The Allahabad High Court has issued one of its sharpest recent critiques of the Uttar Pradesh Police, observing that police officers in the State appear more loyal to the ruling dispensation than to the Constitution.
The remarks came in a judgment by Justice Vinod Diwakar while dealing with a case involving the Uttar Pradesh Gangsters and Anti-Social Activities (Prevention) Act, 1986. The Court was hearing a petition connected to criminal proceedings against three family members in what it described as a dispute that bore the features of a civil matter rather than organised criminality.
In a strongly worded order, the Court said Uttar Pradesh’s administrative machinery had long been vulnerable to political penetration, with transfers, postings and promotions often functioning as instruments of patronage rather than merit-based governance.
“The vertical loyalty of officers runs not toward the Constitution but toward the ruling dispensation,” the Court observed, adding that field officers, aware of the transfer-posting economy, often “calibrate their conduct to satisfy political superiors.”
A Case That Became a Wider Indictment
The immediate case involved proceedings under the Gangsters Act against members of a family. But the Court treated the matter as a window into a deeper institutional problem.
The Bench noted the case of Lalita Tyagi, a 35-year-old homemaker, who was allegedly arrested the day after a Gangsters Act FIR was lodged, despite no incriminating evidence being stated against her in the charge sheets. The Court recorded that she was compelled to remain in judicial custody for nearly 80 days.
Justice Diwakar described the arrest as “patently illegal, arbitrary, and wholly unwarranted in law.”
That finding moved the Court beyond the facts of a single case. It began examining what it saw as a recurring pattern in Uttar Pradesh: stringent criminal provisions being used against street-level or petty offenders, while actual organised crime networks remained largely untouched.
The Court said encounter killings, selective crackdowns and targeted use of the Gangsters Act against inconvenient individuals had repeatedly attracted judicial notice.
‘Procedural Safeguards Are Routinely Bypassed’
The judgment’s most serious concern was not merely that police powers were misused, but that legal safeguards were being treated as obstacles.
The Court observed that a considerable section of the officer cadre treats the rule of law not as a constitutional obligation but as an operational inconvenience. Arrests, it said, are often carried out without due process; FIRs are registered or suppressed with ulterior motives; and preventive detention provisions are invoked arbitrarily at the whims of officers.
“The procedural safeguards under the Code of Criminal Procedure, and now the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, are routinely bypassed,” the Court said. “Judicial orders are complied with in form but defeated in substance.”
This criticism goes to the heart of policing in a constitutional democracy. Arrest is not supposed to be a tool of pressure. Criminal law is not meant to become a substitute for political discipline, private vendetta or administrative convenience. The Court’s remarks suggest that, at least in the case before it, these lines had been blurred.
The judgment also noted that although the Supreme Court is considering issues connected to the 1986 Act, the High Court refrained from giving a final verdict on broader questions tied to the legislation. Yet it did not hold back from recording what it saw as systemic failures in the way police powers are exercised.
Home Secretary, Postings and Institutional Accountability
The Court also expressed concern over the role of the Home Secretary, the senior-most bureaucratic authority in the State’s law enforcement system. It asked the government to independently evaluate the suitability and operational effectiveness of officers in the department.
Justice Diwakar observed that certain officers who rose to the position of Home Secretary had, in practice, served as conduits for self-serving interests. Recommendations on postings, approvals of departmental proceedings and responses to court proceedings, the Court said, had in some instances reflected personal or extrinsic calculations rather than constitutionally informed administrative judgment.
The Court said constitutional governance cannot be held hostage to individual expediency or personal convenience. The State apparatus, it added, must remain answerable to law and the Constitution, not to any ruling establishment.
This portion of the judgment is especially significant because it moves beyond police misconduct at the field level. It points toward the administrative ecosystem that shapes police behaviour: postings, transfers, departmental proceedings, promotions and political expectations.
In the Court’s view, the problem is not merely one of rogue officers. It is a culture in which officers understand that their careers may depend less on constitutional fidelity and more on political alignment.
Bikru, Impunity and the Culture of Leniency
To illustrate what it described as institutional impunity, the Court referred to the 2020 Bikru incident, in which gangster Vikas Dubey and his associates ambushed a police team, killing eight police personnel, including a Deputy Superintendent of Police.
The Court noted that the officer responsible for overseeing the operation, after an SIT probe reportedly pointed to a nexus between police personnel and Dubey, received only a formal caution following departmental proceedings.
Justice Diwakar said it was difficult to reconcile such a disproportionately lenient outcome with the gravity of the supervisory failure involved. The Court described this as part of a wider culture of institutional impunity that emboldens those in authority to remain unaccountable.
The judgment also criticised what it called a feudal and politically patronised administrative ecosystem in Uttar Pradesh, where officers seen as loyalists are rewarded with preferred postings while those showing independence may be transferred to inconsequential assignments.
In the Court’s telling, this ecosystem produces a policing culture in which law is not always the primary reference point. Instead, officers may act according to political pressure, administrative incentives and fear of career consequences.
The ruling is likely to resonate beyond the individual petition because it captures a recurring concern in Indian policing: the gap between constitutional policing on paper and politically conditioned policing in practice.
For Uttar Pradesh, the Court’s words amount to more than judicial criticism. They are a warning that the credibility of law enforcement depends not merely on the power to arrest, invoke stringent laws or conduct crackdowns, but on whether those powers are exercised under the discipline of the Constitution.
