METHODOLOGICAL PRAXIS

My methods combine content analysis of archival documents with observational and interview data collected during ethnographic fieldwork across half a dozen cities and towns in Uttar Pradesh, which occurred over thirty months between 2006 and 2017. I used purposive sampling to identify and contact several police association leaders, working via social media platforms or other interlocutors of mine who could reach out to them via their own networks. After conducting these interviews, I used a snowball sampling method to recruit new study participants and ultimately interviewed and shadowed almost forty active members of five distinct police associations in Uttar Pradesh. I also engaged or observed police association leaders in at least half a dozen other states and union territories of India.Footnote ⁴ When discussing general matters that are already part of the public record, I use peoples’ real names. However, when relating any information or direct quotations that are not already published or that I feel may pose some legal or social risk to my interlocutors over and above what is already present in their daily lives, I use generic titles like “constable” or “senior officer” or terms like “unionist leader” in the interest of protecting safety and privacy while also providing a “partial disclosure” that strengthens research credibility and integrity (Contreras Reference Contreras2019).

Many of the historical documents I use, including commission reports, court decisions, legal statutes, news articles, and social media interactions are publicly available and cited accordingly. However, one set of texts must be handled differently and delicately. During one of my many research field trips to Uttar Pradesh, I was provided access to files in an official police records room that is restricted to the public. I reviewed multiple ledgers containing copies of documents exchanged among senior officers related to the alleged “illegal activities by the members of the Rajya Police Karmchari Parishad.” These documents were not redacted before my review and contain identifying information of police of all ranks as well as other political actors. Following the example of socio-legal historians who have chosen to anonymize certain actors and places, or to refrain altogether from directly citing politically sensitive materials (for example, Markovits Reference Markovits2010; Briggs Reference Briggs2019), I do not reference specific dates, authors, or named recipients of these internal police documents. I have made this methodological choice in the interest of maintaining confidentiality of all interlocutors, living or deceased, and also because I plan to continue to conduct research and publish on these matters in the future.

BEYOND VIOLENCE: POLICE WORK AS SECURITY LABOR

This critical claim about police work in contemporary India came from a former constable named Avinash Pathak, as we spoke about his unionist activities at the residence of an associate of his in Kanpur. In 1998, Pathak had joined the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), an auxiliary paramilitary unit of the Uttar Pradesh police that is recruited and trained separately from the civil police and routinely called upon as backup for emergent “law-and-order” situations, such as controlling large crowds and providing security to “VIPs.” Like his aforementioned unionist comrade Brijendra Singh Yadav, Pathak told me that he began “causing trouble” in the police organization almost immediately, after finding that his official training consisted mainly of doing what he variously called “begaar” (uncompensated or forced labor), “illegal kaam” (illegal work), and “social work” (using English words). Pathak was referring to tasks not typically considered mandated police work, such as building and yard maintenance; domestic services like personal house cleaning, child care, chauffeuring, and food shopping (mostly for senior officers); and strenuous manual labor like open-pit mining in rock quarries and the construction of roads, wells, and ponds (see also Jauregui Reference Jauregui2018).Footnote ⁶ He wrote letters of complaint to state and national human rights commissions and held a small conference at a local press club in Kanpur, during which he openly criticized the government for misusing the labor power of police trainees and in-service constables, rendering them “gulaam” (slaves).Footnote ⁷ In 2004, Pathak was dismissed from service for these activities. He began litigation to contest not only his individual dismissal but also the systemic “abuse” of subordinate personnel by “corrupt” senior officers. He joined forces with Yadav and others in 2010 and began working to overturn legal bans on police unions, lobbying politicians to demand structural reforms, and assisting other dismissed and in-service constables with their own cases against various perceived injustices within and outside of the police institution. Over time, both Yadav and Pathak gained high profiles via social and news media and were simultaneously detained for one year in 2018–19 under the 1980 National Security Act (NSA) for allegedly instigating insurrection among police personnel.Footnote ⁸ Though they have cooperated in the past, their strategies and goals have diverged, leading them to work mostly separately and sometimes in direct conflict through distinct organizations.Footnote ⁹

