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Law and Emergency in India, 1915-1955 Javed Iqbal Wani

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Law and Emergency in India, 1915-1955 Javed Iqbal Wani Decolonizing Public Order: Law and Emergency in India, 1915-1955 Javed Iqbal Wani Department of History Royal Holloway, University of London A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Abstract This thesis sets out to investigate how law was used as a tool of governance in late colonial and early postcolonial India, with special reference to the invocation of states of exception or simply, extraordinary laws. The question is closely related to another issue, the creation of certain ‘problem categories’ to whom the normal process of law did not apply and which represented a legalised and permanent state of exception. With regards to both questions this thesis has found a consistency in perspective across the colonial – post-colonial divide. Bureaucrats in independent India were just as obsessed with maintaining peace and tranquillity as the colonial law and order administration. The case studies discussed in this thesis are diverse both in terms of their focus on different regions and the analytic angle of each instance involved. They include an analysis of the workings of the Defence of India Act of 1915 and the Rowlatt Bills in the 1910s, followed by more bottom-up case studies of how Section 144 CrPC was deployed in local emergencies in several provinces across India. Of particular importance in this context is Uttar Pradesh (UP) which is used to compare governmental practice under the pre and post-Independence Congress administrations. A certain overall pattern emerges from these case studies. For one, there was an increasing trend to normalize states of exception for the sake of maintaining law and order. At the same time, there was an important but subtle shift amongst the kind of situations leading to the invocation of extraordinary legislations and, the nature of those ‘exceptional categories’ of people- or problem categories to whom the normal rule of law was not believed to apply, from late colonial and early postcolonial India. The Raj started with a number of relatively clearly defined problem categories – badmaashes, dacoits, thugs, unruly labour, communists – it often had to totalise the potential reach of emergency legislation to the entire Indian populace. In post-colonial times, such a totalization was often reversed but a sense of problem categories nevertheless persisted. 2 Table of contents Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 8 Chapter One 48 Invoking Exception and Defining Enemies: Extraordinary Legislation and the Colonial War on Terror in Early Twentieth Century India Chapter Two 105 The Dynamics of ‘Public order’ in Late Colonial India: A Study of the Tactical Use of Section 144 CrPC in the Punjab and Bengal Presidencies 1935-1940 Chapter Three 158 Controlling ‘Mobs’ and Maintaining Public Order in Congress-ruled Provinces, 1930-1947 Chapter Four 246 When the Administration Broke the Law: The Peter Budge Scandal and the Issue of Race, Name and Law in UP Chapter Five 277 Lineages of a Post-Colonial State: Understanding the ‘New’ Sense of Public Order in the United Provinces 1947-1955 Conclusion 346 Bibliography 355 3 Acknowledgements I owe my interest to study public order and legal governmentality in India to Rajarshi Dasgupta, my M.Phil. supervisor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, whose course in Biopolitics motivated me to undertake study on this theme. The thesis would have been impossible without the generous funding by means of a full scholarship from Royal Holloway, University of London. Professors Sarah Ansari and Francis Robinson provided encouragement throughout the writing of this thesis. The Administrative Staff at the Department of History especially Marie-Christine Ockenden, Penelope Mullens and Stephanie Surrey were ever so helpful in the smooth administrative functioning of my Graduate life. Monica Kumwenda, International Student Adviser, Royal Holloway, provided required assistance with renewing my Tier-4 UK visa. Funding from University of London Postgraduate grant 2013 by Royal Holloway, and the Helping Hand Trust enabled me to undertake multiple field visits to India. Charles Wallace India Trust supported me with a small grant to keep me afloat in the fourth year of my PhD. A visiting lectureship offered by the department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London not only provided me with professional experience but great financial independence too. My sincere gratitude goes to Professor Sarah Ansari for offering me research assistance jobs to supplement the shortage in my funds on various occasions. I am grateful to Professors Asha Sarangi and Valerian Rodrigues at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University for their continuous guidance and support. Dr. 4 Tanweer Fazal at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems at Jawaharlal Nehru University provided encouraging feedback on various draft chapters. Many thanks to fellow doctoral students at