Before independence, under colonial administration, the police operated entirely under the control of civil administration – and colonial rulers had a clearly defined goal for it. Providing justice to their subjects was, on paper, one of the government’s stated duties, but it existed firmly within, and subordinate to, the wider interests of British colonial rule. In routine matters, the rulers generally left justice-delivering institutions alone, which meant law and order was maintained to a genuinely commendable standard – not because the system was designed for fairness, but because there was no electoral politics, no constituency, and no organized pressure group competing to bend it. Deputy Commissioners and Superintendents of Police, as direct representatives of colonial rule with no local political interest of their own to protect, could enforce the law without having to answer to anyone nearby.
Independence changed that arrangement completely. Ultimate authority passed from a distant king and parliament to Pakistan’s own citizens, who in turn handed it to their elected representatives – which meant the police and justice system came under direct political control for the first time. In any political system, elected representatives have to keep their voters in mind, and that opened the door to political interference and pressure in a way the colonial system never allowed. This is, in one sense, simply what democratic political life looks like, and up to a point it is exactly how it should work – every political process generates real democratic energy, ours included. The problem is that no mechanism was ever built to absorb that pressure while still protecting the balance of the justice system’s institutions. Any machine that runs for years without maintenance eventually wears down in places, and that is precisely what has happened to policing here: daily political interference from influential figures has compounded, visibly, night after night, into a system the public now holds directly responsible for its own dysfunction – increasingly prone to abusing its own authority, acting on behalf of one side rather than enforcing the law evenly, with real people caught in the middle and sometimes actually hurt as a result, as the retired police officer Muhammad Abbas Khan documented in his study Police and Democratic Spirit.
Interference From the Very First Day
Political interference shows up at every level, starting with recruitment itself. Police hiring runs through three tiers: the constable, recruited at the district level; the Assistant Sub-Inspector, recruited by the district’s Senior Superintendent of Police; and the Assistant Superintendent, recruited through a selection board’s recommendation to the Deputy Inspector General. Superintendents of Police and above are recruited federally, as members of the Police Service of Pakistan – the successor to the old Indian Police Service.
This layered system has been badly disrupted. Merit-based eligibility rules have been almost entirely set aside, and recruitment has effectively become a political process. In the recent past, influential political figures – members of the national and provincial assemblies – were simply handed quotas for recruiting constables. People were hired through these quotas without meeting the required education or physical standards. Predictably, those recruited this way became loyal to the patron who got them the job, not to the department itself. They spend more time serving that patron than fulfilling their actual duties, and department rules and discipline effectively don’t apply to them – they take leave and return as they please, and if their patron wants restrictions imposed on their work, they impose them; otherwise they answer to no one but the person who put them there.
In 1993, Punjab’s caretaker government formed a committee specifically to assess the scale of irregular recruitment across government departments. That committee found that between 1985 and 1993, various departments had ignored recruitment rules entirely to hire roughly 25,000 people – a figure that, in the police force alone, included around a thousand inspectors and assistant sub-inspectors, alongside thousands of constables.
Posts for Sale
The same caretaker government discovered that all vacant posts had simply been divided up among individuals loyal to the outgoing government, who then filled them with their own preferred, often unqualified candidates. Written orders authorizing appointments were reportedly being issued on plain paper. Multiple ASI and constable posts were sold outright – and some of the people who bought their way in went on to become criminals themselves, now carrying a police ID.
Muhammad Abbas Khan documented that during the caretaker period, hundreds of Assistant Sub-Inspector and Inspector posts, recruited via loosened merit rules across a single province, went to candidates with no regard for the required age limits – some over fifteen years past the cutoff – or the required education and physical standards; several didn’t even meet the minimum height requirement. Some had criminal records of their own. All of it was authorized directly by the province’s top administrator.
A group of Assistant Sub-Inspector recruits who had gone through the training college’s rigorous coursework and exams reacted furiously when they saw this pattern – officers being recruited on recommendation, bypassing all of it. They marched, in a procession, from the training college to Lahore, all the way to the Chief Minister’s office, to demand the government honor its promise that recruitment would only happen through proper training and examination. The promise held for a while and then quietly lapsed. Several officers who obtained their positions without ever sitting the exam are, today, still passing judgment on the public and the very society these recruits and the examination process were meant to serve – the outcome of a policy that, Khan notes, likely benefited a handful of individuals at a steep and lasting cost to the public.
An Assistant Sub-Inspector who failed to clear his required exam and was accordingly dismissed from the department managed to have new orders issued reinstating himself – twelve times over. In the end he wasn’t merely reinstated but promoted to full Inspector, without ever completing the basic training course the position formally requires; the time he was supposed to have spent training was simply counted as service credit toward the promotion instead. This individual went on to be posted to one of the most sensitive police stations in Lahore, along with additional perks from senior officials. The selection was, by Khan’s account, both wrong and disastrous – the department, government, and public soon learned, through this man’s incompetence and inexperience, that Pakistan’s army had built up a genuinely dangerous gulf between itself and elements of the police, one the police proved unable to match the army in confronting. Khan writes that the situation grew serious enough to reach the federal level before it was, eventually, resolved through considerable effort.
