In the line of FIR(e)

Perspectives on the (colonial) history of policing

The Indian past has never been more political. The Parallel Campaign is a fortnightly newsletter that questions the traditional (male, Hindu, upper-caste, ‘secular’) orthodoxies presented in Indian schools’ history curricula. We investigate historical narratives by consulting sources and perspectives outside established media, and we review some of the most interesting academic books and articles currently languishing behind university paywalls.

There are no definitive answers here because we want to invite as many people as possible to an alternative conversation—on what it means ‘to do history’. If nothing else, we hope to convey that history matters, and to spark our readers’ interest in undertaking historical enquiries of their own.

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Happy Sunday, friends!

The Uttar Pradesh police are having a hell of a week. If they’re to be believed, they’re currently dealing with an international plot to trigger caste-based conflict in Hathras. They’ve charged “unknown persons” with every manner of grave malfeasance, including that old favourite, sedition. 

The context for their claim is the gruesome gang-rape and subsequent death of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in the village of Hathras, allegedly by members of the dominant Thakur caste. UP’s police, even by the usual low standards in dealing with caste- and gender-based violence, have behaved especially poorly in its aftermath—and in a rare moment of good press for Rahul Gandhi, handed him a powerful photo-op when trying to prevent him from travelling to the district.

Source: Congress/Twitter

We are all acutely aware that this sort of behaviour is not an exception, but simply the most blatant expression of the rule—not of law, but of political expediency. The Indian police have been wielded as an instrument of political power by all ruling parties. 

This was certainly true in Hathras, and possibly also in Mumbai police’s case against Republic TV this week. It was also true in Delhi in 1984, Gujarat in 2002, across the country in December 2019, and in Delhi again in 2020—to name just the most famous examples.

But even when political interference is not actively undermining law and order, police brutality and violence are endemic across the country (including in states such as Tamil Nadu, which are generally perceived to be better governed). Official Home Minsitry numbers record 1584 custodial and 112 encounter deaths between April 2019 and March 2020. But these do not include the many cases of grievous injury in custody, nor the more routine police violence apparent in, for instance, the enforcement of the lockdown earlier this year—and they do not by themselves reveal the disproportionate impact suffered by the poor, Dalits, adivasis, and Muslims.

India clearly has a policing problem. History, particularly colonial history, is given centre-stage in almost every analysis of this problem.

But we think that the ‘colonial institution’ historical narrative is also a sweeping one that can obscure as much as it explains, and the exact kind we set out to investigate in this newsletter. 

Explanations point to the police’s origins as a colonial institution and draw a direct line from 19th century repression to today’s. This is undoubtedly true—like near everything else, the police have been indelibly shaped by India’s colonial past. 

But colonialism was not a historical period in suspended animation, divorced from what came before and after. How did colonial processes interact with pre-existing practices and ways of thinking? And—even though most schools teach history as if it ended in 1947—how has independent India treated this colonial legacy? 

The standard narrative also reflects a historical bias towards institutions, which conceptualises the ‘police’ as fixed, unitary, and separate. But how should we understand the history of police officers as subjects of the institution themselves, as well as Indian citizens and members of Indian society?

Khaki kakistocracy?

The standard narrative is spot on when it says that in nations whose institutions of internal sovereignty were shaped by histories of race and colonialism, widespread and constant police brutality is not a form of malfunction, but a sign of the system working exactly as it was designed to. As Arvind Verma points out, the Indian police system—which was founded first by the East India Company in the aftermath of the violent conquest of Sind in 1843, and later reinstituted by the British Parliament in the paranoid aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny—was designed to be composed “of the people, but insulated from them and not governed by them.”

British administrators took their cues from the Royal Irish Constabulary, which the Empire had created to suppress insurgency in Ireland in the 1820s. Unlike police in England itself, who were accountable to local populations, the RIC had military-style training and top-down structures of control. The Indian Police Act of 1861 wholly endorsed this principle of military force in civilian clothing: the primary objective of police was to suppress unrest and dissent of any kind, not to detect or solve crime. 

This was a serious departure from pre-colonial policing in India, where kingdoms had typically had a much more dispersed and local style of policing, with caste councils, villages, and landowners given the ability to investigate, enforce laws, and punish crimes on their own. These dominant non-state actors had the authority to use violence and impose discipline upon local populations—and, importantly, often in ways that cemented caste power. 

