Michael R. Hinz, Jr

TO PROTECT AND SERVE? THE INDIAN COLONIAL POLICE:

1861–1932

A Thesis

MICHAEL R. HINZ, JR.

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University-Commerce in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2016 TO PROTECT AND SERVE? THE INDIAN COLONIAL POLICE:

1861–1932

A Thesis

MICHAEL R. HINZ, JR.

Approved by:

Advisor: William Kuracina

Committee: Jessica Brannon-Wranosky Mark Moreno

Head of Department: William Kuracina

Dean of the College: Salvatore Attardo

Dean of Graduate Studies: Arlene Horne

iii

Michael Ray Hinz, Jr.

ABSTRACT

TO PROTECT AND SERVE? THE INDIAN COLONIAL POLICE: 1861–1932

Michael R. Hinz, Jr., MA Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2016

Advisor: William F. Kuracina, PhD

Following the Munity of 1857 to independence in 1947, no single colonial institution was more essential for British rule than the Indian Colonial Police. Through this organization, challenges to the colonial regime were met; this institution also interacted most frequently with the indigenous population in India. Consequently, the colonial police of India represents a prism through which the rest of British colonial rule can be holistically understood. Reforms introduced to this police structure suggest that this imperial institution required accommodation to handle precise colonial law enforcement needs as the tide of indigenous nationalism, starting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, threatened to disrupt Britain’s foreign domination. Reforms, therefore, did not occur in a vacuum, but rather were introduced by the British in response to very precise conditions and imperial imperatives.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their support during the preparation of the thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. William F. Kuracina whose encouragement, great patience, and scholarly advice helped to make this thesis possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. FRAMING THE APPARTUS OF CONTROL ...... 24

3. REFORMING THE APPARTUS OF CONTROL ...... 45

4. THE FRUSTRATIONS OF CONTROL ...... 67

5. CONCLUSION ...... 92

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 100

APPENDICES

Appendix

I. List of Terms ...... 104

VITA ...... 106

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Sir, that is the way the police work. There is no wonder if people distrust them. -Dewan Bahadur Rangachariar, resident of Madras, circa 19321

Just before dawn, during the early morning hours of October 21, 1932, a small group of four British nationals slowly maneuvered their automobile along antiquated dirt roads, barely wide enough to accommodate their car, constructed by the repeated tracks made by the traffic of animal carts. As they made their way through India’s western province of Gujarat, they were not there in the capacity of pleasure seeking tourists, content on witnessing the wonders of the sub- continent. The assembly had arrived to witness and study the growing development of Civil

Disobedience in Britain’s key colonial territory with the colonial authorities’ attempts to suppress the nationalist movement. As the representatives of the Indian League of London reached their destination of the village of Bochesan, they did not have to wait long to collect information.2

As they entered the village unnoticed, the denizens of Bochesan began preparing for

Congress celebration day; however, they were not the only ones there for the day’s events, so too was the Indian Police. Concealing themselves behind a parapet wall, as not to be observed by the Raj’s civil authorities, the league members made their way to a house terrace to witness the scheduled celebratory parade. Soon a procession of thirty to forty people, the vast majority of whom were women, slowly proceeded down the village road. As the assemblage neared the league’s surveillance point, the police gathered with their dreaded lathis to halt the illegal nationalist spectacle. To protest the action of the police, the marchers squatted down on the road

1 Leonard Matters, V.K. Menon, Monica Whately, and Ellen Wilkinson, Condition of India: Being the Report of the Delegation sent to India by The Indian League in 1932 (New Delhi: Konark Publishers,1999), 227. 2 Leonard Matters et. al., Condition of India, 170.

and refuse to move. With this provocation, the police charged into the crowd and began savagely swing their clubs with both hands at those who refused to disperse. Blows fell hard and heavy upon the heads and shoulder of those who sought to defy the Raj.3

What the league members witnessed, the interplay of force coupled with license and opposition equated with criminality, had developed in India long before the British set foot on the sub-continent. However, with the arrival of the East India Company in 1612 and the assumption of authority later by the British Crown in 1857, following the first serious challenge to British authority in the form of the Indian Munity, India’s colonial rulers sought to impose a tighter control over their dominion in India. Control was to be achieved through legal and administrative means; paramount to this sort of order was the Indian Police, as the Munity proved the folly of relying too heavily upon military forces. Taking Indian’s previous establishment-subordinate police systems, whose loyalty rested with the rulers not the ruled, the

British appropriated the system the goal of which was not the prevention of crime but the maintaining of the state’s order. Lacking the incentive to a create a new police system, the colonial regime grew more adaptive with reforms which enabled the Indian Police to operate, with little hindrance as possible, against those who wished to hamper Britain’s colonial ambition.

Thus, as this imperial structure was designed to impose and maintain order, reforming that structure suggests that the framework of order required accommodation that responded to precise colonial circumstances.

Very few holistic examinations of policing as an imperial function exist, and many of these consider police in the context of governance and immediate law-and-order concerns rather than as an overt expression of imperial ideology and priorities. This thesis begins to address

3Leonard Matters et. al., Condition of India, 170.

intends to address this historiographical shortcoming. Although research about the Indian

Colonial police appeared as soon the British began thinking about policing their empire, this essay considers India’s colonial police systems in the context of works produced by writers between 1875 and 2012. Of the writings that first began to appear in the later part of the nineteenth century, the first critical work that appeared was in 1875 with Mujan Mithu Khan’s

Confessions of a Constable. A former constable who had served in various provinces, Khan wrote at the time to disclose to neophyte Indian officers the positive and negative qualities associated with the police as a profession. To the new officers Khan noted, “I repeat this caution to you that you may not act in ignorance, that is, that you may be on your guard.”4 The author then related his personal experiences as a part of the apparatus of the colonial state responsible for the maintenance of law and order.

However, Khan in his work was quick to point out to his audience that he was not criticizing the British system in India. As the former constable noted, “I do not write against the system, for in my humble opinion, no better system of Police could be devised.”5 When abuses did occur in the line of duty, Khan observed that the fault did not fall on the British. Khan expanded this notion and explained, “I admit that the course of justice whenever it has been impeded is due to the peculiarities of my countrymen.”6 The author also wrote approvingly of his former boss, C. P. Carmichael, former Inspector General of Police of the Northwest

Provinces. For the former constable, Carmichael appeared as an epic figure in the mold of the great men of history. Khan’s work provides one of the early accounts of an ordinary native police constable under the British system of rule. Though the work reflects the attitudes of the

4 Miyan Mithu Khan, Confessions of a Constable (Benares: E. J. Lazarus & Company, 1875), 2. 5 Khan, Confessions of a Constable, 3. 6 Khan, Confessions of a Constable, 3.

time in which it was written, it still provides an early glimpse through an Indian perspective of the system of operation of the colonial police.

Following Khan’s work forty-eight years later, in 1923 S. M. Edwardes’s work, The

Bombay City Police: A Historical Sketch 1672–1916, was published. Edwardes, formerly the

Commissioner of the Police for Bombay, attempted to provide a historical record of police administration for the city of Bombay. The author’s reason for doing so was to have an accessible record regarding crime prevention in the city. However, Edwardes also attempted “to describe the manner in which the Heads of the Force carried out the heavy responsibilities assigned to them.”7 Similar in style to Khan’s work, Edwardes attempted to examine lightly the earlier Indian methods of policing prior to the arrival of the British. The later developments within the Bombay City Police resulted from the efforts of highly influential British men who by virtue of their personalities made use of their influence and brought order to chaos. Edwardes approached his subject in a manner that attempted to humanize the former Heads of the Force, so that readers may better understand the historical evolution of Bombay’s police.

Written in a general narrative style, Edwardes’s work provides extensive background information of those former Police Commissioners who came to India in the name of empire.

The work stops conveniently in the year 1916, at the time when Home Rule was being hotly pressed by Indians, and as Edwardes noted, “despite concessions and political reform, kept India in a state of unrest during the following five or six years.”8 Edwardes’s work differs from the previous one, in that Indians are never mentioned except as recruiting statics, subjects in criminal investigations, or as related to maintaining discipline. In his analysis, the author highlights the importance of the dominant British personality in dealing with the native constables and its

7 S. M. Edwardes, The Bombay City Police: A Historical Sketch 1672-1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), v. 8 Edwardes, Bombay City Police, v.

lasting effects. To illustrate his point, Edwardes explained how an old veteran native officer in passing by a bust of his deceased British superior, “There he drew himself smartly to attention and gravely saluted the marble simulacrum of the Commissioner.”9

Nearly a decade after Edwardes’s work, a slightly more nuanced examination of policing in India appeared in John Curry’s study, The Indian Police. Curry, making use of the libraries at the India Office and the office of the High Commissioner for India, did not confine himself to one city or province, but expanded his research to the whole of the sub-continent. For the author, the definitive phase in the history of the Indian Police began with the Indian Police Act of 1861, which streamlined policing in India, to the time of his work’s publication in 1932. The author sought to present his readers with insights into enforcing law and order in this area of the British

Empire. Before the arrival of British law in India, the law had been the desire of Indian sovereigns. However, after the arrival of the British, Curry drew a distinction between India’s old rulers and its new one; the author explained, “The British object throughout was not sovereignty, but security for trade in India; and the British way to ensure security was by the operation of the Rule of Law.”10

Curry’s work is unique, in that unlike the previous authors, Curry stressed the success of the Indian Police as being due to the cooperation of both the British and Indians. Together they forged an effective organization for policing India, and when India was able to govern itself it would be up to the Indians to discover what an effective organization that they had created. The future success of the organization rested with the British and Indians, and Curry feared that the

Indian Police would become a corrupt organization in the future. The author explained that,

“Responsibility rests on the British Government in England, as the rulers in India, in making

9 Edwardes, Bombay City Police,78. 10 John Curry, The Indian Police (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 9.

their attempt with Indian assistance to devise a stable structure.”11 Curry’s work reflected the pragmatist and cautious mood in Britain regarding India’s eventual self-rule. It is also a product of a moment when British constitutional reforms contemplated transferring police functions to elected Indian officials. Nevertheless, its consideration of Anglo-Indian inactions remains cursory, confined to Indian acceptance of British initiative.

Written at a time when the flip-side of imperial adventures, racial intolerance, greatly influenced British societal norms, both Edwards and Curry perpetuated the idea of the “White

Man’s Burden.” From their writings, neither author observed any problems with the policing system, or with the levels of force tolerated for the Raj’s defense. While Edwards reduced the colonized to numbers in reports, Curry trumpeted the notion that the colonized required the helping hand of the colonizer until that undefined day when independence could be achieved.

Both writers, having commanded police forces in India, remained incapable of separating themselves as scholars from their careers as officials involved with Britain’s civilizing mission.

Produced at the time when nationalism began to challenge the foundations of British rule,

Edwards and Curry failed to provide an objective analysis, refusing to acknowledge the failings of the British imperial policing system, as they themselves were members of that system.

After India achieved independence in 1947, the British began to reevaluate their legacy in their former colony. This reassessment also applied to the policing legacy that they had left behind. Five years after Britain left India, Sir Charles Jeffries, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, published a work reviewing the history of the empire’s various policing agencies titled The Colonial Police. The author’s attention was drawn to that element of colonial work that had seldom been considered by the ordinary Briton. In doing so, Jeffries explained his

11 Curry, The Indian Police, 345.

work as, “An attempt to satisfy interest in a less well known but no less important body of police work, namely that which is done in the Colonial territories for the good government of which

Britain is directly or indirectly responsible.”12 Jeffries’ work continued to call attention, as earlier writers had before, to the great success of Britain imparting law and order throughout the world.

Having examined the British colonial police, Jeffries outlined three stages of development that the police forces had undergone. The first stage was when the British retained the original policing system of those they had conquered and the indigenous system was amended to suit the conqueror’s needs. The second stage, and the longest of the three, was a semi-military force molded on the Royal Irish Constabulary. Stressing the importance of the Royal Irish

Constabulary, Jeffries noted, “So long as the Royal Irish Constabulary existed, it was a constant source of recruitment for officers of many of the Colonial police forces, and its training depot was regularly used as a center for courses of instruction for Colonial police officers.”13 The final stage in the author’s progression was the conversion of the semi-military force into a civil police force, similar to that in Great Britain.

Sir Charles Jeffries’s study of Britain’s colonial police added to the historiography of the subject in that it was not just a review of the many historical facts and events of Britain establishing a colonial police force in the various parts of the empire. It was an analytical attempt at understanding the colonial police services, and also an attempt to illustrate part of the legacy Britain left behind with the dissolution of the empire. How the newly independent nations made use of their police forces was up to the indigenous people to decide. As Jeffries

12 Sir Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Police (London, Max Parrish, 1952), 25. 13 Jeffries, The Colonial Police, 31.

hopefully explained, “The open country lies ahead. The question now is, where do we go from here? The answer rests not on the policeman but his employer - the public.”14

Following Sir Charles Jeffries attempt to make sense of the legacy of Britain’s colonial police, the Indians themselves examined what was left behind and how they themselves had built upon that legacy of the colonial police. An early attempt to do so was a work, The History of the

Madras Police, produced seven years later, in 1959 for the centenary of the Madras Police Force.

Written in a narrative style and within five months by the Inspector General of Police for

Madras, S. Balakrishna Shetty, the work sought to remedy the early accounts of India’s police history written by the British. Writing to inform the Indian public of the development of the

Madras Police within the last one hundred years, Shetty did not just concentrate on the time of

British dominance. The author also sought to explain India’s earlier indigenous police system.

As Shetty noted, “Attempts have been made in the past to write the history of the police in India.

But such productions did not portray in any great detail the systems obtaining in ancient times.”15

The author’s work then presented a brief survey of police during the Vedic times. This discussion was followed by a review of the system used by the Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas.

Shetty then examined law enforcement methods under the Vijayanagar Kingdom, the Moghul

Emperors and their viceroys. Finally, Shetty’s study the examined the rise of the British administration in India, which was first found in Calcutta, Surat, and Madras.

Shetty traced the growth of the Madras City Police with the expansion and development of

Madras City. With the arrival of the British, those areas under their control began to bear the stamp of industrial and commercial growth. This development resulted in the growth of trade and commerce which necessitated laws being remodeled to fit changing times. Shetty found that

14 Jeffries, The Colonial Police, 221. 15 S. Balakrishna Shetty, The History of the Madras Police: Centenary 1859-1959 (Madras: B. N. K. Press, 1959), xvi.

earlier British reforms had fallen short in meeting the demands of a changing society. By the middle of the nineteenth century, as Shetty explained, “A new and more efficient police system had to be ushered in to safeguard the interests of the Government and to protect the rights and liberties of a growing population.”16 Shetty then chronicled the further development of the

Madras Police, when the city’s force was incorporated with the general police force of the province. The highlight of Shetty’s study is the seminal moment of the Act XXIV of 1859; the author explained how over time and with British guidance the Madras police developed into a highly efficient organization for combating crime. Throughout the later part of Shetty’s work, the author was deeply impressed with the achievements in policing the British brought to India.

As Shetty noted, “Born in 1859, nursed and brought up by a foster-mother, it had in the course of hundred years grown in strength and stature. It is now an efficient instrument of tempered steel, unbreakable in its resolve to serve the Government and the people.”17 S. Balakrishna Shetty’s work represented an important mark in which Indians themselves were seeking to better understand their colonial legacy and the former colonial institutions they now controlled.

Nevertheless, they system evolved solely to the British initiative.

S. Balakrishna Shetty’s work about the Madras Police was followed in 1961 by N. A.

Razvi’s study of the police development in the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. Razvi’s work, Our

Police Heritage: Saga of the Police Forces of Pakistan and India, like Shetty’s, traces the historical roots of both India’s and Pakistan’s police forces and the problems confronting both at the time of its publication. Razvi, Deputy Inspector-General of the Punjab Police, noted of his study that, “an effort has also been made to peep into the past in search of conditions which

16 Shetty, History of the Madras Police, 164. 17 Shetty, The History, 542.

influenced crime and criminal administration in the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent.”18 The author was persuaded to produce his work, like Shetty, to celebrate the Police Centenary of West

Pakistan. Razvi also in his work examined the early police systems established by the Chuas and progressed through to the British colonial policing system. The author’s work gives a special place of interest to the progress of police development in the Punjab. Regarding the middle of the nineteenth century as many British began arguing for the need to reform the police services in India, Razvi explained that, “Sind was apathetic to the general outcry for reform because of overconfidence that it had already produced the best police in the country.”19 However, after

1857 the Punjab explored the central government’s notions of economy to reorganize its police.

With the arrival of the police reforms, Razvi examined the two difficulties with which the new police force had to contend: the revival of thuggee and policing the North-West Frontier.

With the revival of thuggee in 1861, the police branch to confront it was again resurrected with its specialists. However, by 1862, the branch was abolished, and it was up to the districts to handle the thugs. As Razvi explained, “The government of British India had felt that besides resulting in an unnecessary expense, the presence of thuggee specialists militated against the all- round efficiency of the general police, which felt free of its responsibility.”20 The North-West

Frontier presented the same problems at the time of Razvi’s writing, as it had before with the

British, that of difficult terrain, tribal ties, blood feuds, extensive possession of guns, and the problem of gathering evidence. Though the British were never able to fully control the area, the problems persisted even with Pakistan, especially smuggling. The author explained, “A police

18 N. A. Razvi, Our Police Heritage: Saga of the Police Forces of Pakistan and India (Lahore: Wapda Printing Press, 1961), 2. 19 Razvi, Our Police Heritage, 83. 20 Razvi, Our Police Heritage, 88.

problem which has now arisen is that the normal customs laws have no place in the tribal system and prevention of smuggling contraband articles is practically impossible.”21

N. A. Razvi’s work also represents an important development in the historiography of the

Indian Colonial Police. The author not only attempted to clarify India’s earlier policing history unlike the earlier British authors, but he also framed his work through that of a Pakistani perspective and what the British colonial policing legacy meant for his nation. Though the author’s work celebrates the centenary of the police, it is also an affirmation of the security forces’ loyalty to the state. Razvi’s loyalty to the state is plain as he noted, “The police forces of

East and West Pakistan are emerging well-knit, loyal and high in morale, and their commanders have all the more reason to feel proud.”22

Both Shetty and Razvi present unique cases of indigenous attempts to understand their nation’s policing legacy in the immediate decades following independence. Yet the authors present biased views of their works, as can only be expected, since they themselves were part of the legacy of that colonial institution. As servants of a system that no longer served the interests of colonial masters, but rather the interests of their nation’s elites, both authors only critically examine the colonial period, essentially absolving themselves and their colleagues from any systemic shortcomings. Never considering the purpose of the police, Shetty and Razvi do not break free of the scholarship of the previous authors, Edwards and Curry. Thus these works find common cause with the British and the problems the colonizers encountered, with establishment- subordinate systems that upheld the dominance of the status-quo.

