Imkong Walling
Bureaucratic secrecy is a characteristic of state administration. Withholding certain information deemed sensitive in nature, pertaining to national security, is an accepted norm or rather enforced with legal sanction.
A standard practice of governments, the Nagaland state government is no exception. The Right to Information Act notwithstanding, the tradition runs deep in the administrative set up and the police department has been one that has thrived in this aspect.
It however gets unhealthy when the tried and tested practice of state secrecy is applied even when it pertains to corruption and misconduct of employees. The recent incident involving some 13 police personnel and the way it was kept under wraps by the Nagaland Police Headquarters, before the lid was blown, being a prime example.
In this case, however, a court paper appeared to be the undoing of the supposedly closely guarded secret. The paper, in the public domain online, happened to be an ‘order’ issued by the Kohima Bench of the Gauhati High Court on October 21 in connection to a ‘pre arrest’ bail plea filed by 13 police personnel of the Narcotic Police Station (PS), Kohima.
With the secret out and the incident undeniably true, the PHQ had to issue an explanation on October 22 in the form of a press release. The PHQ clarification, with its choice of vague words, was anything but an explainer.
It clearly was an attempt at downplaying the gravity of the September 10 incident, as stated in the press release, by dropping a word like misappropriation. How 10 gold bars were “misappropriated” was not explained, with the sentence stopping short at “without following due procedures.”
Besides that, all that could be grasped from the statement was the registration of a criminal case against the 13 personnel and the PHQ placing them under suspension pending departmental disciplinary inquiry.
Questions like: what/which protocol was not followed by the personnel, origin and quantity of the gold; where, when and how it was caught were not answered. The main question the PHQ did not cater to was the secrecy surrounding the alleged misappropriation.
Biased treatment of two separate cases but similar in nature was glaring. One was triumphantly announced, the other was kept confidential. As opposed to the triumphant announcement of October 3 about the Narcotic Police Station personnel catching smuggled gold, weighing 48.14kg and worth over Rs 22cr at the Khuzama Inter-state check-post – nothing was made public about the case pertaining to the 13 personnel until the information became public through other channels.
The 13 Narcotic PS personnel reportedly did not inform their superiors or the PHQ of the gold they seized. The higher ups came to know of it only a few days later prompting a hush-hush Departmental inquiry. But mouths are hard to keep shut when it is gold.
The writer is a Principal Correspondent at The Morung Express. Comments can be sent to imkongwalls@gmail.com