The colonial order, in theory, necessitated delegitimizing these older rights to discipline in the name of the ‘civilised’ system of uniform laws and procedure that the British felt was an appropriate return gift for a century of economic extortion (earning them, in the eyes of Indian nationalists, an instant disinvite from the party). Gagan Preet Singh has shown that old indigenous institutions of collective resolution and community enforcement were undermined by the concentration of repressive power in the hands of the police. 

But more often in practice, the colonial order found it easier to actively cooperate with existing dominant-caste power-brokers rather than take on the cost of undermining or demilitarising them. 

This compromise in local political authority and independence was heavily contested because ordinary people lost the ability to claim traditional rights and customary protections from their local elites—or, as earlier, cooperate with them to effectively evade or resist centralised colonial policies like bonded labour, forced eviction, or extortionate taxation. This dispossession led to prolonged periods of instability and insurgency from local populations of tribes, nomads, peasants, ascetics, and decommissioned soldiers. 

Because resistance to taxation and forced labour was seen as an existential threat to the economic imperatives of the Raj, the British response to insurgency heavily prioritized the violent imposition of order even if at the cost of rule of law—again, often in cooperation with existing pre-colonial, dominant-caste elites who had their own traditional notions of how to ‘keep the peace’. 

An important consequence of this was, as scholars like Malavika Kasturi, Sandria Frietag, and Ranajit Guha have demonstrated, that insurgents were labeled ‘thugs’ and ‘criminal tribes’, drastic measures were authorised to suppress them, and the idea that certain castes and sects of people were hereditary criminals and irrational barbarians was permanently cemented into the ruling psyche.

Source: Rare Books Society of India

Constables were also recruited only from pre-designated ‘martial races’ that had demonstrated loyalty to the empire: Dalits, for instance, were not incorporated into the force until as late as 1937. 

As Nasser Hussain has argued, the colonial police acted in ways that often pitted law and order against each other. Yet when the dust settled, the British felt immense pressure to explain their actions, particularly from voters and liberal newspapers back home in England, where the Empire was justified in terms of its ‘civilising nature’. Extreme levels of police violence seemed to prove that British systems were hardly different from those that preceded them—and that couldn’t do. 

The solution was, unsurprisingly, 100% PR. The colonial legal system used elaborate and alien codes of procedure, paperwork, evidence-collection, admissibility, and testimony as a cover for any type of violence that was considered necessary to maintain absolute sovereign power.

‘Following procedure’ was the smoke-and-mirror that allowed administrators to call the same act ‘torture’ in one instance and ‘interrogation’ in another, whenever it suited them. 

As David Arnold has documented, the British also utilised and even expanded existing practices of policing and punishment—such as whipping, branding, tattooing, mutilation, and collective fines—replacing ‘oriental despotism’ with what Radhika Singha has called a ‘despotism of law’. The brutality of police and prisons was explained as an inescapable function of native primitivism, which absolved colonial law of any responsibility. 

We see this logic at work in the famous Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of the Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency (1855), which, as Anupama Rao has noted, linked the persistence of torture to “the remnants of a traditional and barbaric penal regime.” (The police in Madras were an important case study for the later Police Commission Report of 1860, which formed the basis of the 1861 Act). 

The fact that Indian police officers used unspeakable violence to extract criminal confessions, for example, was not seen as evidence that the system, in giving outsize priority to obtaining confessions, gave officers a motive to find someone vulnerable that they could simply beat into confessing, as opposed to taking the time to pursue the real culprit. Instead, custodial torture became proof that India’s ‘backward’ social conditions—the common people’s animal-like habituation to violence—would always prevent the British from being able to reason and persuade people into obeying them. Oh, the white man’s burden. 

Their (and now our) system was designed to explain away the persistence of violence, not to reduce it. The obsessive focus on maintaining the appearance of good form and legality actively created incentives for exceptions and loopholes to proliferate. 

This violent divide between the theory of law and the practice of order, and attempts to literally paper it over, is perhaps the most uniquely colonial legacy of the police institution.

But it’s important for the standard narrative to recognise that this system did not exist in a vacuum. It was both implemented and shaped in conjunction with pre-existing patterns of class and caste power, and pre-existing practices of torture and violence.

What the British system did is create the ideal conditions for these to entrench and augment themselves. History is often marked by continuities as much as by dramatic breaks with the past. 

A new reason to be mad at Indira Gandhi

For all its emphasis on using the police to maintain order and control over the native population, the 1861 Act was also motivated by a desire to exercise absolute political control over native police officers—it was not forgotten that the 1857 Mutiny had started with native soldiers revolting against their European superiors. 