Eight years later in 1969, American political scientist David H. Bayley contributed to the scholarly literature about the Indian Colonial Police, with this work, The Police & Political

21 Razvi, Our Police Heritage, 98. 22 Razvi, Our Police Heritage, 204.

Development in India. Based on Bayley’s interest about how India dealt with establishing evenness between political freedom and stable order, Bayley’s work seeks to determine how the police of India might have had a formative role in political life. For the author, the unhappy relations between the police and the public in India since 1947 originated with the British liberal tradition and British colonial practices. Bayley began his study by reviewing how the police could play a formative part in the political life of the country. The author found that this role was accomplished by what the police do for each other. As Bayley explained this point, “The

Police force in some countries has been an important avenue of upward social mobility; it has allowed men to escape from depressed conditions of minority status.”23 The author gathered that through occupational membership, policemen’s views about society would be altered, and through this process the police could influence the political life of a country. The author then described the forming of the police system in India and later organizations and problems. In doing so, Bayley glosses over, like Western writers before, India’s earlier indigenous efforts at law enforcement prior to the British. Bayley then related the history of the British colonial police in India and its legacy. From this analysis the author found three lasting elements. The first was that the structure of the police system remained unchanged since 1861. Secondly, the

British left behind their ideas and attitudes about the police to both of those in India who formed policy, and those who lived under it. Lastly, was the notion of what part the police should play in future Indian society. To this notion of the police’s future role, Bayley noted, “Proper police duties today are very much what were considered proper duties under the British.”24

David Bayley’s work made an important contribution to the neglected area of the police in

India. Bayley’s study was that of a scholar instead of the earlier works by government officials

23 David H. Bayley, The Police and Political Development in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 27. 24 Bayley, Police and Political Development, 50.

or policemen. Through the general examination of the police, the author tries to provide for the reader an understanding for those who have little knowledge of the Indian police. The author explained, “The police loom for scholars, students, and the Indian public as a whole as a rather forbidding specter in the background of daily life.”25 Bayley’s work illustrated how it was possible for the police of India to influence the political life of the nation. Problems with contemporary police philosophy traced back by the author to the British colonial practices in which the British, in dealing with containing political self-assertion, failed to see the need to reform practices and attitudes. Bayley’s work provides helpful insights into the evolution of the

Indian police from a colonial instrument to its present day organization.

A decade after David Bayley’s work, in 1979, Indian historian Anandswarup Gupta added his contribution to the colonial police of India with his work, The Police in British India: 1861-

1947. It is a sequel to his earlier 1974 work, Crime and Police in India, in which Gupta dealt with the efforts by the East India Company, its ultimate failure to establish a police network for

India, and the Court Directors’ attempts at reorganization in 1856. Gupta’s The Police in British

India begins with the 1861 police system and reviews its development and operation up to the time of Indian independence in August 1947. The author’s study presents the problems, the reviews taken, and the proposals and suggestions for reforming India’s police during the British rule. Drawing upon unpublished sources, Gupta sought to draw attention to a subject that was still little understood by scholars.

The author examines the Indian police constable, following the revolt of the Sepoy Army in 1857. The Indian policeman was not really a policeman in the traditional sense of the term; as

Gupta noted, “He was not vested with any police powers by the law and the regulations in force

25 Bayely, Police and Political Development, viii.

and was simply a para-military solider in a policeman’s uniform. His justification was that he cost less than a military solider.”26 Crime prevention also was not the first priority for the police services, as the author explained,: “The suppression of the people was to take the first priority in the functions of the police is clearly evident from the penal and Procedure Codes enacted in

1860-1861.”27 According to Gupta, the Government never had a fully correct idea of the situations of crime that faced India during the time of the British colonial era.

In this examination of the colonial police, Gupta reviewed the lack of proper police arrangements for the safety of India’s rural areas. For the author, the British, as with the

Moghuls before them, were not able to establish rural security due to reasons of cost.

Consequently, the villages were left to provide security of the rural areas, which depended on the mercies of those chosen to do so. The author explained, “This was, however, treated by the

Government as a financially useful expedient and the concomitant suggested by the Committee, and increase in the strength of the constables in the rural police stations was not implemented.”28

Although the countryside was left unsecured, new features were being developed in the police system of India for the gathering and dissemination of political intelligence. First established under Lord Lytton in 1877, and later expanded by Lord Curzon, these organizations were extremely valuable to the Government. Gupta expounded on this observation: “These organizations were expanded and became the greatest, almost indispensable, value to the

Government with the birth of terrorism in Indian politics as the freedom struggle gathered momentum.”29

26 Anandswarup Gupta, The Police in British India: 1861-1947 (Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1979), 13. 27 Gupta, Police in British India, 14. 28 Gupta, Police in British India, 25. 29 Gupta, Police in British India, 26.

With the advent of independence in 1947, the colonial legacy still carried over in the new

Republic of India. Delving further into this legacy, Gupta explained, “India received a Police

Force with a very small Indian leadership and a subordinate body, which had been studiously trained in the use of brute force and which corruption and malpractices had been tolerated.”30 At the time of the publication of Gupta’s study the police were, “Still the objects of public distrust and condemnation, if not hatred; and the unfortunate fact remains that they are still in search of a new identity, a new image, a new aim and a new technique.”31 Anandswarup Gupta’s work assertively advanced the understanding of the British colonial police apparatus, and how its legacy carried over the present day India. Like Bayley before him, Gupta sought to provide a scholarly understanding of India’s police and the challenges it has faced since independence from Britain.

Following Anandswarup Gupta’s study was British historian David Arnold’s 1986 work,

Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859-1947. Arnold’s work had grown out of a long interest in British domination of India and authorities’ interaction with the indigenous society.

For Arnold the colonial police served as a metaphor for the British regime as a whole. Through the police it was possible to view the principles and priorities of the colonial regime. However, the object of Arnold’s study carried on further in what the British left behind and passed into

Indian hands unchanged. The result was a British colonial institution that became the main support of a post-colonial India. To make his argument Arnold examined the development of the

Madras police starting a few years after the Munity in 1857 to 1947.

Arnold also objected to Gupta’s interpretation of the colonial police essentially helping to sustain British power after the Munity. Gupta had viewed this imperial role as a straying from

30 Gupta, Police in British India, 29. 31 Gupta, Police in British India, 127.

the police’s original function, to prevent crime and protect citizens. For Arnold this difference between political suppression and crime was a false idea. The author noted that, “To the colonial regime crime and politics were almost inseparable: serious crime was an implicit defiance of state authority and a possible prelude to rebellion; political resistance was either a crime or the likely occasion for it.”32 Arnold also disputed Gupta’s notion that the colonial police served only the British interest in India. To Arnold this notion was incorrect, as he remarked, “Officially or illicitly they also acted in defense of the interests of the Indian propertied classes, and this alignment was one factor in their smooth transference from British to Indian hands at the time of independence.”33 Arnold’s disagreement, however, is relative as the majority of the interests of

Indian propertied classes were aligned with those of British authorities. Arnold’s distinction is designed to explain lingering resentment of police as the protectorate of vested interests.

Arnold argued that a deeper trend appeared that spanned India’s history from the British to the publishing of his work. Arnold observed “the creation, evolution and consolidation of a powerful state apparatus with the police as one of its primary agencies.”34 For the Indian police,

1947 did not present many breaks with its recent colonial past. This continuity could be plainly witnessed by the actions of India’s leaders, as the author explained, “In this heavy reliance upon the police, the rulers of India since Independence have been no more faithful to their colonial inheritance.”35 To understand the beginnings and responsibilities of the colonial police, Arnold argues that it is necessary to look to the provinces of India. This perspective was due in part to the previous authors’ works that made it possible and necessary. Madras was quieter than most other provinces, and as Arnold remarked, “the nature of rural society left its mark on police

32 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859-1947(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. 33 Arnold, Police Power, 4. 34 Arnold, Police Power, 8. 35 Arnold, Police Power, 7.

organization and responsibilities.”36 Distant from India’s northern borders, Madras had fewer soldiers garrisoned, and as a result a greater burden was placed on the police to fill in for the army in quelling riots and rebellions.

David Arnold’s study of the Madras Police from 1859-1947 authoritatively greatly added to the historiographical knowledge about the colonial police force in India. By narrowing his work to a brief time period and area of India, Arnold showed the importance of the Indian colonial police to British India and illustrated how the legacy carried past independence in 1947.

However, Arnold made the assumption that his readers would be fully aware of all the historical terms used during this time in India. Regardless, David Arnold’s study provided clear insight into understanding the development of the colonial police. Arnold showcases the notion that propertied interests took priority and should be protected over the majority of Indian people.

Arnold highlights that the purpose was to exert control to protect those in power.

In 1990, Indian historian and former police officer, B. P. Saha followed Arnold’s work with his own study, Indian Police: Legacy and Quest for Formative Role. Relying upon unpublished documents from the National Police Academy, Hyderabad, and papers prepared by the Bureau of Police Research and Development, Saha’s work maintained that the police in India really only gained a firm foothold in the country around 1902. Using that year as a starting point, the author argues that the police force as we commonly appreciated only took shape around this time due to a Police Commission set up by Lord Curzon. In explaining the importance of this moment, Saha noted that, “The beginning of the century saw the incipient revolt gaining momentum under several matchless patriots, the futile struggle of the extremists, the moderates, and finally, the entry of Mahatma Gandhi in Indian politics.”37

36 Arnold, Police Power, 10. 37 B. P. Saha, Indian Police: Legacy and Quest for Formative Role (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1990), viii.

Saha began his work by reviewing the early emergence of modern policing with the arrival of the East India Company. However, Saha showed that this policing force only acquired its image after Cornwallis sought to beef up the police administration by introducing police stations throughout British India. Progressing from this origin, as the author noted, “The next seven decades of the history of the Indian Police is a sickening story of endless experiments in restructuring till the Police Commission of 1860 changed the very complexion of the force.”38

This change provided the colonial police in India with a hierarchical structure, established a command and control and widened its responsibilities to include civil policing. The Fraser

Commission under the patronage of Lord Curzon had given new life to the colonial police. New departments were created and deficiencies were corrected, all of which was occurring before the police services would face their greatest challenges as the twentieth century progressed. As

Indian nationalists challenged British colonial domination, “assorted Indian policemen resigned and refused to serve the foreign master showing sympathy and attachment to the national cause.”39 But the resignations left the colonial police more resolutely hostile to nationalist agitation. With Gandhi’s call for the Quit India Movement of 1942, the army and the police were let loose with unrestrained ferocity. As the author explained, “Perhaps, history has not yet seen more dreaded records of affront and brutality practiced by the police in crushing a national upsurge.”40

From 1947 to 1975 the Indian Police service experienced phenomenal growth in various branches of the force. However, grievances by policemen were often neglected during this time, until discontentment exploded, resulting in the establishing of police unions. Despite these internal problems the author argued that shortcomings are highly publicized, while the forces’

38 Saha, Indian Police, 319. 39 Saha, Indian Police, 322. 40 Saha, Indian Police, 322.

good works go unnoticed. For Saha, the Indian police inherited the colonial legacy from Britain, and the author acknowledged the unpopularity of India’s police services with ordinary citizens.

Saha gave a possible reason why as due to the police highhandedness in suppressing the national sentiment. As the author noted, “It is therefore, natural that the people are still prejudiced and hesitant to carry a cudgel for the police.”41 Saha’s work like that of the earlier authors enhanced the knowledge about the colonial police, through the use of his unpublished sources and formally classified materials. Saha demonstrated that the important development in the policing in British

India occurred in 1902. The author clarified for the reader how the roots of present day India’s police could be traced to that year. Saha also illustrated the reason for the antipathy between the citizens and the police, something the previous authors did not do. Overall, B. P. Saha advanced knowledge about India’s police upon which future historians could build.

With the arrival of the twenty-first century, additional works on British colonial police in

India have begun to appear. One of these is historian Subrata Chattopadhyay’s 2009 work,

Special Police Force in Colonial Bengal. Based on his doctoral dissertation, Chattopadhyay’s study examines the Special Police Force in colonial Bengal from 1852-1913. For the author, this time was significant in the political administration of this province and for the formation of this force. Chattopadhyay chronicles not only the process of growth of the institution, but how the organizations had to change to meet the challenges presented by militant nationalism. For the author, the indifferent attitude of British attitudes to the demands made by the nationalists of

Bengal galvanized nationalist opposition and encouraged it to turn to militant forms of nationalism, extremism, or extremism. Chattopadhyay begins to consider policing as a negotiation between the colonizer and colonized.

41 Saha, Indian Police, 322.

To combat this nationalist challenge, the British turned to their police system in Bengal to deal with the new threat against the British Raj. The British concluded that the ordinary police network could not deter and isolate those elements hostile to British interests. What was needed was a special police force whose responsibility was dealing with terrorism in the province. As

Chattopadhyay further explained his point, “In other words, the Special Police Force was set up to deal with those people who had resolved to free their motherland form the foreign stronghold.”42 However, despite the Special Police Force operating the province, the British were never able to prevent acts of aggression against their rule. Chattopadhyay noted how this type of thinking still predominates in India’s police services today. The author explained, “The real success of the police in the long run largely depends on its close relationship with the people and on the extent to which it is able to secure the public trust.”43

Chattopadhyay enhanced the understanding of India’s colonial police, by covering the development of the Special Police Force in colonial Bengal. By fixing his work on a certain organization within the colonial police system, the author showed how the failure to stop terrorist activities by militant nationalists was due to their lack of developing a relationship with the people. From this observation the author concludes that today’s Indian police must move past mistrust established in people’s minds, that the police should seek a deeper involvement in the community.

Thus the scholarship starting with Bayley to through that of the 1980s, mark a departure from the previous superficial or heavily biased works about the police. These more recent studies reflect a growing recognition that a more detailed explanation was necessary when examining power relationships between the colonized and the colonizer. Contemporary scholars

42 B. P. Chattopadhyay, Special Police Force in Colonial Bengal (Kolkata: Bee Books, 2009), 25. 43 Chattopadhyay, Special Police Force, 201.

examine centered on the colonial state and its need to control, intimidate, and supervise. With this instrument of British imperialism’s civilizing mission under scrutiny, what emerged was a better understanding of a colonial structure of support and more complete explanations indicating that independence tended to perpetuate the system.

While the investigation into colonial policing highlights structural evolution, the demands of colonial administrators and the overwhelming British desire to preserve control, they share precise shortcomings. The majority of scholarly works are negative assessments – having identified problems with free India’s police forces, scholars search for the origins or evolution of those problems. They settle into a common structural assumption regarding reforms in which alterations to policing systems are top–down initiatives that were imposed forcefully upon an unwilling populace. They commonly assume that policemen were scarcely more than mercenaries hired to protect the property and institutions of the country’s ruling class. In their search for explanations for popular mistrust of police, these scholars intend to showcase colonial and independent governments that disregard popular needs and desires, that free India inherited the intolerant and arbitrary attitudes of colonial rulers that police and government do not operate for the people.

While valid to a point, such common assumptions artificially limit meaningful assessments of colonial policing systems. With an abundance of postcolonial scholarship highlighting points of negotiation between colonizers and colonized, logically notions about one – sided imperial impositions could be revisited to better explain nuances inherent to colonial government.

Reforms of policing systems in India illustrate this sort of negotiation, with reforms considered by the authorities in terms of immediate priorities that change over time. Such an analysis predictably suggests that government itself was and remains a negotiated space.

As historiography of India’s colonial police centered on governance and immediate law- and-order concerns, this thesis address these short comings and assumptions about India’s colonial law enforcement. This work adds to the current literature by examining the police through the expression of imperial ideology and needs. In this imperial structure, accommodation to exact colonial circumstances stimulated reforms. By examining how this achievement in which central control evolved institutionally as nationalist challenges threatened the stability of Britain’s colonial enterprise in India, provides deeper understanding about the relationship between the colonizer and colonized.

As India grapples with its colonial police legacy, in which the police system was no more reformed under India’s new masters following independence than it had been under the British, the time to examine this imperial structure is appropriate as many nations come to terms with their imperial pasts. This thesis will examine that imperial structure and the its reforms in the face of challenging circumstances, throughout the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the colonial regime, the Raj. Chapter Two explores British India shaken by circumstances of the Munity and the raising of a Police Commission in 1860 whose task it was to formulate a reorganization of the police as totally reliance upon military order and almost proved fatal to

India’s colonizers. Chapter Three focuses on summoning of a new commission in 1902, as the

Raj begins to enter into a new century, and its new recommendations that are needed as burgeoning Indian nationalism promised to present new challenges to the British rulers. Chapter

Foure covers the colonial system, as it tries to stay afloat as the trickle of nationalism develops into a flood, as the police tackle the maintenance of the Raj through 1905 to 1932, armed with new weapons in the form of new fail-safe laws that aided police coercion. The thesis as a whole

provides insights into colonial government, revealing that the maintenance of law and order was somewhat less arbitrary than previously assumed by scholars.

Chapter 2

FRAMING THE APPARATUS OF CONTROL: THE INDIAN POLICE ACT OF 1861

It is for the Government to lay down policies. It is for the Police to carry them out, in accordance with the law of the land. -J.C. Curry44

The idea of enforcing the laws of the land and maintaining order, in various degrees, is an essential function of civil society. In some form policemen, though they may not have been identified by this term, have existed throughout the world, providing the means of control against perceived or actual threats created by those who sought challenge the dictates of those in power.

The sub-continent is no exception to that rule, and ideas about order and control for Indian state existed hundreds years before the arrival of British colonizers. These pre-British Indian police institutions enforced the will of the state, i.e. India’s various sovereigns and rajahs, were establishment-subordinate. Thus, the police did not seek to protect the welfare of those being ruled. They in turn, subjugated the wider elements of Indian society they policed. With the arrival of the British and their excessive excitement about how to regulate India’s colonial society, the police, under the India’s new overlords, did not drastically change from its traditional establishment-subordinate model. Looking to establish a tighter grip on the crown jewel of their empire, the British simply introduced organizational reforms to the Indian police model, in which the police accountability to the ruler was left in place. This consolidating of

Britain’s imperial grip upon India was accomplished by the legal code of the Indian Police Act of

1861, which directly responded to recent developments in India.

The catalyst for the promulgation for the 1861 Act could be found in the seismic events of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Though the British made initial efforts before and after the Munity

44 John Court Curry, The Indian Police (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 10.

of 1857 to mold the system of civil control to meet their needs, it cannot be said that they created the police system in India, but built upon an indigenous foundation.45 Before the advent of

British rule, the Mughal Police System in northern India, which was based on a combination of military and civil capacities, was a two-level system. In this structure, a province was headed by a Nazim, Governor, at the provincial headquarters, and the Faujdar, commanders of military forces in the district.46 Concerned with conquest and the collection of revenues, the Mughals were minimally active in administering the countryside. “The villages were left responsible for their own safety,” as historian John Curry noted, adding, “and that of travelers within their limits.”47

Under the Mughals, the zamindars, or land holders, were responsible for maintaining peace and security of their people.48 However, as stated above, it was the responsibility of the village itself, working in tandem with zamindars, to apprehend criminals. In this agreement the zamindars were assisted by the village watchman, chowkidars, the village watchman responsible for basic policing.49 The village watchman kept watch during the night and reported to the zamindars the arrival and departure of all unknown persons within the village. The village watchman was to be familiar to the people of the village, and try to detect criminals. The responsibility for stolen property was delegated to the village watchman as far as his means allowed, and the remainder was placed on the village as a whole.50

45 J.C. Madan, The Indian Police, Its Development Up to 1905: An Historical Analysis (New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, 1980), 2 46 B.B. Mirsa, The Administrative History of India: 1834-1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 532. 47 Curry, The Indian Police, 20. 48 K.S. Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment: Ruler-Supportive Police Forces of South Asia (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1998), 55. 49 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 63. 50 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-3, 10.

In southern India, the two groups were invested with responsibilities of performing customary policing actions: the taliaris and kavalkars. Like their counterparts to the north, the chowkidars, the taliaris were the village watchmen, responsible securing property and observing outsiders in the village.51 Often this vocation was a hereditary position and was left to low-caste

Hindus, mostly Untouchables, who were paid with a percentage of the village harvest. The kavalkars, however, unlike the taliaris or chowkidars, were state appointees whose domain of responsibility included not only a village, but roads, countryside and markets.52

However, both methods of indigenous policing did not come without problems. Often it was widely assumed that the village watchman was himself a thief and that zamindars protected thieves to share in their ill-gotten gains.53 To add another needed layer of protection to the villages, leaders of plundering tribes were paid off to induce them and their followers from attacking the village.54 From the eleventh to the eighteenth century, Muslim rule remained a relatively foreign rule throughout the whole of the sub-continent. As historian M. B. Chande notes, “The viceroys and other principle officers came and went without taking any real interest in the life and well-being of the inhabitants of the area under their charge.”55 This statement emphasizes that colonial officials remained disinterested in the public welfare as a priority for security; instead, stability and order assumed precedence and a system that, despite its transparent flaws, promoted order throughout British India was sufficient, regardless of its origins.