What Happens to Officers Who Say No
The department’s discipline and internal rules being undermined by interference is one form of political pressure. A second, related form is the retaliation aimed at officers who refuse to go along with it.
One assistant sub-inspector had been hired through outright bribery – a political figure had paid ten thousand rupees to get him recruited. When that recruitment fell through anyway, the political figure demanded his money back. This example, along with the earlier ones, appears in the book Policing in Pakistan by M.A. Chaudhry.
Pakistan’s police has its share of uglier stories too. In recent years, Karachi in particular has produced no shortage of examples of political postings and transfers driving how the force actually operates. Bribery to secure appointments or postings surfaces frequently. One especially ugly case began in Bahawalpur, where a powerful, well-connected man wanted a relative recruited as an Assistant Sub-Inspector; the Deputy Inspector General of Police refused, and the man went straight to the Inspector General of Police for Punjab instead, offering a bribe. That man was thrown out – but the IG himself was transferred out of his post shortly afterward, and news of it spread as far as the IG’s own office before he even left.
Political interference shows up constantly in the mundane, day-to-day work of the department too, and press reports supply plenty of examples. One worth remembering: a traffic sergeant fined a politically connected person for a traffic violation. The connected individual filed a political complaint against him. The DIG at the time was transferred out over the affair, and the sergeant himself, who had been posted within a few miles of Lahore, was reassigned to a district roughly two years’ distance away and stayed a traffic sergeant there for the better part of a decade – people used to say he might as well have been sent to jail. It’s worth remembering that the sergeant’s actual offense was writing a ticket in accordance with the law.
In Sargodha district, a locally influential figure surrounded a police station with armed supporters and demanded the removal of the officer in charge, in order to install his own preferred candidate as SHO. In another district, a district police officer’s pick for a station commander was blocked from taking his post at the direction of a local figure, who kept his own preferred candidate seated at the desk instead – until pressure eventually eased and the situation resolved itself.
In Muzaffargarh district, an Assistant Sub-Inspector who had reached retirement age had his service extended anyway, purely because local political figures didn’t want anyone else posted in his place.
A particularly serious example comes from Gujranwala district. The provincial Crime Branch’s Anti-Narcotics Task Force recovered 15 kilograms of opium from seven men and shut down the operation. One of the men involved was politically well-connected, and the case became a political headache for a serving MPA in the province, who intervened. Officers who resisted the pressure were forcibly attacked at their own station: an armed mob broke in, beat the officers present, opened fire, snatched back the arrested suspect along with the weapons that had been seized, and made off with them. Police did register a case over the assault, but no legal proceedings against those responsible ever materialized. After nearly six years in limbo, the case was formally closed and archived in 1991, without any real legal outcome.
Political interference also reshapes the everyday performance of duty in a quieter way – officers deliberately routing investigations toward a preferred, sympathetic investigating officer. A survey in Gujrat district found that 81 percent of murder investigations were transferred between different officers at some point, with some cases changing hands ten separate times, each handover further degrading the quality of the investigation and, in a number of cases, effectively burying it.
Taken together, these examples make one thing painfully clear: political interference has genuinely devastated Pakistan’s police, and the department has come to look, to much of the public, like an instrument of whoever happens to hold political power at the moment.
Not Only Politics
Political interference isn’t the whole story, though. Internal factors have damaged the department’s standing too, and grown the misuse of the powers officers already have. Educational attainment inside the force is genuinely low: department-wide figures put 3.6 percent of officers as fully illiterate, 6.6 percent educated only to primary level, 34.7 percent to middle school, 44.2 percent having passed matriculation, 6.3 percent with an intermediate qualification, 2.4 percent with a bachelor’s degree, and a mere 0.06 percent holding a master’s or law degree. Broken down by rank, the gap is stark: 77.3 percent of constables have only the most basic education, dropping to 11.6 percent among head constables, and falling to just 0.5 percent among Deputy Superintendents of Police. As education climbs the ranks, education levels rise – but the base of the pyramid, where officers do the great majority of direct public contact, is the least educated tier of all.
Sekiene Kenichi, head of the Japanese police system delegation that studied Pakistan’s force as part of a United Nations review mission, proposed two central reforms: first, that police work be freed from political one-sidedness and placed under reliable democratic control; and second, that recruitment and promotion within the force be based on merit and merit alone. Genuine as those internal problems are – incompetence, weak professional skill, dishonesty, bribery, favoritism – the department did, at least on paper, once maintain an internal oversight system meant to catch exactly this kind of decay: senior officers were required to inspect every police station and examine registered cases, investigation quality, and any signs of arbitrary detention or false witness testimony, on a running quarterly basis, with inspection reports sent up the chain to the DIG. Today, that kind of oversight has largely become something closer to an old story from another era.
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