Chandravarkar-Customs of Governace

Modern Asian Studies 41, 3 (2007) pp. 441–470.

C 2007 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0026749X06002472 First published online 11 January 2007
Customs of Governance: Colonialism and

Democracy in Twentieth Century India
RAJNARAYAN CHANDAVARKAR
University of Cambridge
‘Who is stealing electricity’ at Tis Hazari?—the principal magistrate’s

court for the city of Delhi. The mystery, it turned out, had a
simple solution. It implicated a large proportion of the 1500 lawyers’
chambers in the court buildings. According to the Vice-President of the
Delhi Bar Association (Criminal), the problem arose because the Delhi
Vidyut Board ‘had installed electricity junction boxes in the premises
and has not given any regular connection to individual chambers.
Hence, most lawyers had to make their own arrangements’.1 By this,
he meant that the lawyers resorted to tapping electricity from the
board’s supply lines to run their lights and fans, their refrigerators,
air-conditioners and computers. Speaking on behalf of the criminal
lawyers, and lending a certain adjectival force to their professional
description, their Vice President admitted that it was true that ‘earlier,
we were stealing electricity. . . . But now we have taken up the matter
with the DVB and have shown our eagerness in seeking regularised
connections’.2 It was almost as if he expected that their eagerness
could be entered as a plea in mitigation.
The Enforcement Department of the DVB observed that the lawyers
had caused ‘a whopping financial loss to the Board’ and that ‘this
[theft] has been going on for years’. But they had recently covered
themselves in glory by launching a series of dramatic raids to eliminate
power theft by their own employees in the Board’s own residential
colonies and were willing to approach the problem at Tis Hazari
in a spirit of compromise. They were looking, they said, for ‘a
fruitful solution . . . without turning it into a legal battle. We want
to tell them how they can join us . . . We want to bring them into
1
Indian Express, 17 April 2000.
2
Ibid.
0026–749X/07/$7.50+$0.10
441
442 RAJNARAYAN CHANDAVARKAR
the electricity network so that they no longer have to steal power’.3

Perhaps the DVB’s enforcers were reluctant to pursue the lawyers
through Tis Hazari. Or alternatively it is open to speculation that
a closer examination in court of how the electricity junction boxes
came to be installed without meters or connection could also prove
embarrassing to the staff of the Delhi Vidyut Board.4 In any event, the
theft of power by the criminal lawyers at Tis Hazari, and by the DVB
employees in their official residences, must be placed in the context
of the massive loss of electricity supply through theft. It is estimated
that between 20 and 45 per cent of India’s electricity supply—which
remains about 15 per cent below total demand—is lost in ‘transmission
and distribution’.5 Behind the widespread theft of electricity loomed
the allegations of corruption—seemingly a chronicle of the looting of
the state for political profit—that marked the efforts of successive
governments in Maharashtra to award, cancel and then reissue a
contract to Enron for the building of the infamous Dabhol power
plant.6
The dispute at Tis Hazari may be seen as integral to the growing
volume of evidence to suggest that since at least the early 1970s
there have been fundamental changes in public attitudes to the rule
of law, that there has been a growing lawlessness at the heart of the
Indian state and more widely, that violence, coercion and brutality
have been more clearly manifested in the everyday practices of its
democracy. For at least the past six decades, since the eve of India’s
independence, political commentators have repeatedly returned to the
theme of ‘ungovernability’.7 The obverse of ‘a crisis of governability’ is,
3
Ibid.
4
Indeed, according to Abhay Mehta, the Delhi Electricity and Supply Undertaking,
later reconstituted as the DVB, was ‘one of the most corrupt and bankrupt
organizations in the country.’ Abhay Mehta, Power Play: A Study of the Enron Project
(Mumbai, 2000), p. 10.
5
International Energy Agency, Electricty in India: Providing Power for the Millions
(OECD/IEA, 2002), pp. 31–36. According to the Union Minister for Power, Mr.
Sushilkumar Shinde, 31.5 per cent of electricity supply is lost in transmission and
distribution (compared to 7 per cent in China, 18 per cent each in Sri Lanka and
Bangladesh, 20 per cent in Myanmar, 21 per cent in Nepal and 26 per cent in Pakista n.
He attributed these losses to ‘low metering, billing and collection [in]efficiency, meter
tampering and power theft.’ Hindustan Times, 23 February 2006.
6
For a detailed account of the Enron project, see Mehta, Power Play; Human Rights
Watch, The Enron Corporation: Corporate Complicity in Human Rights Violations (London,
1999).
7
Selig Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, 1960); A. Kohli,
Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge, 1990).
CUSTOMS OF GOVERNANCE 443
of course, a failure of governance. In the past few decades, as political
scientists have analysed ‘the crisis of ungovernability’, evidence of
the failure of governance has begun increasingly to unfold. Recent
decades have also witnessed growing anxieties about the machinery
and operations of the state. There has been a growing sense that
officials, politicians and parties, as they scramble to gain access to the
resources of the state, are incapable of pursuing much more than their
own sectional interests. The proliferation of corruption scandals has
suggested venality on an unprecedented scale.8 ‘The reality is’, wrote
N. Vittal, the Government of India’s Central Vigilance Commissioner
in 2000, ‘that India is one of the most corrupt countries in the world’.9
The IAS officers’ association in Uttar Pradesh, dismayed by the extent
to which their collective reputation was besmirched by a significant
number of their colleagues, held a poll in 1997 to decide upon the
most corrupt officer in their ranks.10 The police have been perceived
to be the most corrupt of all the state agencies. They have often been
perceived to act too readily as the instrument of powerful politicians
or other major social interests. The massive expansion of the armed
police and paramilitary police forces, both at the command of the
central and the state governments, has elaborated the widespread
assumption that they are capable of extreme violence. Reports of rape,
torture and violence against prisoners, encounter killings and deaths in
custody, along with the more extensive use of detention without trial,
have developed the notion that the police and paramilitary forces are
liable to abuse their considerable power.11 Moreover, the police and
8
India has often performed poorly in the Corruption Perception index produced
by Transparency International. For the Corruption Perception Index for 2005,
see http://ww1.transparency.org/cpi/2005/2005.10.18.cpi.en.html#cpi. See also Aqil
Shah, ‘South Asia’ in Global Corruption Report, 2001, Transparency International, edited by
R. Hodess, J. Banfield and T. Wolfe (Berlin 2001), pp. 39–52.
9
N. Vittal, ‘Combatting Corruption’ Seminar, no. 485, (January 2000). See also,
N. K. Singh, The Politics of Crime and Corruption: A Former CBI Officer Speaks (New Delhi,
1999); S. Viswanathan and H. Sethi, Foul Play: Chronicles of Corruption, 1947–97 (New
Delhi, 1998); S. Guhan and S. Paul (eds.), Corruption in India: Agenda for Action (New
Delhi, 1997).
10
Hindustan Times, 9 November 1997. The IAS Officers’ Association has held a
similar poll in several subsequent years. Two officers who placed by the 1997 poll
among the three most corrupt officers in the service in 1997 eventually became Chief
Secretary, or the head of the civil service in the province, in the following decade and
appear to have attempted to prevent the conduct of a similar poll in 2005. Tribune, 3
April 2005; Mid-Day, 27 March 2005.
11
A. Desai (ed.), The Violation of Democratic Rights in India (Bombay, 1986); Amnesty
International, India: Torture, Rape and Deaths in Custody (London, 1992); Ujjwal K.
Singh, Political Prisoners in India (Delhi, 1998).
paramilitary forces have been seen to take sides in communal and caste
conflicts.12 The judiciary has been placed under increasing suspicion.
Certainly, the Bleak House which the republican state inherited has
acquired an even more labyrinthine complexity, which has placed
it beyond the reach of the vast majority of the population.13 Three
crore cases are said to be currently ‘pending’ in the Indian judicial
system.14 We might see the growing ethnic and sectarian violence15
that has occurred since the early 1980s as well as what have in effect
been civil wars, fuelled by cultural nationalism and states rights, in
Punjab, Assam and Kashmir,16 as evidence of the deepening failure of
12
Report of the Srikrishna Commission Appointed for Inquiry into the Riots at Mumbai
during December 1992—January 1993 and the 12 March 1993 Bomb Blasts (Bombay,
n.d. [1998?]); T. B. Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of the State in Mumbai’, in
C. J. Fuller and Veronique Benei (eds.), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India
(London, 2001), pp. 31–67; P. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation
of Collective Violence (Princeton, 1997), pp. 51–57, and passim; Vibhuti Narain Rai, ‘An
Open Letter to My Fellow Police Officers’, in S. Varadarajan (ed.), Gujarat: The Making
of a Tragedy (New Delhi, 2003), pp. 211–13; and T. Setalvad, ‘When Guardians Betray:
The Role of the Police’, in Ibid., pp. 177–210.
13
U. Baxi, The Crisis of the Indian Legal System (New Delhi, 1982); Pratap Bhanu
Mehta, ‘India’s Judiciary: The Promise of Uncertainty’, in D. Kapoor and P. B. Mehta
(eds.), Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design (New Delhi, 2005), pp. 158–93.
14
The Chief Justice of India, Y. K. Sabharwal, offered this estimate when he
took office in October 2005. See The Tribune, 21 October 2005. This figure is widely
employed. However, it is not clear that these estimates include the backlog in the
lowest courts. See also U. Ramanathan, ‘Crime and Punishment’, Seminar, no. 557,
January 2006.
15
From a large literature, see, for instance, P. van der Veer, Religious Nationalism:
Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1994); T. B. Hansen, The Saffron
Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, 1999); A. Basu and
A. Kohli (eds.), Community Conflicts and the Syaye in India (Delhi, 1998); O. Shani, ‘The
Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: A Case Study of Ahmedabad in the 1980s’, Modern
Asian Studies, vol. 39, part 4 (2005), pp. 861–96.
16
D. Gupta, ‘The Communalising of the Punjab, 1980–1985’, Economic and Political
Weekly, vol. 20, no. 28 (13 July 1985), pp. 1185–1190; P. Brass, ‘The Punjab Crisis
and the Unity of India’, in Kohli (ed.), India’s Democracy, pp. 169–213; P. Wallace,
‘Religious and Ethnic Politics: Political Mobilization in Punjab’, in F. Frankel and
M. S. A. Rao (eds.), Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order,
vol. 2 (Delhi, 1990), pp. 416–81; Gurharpal Singh, ‘Punjab since 1984: Disorder,
Order and Legitimacy’, Asian Survey, vol. 36, no. 4 (1994), pp. 410–21; Gurhapal
Singh, Ethnic Conflict in India: A Case-Study of Punjab (Basingstoke, 2000). On Assam,
see J. Das Gupta, ‘Ethnicity, Democracy and Development in India: Assam in a
General Perspective’, in Kohli (ed.), India’s Democracy, pp. 144–68; S. Baruah, India
Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Delhi, 1999); and S. Baruah, Durable
Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (Delhi, 2005); on Kashmir, see S.
Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Cambridge, 1999); B. Puri,
Kashmir: Towards Insurgency (Delhi, 1993); S. Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir: Democracy,
Self-Determination and a Just Peace (Delhi, 1997).
governance. Indeed, it would be difficult to explain the pogroms waged
against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and against Muslims in UP in the 1980s
and early 1990s, Bombay city in 1992–93 and Gujarat in 2002, except
in the light of the collapse of government and the lawlessness of the
state.17 For many Indian citizens, therefore, the state has appeared
more than ever before to constitute an armoury of resources upon
which its agencies and its allies among dominant groups can draw to
impose their will more or less arbitrarily upon the powerless. Or to
put it differently, for large sections of the population, the notion would
seem plausible that government and the rule of law are no more than
a cover for limited cliques of dominant groups to pursue their own
particular interests.
Complaints about lawlessness might generally be taken, as I have
argued elsewhere,18 as an expression of ruling class anxieties about
the threat of disorder or about their own ability to control the poor.
However, recent evidence and experience of the state has made it a
little harder to wholly discount these complaints. Nor has it become
easier to establish how we might weigh the evidence that fewer and
fewer people subscribe to the rule of law or how we might measure
changes in the everyday practices of the state.19 We could scarcely
subscribe to the romantic notion, sometimes nurtured with surprising
frequency, that corruption and chicanery surfaced only when the
earth’s great age began anew in 1947.20 Nor could it be supposed that
society was more law-abiding in the early twentieth century than it is
today. In most cities, for instance, the political economy of squatter
settlements, developed on illegally occupied land, has now come to
17
T. B. Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay
(Princeton, 2001); Varadarajan (ed.), Gujarat.
18
R. Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State,
1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1998), chapter 5.
19
As Shekhar Naphade, a senior counsel in the Bombay High Court, declared,
‘Lawlessness is rampant nowadays. Few believe in following the rule of law’, Times of
India, 29 March 2000.
20
Indeed, as the noted economist, D. R. Gadgil, observed in 1950, ‘Politicians
as well as the ordinary man in the street allege today the average administrator in
India is neither efficient nor honest. It is, of course, generally agreed that our traders
have little moral sense and that few among the public at large exhibit the strength
of character necessary in a regime of controls’. Curiously, politicians in Gadgil’s
narration made the allegations rather than becoming the object of them. Indeed,
traders probably had as much moral sense in 1950 as ‘politicians’ and ‘the ordinary
man’ allowed them to retain. D. R. Gadgil, ‘Wartime Controls and Peacetime Ends’ in
Government of India, Ministry of Labour, Problems of Indian Labur: A Symposium (Simla,
1950), p. 5.
infuse wider networks, frequently brutal and coercive, of political