As the Mughal Empire in India began to decay, political chaos ensued. With a police system that was establishment-subordinate, in which defending those in power took precedence

51 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17. 52 Arnold, Police Power, 19. 53 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 63. 54 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-3, para 8. 55 M.B.Chande, The Police In India (Delhi: Atlantic Publishes and Distributors, 1997), 65.

over defending Indian civil society, the loss of control from the top shattered India’s indigenous police system and methods. According to B. B. Mirsa, as the Mughal system of administration evaporated, “the official and private instruments of the police began to work at cross purposes, the latter becoming increasingly independent of the former.”56 Police officials and forces, whose task had been to ensure the stability of the state, took advantage of the political power vacuum, and through corruption and exploitation now sought their own personal self-aggrandizement among the population they were meant to police. In many cases, abuses of all manner occurred involving oppression and extortion was practiced by police officials. This corruption was later noted when the British reviewed this interregnum, after the loss of Mughal control and their own assumption to power in India. A British report explained that, “The weapons which were intended for the enemies of the state were turned against the state itself, and each other, and were used for plans of personal aggrandisement, mutual revenge or public plunder.”57

With the state’s traditional weapons for control now becoming the new groups engaging in criminal activities, traditional criminal groups and crimes flourished. Often various armed gangs, dacoits, composed of India’s different ethnic groups ranging from Pindaris, Marathas, or

Afghans traversed the countryside in search of victims.58 From this anarchy of criminal activity predominating the countryside, it was said in the Indian phrase that “‘the people did not sleep in tranquility.’”59 Though the people may not have slept in tranquility, they were quick in adding to the turbulence that was shattering the placidity of village life. Often, in disputes which erupted over the rights of stolen property, villagers practiced night raids on one another to settle a

56 Mirsa, Administrative History, 533. 57 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 11. 58 Madan, Indian Police, 11. 59 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 12.

perceived wrong.60 Reflecting over this time of chaos in the Indian countryside, Mountstuart

Elphinstone, the Governor of Bombay, lamented, “Though the natives put up with petty disorders they checked great ones with a rough hand and gave themselves no concern about the attendant evils.” Thus, this pandemonium became the legacy that the British East India Company inherited after accepting the diwani, the revenue administration with somewhat indefinite political responsibilities, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1765.61 As this changing of authority transpired, the East India Company had also consolidated its political dominance and stability in the provinces of Madras and Bombay.

British involvement dramatically increased once the East India Company began expanding from its original trade settlements of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Since the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1764, British power was secured firmly in India. “Plassey proved, crudely but effectively,” as Lawrence James explained, “that the Company was a force to be reckoned with in India.” 62 As such, even though the British won control over financial and administrative concerns of the three provinces from the Emperor Shah Alam II, the Nawab retain power of the police and criminal justice. However, the influence of the Company’s men destroyed the authority of the Nawab of Bengal, forcing the British to fill the power vacuum.63 After receiving authority in the form of the diwani, the British sought to protect those areas under their responsibility. As David Arnold explained, “the collection of land revenue became the

Company’s ‘ruling passion’ and replaced trade as the main source of income in India.” 64 Thus for the Indian revenues to flow into British coffers, stability was required, and if stability was not

60 David H. Bayley, The Police and Political Development in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 39. 61 Curry, Indian Police, 25. 62 Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), 128. 63 Madan, Indian Police, 12. 64 Arnold, Police Power, 8.

provided the British would provide it for themselves in the wake of the disintegration of India’s

Muslim regime.

The first British Governor-General of the East India Company who attempted to set up a colonial police force in India was Warren Hastings. At the time of Hastings’ arrival in Bengal in

April 1772, the rate of crime and mayhem had reached such levels of heightened seriousness that neither the cities nor countryside were considered safe.65 This lawlessness could be plainly seen, in February 1771, by the British when dacoits ambushed and killed four Company men and stole the collected revenues that totaled Rs. 15000.66 For Hastings, the answer could be found in the reforming of the indigenous police system rather than abolishing it. In 1774, Hastings looked to the institution of the Fujdars, complemented by the assistance of the zamindars, in combating crime and delivery of intelligence.67 By 1781, these measures were found unsatisfactory, due to

Fujdars lacking proper authority in which they could not punish the zamindars for criminal offenses, and with that the Fujdars were abolished.68

In 1785 Hastings was recalled back to Britain and was succeeded by General Sir Charles

Cornwallis.69 Arriving in India, Cornwallis was suspicious of the native inhabitants and he viewed Company officials as altruistic. As Piers Brendon explained, Cornwallis expected that:

“Indians should be looked after, as befitted people who were backward, corrupt and incapable of much save low cunning.”70 Cornwallis, entering his new position with a skewed sense of noblesse oblige, observed that the condition of the criminal administration was deteriorating

65 Dhillon, Defenders, 81. 66 Nikarkama Mazumbar, Justice and Police in Bengal:1765-1793 (Delhi: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1960), 80. 67 Madan, Indian Police, 14. 68 Mazumbar, Justice and Police, 175. 69This Cornwallis was the same General Charles Cornwallis who had surrendered his forces at Yorktown in 1781, during the American War for Independence. Returning to Britain, Cornwallis found that blame for what had occurred was not placed upon him, but General Sir Henry Clinton. Being held blameless he continued to enjoy the confidence of successive British governments for the remainder of this career. 70 Piers Brendon, The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire: 1781-1999 (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 38.

rapidly and that many zamindars had joined forces with the dacoits. To remedy the situation,

Cornwallis introduced the daroga, or supervising officer system. Under this system the East

India Company completely took over the administration of the police and the zamindars were stripped of their responsibilities.71 Each district was divided into police jurisdictions, thanas, under the daroga, who in turn was tasked with arresting offenders and sending them to a

Magistrate within twenty-four hours. Despite the reforms of Cornwallis and his successor Lord

Maira, nothing changed. As historian B. P. Saha explained, “Crime shot up. Dacoities and organized crime by armed gangs showed an unprecedented increase.”72 The increase was due to the daroga not being able to bring the village police to bear and being spread to thinly. This deficiency resulted in the system being seen as a creation of a foreign authority, which local castes and leaders would not back.73

Throughout the other parts of India under British control, the experiment of colonial policing was not uniform and worked independent of one another. However, following the 1843 conquest of the province of Sind on the west coast of India (now part of Pakistan) General Sir

Charles Napier initiated a new venture in Indian policing by creating a force formed on the Royal

Irish Constabulary model.74 The newly subjugated territory was provided with a semi-military constabulary force to help alleviate public-order responsibilities of the army, upon which policing had been forced to rely. In each district of Sind there was a European lieutenant of police, who reported to the captain responsible for the district. The captain of the district served

71 Madan, Indian Police, 17. 72 B. P. Saha, Indian Police: Legacy and Quest for Formative Role (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1990), 9. 73 Bayley, Police and Political Development, 41. 74 Considered to be England’s first real colony, Ireland provided the paradigm in colonial policing and control that was repeated across the globe as the British continued, throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, to plant the Union Jack in the remaining far-flung areas of Asia and Africa.

at the behest of the chief commissioner, who found himself responsible to the province’s governor.

Since the time of Warren Hastings, the administrator or “collector” held jurisdiction over the prerogative of policing, under the umbrella of mixed executive and judicial powers in a district.75 Supporting this organization, the police found themselves employed with any task arising from red tape bureaucracy issuing from an administrator’s portfolio. Under Napier’s model, a separate and self-contained organization existed which had no other duty to preform but police activities.76 In Napier’s action, policing, on the sub-continent, moved past the traditional command and control to modern modes of standardization. However, despite the newly inaugurated changes to the province’s police, subservience still fully rested upon the civil executive of the newly constituted ruling regime. Thus with a police force fully devoted to combating those criminal enterprises to which they were composed, officials found Napier’s model began paying dividends. By 1859, the police success in combating malefactions and securing the British mandate in Sind culminated in a report which proudly proclaimed that

“‘many crimes such as Gang Robbery, Highway Robbery, by armed or mounted men, and cattle lifting by armed bands…all of which were very common are now almost unknown.’”77 Viewed as a success, in 1852 the governors of other British areas soon looked to Sind as example to follow.

75 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism And Its Forms Of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 60. 76 Saha, Police Power, 13. 77 Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History Of The Indian Police (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1971), 70.

In the Presidencies of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal, the colonial police system followed an independent course from that of other areas of British dominance.78 Throughout these three regions of British control, an independent system of colonial police was formed to administer to local needs.79 In Bombay, various experiments in colonial policing were tried. However, after

1827 the police of Bombay took shape, consisting of the village police, the stipendiary district police and the irregular corps.80 After 1847 when George Clark, the Governor of Bombay, visited Sind, the Bombay Police was reorganized along Napier’s model. Madras was the next

Presidency which adopted Napier’s experiment in policing. When the results of the Torture

Commission of 1855 highlighted the abuses of the people by the police in their dual role of revenue collectors, the commission recommended that there should be a separation of revenue and police functions.81 The Madras Government accepted the Commission’s recommendations, and drafted them into law. This reform created a Superintendent of Police, administrating a separate police force in each district. This position was subordinated to the District Magistrate and a Commissioner of Police of the entire Presidency.82 However, for Bengal, the Governor-

General Sir J. Halliday was not interested in Napier’s system of separating the police from their other assigned bureaucratic duties. In 1856, Halliday declared that the offices of the Magistrate and Collector should remain the same and that chowkidari should be revived with the Magistrate hold authority over it.83

78 These two areas of Bombay and Madras breaking with the traditional patterns in Indian policing would escape the upheavals produced by the 1857 Munity. Consequently when the Police Act of 1861 was enacted, it would apply to all of British India except Bombay and Madras. 79 Saha, Indian Police, 14. 80 Saha, Indian Police, 18. 81 Arnold, Police Power, 20. 82 Misra, Administrative History, 536. 83 Saha, Indian Police, 13.

Though the situation remained a patchwork, in regard to fashioning a uniformed infrastructure for Britain’s colonial law enforcement, Napier’s premise for applying the Irish model provided forward thinking in that it stripped the police of its multifaceted bureaucratic duties and made the police solely responsible for upholding colonial rule. Despite Napier’s novel administrative approach, and the other British provinces examining his methods, British

India still experienced a certain amount of disorder and discrepancies because no uniform system of colonial policing existed yet. However, the work of providing the total reorganization for the colonial police based on a set of uniform policies, in which colonial rule was enforced, was found in the Indian Police Commission of 1860-61.

With the introduction of a more standardized police system, through Napier’s model, by the

1850s, British dominance through the Company state system strengthened in India. However, by mid-nineteenth century, British officials were considering more of a civilian makeup to replace the military composition of the colonial state. Explaining this point, David Arnold noted “The formation of ‘civil’ police forces was intended to lessen what by the 1850’s had come to be seen as a dangerous reliance on the army for internal policing.”84 For state control, relying continuously on military policing was seen as unrefined and colonial officials worried that it would produce alienation among the people.85 By 1857, Indian mistrust of the British had graduated into full revolt when rumors spread that the British were issuing bullets greased with cow and pig fat to sepoys, indigenous Indian troops. The cow was considered sacred to the

Hindus; the pig was an anathema to the Muslims. The resulting revolt quickly spread and finally the British quelled the rebellion within a year. Known to the British as the Great Rebellion or the Sepoy Mutiny, to the Indians it would be known as the First War of Independence.

84 Arnold, Police Power, 35. 85 Arnold, Police Power, 28.

Regardless of what the moment is called, the British very nearly lost control of northern India.

Raj officials concluded that enhanced security was necessary.

When the dust settled from the quelling of the Munity, the British were shocked into an interval of imperial reevaluation for the great expanse of India under their control. For the

British, the reevaluation was shaped to focus on the need for consolidating their hold on the subcontinent rather than trying to improve native lives or relinquishing power.86 This consolidation of British administrative power came in a flood of imperial legislation with the creation of the Indian legal codes: the Code of Civil Procedure in 1859, the Indian Penal Code in

1860, and Criminal Procedure Code in 1861.

After the transfer of Indian sovereignty from the Company to Parliament and the Queen through the Government of India Act in 1858, stability was seen as resting upon the twin pillars of the Army and the Police. Before an effective reorganized Army could be put into place, it was seen as a precondition that an effective reorganized Police had to come first. As the Governor of

Madras, Sir Charles Trevelyan explained, “Until this done, the Army cannot be concentrated and reduced to the proportions really required as a reserve in support of the Civil Power.” Financial reasons too were noted for what stability in India would mean to Britain. As the Journal of

Statistical Society of London noted, “India will become, as heretofore, auxiliary to the political strength and wealth of England.”87 For these various reasons the importance of policing was deemed too critical to be left to uncoordinated indigenous systems. British officials considered a civilian force, placed under magisterial authority, as insurance for safeguarding European lives and property holdings. This change in attitude went in tandem with a new British mindset about how Indians were to be treated, that, “they were to be ruled with a firm hand and ruthlessly, if

86 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 138. 87 Sykes. “The Past, Present, and Prospective Financial Condition of British India.” Quarterly Journal of The Statistical Society 22 (December 1859): 455-480.

necessary.”88 By 1860, these changed attitudes and priorities finally resulted in a commission being set up to examine meticulously the requirements for revamping the police apparatus of the colonial government.

This undertaking fell to two military officers in civil employment and three Civil Service

Officers, from various parts of India, who had dealt with police reforms within their provinces.

Lieutenant Colonel H. Bruce of the Bombay Army, Chief of Police, Oudh, found himself a member as well as Secretary of the Commission. Other members included Lieutenant Colonel

Phayre, the Commissioner of Pegu, R. Temple and S. Wauchope of the Bengal Civil Service, and

W. Robison of the Madras Civil Service. Together these men were tasked by the Governor-

General of India, Lord Canning, to produce a safe, sure, and protective force. Lord Canning himself had been made to feel the full force of the financial importance of the undertaking from the Secretary of State for India, Charles Wood. Wood expressed uneasiness at the military aspect and growing numbers of the police forces and the drain upon monetary reserves.89 From this reservation, Canning presented the Commission when it met on August 17, 1860, with three points of reference in its task:

(a) To propose a new system of police applicable to India generally, whereby economy and efficiency might be secured. (b) To prepare for publication all available information regarding the best system of police organization. (c) To collect the most comprehensive statistics obtainable, regarding the cost and establishment of the police of all kinds, throughout India.90

Not to be undone, Wood also sent to the Commission a memorandum about the various police systems utilized in India, and what he desired from the group’s recommendations for a secured colonial police force. For Wood, a structure comprising of an integrated system of civil

88 Anandswarup Gupta, The Police in British India: 1861-1947 (Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979), 1. 89 Madan, Indian Police, 41. 90 A.P. Mukherjee, Encyclopedia of Police in India, Vol I (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1993), 31.

police and the military could best serve all the provinces under British control. However, in this arrangement there was to be a broad line of distinction maintained between the civil police and the military. Both organizations were to confine themselves to their respective repressive duties and responsibilities. In matters of detection of in suppressing civil disturbances the civil police would be superior to the military. However, the military would detach itself from its primary duties of occupation and preventing foreign intervention to aid the civil police when they were no longer able to contain disturbances.91

Curiously absent from Lord Canning’s and Charles Wood’s reference points, for the

Commission, was the lack of concern about the prevention of crime; again, the reestablishing of the stability of the colonial state, in the most cost-effective manner, trumped the protection of the

Indian people. With these imperial terms of reference handed down, the Commission began work that lasted seventeen months.92 During that time the Commission began promptly analyzing how the variegated provinces of British India made use of their existing police forces. From this evaluation the Commission hit upon one of the great difficulties that came about with various police forces having been used under various local rulers. In such vast areas it was observed that many men had been hired temporarily for police duties, and had never been discharged; coupled with this astonishing information, data showed that the men were paid by a district department or from other extraneous sources.93 This financial aspect of providing security to the British establishment formed an influential part of the Commission’s review and later recommendations.

This data, as reported by the Commission, about the expenditure of both Military and Civil

Police of every kind paid for by the state in the British provinces as on 1 May 1860 was:94

91 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 103. 92 Madan, Indian Police, 41. 93 Madan, Indian Police, 65. 94 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 104.

Rupees

Bengal (excluding Arracan) 45,310,342 Bombay (including Sind) 45,810,220 Madras 47,280,010 Punjab 52,091,069 N.W. Province 76,064,325 Oudh 16,050,387 Burma 11,060,519 Nagpur 9,240,370 Total: 302,907,242

From this data the Commission advocated trimming down these expenditures effecting the economy in the Police budget. Commissioners in turn presented their British superiors with a general limit for costs to the Police from the various provinces:95

Bombay Rs. 45,081,220 Madras Rs. 47,028,010 Punjab Rs. 52,091,069 N.W. Provinces Rs. 76,064,325 Central Provinces Rs. 10,050,000 Burma Rs. 10,026,492 Oudh Rs. 10,000,000 Bengal Rs. 45,031,342 Total: Rs. 295,372,458

Looking to couple efficiency with economy, the Commission formulated that the level of having a uniform police force for the whole of British India was determined in relation to an area to be policed, the population, the revenue, and the reputation of the country. With these new prerequisites, the Commission computed that the new reorganized police force for their Indian possessions would consist of 130,000 to 160,000 officers and men.96 To provide proper leadership for this reorganized force, in a manner that would integrate efficiency and discipline,

95 Police Commission to Government of India, No. 5, 17 January 1862, Madan, Indian Police, 66. 96 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 105.

it was seen that European superintendence was a necessity. Those Europeans favored to superior police positions were army officers due to their experience in recruitment and training.97 For it was upon drill and discipline, the elemental components of training, that the reorganized civil police force was to be based to maintain British order in India. Consequently, the recruitment to the superior police took on the deliberate sense of racial superiority and mistrust, for it was supposed that European officers proved more competent for the proper discharge of important police duties.98

By contrast, Indians themselves were considered by the British as inferior and only able to fill the position of the constable, the lowest of the subordinate police ranks, and incidentally this rank had to perform the general duties of the police. Indian recruits wishing an appointment to the subordinate police could not come from low castes, and they need to be education.99 In this respect, education for native recruits apparently took a back seat in the later requirements to serve in the subordinate police. In 1875, in a report of the Madras Presidency, it was noted, “The number of Head Constables and Constables who cannot read and write decreased since last year.

The general percentage of men who can read and write has increased from 63:2 to 64:5.”100

This idea of the Indian officer as inferior to the European was still held in 1913 in an article of the Journal of American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology “the superior officers

(Europeans) are well paid and fine men; that the lower police are natives, illiterate, poorly paid, do dangerous work, have no hope of promotion and are constantly under pressure to accept or extort bribes.”101

97 Arnold, Police Power, 40. 98 Madan, Indian Police, 54. 99 Madan, Indian Police, 54. 100 United Kingdom. “Report of the Administration of the Madras Presidency 1875-76,” 1877, p.86. 101 Charles Henderson, “Control of Crime in India.” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 4 (September 1913): 380.

