Mightier than the Bullet: The Writings of Julio Riberio
Image courtesy: Yoda Press
In Hope for Sanity, a collection of columns filled with nuggets of wisdom, empathy, and advice, decorated former policeman Julio Riberio emerges as a “conscience keeper” for our nation.
I was born in October 1984, just a fortnight before prime minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her bodyguards. It was an incident that marked the apex of turmoil flanked by pro-Khalistani movements in Punjab, ‘Operation Blue Star’, and the organized anti-Sikh pogroms that followed in Delhi, Punjab, and across the country.
I would hear of Julio Riberio years later, when I would be old enough to better comprehend the world. As it was for most Indians of my generation, I knew of Riberio only through anecdotes and heresy, as a larger-than-life figure who served as the general director of Punjab Police, and led what was called a “ferocious crackdown” during the worst periods of insurgency and terrorism in the state. These anecdotes painted him in extremes: he was either praised for being ruthless to separatists, gangsters, and terrorists; or criticized for the collateral damage caused by his supposed ruthlessness. He was even credited—or discredit—for the “bullet for bullet” approach by the police, matching each act of aggression with equal retaliation in dealing with violent offenders.
Whether or not these attributes credited to him were true, Riberio has spent the better part of his retirement years projecting a more nuanced and more complex picture of himself. As a regular columnist to The Times of India, DNA, The Indian Express, The Tribune, Scroll, and more, the decorated former police officer has emerged as a statesman to keep a check on our nation’s moral fibre, who, with empathy and a strict sense of moral protocol, has become one of India’s “conscience keepers”.
Those last few words are quoted directly from columnist and editor Samar Halarnkar, who wrote the foreward to the recently-published book Hope for Sanity (Yoda Press, 2023), featuring a selection of columns written by Riberio for various journals from 2002-2021. Now in his mid-90s, Riberio writes from his hometown Mumbai—where he was once the city’s police commissioner—commenting on a variety of quandaries faced by the city and the nation in contemporary times.
The writings published here also include “I Didn’t Say It, Then Who Invented ‘Bullet for Bullet’?”, first published in The Tribune India in 2019, where Riberio contradicts the very phrase that had once brought him fame and notoriety in the ‘80s. The phrase simplified Riberio’s approach to one where violence only begat more violence. After terrorists killed six Punjab Police officers in a daring rescue of the militant Sukha Sipahi, Riberio recalls, “I said that I would teach my men to fight. They had been provided with weapons and ammunition. They would be conditioned to use those weapons in self-defence.” (54) This proclamation was translated into a clear, aggressive stance, “Bullet for Bullet” by Arun Nehru—then the minister of Home Affairs—who had “put these words into the mouth of The Hindustan Times correspondent” (55), Riberio writes. Despite his disavow of the phrase, Riberio ending up accepting it as the title of his 1998 memoir, Bullet for Bullet: My Life as a Police Officer.
In clear, concise language, Riberio has written columns that may now be considered particularly ‘bold’, in a country where any criticism of the government and the prime minister’s action is censored or marked as seditious
Much of Riberio’s writings published in Hope for Sanity are similarly complex, as he doesn’t shy away from critiquing the same police organizations in which he carved his illustrious career. He specifically rejects and criticizes unnecessary violence and brutality from the Indian police, often highlighting his disdain for “fake encounters” (staged shootouts where the detained accused are killed before trial) and of policemen who have gained fame as “encounter specialists”. In “With Sachin Vaze’s Arrest, a Warning About Glorifying ‘Encounter Specialists’”, Riberio writes,
Since the judicial process system has failed to function like it was expected to, shooting criminals down in the street represented raw justice as an alternative.
…
Police officers turned rogue are infinitely more dangerous than the criminals they pursue daily. They enjoy the protection of the uniform and consequently become a law unto themselves. The impunity the uniform enjoys enables them to kill without fear. (126)
There are few in India who have tangled firsthand with the many contradictions of India’s police forces—the noble, the ignoble—like Riberio. In a career that began in Mumbai in the ‘50s, Riberio became the city’s police commissioner in the early ‘80s, served as the director general to the Central Reserve Police Force [CRPF], the director general of police in Punjab, the DGP in Gujarat, and more advisory positions in the government. He has encountered mafia, terrorists, and politicians, survived an attack in Jalandhar in 1986, and an assassination attempt in 1991 while he was the Indian Ambassador to Romania. In 1987 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian award.