power and commercial enterprise. But coercion and violence have
of course never been very distant from the regulation of affairs within
working-class neighbourhoods.21 So that which has changed appears
on closer scrutiny to have remained the same. Perhaps, one way out
of this impasse is to place the habits and customs of governance
which commentators observe today in a longer historical perspective.
This objective, of course, entails in part developing a history of the
state and of the evolution of statecraft in modern India. At its most
comprehensive, this task falls outside the scope of this essay. Instead,
this essay seeks to explore the lines along which the relationship
between the state and its subjects, (and subsequently, citizens), and
the habits and customs of governance changed in twentieth century
India.
Most attempts to theorise the state characterise it in terms
of its social base and the ‘coalition of interests’ which constitute
it.22 But once these coalitions of interests or social blocs are
dissembled into their constituent parts, the coalition often appears
irredeemably fragile and even incoherent. Their differences might
for a time be brokered into combination, but their solidarity
has frequently depended upon specific historical contingencies.
Theoretical assumptions about the general effects of production
and distribution have sustained the notion that social groups have
objectively defined interests in common, which is then deployed to
identify the social basis of the state. It might be more fruitful to
approach the history of the state, and the evolution of statecraft
through an examination of its everyday practices.23 Needless to say,
the political ethnography of the state could also shed light on its class
character and social basis. Significantly, the ethnographic approach
21
R. Chandavarkar, ‘Workers’ Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay Between
the Wars’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 15, part 3 (1981), pp. 603–48; N. Adarkar and M.
Menon, One Hundred Voices, One Hundred Years; N. Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor
in Early Twentieth Century India (Cambridge, 2001).
22
The classic statement is by P. Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India
(Oxford, 1984).
23
C. J. Fuller and V. Benei (eds.), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India
(London, 2001); A. Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the
Culture of Politics and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, no. 22 (1995),
pp. 375–402; J. Parry, ‘“The Crisis of Corruption” and “the Idea of India”: A Worm’s
Eye View’, in I. Pardo (ed.), The Morals of Legitimacy (Oxford, 2000), pp. 27–55; S.
Corbridge et al., Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Cambridge,
2005).
has yielded important, and often nuanced insights into the varied
relationships between officials and ordinary citizens, how people
identify and perceive the state and the range of initiatives by which
they are able to create some spaces of autonomy from dominant
groups and government officials by manipulating or working around
the institutions of the state. But to the extent that they have focused
upon the specificities of local political culture at a particular moment,
they have remained limited in their ability to calibrate or explain
changes in the nature of governance.
In a third, more theoretically ambitious, approach, Partha
Chatterjee has suggested that popular politics, built around the moral
economy of ‘community’, tends to operate outside the framework of
the law and the ambit of civil society.24 On the other hand, the arenas
of civil society are inhabited by ruling elites, who are more intimately
linked with or operate within the institutions of the state. To manage
‘political society’ and to accommodate its claims, the agents and
institutions of civil society are forced increasingly to operate on an
extra-legal terrain and by methods which violate its own conventions.
Within the sphere of ‘political society’, ‘various deprived population
groups must struggle to make their claims to governmental care’ by
means of ‘criminality or violence’. However, criminality and violence
were by no means the prerogative of the deprived. Indeed, as this essay
will argue, the distinction between a domain of localism, criminality
and violence, inhabited by the deprived, and a domain governed by
formal conventions and characterized by legality, and occupied by the
priveleged, remains untenable.
The antecedents of India’s democracy lay, of course, in Britain’s
oriental despotism. The colonial state tolerated, even helped to create,
local domains of power from which it averted its gaze and in which
dominance was asserted, contested and sometimes perpetuated with
some degree of freedom from the systematic operation of the rule
of law. These domains were consolidated and strengthened in crucial
ways by the workings of democracy after independence. Yet, at the
same time, local power brokers found in democratic processes the
means by which they gained access to highest reaches of the state. As
a result, the methods and conventions by which dominance was once
exercised, and often circumscribed, within the locality has suffused the
practices of governance more generally. In thus attempting to place
24
P. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the
World (Delhi, 2004).
the habits and customs of governance in independent India in histor-