Pathak’s construction of “social work” in opposition to genuine “police work” describes a conscious, purposeful misuse of subaltern labor time and power by Indian state officials who are authorized to manage and direct the actions of police personnel through official orders. His disdain for the kinds of labor demanded of him and other police resonates strongly with global critiques of the “mission creep” over time that has resulted in police intervention—often with harmful effects—in increasingly variegated spheres, from mental health, addiction, and housing, to child welfare and domestic or local dispute resolution, or to “social work” of other kinds in which police generally are not adequately trained or well suited to conduct. The indeterminate multiplicity of tasks demanded of public police has been analyzed more or less explicitly and extensively by police scholars over the decades (Bittner Reference Bittner1970; Muir Reference Muir1977; Manning and Van Maanen Reference Manning and Van Maanen1978; Brodeur Reference Brodeur2010; Jauregui Reference Jauregui2016; Marquis Reference Marquis2016) and is a key factor in contemporary calls for defunding or otherwise restructuring police work across the world. These calls spotlight challenging and unanswered questions regarding what police work is or ought to be.

Scholars in the global North, particularly the Anglo-American sphere, have generally analyzed police work qua work in one of two ways: (1) as a realm of practice that has undergone an uneven, but transformational, process of “professionalization” or (2) as an employment sector with fraught relations to organized labor more generally. Let us briefly consider each in turn. What scholars have called the professionalization of police work occurred globally over the long twentieth century. While this process has had different drivers, contours, time lines, and effects across various world regions, police professionalization in most places has involved the bureaucratization of personnel recruitment and training; the construction of legal protections of officers from arbitrary and politicized hiring and firing decisions; and an increased emphasis on scientific evidence gathering and effectiveness in reducing or responding to crime and disorder (Westley Reference Westley1970; Walker Reference Walker1977; Ericson Reference Ericson and Richard1982; Forst Reference Forst2000; Sklansky Reference Sklansky2011). These structural reforms have been widely perceived as being necessary institutional improvements for rendering state policing less “corrupt” or oriented toward serving private interests and more “accountable” or oriented toward serving public interests. The changes were intended to correct long existing pressures on police agents associated with localized political economic structures and thus aimed to “depoliticize” police work by converting it into a rational bureaucratized profession characterized by supposed impartiality and “procedural justice” (Tyler Reference Tyler2017).

And, yet, as suggested by social theorists over many decades, policing as a bureaucratic institution of governance—and, by association, police work as a vital form of public sector employment—always has been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, intensely political (Muir Reference Muir1977; Weber [Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1919] 1978; Lipsky [Reference Lipsky1980] 2010; Bowling, Reiner, and Sheptycki Reference Bowling, Robert and James2019). Importantly, police politics operate not only from the “top down,” as when governing elites interfere in everyday police work, but also from the “bottom up,” as when rank-and-file officers act in different ways on a variety of agendas (Marks and Sklansky 2012). Either vector of police politics may take the insidious form of what one retired senior police officer in India has called “‘political bureaucrats’—which [may] openly support the ruling party … [rendering police and other government servants] handmaidens to the political masters” (Singh Reference Singh, Arora and Radin2000; compare Jauregui Reference Jauregui2016). However, political interactions around police practices may also be read as opening a space for what David Sklansky (Reference Sklansky2008) has called a kind of “workplace democracy” that operates through more or less organized forms of PWP (Jauregui, forthcoming).

Historical and sociological research conducted mostly in the Anglosphere delineates two primary forms of PWP that typify the fraught relationship of policing and organized labor more generally: (1) police strikes and (2) police unions (including many non-bargaining professional organizations or welfare associations that are not certified trade unions) (Manning Reference Manning2010). Police strikes or work stoppages occurred in many global North regions in both the interwar period of 1918 to 1939 (Lyons Reference Lyons1947; Russell Reference Russell1975; Bean Reference Bean1980; Slater Reference Slater1996; Brown and Haldane Reference Brown and Robert1998) and the latter half of the twentieth century (Giacopassi and Sparger Reference Giacopassi and Sparger1981; Northrup and Morgan Reference Northrup and Morgan1981; Bopp and Wiatrowski Reference Bopp and Wiatrowski1982; Ichniowsky Reference Ichniowski1988; Bovenkerk Reference Bovenkerk1993), and they mostly have been analyzed as discrete events peculiar to a particular locale and historical moment.Footnote ¹⁰ While sometimes directly connected with strikes, police unions and unionism (that is, expressing a desire or support for a union) as an ongoing social phenomena are a distinct form of PWP that have been remarkably under-theorized (Berry et al. Reference Berry, Greg, Maurice and Paul2008; Walker Reference Walker2008). Police union organizational structures, activities, and goals have varied widely across time and space, as have their legality and legitimacy (Bergsman Reference Bergsman1976; Slater Reference Slater1996). Most police unions, and other kinds of police worker associations, provide legal advocacy and perhaps occasional contract negotiations on behalf of personnel, but they do not afford these employees the right to strike (Delord et al. Reference DeLord, John, Michael and Jim2008; DeLord and York Reference DeLord and Ron2017). And in some time spaces, especially in the contemporary global North, the ways in which police unions work to protect their members may actively harm the public interest—for example, if they shield those individuals who have abused their authority (Friedersdorf Reference Friedersdorf2014; Adetiba Reference Adetiba2016; Levinson Reference Levinson2017; Place Reference Place2018; Thomas and Tufts Reference Thomas and Tufts2020).

