Kiran Bedi: inspiring post-conventional leader who dares to act from the heart

Kiran Bedi was a national tennis champion, the first woman to join the Indian Police Service in 1972, and a Civilian Adviser to the Secretary-General UN in Peacekeeping Operations.

She initiated various prison reform programs with major social impact. On one occasion, she single-handedly charged a rioting mob until they were subdued by her sheer determination and resilience.

(Kiran Bedi - right, with Maria Anderson during the ARLP Course 15 visit to India)

Dr Bedi has numerous international humanitarian awards, and was voted as India’s 'Most Admired Woman' in an opinion poll conducted by The Week in 2002. She is a profound force for social change and one of the reasons the Foundation has returned to India three times – and is planning a fourth ARLP visit in 2011. Her achievements and leadership thinking are worthy of emulation and admiration.

Rural journalist Jane Milburn – a participant in ARLP Course 16 – keenly anticipated the time she would spend with Dr Bedi, during the course’s visit to Indian in February this year.  Jane interviewed Dr Bedi, now retired from the force and working with India’s poor.

There is no room in Dr Kiran Bedi’s head for negative thoughts. As an agent of change working with the rural poor in India, Dr Bedi focuses single-mindedly on a positive future and how she can do things better today than yesterday.

“Literally here and now, you need to be a traffic manager in your mind and drive your own self,” Dr Bedi told Course 16 of the Australian Rural Leadership Program during a study tour to India earlier this year.

“This is not theory. You need to practise every day – being conscious every moment, here and now, you are literally listening to yourself, observing yourself and monitoring yourself. If a negative thought comes there is no room for it because it gets surmounted by the rest of the positive energy that says – there is no place for you, get out. You need to be continually steering yourself. It is a very conscious habit and you nurture it by good reading, good deeds, good environment and doing the right thing,” she said.

Breaking new ground and searching for innovative ways around challenges and obstacles has been the story of Dr Bedi’s life – from student to tennis champion, senior police officer, prison leader, social justice campaigner, motivator and social change agent.

In her book I Dare!, Dr Bedi outlines how she resolutely faced obstacles placed by powerful opposing forces and emerged stronger after each ordeal, including her stymied quest to become the first woman commissioner of Delhi Police and her appointment instead as inspector general of prisons at Tihar Jail in New Delhi.

From her descriptions of breakfast with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to hugs from Mother Theresa, Dr Bedi tells her story of innovative and reformative policing and is a compelling lesson in positivity and commitment to the greater good.

In approaching any problem, Dr Bedi advises looking over, under and around it. As a reformist police and prison leader, she applied herself to thinking about crime solutions. This eventually led to the setting up of Navjyoti India Foundation, to help the impoverished move towards self-reliance through skills and opportunities.

ARLP course 16 visited Navjyoti (meaning, new light) based at Gurgaon, on Sohna Block south of Delhi, to observe its work with women and children in disadvantaged rural communities.

Through the integrated community, women and rural development programs, Navjyoti is providing education, skills, mentoring and support to enable and empower.

“This program is the product of an attitude to crime prevention because I started this when I was a serving cop in 1987. It was a solution to a problem, the problem of drug abuse – the problem of children involved in drug peddling, problem of women and drug traffickers, and the problem of police officers and women,” Dr Bedi said.

“I had a whole constituency of drug addicts who were committing crimes and here I was a cop who was charged with preventing crimes. The drug addict is a problem to me because he is an addict. If I catch him and send him to jail for five days, his drug abuse is not going, he comes back with more friends in prison where he linked up with robbers and thieves. I am only increasing my problem by sending him in there. Something in me thought there must be a better approach.”

“Navjyoti was born from that – it was a problem-solving approach. You have got to break the cycle of crime – crime, drugs, jail, bail and back to crime. You have to get to the root of the problem.”

Dr Bedi’s solution was to set up drug abuse centres for men, vocational training centres for women and schools for children to help people deal with crime-related problems. Crime fell by 50 percent.

“I didn’t read it in a text book, I had a problem and I looked for a solution,” she said.

“The police station became a healing centre and people started to flock there for treatment. I had a huge number of volunteers I could ask for help because it was a selfless asking. All I did was put up a big barrack and the centre was ready. I was surprised, but all the good deeds and good intentions started to give rewards.

“After two years, I was to be transferred and people thought I had to institutionalise this work. Navjyoti was born in 1988 out of people’s demand, not my intention. For five years we operated with no government grant and I would cash in my goodwill cheques. I would tell people, I am doing this for them, what can you do?”

Dr Bedi says the ongoing success of Navjyoti requires it to be absolutely transparent, participatory, truly democratic and totally directed to always looking for solutions and not stopping at the problem.

“It is reaching out to the problem, not waiting for the problem to come. Our rule is to start from the field, don’t start from the office. Reach out where your instinct takes you,” she said.

In a nation where men own the land and still control most of the opportunities, Navjyoti supports disadvantaged women and children to be the best that they can be.

Reflecting on her creative and positive approach to life, Dr Bedi says some are born with a positive mental attitude and some acquire it.

“I was born with it and never unlearned it. My approach is to think about how I can do better than yesterday, not how I can defeat people. I have to be a winner for myself and work out how to do it”.

Dr Bedi’s story has been captured in an award-winning documentary Yes Madam Sir by Australian film-maker Megan Doneman.