ical perspective, the essay builds on two sets of initial propositions.
First, Indian democracy inherited its habits of governance from
colonial practice. The colonial state had permitted some measure of
representation to carefully selected Indian interests. But it had also
ensured that the state had always operated at a level removed from
the society which it governed and it rendered itself as far as possible
immune to the pressures which its subjects might generate. The
colonial state had long appropriated an executive privilege for itself.
Colonial officials often described government as an entity which stood
aloof from society. Government defined the terms, constituencies and
institutions within which people might organize to gain access to
its resources. These manners and customs of governance endured
in the discourse and practice of the state after 1947. Indeed, in public
discourse, the state continued to be treated as if it was, indeed it some-
times claimed to be, abstracted from its social and political context. It
appeared to stand outside the realm of, and therefore free to arbitrate
over, social conflict and political competition. Its relationship with its
subjects continued to be conducted in the language of supplication and
concession, grants and demands, charters and petitions, grievances
and repression. At the same time, it appropriated greater executive
powers. Yet with the inception of democracy, the notion that govern-
ment served the people who elected it and was accountable to them
sat uneasily with its inheritance and expansion of executive powers.
Second, this paper seeks to argue that the propensity of a democratic
state for success or failure in protecting human rights and civic
freedoms, including freedom from want, will depend not so much upon
the extent to which its society has adopted and developed a bourgeois
culture, but rather upon the stake which its political imaginary allows
labour—in the widest sense of the term—within the state. Or to put it
differently, the civility of practices of governance will be determined
largely by the attitude to the poor, or to labour, that is, by the discourse
about labour, entertained by the politically and socially dominant.
Colonial statecraft and its perception of the social order were shaped
by its characterization of the problems of managing, controlling and
governing labour. The colonial project in India was driven by the
imperative to gain closer control over labour, to cheapen its costs and
to subordinate it to the disciplines of capitalism.25 In confronting this
25
Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chapters 1 & 9.
task, and its often insuperable difficulties, that is in its construction of
the ‘labour problem’, colonial discourse fashioned its understanding
of, perhaps even created what it described as the ‘culture’ of it subjects.
Significantly, the colonial discourse of labour not only resonated with
meanings which the British elaborated in their approach to public
order, but also yielded the parameters within which their policies
took shape. At the same time, Indian elites gained greater power to
subordinate labour from the processes of colonial expansion and they
have been manifestly reluctant to surrender these gains since 1947.
In the nineteenth century, the British in their approach to public
order formalized their practice of salutary neglect. Their purpose in
ruling India was not good government but to deploy Indian resources in
their own international interests. To mobilize these resources for their
imperial purposes, they clearly had to preserve the public peace. They
could not, however, achieve their aims simply through the exercise
of force. Necessarily, physical force remained the final sanction for
the maintenance and perpetuation of imperial rule. But the colonial
state could not use it freely. Its monetary and political costs might,
as colonial rulers recognized at least since the end of the savage
campaigns of pacification which followed the Mutiny, bankrupt the
state or force it to sacrifice imperial priorities more pressing than
holding on to Britain’s most prized dominion. So the colonial response
to discontent and unrest was, if at all possible, to ignore it and to
throw a hastily constructed façade of order across deeper levels of
social conflict.26 The problem of public order could thus be abandoned
to the disciplinary mechanisms of local structures of power.
Despite the convenience, perhaps even the inherent wisdom, of
salutary neglect, it was unlikely to provide a lasting solution. Social
control has always been more easily theorized than enforced. As
agents of social control, local bosses were subject to the competition
of their rivals and the relentless pressure to satisfy their clients. What
sometimes appeared to be a formidable array of power was often
26
A. Seal, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism in India’, in J. Gallagher, G. Johnson and
A. Seal (eds.), Locality, Province and Nation: Indian Politics, 1870–1940 (Cambridge,
1973), pp. 1–15; R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism:
Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and R. Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies
in the Theory of Imperialism (London, 1972), pp. 117–42; C. A. Bayly, ‘Local Control
in Indian Towns—the Case of Allahabad, 1880–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 5,
no. 4 (1971), pp. 289–311; D. Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: Madras
Presidency, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1976), especially, chapter 3; A. Yang, The Limited
Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India: Saran District, 1793–1920 (Delhi, 1989).
found to rest on rather fragile foundations. The social relationships

underlying their dominance were rarely stagnant. Indeed, when local
structures of dominance were effectively challenged, they threatened
to take away with them much of the façade of order behind which
colonial rule nestled.
It was against the background of this strategy for maintaining
public order, and the innumerable problems which it spawned, that
a uniform system of policing was introduced in the subcontinent in
the 1860s.27 For the police, their understanding of their own role,
and their perception of crime and the social order, was coloured by
their military antecedents. Thus, they were liable to understand crime
primarily in terms of rebellion and disorder rather than simply in
terms of law-breaking and the security of property and the person.28
The operations of the police imparted to the notion of public security
an explicitly, and narrowly, political meaning. What is remarkable
about the colonial police is how little they were interested in crime.
For this reason, they neither sought to intervene energetically nor
to disturb too greatly the practices by which offences against person
and property were handled within informal social networks or local
power structures. As a result, to a very large extent, propertied elites,
merchants and industrialists and local magnates created their own
private arrangements for protection and policing.
The style of policing in colonial India merits closer scrutiny. Its
methods and operations provide a useful perspective on the prevailing
customs of governance and they could also shed light on how far
statecraft evolved in relation to knowledge about the culture of the
poor and the working classes. Not only were the police, at least in
the towns, the only significant agency of the colonial state to come
extensively into close and direct contact with the working classes and
the urban poor, but they also operated on the thin line which divided
the arbitrary exercise of power from the rule of law, and in doing so,
they mapped the contours of both. Colonial India was far more sparsely
policed than England. Both in personnel and resources, the thin blue
line was very thin, indeed. In the early twentieth century, the ratio of
policemen to population in the Bombay Presidency was about half the
27
D. Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi, 1986);
P. Robb, ‘The Ordering of Rural India: The Policing of Nineteenth Century Bengal
and Bihar’, in D. M. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire: Government,
Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester, 1991), p. 126–50; Chandavarkar,
Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chapter 6.
28
This argument is elaborated in Chandavarkar, Imperial Politics and Popular Politics.
ratio for England and Wales. The per capita expenditure on policing
in England and Wales was eight times higher than in the Bombay
Presidency.29 Over large parts of the Indian countryside, there was no
police presence at all. Villages were omitted from the administrative
design of the police force. The basic unit of the District Police was
the sub-divisional outpost which lightly supervised the works of the
village watch, ostensibly conducted by the hereditary servants of the
village community, an institution always more active in the sociological
imagination of the official mind than it was in rural society. When it
was effective, the village watch was to a large extent the strong arm
of its headmen or more broadly, its dominant families. According to
Edmund Cox, the village watch in the Bombay Presidency was ‘for
the most part an elegant fiction’. It usually consisted of ‘a rabble of
over a dozen nondescripts’, who rarely ‘use the powers that have been
conferred upon them’ and ‘so far from assisting the more disciplined
guardians of the peace, they are actually at the bottom of much
concerted crime’.30 Yet, in the cities, the police lacked resources,
discipline and sometimes even manpower. To a very large extent,
both in the towns and the countryside, Indian society relied upon
informal systems of policing and conflict resolution. The structural
and organizational weaknesses of the police in Bombay, for instance,
forced them to operate through alliances, networks and connections
made within the neighbourhoods. They also put their faith devoutly
in the value of these street and neighbourhood connections for the
detection of crime. In fact, their belief was belied by the criminal
statistics. For the low rates of recorded crime suggest both reluctance
on the part of residents to report them and on the part of the police to
record them.31 This reluctance only serves to reinforce the suggestion
that the prevention and detection of crime, as well as the meting out
of punishment, remained throughout this period largely the preserve
of the social networks of the neighbourhood.
The constraints under which the police functioned meant that they
were only likely to be effective if they identified, marginalized and
concentrated upon selected targets. In this process of selection, they
29
W. W. Hunter, Bombay, 1885 to 1890: A Study in Indian Administration (London,
1892); E. Cox, Police and Crime in India (London, 1910); J. C. Curry, The Indian Police
(London, 1932); Annual Reports on the Police in the Town and Island of Bombay, 1884–
1912 (1885–1913); Annual Reports on the Police in the City of Bombay, 1913–47 (Bombay,
1914–1948).
30
Cox, Police and Crime in India, pp. 254, 258 & 256.
31
Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chapter 6.
would necessarily have to rely upon a general consensus about which