Ex-soldiers were eagerly sought as police recruits, following the caste recruitment plan of the Army in which members of “martial races” were eagerly sought. This preference for the

“martial races” translated into looking favorably upon Muslim recruits. The reason was twofold: the British expected Muslim police forces in predominantly Hindu provinces to have fewer connections with the population, and Muslims were seen as tough and courageous and Hindus as being timid.102 Regardless of the British preference, however, those who joined usually enrolled for general service in the province from which they originated.103 Once in the service of the subordinate police, constables could not leave the service without giving two months prior notice.104

Throughout the period of the Commission’s research into India’s policing problem,

Commission members had been submitting recommendations through a series of reports to the

Government of India. The first report of September 8, 1860 carried with it a draft bill to expedite legislation for the standardization of the police for all of British India.105 Introduced into the

Legislative Council on October 3, 1860, and after some minor modifications of the Bill, the

Government of India promptly ratified it into law as the Police Act (Act V) of 1861. 106 From this legislation, British authorities in India now possessed a consistent guide of policing with a consolidated system of command and control. This chain of command took the form of placing a province under the authority of the superior police in the form of the Inspector General of

Police. A province was divided into various districts in which a District Superintendent would preside with aid of an Assistant District Superintendent. Following this modification were to be the subordinate police the in ranks of Inspectors, Head Constables, Sergeants, and Constables.

102 Arnold, Police Power, 41. 103 Madan, Indian Police, 55. 104 Indian Police Act, Section 9. 105 Saha, Indian Police, 20. 106 Madan, Indian Police, 62.

The Police Act also established the provinces as the area from which the raw indigenous police recruits were to enlisted and trained in their roles for helping to maintain the stability of the reorganized British power throughout the sub-continent.107

For an article of legislation that sought to provide British interests in India with one of several mechanisms of control, the Police Act of 1861 was surprisingly short, consisting of only forty-seven sections. Yet regardless of its pithiness, the preface of the Act unashamedly asserts that “Whereas it is expedient to reorganise the police and to make it a more efficient instrument for the prevention and detection of crime.”108 Through the Act’s succinctness, wrapped in magisterial jargon, the British colonial ideal is made discernible that the obligation of the police did not reside with the indigenous public and its general welfare, but to the general welfare of the foreign British colonial state. As British historian J.C. Curry, writing seventy-two years later on the Act and its intended vagueness, explained, “Details are carefully avoided. The Act is a mere framework which the provincial governments are invited to clothe.”109 Thus, as with the previous policing systems utilized throughout India’s early history, the police still remained the same old establishment-subordinate set up within which local variation thrived, albeit revamped, with accountability found only in the colonial state’s control over it.

As the British sought to provide stability in the form change in India, following the

Mutiny, many indigenous traditions still remained the same in the new Indian colonial state.

Proof of this statement could be found in the Police Act that protected India’s traditional village police. Section 21 of the Act read, “Nothing in this Act shall affect any hereditary or other village police officer”110 With this distraction, legal colonial recognition of the countryside was

107 Indian Police Act, Section 4. 108 Indian Police Act, Section 1. 109 Curry, Indian Police, 36. 110 Indian Police Act, Section 21.

given over to a hereditary class of men that had always observed the village. Why had this system that had been used by other regimes in India, including the Mughals, still remained under the British? The answer was that the Commission viewed the village police as unavoidable due to custom and prescription that carried special weight with the people.111 This connection with traditional modes of policing also carried the added benefit of legitimizing the Crown’s regime and its policing reforms. In a special report about the subject of the village police, the

Commission noted, “‘In the existing condition of the interior of the country, the organised police cannot be informed of all that occurs of public consequence, unless they have some tolerably reliable agency in the villages.’”112 Stability for India’s new rulers required economy of force having to be stretched across the sub-continent, hence the old system for the countryside remained in place for the British as it had with the Mughal predecessors. In tandem to this setup was the recognition that British rule required Indian collectors.

With the shoring up of British stability in India completed, with a colonial police whose loyalty was found in the success of British occupation, the full meaning of institutionalizing the stability of a colonial state in a foreign land can be observed in the Police Act of 1861. With the omnipresent idea of economy in the background of sustaining British power throughout India,

Sections 13, 14, and 15 sought to assist a cash-strapped colonial government and provide an additional method of control via the subsidies. Under Sections 13 and 14, those individuals or companies that requested additional protection were required to pay for the supply of extra police. Section 15 of the Act went even a step further, quartering additional police forces in areas deem “disturbed” or “dangerous” districts. This area of the Act declared, “the cost of such additional police force shall be borne by the inhabitants of such areas described in the

111 Madan, Indian Police, 59. 112 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 108.

proclamation.”113 If payment was not forthcoming, the sum could be collected by having distress warrants issued and from the sale of confiscated property. Thus in a masterstroke, the British had discovered a way to pay for the upkeep of their colonial authority and impose the managing costs on their colonial subjects.

To make the inhabitants of an area also a tool of complicity in maintaining the British power when disturbances of the peace took place, Section 17 provides for the appointment of

“Special Police Officers.” When sufficient force was not able to be brought to bear against an unlawful assembly or riot, a police officer not below an Inspector could “appoint so many residents of the neighbourhood as such as the police-officer may require.”114 Hence the inhabitants themselves could be pressed into service when the situation required such action. To make sure that an inhabitant pressed into helping enforce the colonial law did so, Section 19 made it clear that refusal meant “he shall be liable upon conviction before a magistrate, to a fine not exceeding fifty rupees for every such neglect, refusal or disobedience.”115 Thus when civil order was threatened, the exigencies of maintaining order became a weapon of the state in the form of impressment.

For the Indian police officer who helped to ensure the stability of colonial regulations, he found himself heavily also regulated by the colonial state. Section 22 served to remind the officer that he was always on duty, and should he get too comfortable in his surroundings he could “at any time, be employed as a police officer in any part of the general police-district.”116

As the officer served at the discretion of British authorities, Section 23 left the officer in no doubt as to what his duty constituted in the colonial state “to obey and execute all orders and

113 Indian Police Act, Section 15. 114 Indian Police Act 1861, Section 17 115 Indian Police Act 1861, Section 19 116 Indian Police Act 1861, Section 22.

warrants lawfully issued to him by any competent authority; to collect and communicate intelligence affecting the public peace; to prevent the commission of offences and public nuisances”117 This part of the Act highlights that for the colonial state the priority of not only collecting and disseminating vital information, but more importantly the monitoring of the police themselves.

To keep an accurate record of the officer and ensure the proper performance of his duties,

Section 44 of the Act required officers to keep diaries of their activities. The diaries were intended “to record therein, all complainants the offences charged against them, weapons or property that shall have been taken from their possession or otherwise, and names of witnesses who shall have been examined.”118 Through this requirement, observation was ensured of the officers themselves at any time when the colonial state, in the form of the Magistrate, wished to examine their records. Thus an added form of protection for the colonial state ensured that the tools for its survival, the police, did not forget that their loyalty resided with their colonial masters. Coupled with this requirement was intelligence about the public peace, a result of the

Munity, dealing with minor problems before they became larger ones. While order was the primary concern, public peace still included public safety.

The Indian Police Act of 1861 erected many of the barriers between policemen and the public which infiltrate scholarly assessments. Constables were now separated for the public they serve by uniform application of institutional functions that balanced efficiency with accountability. Accountability, of course, arose as a solution to the fiscally irresponsible patchwork of policing that balances the sub-continent. The Police Act sought to legally codify a

117 Indian Police Act 1861, Section 23. 118 Police Act, Section 44.

single structure of control, an important to Mughal establishment-subordinate forms which contended to fulfill the institutions inherent to those forms.

Seeking to sustain a tighter hold on India, following the disastrous events of the Munity, the British did not seek to change the policing model that had existed in India for centuries.

India’s traditional establishment-subordinate police systems was an instrument of control that required reorganization for India’s new colonial masters, abolition. Following the Mutiny,

Indian loyalty was suspect. The reforms induced ways to check the multiple layers of loyalty and create collaborators in which foreign rule reigned through native intermediaries. With the

Police Commission of 1860 a new era in police reforms began to the latter part of the nineteenth century for the tightening of Britain’s control over India began. However, with the dawning of a new century in India, a new commission would be appointed that would seek to take the colonial policing and the maintenance of British power on the sub-continent to new levels.

Chapter 3

REFORMING THE APPARATUS OF CONTROL: THE POLICE COMMISSION OF 1902

Of all the branches of the public service in India, the police, by its history and traditions, is the most backward in its character.119

With the creation of the Indian Police Act of 1861, a new bulwark had been established for protecting British colonial interests on the subcontinent from the chaos and instability that had recently shaken British confidence during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Following the Mutiny’s wake, the 1861 Act had created a single uniform police force, no longer an amorphous institution, intended to protect the angrezi raj, rather than the preventing and detecting of crime in India. Implicit in this arrangement also was a force that did not work to secure Indian public support, as it turned its full energies to keep the country forcefully in check. In the decades that followed the enactment of the Indian Police Act of 1861, through the dawning years of the twentieth century, it became obvious that additional internal reforms and consolidation were required as new and more difficult challenges to the Raj began to appear on the horizon in the form of Indian nationalism. Reforms reveal British administrators grappling to retain control in the context of changing circumstances.

Into this colony a new viceroy steeped on the scene and brought with him a new aggressiveness to colonial policies as he vowed to reform and strengthen British rule in India.

With police administration particularly in mind, a new Police Commission was constituted to study the nationalist changes taking place within India with regard to the Indian Police Act established forty years earlier. The end product of the Commission’s labors was a shocking report with recommendations that ultimately failed due to a lack of coherent, but the lasting

119 Government of India’s Home Department Resolution, March 21, 1905.

effects of which helped to reform the police intelligence and provided domestic intelligence with the form it would use until the British Raj passed into history in 1947.

In 1889, as an astonishing 300,000,000 Indians were governed over by a mere 4,500

British members of Indian Civil Service and army officers,120 a misleading document was prepared by the Secretary of State for members of the British Parliament. As Britons prepared to congratulate themselves regarding thirty years of imperial rule throughout the subcontinent, members of Parliament were informed in sensible Victorian terms about the contemporary management of colonial Indian affairs. With regard to the subject of the Police, the Secretary of

State commented:

Though the Police is now, as heretofore, a weak point in the administration, and though from time to time cases of extortion or oppression by the police come to light, still there have been important improvements in the police system and practice during the past thirty years.

Overall, petty larceny still proved an on-going struggle for the police as home invasions and thefts of livestock still occurred. Often, in such minor cases, victims opted not to report such incidences to law enforcement due to the amount of time involved in resolving the issue. There can be little doubt as to why the vast majority of the people did not develop any sympathies with city and local laws. This disconnect was exaggerated because:

Minor criminal cases are still tried in all provinces by officers who exercise revenue and executive functions, and the District Magistrate is everywhere, outside the Presidency towns, responsible for the control of all subordinate Magistrates within his jurisdiction.121

The limited number of officers required them to assume multiple tasks, minimizing the effectiveness of enforcement.

120 Dennis Judd, The Victorian Empire (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 171. 121 Anandswarup Gupta, The Police in British India: 1861-1947 (Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979), 128.

Thus colonial control was failing, the police created to provide the regime with a structure of control had become rife with flaws. Key to this statement was the fact that the vast majority of Indians still had no sympathies with Britain’s alien government. When tasked with turning to his colonial master for assistance, the colonized preferred to accept his hardship. This memorandum to Parliament reveals that, on this commemoration of subjection, the British government furnished for the consumption of the British public a form of disinformation that masked British failures in this area of India’s administration. In this report, the average British reader could take pride in the knowledge that in this area of the empire Britain had provided an adequate system of police and law for their far eastern subjects. Of course, where negligible problems of delinquency still existed, be it in the system itself or among the Indian populous, the fault was not to be found with the benevolent colonizer but with the thick-headedness and venality of the colonized.

For many Britons who reflected on police contributions to stability, like the later writer Sir

Percival Griffiths, many continued to maintain that the British establishment of police stood with

“the firm establishment of law and order,” and was one of lasting achievements of their empire.122 However, what the average British reader would not have known was that despite the enactment of Indian Police Act of 1861, police officials had never been able to gain the trust of the people, as opposed to the police in Britain, nor were Indian policemen effective in tackling crime. This shortcoming of course was due to the fact that the constituted police force in India had ever been meant to do those duties that their British counterparts performed back in Britain.

The latter organization had been established in a nation that had long traditionally entertained some elemental individual rights and laws; hence English law, as the early historian

122 Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1971), 2.

of the Indian police J.C. Curry stated, “is not so much an engine for the repression and punishment of crime as a part of the national heritage.”123 For British observers, in India the exact opposite was the case, a situation in which the police and law was created to serve as establishment-subordinate institutions that served at the behest of the colonial power. It would naturally follow from this distinction that the Indian police were, as the historian K.S. Dhillon noted, “an imposition from above which large masses of people considered as hostile and offensive.”124 Thus with a preventive force imposed from on high, in which the prerequisite for an Indian candidate was total loyalty to the British Government in India, there was no reason for a necessary underpinning need to combat crime, a mission that would generate indigenous community support and cooperation. Not that crime prevention was a conception that an Indian could appreciate, for in the British mind the colonized, “were a people without principle,” and to whom ethical behavior was meaningless in that Indians, “inevitably lied in court, pocketed bribes, and willfully rejected the benefits of British justice.”125 With this imperial affirmation, in which the Indian appeared as the “other” in relation to the supposed “moral superiority” of the

British, there also lurked the fear that the Raj’s subordinate collaborators’ unscrupulousness could even corrupt the colonizer.126

From this setup it was inevitable that the seeds of corruption within this police force that maintained “the rule of order” came to germinate within this colonial setting in which the “rule of law” was not exactly maintained. In this colonial system, in which Indian subjects perceived the Indian constable as having “more mustache (!!) than brain,”127 simple corruption among the

123 J.C. Curry, The Indian Police (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 13. 124 K.S. Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1998), 115. 125 Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24. 126 Claude Markovits, “Indian Communities in China,” in New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1953, ed. Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 258. 127 R. R. Choudhury, Calcutta A Hundred Years Ago (Bombay: Nachiketa Publication, 1987), 159.

lowest to the highest officers in India was often ingenious. For an enterprising constable wishing to supplement his salary, when it came to simple performance of his duties, he often found that the old adage that, “crime doesn’t pay” did not necessarily ring true. Often, officers would levy a fee or secure a gift for assisting members of the indigenous public, be they law abiding subjects or even criminals. Those persons wishing to register a grievance found that they had to pay a fee just to have their complaint recorded by the officer. If the complaint blossomed into a full- fledged investigation, the complainant was sure to find that more of his money would find its way into the officer’s pockets.128

For those who had advanced to become Station House Officers, who Curry dubbed, “…the corner-stone of the whole system,” they found that rank certainly had its privileges.129 These old hands in the service, referred to as the Darogah, though a minor official compared to his pre-

Police Act predecessor, found that the distinction of their position, in relation to the indigenous population, placed them as the “corner-stones” of new levels of graft. As this representative of the colonial state to the community policed, the Darogah would:

…sometimes hush up a case on payment of his terms; he will receive presents from parties and their witnesses; he will levy licit fees from shopkeepers and others for services rendered, or to obviate vexatious espionage. He has an especially rich vein in cases concerning disputes about land, water or crops, and sometimes in the management of cattle pounds. Both parties are often willing to pay him well for maintaining neutrality; or one party will pay well for intervention on his behalf.130

Thus for the Darogh, who “ruled their territories, like little kings,” and for constables who sought to carve out their own personal fiefdoms, money was the lubricant which determined how these gears in the apparatus of empire functioned.131 For the average Indian subject of the Raj,

128 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-03, 21. 129 Curry, Indian Police, 95. 130 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-03, 21. 131 John Beams, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 140.

this malfeasance meant being fully exposed to the predatory nature of the colonial state, in the form of the police. In this colonial system, in which the British took pride and in which unofficial bureaucratic desideratum equaled personal benefit, those who wished to enjoy the full protection of the colonial law had to endure the full harassment by the representatives of that legal apparatus.

Corruption itself could also take curious turns by which the police employed colonial law, in a circumvented manner, to preserve colonial order. As historian David Arnold explained,

“Police power was often used to circumvent or supplement the legal process because the latter was too dilatory or too scrupulous to satisfy the colonial need for prompt retribution and collective punishment.”132 This Machiavellian circumvention in which the police engaged to preserve British dominance dealt with unlawful protests or riots against the regime. By playing fast and loose with the colonial law that allowed for the police to deputize “special constables” when the ordinary police force was not sufficient to deal with these serious disturbances, the Raj could imprison those who refused to serve.133 This deviousness was witnessed firsthand by a

District Superintendent of Police in the Bengal Presidency, who recalled “The process was as simple as it proved invariably effective in all cases reported in good time, when immediately on receipt of the information, the leaders of each party were promptly appointed as special constables and called in at once to the police station concerned to fill the gaps caused by the deputation of the “regulars” to the village or villages in question.”134 Thus as colonial authorities found themselves being presented with burgeoning indigenous resistance, the preservation of order surpassed the letter and spirit of the law as such practices by law enforcement became innovative tools of repression.

132 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. 133 Police Act of 1861, Section 19. 134 Charles Elphinstone Gouldsbury, Life in the Indian Police (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1912), 283.

When used in this capricious fashion, technicalities became a valuable tool in the high handedness of the police, and by default that of the Raj. This method was deliberately applied in dealing with those individuals suspected of a crime, for legal restriction provided that an accused person could not be held for more than 24 hours without remand. On this subject a British officer remarked about the cunning way native officers dealt with this legal restriction, in that, “The officer refrains from making any formal arrest as long as he can, perhaps three or four days. But meanwhile he cannot let them go. He has, therefore hit upon a plan of detaining them in a sort of informal custody.”135 This informal custody practice known as “surveillance,” was nothing more than the unlawful confinement of a suspect.136 For those persons unfortunate to be a prisoner, whether in custody “formally” or “informally,” the side stepping by the officers still continued when it came time to grapple with tortuous understanding of the rules for gathering evidence and soliciting a confession to a crime.

With colonial law and procedure fashioned after the Western ideas of jurisprudence in which criminal offences were specifically defined for the purpose of uniformity of criminal trials, the new collection of laws were very complex and difficult to implement in a coherent manner. This process was witnessed in the Criminal Procedure Code and Indian Evidence Act of

1871, complex enough to try the understanding of many veteran British magistrates.137 It was not surprising that many native officers felt out of their depth. They were, as Dhillon described,

“mentally and professionally incapable of adjusting to it and with supervisory ranks winking at

135 Edmond Cox, Police and Crime in India (New Delhi: Manu Publications, 1976), 106. 136 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-03, 22. 137 The Code of Criminal Procedure, which was minutely codified, was enacted in 1898. From this the Act gave the modus operandi to be utilized by trial courts, in both civil and criminal matters, for the handing down of justice. The Indian Evidence Act was enacted in 1872. This Act gave direction in the quality and quantity of evidence to prove or disprove wrongdoing; this was applied in both criminal and civil proceedings.

malpractices and manipulations.”138 Thus, with the representatives of Britain’s Imperial power, i.e. British officers, condoning malfeasance in the investigation and collection of evidence, it was natural that a system of unlicensed petty tyranny and brutality defined the colonial police culture.

