T.K. Manna who helped a student locate her Madhyamik admit card early this year

At two in the morning, on a deserted street at Lake Gardens late last month, a trap was laid for the Calcutta police. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was scheduled to complete six years in office as chief minister of West Bengal on November 6. He had promised a people-friendly police force and half a dozen years seemed to be long enough a time for a bit of stock taking.

A thirty-something woman, an employee of an advertising agency, steps out of her house in Jodhpur Park and walks into the night. The neighbourhood roads are mostly empty except for the occasional car that zips by. The silence — broken only by the barking of street dogs — is a little scary, especially since she has decided to don a noodle-strap top and a mini skirt.

Sub-inspector of Lake thana Biplob Chakraborty is on night duty and he sees the woman approach the only taxi parked in a road off Lake Gardens. He notices that there is an argument. He walks over to the cab and is told by the woman that the taxi driver refuses to take her to Park Hotel unless she pays him extra money.

“Take the lady where she wants to go,” Chakraborty orders, before turning to the woman, “Please go ahead.”

“I was moved,” the woman later says. “Dressed the way I was and the time of night being what it was, I had expected absolutely no help from the police. But this was a completely different face of the police that I was seeing.”

At another point of time, a policeman on duty would have spent some time asking questions of a woman out late at night and dressed minimally. “Not only did he make the effort to come over and help but he did not ask me a single question about who I was or why I was going to a hotel at night alone, dressed the way I was.”

So was the friendly face of the police in West Bengal really becoming more visible? Was the chief minister, as head of the home ministry and thus the head of the police force, quietly working on his plans to clean up the police in the state?

Evidently there is a raging debate on the topic out there with the common man’s opinion swinging between the two extremes of “Absolutely not” and “Yes, definitely.”

Among those who believe that police reform is all hogwash is a resident of an apartment complex in Tollygunge, who had called up the Regent Park police station a little past midnight early last month to complain about loud music being played in the neighbourhood. “I was very ill and I wasn’t being able to get any rest. Initially, the phone rang, without anyone answering it. Finally someone came on the line and took down the complaint and said, “Okay, we’ll look into it.”

At 2 am, when the cacophony still continued, he called up a journalist friend who got in touch with the police station. “The music finally stopped at around 3 am. And to think that this was Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s own constituency!”

One polite policeman doesn’t make a friendly force, says a truck driver on the Delhi highway, near the town of Chinsura. The rules have got tougher — for instance, a truck, which could earlier enter the city after 8 pm, can’t do so till 10. “But the tougher the rules, the more they will be broken and more money will the cops make out of the situation,” says the driver, as he washes down a double egg omelette with tea sitting on a rope cot in a roadside eatery. “Things are so bad that they demand money at any time of the day or night. Even when we are sleeping at night, we are often rudely awakened by a cop, who demands money.”

Saha, a traffic policeman in Tollygunge, indirectly endorses the charge. “I have three grown-up sons,” says the constable, who is from a village in South 24 Paraganas. “I have spent a lot of money on their education — but none has a job. I have been working for 33 years and now my salary is Rs 11,000. There are five mouths to feed. How am I supposed to get by on this meagre salary?”

And that is possibly one of the reasons, Shamol Samanta, who delivers gas cylinders from house to house in Chinsura, is being hounded by the police for money. “My brother had committed some petty theft and the police threatened to pick me up, lock me up and beat me up. Then they demanded some money. What friendly police force?”

But highly-placed police officials stress that much is being done in terms of training to change precisely this kind of attitude in the police force. “The current government places a lot of importance on police training. This includes not just aspects of internal discipline but also extends to areas of the police-people interface,” says R.K. Johri, additional director general of police and head of training of Calcutta police.

The change, many hold, is yet to be seen on the ground. Kirity Roy, director of MASUM, a West Bengal-based NGO working against human rights violation, sniggers, “They can quote statistics after statistics, enumerating the various training programmes, but the ground reality is something else. Human rights violation — from illegal arrests to torture of prisoners in police custody — continues unabated.”

Not everybody thinks so, though. As she drives on the highway from Howrah to Chandanagore, Dola Chatterjee is all praise for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s police force. “I have been driving for the last six years. They are much more friendly now. I am not harassed at all. I think they are more helpful towards women than before.”

But an auto rickshaw driver stresses that police harassment is a part of his life. Biplab — that is how he identifies himself (“if I reveal my name, the cops will get back at me”) — doesn’t think Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has done anything at all. “It’s not how much money the policemen make. It’s their attitude. They are corrupt and power has gone to their heads,” he says.

Johri seeks to stress that change in attitude happens over time. “You cannot expect miracles. Still I believe that our training is going to be effective and in the long run West Bengal will have one of the best police forces ever.”

But Biplab, the auto-driver, is not convinced. “There isn’t a single good cop,” he says with finality.