groups in society were especially prone to criminal activity and might
constitute, therefore, the proper objects of policing. In the context of
colonial India, this consensus proved particularly difficult to achieve.
Of course, by enacting this principle of selection, the colonial state
was able to create criminal tribes and castes.32 But while it might
police them energetically, the criminal tribes were scarcely by the late
nineteenth century a potent threat to the social order. To marginalize
more substantial social groups was an intractable and often hazardous
proposition. In particular localities and regions, it was sometimes
possible to find a consensus which isolated and marginalized some
social groups. But social groups that were marginalized in one area
might be harder to isolate in another, where, indeed, they might
even exercise some influence on the strategies for policing the public
order. Among those who laid claims to respectability and sought
to distance themselves from the rough, there were many for whom
the experience of selective policing was never too remote. With the
development of nationalist politics, a greater variety of people found
a possible consensus about the strategies of policing and the de-
finition of its proper objects unconvincing and untenable, in the
light of their own experience, real or imagined, of the state. The
intensification of communal conflict further only made this consensus
more difficult to achieve. By generating and developing a political
vocabulary of sectarianism, the colonial state in fact foreclosed the
possibility of creating a viable language of order. This was why it
often found it difficult to satisfy the logic of its position by freely
expressing its coercive disposition. The function of crime for the
capitalist industrial state, we are sometimes told, was to regulate
society more closely and to discipline and punish the working classes.
The colonial state, however, was thrown back upon the more slippery
linkages of the neighbourhood and shifting and conditional alliances
with their collaborators to underwrite the social order.33
32
S. Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing the Criminals by Birth: Parts I & 2’,
Indian Economic and Social History Review [henceforth, IESHR], vol. 27, no. 2 (1990),
pp. 131–164, and IESHR, vol. 27, no. 3 (1990), pp. 257–87; R. Singha, ‘Providential
Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation’, MAS,
vol. 27, no. 1 (1993), pp. 83–146; A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India
(Tucson, Ariz., 1985); M. Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: “Criminal tribes” and
British Colonial Policy (Hyderabad, 2001); S. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of
Colonial North India’, MAS, vol. 25, no. 2 (1991), pp. 227–61.
33
Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics.
These social, ideological and resource constraints upon the police
were symbolic of the weaknesses which tempered the unabashed
autocracy of colonial rule. It imposed upon the state the self-denying
ordinance by which it cut itself out of substantial parts of the realm.
Its immediate effect was to create significant social arenas for the
arbitrary exercise of power. It is not intended to suggest that those who
dominated these domains could afford with any consistency to simply
do whatever they chose. Necessarily, their followers placed obligations
upon them; and the foundations of their power were scrutinized and
challenged by rivals. Nonetheless, these represented political or public
domains in which local bosses became the arbiters of ‘civility’ and
social exchange. In other words, the effect of salutary neglect was
to create social arenas which were removed at least partially or
intermittently from the systematic rule of law and where the play
of power and negotiation of dominance achieved a measure of im-
munity from its operation. The expansion of the state and the fuller
integration of these domains into the political system in the late
twentieth century did little to breach these immunities and may even
have paradoxically increased the scope for the arbitrary exercise of
power.
From the 1910s and 1920s onwards, some of the leading
assumptions of salutary neglect appeared to become untenable. The
colonial state could no longer be sure to draw a veil over local
social struggles. It found it increasingly difficult to rely upon the
expectation that local structures of power would contain threats to
the social order. In part, this was of course the consequence of the
growing momentum of popular political movements, whether they
were driven by caste or class, religion or nation. In part, it followed
upon the increasing influence which Indian landed, commercial and
bourgeois interests acquired within the state. Indian elites showed less
respect for salutary neglect. Like all propertied elites, they valued the
freedom to exercise their power arbitrarily. If their own differences
and rivalries, or the resistance which they encountered, undermined
their position as arbiters of the local domain, they sought to draw upon
the resources of the state to shore it up. As they gained increasing
influence over the local and provincial machinery of the state, they
used its resources more eagerly to discipline and control labour,
whether in the towns or the countryside.34 In the 1920s and 1930s,
34
C. J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamil Nadu Countryside, 1880–1950
(Oxford, 1984); Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chapters 3, 5 & 6;
too, the army was deployed more frequently than before ‘to maintain
order’ or ‘restore the peace’.35 Troops were called to the aid of the
civil authorities most commonly in the case of communal violence.
The police accumulated and used the means of repression with a
growing readiness. Increasingly in this period, especially in the 1930s,
the willingness of the police to swing their lathis and point their guns
at antagonistic crowds quickened. Yet, at the same time, Indians were
recruited in larger numbers into the senior ranks of the police and to
a lesser extent into officer corps of the army, and more significantly,
Indian control over the institutions and agencies of the state tightened.
The expansion of the repressive powers of the colonial state, and the
increasing willingness of ruling elites to deploy it, was legitimized by
recourse to some of the abiding motifs in the colonial discourse about
labour. Indeed, it was a particular representation of the nature and
motivation of the politics of the working classes which led ruling elites
to conclude that the use of substantial repressive force to contain
them was not only justifiable but quite simply inevitable. At the
same time, forced to deal with collective action on a wider scale, the
police became increasingly aware of their own vulnerability, which in
turn also contributed to their understanding of the nature of popular
politics. Thus in colonial discourse, the pattern of political action by
the urban poor and the working classes originated in and was marked
by their peasant or pre-modern culture, which inscribed into their
outlook an aversion to rationality, organization and discipline.36 Their
peasant character, forged by hierarchies of caste and fostered by the
village community, created a tendency among them towards extreme
R. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the
Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 1994), chapter 9; Gooptu, The
Politics of the Urban Poor; Subho Basu, Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers’
Resistance in Bengal, 1890–1937 (Delhi, 2004).
35
Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, vol. 1, Survey (London, 1930), p. 95.
36
See, for instance, Report of the Indian Factory Labour Commission, 1908, 2 vols. (Simla,
1908); Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India (London, 1931); G. M. Broughton,
Labour in Indian Industries (London, 1924); P. S. Lokanathan, Industrial Organization
in India (London, 1935). These assumptions and hypotheses have sometimes been
offered as an explanation for workers’ resistance and their propensity for violence
by more recent writers. See, for instance, D. Arnold, ‘Industrial Violence in Colonial
India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 22, no. 2 (1980), pp. 234–55;
D. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History, 1890–1940 (Delhi, 1989), especially
chapter 5; V. Das, ‘Introduction: Communities, Riots and Survivors: The South Asian
Experience’, in V. Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South
Asia (Delhi, 1990).
tolerance, acquiescence and even passivity, but it also accounted for
their propensity to fitful, spasmodic and violent protest.
It was precisely because these supposedly pre-industrial workers,
rural migrants, seemingly half-peasant and half-proletarian, could
not be relied upon to operate within the domain of reason that
they appeared quite so threatening.37 Not only could they be easily
worked up into ‘a state of excitement’, but their material grievances
could readily be given a political, even seditious, colouring. Similarly,
it was feared that their resentments and grievances might find
frenzied expression in their caste prejudices and religious fanaticism,
which were always liable to result, or so it seemed, in violence and
bloodshed.38 In this perspective, the working classes or ‘the mass
of uneducated Indians’ appeared to inhabit a very narrow spectrum
between passivity and fanatical fury.
Colonial discourse developed an elaborate aetiology of popular
politics and especially of mass violence.39 It often treated Indian
politics as a synonym for, and the outcome of, conspiracy, developed
through incitement, rumour, propaganda and sedition and spread by
unscrupulous agitators to credulous, illiterate and volatile masses,
whose own responses fell outside the universe of reason. This
combination of unscrupulous and irresponsible agitators and irrational
and volatile people signified, in this discourse, the ever present and
palpable threat that, in no more than an instant, tension could flicker
into riot, mere discontent could erupt into an epidemic of violence,
antagonisms could be inflamed into a major political conflagration.
The inflammability of the people and their politics made it crucial
that the colonial government should, for the sake of its own subjects
as much as itself, maintain and strengthen public order and stamp out
37
Report of the Indian Factory Labour Commission, 1908, vol. l; Report of the RCLI; Annual
Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association, 1918, p. xii.
38
See, for instance, Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to
Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab etc., Parliamentary Papers [henceforth, PP], 1920,
vol. XIV, Cmd. 681; Government of Bombay [henceforth GOB], Home (Special) File
750 (26) of 1930, Maharashtra State Archives [henceforth, MSA]; Secretary, GOB,
Home to Secretary, Government of India [henceforth, GOI], rmy, 12 January 1921,
in Bombay Confidential Proceedings, January 1921, vol. 62, Oriental and India Office
Collection [OIOC]; Curry, The Indian Police, pp. 86, 99.
39
See, Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chapters 5 & 6. For an
account, however a-historical, of the identification of popular politics with disease,
contagion, irrationality, and conspiracy and also its description in terms of the
speed and suddenness of its ‘eruption’, see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant
Insurgency in India (Delhi, 1983), pp. 221–26.
disturbances at the first sign of their appearance. In India, it seemed, it