This definition was keenly illustrated when Charles Trench of the Indian Civil Service was informed by a Deputy Commissioner of Police how this system functioned. Trench observed that “‘There are two kinds of policemen,’” the Deputy Commissioner recalled based on his experience and wisdom, “‘the honest and dishonest. The honest policeman rigs the evidence to convict the man he knows is guilty. Probably it is the only way he can get a conviction. The dishonest policeman rigs the evidence to convict a man he knows is innocent.’”139

This “rigging” of evidence, regardless of a person’s guilt or innocent, could often be induced effortlessly through threats or moral pressure; however, where these “third degree” techniques failed, more gruesomely simplistic means were employed against those persons kept in custody. In Bengal, close to the end of the nineteenth century, the police employed two methods which made even most recalcitrant prisoner more amenable with assisting in an investigation. C.E. Gouldsbury, a British administrator, witnessed both and explained:

For the first, the services of a beetle were enlisted, preferably one of the burrowing kind, which being placed on the victim’s stomach, was covered over with a glass or other concave vessel. The insect, thus finding itself a prisoner, might wander about the prisoner for a while, but eventually, following its natural instincts, would proceed to burrow into the flesh, till the agony caused by this process elicited the information required. The second plan was even more ingenious besides possessing the additional merit of leaving no marks, but could only be made use of when two or more persons were “put to the question” at one time and provided they both had beards or moustaches, which, as the bulk of the population was Mohammedan, were generally available. Given that the persons to be operated were possessed of one or other of those appendages, the operation was performed in the following manner. The subjects to be treated were made to stand close together, facing each other, and their beards or moustaches being connected together with thin twine, the men were held firmly in this position by

138 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 119. 139 Charles Chenevix Trench, Viceroy’s Agent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 31.

some of the operators, while another administered a-pinch of snuff to each other, continuing the excruciating process till the confession, or information wanted was extracted.140

However, if an investigation failed to produce a conviction due to the suspicion placed on the evidence “obtained” by the police, then the police soon turned their attention to the complainant in a case. Often the complainant was coerced that to admit that they had made a mistake and that the case had been false.141 Accordingly, many officers engaged in these and similar activities, contradicting the image of Britain as the benevolent power. In a colony that seemed to be in a state of arrested development, these abuses of malfeasance served only to preserve Britain’s hold on the subcontinent by keeping a tight hand on its colonized in the form of a benevolent terror. The pervasiveness of these acts predated the arrival of the British by centuries, in which torture was routine method of an investigation.142 Even with the British insertion of alien operating system, the colonizer could not remove entirely the traditional mindset by which investigations were conducted by indigenous officers.

Despite such facts, there were those who sought to excuse such behaviors. Curry, for example, in tones reminiscent of the Gilbert and Sullivan refrain that “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” noted of the Indian constable, “His work is heavy; and it is not always easy to reconcile the requirements of a strict code of law with human nature. He may feel that has not the time for the innumerable questionings, journeys, searches and the like which every investigation should entail. So sometimes he tries to take a short cut to achieve his aim.”143 In this excuse one can well imagine that because the officer took the “short cut” in achieving his goal of suppression, through the methods of corruption and technicalities, no positive bonds

140 Gouldsbury, Life in the Indian Police, 280. 141 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 22. 142 Vijay Karan, “India’s System of Policing: Needs For Urgent Reform” in Policing India in the New Millennium, ed. P. J. Alexander (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2002), 263. 143 Curry, Indian Police, 103.

formed between the police and the people. Accordingly, as the line between the police and criminals at times was often blurry, actual criminal activity such as dacoities, burglaries, and thefts continued unabated. These activities had only been detected when a confession was obtained, whether coerced or not.144

By the later part of the nineteenth century, as that branch of the colonial service tasked with the colonial state’s preservation and in whose name misdeeds continued to mount, some

British functionaries of the Government anticipated that the weight of the evidence of malfeasance had accumulated to such an extent that they no longer could simply condone it.

Implicit in this problem was that as, “enlightened Victorians they could hardly deny that good government was the raison d’etre of the Raj.”145 By 1901, the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal,

Sir John Woodburn, made clear where in his opinion the heart of the trouble could be found. He wrote “It is essential for a real reform that there should be a bold increase in the wages of the staff which wields so great a power, and in the more careful supervision of their work.”146

Hitting the nail on the head, Woodburn identified that common reason most government venality occurs: low pay. For the colonial police’s most numerous component, its indigenous component, wages had remained fixed since 1860.

Since the time of the Police Commission of 1860, the rate of a constables’ pay had been fixed at a rate less than that of an unskilled laborer, the reason being that a constable would have permanent employment with the added bonus of a pension, whereas the unskilled laborer would not.147 Coupled with this reasoning was that the taxpayer back home in Britain would not pay a penny for India, which necessitated keeping financial concerns in perspective while

144 Gouldsberry, Life in the Indian Police, 281. 145 Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997 (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 235. 146 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 145. 147 J.C. Madan, Indian Police, Its Development Up to 1905: An Historical Analysis (New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House, 1980), 56.

governing.148 Based on such reasoning, the British anticipated that they would be positioned to recruit men of quality that were literate and of high-caste to their nascent colonial force. What the British got instead was not exactly the caliber that they had expected, for as historian David

Arnold notes, “for many recruits employment in the police was a real, if second-best alternative to factory or field work.”149 Thus, the flip side to the British, almost delusional, thinking that low wages would translate into men of high caliber was instead the direct opposite. What filled the ranks of the subordinate police were mostly men of from lower-status communities, possessing negligible education, who viewed the police as their entrée into service of the colonial government.150 As this problem manifested itself, the twilight of a new century was about to dawn on the Raj. Its bureaucracy was reaching its apogee at a time when a resentful Indian nationalism was about burst upon the imperial scene.

By the late nineteenth century, Indian nationalism confronted the Raj at times in the forms of agitation and violence. Curry blamed English education and “English legal and political ideas.”151 However, rationalism was indeed the by-product produced by the pent-up rancor of a newly westernized Indian elite, who served in the colonial administration at a secondary level and who found the door to higher government positions barred to them. Educated Indians were treated by the British as if they were only useful in subordinate positions under European control.

With the bitter memoires of the Munity fresh in their minds, the British erected the institutional framework of the Raj to restrict indigenous participation from the superior executive political and military offices of the colonial regime. Regarding this subject, many shared the opinions of

John Strachey, who as a member of the Viceroy’s Council in 1868, held that the upper echelons

148 Ronald Hyam, Britain ‘s Imperial Century 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1976), 232. 149 Arnold, Police Power, 49. 150 Arnold, Police Power, 49. 151 Curry, Indian Police, 317.

of power belonged in British hands and that colonizer could not go, “…on the assumption that they will always be faithful and strong supporters of our government.”152

Though small concessions were eventually given by the British regarding the subject of governance and in the creation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, seen by the British as a safety valve for native frustrations directed against the Raj, the police was an area where the

British would not yield.153 By the beginning of the twentieth century there was still, “even more resistance and a firm refusal to entertain any proposal to open up the higher grades of the Police to Indians.”154 While some strides were made in opening up higher levels in the Indian Civil

Service and judiciary, allowing Indians into the higher administrative police ranks was deemed too great a security risk. It would be foolish to think that the colonial state’s weapon used to combat the ideas of Indian nationalism, the vast majority of which were Indians, would not itself in some way be receptive to the nationalist cause with regard to their own situation.

Before the new century, apathy prevailed due to the working conditions and wages in which constables found themselves, hence the instances of corruption and abuse. No effort had been made to seek improvement, simply because officers resigned or deserted.155 Now with nationalism seeping through the Raj, subordinate officers even began to collectively articulate their dissatisfaction and job grievances through petitions and meetings. Thus the colonial policemen found in the cause of nationalism the leverage they needed to make the government appreciate, “the political importance of maintaining the loyalty and morale of the

152 Gupta, Police in British India, 49. 153 Created in December 1885, the Indian National Congress, was an organization that welcomed educated Indians from all professions to its ranks. In the beginning the association, which met annually, was comparable to a debate society, but their goal was to place demands on the government to at high levels on all major matters related to Indians. By the twentieth century the organization had become the most important national political party in India. 154 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 112. 155 Arnold, Police Power, 53.

constabulary.”156 Faced with the fear of losing the Raj’s main tool for self-preservation, the message became clear to Viceroy and Governor-General Lord Landsdowne, who began pressing for the improvement in pay of the subordinate police, but before he shaped out a plan a new man arrived from London.157

Arriving in January 1899, George Nathaniel Curzon, at 38, assumed Landsdowne’s post of the Viceroyalty of India. Possessing eloquence, a boundless energy, and a genius for administration, he was nevertheless famously arrogant and abrasive. Though the imperious

Curzon was, “mocked as a ‘most superior person,’ as ‘George the Fifth,’ and as ‘God’s

Butler,’”158 he set about to develop a better government then India had ever experienced.

However, this goal was not due to altruistic reasons, but due to anxieties about Britain forfeiting its greatest dependency; thus, by correcting the flaws in the imperial system, Curzon sought to pull the teeth out of the troublesome Indian National Congress. The first stage in his plan of overhauling the administrative machinery of the Raj was the police itself. According to Curzon, that branch exhibited, “Grave abuses” and was “responsible for the administrative and judicial short-comings that are generally deplored and the have produced a wide-spread and legitimate discontent.”159 To accomplish this task, in 1902, Curzon ordered the formation of the Indian

Police Commission to observe the problems that had since developed since 1861, and to suggest measures to best meet the changing dynamics of Indian society.

To execute this order, an eight member commission was created on July 9, 1902, which also included, for the first time, indigenous participation in the form of two Indian members.

Hoping to invest the group, and by default its findings, with an air of authority and respect, the

156 Arnold, Police Power, 57. 157 B. P. Saha, Indian Police: Legacy and Quest for Formative Role (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1990), 31. 158 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 244. 159 Krishna Chandra Roy, Some Desultory Notes on Lord Curzon’s Work in India: (January 1899-June 1901) (Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri & Company, 1902), 44.

Commission was to be composed of eminent civilian and official members who were knowledgeable and experienced.160 To chair this august group, H. L. Fraser, Chief

Commissioner of the Central Provinces, was approved. The other four British members of the investigative body included: H. A. Stuart, Inspector-General of Police of the Madras Presidency;

Justice E. T. Candy, a judge of the Bombay High Court; Lt. Colonel J. A. Montgomery, a member of the Council of the Governor of the Punjab; W. M. Colvin, a Barrister of Allahabad;

A. C. Hankin, Inspector-General of Police Hyderabad; Rameshwar Singh, Maharaja of

Darbhanga; and Srinivasa Raghava, a member of the Council of the Governor of Madras.161

The Commission was instructed to set down recommendations for improvements to organization, training, and pay of the police and it was to suggest ways to improve evidence gathering, intending to prevent torture.162 However, this group was not given carte blanche as certain obstructions were placed in the way of the Commission’s investigative path. Rural police units were not to be placed under the Police Act, European control was not to be weakened, and while uniformity was sought, “there were matters in which uniformity was neither desirable nor possible.”163 With this mandate, and with its curious constraints in mind, the group assembled in

Simla on October 15, 1902, to begin the process of examining the administration of the police and formed a questionnaire for the main heads of that administration. Copies of the questionnaire were given to witnesses designated by the local governments who had volunteered to give evidence to the Commission.164

160 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 147. 161 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 148. 162 Madan, Indian Police, 237. 163 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment,149. 164 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 7.

Soon, before the close of 1902, the Commission took to the road and visited all of the

Raj’s provinces with the exception of Baluchistan.165 As the members toured the various areas, they observed how the students at the police training schools of Bhagalpur, Moradabad, Vellore, and Phillaur were taught and lectures were given. Leaving no stone unturned, the Commission visited numerous police stations and interviewed the officers of those areas. As the itinerant officials sought native civilian testimony, the Commission held fifty public sessions to take evidence. In reference to their questionnaire, 683 persons answered the Commission’s inquiry, and the Commission examined 244 persons orally and even accepted 35 witnesses who had not submitted replies to the questionnaire. Thus the Commission during its tenure in the field took

279 oral testimonies from the civilian population.166 Surprisingly enough, during this time of inquiry apparently the Commission gave no thought to possible retaliation against witnesses, and allowed witness testimonies to be published in the newspapers.167 Whether any witness found himself facing retribution of an officer for speaking to the Commission, can only be surmised.

At the end of its fact finding mission, the Commission retired back from whence it came, the hill station of Simla. There among the crisp Himalayan air, Commission members settled down to make sense of the information that had been garnered and to process it into a report for

Curzon. However, before the writing began, one last conference was held, in which the British members were the only persons allowed to attend, in which all provincial Inspectors-Generals of

Police arrived to review questions related to administration, financial issues and recommendations they previously had decided to submit.168

165 The Governor-General of that province informed the Commission that it was not necessary for them to come to Baluchistan, nor did he send the Commission any case against the police of that area. 166 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 8. 167 Madan, Indian Police, 238. 168 Saha, Indian Police, 33.

Finally on May 30, 1903, after seven and a half months of working, the Commission transmitted to the Government the findings of its enquires.169 Although the Secretary of State for

India, Lord George Hamilton, and the provincial governments of India agreed on the

Commission’s findings and recommendations, the Secretary of State objected to Curzon’s desire to publish the report. The Secretary anticipated that publicity would undermine the strength of the Raj’s police.170 However, given the findings of the report, Lord Hamilton’s cause for concern was warranted and understandable.

The Commission examined the various facets of the Raj’s police system established since

1860, and judged it to be, “on the whole, a wise and efficient system,” but confirmed officially what many people in India had already privately suspected for some time.171 The report declared that the police system whose, “peculiar philosophy of police work developed for this country after the revolt of 1857,” suffered from major defects and reform was desperately required. The

Commission made clear to its readers that:

There can be no doubt whatever that the evidence laid before the Commission has fully established the necessity for the inquiry which has been instituted. The police force is far from efficient; it is generally regarded as corrupt and oppressive; and it has utterly failed to secure the confidence and cordial cooperation of the people. 172

When British writers, like Griffiths, later reflected about the report, many shared in the viewpoint that “The judgment passed by the Commissioners on police administration in India has generally been considered too harsh.”173 As they tried to find fault with the Commission’s findings they criticized the report as having focused on “miry side of the police,” and not

169 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 150. 170 Saha, Indian Police, 34. 171 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 18. 172 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 149. 173 Griffiths, To Guard My People, 98.

assessing the problems that the police had to confront for 40 years.174 However, these later feeble sideswipes aside, the Commission’s report provided valuable insight into the disappointing recruiting and training of superior (British) officers, unnecessary intermeddling by

Magistrates and Commissioners with the police, deficient staffing both British and Indian, insufficient pay for all ranks, the use of poorly educated men, and the use of the village police.

Though some later writers found fault with the Commission, others like Pakistani police historian Nazir Razvi, noted that the Commission, “produced a valuable document dealing with all the main aspects.”175

From these aspects, the Commissioners illustrated with crystal clarity the popular perceptions throughout the Raj about its police force. The Commissioners explained:

…it is not difficult to understand how frequent are the complaints of the highhanded indifferences of police here to the feelings of the people, nor does one wonder at the coarse and brutal way in which the police often treat crowds or individuals with whom they have to deal. This is alleged everywhere as a cause of police unpopularity, as a reason for the people dreading the police and making every effort to avoid having anything to do with them. These men, too often rough, ill-trained and under-paid, are clothed with authority to report on the work of the village headmen, to investigate cases in remote villages, or to arrest respectable citizens for alleged nuisances in towns.176

Thus in this imperial possession, where the police had never been meant to gain the support of its colonial subjects, it is not surprising that they and their abuses were loathed. What is surprising is it took India’s colonizer almost forty years to grudgingly appreciate that fact, and only in an attempt to better control the colonized. However, the common constable was not the only one whose delinquencies were made public. The Darogah, who was responsible for

“impressing upon the police how essentially incumbent it is on them at all times, to exercise the

174 Saha, Indian Police, 35. 175 Nazir Razvi, Our Police Heritage: Saga of the Police Forces of Pakistan and India (Lahore: Wapda Printing Press, 1961), 97. 176 Report of the Indian Police Commission 1902-1903, 20.

greatest forbearance, mildness, courtesy, and perfect civility,” was to feel the scrutinizing glare of the Commission’s investigation as well.177

Though he went by various titles of Darogah, Head Constable, and Station House Officer, it had become apparent that something had gone wrong with this position in the Raj’s police force. His position within the police had been meant for commanding a police guard detail, an outpost, or the clerical work of the station house; his duties had greatly mutated from his original purpose. This non-commissioned officer of police, “who has the most power for good or evil,”178 found himself running Station House and conducting investigations in which methods of torture were employed. The Darogah, who was described to the Commission as, “ignorant and inefficient,” was in a sense to have his wings clipped by the report. To prevent further abuses from again occurring, the Darogah was to be, “relegated to the inferior service, and Sub-

Inspectors everywhere in charge of police stations.”179 To also combat these abuses, better recruitment policies and training was recommended for recruits who might advance to higher positions of leadership within the police.180

Better recruitment and training policies were a few remedies expected to combat the myriad of police abuses, but the one area of abuse that alienated the people the most was strongly empathized by the Commission to its readers. As the Commission explained:

Everywhere they went the Commission heard the bitterest complaints of the corruption of the police. These complaints were made not by non-officials only, but also by officials of all classes including Magistrates and police officers, both European and Native. It was generally admitted that constables possessed very much the characteristics of the classes from which they were recruited; and that corruption was no more an essential characteristic of the constable than of the revenue peon, the process-server or the forest chaprasi.181

177 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 20. 178 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 21. 179 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1902, 46. 180 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 43. 181 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 19.

Venality was a central theme that ran throughout the report, and yet was a vice that strangely seemed to infect only Indian officers, because British officers were, “upright men beyond the influence of corruption.”182 The report made clear that though corruption could be found among other native officials of the Raj, “the corruption of the constable is more intolerable because of the greater opportunities of oppression and extortion which his police powers afford, because of the intimate connection he has with general life of town and country.”183 From this observation the Commission, as Sir John Woodburn had articulated two years earlier, identified low pay as the cause of corruption. The report chided the Raj in that:

The police system seems…to have aggreavated the evil both by under-paying the constable and by assigning to him duties which he is not qualified to perform. To pay a constable Rs. 6 or even Rs. 7 per mensem, especially when certain deductions are made for uniform, etc., is to offer strong inducement to dishonesty.184

Having once identified the root cause of many of evils committed by the Raj’s police, due to want of money, the Commission’s report recommended that a constable’s pay scale should set at a minimum rate, as to give the officer a “living wage.”185 Again the Commission criticized the way the pay scale and been set and took the Raj to task again, with the report adding that constables should, “be placed above the necessity for eking out his pay by means of by mean or dishonest practices.”186 To remedy this malady the report suggested that constables should be set at not less than Rs. 8 a month, adding that for the Raj, “There is no province in India where less than this minimum is reasonable.”187 For the Head Constables, that buffer between the constable

182 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 24. 183 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 19. 184 Report of the Indian Police Commission , 1902-1903, 19. 185 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 44. 186 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1902, 44. 187 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 44.

and European officer, his wages were to be set between Rs. 15 to Rs. 25.188 Regarding British officers, the Commission laughingly assured its British readers, that “There is no suspicion that they receive bribes or are influenced by any kind of gift;” they too were recommended for a rate of salary increase.189 The pay range for these men of so called “high morals” was to range from

Rs. 400 to 1,000 depending on their rank.190

As the Commission labored to provide recommendations for reforming the Raj’s forty year old police system, the man responsible for the Commission’s existence, the Viceroy, focused his attention to the issue of police intelligence. As Lord Curzon attempted to combat the rising tide of Indian nationalism by reforming and consolidating British rule, the issue of police intelligence, “was an aspect of the …work which he personally thought of great importance.”191

As it appeared that the Raj was confronting new criminal challenges in which wrongdoers could make use of India’s transportation (trains), and communication (telegraph and mail) networks, officials increasingly expected that a new department directly under the government of India was needed, to facilitate the follow of information. Consequently, the Criminal Investigation

Department, the C.I.D., was established about which the Commission commented “There is clear necessity for a special staff of officers to obtain and transmit information about the movements of suspicious persons.”192 The C.I.D. was to be the Intelligence Branch of the Raj, with each province operating its own branch.