This was also accompanied by deep concern about cost—putting down the Mutiny had not been cheap—and the 1860 Police Commission had been explicitly asked to “report any alteration in system which [they] consider[ed] likely to increase efficiency or diminish expense”. 

Unsurprisingly, these twin motivations led to a Police Act that was fundamentally unconcerned with the working conditions of the constabulary. Section 22, to take just one often quoted example, requires that “every police officer shall...be considered to be always on duty, and may at any time be employed as a police officer in any part of the general police-district”. The bulk of the police’s institutional resources were reserved “for providing of European Officers to supervise and control” the mass of constables. 

Hello, boss. Source: Flickr

In short, the colonial legacy gives rank-and-file police officers as much reason to hate themselves (or the institution that they make up) as we do. They are the subjects of an institution designed to make them completely beholden to their superior officers, while also proscribing any expense on their account. 

But the 1861 Act has limited explanatory power by itself. The 1966 Police Forces (Restriction of Rights) Act (aka RORA; talk about the title being a spoiler!) is a powerful reminder that often what we attribute to mere institutional path dependency from colonial times has in fact been reaffirmed—and at times violently reinforced—in an independent, ostensibly democratic India.

There are obvious parallels to be drawn between the European officers of yore and the gazetted officers of the Indian Police Services and the various State Police Services post-independence. Sub-inspectors and constables themselves draw these parallels, referring in UP to adhikari tanashahi, or senior-officer dictatorship (who, to be fair, are in turn beholden to central or state government because the 1861 Act makes the police solely accountable to the executive, not the policed population.)

In a wonderfully thought-provoking article on police unions, the anthropologist Beatrice Jauregui recounts an interview with a police officer who “summarized the police institution’s primary problem in terms of a hierarchical structure of official rankings and relations that reflect and reinforce unofficial class inequalities and prejudices, a ‘colonial hangover’ that fosters widespread maltreatment and exploitation of the masses of subaltern police.” 

This manifests itself in what Jauregui calls the “expendability” of the rank-and-file—most starkly in the ‘orderly’ system, in which superior officers command subordinates to do their domestic chores or other uncompensated manual labour. Expendability also makes police vulnerable to being suspended or dismissed without due process, pressures them to pay bribes up the chain of command, and subjects them to “everyday exploitation and apathy regarding their welfare”.

Pictorial excerpt from undated police unionist pamphlet. Source: Jauregui (2018).

By Jauregui’s count, there have been seventeen major uprisings of subordinate police personnel that have taken place across the country since Independence. Since it was enacted, police officers participating in most of these uprisings have been charged under RORA, which prohibits police from forming or joining labour unions or political associations, or making any kind of public statement or gesture critical of the government. For obvious reasons, there are concerns that the Act is unconstitutional, violating police officers’ fundamental rights as citizens of the Indian republic. 

RORA is in place in most of the country today, and was implemented as a direct response to mass protests by the Delhi-based Police Karmchari Sangh (PKS), or Police Workers Union in 1966. Totally in keeping with her soft and cuddly image, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s response to the protests was: “those policemen who find it difficult to fit into ‘discipline’ should find something else to do”. Significantly, however, states such as UP allow gazetted officers to be part of professional associations for ‘social’ activities, but which still routinely lobby the officers’ political interests within the institution. 

Several police movements since independence have been efforts by constables to unionise, and many have ended in the military being called in to reinstate ‘order’. There was a nationwide outburst of police strikes in 1979, which spread over more than one dozen Indian states and among some national-level police organizations. The most violent of these movements—or what one retired senior officer deemed to Jauregui to be the greatest of the police agitations in Indian history—occurred in 1973 in UP: dozens of people were killed, wounded, criminally charged, or dismissed from service. (The official death toll was 40, but officers claimed the numbers to be seriously underreported.)

The powerlessness of rank-and-file police is evidenced by how easily state power is turned against its own functionaries. 

Narratives are, at their best, constructed from detailed studies of primary sources and first-person accounts where these are available. But as far as we can tell, no consolidated history of police uprisings has yet been written, though the memory of these events, particularly the violence of the 1973 protest, is alive in the memory of several officers and their famillies. They are, if briefly, mentioned in the memoirs of retired senior police officers. 

We’re not sure why this is so under-studied—perhaps it is too much cognitive dissonance given the general relations between police and the policed, or because the colonial focus is too comforting, or because historians don’t interact enough with other disciplines like anthropology. 

Source: The Economic Times.