was essential for the police and the state to act quickly and decisively.
Imperial prestige and the pride of the ruling race might demand it, but
more crucially, officials recognised only too well how easily they could
be swamped by the swelling tide of frenzied and fanatical natives.
Thus, ‘the first and last rule of conduct for all ranks’ declared the
Bombay police officer, J.C. Curry, ‘is to go straight for any trouble and
deal with it before it becomes more serious. There can be no excuse
for failing to learn of a small cloud low on the horizon which . . . may
quickly obscure the sky’.40
The urgency which the colonial state felt about the need to maintain
order at all times and to thwart any threat to it at the first opportunity
arose from its perception of its subjects as volatile and fanatical as
well as its awareness of its own weakness and vulnerability. These
perceptions fed and developed the anxiety of the colonial state, and
its agents, especially the police, that they might be on the point of
being overwhelmed.41 In other words, the weakness of the police
arose in part from the fallibility of their assessment of the threat
to the social order and of their judgement about the best means of
reasserting control. It also entrenched an intermittent tendency to
restore order with excessive force or perhaps more crucially it tended
to obscure the distinction between minimal and excessive force.42 The
imperative for immediate and effective action to contain the threat of
the volatile masses seemed at times, therefore, to legitimize measures
of repression, whose brutality was disproportionate to the threat they
sought to contain, just as an acute awareness of the vulnerability of the
colonial state, when faced with mass revolt, and the futility of ruling
India by force, sometimes imposed constraints upon its uninhibited
use.
The implications of the inherent instability and volatility of Indian
society extended beyond police practice to embrace the law and the
powers of the state which were necessary to contain it and, therefore,
also circumscribe the freedom and autonomy of civil society. It was,
after all, to perform precisely this essential function for its subjects
that Britain ruled India. Indeed, the social and cultural ‘circumstances’
40
Curry, The Indian Police, p. 99.
41
Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chapter 6.
42
Disturbances in the Punjab, Statement by Brigadier-General R. H. Dyer, PP, 1920,
vol. XXXIV, Cmd. 771; D. Sayer, ‘British Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–
1920’, Past and Present, no. 131 (May 1991), pp. 130–64.
in India, as Curry noted, ‘render it compellingly necessary for authority
to be armed with wide powers for which no need exists in other more
homogeneous countries’. For no government, whatever its provenance
could ‘hope to administer such a country, unless its local officials
have extensive legal powers and ultimately the backing of unlimited
force’.43 The Amritsar massacre in 1919 (or indeed in 1984) showed
precisely where this line of reasoning was liable to lead.
By 1947, the discursive and material practices of the colonial
state had entrenched some resilient habits of governance which the
independent state inherited. These habits of governance, especially
as they related to their subjects, derived in large measure from
colonial knowledge gained from the experience of extracting and
disciplining labour. First, for now largely familiar reasons, the police
showed no greater interest in the protection of person and property
after independence than they had under colonial rule. Their primary
concern remained the maintenance of the irredeemably fragile
political order. The old colonial habit of governance which viewed
society through the prism of public order and understood ‘rebellion’
and resistance as crime, remained largely entrenched.44 Thus, the
customary role of the police, and through it, the state, in protecting
person and property, was abandoned to the older and baser arts,
the rough justice and informal sanctions of the neighbourhood. As
a result, the independent state left intact those social arenas, created
by the customs of colonial governance, in which the arbitrary exercise
of power flourished by contrast to, and at the expense, of the rule
of law. It is not intended to suggest that these social arenas or
the configurations of power within them remained unchanged. Nor
is it intended to suggest that they were autonomous and isolated
from, or even marginal to local society. On the contrary, local power-
brokers found that democratic processes propelled them towards
lofty connections and into wider arenas of politics. Indeed, these
local structures of power were integral to larger processes of state
formation.
As these social arenas for the arbitrary exercise of power have been
entrenched and consolidated, their effect has been to ensure that
43
Curry, The Indian Police, p. 99.
44
Baxi, The Crisis of the Indian Legal System; D. H. Bayley, The Police and Political
Development in India (Princeton, 1969); D. H. Bayley, ‘The Police and Political Order
in India’, Asian Survey, vol. 23, no. 4 (1983), pp. 484–496; J. Ribeiro, Bullet for Bullet:
My Life as a Police Officer (New Delhi, 1998); Verma, in Kapur and Mehta (eds.), Public
Institutions in India: Performance and Design.
many, perhaps a growing number, among the agrarian and urban poor,
dalits and especially women, have had to live their lives in a relatively,
or at least intermittently, lawless context. For instance, the ‘atrocities’
to which dalits have been subjected since independence by dominant
castes, often their landlords and employers, often with the connivance
of the local agencies of the state, have claimed lives on a massive scale,
but they remain only the most visible and the most brutal instances
of a spectrum of daily acts of oppression that continue to mark and
deepen the subordination of the ‘untouchables’.45 For women, these
social arenas have been particularly lawless. Just as women’s work
has often been perceived and characterized, increasingly so since the
1920s, as an extension of domestic labour, so the police have tended
to treat violence against women as a domestic matter, confined to the
private sphere of the family and outside the purview of the state. In
the response of its police force and its judiciary, India is, of course, by
no means unique. More remarkably, however, the reluctance of the
police and the courts to intervene has appeared to extend to cases of
murder, which, in the event of domestic violence, have been classified
more readily as accidental death or suicide.46
In the 1980s, widespread campaigns by women’s groups against
dowry violence led to the formulation of specific protective laws
and also resulted in the increased recording of dowry deaths.47
45
Jan Breman, ‘Silencing the Voice of Agricultural Labourers in South Gujarat’,
Modern Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (1999), pp. 1–22; O. Mendelsohn and M. Vicziany,
The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge, 1998);
Human Rights Watch, Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s Untouchables (New
York, 1999). On the political assertion of dalits, Y. Yadav, ‘Understanding the Second
Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the
1990s’, in F. Frankel, Z. Hasan, R. Bhargava and B. Arora (eds.), Transforming India:
Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (Delhi, 2000).
46
See Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for
Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (London, 1993); Subhadra Butalia.
The Gift of a Daughter: Encounters with Victims of Dowry (Delhi, 2002); Urvashi Butalia,
‘Confrontation and Negotiation: The Women’s Movement’s Responses to Violence
Against Women’, in K. Kapadia (ed.), The Violence of Development: The Politics of Identity,
Gender and Social Inequalities in India (New Delhi, 2002), pp. 207–34; Nisha Srivastava,
‘Multiple Dimensions of Violence Against Rural Women in Uttar Pradesh: Macro
and Micro Realities’, in Ibid., pp. 235–91. See also V. Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The
Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (Delhi, 2002).
47
Butalia, The Gift of a Daughter. On the legislative changes, see Flavia Agnes,
‘Protecting Women Against Violence? Review of a Decade of Legislation, 1980–
1989’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 27, no. 17 (5 April 1992), pp. ws19–ws32;
Kumar, The History of Doing, pp. 115–26; and Ratna Kapur and Brenda Crossman,
Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (New Delhi, 1996). For instance,
The number of deaths registered as dowry-related thus increased
from about 400 per annum in the mid 1980s to over 5,000 in the
early 1990s and nearly seven thousand by 1998.48 In the city of
Bangalore alone, in 1998, about one hundred women were reported
to have been murdered for dowry each month.49 In addition to the
often powerful web of social pressures on the victim, her family and
witnesses that inhibit the reporting of dowry violence, high rates of
acquittal, slow, perfunctory and sometimes incompetent investigation
and the length of the judicial process have often combined to
deter both reporting and prosecution.50 In turn, these factors have
together added to the reluctance of the police to record cases of
dowry violence. Tejdeep Kaur Menon, Andhra Pradesh’s Inspector
General of Police (Special Protection Force), expressed her own
‘serious doubts about the correct recording of cases’ of crimes against
women while criticizing ‘the failure of the criminal justice system
to inspire confidence in the victims’ and law enforcement agencies
more generally for their ‘shocking apathy to gender issues’.51 Not
surprisingly, the under-reporting of dowry harassment is replicated
in relation to domestic violence and violence against women, more
generally. Dowry harassment comprises only a small proportion of the
the Indian Penal Code was amended to make ‘cruelty’ and harassment for dowry a
cognizable offence, punishable by imprisonment. The Criminal procedure code was
amended to make a post-mortem compulsory in the case of married women who had
died within seven years of marriage. The Indian Evidence Act was amended to provide
that in the event of a woman committing suicide within seven years of the date of
her marriage, evidence that her husband or her family had subjected her to cruelty
or harassed her for dowry was sufficient to allow the court to presume that they had
abetted her suicide. See also Subhadra Butalia, The Gift of a Daughter; Urvashi Butalia,
‘Confrontation and Negotiation’ pp. 207–34; Nisha Srivastava, ‘Multiple Dimensions
of Violence Against Rural Women in Uttar Pradesh: Macro and Micro Realities’ in
Ibid., pp. 235–91.
48
The Hindu, 24 August 2003; the figures for the mid 1990s are from National
Crime Research Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India ‘Crimes in
India’ cited in Srivastava, ‘Multiple Dimensions of Violence’, pp. 242–49.
49
Parvathi Menon, ‘“Dowry Deaths” in Bangalore’, Frontline, vol. 16, no. 17 (14–
27 August 1999).
50
In 1999, the courts took six to seven years on average to dispose of cases of
dowry violence in Bangalore. See Menon, ‘“Dowry Deaths’’ in Bangalore’. Similarly,
according to the Government of India’s own figures, more than a quarter of dowry
deaths in 1998 were ‘pending investigation’ by the police while 85 per cent of cases
that had reached the courts were ‘pending trial’. ‘Crimes in India, 1998’ National
crime research Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, cited by
Srivastava, ‘Multiple Dimensions of Violence’, pp. 245–46.
51
Tejdeep Kaur Menon, ‘Crime Against Women: Violence Within and Without’,
The Hindu, 1 September 2002.
cases of domestic violence which reach the judicial system. Indeed,