However, it should be noted that crime and politics for the Raj were two sides of the same coin. For the Raj the most serious offense against the colonial state was, as Arnold noted, “an

188 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 46. 189 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 24. 190 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 53. 191 Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904-1924 (London: Frank Cass & Company, 1995), 41. 192 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 74.

implicit defiance of state authority and a possible prelude to rebellion; political resistance was either a ‘crime’ or the likely occasion for it.”193 Thus with politics now equaling criminal behavior, the Raj now found itself with a new class of criminal to confront, the nationalist. For the arch imperialist Curzon, who came to, “identify the Indian National Congress squarely with anti-British forces,”194 reform in this area of the police administration was required. To aid the

Raj in its effort to confront those who would seek to undermine it, be it through traditional criminal activities or politics, the speedy flow of information was essential. Information about offenders was to be provided to district headquarters, from where the Superintendent could publish the information in the Police Gazette. From this Surveillance Register, the police would be given free access to the telegraph and railway; the Commission even recommended the police stations be connected by a new device, the telephone.195

The Commission report sought to break down the artificial barriers between police and

Indian subjects that were exacerbated by neglect of the police forces. Adhering to liberal concepts about good government based on consent of the governed, British officials deliberately sought to overcome a lingering source of popular resentment toward an insensitive colonial government. Furthermore, reforms intended to better secure the quality and loyalty of policemen, to better preserve British control of the sub-continent.

As the Raj entered into a new century, it became clear that continued British control of

India required significant reforms. Lord Curzon, anticipated that he could tackle the needed reforms, thus killing growing Indian nationalism with kindness. With the Raj’s police an establishment subordinate institution, whose goals had never included gaining the support of the people, it was only natural that abuses over time occurred as it was not accountable the Indian

193 Arnold, Police Power, 3. 194 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 44. 195 Report of the Police Commission, 1902-1903, 101.

people. As the police and many other failings of the Raj became targets of a growing nationalist resentment, Curzon sought to tighten Britain’s colonial control and targeted those failings.

Control meant a comprehensive assessment of the system, for which the Commission was formed with the task of investigating the whole of police administration. As the Commission took to its assignment, while dealing with the Raj’s political, military, and financial restrictions, no one was left in any doubt that the condition of the police over a forty year period had deteriorated. Though the Commission’s recommendations, in which they admitted was “in no way radical,”196 the Commission did provide the colonialist state with stronger tools in the form of a revamped Police Intelligence section, before the storm of nationalism erupted following the year 1905.

196 Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1902-1903, 149.

Chapter 4

THE FRUSTRATIONS OF CONTROL: THE CRIMINIAL AMENDMENT ACTS

The maintenance of public order in India presents a unique problem partly because of the many forms the challenge assumes but even more because of the extent of and constancy of it. -David Bayley197 The Police are here not to protect but to beat us. -An anonymous Indian resident of Gujarat, circa 1932198

As British colonial rule entered into the promise of a new century, it appeared to India’s colonizers that the British imperial sun would not set on the sub-continent. However, the rulers of the Raj soon reached the sobering realization that the twentieth century did not herald the imperial optimism of a new era, but an inundation of indigenous opposition to India’s colonial state, ultimately culminating in the colony’s independence in 1947. Faced with a constant barrage emanating from a rising national consciousness that challenged the entrenched socio- political authority of the British imperial system, the status of the Indian police assumed a new priority the colonial regime. As an institution of social defense, created to facilitate the mandates of their British colonial masters, Indian policemen became the main buttress for reinforcing that rule. With that colonial stability confronted with rising levels of nationalist challenges, unrest that seemed to indicate that the first rays of the imperial twilight had begun to set on British rule, the Raj looked to strengthen the authority of its enforcers of the colonial status-quo. As British officials viewed all nationalist activity through the prism of unrest, unrest became the new issue of colonial control. To combat those indigenous individuals or forces which sought to engage in unrest, whether through violent or peaceful means, the British needed new weapons to help instill proper obedience to colonial authority. For the Raj, this appeared in the form of the

197 David Bayley, The Police and Political Development in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 248. 198 Leonard Matter, V.K. Menon, Monica Whately, and Ellen Wilkinson, Condition of India: Being the Report of the Delegation sent to India by The Indian League in 1932 (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1999), 357.

Criminal Amendments Acts of 1913 and 1932, providing law enforcement with uncomplicated guidelines which could yield easier arrests and in turn produce desired criminal convictions.

When the robes of imperial authority descended upon the shoulders of India’s aloof and condescending Viceroy, Lord Curzon, the crown’s executive sought to reform the Raj’s authoritarian and collaborationist system to strengthen its future rule. For those who did not share the shadow-sovereign’s imperial prerogatives, Curzon was not averse to stepping on the toes of those who lacked his administrative vision for a subcontinent brimming with millions of colonial subjects. This imperial vision became abundantly clear in July 1905. Curzon, true to his modus operandi, ignored the opinions of eighty-five million occupants of Bengal, when in the name of imperial efficiency the partition of the province’s 189,000 square miles was announced to the area’s unconsulted inhabitants.199 Bengal had long since been considered by its colonizers too large an area for maintaining effective bureaucratic control and due to this perspective the judgment fell that “the Government of Bengal was beyond its strength.”200

Therefore, in October 1905, the 14 districts comprising Bengal’s eastern provinces were united with Assam, creating a new province containing 31 million inhabitants, known as Eastern Bengal and Assam. The remaining half of Bengal, with its 50 million residents, was added to Bihar and

Orissa.201

Though Bengal officially was separated on the basis of bureaucratic streamlining, the partition also produced the curious fact of taking a province which contained a majority of

Hindus and a minority of Muslims, both of whom were becoming politically attuned in an area

199 Not consulting with the indigenous inhabitants over land partition was nothing new in the Raj. After long deliberation over how to tackle the problem of Bengal, the precedent for partition was found in the previous handling of the province of Assam. The province of Assam itself had been part of the Bengal Presidency until it was separated by the British in 1874; this also had been done in the name of imperial administrative effectiveness. 200 Lovat Fraser, India: Under Curzon & After (New Delhi: Sagar Publications, 1911), 369. 201 Anandswarup Gupta, The Police In British India: 1861-1947 (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979), 255.

that was the heartland of the Congress Party, and separating them into a Muslim-dominated eastern and Hindu-majority western provinces. Viewed by writers at the time and by most historians today, the partition for India was, “the beginning of a grand design of divide and rule.”202 What the British stratagem of divide et impera accomplished in the short-term was the desired goal of strengthening colonial rule, but for the long-term it produced the unintended political catalyst that later flowered into the mass movement for an independent India.203 The roots to this flowering, as it sprouted in the soil of the Bengali partition, were found in the swadeshi, the revolutionary/extremist path, and the Muslim League.

Since the disclosure of the province’s impending fragmentation, Bengal’s population erupted into acrimony and obstructiveness to Curzon’s provocative proposal. For many Hindu middle-class Bengalis it was palpable that, “this was a vivisection of their beloved homeland and a blatant attempt to reduce their power.”204 This frustration to partition was not confined to one of Bengal’s faiths; Muslims also opposed the plan and joined huge demonstrations that degenerated into Hindu-Muslim riots against the Raj in several places.205 Soon this indigenous disgruntlement sought new avenues to channel the popular sentiment of resentment into political concurrency. One outlet engendered by the frustration, which Bengal’s Hindu bhadraloks approved, was in the form of swadeshi, in whom leadership was found in Surendranath

202 K.S. Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment: Ruler-Supportive Police Forces of South Asia (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1998), 177. 203 Having stirred up the emotions of nationalism, Lord Curzon would not remain long in India to observe the full consequences of his Bengali action. Embroiled in a epic test of imperial wills with the new Commander-in-Chief, India, Lord Kitchener, regarding the issue of civilian control, Curzon resigned when London refused to side against Britannia’s celebrated mustachioed warlord. London refused to invalidate Curzon’s order regarding the partition of Bengal. 204 Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156. 205 Gupta, Police in British India, 256.

Banerja.206 From this movement materialized, not just a political mobilization, but a mass awakening in which all colonial elements connected to Indian life were boycotted. From the simple production of khadi clothing to shunning of imperial institutions; boycotts became a visible sign of protest against the Raj. Thus these simple subversive challenges to the Raj signaled not only the anger about partition but a growing new a demand that also became policy of the Congress Party: swaraj.

If there were those angry dissidents who sought swaraj through peaceful subversion, then there were those less discerning types who desired an independent nation pursued through means a little farther afield. In the nationalism that was kindled by the spark of partition, a new movement sought to set the Raj ablaze with violence to secure the end of foreign domination.

This school of nationalist thought rejected both the persuasive ideas of swadeshi along with the moderate ideas as espoused by the Congress Party, and chose to embrace the revolutionary/extremist call to arms. In subscribing to this militant nationalist view, Indians looked to western revolutionary models for their own inspiration. Therefore, political agitation was best accomplished through violent means involving terrorist activities, political assassinations, and dacoities to fund underground enterprises. This onslaught centered on high- profile acts that attempted to shock the Raj’s sensibilities and, “to render government difficult by preventing friendly relations between the officers of Government and the people.”207 To sanctify their extremist path for an India independent of British rule, they pledged their lives, guns, and bombs to the sharp-fanged Hindu goddess Kali.208

206 The term bhadraloks (gentle people) was a term that used to describe the three Calcutta-based Hindu elite castes in Bengali society. 207 Andrew H. L. Fraser, Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots (London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1911), 310. 208 In Hinduism, Kali (She Who is Death) is the goddess of death, time, and Armageddon. Kali is also associated with sexuality, violence, and as a paragon of motherly affection.

The goddess of death would not have to wait long before her disciples made good on their pledge as chaos and turmoil erupted in Bengal, and later the rest of the subcontinent itself. The first targets to feel the effects of the new radical school of Indian nationalism were the local officials of the Raj, the police and their informants.209 Though Curzon’s police reforms expanded the Criminal Investigation Department, they could not keep pace with the escalating level of violence, which from 1909 to 1914 encompassed an average of twenty-four politically motivated crimes a year.210 Emboldened by their radical activity, the revolutionaries began to concentrate on higher-end targets, transforming Bengal into the home of the sub-continent’s powerful terrorist movement.211 Their first chance came in December 1907, when the former head of the Police Commission and now Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Andrew H. L. Fraser, was traveling by train when his official transport was derailed as a bomb was detonated on the railroad tracks.212 Andrew Fraser emerged unscathed with his brush with the extremists, others would not be as lucky. A month later, not to be denied their blood lust, the assassins targeted the assistant for the District Magistrate of Dacca only to find much to their surprise their mission’s objective suddenly changed when after shooting the assistant, they were able to critically wound the District Magistrate, Mr. Allen, as he rushed to the aid of his clerk.213 Less than a year later, on November 7, 1908, Fraser found himself the target of yet another assassination attempt when after arriving at Calcutta University, to attend a guest lecture, a student approached Fraser producing a pistol which failed to fire. Fraser’s friend, the Maharajadhiraja Bahadur, inserted

209 Surprisingly, in the beginning, the British found it hard to understand the developing gravity in Bengal. Trapped in their racial stereotypes of Bengalis as effeminate and lacking the capacity for violence, as they were not of the India’s “martial races,” the Raj underestimated the possibility of Bengali terrorism. 210 Lawrence James, Raj: The Making And Unmaking Of British India (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 431. 211 Richard Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904-1924 (London: Frank Cass & Company, 1995), 100. 212 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 181. 213 Fraser, Indian Rajahs and Ryots, 41.

himself between Fraser and the student shielding the governor until the assassin was apprehended.214 For the British the most shocking incident occurred on April 30, 1908, at the rail station at Muzaffarpur when a terrorist bombed a train carriage, believed to be the local judge’s transport, killing a mother and her daughter, Mrs. and Miss Kennedy.215 With the extremists’ activism becoming brutally manifest, this revolutionary scion of Indian nationalism remained circumscribed to a few groups and never merged with the political mobilization among

Indians as swadeshi activism.

Aghast by the Raj’s action taken against Bengal, the case against partition soon became the cause for agitation among India’s nationalists, as there was, “widespread anger that Bengali wishes should have been flouted so openly.”216 From Calcutta to the Punjab and from Bombay to Poona, mass rallies, petitions, the burning of British goods, culminated in an explosion of anger across the sub-continent.217 However, this nationalist rhetoric began to fall on the deaf ears of Bengal’s Muslim population, as most of the upheaval now became the occupation of the area’s Hindus.218 Having opposed partition at its announcement, commitment began to wane as

Muslims with less economic means were leaned upon to buy swadeshi cloth, faced nationalist discourse that suggested Bengal was a Hindu land, and witnessed the insurrectionary exertions of the Hindu protests, which soon began to alienate Bengali Muslims.219 During the Bengali partition, estrangement rested upon the foundation of India’s traditional sectarian divide with its omnipresent Hindu-Muslim antagonisms.

214 Fraser, Indian Rajahs and Ryots, 65. 215 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 104. 216 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century 1915-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1976), 237. 217 Metcalf, A Concise History, 157. 218 Michael Edwardes, Nehru: A Political Biography (London: Cox & Wyman Publishers, 1971), 28. 219 Metcalf, A Concise History, 159.

Since the early eighteenth century, as British authority began asserting itself more, sporadic sectarian violence had become a yearly localized occurrence across India.220 No province was left unscathed by sectarian rioting; however, violence became more common in the

Punjab, Central Provinces, United Provinces, and Eastern Bengal.221 These clashes, referred to as communal strife by the British colonial authorities, most often took place during religious holidays and centered on how both Hindus and Muslims celebrated their respective holidays.222

Violence erupted from the sprinkling of water on Muslims during the celebration of Holi, or the

Muslim killing of cattle to celebrate the end of fasting during Ramadan at Eid ceremonies.223

Coupled with this growing religious rancor, in East Bengal, Muslins now found themselves the majority population, via partition, in which reunion with Bengal meant surrendering the newly acquired majority for the traditional minority status, vis-à-vis the Hindus.224 However, the political awareness of India’s Muslims had been awakened by the recent events that gripped

India’s political consciousness. Acting at the urging of the Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, India’s conservative Muslim elites, the nobility and the clergy, assembled in Dacca as delegates from across the India to proclaim on December 30, 1906, the establishment of the All India Muslim

League.

220 Fighting just was not contained in the usual Hindu versus Muslim dichotomy in India. Violence also found its way into the sects of India’s faiths, specifically in Islam. Bombay, in 1911, became the battle ground between Sunnis and Bohras over whose interpretation of Islam was correct. This same conflict also occurred in the Punjab and United Provinces between Sunni and Shias over the interpretation of Islamic doctrine. 221 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 189. 222 Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police (London: Ernst Benn Limited, 1971), 279. 223 The issue of cattle slaughter became the main area of contention between Hindus and Muslims. For Hindus the bovine held a place of prominence as the cow symbolized a universal mother, specifically Earth. By the start of the twentieth century several parts of India experienced revival of earnestness in cattle protection, as Hinduism sought new revivalism on the sub-continent. 224 One possible root of reluctance for Bengali Muslims to surrender their newly created majority status can be trace to the Raj’s artful administrator, Lord Curzon. In an effort to sideline the growing sympathy against partition, the viceroy toured the newly created province announcing his desire to create a province where Islam and its followers could now hold the upper hand, thus playing on and increasing the Muslim-Hindu divide.

With the creation of the League a historic split transpired between the Raj’s two major colonized groups, Muslims and Hindus, and their respective ideas regarding the nationalist movement. Though it consisted mainly of a small preserve of elites, the League’s stated goal was to safeguard and advance the interests of all of the sub-continent Muslims, as the organization “claimed to represent a nation within a nation.”225 This claim no doubt felt justified as the successor to Curzon’s viceregal authority, Lord Minto, sought to separate Muslims from the call of Swaraj and Swadeshi, and assure the Muslim community that he and his successors would safeguard their interest and political rights.226 For the colonial government, there were other practical reasons to welcome the conception of a political organization that represented “a substantial community whose members were disproportionately represented in the army and police.”227 When reunion finally arrived in 1911, bringing to an end to the partition of Bengal,

India’s Muslims, coupled with the leadership of the Muslim League, found themselves set on a course which in four decades would ensure the partition of India with the creation of Pakistan.

As 1905 marked the beginning of a new gambit of unbridled challenges to British rule by

Indian nationalism, the Raj’s instruments of coercion, the army and police, through which 303 million Indian colonial subjects were kept subservient, was sharply circumscribed due to the

Raj’s omnipresent foe: financial constraints.228 Though the ranks of the police accounted for more than 200,000 men, the vastness of the subcontinent meant that the wearers of the red turban, the uniformed headgear of the indigenous policeman, found themselves thinly distributed

225 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 248. 226 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 179. 227 James, Raj, 419. 228 In possessing the Indian empire, the British reveled in superficial glories that imperialism provided and the covetousness of other European powers; however, the amour-propre ended was on the issue of financing India’s administration. Financial stringency became the order of the day on all subjects regarding the functioning of the Raj. Since the cost of empire was defrayed upon the backs of colonized, this ironically led to the Raj becoming more dependent on Indians in the middle to lower levels of the administration, and in expanding Indian representation in a foreign colonial system determined to dominate them, but was in constant need of monetary resources to do so.

across the country.229 This economy of force became embarrassing clear, as evident by the fact that, as partition entered into its third year, in the East Bengali area around Dacca the Raj could only boast of one policeman to every 88,500 inhabitants.230 In relation to this dilemma of inadequate police numbers was a simple problem that Sir Edmund Cox made in clear in his 1910 work. Regarding his thirty years with the Indian police, he explained “The police in India are of the people. With whatever care they are selected, whatever training that they may be given, it is impossible to suppose that they can be free from their national traits, inclinations, and weaknesses.”231 What this opinion translated into was that indigenous policemen, though they were pillars of support for the colonial regime, they too were still members of the colonized and subject to the psychological pressures from those they policed as they enforced the Raj’s rule.

Often the government of western Bengal noted the pressures applied by swadeshi agitators, many of whom were relatives of Indian policemen, as they applied “social boycotts” when confronting the Raj’s instruments of coercion. Thus the social/cultural life pressures of a community, as channeled by nationalist pressures, crept into the public and private lives of officers as, “Priests, washermen and barbers refused to serve them, while friends and relatives shunned them. Worst of all, they found it difficult to marry off their daughters.”232 Yet, despite the disadvantages of low police-to-civilian ratios and harassing ostracism, the law-enforcement machinery proved itself a worthy opponent to the violence and civil disorder that threatened the colonial status quo.

