Police Matters by Radha Kumar

Author:Radha Kumar [Kumar, Radha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Law, Legal History, Political Science, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781501760860
Google: y_cyEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-05-15T01:11:17+00:00

Conclusion

The transition to independence by no means ended the display of sovereign violence by the police. The Indian Emergency only brought the issue—especially custodial violence—under a harsher spotlight. The number of recorded deaths in police custody in Tamil Nadu was six in 1974, ten in 1975, and ten in 1976.115 There was thus a rise in police violence during the Emergency months, but this was not a binary shift from nonviolent law to violent lawlessness. Sovereign violence was woven into routine law enforcement, and did not occur only in exceptional periods when the rule of law was suspended. It occurred in colonial and independent India; it occurred inside and outside the police station. This chapter has framed everyday acts of police violence as a performance of state authority rather than as individual failing on the part of policemen: whether occurring lawfully, outside the station, or less lawfully, inside the station, violence occurred in the performance of routine police tasks. Policemen exercised their authority as agents of the state, rarely facing judicial penalty for use of force. Records of oral narratives also suggest that subject-citizens perceived police violence as state violence rather than as acts of oppression by isolated individuals.

Less noticed forms of violence, such as those examined in this chapter, targeted segments of the population already marginalized by virtue of race, class, caste, gender, or political affiliation. The routine performance of sovereign violence repeatedly helped redraw the axes of power along which society was divided, in colonial and postcolonial India alike. When subject-citizens were less marginalized, or more politicized, the state needed to invoke emergency provisions explicitly to maintain order. I discuss this in the next two chapters.

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