Rogue Ranks

Few things corrode a democracy faster than a police force at war with itself. Maharashtra has now been offered a lurid glimpse of that pathology in the extraordinary feud between two of its most powerful former police chiefs, Rashmi Shukla and Sanjay Pandey, each accusing the other’s camp of bending the law into a political weapon.

Five days before her retirement, Shukla, then Maharashtra’s director-general of police, has lobbed a political grenade into the home department. Acting on a Special Investigation Team’s report, she recommended that an FIR be filed against her predecessor Pandey, along with two other senior officers, for allegedly conspiring during the Uddhav Thackeray–led MVA government to frame Devendra Fadnavis and Eknath Shinde in a revived 2016 extortion case.

Pandey, who headed the force when the MVA coalition ran the state, denies the plot. His allies note that neither Fadnavis nor Shinde was ever arrested or named as an accused. Known for her closeness to the ruling BJP, leaders of the Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT) have dismissed Shukla as a “BJP and RSS worker.” When police chiefs are accused of partisan loyalty as casually as party hacks, the rot is already deep.

Yet the allegations, if even partly true, are grotesque. According to the SIT, businessman Sanjay Punamiya was pressed while in custody to provide statements implicating Fadnavis and Shinde in an urban land-ceiling scam. A re-investigation of a long-closed Thane case was allegedly triggered by a conveniently timed application delivered straight to the then DGP, Pandey.

The BJP, sensing blood, has seized on the affair with relish. Its leaders speak darkly of an ‘invisible hand,’ alluding to Uddhav Thackeray, as directing the police to neutralise rivals.

Shukla’s own timing invites suspicion. Given the looming civic polls, why submit such a momentous recommendation just days before demitting office? Her defenders say she was merely fulfilling her duty on the basis of a report delivered two months earlier. Her critics see a last-minute settling of scores, or worse, an attempt to lock in a narrative before a successor could take a different view.

The deeper scandal is not whether Pandey or Shukla is right. It is that Maharashtra’s police, once among India’s more professional forces, have been reduced to a battlefield for political vendettas. When every change of government is followed by a purge of investigations and counter-investigations, the law ceases to be a shield and becomes a cudgel.

Democracies depend on a simple bargain: politicians make the laws; police enforce them without fear or favour. In Maharashtra that bargain has been shredded. Senior officers appear to have behaved like political fixers, while politicians treat the police as just another wing of their party machinery.

The Shukla–Pandey feud has revealed a force that no longer answers to professional norms but to shifting political winds. Until that changes, Maharashtra’s police will remain not guardians of the law but contestants in an endless, ugly gang war.