It is this wealth of experience that has perhaps offered Riberio his unshaking resolve in his post-retirement life, as exemplified by the writings published in this volume. In clear, concise language, Riberio has written columns that may now be considered particularly ‘bold’, in a country where any criticism of the government and the prime minister’s action is censored or marked as seditious. Hope for Sanity’s very first column is “Lost Middle Ground”, written for The Times of India in 2002 soon after the Gujarat riots.
My inquiries showed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (henceforth BJP) government of Narendra Modi, with a VHP activist named Govardhanbhai Jhadafia as Minister of State for Home, had systematically emasculated the leadership by placing pliable officers and men of its choice in every possible position at the cutting edge. Gujarat is easily the worst (or best) case study of a police force becoming politicised by the misuse of the power of appointments and transfers. (2-3)
As per form, Riberio doesn’t mince his words, writing his informed truths, and calling out the man who has since become the most powerful individual in the land. “Lost Middle Ground” also proves to be incredibly prophetic in predicting the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment from the seeds that had been sowed in Gujarat: “What I worry about most is that the communal poison has spread so deep in the hearts and minds of the Hindu middle-class that it will have to be extracted by super-human efforts before we can hope to re-establish any semblance of communal unity.” (4)
The former chief minister of Gujarat is now the country’s prime minister. With a meteoric rise in anti-Muslim hate speech and religious violence in recent years, the poison emanating off the Gujarat riots has now intoxicated much of the country.
Much of Riberio’s preoccupation in these essays is communal unity, and specifically, an urgent interest in ensuring that the individuals in power—the politicians, the judiciary, and the police—work with intent in preserving that unity. After decades of high-stakes, on-field experience, Riberio’s columns read like nuggets of philosophical truths in dealing with fraught relationships between the individual, the community, and the nation. He applies his experiences countering terrorism in Punjab to advice the state’s approaching towards the rise in Islamic terrorism and insurgency in Kashmir: “My hands-on experience of fighting terrorism in Punjab taught me that there is only one classical response to the havoc unleashed by fanatics. While going hammer and tongs at the brainwashed diehards, the state and its agents have to win over the community to which the terrorists belong. (5)”
“Terrorists,” Riberio continues, “cannot survive without the sympathy of their own co-religionists or community…The obvious solution would be to remove this feeling of alienation from their minds by treating them as equal citizens of this great country with equal rights as well as, of course, responsibilities.” (5-6)
Riberio eventually turns the lens to gaze inwards, too: three and a half decades after the violence in Punjab, he muses on the importance of psychological victories, beyond those on the field of battle, in the 2020 column “A Softer Touch Could Have Won People Over”: “Winning hearts and minds should be the main objective of the state.” (76)
Elsewhere I this collection, Riberio tackles other important national issues, including the 2012 Nirbhaya case in Delhi, the Delhi Police’s political balance between the local and union government, the 2019 Pulwama attack, his personal experiences with powerful political figures like Bal Thackeray, and police insensitivity towards victims of sexual assault.
It is the police institutions—from Delhi to Mumbai, from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, and beyond—for whom Riberio reserves his most forthright advice and criticism. Just a day into the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, Riberio wrote a sharp criticism of the city’s security and response lapses in a DNA column titled “Mumbai Police Needs Leadership” (9). He also notes the allegations of corruption in the Delhi police, stating in a 2015 article, “It is widely rumoured that in Delhi, police officers do not react to complaints even of cognisable crime unless they are first paid!” (30).
Riberio’s post-retirement war of the words against policing came under a wider scanner recently, as exchange of letters between him and Delhi’s police commissioner SN Shrivastava went viral. Riberio criticised the Delhi Police’s handling of the riots in Northeast Delhi in 2020, particularly calling out the allegations that the police heavily favoured the majority Hindu community, while Muslims faced more arrests and suffered a greater loss of life and property. This letter exchange provided a fascinating glimpse into the perspectives of powerful men, tasked with maintaining the safety and peaceful balance of our communities.
