BOMBAY, 18 April 2006 — If the Maharashtra government approves the recommendations of the state review committee that takes periodical review and gauges the level of threat perception to the lives of politicians, industrialists, bureaucrats, police officers and celebrities from the film industry, then it’s time for all of them to have their security downgraded.
According to state Home Ministry sources, the review committee has suggested downgrading the security of Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, BJP leader and former Home Minister Gopinath Munde, federal minister for power, Sushil Kumar Shinde, several leaders of the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, former Bombay Police Commissioner M.N. Singh, film star Amitabh Bachchan and Anil Ambani. These people do not have serious threats to their lives and therefore the security of these should be downgraded, commented a senior official.
Politicians and celebrities, demand security cover not from the point of threat perception but more as a status symbol and love to move around with a number of armed security personnel and police escort vehicles. Also there is tremendous pressure from political parties to provide “Z” plus security cover to their leaders. The government in order to please the political parties, does not verify the quantum of threat to the leaders, grants them the security cover, though these leaders have no risk to their lives, said a police official.
As a matter of fact, the review committee’s opinion in Bal Thackeray’s case appears justified as, due to his ill health, he rarely ventures out of his Bandra residence. Hence the large number of security personnel at his disposal are a sheer waste of the much-needed police manpower for other purposes.
The review committee has been urging the government for the last one year to downgrade the security cover to Thackeray, Amitabh Bachchan, Ambani and others, but the deputy chief minister and home minister R.R. Patil is dithering of taking a decision, and it is very unlikely that Patil would take the risk of taking a decision, due to political compulsions.
A long list has been prepared of people’s whose threat perception has scaled down, after a review by bureaucrats and police officials in the committee. Several names have been dropped from the list, but politicians who are accustomed to the status symbols are not willing to part with it, and are using all their political clout to scuttle the move of the review committee to down grade their security cover.
