Organized policing in India started with Charles Napier, who, in 1842, at the age of 60, was appointed to command the British Indian army of Bombay Presidency.
An army man, Napier had spent many years in the beginning of his career fighting Napoleon’s legions on the Iberian Peninsula. In 1843, Napier marched to Sindh at the head of his army, to put down rebellions by the local chieftains. He did so, and then went further.
Blatantly disregarding treaty obligations with the independent Sindhi chieftains and technically being insubordinate to his bosses, he ended up conquering and annexing the entire province to British India. After the job, he dispatched to his superiors the short message, "Peccavi", Latin for "I have sinned" (a pun on I have Sindh).
Proponents of British rule over India justified the conquest thus: "If this was a piece of rascality, it was a noble piece of rascality!"
An army officer towards the end of his career, Napier was then burdened with the job of administering an ill-gotten possession. Concerned with subduing rebellious chieftains and keeping the disgruntled native population in check, he got together disbanded and retired army officers to form a provincial constabulary.
He improvised on his job, with an ad hoc approach.
A story for which he is noted deals with Hindus complaining about prohibition of Sati: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; [then] beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
Napier’s perspectives on policing are shown through the following comments: “The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed” and "the human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear." His model was successful since “fear” and loathing are the key emotions that Indians felt regarding the police.
The policing system in the provinces of British India, instituted then, and which unfortunately has continued till date, was marked by the imperialist prerogative of maintaining control by a relatively small constabulary over large native populations. The police became the important tool of the state for keeping an oppressed native population in submission. It was not the priority of colonial rulers to administer the Criminal Justice System for the common man, let alone bother much about the niceties of protection of human rights of their native subjects.
The beginning made by Napier in Sindh was later codified into the Police Act of 1861 and the Indian Penal Code of 1860.
Maja Daruwala and others of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative wrote: “The Police Act, 1861 was legislated by the British in the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857 or the First War of Independence. The British, naturally at that time wanted to establish a police force that would suit the purpose of crushing dissent and any movement for self government.”
Intelligence gathering to forestall moves towards independence was an important job of the police.
Sir John Hunt, leader of the successful 1953 British Expedition to Mount Everest, was a Military Intelligence officer in the Indian Army, and was seconded to the Indian police. Hunt worked undercover, gathering intelligence in Chittagong whilst dressed in Indian clothing. This was just after the Chittagong armory raid, an attempt in 1930 to raid the armory of police and auxiliary forces, by revolutionary freedom fighters led by Surya Sen. “Hunter sahib” contributed to the arrest of many revolutionaries for which he was awarded the Indian police medal.
The emergence of India as an independent nation state was long and rough with the price being paid in blood. Predictably the Imperial Police played a noteworthy role in trying to stymie the legitimate struggle of the Indian people.
The Dandi March and the ensuing Dharasana Satyagraha drew worldwide attention to the Indian independence movement through extensive newspaper and newsreel coverage.
In 1930 the Indian National Congress chose satyagraha as their main tactic for winning independence from British rule and appointed Gandhi to organize the campaign. Gandhi chose the 1882 British Salt Act as the first target of satyagraha. The Salt March to Dandi, and the beating by police of hundreds of nonviolent protesters received worldwide news coverage. United Press correspondent Webb Miller reported that:
“Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down.”
Vithalbhai Patel, former Speaker of the Assembly, watched the beatings and remarked, "All hope of reconciling India with the British Empire is lost forever."
Following attempts by the British to censor Miller's story, it eventually appeared in 1,350 newspapers throughout the world, and was read into the official record of the United States Senate. Time magazine declared Gandhi its 1930 Man of the Year, comparing Gandhi's march to the sea "to defy Britain's salt tax as some New Englanders once defied a British tea tax."
It is strange that those at the receiving end of the lathis and bullets of the Imperial Police did nothing to change the repressive nature of policing after India became free.
The Midnapore region of West Bengal, of Lalgarh and Nandigram fame, does have a history of parallel governments. Such a parallel government, from Tamluk town in Midnapore, functioned from 1942 to 1944 as part of the Quit India Movement.
To set up such a government, members of the Indian National Congress planned to take over the various police stations and other government offices as a step to overthrowing the British. Matangini Hazra, who was 73 years at the time, led a procession of six thousand, mostly unarmed women volunteers, towards the police station in Tamluk.
The marchers were ordered to disband and then fired upon. As she stepped forward, Matangini Hazra was shot once. She continued to advance with the tri-color, leaving other volunteers behind. The police shot her three times. As she was repeatedly shot, she kept chanting Vande Mataram and died with the flag held high and still flying.
The country was independent and Matangini Hazra was honored by a spate of road-naming and unveiling of statues. However, nothing was done to align the police forces, the hated instrument of oppression of the British Raj, with the needs of a self-governing people.
The country had to wait till 1977 for the first step towards police reforms until the first Janata Dal government was formed.
In the years of Emergency, the political opposition was subjected to unprecedented police brutality. Serving and retired officers of the Indian Police Service were appalled at the misuse of the police forces by the vested political interests. Their clamor for police reforms was given a sympathetic ear by Chaudhary Charan Singh, the Home Minister. He instituted the first commission for Police Reforms.
The first Janata Dal government did not last long enough to implement the commission’s recommendations. Subsequently several other commissions submitted their reports on the same subject, which gathered dust. It seemed that the police forces were the instrument of oppression by the ruling class over the common citizen of India.
Panning to the first decade of twenty first century India, we find that a gentleman named Prakash Singh took up the cudgels for police reforms. Having been Director General of Police of Uttar Pradesh and thereafter having headed the police of ULFA-affected Assam, he had all the right credentials as a policeman.
He filed a PIL in the Supreme Court praying for implementation of police reforms. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, asking the states to legislate new police acts. Horror of horrors, some states passed acts which are even more retrograde than the earlier Police Act of 1861.
This leaves us today with a over-stretched police force with archaic infrastructure, training, manpower, equipment and mindset… ill-equipped to meet the needs of the civil society of the world’s largest democracy.
While a significant percentage of the country’s resources, and very rightly so, is devoted to the armed forces, one tends to forget that today wars are fought more often than not within the nation’s borders. It is the police which are charged with internal security.
Occasionally an Ajmal Kasab forces kneejerk reactions. But is it that we should depend solely on people of his ilk to reactively force us into modernizing our police forces? Can we, as a people, not muster the genius to devise the policing that we need and deserve?
These are questions we need to answer fast to decisively move into the era of Pax Indica that beckons us in the years to come.
(Originally published in "The Broad Mind - Opinions from the Takshashila Community" on 15.09.2010, 16.09.2010 and 17.09.2010)
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