Zaheera Sheikh does a volte face in the Best Bakery case. Pappu Yadav openly holds court in a Bihar jail. No one can say for certain what the outcome of the Ayodhya demolition case will be because of varying police accounts since December 1992. The Bofors case is still being investigated, more than 15 years after it first surfaced. The 1984 riots cases still hang in balance. These are not ordinary quirks of the justice process. They are evidence of a rotting criminal justice system. The trouble is that the lawmakers, judicial bodies, bar associations, police and human rights activists have failed to reach a consensus on how to achieve this.

Three decades after the National Police Commission (NPC) suggested ways to revamp a highly politicised police structure, its report has remained on South Block’s dusty shelves. In the series of eight reports the NPC submitted, the one that relates to insulating the police’s investigative wing from administrative control of the executive is particularly relevant. But since the report was first submitted in 1979, the prospect of reform has become only hazier, the political class more divided and the police force more amenable to manipulation and graft.

Cases upon cases can be cited for how things can go so terribly wrong. When Bofors first came to light, there was a Congress government. It took several years and a non-Congress government to pursue the investigation with any vigour, by which time the trail had gone cold. It was similar in the Ayodhya demolition case. The first police reports filed on the day of the demolition hardly mention the presence of any saffron big shots. Reason: there was a BJP government in power in Uttar Pradesh.

The NPC itself was not the first attempt of its kind. Between 1959 and 1967, the Kerala Police Reorganisation Committee, the West Bengal Police Commission, the Punjab Commission and the Tamil Nadu Commission pointed to grave political interference in police functioning and sought remedies similar to those recommended by the NPC. Later, the Shah Commission, examining the excesses of the Emergency, had suggested the government seriously consider the “feasibility and desirability of insulating the police from the politics of the country and employing it scrupulously on duties for which alone it is by law intended.” The worst projections of these experts have come true. The police have turned into handmaidens of the political party in power.

It is worth taking a look at what the NPC proposed in its crucial eighth report. It felt that “a fresh examination is necessary of the role and performance of the police both as a law enforcement agency and an institution to protect the rights of citizens enshrined in the Constitution”. In order to make the investigative functions of the police independent of any ‘‘extraneous influences’’, it proposed that the police chief be given a statutory minimum tenure. To defeat the blackmailing tactics of politicians, it suggested that changes be brought in to stop rampant and whimsical transfers of police officials who don’t toe the government line. In some states, the average tenure of a district police chief does not exceed six months.

Compounding these already formidable problems is a typical Indian malaise: the lack of consensus. In 2003, the Malimath Committee — instituted by the NDA government — proposed radical changes in the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that India had adopted. It suggested that the inquisitorial style of European or French justice be adopted. The Malimath proposals included easier convictions, reducing the threshold of evidence, reversing the burden of proof as it exists in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and, controversially, making admissions before the police admissible as evidence. In other words, turn the police into public prosecutors so that the phenomenon of the accused or victims turning hostile in courts is held in check. But critics have pointed out to a number of lacunae that the Malimath Committee apparently ignored including the fact that there are at present nearly three lakh undertrials in India, a majority of whom belong to the poorer sections of society.