Zero-tolerance on drugs and other illegal activities, nobody will be spared
New Mangaluru Police Commissioner warns Rowdies in an interview with Vartha Bharati
Mangaluru: IPS Officer Dr. Harsha PS, took charge as the new Commissioner of Mangaluru Police on Friday, August 9 after his predecessor Sandeep Patil was transferred to Bengaluru as the Joint Commissioner of city’s crime department.
Having served in the Dakshina Kannada more than a decade back as the Assistant Superintendent of Police in Puttur, Dr. Harsha says he is much familiar with the people of the District and knows how things work in Coastal Karnataka.
Vartha Bharati Sub-editor Ismail Zaorez recently caught up with the incoming officer for an exclusive interview at his office, wherein he spoke on a range of topics and elaborated on his plans as the City's Commissioner of Police.
Excerpts from the interview:
What are your views about Mangaluru?
Mangaluru is one of the most cosmopolitan, globally relevant and fast-growing city of India. It is also a pride of Karnataka with very rich cultural roots. It’s been a hub of education and one of very sound health cities with a history of having accommodated people of all religions and cultures.
What will be your priorities as the Commissioner of Mangaluru City Police?
The priority will be to take policing closer to the people here and to make it people-friendly. We will straightaway work towards strengthening the beat system at the police stations. We will be actively collaborating with various groups of citizens, religious leaders and influencers of the society to pinpoint the problems of citizens and how they can be tackled. Second priority will be zero tolerance about any goondaism which pose a threat to the tranquility of the society. Also, we will deal with any illegal activities strictly. Mangaluru is a fast-growing city, so traffic is also a priority, and we are working on bringing in new methods through which we can regulate seamless and congestion-free traffic in the city.
Traffic and Drugs are two of the biggest problems the city is currently facing. How are you planning to deal with it?
In any developing city where there are students and migrant population, drugs abuse and substance abuse will be there. It causes a lot of inconvenience to the administration and Mangaluru is no different. I have been informed about this problem. We have planned a few programs to deal with it. We will collaborate with individuals and educational institutions and we will continuously work towards uprooting the source and peddlers from the city. There will be zero tolerance in this regard. Those who are involved in peddling and consumption of drugs, they better refrain from such activities, otherwise, we will not spare anybody.
Apart from Drugs and Traffic, Mangaluru also has a tag of being ‘Communally Sensitive’ city. What are your views about it?
Coastal Karnataka has been a house to several cultures and various lifestyles, so I will not call it communally sensitive. It’s a fact that people of various cultures, religions, ethnicity have been staying in this region. If you look at it, Dakshina Kannada has been an ambassador to the communal harmony and co-existence of several cultures, religions and ethnicity. There have been incidents where the communal harmony and peace of the region have been put to test but law enforcement machinery will take very firm legal action against anybody trying to medal with communal harmony. Again, those will be isolated incidents, if you look at bigger picture people here have been co-existing very peacefully over the years. We will work in collaboration with the religious representatives to ensure peace, harmony in the region.
Your message to the people of Mangaluru.
Mangaluru city can be made much more public friendly only when the people will come together with the police department. Policing is an activity that can effectively work when the people are involved and are cooperating with the Police department. So I want to assure people that the department is for people and will come to their aid whenever there is a need. Whatever be the problem the department will be ready to offer any help to the people. The only appeal to the people is to cooperate with us and not sensationalize issues.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
