Bombay's police commissioners
An old institution gets a new manon the first day of the new year!

THE last time I met Ranjit Singh Sharma, our few-hours-old police commissioner, I did not recognise him as a policeman. It was he, in fact, who gave me his piercing cop stare and drew my attention to the fact that his was a familiar face. This was in Pune, sometime in August last year, and I was to be excused for not making Sharma out. For he was dressed in track pants and t-shirt and looked nothing like the suave policeman I knew since his last stint here in Bombay at the Crime Branch. Moreover, our meeting took place at the yoga institute of the legendary yogacharya B. K. S. Iyengar, of whom Sharma was a student. Absolutely the last place you would expect to see a policeman. But there he was, tall, dark and handsome, an athletic looking man whom I never guessed would be 59 years old. It shows what yoga can do to the ageing process. Look at Iyengar himself, 84 years old and with as much zip in him as there is in a Sachin Tendulkar at 30! I had an inkling even then that Sharma was going to return to Bombay as police commissioner after M. N. Singh retired. And after pleasantries had been exchanged, I casually asked him when he was going to come back. "Let's see," Sharma said with a disarming smile.

Cub reporter

I like meeting and talking to policemen, especially those who are commissioners or who are going to become one. When I started writing on crime, the police commissioner was Julio Ribeiro, a tall, thin and rather fearsome policeman with a bark that was as bad as his bite. I was a cub reporter, so naturally, it was not easy to meet and talk to Ribeiro. But I was to see him in action soon. My father worked for the Times of India and the Old Lady of Bori Bunder was in cantankerous form those days. There were three labour unions ruling the workers and strikes happened frequently. On one occasion, the management decided that it had had enough, and it sealed its top officers inside the Times building with a team of loyal workers and broke the strike. The paper came out all right, but my father had to stay inside, there was no getting out as long as the murderous goons of the unions roamed around. To discourage my father, they attacked my mother, as vulnerable a target as you may find. That's when Ribeiro stepped in. He gave my father his personal guarantee that nothing more would happen to us. And he posted round-the-clock security at our residence. I will never forget his quiet strength, his confidence, and the look in his eye that came when he was dealing with lawlessness and crime.

I got to know Ribeiro fairly well after that. And subsequently, all the police commissioners who followed him. Most of them I interviewed for this paper. Some of them became friends. Several still are friends, though they have long since given up policing and walked off into the sunset to play with their grandchildren. Like M. N. Singh yesterday did. And Ronald Mendonca and Satish Sahney did before him. Ram Deo Tyagi and Subhash Malhotra were police commissioners sometime in between Sahney and Mendonca. And both are friends. Though I don't know where Tyagi currently is. He was the most jovial police commissioner I knew. A large and bluff man with an uproarious laugh and an abstract sense of humour. He used to hold darbars in police stations and sit in the centre of grand chaos with housewives screaming in his ear for attention and their children trying to touch his uniform! Tyagi went into or almost went into politics after retirement. I know he talked of becoming Balasaheb Thackeray's disciplined soldier. But I don't think that happened. As for Subhash Malhotra, I think, he is the longest serving policeman I know. Tyagi and Mendonca and Singh came and went after him. But Malhotra is still a policeman, he is director general of police, the highest ranking policeman in Maharashtra today!

Part of the joy of being a crime reporter, or an editor who likes writing on crime, law and order, and security, as I do, is that you often go to call on the police commissioners at their office. This is in the old Bombay Police Commissionerate, one of the happier legacies of the British raj, a complex of old stone buildings in Crawford Market where they play the Retreat every evening at sundown and where every policeman leaves whatever he is doing and stands stiffly to attention. The police commissioner's office, naturally, is the best one in the commissionerate. Each man who occupies this coveted office adds to it his own little touch.

Amarjit Singh Samra, who replaced poor Shrikant Bapat at the height of the 1992-93 riots, used to hold a press conference here every evening for crime reporters. And Tyagi, yes, used to keep his doors open for every constable, sub-inspector and inspector who had something to say to him. Malhotra was a chain smoker, and his office had in addition to the smell of old teak and leather, the aroma of cigarette smoke. Mendonca almost lived in the office, Sundays too, and I have spent afternoons here with him in conversation over tea. Unfortunately, Mendonca spoke off the record and most of what he told me I could not use. Sahney, I had to call upon to make an apology. This newspaper had carried an advertisement for a movie on the front page that read like a news item. And since it said "Manisha Koirala Murdered", we had run into big trouble.

With the police, with the judiciary (Justice B. N. Srikrishna was outraged), with readers. My editor, Behram Contractor, feared arrest; so he and I called on Sahney and made our peace.

Distinguished men

There have been several other police commissioners in between Ribeiro and Singh whom I have met in their office. Like D. S. Soman, Vasant Saraf, Sudhakar Bhave, Shrikant Bapat, A. S. Samra. And they have all been distinguished policemen who have left some indelible stamp on the commissionerate before going. Most of them I still bump into at official functions or at social occasions. Marriages are the best times to catch up with all of Bombay's retired police commissioners. If the son or daughter of one of them is getting married, like Tyagi's and Mendonca's and Sahney's and Singh's have, all the former police commissioners turn up to bless the bridal couple. In fact, the entire police force does its bit to make sure the marriage reception goes off smoothly. And this can be anything, from police inspectors delivering the wedding invitation home to traffic constables helping motorists to park at the reception area.

The handing-over and taking-charge ceremony every time an old commissioner retires and a new man comes in, is also a nice time to meet these old gentlemen of the Bombay Police. They all turn up to wish the new commissioner well. Unfortunately, I missed the function yesterday. Which means I will have to visit the commissioner's office to meet Sharma. It is something I like doing. Meanwhile, Bombay has a new police commissioner on the first day of the new year. Welcome home, Ranjit Singh Sharma.