the scale of this under-reporting is suggested by the extensive survey
of domestic violence, covering about 10,000 households across India,
conducted by the International Centre for Research on Women. It
revealed that while nearly 50 per cent of women reported experiencing
some form of physical or psychological abuse from their husbands at
least once in their lives, less than 2 per cent sought help from the
police, officials, medical specialists or women’s organizations.52 From
the mid 1980s onwards, the police began to establish special units
for dealing with dowry violence. These ‘anti-dowry’ units, including
those staffed exclusively by women officers, for instance in Gujarat
and Karnataka, have tended, it is suggested, to treat complaints of
domestic violence lightly unless they demonstrably involved a dowry
dispute. The tendency to treat domestic violence indiscriminately as if
it entailed dowry harassment has been held to contribute to high rates
of acquittal. Yet, conversely, the police have continued to operate
on the assumption that cases of domestic violence were usually the
outcome of family disputes, which in turn were most appropriately
handled within the household, and in any case did not call for the
intervention of law enforcement agencies.53
It should not be supposed, however, that the arbitrary exercise of
power was experienced exclusively by the poor or by women. The
tolerance of domains which were protected from the rule of law was
always liable to allow the attitudes to power and dominance that it
bred to leach into the political conventions and general practices of
governance.
Second, following an old colonial tradition of statecraft, government
situated itself at a level removed from society and, in official discourse,
assumed its own autonomy. It would both represent its citizens
and, in its own private court of appeal, adjudicate upon their best
interests. This contradictory understanding of its own role after
independence was expressed both in relation to public order and
economic development.54 Like its colonial predecessor, the republican
52
Domestic Violence in India: A Summary Report of a Multi-Site Household Survey,
International Center for Research on Women, Washington D.C., 2000); Times of
India, 24 February 2000.
53
New York Times, 26 December 2000; Butalia, The Gift of a Daughter; Kumar, A
History of Doing; Oldenburg, Dowry Murder.
54
P. C. Mahalanobis, Talks on Planning (New York, 1961); A. H. Hanson, The Process
of Planning (Oxford, 1966); S. Chakravathy, Development Planning: The Indian Experience
(New Delhi, 1987); P. Chatterjee, ‘Development Planning and the Indian State’, in
state assumed that it would need to arm itself with wide powers to act
in the interests of it subjects. Its benign purposes would not be served
unless it was allowed to arm itself with ‘unlimited force’. Indeed, since
1947, and increasingly from the late 1960s onwards, the police and
armed forces acquired increasing powers of repression. The police
forces under the control of state governments have expanded at a
faster rate than the population. Since the constitution placed the
police under provincial jurisdiction, the Union government created
its own Central Reserve Police in 1949.55 In the late 1960s, its
budget increased five-fold and its single battalion had multiplied to 60
battalions by 1973 and 83 battalions by 1987.56 Similarly, since the
late 1960s, the number of paramilitary forces has proliferated while
the powers, personnel and resources placed at their command have
expanded substantially. By the mid 1980s, the various police forces
under the command of the Centre matched the combined strength
of all the state police forces and they were used to police religious
and ethnic minorities, to cuff communists when they have appeared
menacing and to break strikes. At the same time, the army was called
out with increasing frequency in times of social unrest and communal
violence.57
In addition, the state set out to accumulate even more repressive
powers, drawing liberally from the colonial armoury. Some 250
clauses of the constitution were in fact lifted from the Government
of India Act of 1935.58 The ground-rules for the political system
of independent India, based on universal adult franchise and
T. J. Byres (ed.), The State, Development Planning and Liberalisation in India (Delhi, 1998),
pp. 82–103; D. Washbrook, ‘The Rhetoric of Democracy and Development in Late
Colonial India’, in S. Bose and A. Jalal (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development:
State and Politics in India (Delhi, 1997), pp. 36–49; V. Chibber, Locked in Place: State-
Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton, 2003).
55
Bayley, The Police and Political Development; Bayley, ‘The Police and Political Order’;
P. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. IV,
part 1 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 54–9.
56
D. Hiro, Inside India Today (London, 1978), pp. 205, 194–205; K. Mathur, ‘The
State and the Use of Coercive Power in India’, Asian Survey, vol. 32, no. 4 (1992),
pp. 337–49.
57
S. P. Cohen ‘The Military’, in H. Hart (ed.), Indira Gandhi’s India: A Political System
Reappraised (Boulder Co., 1976), pp. 207–40; Stephen P. Cohen, ‘The Military and
Indian Democracy’, in A. Kohli (ed.), India’s Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State–
Society Relations (Princeton, 1988), pp. 99–143; Mathur, ‘The State and the Use of
Coercive Power’, pp. 345–46.
58
Sir Ivor Jennings, Some Characteristics of the Indian Constitution: Being Lectures Given
in the University of Madras During March 1952 Under the Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Aiyer
Shashtiabdapoorthi Endowment (London, 1953); G. Austin, The Indian Constitution: The
parliamentary sovereignty, were thus derived in large part from

colonial and authoritarian legislation which sought to tighten
London’s control over the Indian Empire and to define more closely
the relationship between powers devolved to elected Indian politicians
and the ultimate control of colonial officials. The most potent
of the 1935 provisions borrowed by the Indian constitution and
enthusiastically deployed by Indian governments were the ‘emergency
provisions’ which enable the President to suspend democratically
elected governments and the fundamental rights of its citizens. In this
way, the authors of the Indian constitution took immediate recourse to
the principle of dyarchy, first enunciated in the Montagu-Chelmsford
Reforms of 1918.59 In addition, the Defence of India Rules, framed
in a fit of colonial paranoia about ‘conspiracy and outrages’ in
the 1910s, and then renewed during the Second World War, have
been repeatedly enacted since 1947, initially at least by those
who had participated enthusiastically in the Rowlatt Satyagraha.60
Similarly, colonial provisions for ‘preventive detention’ of persons
arrested on suspicion of disturbing public order has been held in
force more or less permanently since 1950, even as its provisions
have been elaborated and developed in its more recent incarnations:
the infamous Maintenance of Internal Security Act of 1972, the
Terrorism and Detention Act in the early 1980s and more recently,
the Prevention of Terrorism Act.61
Similarly, in the rhetoric of nation-building, which at the outset ran
parallel with the discourse on the future of democracy, it was taken for
granted that the direction and guidance of the state was indispensable
to the task of dragging India into the modern world. The state
appeared to be a neutral force, occasionally even an independent actor,
divorced from the processes by which politicians, ruling elites and
Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford, 1966); Washbrook, ‘The Rhetoric of Democracy and

