The Baton and the Ledger: How the Raj Built the Pu...

Summary

• In 1891 a Police Training School was established at Phillaur in Jalandhar district, and in 1892 it began functioning for trainees from the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province and the princely states.
• A school that had trained the police of the whole of undivided Punjab and the Frontier was, within a single season, separated from the force it had shaped.
• A Muslim officer of the Indian police service who retired in 1938 as a Deputy Superintendent of Police in the Punjab.

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By Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi and Malik Khuda Bakhsh Awan, former Inspector General of Police

Every police station in the Punjab, on either side of the border, carries an inheritance that most of its visitors never think about. The brick thana with its verandah, the daily diary kept in a bound register, the Station House Officer who is both investigator and lord of the locality, the constable at the bottom of a steep ladder of rank: none of this grew naturally out of Punjabi society. It was designed. It was designed by a colonial state that had just conquered a restive, martial, heavily armed province and needed to hold it cheaply, quickly and permanently.

We write this together because the story has two halves that are rarely told side by side. One is the story of the institution: its laws, its structure, its training schools and its political purposes. The other is the story of the people inside it, and in particular of the Muslim officers who rose, or were allowed to rise, within a hierarchy built by foreigners. To understand why policing in the Punjab feels the way it does today, we need both. This is a story about administrative ingenuity, about fear, about the real ambition of individual officers and the cynicism of the system that employed them. Above all it is about a choice: the British could have built a police that served the people of the Punjab, and they built one that served the Raj. We inherited that choice along with the buildings.

Before the Punjab was British: the inherited machinery

The year 1840 is a useful starting point, because the Punjab was not yet British. Maharaja Ranjit Singh had died in 1839, and the Sikh kingdom he assembled was starting to fracture in a cycle of palace intrigue and army politics. Order in the kingdom rested on layers older than the Sikh state itself. The Mughals had left behind the kotwal, the city magistrate and police chief responsible for markets, the night watch and public order in towns, and the faujdar, who held armed authority over the countryside. In the villages, order was kept largely by the community: the headman, the village watchman, and the hereditary trackers who could follow stolen cattle across the fields.

Under Ranjit Singh these arrangements were bent to the needs of a strong, centralizing court. Revenue collectors, the kardars, doubled as keepers of order, and local chiefs and jagirdars answered for crime in their territories. Punishment was swift and often brutal, but it was also personal and visible. The system had no uniform, no written procedure and no professional rank structure, but it was embedded in kinship, caste and landholding, and ordinary people understood it.

The British did not find a vacuum. They found a working, if rough, social system of order, and they proceeded to replace it with something very different.

The models the British carried with them

The architects of Punjab policing did not start with a blank sheet. They brought two models already tested elsewhere in the subcontinent.

The first was the Cornwallis model of the 1790s in Bengal, which stripped landholders of policing duties and handed them to a salaried force organized around the thana, a police circle headed by a daroga. The aim was to separate policing from revenue and from landed power. In practice the darogas were underpaid, widely corrupt and feared, and by the 1830s the reputation of the system was poor.

The second was the Irish model. In 1843 Sir Charles Napier conquered Sindh and created a police there on the pattern of the Royal Irish Constabulary: a centralized, armed, quasi-military force distinct from the army, with its own chief, organized into companies and housed in barracks. The assumption was that Ireland and the colonies posed the same problem, a foreign ruling class governing a population it did not trust. When the Punjab fell a few years later, officials with Sindh and Irish experience had a blueprint ready.

1849: conquest and the Punjab experiment

The Anglo-Sikh Wars ended with the annexation of the Punjab in March 1849, and the province was placed under a Board of Administration led by Henry Lawrence, his brother John Lawrence and Charles Mansel. This was the moment at which the Punjab Police, as a distinct institution, began to take shape.

The Board had three problems at once: to disband the Sikh army and disarm a heavily armed population, to secure a long and violent frontier, and to do both on a budget. Policing was the answer to all three. The result was a dual structure that defined Punjab policing for nearly a century. There was a civil police, charged with ordinary crime and local order and posted in district thanas, and a military or frontier police, organized like soldiers and deployed along the northwestern border and in tracts where raiding was endemic. The Lawrences recruited heavily from among former Sikh soldiers and from Punjabi Muslims, men who knew the terrain, could be paid less than British troops and, crucially, could be balanced against one another.

Here we see a pattern the Raj would turn into doctrine: the recruitment of “loyal” communities and the careful management of communal balance within the ranks. The early Punjab force was not merely a crime-fighting body. It was a device for converting the conquered into the conqueror’s agents.

The Lawrences also placed the police under the civil magistracy. The district officer, the Deputy Commissioner, became master of law and order in his district, and the police were his instrument. This was the famous Punjab system of personal government: one powerful officer holding revenue, magisterial and policing powers, answerable up the chain to the Lieutenant-Governor. It was efficient, and it was profoundly unaccountable to those it governed.

1857: the loyalty that sealed the design

The Rebellion of 1857 tested everything. Much of northern India rose against the Company, but the Punjab stayed largely quiet and contributed troops, supplies and policemen to the siege of Delhi. For British administrators the lesson was unmistakable: the Punjab model worked, the province could be trusted, and its soldiers and police could be used as an imperial reserve. The idea of the Punjab as the sword arm of India hardened into policy, and a region conquered by force was permanently reorganized as a resource for the force that conquered it.

1861: the Police Act and the architecture of control

After 1857 the Crown took over from the Company, and a Police Commission appointed in 1860 produced the Police Act of 1861 (Act V of 1861), one of the most consequential pieces of colonial legislation ever written.