Today, even human rights organisations—which you’d think would already have their work cut out for them documenting police brutality—have acknowledged that the police’s own condition is “abysmal”. The UP police were using rifles from World War I until January of this year; India’s police as a whole are deeply understaffed. 

We are in no way excusing or justifying the excesses and violence of police officers in this country—and goodness knows that police unions are dangerous, especially in a context when there are already almost no incentives for any actor to undertake reform. 

But we are saying that there is a link between expendability and brutality that needs more historical attention. If your superiors demand a certain result from you at pain of worsening an already precarious state of affairs, are you more likely to torture to extract confession, fabricate evidence to produce the desired result? (Hannah Arendt, famous for her account of the origins of totalitarianism, makes the compelling point that violence is what results from a fragility of power.) 

As an officer put it to Jauregui: “how are we supposed to respect and protect the rights and welfare of the people when we are denied such provisions ourselves?” 

Yet, as the Black Lives Matter movement in the States has so powerfully demonstrated, even the best funded organisations and most powerful unions do not necessarily mean that police brutality will just go away. Historical narratives of the police need to contend with police officers not just as citizens, and subjects of the institution, but also as members of a society that share its biases and fallibilities. 

Power and prejudice

A legacy of colonial laws doesn’t foster discriminatory policing on its own: pre-colonial prejudices formalised in British administration endure in mindsets that justify differences of caste, class, religion, or ethnicity as natural, fixed, and unchangeable racial difference. This modern specter of the idea of martial and criminal races normalizes the assumption that some communities and races are just more criminal than others, while others are intrinsically more virtuous. 

The everyday prejudices of the police, which betray their social location, show that police brutality is not explained just by colonial laws, but by how colonial laws combine with modes of collective criminalization that are enabled by pre-existing interests of caste power and communalism.

Caste socializes the exercise of sovereign power and punishment. Caste poses a barrier to the internal reform and democratization of police just as surely as it poses a barrier to democracy in the rest of society.  

A police officer from the Rapid Action Forces stands in front of a mural of Mughal rulers in Jafrabad. Source: Shahid Tantray for Caravan Magazine

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of violence against marginalised groups within the police force itself (and a reminder of the many fragmenting forces that pose an internal obstacle to unionisation).

In 1991, the first case ever registered in Maharashtra under the Prevention of Atrocities Against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act was for the murder of a Dalit police officer, Ambadas Sawane, by his own superiors, the police patil and sarpanch of his village. 

Sawane was bludgeoned to death because he had promoted the erection of a statue of the Dalit leader BR Ambedkar on village grounds, and because he had accidentally stepped inside a temple to avoid a downpour of rain. His killers walked free for two weeks before the publicity surrounding the case resulted in their arrest. Information surrounding the case had to be ‘discovered’ by the very top of the chain of command, in Bombay, before it would be acknowledged by the local police.

Anupama Rao, in her study of police documentation related to the case, observed: “internal correspondence within the police hierarchy betrays the manner in which investigators collaborated with perpetrators' version of the event and were themselves imbued with a sociology of untouchability that biased them towards upper castes.” 

Sawane’s fate echoed the long history of oppressed-caste men on the otherside of the police lathi, facing the overwhelming brunt of custodial torture and police brutality even when they are ostensible collaborators in policing. The historian Deana Heath notes that state violence against oppressed caste-men was so ubiquitous in the colonial period that it was expected. It included “being stripped naked; having their [genitals] beaten, burned, or cut; being raped...being emasculated... That men may indeed have become inured to such forms of violence and may even have come to expect them at the hands of men in positions of authority is suggested by the action of a young man who, when brought before a British district magistrate for questioning, simply ‘mumbled and tried to take off his loin cloth.’”

In Sawane’s case, because he was a police officer himself, the police were forced to admit that the open enforcement of untouchability and other forms of discrimination were a central part of the historical context within which their own practices of information-gathering, evidence-collection, and interrogation were situated—not just because of colonial law, but because of centuries of enforced social inequality.

The vast majority of victims of police violence—Dalits, Muslims, adivasis, transgender and queer people, daily-wage labourers, sex workers—cannot even expect that. 

Ambedkar worried that “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” Perhaps this is true also of any attempts at police reform that focus solely on the colonial legacy, and ignore the violence, prejudice, lack of accountability, and power dynamics that both precede colonialism and have survived it—often with the violent sanction of the democratic state. Ideas about police reform are the domain of political scientists and lawyers, but historians—especially when they complicate comforting narratives and offer different perspectives—can hopefully serve to make the reform agenda a more thoughtful one.