the police desperately tried to cut the power supply and get people living in adjoining houses to evacuate. Following tip-offs, late-night roadblocks were set up to catch gangsters. The police also make visits to crowded courts. I also got an idea of the rhythms of the vast bureaucratic empire at the police headquarters, complete with community cats and dogs lounging around.

I followed cases (though not to their conclusions), involving a gang of car thieves operating in Delhi’s Rohini area. They stole, on an average, two cars a week over a period of six months, using sophisticated computer technology to hack into the cars’ onboard safety programmes. They were caught with the help of a carefully laid trap. A woman was strangled by a relative inside her hostel room with the cable of a phone charger, and he had then arranged the scene to make it look like a suicide. A spate of robberies was reported from an upscale Delhi neighbourhood. We also came across the case of two teenage boys stealing bikes as a recruitment test to join
a criminal gang.

Then there was the poignant case of a man who kidnapped young girls and took them to his house, treated them well, and returned them after a day or two. When caught, he revealed that his own daughter had died some months ago, and he was in such grief that he did not understand why he was doing what he was doing.

Ground reality

At some point in this rich, almost overwhelming exposure, I realised that facts and figures were not enough to express what I was seeing and hearing. I wanted to tell stories that drew people into the world of the police, stories that remained with them in an emotional way.

The Japanese author Hideo Yokoyama, whose epic ‘Six Four’ is for me the finest police procedural ever written, said it best: “I believe the purpose of fiction is hidden in the things not written about in non-fiction, the things I then have to write and can only write as fiction.”

In some strange way, my debut police procedural, ‘The Beast Within’ (Westland Books), is a far truer representation of my time with the Delhi police than any journalistic story I have written. It was released last month. It follows the lives of a unit investigating the murder of a young woman in a posh Delhi locality.

Much of what I described in the preceding paragraphs found its way into the book. Many featured conversations are faithful transcripts of actual interactions I witnessed, though they are used in completely different contexts. I saw how the police handled the violence they encountered and meted out almost daily — by accepting it as a normal part of life. One moment they could be beating a suspect in the lock-up, and the next, sitting at a common table for a lunch of homemade food, talking about politics, home improvement, the markets, or the weather.

“On the first day of my job, I was called to an accident site,” a constable told me. “A man had been crushed by a truck. I had to scrape body parts off the road. That day I thought, ‘If I survive this, nothing else will faze me, but if this is too much, I will quit tomorrow’. Well, I didn’t quit. I can confidently say that nothing fazes me now.”

What I learnt about how the police work informs every step of the investigation and action in the book.

Inspired stories

One narrative strand in the book involves the abduction of children — more than 6,000 go missing every year in Delhi — and an officer who, through sheer diligence, cracks a major kidnapping ring and rescues many of them. This officer responds to the case of a missing child in one of the city’s poorest areas called Shahbad Dairy. She soon discovers that it is not just one child, but dozens who have gone missing from a slum cluster in just a few months. She also learns that in all these cases, the Investigating Officer (IO) was reassigned within a month or two — and not one had done more than putting up a notice with the child’s details. No one had stepped out to ask questions, checked call records, or combed through CCTV footage. In some cases, the IOs hadn’t even bothered to obtain a photograph of the missing child.

My woman officer decides to do all these things, putting her heart and soul into the case — and she gets results. This is based on a true story: police officer Seema Dhaka did exactly this in 2020. She worked for months without seeing her own family, doing the work that dozens of IOs before her had failed to do.

If there is one element of wish-fulfilment in my book, it is the class division that my fictional officers manage to overcome in their investigation into the death of the girl. It is a harsh reality that economic status plays a huge role in how a person is investigated (arguably true not only for India, but most of the world). Time and time again, I saw the police treat people from low-income groups with impunity — hauling them into cells, beating them to extract information, and casting aspersions on them. This is not the treatment meted out to suspects from more well-to-do backgrounds, where the police toe the legal line, producing warrants, and keeping interrogations strictly verbal. Why this discrepancy? Are the police to blame entirely for it? No, because they come from the same social milieu as you and I, and here, the poor are treated badly and become automatic suspects in most crimes. But should the police, being a uniformed force with a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence, be held to higher standards? Absolutely. But that’s wishful thinking, and in my book, I make that wish come true.

My protagonist, inspector Prashant Kumar, is unswayed by economic status. In the classic tradition of fictional detectives, he is driven by an inner moral compass and a personal tragedy that makes him rise above deeply held, reflexive social beliefs. He is battered and bruised, threatened and humiliated, left lonely and alone, pulled up by his bosses, taken off the case and (almost) suspended — but he does not deviate from his path.

I have met officers like him. I wish there were many more like him in the real world. But it comes at a cost. At one point in the book, Kumar’s lonely, unloved wife tells him: “Someday, you will realise you threw away the living for the dead, but it will be too late.”