The ugly confrontation between the Aam Aadmi Party ( AAP ) and the Central authorities over control of the Delhi Police is nothing more than a naked struggle for power, the desire of political cabals to retain or secure control over one of the most powerful institutions in the state apparatus. It has never had anything to do with police performance, efficiency or reform.Chief ministers who have failed to demonstrate a modicum of efficiency, effectiveness, vision or honesty in administering their existing and limited functions have persistently and deceitfully pretended that all problems of crime and lack of security in Delhi will magically disappear the moment control of the police is transferred to the state. This is perhaps the very opposite of what would happen, and the reasons for this are not difficult to understand.The Rs 5,372.88-crore allocation of Union ministry of home affairs for the Delhi Police for 2015-16 is a little over 13 per cent of the Delhi government ’s 2015-16 budget of Rs 41,129 crore.Note that most states spend well below four per cent of their budgets on policing, and many allocate less than two per cent (Odisha, in 2013-14, had just 0.29 per cent); the exceptions are the ‘insurgency-afflicted’ states, where the Centre underwrites security-related expenditure, including large heads under policing and even here, expenditure caps off at about seven per cent of the state budget.In many of the northeastern states, this has encouraged tremendous profligacy, but has done little to improve policing, beyond pushing up police recruitment to absurd levels, as government employment is regarded as one of the chief instruments of keeping the population generally pacific. Thus, at the end of 2013, Manipur had a police-population ratio of 1,020 per 1,00,000 and Mizoram at 904 per 1,00,000 as against a national average of 141.In case a transfer of authority occurred, the state would not be able to raise even a fraction of the revenues necessary for policing the very complex environment of India’s capital city. Rather, policing would naturally deteriorate dramatically, or the state government would be back with a begging bowl, asking the Centre to underwrite its bill for policing, but refusing to concede any control over its allocations and expenditures, likely encouraging far more irresponsibility and waste than is currently the case.There is a great deal of nonsense being written about the ‘accountability’ that would automatically result from the transfer of policing to Delhi state. The argument is fairly rudimentary — the state government is elected by the citizens of Delhi, hence it is ‘accountable’ to them; while the national government has a far more diffused accountability to a wider electorate.Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has argued that Delhi Police is corrupt and compromised primarily because it doesn’t answer to the CM. But if mere control of the police by the CM could bring about accountability and efficiency in the operation of the department, control crime, and confer security on the general population, how are we to explain the enduring anarchy that is Uttar Pradesh? Or the disastrous conditions that persist in so many other states?Police efficiency and transparency has little to do with who controls the department, and everything to do with the quality and integrity of administration. It is useful, in this context, to reiterate that Delhi, whether under Kejriwal or his predecessors, has hardly been a model of particular efficiency or honesty in administering its limited jurisdiction.Numerous systems of dyarchy are also being proposed — the hiving off of some of the duties of the police to the state government, or the division of the National Capital Region into different jurisdictions, respectively controlled by the Centre or the state.The division of municipal functions under the New Delhi Municipal Council and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has been proffered as a model, among others, but the performance of these two agencies and the disaster that passes for ‘coordination’ between them are hardly encouraging.Some ‘models’ have also been picked out from policing systems in various Western capitals, but this again is fantastical twaddle — to believe that London’s system of police administration can simply be transferred to Delhi is to believe that the Delhi policeman can magically be transformed into the London Bobby by a stroke of legislation.Administrative and political cultures, the sheer scale and profile of populations, funds, technologies, and the widely divergent character of crimes and threats to security make any easy importation of these foreign models impossible.Finally, the AAP’s current conduct, its abuse of the instruments of government, its fantastical conspiracy theories, its attacks — verbal and physical — on policemen, its relentless confrontations with Central authorities are themselves the most effective argument against transfer of the police to the state government. A maverick chief minister and ruling party, with a proclivity to fabricate allegations of crimes and offences, could wreak havoc in Delhi with control over the police and force an irreducible, paralysing conflict with the Centre.(The author is executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi