History
The Indian police force has a long and impressive past going back to recorded history. A famous work on statecraft and public administration, Arthasahtra, traceable to 300 b.c.e. and written by Kautilya, a minister in the Maurya Dynasty, confirms the use of spies to keep track of criminal elements. The Laws of Manu (200 b.c.e. to a.d. 200) speak of the king’s duty to maintain fixed police posts, run spies to help in criminal justice administration, and punish those indulging in violence by imposing penalties on them. There follows a dark period of several centuries, during which only sketchy information is available. Reliable material starts appearing only about the fifteenth century, when a mixed race of Persian, Turkish, and Mughal elements stabilized in the Indian subcontinent to establish a formal Mughal Empire. Chronicles of this period speak of various officials looking after public administration, of whom the Kotwal was an urban police officer. Ain-I-Akbari, a treatise written by Abul Fazl Allami, one of Emperor Akbar’s advisers, also gives glimpses of police management.
The British, who followed the Mughals in the early seventeenth century, tried out several experiments before introducing the Royal Irish Constabulary system, first in Sind (now part of Pakistan) in 1843, and extending it later to other parts of the country. The report of the Police Commission (1860) was a landmark, since it saw the abolition of the military police and the launching of a homogenous civil police. It also resulted in the coming into being of the Police Act of 1861, which remains to this day as the fundamental enactment outlining the police charter for the whole country. Several police reforms followed, until India obtained independence from the British in 1947.
Present Structure
India is a quasi-federation with a clear demarcation of authority between the federal government (officially known as the Union Government) based in New Delhi and the twenty-eight states. There are also seven union territories (UTs) directly administered by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) of the federal government.
Under the constitution of India promulgated in 1950, the subjects of ”police” and ”public order” are within the legislative competence of the state legislature. Policing is, therefore, the specific responsibility of state governments. The federal government has only an advisory role, except in UTs where the MHA has control over the police. However, with the help of its own paramilitary and specialist forces such as the Border Security Force (BSF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), and the Railway Protection Force (RPF), the federal government assists state governments in crisis situations, such as widespread rioting or a natural calamity. Interestingly, however, those who belong to the Indian Police Service (IPS), the elite corps of police officers who occupy the senior ranks in the force, are recruited and appointed by the federal government, although they spend a major part of their career with state governments.
Every state police force is headed by a director-general (DGP) to whom several additional directors-general (ADGP) and inspectors-general (IGP) report. There are at least seven ranks below them, going down to the police constable (PC), who is at the bottom of the pyramid.
The authorized strength of the Indian police (federal and state police forces together) is about two million. About 10% of positions at any point in time remain unfilled for a variety of reasons, such as dismissals, resignations, or deaths. (Police casualties in action are about one thousand personnel every year.) There are 41 policemen per one hundred square kilometers and 1.2 policemen per one thousand of the population.
Composition
Affirmative action is known to India. Nearly 22% of policemen are from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (two disadvantaged groups in society that had been traditionally neglected) and 8% are Muslims. Women police (thirty thousand nationally) are a well-established wing, and have proved quite useful in a variety of positions, such as guarding and escorting women prisoners, handling women demonstrators in the streets, and settling marital disputes.
The sizes of the state police forces vary enormously. In a large state, such as Uttar Pradesh in north India, there are more than 150,000 policemen. A small state, Mizroam in the northeast, has less than 4,000. The country has about 12,900 police stations. Of these, more than 230 are staffed wholly by women, which cater mainly to women with complaints of various forms of sexual harassment and domestic disputes.
Division of Work
State police personnel are normally distributed among three functional groups: law and order (equivalent to what patrol officers do in the United States), crime (analogous to the work of detectives), and road traffic enforcement. This division of work is more common to urban police stations. In the rural stations, all three functions are performed by the same group. There is a fourth group, known as the Armed Police, which is basically the riot police available at state headquarters as well as in districts, which are administrative divisions of a state headed by a district collector (gener-alist) and a district superintendent of police. Except under grave circumstances, the average patrolman in the country seldom carries firearms on beats. He uses the firearms (normally .303 rifles) kept in custody at police stations for handling any major situation.
Police Response
Police stations and supervisory staff are connected by VHF radio. Polnet is a major federal government project that is under way. It is designed to connect online all police stations in the country for the quick exchange of crime information. The public have telephone access to the police for an emergency response through control rooms in cities that are manned on a 24/7 basis and have a limited number of mobile patrol vehicles. While police response is reasonably fast in major cities, it is slower elsewhere.
Use of Science
Each state has a forensic science laboratory and a chain of regional laboratories. DNA testing as part of crime investigation is now common, but is available only in a few laboratories that are shared by two or more states.
Major Operational Problems
Terrorism
The issues that occupy police attention are mostly on the law and order front. These take the form of terrorism (especially in Kashmir and a few northeastern states such as Manipur and Assam) and interreli-gious riots (as witnessed in the western state of Gujarat in 2002). The Indian police force has tackled terrorism imaginatively and with great courage. The success it achieved in the Punjab by breaking the back of Sikh terrorism in the late 1980s and early 1990s is a testimony to its professional competence. Terrorism is still a problem that keeps the police on their toes in some parts of the country.
Religious Riots
Hindu-Muslim clashes test the neutrality of a heavily Hindu-dominated force, and several post-riot commissions of inquiry have indicted the police for partisanship. The situation has been changing with better training methods and through judicial monitoring. A rapid action force (RAF) under the CRPF of the federal government is available to states to provide impartial and prompt handling of interreligious riots.
Handling of Crime
The serious crime rate (that is, offenses per one hundred thousand population) holds steady at around 170. The trend is one of a marginal increase or decline over the years. Police investigation time is taken up mostly by homicides (about thirty-five thousand to forty thousand annually), burglaries (one hundred thousand), riots (seventy thousand), and auto thefts (sixty thousand). The use of firearms in violent crime has been increasing, despite a restrictive gun license policy. About one-third of homicides in 2002 were committed with the help of firearms, many of which were unlicensed.
Crimes against Women
Crime in India, an annual publication of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) of the federal government, recognizes twelve categories of offenses with respect to women. It reports an annual figure of about 140,000 cases. Rapes alone account for about 16,000 cases, nearly 90% of which are committed by persons known to the victims. Success rate in court prosecutions of offenders is low.
Public Image
Under the British rule, the Indian police force was considered a tool in the hands of an alien power to suppress the freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. The present perception of the common man is one of an insensitive and corrupt force that will not hesitate to use torture to extract information from crime suspects. (Eighty-four deaths in police custody were reported in 2002.) Integrity levels, even among senior ranks, have dipped, inviting public ire and ridicule.
Lack of Autonomy
Perhaps the most trenchant criticism is that the Indian police force does not enjoy sufficient operational autonomy, as a result of which it acts as the handmaiden of whichever political party runs the government in a state. Several reform bodies, including the National Police Commission (1977), have suggested measures on how the police could be insulated from misuse by political leaders. These have mostly been ignored because of a lack of political will.
