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II

THE PROBLEM OF THE INDIAN POLICE

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SOMEWHERE about the middle of this very interesting book, the author asks: "What is one to believe in India?" Still more difficult is it for us in England to know what ought to be believed concerning India, its administration in general, its police force. The police of India has recently come in for much hostile criticism, and these assaults cannot well be overlooked, inasmuch as in this vast region of the Empire, efficient, intelligent, and sound policing is of the very utmost importance. The police in India stands for more than the army, though we may not be accustomed to think so. It is by the police-and not by the army-that we control India; and an India peaceful, prosperous, and contented means an India wisely and sympathetically policed.

Sir Edmund Cox, who was in this force for nearly thirty years, says :

"The police department in India is the very essence of our administration. There is no other which so much concerns the life of the people.

1 Police and Crime in India. By Sir Edmund C. Cox.

To the ordinary villager the blue-coated head constable, or even constable, is the visible representative of the Sirdar, or Government. There is no one upon whose goodwill and uprightness his happiness so greatly depends."

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But the "goodwill and uprightness of the force are qualities of which there has been serious question. Some years ago Lord Curzon appointed a Commission to consider the conduct of the Indian police, and the report presented was a general condemnation of the system. The Commissioners took the view recorded in 1901 by the late Sir John Woodburn, then LieutenantGovernor of Bengal, which was this :

"In no branch of the administration in Bengal is improvement so imperatively required as in the police. There is no part of our system of which such universal and bitter complaint is made, and none in which for the relief of the people and the reputation of the Government, is reform in anything like the same degree so urgently called for. The evil is essentially in the investigating staff. It is dishonest and it is tyrannical. It is essential for a real reform that there should be a bold increase in the wages of a staff which wields so great a power, and in the more careful supervision of their work."

Perhaps Lord Curzon's inquirers were not quite

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A CAMEL CONSTABLE TAKING THE SAHIB'S SON FOR A RIDE

as discriminating as they should have been, and their conclusions were not universally approved. They were censured-at any rate, by implication -in a Resolution by the Government of India in 1905, wherein it was suggested that, even if many statements in the Commissioners' indictments were true enough when separately considered, "true statements may be so combined as to form an exaggerated picture"; and it was added that this particular picture appears to the Government of India to convey an impression, the acceptance of which would not be fair to the Indian police force as a whole."

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Into a quarrel of this sort a layman should be shy of entering; but a few general reflections germane to the issue may be ventured on. In the first place, it is surely a rather wonderful thing that we have trained an Indian police force at all, and that, in fifty years or so, we have organised one which preserves order and gives a great measure of security to life and property throughout a wide Oriental continent, with a heterogeneous population of three hundred millions. What is this force? It is, as Sir Edmund Cox is careful to observe, an institution altogether exotic in India. It is composed, for the most part, of the descendants of fierce and rapacious races, little used to discipline-not in the least familiar with codes of law or fixed tribunals, and habituated to none but the rudest

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