A Letter from India: Problems and Prospects for the Modern Police
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A Letter from India: Problems and Prospects for the Modern Police Prasenjit Maiti1 The Indian police force is seldom considered to be a highly professional and regimented organisation characterized by discipline, honesty and efficiency. There is a general sense of popular suspicion that has alienated the Indian police from Indian civil society. Indian policemen, as generally elsewhere in the developing world, are regarded as villainous, trigger-happy characters appointed by the State to act as judges, jury and executioner on its behalf. The ‘modern’ Indian police force was structured as ‘a defender of the Establishment’ rather than as a professional organisation owing its accountability to democratic good governance and the Rule of Law, and this situation has changed little. Key Words: Police brutality; police efficacy; popular antipathy; rule of law; good governance According to Bayley: By and large Indian police are perceived as performing an exacting regulatory function, not as being capable of responding sympathetically and helpfully to felt needs of distressed individuals.2
The Indian police force, as a law and order-maintaining agency in a postcolonial democracy,3 is not often regarded as a highly professional organization characterized by any remarkable esprit de corps. Justice A.N. Mulla once condemned the force as ‘a uniformed gang of criminals’, and added that ‘no self-respecting person would willingly associate with the police—whether as a witness, a complainant or a defendant’. This general sense of distrust that alienates the Indian police force from the Indian people is nothing new, as we repeatedly come across unsavoury descriptions of the village chowkidar, the medieval kotwal, daroga or patil that underscore their repressive character. The ‘modern’ Indian police force—which dates back to the colonial Indian Police Act of 1861 (modeled on the Irish rather than the British framework)—was designed as ‘a defender of the Establishment’ rather than as a professional organisation owing its accountability to its citizens and the Rule of Law. Networks of patron-client relationships as sustained by the colonial regime had prevented any identification of the people with the institutions they happened to interface with in British India— the courts of law and the police force can be cited here as topical examples. Atul Kohli has written about the prizes that are to be won through political loyalty, rather than professional ability, in Indian government and politics.4 This syndrome is also widespread in the country’s bureaucracy, especially in the police.5 Jim Masselos, while studying the civil disobedience movement of 1930 at Bombay (present-day Mumbai, in western India), has sought to provide an additional perspective.6 Masselos was concerned with the interaction between the Congress volunteers who had offered satyagraha
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Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal
(passive resistance) and the Indian people who had watched such statements o
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