Royal Holloway, Layli Uddin and Eve Tignol, for commenting on some of the early drafts. Profound thanks go to the management and various officials maintaining access services to archives and libraries in UK and in India. Without their support, this research would not have been possible. I owe special thanks to the National Archives of India in New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow, The British Library in London, Bedford Library at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi and the Central Library of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I am grateful to institutions who invited me to share my ‘thesis in progress’ findings by offering me a platform to present at seminars and conferences. Initial drafts of my thesis were presented as papers at the Postcolonial Governmentalities Workshop 2015, ‘Spatial Practices of Postcolonial Governance: Inequalities, Exclusions, and Potentials’ held in September 2015, at Cardiff University, United Kingdom; The Graduate Conference 2015, “Reflections on Social Change: Metamorphosis or Transformation?” at Birkbeck, University of London, in May 2015; The History and Cultures Workshop, University of Birmingham, in May 2015; and, the British Association of South Asian Studies conference 2015, University of Portsmouth in April 2015 Staying in a big and expensive city like London can be exhausting. The International Lutheran Student Centre (ILSC), London, realizing my need to stay closer to British Library for research purposes offered me a place to stay and made my stay comfortable. I am thankful 5 to Honor for offering great hospitality during my stay in Edinburgh in the summer of 2015. Most of the initial drafts of this thesis were written at their beautiful house in Edinburgh when I took a break from London. I am deeply grateful to my friend Syed Zaigham Abbas for his hospitality in Delhi during my various visits to India for fieldwork. David and Sanjay kept me motivated with their friendship. While pursuing my higher studies, my home was mostly in Delhi and later in London, I could not be with my parents as often as I should have. I thank my parents Kalsoom Akhter and A.R.Wani for their continuous belief in my decision to pursue academics against all pressures. I am indebted to my brother Amir Rashid Wani, who is my strength and has been dauntingly managing family responsibilities on his own while I was away for higher studies. I thank Sangeeta for her love and friendship and being patient with the geographical distance between us. I dedicate this thesis to my PhD supervisor Markus Daechsel, who provided support in every possible way to make my time at Royal Holloway and UK as comfortable as possible. I thank him for his generosity, guidance, straightforwardness and honesty while commenting on my half-baked ideas and for steering me in the right direction. He is one of the kindest human beings I have met in my life. I am thankful to him for the countless number of meals he has sponsored during our supervisorial meetings, which eventually came to be jokingly referred by me as ‘Baba Daechsel da langar.’ 6 7 Introduction Independence from British rule ushered in an era of unprecedented opportunity to construct a new polity in India according to the principles of democratic citizenship and nationalism. But not all civil servants of the new state were equally enthusiastic about the new political climate. Many of them maintained an underlying attitude of distrust towards ordinary Indian citizens that would have been more appropriate for colonial times. Ram Kinker Singh, the District Magistrate of Etah in the United Provinces, for instance lamented in an official communication in 1949, that since independence, “[T]he Police does not inspire fear” among the masses.1 He further deplored that “ignorant and illiterate people have got erroneous and perverted conceptions of freedom” and believed that they now had “no respect for authority”. Many police officers in the new nation also did not have a very favourable opinion about the general public order and, the citizen population in particular. The Superintendent of Police (SP) of Bahraich, for example, came to the conclusion that “[W]ith the advent of freedom the public at large had developed a peculiar psychology of confusing liberty with license.”2 This, he felt was the result of a basic distrust between the police and the public that had remained unchanged since the British departed. For this reason, the public did not provide much cooperation to the security forces when dealing with criminals. These comments came in the wake of a complex discussion that took place between various departments of the bureaucracy responsible for maintaining public order and peace in what was soon to become the state of Uttar Pradesh. These high-ranking bureaucrats sounded uncannily like their erstwhile colleagues in the British Raj, who had stressed many times before that Indians could only be given good government because they were unsuited to enjoy free government. For the colonisers, the natives could not be trusted with their own freedom.
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