In encountering his columns, we aren’t greeted with the “bullet for bullet” supercop; instead, we meet a version of the man who displays the revolutionary power of words over the vengeful dart of bullets, who holds himself to a higher moral standard, and expects the same from his fellow countrymen.
Riberio’s own perspective often dabbles towards a sense of pessimism in police institutions gone awry. In his 2017 column “Panchkula Everywhere” about the chaos that followed Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh’s arrest in Punjab, Riberio wrote the truth that most citizens already suspect, “The police in India today are not expected to uphold the rule of law. They are trained to do that but as soon as officers are absorbed into the system, they quickly learn that all they are required to do is uphold the rule of the party in power.” (44) It’s a damning declaration by a man who was once an insider of the same institution.
In a more specific accusation, Riberio blamed the administration—the prime minister, the home minister—of attempting to “destroy our institutions” after Rakesh Astana, an IPS officer from Gujarat, was appointed police commissioner of New Delhi just days before he was slated to retire. “A police force that does not attempt to provide service to the people but treats the people as zombies who bow and scrape before the rulers is not an ideal to strive for.” (145)
One of the most intriguing columns in this collection is the 2015 piece “The Life & Death of Ravindra Patil”. Riberio shares the story of Patil, a young, inexperienced constable from a small town who was asked to serve as security for the Bollywood superstar Salman Khan, and was exposed to “fast cars, the best Scotch and late nights.” (37-38). Patil would go on to become the primary witness in Khan's 2002 DUI hit-and-run case, but his stand only led to his downfall. He would be suspended from service, divorced from his wife, disowned by his parents. The stress drove Patil further into substance abuse and diseases, and he died in his 30s in 2007, just five years after the incident. Riberio’s words here shimmer with a close interest to detail, a straightforwardness that paints a larger picture of poetic tragedy. “He was reduced to a pile of bones and weighed a mere 30 kilograms. He moved and spoke only with difficulty. The doctors thought he was a beggar who had managed to collect a few rupees to hire a cab to come to the hospital.” (39)
Elsewhere, the collection includes Riberio’s reflections on policing in the George Floyd case in the USA, the arrest of actress Rhea Chakraborty after actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide, and now corrupt institutions “create” criminals like Vikas Dubey in Uttar Pradesh (who was killed in an ‘police encounter’ in 2020).
The title for this collection is borrowed from a column “Hail Judges Who Seek to Dispense Justice” for The Tribune in 2020, where Riberio commended the few Indian judges who have resisted the pressure of current-day politics, resisting the favours they would be offered for toeing the party line, and making bold decisions despite the potential for testing the government’s spite. Riberio cites the example of Justices TS Nalawade and MG Sewlikar of the Bombay High Court, who criticized the charge by the government that the Muslim clerics who attended the markaz of the Tablighi Jamaat had been responsible for the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. Then, Riberio shared the case of Justice Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court, writing,
When he was shifted to the Punjab and Haryana High Court almost overnight before the day he was expected to deliver an order unfavourable to the party in power and its hate-mongers, almost the entire bar turned up to bid him farewell. That gesture of the bar afforded comfort to believers in justice that there still is hope for sanity and justice in our country. (89)
Much of Riberio’s written work is a reflection of the angst being felt in this country: of broken communal bridges, a tampered judiciary, and a corrupt police force. Often, the deluge of daily news can feel overbearing, where anger, vitriol, and the greedy actions of a power-hungry government have pushed the nation to the brink of collective madness. But, just like the title of this collection, Riberio’s words offer some hope of sanity, a silver lining around the dark cloud that reminds us that there are still men and women in this country who would rather build institutions rather than seeing them burn.
In encountering his columns, we aren’t greeted with the “bullet for bullet” supercop; instead, we meet a version of the man who displays the revolutionary power of words over the vengeful dart of bullets, who holds himself to a higher moral standard, and expects the same from his fellow countrymen. Our nation would be a much saner place if more leaders in positions wielding great power—our police commissioners, our judges, our MLAs, our prime minister—held themselves to that standard, too.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, and the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
