Celebrated--but Controversial--Police Chief in India Is Replaced

He has been India’s most celebrated super-cop, his name synonymous with muscular and ruthless measures to fight terrorism--until this week, that is.

On New Year’s Day, K.P.S. Gill was unceremoniously replaced as director general of Punjab’s police. For many Indians, the Lahore-born Sikh with the brooding gaze is a national hero for crushing a separatist rebellion in the country’s northern breadbasket state.

Others view Gill’s removal differently. “He has brutalized the force and was exploiting it for personal gain,” a senior colleague in the elite Indian Police Service said in a newspaper interview.

To critics, the 61-year-old career police officer came to personify a corrupt and out-of-control bureaucracy willing to break the very law it is sworn to uphold.

Under Gill’s command, Punjab’s police all but eradicated a militant Sikh insurgency that once seemed to threaten the integrity of India itself. But independent human rights groups inside and outside the country accused Gill’s “boys” of summarily killing many suspects in cold blood after their arrests, then fraudulently reporting the deaths as the result of nonexistent shootouts with police.

In many cases, Punjabi police officers have been accused of brutality, torture or shaking down citizens for money.

In its 1995 report, Amnesty International charged Gill’s force with carrying out most of the unexplained “disappearances” in Punjab. During the more than six years that Gill commanded Punjab’s police, the force became a “killer machine,” former state Chief Secretary A.S. Pooni said.

The lanky, charismatic Gill has also been dragged into court by a female member of the Indian Administrative Service on accusations of “outraging her modesty.” The affair has provided more ammunition for critics who see Gill as a dinosaur out of step with modern Indian trends.

The fateful turn in Gill’s career came Aug. 31, when his political mentor, Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh, died in a bomb blast in the Punjabi capital of Chandigarh. Gill was in charge of Singh’s security, and the murder took place in the top-security zone of Punjab’s secretariat building.

The state’s new chief minister, Harcharan Singh Brar, reportedly was irked when Gill refused to carry out his orders to shuffle senior officers to bring the police under tighter civilian control. And a shuffle at the Home Ministry in New Delhi last autumn deprived Gill of a highly placed protector.

The end came Sunday night in a terse message faxed by the Home Ministry to authorities in Punjab, ordering Gill relieved of his duties.

“I felt relieved, relieved on two counts: One, I will not have to take directives; two, I will not be bothered for favors,” Gill said afterward. “I have my little responsibilities, my family, my property.”

Punjabis will be watching to see if Gill’s departure fans the dying embers of the Khalistan separatist movement. The government of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao will also have to decide whether to heap honors on a longtime public servant or let slip into oblivion a controversial figure who increasingly came to symbolize to Punjabis a reign of police terror.