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LUCKNOW: When three college students, in their 20s, studying at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and an IITian in Kanpur were slapped and dragged out of parks by the much-famed anti-Romeo squads ( ARS ) of UP police in March this year while they were spending quiet time with their female friends in parks, endless brickbats for the Yogi government followed.

Since then, the squads have had a peaceful time negotiating with and identifying stalkers from lovers.

It’s not because the incidents have shrunken. Instead, a Rs 20,000-a-day course in anger management, transaction analysis and emotional intelligence with management gurus of IIM-Lucknow and leading psychotherapists of the state has helped the ARS team’s female and male constables. While the B-school faculties gave lessons in gender sensitisation, body language and micro expressions, psyhotherapists relied on alternative approaches to “lower blood pressure” along with meditation techniques.

“Self-leadership communication techniques had to be deployed to deal with the cops here. Focus was on communicating with the patriarchal world, where we question the women more than we do the perpetrator. So we would tell the police personnel to take assertive leadership but not without being empathetic in the situation,” said human resource management professor Himanshu Rai at IIM-L, who led the course training.

The IIM faculty also conceived a no-no for the UP cops: asking men for sit-ups, ear-pulls, face blackening or head shaves. A popular clinical research, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was heavily lectured on with the male cops, who expressed difficulty in resisting physical force with stalkers.

“There are times when we are ourselves scared of talking to cops. That’s the fear of being judgmental. We either ignore or suppress our issues. So I used the MBSR technique that heightens sensitivity to the environment and one’s own reactions to it, consequently enhancing self-management and coping,” said Dr Neha Anand , psychotherapist, who was part of the three-month training.

‘Taught cops how to deal with egos’

In transactional analysis, I taught the cops on dealing with egos of people along with non-verbal cues which includes eye accessing cues, gestures and facial expressions as these cases deal with the physical appearances of a stalker or a lover,” added Anand.

The female cops, among them, were given lessons on regulating emotion and “moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness”.

“Depressive symptoms are common among the female police personnel as they tend to get more anxious and stressed while dealing with such cases. So, for them we focussed on meditation, yoga and spiritual trainings along with,” said a cop involved in the training module. 810 constables across 75 districts of UP have been trained by the program, that is part of UP Police’s women helpline 1090. Three legal experts were also roped in for the training.