For the British Indian official, Indian politics walked hand-in-hand with conspiracy against the Raj, thus politics equaled crime. According to the mindset of colonial paternalism, nationalist agitators were criminal opportunists who “incited the credulous and manipulated the

229 James, Raj, 430. 230 David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Politics of the Indian Army 1860-1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 20. 231 Edmund C. Cox, Police and Crime in India (New Delhi: Manu Publications, 1976), 163. 232 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 107.

naïve.”233 Despite the Raj’s own naïveté as to why there was unrest among Indians, one thing was clear: unrest was growing by alarming numbers. Within the first year after partition, the number of riots rose from 425 to 2,096, and by 1907, they had risen to 1,886,054.234 Thus, due to Raj’s economy of forces, by which it was impossible to be everywhere, when agitators accomplished incitement of riots, quick and ruthless repression was viewed as the imperial panacea to the criminal actions of civil uprisings.235 To accomplish this task, the leaders of the force sought to tackle the complex political agenda by refurbishing their strategies and techniques, as officers found themselves in the new milieu of swadeshi.236 Police responses to political disturbances took the form, employing crude but yet effective techniques, of brutal force. For those nationalists picketers who failed to disperse when ordered, the police employed a simple instrument of force against the crowd, the lathi.237 Moving against agitators in a striking line, known as a lathi charge, officers mercilessly beat protesters until they were driven away. When this level of coercion failed or could not be applied, deadly force was employed with the use of paramilitary police forces, known as armed reserves, though they were supplied with bored out, antiquated Martini carbines.238

To also stem the upsurge of inflamed unrest regarding swaraj, the colonial authorities closely regulated the ability of Indians to attend public meetings and demonstrations. When meetings were held the police utilized a method of political surveillance that came into vogue in the 1890s, in which policemen either in uniform or in personal attire recorded speeches to gain

233 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 207. 234 Gupta, Police in British India, 267. 235 The Raj’s decision to resort automatically to threats of disorder with ruthlessness was based on the British experience in the Indian Munity of 1857. Following 1857, in which the future threats of lawlessness became the bête noire of British colonial officials, the lesson taken from the munity was that failure to act swiftly and forcefully to Indian disturbances was to invite more trouble which might metastasize to levels beyond the Raj’s control. 236 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 180. 237 B. P. Saha, Indian Police: Legacy and Quest for Formative Role (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1990), 74. 238 David Arnold, Police Power And Colonial Rule: Madras 1859-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 123.

evidence against speakers. This practice extended even to the annual sessions of the Indian

National Congress. 239 To prevent any interference by the attendees of political or quasi-political meetings, the Raj made it clear to Local Governments that the police attend openly in such numbers to prevent any chance to molest them.240 Doubtless, this form of governmental monitoring caused years of nervous concern among those Indians engaging in the cause of nationalism. To ease anxieties, in 1938, the president of the Congress issued a statement that “In connection with the objection taken to police reporters taking down speeches delivered by some congressmen, the Premier said that the C.I.D. were the ears and eyes of the government and therefore there was nothing harmful or derogatory in their taking down speeches.”241 The information documented by officers during public meetings was sent to Criminal Investigative

Department, which collected reports from every district, along with abstracts from newspapers, proscribed literature, and even barroom gossip.242 However, despite refurbishing of strategies and expanding the mechanism of police control, radical and terrorists activities continued unabated. What resulted instead was the estrangement of the police from India’s nascent political class.243 This separation was, in fact, observed by Indian nationalist leaders who demanded popular control of the police and armed forces, rather than the use of “mercenary force.”244

Not surprisingly, the severe measures adopted by the colonial authorities of the lathi, bullet, and surveillance, could not effectively counter the acts of terrorism and extremist crimes that still continued to plague the Raj, growing from minor impertinence to extreme seriousness.

239 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 180. 240 Gupta, Police in British India, 259. 241 Nambudiripad to Bose [no date] Jayaprakash Narayen Papers, Subject File 27/1937-1946. 242 Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, 206. 243 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 179. 244 Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, ed. S. Gopal. vol. 9 (New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd, 1976), 61.

For the Raj, the effort of subduing militant crimes became frustrating, as convictions became impossible when substantive offences could not be proven against the accused. However, the

Raj proved to be resilient as ever, as colonial officials used to the law to get around the law, and provided the police with easier guidelines in which arrests would produce the desired convictions, thus eliminating threats to the colonial regime. This legal feat was simply accomplished by strengthening the Indian Penal Code, in which Chapter V-A was added, through the Indian Criminal Law Amendments Act, 1913. This fail-safe law, titled Criminal

Conspiracy, contained two sections that revealed the frustration colonial officials faced while trying to combat those Indian elements that wished to expel the British from India. The explanation for the reasons for the legislation and purpose of action was “Experience has shown that dangerous conspiracies are entered into in India which have for their object aims other than the commission of the offences specified in section 121-A of the Indian Penal Code and that the existing law is inadequate to deal with modern conditions.”245 Section 121-A had proven to be deficient as it provided only the guidelines and punishments for those who attempted to wage war against the Government of India, thus political extremist crimes did not fit easily into this legal category.

To solve this dilemma, political/extremist crimes were cloaked in concept of a “criminal conspiracy” that was defined in section 120-A as “an agreement between two or more persons to do, or cause done, an illegal act or an act which is not illegal, by illegal means.”246 Whether ultimate object of the conspiracy was an illegal act or resulted incidentally was designated

“immaterial.”247 For those Indians who found themselves on the receiving end of the Indian

Penal Code’s new chapter, there was to be no softheartedness for violators of section 120-A.

245 Universal’s Indian Penal Code (45 of 1860) (New Delhi: Universal Law Publishing Company, 2009), 39. 246 Universal’s, Indian Penal Code, 39. 247 Universal’s, Indian Penal Code, 39.

Section 120-B emphasized that the results of engaging in criminal conspiracies brought the dire consequences of “death, imprisonment for life or rigorous imprisonment for a term of two years or upwards.”248 As the partition issue opened up a Pandora’s Box of nationalist woes for the Raj, the issue of maintaining law and order increasingly became the issue of solely maintaining colonial order. Following the blowback from 1905, the Raj would come to lean more heavily upon the police and the army as the headache of Indian nationalism only increased in the intervening years. British frustrations regarding the means of protecting and maintaining colonial order was observable with the Indian Criminal Law Act of 1913, as the Raj provided the bureaucracy with new powers to subdue the ideas of Indian nationalism that were becoming more difficult to contain through the use of traditional force.

Following the upheaval of 1905, by 1914 Indian nationalists found that world events were shaping their politics. As Britain entered into the First World War, all nationalist parties, with the exclusion of a few terrorist groups, proclaimed loyalty to the British war effort.249 This change in Indian attitudes had been garnered by the British with promises of political reforms following the conclusion of hostilities in exchange for needed Indian support.250 Added to these promises was that India could also achieve one of the goals the Allies proclaimed they were fighting for: self-determination.251 However, the high hopes that greeted the news of the war’s end brought nothing but bitter disappointment. By December 1919, the much promised British reforms took the form of transferring some harmless provincial departments regarding health, education, agriculture, and public works to Indians, while the Governor retained control to

248 Universal’s, Indian Penal Code, 40. 249 James, Raj, 439. 250 By the war’s end in 1918, India had supplied to Britain over 1.4 million troops that fought in Europe and in the Middle East. For those back home the war was a time for distress as money needed to fight the war was found in Indian land revenue increases that rose from 1916 from 10 percent to by 1918 at 15 percent. 251 Metcalf, A Concise History, 163.

reverse any disagreeable decisions they chose to make. Known as the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, Indians rejected the scheme as unsatisfactory because they did not gain real autonomy.252 In March, as the government faced renewed terrorist activities, coupled with postwar economic distresses, the Raj decided to carry over wartime emergency powers, known as the Rowlatt Acts, in which suspects in political cases either faced imprisonment without trial, or if the accused received a trial it would be without the benefit of a jury.253

As political tensions were on the rise Indians perceived their civil rights being eliminated,

Mohandas Gandhi, having only recently returned to India after two decades in South Africa, entered into the political fray.254 Denouncing the Rowlatt Acts, Gandhi announced, on February

24, 1919, his intention to lead a movement of Satyagraha in protest. The date of the Gandhi’s hartal, a day of fasting and penance, had been chosen as March 30, 1919, and engendered much excitement across India.255 However, the date was changed to April 6, unfortunately for some protestors in India the change of dates had not be received. The first outbreak occurred in New

Delhi, as processions and hartals took place and many found the police and army waiting to confront them. Through the standard lathi charge and use of armed force, the Raj’s forces carried the day at the cost of the lives of five protestors.256 Gandhi was promptly arrested a few days later on April 9, which resulted in riots in the cities of Bombay and Ahmadabad. Shocked by the violence Gandhi called off his campaign.257

252 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 265. 253 Metcalf, A Concise History, 168. 254 Born in Gujarat, in western India, in 1869, Gandhi upon completion of his legal studies in London became a lawyer in 1893. Arriving in South Africa to work in a law firm that served Indian workers, Gandhi was soon confronted by the racial injustices experienced by Indians employed there. Returning home to India in 1915, Gandhi became involved in the nationalist movement. Using the knowledge gained in South Africa, Gandhi helped to craft an independence movement based on non-violence that ultimately secured India’s independence from Britain. 255 Griffiths, To Guard My People, 242. 256 Saha, Indian Police, 67. 257 Edwardes, Nehru, 38.

Yet, the violence would continue, the culmination of which erupted in the Punjab’s administrative capital of Amritsar. There on April 9, 1919, the organizers of the movement against the Raj, Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Kitchlew, were summarily arrested then deported to an undisclosed location.258 This official action soon resulted in violent mobs exploding into destruction and brutality throughout the city. With several Europeans killed, and a police force that had failed, the city of Amritsar had spun out of civil control upon which authority was given to the military to restore the colonial order. For this task, the British entrusted the mission of restoring order to a man known as a hot tempered martinet who was far from an ideal candidate for the job, Brigadier-General Reginald “Rex” Dyer.259 On April 13, when local Congress leaders defied the Local Government’s ban on all public meetings, and 15,000 to 20,000 Indians assembled in the enclosed Jallianwalla Bagh gardens, Dyer decided on a show of force.260 With a strike force of a hundred Gurkha troops, the general confronted the assembly. Giving the order to fire, 379 Indians were killed with over 1,200 wounded.261 When news of the massacre and repression leaked out of the Punjab, rioting occurred affecting most of India, except for the extreme south. The Raj remained unapologetic as its instruments of repression mobilized into full swing, with beatings, shooting, hangings, bombings from the air all employed and harsh sentences were handed out.262

It was at this time that Gandhi, the astute politician, seized upon the moment in August

1920, to begin the first of his non-violent movements to gain political goals, by inaugurating a

258 Saha, Indian Police, 68. 259 Dyer was a hero of the old imperial school, born in India and educated at Sandhurst, and served on the Northwest Frontier and Burma. With cropped grey hair, and fiery red complexion that matched his fiery temperament, the general’s irritable manner was due in part to injuries sustained during a hunting trip. Dyer often tried to smoother the pain with brandy, tobacco, aspirins, and wrapping his head in wet towels, yet he never found relieve. After Amritsar, Dyer was stripped on his command and forced into retirement, in 1927 he final succumbed to a series of strokes and died never expressing regret for his actions. 260 James, Rise and Fall, 417. 261 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 301. 262 Gupta, Police in British India, 364.

non-cooperation movement on the issue of the Khilafat. As a result of Turkey’s defeat at the hands of the Allies, the institution of the Khilafat was abolished angering Muslims across the globe, and in particular in India. Gandhi was presented with a unique opportunity in gaining the leadership of India by drawing Muslims into the path of the national struggle.263 By making common cause with India’s Muslim leaders, Hindu and Muslim nationalists could be joined together in a common political platform, thus countering trends growing in recent years of Hindu and Muslims drifting away from one another. By May 28, 1920, the All-Indian Khilafat

Conference, accepted the idea of non-violence and decided to follow Gandhi’s leadership.264

With the acceptance of Gandhi’s ideas, the nationalist cause was converted from one of an elitist movement into one of mass struggle.265 The political union proved to be a happy arrangement until the common cause that held them together dissolved. This disruption occurred in 1924, when Turkey’s new secular government under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk abolished the

Khilafat itself.266 Regardless, of future events, Gandhi’s non-violent/non-cooperation movement was to confront the colonial authorities with their greatest challenge yet.

Mobilization came in earnest the form of mass boycotts of foreign goods, legislatures and educational institutions aided by the Raj. The greatest segment of picketers came from the student community, as large numbers of them engaged in protesting. Soon the beat of non- cooperation enhanced as Civil Disobedience as the Congress Party authorized provinces to stop paying taxes.267 However, the greatest slap-in-the-face to the Raj occurred with the visit by the

Prince of Wales to India in 1921. Gandhi announced a nationwide boycott of the prince’s tour,

263Dhananjay Keer, Mahatma Gandhi: Political Saint and Unarmed Prophet (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1973), 341. 264 Saha, Indian Police, 71. 265 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 196. 266 Metcalf, A Concise History, 181. 267 Saha, Indian Police, 71.

and the Prince of Wales, himself, was robbed of celebrations by the Indian population as he was driven through empty streets.268 In the initial phase, the Raj did not take the challenge of satyagrahis seriously, but as the movement began gaining steam it no longer became an affair to ignore. With these new techniques of non-violence being implemented on a large scale the police found the new strategies difficult to comprehend as laws were being violated symbolically through non-violent means. Simply put, civil disobedience entailed deliberately breaking the laws; matter-of-fact enforcement of the laws no longer sufficed to ensure control.

Consequently, the police were quick to adapt and devised new strategies of their own to confront the movement whose ultimate goal was swaraj.

The police took drastic action against those who supported non-cooperation and civil disobedience. The new stratagem focused on massive arrests of all those involved in any form of non-cooperation against the government, ranging from the boycotting of schools to the production of indigenous products.269 Any gathering was penalized with lathi beating and the use of deadly force by paramilitary police units.270 Soon the violence to halt agitation through massive arrests, and brutal lathi charges became part of everyday life in India. From February

1921 to April 1922, to help process those arrested through the courts, 866 fully-functioning new non-official arbitration courts were established.271 Inevitably, due to the massive number of arrests being made the judicial administration became bogged down, despite the creation of arbitration courts. This backlog produced in the police apparatus inventive ways to deal those

268 Edwardes, Nehru, 46. 269 Saha, Indian Police, 71. 270 Since the mid-nineteenth century it had been the Raj’s policy to use the army in matter of suppressing serious rioting. However, due to the availability of troops and the disaster of troop usage at Jallianwala Bagh by General Dyer in 1919, the Raj authorized the creation of more paramilitary police units equipped with the latest weapons to handle internal security. Troops were still utilized in but only in situations where a show of force was seen as necessary and control was need immediately 271 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 197.

detained once arrests were ordered to temporally stop. One method utilized by the police was placing demonstrators in police vans and transporting them thirty miles into the countryside and simply dumping them out.272 Another method employed was turning fire hoses upon demonstrators during the winter months. Often, however, the police reverted back to the tried and true method of simply beating those detained with lathis.273

During the early phases of the non-cooperation movement, the one area that caused Raj with the greatest anxiety was the mobilization of the industrial sector’s large labor force, of which Muslims made up the largest portion of workers. India’s workers previously had experienced labor strikes in relation to demands originating through labor unions - pay, hours, job security, and the harsh treatment by European superiors.274 Because of these labor demands, the industrial workers were for the Raj a dangerous class in need of careful attention.275 Often the workers received “special policing” as the police were employed by factory owners as strike- breakers when unrest arose.276 The intervention of the police in strikes was not only a reaffirmation of state power, but also was necessary due to the high level of violence employed in industrial disputes.277 Throughout the years following World War One, strikes were growing in intensity, as the leadership of Congress could not prevent the militancy of the workers from challenging factory owners.278 In a yearly administration report of Bengal for 1921, there were over 150 strikes involving 265,000 workers, by 1922, 91 strikes transpired involving 160,00 workers.279 With the level of labor unrest rising India, if the bourgeois leadership of the

272 M.B. Chande, The Police in India (Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1997), 89. 273 Saha, Indian Police, 73. 274 Arnold, Police Power, 176. 275 Arnold, Police Power, 151. 276 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 198. 277 Arnold, Police Power, 183. 278 Metcalf, A Concise History, 188. 279 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 198.

Congress could not handle organized labor, then a fledgling new party on the subcontinent would accept the challenge.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, Vladimir Lenin quickly asserted his abhorrence of the British Empire. From this animosity, Soviet plans had been devised to liberate India of its colonial masters, and the main agent chosen in this strategy was the committed revolutionary M. N. Roy.280 Establishing the communist Party of India while in exile,

Roy found it difficult to work with other people, and by the middle years of the 1920s the movement was foundering. As Roy’s shortcomings became obvious, Comintern agents were sent from Britain but were taken into police custody.281 However, disillusioned by lack of success, by 1926 Roy admitted that the communist party did not have mass support, and blamed the alertness of the police.282 Despite the party’s setbacks, Communist organizers were able to establish some level of organization of labor unions and provide direction during labor strikes.

The success of the communist toiling did pay some dividends as seen in the 1928 Bombay textile strike that lasted for six months, and the forming of worker’s committees to the Girni Kamgar

Union, whose ultimate membership rate topped 60,000.283 These proletarian achievements were partly due to Philip Spratt and other British communists who had been sent to India.284

Despite the party’s small victories, these achievements could not be tolerated by the Raj, which feared communism planting its roots in India as the colonial authorities grappled with

Gandhi and non-cooperation. Government quickly and ruthlessly went after the communist party.285 The Raj’s chance to hit hard came in the communist planning for a future strike on the

280 Griffiths, To Guard My People, 352. 281 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 313. 282 Griffiths, To Guard My People, 352. 283 Metcalf, A Concise History, 189. 284 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 316. 285 A. G. Noorani, Indian Political Trials: 1775-1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 239.

India Peninsular Railway in 1930. The Raj’s main legal weapon Chapter V-A, Section 120A of the Indian Penal Code. Under this regulation, in 1929 Spratt and thirty of his fellow comrades were arrested on the charge of “Criminal Conspiracy” and brought to trial, in the highly publicized Meerut Conspiracy Case. The trial would last until 1933, in which twenty-seven of the accused, most of the leadership of India’s communist party, received varying sentences from three years imprisonment to transportation for life. Authorities also declared the party illegal following this verdict and the communist party languished as it could not gain traction in the countryside. The party’s troubles were only compounded as Moscow kept disagreeing about the appropriate policies for the party itself.286

As the nationalist challenge of non-cooperation grew in strength and popularity the increasement of brutalization by the police grew as well. The Raj declared Congress volunteer organizations illegal resulting in mass arrests of Congress workers, though the police left Gandhi untouched. 287 Undismayed by the police violence, Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy on February 1,

1922, voicing his criticism regarding the brutality that the police were displaying throughout

India.288 To meet the Raj’s high handedness, Gandhi called for more and more protests which resulted in some thirty thousand demonstrators being held throughout various prisons in India.289

From this heightened atmosphere of tension violence erupted on February 4, 1922, when a frenzied mob, in the Gorakhpur district of the United Province, at Chauri Chaura burned down the police station, roasting 22 policemen alive.290 Gandhi, along with the other leaders of the

Congress who met at Bardoli, was shocked to see that violence was seeping into the non-violent movement. Thus it was decided on February 11, 1922, by those present to postpone indefinitely

286 Metcalf, A Concise History, 189. 287 Edwardes, Nehru, 46. 288 Saha, Indian Police, 73. 289 Edwardes, Nehru, 47. 290 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 199.

all forms of civil disobedience.291 Following on the heels of this decision, Gandhi was arrested on March 10, and brought to trial on March 18 where he plead guilty and was sentenced to six years imprisonment. With Gandhi passing from the court room to the prison cell, the first round of Civil Disobedience movement was over, resulting in a temporary victory for the Raj and its police measures.

As Gandhi served his sentence, the call of the non-cooperation campaign lost much of its luster.292 During this time the Raj regrouped as Indian nationalists found themselves in disharmony. It was this disharmony that greeted Gandhi in 1924, when he was released from prison early due to health reasons.293 Upon his release he found the Congress divided about the issue of participating in constitutional bodies, to which Gandhi exited the stage to champion the cause of the Untouchables and the khadi campaign.294 By 1927, the British government appointed a commission, under Sir John Simon, to reform the constitution of India, which did not meet with the expected positive response, and instead Indians across the political spectrum saw it as insult that the colonized were incapable of handling their own fate.295 The newly installed

Labour government made it known that the eventual outcome of constitutional reform would produce Dominion Status. For the Congress and Muslim League, the Simon Commission was nothing less than an attempt to subvert the constitutional and political advancements made thus far by Indians.296 The British Prime Minister, Ramsey McDonald, decided hold to a series of round table talks in London, in which all Indian members were included, in the hope of working

291 Keer, Gandhi, 418. 292 Griffiths, To Guard My People, 247 293 Alfred Burt, The British Empire and Commonwealth (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1956), 790. 294 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 382. 295 Metcalf, A Concise History, 190. 296 Dhillon, Defenders of the Establishment, 210.

out any differences, but it ended in failure. By January 26, 1930, the Congress Party, which had boycotted the talks, demanded complete Independence from Britain.