Development’.
59
Significantly, the architects of the state in Pakistan, especially its generals,
showed a similar fondness for ‘reserved powers’ and ‘dyarchy’. See Mohammed
Waseem, Politics and the State in Pakistan (Islamabad, 1994); and ‘Constitutionalism
in Pakistan: the changing patterns of dyarchy’, unpublished paper presented to the
conference on Pakistan: The State, Citizenship and Religion, Centre of South Asian
Studies, Cambridge, July 2005.
60
R. Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971).
61
A. Desai (ed.), The Violation of Democratic Rights in India (Bombay, 1986);
Mathur, ‘The State and the Use of Coercive Power in India’, pp. 340–43; Amnesty
International, India: Torture, Rape and Deaths in Custody (London, 1992).
powerful interests sought to gain access to the resources of government
and the levers of power. This perspective of course privileged executive
action by the state and frequently overlooked its contradiction with
democratic choice. The politics of development and nation-building
in the three decades after independence only served to expand the
space in which the state was allowed a privileged executive role. It
also quickened the urgency for the state to enact this executive role.
Third, while its repressive arm has been strengthened, the state has
often appeared to subscribe to a similar aetiology of popular politics
which had once held its colonial predecessor spell-bound.62 The poor
have largely continued in the official mind to combine innocence and
passivity with ignorance and volatility. This combination rendered
them the prey of unscrupulous agitators or scheming (but, now, other)
politicians. Their irrationality, their propensity to violence and their
inherent fanaticism required that collective action be promptly and
decisively quelled. The emergence of a lively, raucous and fractious
democracy did not transform official explanations for popular politics.
This aetiology of popular politics within the state, built upon its
knowledge of working class culture, has not promised much for the
civil liberties of its citizens. It has facilitated, at least justified the
quest for, military solutions for political problems in Punjab, Assam
and Kashmir in the 1980s and 1990s.63 These military actions were
in some respects reminiscent, albeit conducted on a much larger scale
and with greater brutality, of the campaigns waged by the colonial
regime against the Mapillas in the 1910s and early 1920s, the Bengal
‘terrorists’ in the early 1930s and the Quit India movement, especially
in east UP and Bihar in the 1940s.64
It is neither intended to suggest that independence wrought no
changes to Indian political life nor to identify the state exclusively with
62
Compare, for instance, Julio Ribeiro’s enunciation of ‘the principles of mob
control’ with the nostrums of J. C. Curry, quoted above.
63
See footnote 17 above.
64
On Malabar, see K. N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant
Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921 (Delhi, 1989), pp. 139–90; and S. F. Dale, Islamic
Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mapillas of Malabar, 1498–1922 (Oxford, 1980),
pp. 179–218; on Bengal, see Government of India, Terrorism in India, 1917–1936
(Simla, 1937); D. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London,
1994), pp. 223–25; T. Sarkar, Bengal, 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi, 1987);
on the Quit India Movement, see GOI, Home (Poll), File 3/15/43; GOI, Home (Poll),
File 3/52/43, National Archives of India; F. Hutchins, India’s Revolution: Gandhi and the
Quit India Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), especially, chapters 7 and 9; G. Pandey
(ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta, 1988).
its repressive character. Among the many significant transformations

which followed from independence was universal adult suffrage.
Indians took to democracy after 1947 with a passion and an enthu-
siasm which they have ordinarily only reserved for cricket. Between
1967 and 1996, about 60 per cent of the electorate have fairly
consistently turned out to vote.65 The slight decline in the late 1990s
was accompanied by a continued increase in the turnout of the
poorest voters.66 Moreover, voters have shown a marked propensity
for throwing out incumbent governments. We might expect, therefore,
that this exuberant and widespread commitment among to democracy
would breach the defences of those domains of local power which had
remained immune to the rule of law. If these expectations have been
belied, the reasons lie partly in the nature of the democratic process
and its relationship with the bureaucracy.
On average each parliamentary constituency in India has a million
voters. The territory of each parliamentary constituency contains
between 6 and 8 state assembly seats and is honeycombed with
representative institutions stretching down to the gram panchayat,
each able to establish independent access to ministers, legislators and
politicians at the state or national level. No parliamentary candidate
could hope to secure election without striking favourable bargains with
a host of power brokers operating at every level in his constituency. In
weaving these networks, politicians, factions and parties valued those
who could command and deliver every additional vote. Local bosses
needed favours from politicians in order to satisfy their clients and
dependants.67 At the base, the neighbourhood dada who was associated
with a particular politician or faction will mobilize votes among his
followers because that candidate would be known to be willing to
65
D. Butler, A. Lahiri and P. Roy, India Decides: Elections, 1952–1991 (New Delhi,
1991), pp. 7–11; R. Roy and P. Wallace (eds.), Indian Politics and the 1998 Election:
Regionalism, Hindutva and State Politics (New Delhi, 1999); P. Wallace and R. Roy (eds.),
India’s 1999 Elections and Twentieth Century Politics (New Delhi, 2003); and especially,
the collection of articles on ‘Electoral Politics in India, 1998–99’, in Economic and
Political Weekly, vol. 34, nos. 34 and 35 (21 August–3 September 1999); and on the
2004 election, the collection in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. no. 39 (18 December
2004).
66
Yadav ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge’.
67
P. Brass, ‘National Power and Local Politics in India: A Twenty Year Perspective’,
in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (February 1984), pp. 89–118. On the political
and electoral expression of the rivalries between dadas in Bombay, see the testimony
of Govind Phansekar in N. Adarkar and M. Menon (eds.), A Hundred Years, A Hundred
Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta, 2004), pp. 290–303.
help them secure access to benefits and services—from water supplies
and electricity to jobs, health care and education, which neither the
state not the market can readily provide. Conversely, the secret ballot
exercised only a limited fascination for these voters. To maximise the
services which would flow back to them, it was imperative that they
made their choice known to both the local boss and the candidate.
Needless to say, the gains which voters have thus made have not
always measured up to the value of the votes they cast. Moreover,
these political relationships are by no means static. Rivalries between
street corner bosses associated with the same party could explode
into violence. They could even lead to the deepening of communal
antagonisms and result in violence, if the differences were so aligned,
as Veena Das’s ethnography of anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 in Sultanpuri
in Delhi demonstrated.68
These relationships can be also viewed from the other end of the
process. Ghani Khan Chaudhury, the Congress M.P. from Malda in
West Bengal, has held the seat for over 20 years during a period of
CPI(M) dominance in the state and, more widely, Congress decline
and BJP resurgence. In fact, Congressmen were returned in 6 out of
7 assembly segments of his constituency. For over a decade earlier,
he represented the town of Malda in the state assembly. It is said of
Ghani Khan that he never wears khadi nor indeed a kurta and dhoti.
He campaigns often in a black suit and tie and is driven around the
constituency in a Mercedes Benz. As irrigation minister in the state
in 1972, Ghani Khan first secured the flood defences of the town,
which also served to secure it against wandering animals from the
surrounding jungle. Subsequently, in the 1980s, as a cabinet minister
in Delhi, he became famous for his ability to divert development
projects to his constituency. Malda became the headquarters of
a railway division and acquired some additional railway lines, an
extensive network of roads, a hydro-electric and thermal power plants,
a new college, a silk factory and all the villages in the district were
electrified. He boasted that he had secured jobs for between 60,000
and 70, 000 local youths in the railways, power plants and coal mines.
In the 1991 elections, his majority was substantially reduced. ‘At that
time’, he explained, ‘I had been without any ministry for four years, so
I could do nothing’. But after another term of office at the centre for
68
V. Das, ‘The Spatialization of Violence: Case Study of a Communal Riot’, in K.
Basu and S. Subrahamanyam (eds.), Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s
Secular Identity (New Delhi, 1996), pp. 157–203.
the Congress, Ghani Khan returned with a massive majority of 90,000