Unsurprisingly then, public responses to police unionism and other forms of PWP are mixed. However supportive or critical these responses may be, there appears to be widespread consensus that PWP should be approached with extreme caution, if not extreme prejudice, and that the scope and techniques of police worker advocacy should be severely restricted, mainly because of the unique social position that is occupied by these state officials authorized to deploy coercion by violence in the name of public order and security (Sklansky Reference Sklansky2008; Jauregui Reference Jauregui2018). Anxieties about PWP abound and often diverge along ideological lines. People with strong leftist or abolitionist views on policing seem unanimously to decry police unions as a tool of ongoing racist, colonial, capitalist, or otherwise discriminatory oppression of marginalized peoples—the Black Lives Matter movement is a recent and prominent example of this view, which has a long history (Mitrani Reference Mitrani2013; Vitale Reference Vitale2017). Moderate liberals and conservatives alike tend to be apprehensive about police unions, fearing “bad apples” associated with these organizations may serve as obstructions to necessary reforms, howsoever those reforms may be idealized. Radical right wing groups of various stripes, especially those that desire minimal or no government “infringement” on everyday life, often are as avidly anti-police (and their unions) as many progressive leftists, some to such an extent that they may actively target and kill police officers, as starkly evidenced in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol building in Washington, DC (DiManno Reference DiManno2020; Evans and Wilson Reference Evans and Jason2020; Griffith Reference Griffith2021).

Whatever their ideological leanings, grassroots social movements tend to have little or no sympathy for, nor much interest in collaborating with, police worker organizations or activists. There have been some counterpoints to this tendency, particularly in global South regions.Footnote ¹¹ For example, I have examined recent collaborations between police unionists and anti-corruption activists in India as well as expressions of public support for police strikes in Brazil (Jauregui, forthcoming). Monique Marks and Jenny Fleming (Reference Marks and Jenny2006a, Reference Marks and Jenny2006b, Reference Marks and Jenny2008; see also Fleming and Marks Reference Fleming and Monique2004) have conducted comparative analyses of police union(ist)s in Argentina, Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and various countries in southern Africa and argued for increased cooperation between police personnel, trade unions, and social justice advocates. But these are rare exceptions. Most police unions tend to be viewed with suspicion, apprehension, and, often, downright abhorrence. If police unions are included under the umbrella of organized labor at all, they are routinely perceived as odd bird splinter groups (or thorn-in-the-side distant cousins) that other labor leaders struggle to tolerate. In some contexts in which public discourses on police defunding or other types of major structural reform have gained strength, there have been loud and insistent calls to labor organizations to divest from police unions (Hayes Reference Hayes2020; Kelly Reference Kelly2020).

Why are anti-police unionism sentiments so pervasive? And why have police workers not been considered significant actors in the global history of organized labor movements? I argue that the answers to these and related questions reside somewhere within the thorny problem of defining what exactly it is that constitutes police work as labor. Theories of police work tend to be conceived in terms of the social role of police institutions more broadly and mostly still rely on Egon Bittner’s (Reference Bittner1970, 46) classic sociological argument that the defining function of police “is best understood as a mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force employed in accordance with the dictates of an intuitive grasp of situational exigencies.” In other words—and following Weberian maxims regarding the ideal of state control over the legal and legitimate means of coercionFootnote ¹²—there exists a widely shared assumption that the police power to potentially or actually deploy direct violence in the name of “security” as a “necessity” is the fundamental feature of police work that distinguishes it from other forms of labor. Some scholars, like historian Micol Seigel (Reference Seigel2018, 10), have gone so far as to define policing itself as “violence work” and police personnel as “violence workers” insofar as their use of physical force realizes “the core of the power of the state.” Invoking a centuries-spanning roll call of white male social and political theorists—from Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, through Karl Marx and Max Weber, to Michel Foucault and Egon Bittner—and redefining a term borrowed from scholars who refer to police as “atrocity facilitators” and “direct perpetrators” of violence, Seigel explains that her labeling of police as violence workers “is not intended to indict police officers as bad people … [but] simply about what their labor rests upon and therefore conveys into the material world” (10).Footnote ¹³

