It was during the Asian Games held in Delhi in November 1982 that the Kiran Bedi phenomenon first surfaced in an India media on the cusp of proliferation. Posted in Delhi as DCP Traffic, Bedi was asked to manage the traffic as well as the petty corruption that plagued the department. There is an image from that time of a “no nonsense” incorruptible woman cop who hired a crane and made India’s notoriously arrogant political elite bow to her ways by carting their illegally parked cars away from the streets of Delhi. Other measures included spot fines and presenting the likes of the controversial Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari considered close to Indira Gandhi, with parking tickets. This was an early example of Indian democracy at work, a demonstration that an individual functionary could presume to correct the system and deliver basic services to a long deprived citizenry in India’s rapidly growing cities.
Kiran Bedi caught the media’s fancy and seemed to tap into a very middle class aspiration for change, a feeling which has grown even as despair at the chaos in urban India has multiplied in the last three decades. That this unlikely figure had wormed its way out of an aggressively patriarchal North Indian society added to its powerful if slightly perverse appeal. As the recent horrific rapes show, this is after all a deeply misogynistic society where the girl child is often wished out of existence and to be a woman is to be humiliated in abominable ways. In more subtle and persistent forms of discrimination, daughters with substantial career achievements are told they are as good as sons by elders who still consider this the highest form of praise.
Wide angle view
This is the universe of Dare to Do , a book on the turbulent life and times of Kiran Bedi, the first woman officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS). Bedi joined the elite service in 1972 and took voluntary retirement in 2007 when she felt she was denied her rightful appointment as Commissioner, Delhi Police, a force she has known well. A commissioned biography, this has sections where the subject even makes first person interventions. The book presents a wide angle look at a career spent in fighting off several challenges linked to her innovative and transparent style of functioning with a strong vision for preventing crime. In a system which does not deliver her enthusiasm has been rewarded with incessant transfers, accusations of insubordination and charges of being a publicity fiend whose stints in various departments have tended to end in unconventional ways. The book begins with a graphic account of the Republic Day parade at Rajpath Delhi in 1975. Kiran Bedi as a young officer led the Delhi police march past and the narrative, revealing its unabashed adoration of its subject, informs us that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi “virtually jumped out of her seat with a sense of personal pride and joy”.
The young woman leading an all male contingent with a heavy sword in hand is a powerful image and right from the beginning the book continues to show us Bedi at her inspirational best although the account is sometimes marred by a slightly exaggerated sense of her own destiny and the trials she faced. Four years later in 1979 she was to face a group of angry Akalis, swords in hand marching towards Rashtrapati Bhavan on the same Rajpath protesting the Sant Samagam held earlier by Nirankari Sikhs. Using only an oversized helmet and baton, Bedi charged at the mob holding them off after the men in her party had disappeared, a feat for which she was awarded the Police Medal for Gallantry. But her much lauded efficiency has always invited suspicious mistrust from her seniors and political leaders whose faults she has exposed often with disingenuous directness. As the chief of traffic operations in Goa she made it compulsory for VIPs to park their cars in a bay and walk a few steps to the annual Exposition of Francis Xavier instead of driving right up as they were used to. This matter was considered grave enough to be taken up by the chief minister Pratapsingh Rane. Bizarre as it sounds, Bedi was summoned to his office and asked to apologise to a minister who had been made to walk. When her daughter fell ill a month later with nephritic syndrome, her leave application cleared by her IGP was held up by the Secretariat. There is no doubt also that a section of the powerful men in government and in the police department who found fault with Bedi disliked her quite simply for being a woman.
Hagiography
These are doubtless inspiring stories sometimes flawed by self-promoting hagiography. They might have been more effective if they had been rendered in a more matter-of-fact tone. This style of writing adds to the white noise of excessive self regard and sometimes gives rise to ambivalence in the reader about their true worth. This is a pity because there really is so much to commend in this account. Bedi’s home grown and self taught feminism based on common sense for instance is something that can speak to Indian women across class and generations.
In a chapter towards the end of her book, “Educated Women But Still Disempowered”, she makes a very pragmatic assessment of women who are party to their own loss of status after marriage. This is a system that seeks to establish men as policy makers and women as “acquirers of gold and jewellery”, she warns. By suggesting that the onus for living honestly and with dignity whether as women, citizens or government functionaries was on the individual, Bedi’s life and career help us restore a sense of the rightness of things in the midst of countless challenges.
