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SC Mukhopadhyay's Study on Policing in Post-Colonial India

This is a summary of the 1997 University of Leicester PhD thesis by Surajit Chandra Mukhopadhyay on Police in India titled Conceptualising Post-Colonial Policing: An Analysis and Application of Policing Public Order in India.

Conceptualising Post-Colonial Policing: An Analysis and Application of Policing Public Order in India

Central argument

Mukhopadhyay contends that the defining problem of policing in post-colonial India is a persistent deficit of legitimacy: the police lack broad public consensus for their actions. Because consensus flows from the legitimacy of those in power, policing is inseparable from the political regime and the wider discourse of power. He argues that policing cannot be understood through a static, structural analysis alone; it must be examined diachronically, i.e. along its evolution over time, because so many of the Indian police's structural features were forged during colonial experimentation.
His core claim is a "continuity thesis": post-colonial policing is powerfully shaped by the precedents, methods and strategies set under colonial rule, and its central preoccupation—maintaining public order—rests on an ever-increasing reliance on paramilitary style and tactics.

Approach and sources

The study combines

Chapter One – History of the Indian Police (to 1861)

The thesis surveys pre-British and colonial policing. In pre-colonial India, policing was hereditary and collectivist, closely tied to community and to the caste system; routine policing was typically entrusted to lower castes. The British did not simply replace traditional structures with modern ones but negotiated with existing elites, retaining elements (such as a broadly Mughal district-administration structure) to secure a measure of consent. He traces how colonial rule gradually formalised a police system designed to serve colonial interests rather than to protect ordinary people's life and property.

Chapter Two – Critical Review of the Literature

Mukhopadhyay argues that scholarship on Indian policing is thin and skewed. Memoirs of police officers from the colonial period tells us that the overriding priority was ‘order’. Author argues that much of colonial policing criminalised what was traditions considered normal by the native people. It is dominated by public-administration scholars and criminologists and is largely descriptive or trapped within structural-functionalism. Existing work is "reactive" and issue-based (human rights, civil liberties, corruption), treating symptoms rather than causes, and confined within national boundaries. Bayley's 1969 monograph was the first to link political structures to policing but lacked a post-colonial theoretical framing and missed the colonial–post-colonial continuities.

Chapter Three – Post-Colonial Policing in India

This chapter centres on the Police Act V of 1861, which remained the legal basis of Indian policing at the time of writing, a vivid illustration of colonial continuity. It documents chronic problems

The National Police Commission (1979) concluded that the police operated under an "outmoded system" and fell short of public expectations, yet its reform recommendations were ignored by the governments of the day. Mukhopadhyay highlights a "double socialisation": formal training is unlearnt on the job as daily practice contradicts it, feeding an adversarial police–public relationship. Using Brewer et al.'s framework, he positions the post-colonial police as aligned less with constitutional values than with the "strong" version of the state.

Chapter Four – Post-Colonial Universality

Here the argument moves from India to a general model. Mukhopadhyay proposes that post-colonial policing should be studied comparatively and cross-nationally, not fragmented along the territorial boundaries of nation-states. He constructs a composite framework of shared variables and features—centralisation, paramilitarism, corruption, training, bureaucratic continuity, and the policing of divided societies—against which any post-colonial police force can be evaluated. This enables cross-structural comparison of organisational commonalities across former colonies.

Chapter Five – The State, Discourse of Discipline and the Post-Colonial Police

The theoretical heart of the thesis draws heavily on Foucault. Mukhopadhyay argues that post-colonial policing operates as discipline-blockade—Foucault's negative, "enclosed institution" that arrests, breaks communication and suspends, imposing order from outside society—rather than discipline-mechanism, the subtle, productive, internalised power that meets little resistance and characterises efficient modern governance. He also invokes a model of two disconnected orders in the post-colonial state: an "outer" legal-rational structure sitting mechanically atop an "inner" core of discursive practices, with minimal transaction between them. This hiatus between formal law and everyday practice explains why the police enforce an "alien" order that is intensely contested.

Conclusion

The thesis synthesises these strands around acceptance and legitimacy. Drawing on Beetham, it argues that legality is not legitimacy: authority must be drawn from civil society, which in post-colonial states is a weak construction. Because the colonial intervention privileged the state over civil society—importing a police force with foreign roots to protect a colonial capitalist order—the police became statist, highly centralised, and oriented to "macro" public-order issues, leaving them organisationally and cognitively unprepared for genuine community policing (which requires decentralisation and two-way communication).

Post-colonial policing is thus policing within a divided society fractured by caste, class, ethnicity and religion. The colonial strategy of "policing by strangers"—deploying supposedly neutral "martial races," a logic continued through the all-India IPS cadre—paradoxically deepened these fissures and reinforced the police's alien character. The lack of legitimacy has driven the expansion of armed police and central paramilitary forces, effectively re-centralising coercion despite the constitution making police a state subject. Paramilitarism becomes a convenient "technological fix" for what are really political problems, substituting for army deployment while blurring the very military–police distinction the modern police was meant to resolve.

Finally, Mukhopadhyay situates this within debates on modernity, post-modernity and globalisation, arguing that imposed, "mechanical" colonial modernity left the modernist project incomplete in the post-colonial world—which is precisely why the discipline-blockade persists and why legitimacy remains elusive.