UP, Uttarakhand police to locals: Can’t act like Dabangg heroes

ALIGARH: “Reel police ko taali aur real police ko gaali,” (applause for reel police and abuse for real cops) is the plaintive message on WhatsApp that has gone out from a bunch of policemen unable to deal with “unreal expectations” of them from the general public.
The message, sent out and widely shared by members of the Provincial Police Service (PPS) of Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, has now had even senior cops joining the chorus and taking it upon themselves to educate ordinary folks that movies like Dabangg and Dhoom 3 don’t quite paint an accurate picture of policing.
It’s not as if policemen in UP and Uttarakhand don’t have enough worries to deal with, said some of the cops behind the peculiar appeal. “Now, the depiction of policemen in Bollywood movies is making things even harder for us,” one of them said. “Movies like Dabangg, Singham, Dhoom 3, Rowdy Rathore, Zanjeer and Deewar depict superhuman policemen, who spring in the air and clamber onto airplanes, for instance. Real policemen cannot quite work like that. Ordinary viewers forget that.”
The police officers, more than 50 of them, said they took to WhatsApp in an effort to sensitize people about constraints within which cops operate. On the PPS group chat, they are busy these days disseminating the long message in chaste Hindi and sharing it with other police branches and the media.
Speaking of the tendency to applaud policemen in the movies while abusing them in real life, the message asks why police often fail to crack cases. Answering that rhetorical question, it reads: “Elsewhere in the world, the general public cooperates with the police force and defers to the law. In India, people fear the police instead of the law...Films are a source of entertainment. The action-packed formula films are popular. In the end, the police restore order and peace. Every possible actor, Dharmendra, Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Sunny Deol, Ajay Devgn, Suneil Shetty and Akshay Kumar have performed the roles of impressive police officers. These actors receive thunderous applause, but audiences must see that there is a difference between reel and real police.”
The police officers also mention with some envy the manner in which soldiers are held in high esteem. “The police is not treated with the respect accorded to the army. If it were, every officer would be like Ajay Devgn (in Singham) or Amitabh Bachchan (in Zanjeer).”
Among the officers on the PPS WhatsApp group is circle officer Suresh Chandra Rawat of the Civil Lines, Aligarh. Rawat has been especially active in sending the message out to fellow officers.
“Few people understand our problems – the kinds of houses we live in, the tough and long hours we work, the days and nights we spend trying to nab criminals, and the frustration of seeing all our hard work turn to nothing when courts, in just five minutes, release the people we strive to nab. There are no holidays for us on festivals, we earn modest salaries. But when people watch Dhoom 3 they believe that if we jump in the air, an airplane will carry us along. If we dive into water, a boat will suddenly appear to take us to the shore. People should see the reel police is just not real,” Rawat said.
SK Singh, attached to the Vikas Nagar Circle of Dehradun, said the message has gone viral. “Watching such films, people imagine that is how cops should function. But there is a difference, what is entertaining on screen cannot be replicated in the real world,” he said.