votes.69 In 1998, the authorities were mystified that the electorate in
Malda had grown by 600,000 voters in less than two years. Ghani
Khan did not long ponder the mysteries of the electoral roll. He
was returned once more as the M.P. for Malda. While democracy
has enlivened rivalries within local structures of power, politicians
have built their extensive networks upon them and thus have helped
to protect them from the systematic application of the rule of law.
In fact, if anything, democracy has enabled the arbiters of the local
domain to extend their reach to the highest levels of the political
system.
The role of the bureaucracy in implementing policies and
supervising the observance of regulations would, of course, prove
crucial to the experience of the arbitrary exercise of power. While
the colonial bureaucracy represented itself as neutral, its daily
functions were, of course, inescapably political. ICS officers in
the districts regularly heard petitions and grievances, arbitrated
in disputes, intervened in the maintenance of public order and
enjoyed considerable discretion in the implementation of orders which
emanated from the provincial capital.70 Their successors in the IAS
perform similar functions, even if they are allowed less latitude and
are generally subordinated to politicians and especially ministers.
Recruited into a national cadre, IAS officers are assigned to a specific
state and spend a significant part of their careers in them.71 As a
result, they, and even more fully, the subordinate bureaucracy, have
been vulnerable to the pressure and influence exerted by rural elites,
often a prosperous peasant strata which has done well out of the
Green Revolution, and who dominate state politics. But political power
since the late 1960s has been increasingly fragmented. Ministerial
instability and proliferating coalitions drew these officials into their
ambit and opened them to the bidding of rivals as political competition
69
Times of India, 17 February 1998.
70
D. C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators, 1919–1983 (Oxford, 1986); C. Dewey,
Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993); D. Gilmour,
Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London, 2006).
71
Potter, India’s Political Administrators; B. B. Misra, Government and Bureaucracy in
India, 1947–1976 (Delhi, 1986); S. Goyal, ‘Social Background of Officers in the Indian
Administrative Service’, in F. Frankel and M. S. A. Rao (eds.), Dominance and State Power:
Decline of a Social Order, vol. 1 (Delhi, 1989), Appendix II, pp. 425–33.
intensified.72 The fragmentation of the Centre has since the late 1980s
only deepened and extended this process.
Democracy has also affected the relations within the bureaucracy.
The efficacy of the colonial district administration depended very
largely on the close links and good relations between officials at various
levels and in different departments. The interplay between politicians
and the bureaucracy has made this difficult to maintain. The status
and conditions of the IAS officers are deemed to be superior to other
services. As a result, those who are assigned to the police, following
their competitive examinations, have in significant numbers tended
to re-take their exams in the hope of entering the IAS.73 This has
given rise to the suspicion among police officers that their colleagues
or superior officers are in their posts only because they have failed
to get into the superior service. Similarly, the attempt to obliterate
the colonial distinction between ‘gazetted’ and ‘non-gazetted’ officers
in the 1950s has complicated the relationship between them, made
worse by lumping the latter in with unskilled employees like the peons
who are often the key, not simply ubiquitous, figures in a government
office. Predictably, since these changes were not accompanied by
wage increases or wider differentials, it has generated considerable
and widespread discontent among both gazetted and formerly non-
gazetted officers. However, the unintended consequence of this
attempt at egalitarianism has been that the relationship between
them has, in the words of one IAS officer, ‘tended to become rigidly
formalised and the different echelons have drifted apart’.74
Finally, factional rivalries within parties and increasing competition
between them both at central and state level has made the
relationship between senior civil servants and politicians, especially
ministers, particularly important to the former’s career and the
latter’s effectiveness in office. Changes in government have thus been
accompanied by a flurry of transfers, not only to bring compliant
civil servants into the departments of favoured ministers but also
72
R. Wade, ‘The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is Not Better at
Development’, World Development, vol. 13, no. 4 (1985), pp. 467–97.
73
However, calculations about which of the public services will yield the most
revenue in the form of bribes has sometimes acted to balance old considerations of
status.
74
B. P. R. Vithal, ‘Evolving Trends in the Bureaucracy’, in P. Chatterjee (ed.), State
and Politics in India (Delhi, 1997), p. 212.
to hoist awkward civil servants upon dissidents and opponents.75

In the lower bureaucracy, political influence has often taken more
direct forms. Both ‘gazetted’ and ‘non-gazetted’ services have become
unionized partly because political parties have sought to organize and
incorporate them into their own electoral machinery. The fact remains
that Class IV officers—teachers, police constables and peons—
wield considerable influence in wide sections of society because of
their ability to get things done for ordinary citizens or conversely to
obstruct their business. More crucially, they are usually deputed to the
tasks of organizing and conducting elections. It would be impossible
to ‘capture’ a poll booth or to stuff ballot boxes or to organize
multiple voting without the complicity or sometimes the coercion of
these officials.76 Significantly, when the Haryana police went on strike
in 1991, one of their major demands was protection from political
interference. As their leader complained, ‘We are pawns in the hands
of the powerful politicians and clever officers’.77 Indeed, as a senior
police officer told the Hindustan Times a few years earlier, two-thirds of
‘station-house officers in India . . . are political appointees whose main
job is to make money and give a part of it to their political patrons’.78
Since the 1960s, the domains in which local power could thus be
exercised arbitrarily have expanded. Domains of power and local
immunities created by the principle of salutary neglect and by
a particular and distinctive style of policing and approach to the
maintenance of public order were now transformed by their expansion,
their increasing commercialization and their incorporation into more
powerful and more elevated political networks. As a result, the extent
and depth of lawlessness which surrounded the lives and governance of
the poor has steadily increased. Their ability to impose the constraints
and obligations of reciprocity upon their patrons considerably
weakened.
The failure of governance in modern India merits closer and more
systematic attention. This paper has suggested that the failure of
75
The question of the transfer of civil servants is widely and regularly reported
in the Indian press. For a discussion of these issues before the political parties
fragmented at the centre, see Wade, ‘The Market for Public Office’.
76
Vithal, ‘Evolving Trends’, p. 217.
77
Hindustan Times, 27 September 1991. On the relations between politicians and
the local police, see Brass, Theft of an Idol, pp. 51–7; and Hansen, ‘Governance and
Myths of the State’.
78
Hindustan Times, 26 October 1986. See National Police Commission quoted in
Amnesty.
governance was rooted in customs and habits, developed by the colonial
autocracy and transposed into the democratic practices of independent
India. At the core of these customs of governance were to be found the
constraints which were imposed, and the influence exerted upon them,
by the discourse about labour. In large measure, the ‘civility’ of the
customs and habits of governance was determined by the generosity
of this discourse about labour.
The colonial discourse was scarcely generous towards labour. Its
characterization of the culture which encompassed it served to
strengthen its claim of legitimacy to rule as well as to claw back
the returns to labour. But it was a sufficiently capacious discourse to
create a basis for alliance, however shifting, with significant groups in
Indian society. For landed and mercantile elites obtained, as a result
of colonial expansion, by the 1830s, a growing measure of control over
labour. They tightened their control over labour in the early twentieth
century and have perhaps subordinated it more fully since 1947.
We might take this as simply yet another case in which indigenous
elites have after decolonization slipped into the colonial mantle with
remarkable ease and sometimes brutal political consequences or in
which, in a slightly different argument, they have adopted the tropes
of colonialism, sometimes inverted them, and sometimes exaggerated
them. These arguments have some force, but it is time to dig at deeper
levels. The failure of governance has had long and resilient roots. They
have extended to and derived sustenance from processes of state form-
ation which have been active at the very base of society. Continuities
in the practices of the state as well as their transformative effects were
manifested within local domains of power and sometimes radiated out-
wards from them. Changes within them, often rather portentous, have
blown back upon the state at levels where it had become accustomed
to imagining that—often acting as if—it operated with immunity at
its own court at a level removed from society. As a consequence, these
processes of state formation in twentieth century India have served to
obliterate any simple distinction between elite spaces of legality and
popular spaces of disorder, crime and violence. The sources of criminal-
ity and violence were to be found among elites who operated habitually
within the formal institutions of government and public life. The
deprived often sought to engage and negotiate with the institutions
of government to secure an advantage or counter a threat and they
often did so within its norms and conventions. Most social groups were
touched by, even pulled briskly into, the processes of state formation. It
was precisely the encompassing nature of state formation that led and
enabled the arbiters of social exchange in their local domain to seek a

measure of political power in wider political arenas and to deploy it to
protect their local immunities. Conversely, it was primarily because
their local dominance was severely contested and subjected to scrutiny
by their rivals, and especially by those whom they tried to discipline
and control, that they sought to reach into the upper echelons of the
state.

Chandravarkar-Customs of Governace

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Modern Asian Studies 41, 3 (2007) pp. 441–470.

Customs of Governance: Colonialism and

‘Who is stealing electricity’ at Tis Hazari?—the principal magistrate’s

the electricity network so that they no longer have to steal power’.3

infuse wider networks, frequently brutal and coercive, of political

the habits and customs of governance in independent India in histor-

found to rest on rather fragile foundations. The social relationships

would necessarily have to rely upon a general consensus about which

disturbances at the first sign of their appearance. In India, it seemed, it

cases of domestic violence which reach the judicial system. Indeed,

parliamentary sovereignty, were thus derived in large part from

Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford, 1966); Washbrook, ‘The Rhetoric of Democracy and

its repressive character. Among the many significant transformations

the Congress, Ghani Khan returned with a massive majority of 90,000

to hoist awkward civil servants upon dissidents and opponents.75

enabled the arbiters of social exchange in their local domain to seek a

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