As India appeared to be divided over the earlier promise of Dominion Status, Gandhi looked for a positive and dramatic strategy to unite the nationalist and make the movement understood by the masses; he would not have to search long, as he found the answer in salt.297

On this staple of Indian life, Raj held the monopoly in the production and the taxes collected from salt, though it never a major source of revenue for the Raj.298 Gandhi announced a pilgrimage to the sea to make salt without paying the tax. Through the hazy of the morning of

March 12, 1930, Gandhi set out on a 240 mile journey on foot to the coastal village of Dandi; the second phase of the non-cooperation movement had begun. Followed by huge crowds, Gandhi was arrested before he could reach the sea by policemen as he slept by a river.299 However, though Gandhi was taken quietly others would be so lucky. Many demonstrators met the full brutality of the Indian police, through mass arrests by the end of May more than 10,000 people were sitting in prison.300 From Gandhi’s act the cause of Indian nationalism had the attention of the globe.

Faced with yet another challenge of non-cooperation to its authority, which was growing in popularity, the Raj began to worry that its power was slowly passing into the hands of the

Congress.301 To shore up its authority and to meet this nationalist challenge, the Raj looked again to the legal code as a weapon. From this came the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1932, in which the growing concern of the Raj was palpable. Passed when Gandhi was in London negotiating for political concessions, the amendment enabled the Raj to shut down the second

297 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 384. 298 Brendon, Decline and Fall, 386. 299 William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932 (New York: Dell Trade, 1983), 846. 300 Manchester, The Last Lion, 846. 301 Metcalf, A Concise History, 193.

stage of Civil Disobedience campaign of 1932. The Raj’s preamble to the legislation noted “The

Civil Disobedience Movement has made it necessary to supplement the Criminal Law by means of certain Ordinance promulgated by the Governor-General in exercise of his powers under

Section 22 of the Government of India Act.”302 To sideline the growing wide appeal of the non-cooperation movement, the legislation attempted to paint the nationalists in criminal shades, explaining, “its organizers have not yet abandoned their attempt to paralyze the Government and to coerce law-abiding citizens.” One of the key sections contained in the act centered on Section

Five and the spreading of proscribed information. The consequences of publishing or repeating any book, newspaper, or other document forfeited by the Government was “imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or with a fine or with both.” Thus the medium of the printed word, in whatever form it could take, espousing nationalist rhetoric and inciting unrest was to carry a heavy price for its writer, publisher, and a distributor.

Due to the mass non-cooperators cheerfully wanting to be arrested, only to be bailed out again, the Raj turned to Section 10, in which the colonial administration changed the rules regarding the ability to secure release from jail. Now State Governments were permitted to make certain crimes non-bailable.303 The reform also targeted Indian youths who were at the frontlines of Civil Disobedience, concerning those wanting to be jailed, but were still under the authority of a parental figure, Section 8 enabled the State Governments to order the parent or guardian to pay the fine imposed on the children or charges.304 Thus the young law breakers faced the wrath not only of an irritated colonial government but parental figures as well. As those who sat in the

Raj’s jails awaiting their day in court, be they adults or juveniles, the colonial authorities made sure they would dispense swift justice from the regime’s higher courts. Under Section 9, lower

302 Indian Criminal Amendment Act 1932, 1. 303 Indian Criminal Amendment Act 1932, 2. 304 Indian Criminal Amendment Act 1932, 3.

courts were forbidden from handling cases of unrest, as the new law stated “No court inferior to that of a Presidency Magistrate or Magistrate of the first class shall be tried any offence under this Act.”305 Form this legislation the Raj once again tried to retain a stronger hold on India through its legal code by providing its police easier guidelines to arrest the nationalist elements actively challenging their power.

With the beginning of a twentieth century, India’s British rulers looked forward to the continuing of the old colonial order; however, the first decades heralded the first signs that the old colonial order was fading from existence. With rising national consciousness challenging the socio-political authority held by the Raj, colonial authorities looked to that institution of social defense to be their main weapon, the police. As the level of challenges multiplied it became apparent that standard form of repression in the forms of the lathi and gun could not hold back the changing attitude of Indians regarding nationalism. While some Indians chose the peaceful path to swaraj via non-violence and non-cooperation, others looked to means that expressed their frustrations with alien rule, i.e. terrorism/extremist crimes. In recognition of these different means of subverting its sovereignty, the Raj sought to arm its police with fail-safe laws as seen by the Criminal Amendment Act of 1913 and 1932. Through these acts the loop holes that allowed the arrested nationalists to escape prosecution on lack of evidence were now made more stringent. However, the repressive manner that grew with each successive agitation, which enabled the police, in dealing to those challenges to the colonial order, to respond with brutal force would linger well past independence in 1947.

305 Indian Criminal Amendment Act 1932, 3.

Chapter 5

CONCLUSION

The services that you perform are essential to the welfare of the public, for your duty requires that you should be friends and protectors of all persons who are concerned. –Viceroy Linlithgow message to the Indian Police, circa 1936306

The more things change, the more they stay the same. –Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr307

When the London representatives of the Indian League concluded their eleven week investigation into the complex issue of Indian nationalism, and the actions taken by the Raj to counter the expanding episodes of non-violent indigenous defiance, the league’s report was finally published in 1934 under the title Conditions in India. As their findings highlighted the highhanded actions taken by the Indian Police, a term, used by the colonial regime’s opponents, was adopted to illustrate the actions taken to suppress the nationalists: Police Raj.308 Although the Raj never developed into a police state, as the term implies, with arrival of independence in

1947, the police had come to occupy an important in the ordering of Indian society. This ordering encapsulated the suppression of political opponents and the maintenance of elite control of the state. Having secured an independent nation, as the Congress Party now began to govern, the expected break with India’s colonial past did not transpire. Faced with the savage chaos of partition of the sub-continent following independence, along industrial unrest, and communal violence, the Congress adopted and endorsed the colonial police system.309

In 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru, who became free India’s first Prime Minister, discussed

Congress control of government. Regarding police functions, he remarked that, at that moment,

306 Anandswarup Gupta, The Police in British India: 1861-1947 (Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979), 446. 307 Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Les Guepes (Paris: Ancienne Maison Michel Levy Frères, 1877), 126. 308 Leonard Matters, V.K. Menon, Monica Whately, and Ellen Wilkinson, Condition of India: Being the Report of the Delegation sent to India by The Indian League in 1932 (New Delhi: Konark Publishers,1999), 174. 309 K. S. Subrmanian, Political Violence and the Police in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007), 63.

despite popularly-elected Congress ministries in provinces, “it is still the British Government that rules India.” During the heyday of nationalist resistance to the Raj, Nehru predicted that “in spite of the old atmosphere there is entirely a new atmosphere in those provinces where Congress ministries are functioning.”310 Nehru also stated that police repression by Congress governments was “a vital question,” a trap whereby Congress officials would “copy the methods of the British

Government.” Nehru warned, “We shall slowly become their replica, doing their work and preserving them from the odium of doing it.”311 Regardless of this optimism and these expressed concerns, Nehru retained a certain pragmatism regarding police authority “Government is the coercive part of the state.”312 Despite proclaimed intentions, at independence the new Indian authorities found themselves following the crises emerging from partition, permitting circumstances to govern police operations and settling into a system that perpetuated the status quo. Thus the evolution of police power in India had come full circle, as this imperial structure that had been designed to impose and maintain order, requiring accommodation as a response to precise colonial crises, now continued to function, no longer serving British masters but those who inherited political power.

The evolution of police authority in India occurred by degrees, encompassing the time frame from the Mutiny to Independence; however, the pace accelerated as the nineteenth century past into the early decades of the twentieth. Following the arrival of the British, who possessed a mania about how to regulate their new colonial society in India, the police was one institution that was scarcely altered. Seeking stability in their new colonial possession, the British had little incentive to change the traditional establishment-subordinate system that had well served India’s

310 Speech at Calcutta, October 28, 1937 in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 8, 272 – 3. 311 Memorandum to Working Committee Members, November 24, 1937 in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 8, 363. 312 Press interview at Bombay, August 12, 1937 in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 8, 306.

past rulers. With police accountability to be found in the ruler, there would be little reason for the police to form any bonds of connection with those they policed. The Mutiny marked a pivotal point in the evolution of the police, from an organization of secondary to primary concern, at a time when Indian loyalty was suspect and total reliance on the military had proven to be a folly for the British. From this came the Indian Police Act of 1861, which following the inquires made by the Indian Police commission of 1860, sought simple reorganization of the policing system to fit a new colonial situation. Producing a multiple-layered system of loyalty in which native intermediaries became collaborators with the Raj, a tighter colonial hold on India appeared to have been achieved.

In the decades that followed the establishment of a single uniformed police force, it became clear that additional reforms and consolidation was needed as the Raj began to experience the first challenges of Indian nationalism. Into this imperial struggle of colonial suppression versus native nationalism stepped Lord Curzon. Determined to preserve the colonial status quo against the budding indigenous political challenges, Curzon sought reform to strengthen British rule. The one area of interest for the new viceroy was the Raj’s police force.

From his authority a new Police Commission had been tasked with examining the nationalist challenges with regard to the Indian Police Act of 1861. The result of the inquiry provided a shocking revelation that colonial control was failing, and that the police required urgent reform to preserve British control. The results produced steps to strengthen the police, mainly in the area of intelligence, in which the collecting and disseminating of information proved vital to a colonial system that deemed political participation as criminal activity.

As British administrators grappled with attempting to retain control in the context of rising nationalism, more ominous challenges confronted the Raj. With the dawning of the

twentieth century British rulers looked forward to continued colonial rule, however following the partition of Bengal in 1905, the end of colonial rule had begun. In each successive nationalist shockwave, ranging from Swadeshi, terrorism, Non-Cooperation, the Khilafat Movement, and

Civil Disobedience, unrest became the new issue of colonial control. To tackle these new threats the British required new weapons, as the standard forms of repression were not able to handle the new situations. For the Raj temporary salvation appeared in the form of the Criminal

Amendments Acts of 1913 and 1932. From these new areas of legislation the police were armed with fail-safe laws that enable easier arrest and prosecution of those who challenged the authority of the Raj. Another weapon that colonial authorities came to rely upon with each successive agitation movement was simple brutal repression in the form of physical violence.

For British many officials, India was critical to not only maintain their imperial status in the world but their livelihood as a nation. Lord Curzon articulated these feelings when he announced, “‘So long was we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third rate power.’”313 This sentiment was easy to understand, for at the time of Curzon’s arrival in India about one-fifth of the total British capital was sunk there totaling around 270,000,000 to 300,000,000 pounds.314 As a ready market for British goods, India took in nineteen percent of British exports. Additionally, the subcontinent also provided Britain with an auxiliary source of military manpower in the form of the Indian Army. However, imperialistic envy and jealousies abounded in Europe towards Britain’s colonial enterprises and many nations hoped to replicate, if not totally separate Britain from its place of imperial prominence. For example, the Crimean War (1854 –6) found Britain allied with its traditional enemy, France, against Russian attempts to gain a foothold in the

Middle East, thus presenting a later threat to India. The conflict also assured Britain’s naval supremacy in

313 Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (London: Weidenfeld Publishers), 256. 314 Denis Judd, The Victorian Empire (New York, Praeger Publishers), 170.

the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean, at a time when both Britain and France contemplated the possibility of the Suez Canal. Yet, the Russian bear still sought ways to pull the British lion’s tail in India through Russian encroachment in Central Asia in an imperial rivalry that became termed the “Great

Game.” To halt growing Russian influence in Central Asia, Britain embarked on two military adventures known as the Afghan Wars. The first of war (1838–1842), ended with an Afghan victory over the British.

The second conflict (1878–1880) found Britain victorious and allowing Afghan tribes to maintain internal rule. More importantly, it managed Russian influence in the region.

As Britain dealt with Russia’s machinations, other nations began to rise on the European continent that had colonial desires. By end of the nineteenth century, Imperial Germany became the dominant European power and chief rival of Britain. This rivalry only increased as both nations became involved, not only against each other but with other European nations too, from the late nineteenth- century through 1914, with these rivals in competing for territory in Africa, better known as the

“Scramble for Africa.” Germany, under the leadership of the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, instituted a new program of a naval expansion that threated British dominance of the seas. By the end of the century,

German designs on Morocco threatened British sea lanes through the Mediterranean. In 1905, the British found themselves again partnered with the French to overcome their present rivals. This tension came to a boiling point in Morocco between March 1905 and May 1906, when Germany backed the Sultan challenging French influence in that area. Though Germany backed down, this conflict perpetuated the

Second Moroccan Crisis in April 1911, when the Kaiser sent a gunboat to Morocco to protest French troop increases there. None of these global challenges could be met by Britain without the manpower, material and economic resources provided by India. The British sought to protect the “Jewel of the

Crown” at all costs.

For British officials preoccupied with maintaining order, reforms of Indian policing unsurprisingly responded to assorted expressions of disorder. From the Mutiny, through

Swadeshi and terrorism, and throughout assorted protests, demonstrations and strikes associated

with nationalist campaigns against the Raj, British administrators perceived organized expressions of unrest as symptomatic of the sub-continent’s populace. As the primary purpose of the establishment-subordinate police system was to preserve power for those who held it, revisions regarding how the colonial administrative structure retained power naturally responded to specific challenges to the colonial order. Whereas police optimally serve as a branch of government to protect and serve citizens of India, colonial reforms established only popular suspicion, mistrust and fear of this repressive arm of government.

Born out of the needs of colonialism, the police of India became the mirror image of colonial rule. The belief in force as the form of authority to any opposition, loyalty of the force based on subordination to the established political order, dependence upon supervisory forms of manipulation, and brutal violence when required, these components speak volumes about the system the British employed while attempting to secure and preserve their dominance in India.

Though the image of a benevolent Raj was often promulgated by its colonial masters, what is shown through the maintaining and reforming of its colonial police presents a contradictory image. The part of the foundation of colonial rule the ideas of protecting and serving and law and order translated into the protecting and serving the colonial interests in which order was aided through the contrivance of the law. With institutionalized coercive functions and through later paramilitary forces and the intelligence bureau, the police became a key asset not only to the British but to those who assumed power after 1947.

Today the Indian Police still adheres to the Police Act of 1861, and their main areas of concern still center around the maintaining of order and collecting political intelligence.315 As the colonial police system was adopted following independence, there can be little doubt why the

315 Subramanian, Political Violence and the Police, 56.

Indian Police today have earned a bad reputation in terms of human rights abuses.316 With the police leadership held prisoner by the political party in power, the old establishment-subordinate system found under the British still holds sway. The old issue of corruption still remains with

India’s police forces as the pay rate for officers’ remains as bad as it once was under the Raj.317

In response to the increasing public demand for government accountability, the Indian

Parliament passed the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988, designed to eliminate corruption in government agencies and public sector businesses.318 It was followed by the Lokpal (Caretaker of the People) Act of 2013.319 In both instances, police officials were charged with investigating allegations. However, what occurs when officers engage in corruption?

On March 25, 2016, fifteen officers of the city of Visakhapatnam’s police force had been arrested or suspended on charges of corruption.320 In April 2016, The Times of India reported about recent police involvement in criminal activity. Three Delhi policemen were arrested for attempting to extort Rs 200,000 form a businessman, threating to “arrest the victim or kill in an encounter if he did not pay.” Two officers were arrested for abusing a female judge and for operating a gambling racket.321 Echoing their British predecessors, Indian officials have enacted reforms to address these issues, including the establishment of Anti-Corruption Bureau police stations throughout the country.322 Ongoing and recently more strident popular calls for reform have begun to make police forces accountable to the public whom they serve.

316 P. J. Alexander, Policing Indian In the New Millennium (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2002), 16. 317 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 236. 318 http://www.persmin.gov.in/DOPT/EmployeesCorner/Acts_Rules/PCAct/pact.pdf 319 http://www.indiacode.nic.in/acts2014/1%20of%202014.pdf 320 Siva G, “Corrupt Cops Tarnish Image of City Police,” The Times of India (March 25, 2016) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Police-Corruption. 321 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Delhi-Police-cracks-the-whip-on-corrupt-cops-3-held-for- extortion/articleshow/51760245.cms 322 B.S. Manu Rao, “All police stations to register corruption cases till ACB starts operating: DGP,” the Times of India (March 30, 2016), http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/All-police-stations-to-register-corruption-

As the colonial police system was adopted by the free Indian state, these occurrences can of highhandedness, human rights abuses, and corruption can hardly surprising. After nearly seventy decades after independence the incentive to create a new police does not exist with

India’s political elites any more than it had with the British. As the inheritors of the colonial police, the system had been adapted to enable the police to operate with little hindrance against those sought to challenge the Raj. In this design too came the need to reform that required accommodation that responded to precise colonial circumstances. It is little wonder that India’s new masters differ vary slightly from the old colonial masters and they weapons that are still employed to main elite control of the sub-continent.

cases-tillACB-starts-operating-DGP/articleshow/51623127.cms. The Anti-Corruption Bureau was established in 1961 and is responsible for investigating offenses under the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988.

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APPENDICES

104

APPENDIX I

LIST OF INDIAN TERMS

105

LIST OF INDIAN TERMS

Angrezi Raj: (English rule) was the term used by Indians in describing British rule of India.

Bhadraloks: (gentle people) was a term used to describe the three Calcutta-based Hindu elite castes in Bengali society. Khadi: (home-spun) refers to fabrics made from cotton yarn produced by hand on a charka (spinning wheel). Khadi production after 1922, during the period of Non- Cooperation moved beyond the Swadeshi movement and came to symbolize the rejection of British idea of India as different communities, based on the varieties of indigenous dress. Thus Khadi came to represent its wearer as a member of a unified nation. Lathi: a club that is composed of an iron-shod bamboo stick. Still employed by police worldwide, the lathi is about 2 feet long, but in India’s northern states and Pakistan they can be up to four to five feet long. When employed, officers are instructed to strike at the body’s lower extremities, never the head or neck area as death can occur. Because of questionable use of violence employed, the lathi has become a matter of concern among human rights advocates. Nawab: (deputy) was a term used to describe an official of the Mughal Emperor. However, the word became corrupted by the British into “nabob,” referring to those individuals who found wealth in the East. Satyagraha: as explained by Gandhi, it was passive resistance that could take multiple forms- fasting, non-violent protesting, various types of non-cooperation, and civil disobedience, in which participates did so in full anticipation of the legal penalties. Swadeshi: (of one’s country) is a term derived from Sanskrit; it was used by Indian nationalists in promoting the manufacture and consumption of products made in India by Indians. Swaraj: (self-determination) was a term used by Indian nationalists to denote their desire for self-rule of India. Thuggee: a term used to refer to a group of professional robbers and murders in India that strangled their victims as an act of devotion to the goddess Kali. The word itself became corrupted by the British into “thug,” and is still used in the English language to describe a violent criminal. Untouchables: in Indian society it was a term used to denote any member of the various low- caste Hindu groups outside the caste system. The word’s usage today was declared illegal in India in 1949 and by Pakistan in 1953. Today the word is considered to be offensive and condescending. Now or days the term is referred to as Scheduled Caste.

106

VITA

Michael Ray Hinz, Jr. was born in Paris, Texas. He graduated from Oklahoma State

University in December 2003 and received a Bachelor of Arts in History. In January 2013, he enrolled in the Graduate School of Texas A & M University-Commerce. A student in the

History Department, he focused on British Imperial History, and graduated with a Master of Arts in August 2016. He held graduate assistantships in both the History Department and the

Department of Mass Media and Communication.

2020 Hubbard Street, Paris, Texas 75460 [email protected]