As several anthropologists of police have suggested, however, reducing policing generally—and, I would submit, reducing police work specifically—to violence qua violence may elide as much as, or even more than, it reveals (Jauregui Reference Jauregui2016; Martin Reference Martin2019, Reference Martin2020). Doing so arguably conflates the variegated means and ends of policing in ways that limit our potential for understanding the political significance of police workers in the global history of organized labor and other social movements dedicated to realizing justice and progressive reforms. Violence as direct physical force (rather than as reproduction of social inequity or “structural violence”) is only one tool that police workers may deploy in answering ongoing public demands for their labor toward many and sundry ends that reside under the umbrella of a shared desire for security. Police work also entails provisions and resources like direction and instruction; protection and peacekeeping; negotiation and de-escalation of conflict; knowledge production and dissemination; and a host of other capabilities associated with order maintenance that Foucault ([Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1978] 1991) has labeled a process of “governmentality” via, among other institutions, the state security apparatus. However much we may wish to diminish or even abolish police power, we cannot deny that there are real and often reasonable demands for the various forms of labor that police perform among almost every community in the name of realizing “security,” whatever that may mean and whomever it may serve or harm in a specific time space. Thus, I propose we consider police work as a particular and problematic form of “security labor” that will always be in demand.

Demands for police work as a dispersed and mundane form of security labor arise in contexts of long-standing social inequalities structured around differences of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, socioeconomic class, religion, citizenship, embodied ability, and a myriad of other distinctions that divide societies the world over. Police work reflects and exacerbates these problems and their concomitants, such as inadequate infrastructure for various forms of social welfare, from public education and housing to environmental sustainability and health care. People from marginalized communities suffer not only from “over-policing” or discriminatory harassment but also from “under-policing” or neglect, which is part of why many people associated with social minority groups express demands for more and stronger police presence rather than abolition or defunding. Applying these insights to the aforementioned problem of distinguishing the ends of police work from its means—which include, but are not limited to, coercion by violence—we may analyze the various objectives around which demands for police work are made in specific contexts and further examine how these demands configure police as despicable and expendable subjects ironically excluded from political society even as they occasionally project hyper-empowerment. As I demonstrate here, in the Indian context specifically, subaltern police workers find themselves not only constructed as depoliticized security laborers living and working outside the demos but also exploited by various powerful officials, especially their bosses higher up in the police hierarchy, without any recourse for securing their own rights in accordance with organized labor or even as part of the voting public (Jauregui, forthcoming).Footnote ¹⁴

I borrow and build on the term “security labor” as used by historian Partha Pratim Shil (Reference Shil2016, 19), who has traced how the development of the police constabulary in northern and eastern India reflected broader trends (and, indeed, stark social inequities) in what he calls the “colonial security labour market.” Shil analyzes patterns of recruiting constables in South Asia from long-standing local and migrant networks of men who struggled to find other kinds of work in the period from approximately 1850 to 1950. The analysis sheds light on these early modern police workers’ everyday lives and routine expressions of job-related grievances through techniques like the “strike threat.” This technique relied on the power of ambiguous signs, amorphous rumors, and administrative anxiety to demand reforms like pay increases while almost never resulting in an actual work stoppage by police. Shil’s incisive study is one of the first to directly address challenging questions like: “What does the history of police constables look like when analysed as working-class history? … What were the various tactics that constables developed, short of striking, to achieve wage hikes? How did a constable think about his own work? What kind of subjectivity emerged when a constable in the employ of a colonial state becomes a nationalist or a socialist? [sic]” (5; emphasis added). The next section builds on these questions to examine how administrative anxieties around security labor in South Asia have manifested in lawfare that subjectifies rank-and-file police as subjugated workers who are unable to unionize and criticize their employer, the state government.

SUBJECTIFYING SUBALTERN SECURITY LABOR IN SOUTH ASIA

An on-duty constable wearing a brown balaclava and threadbare sweater uttered this line during a casual conversation we had while shivering in a tent on a cold Allahabad evening in January 2007. I have since heard versions of this “exploitation in the name of” statement by innumerable subordinate police personnel across the region as a kind of discursive meme, signaling their discontent with the organizational structure of relations shaping police work. Official police hierarchies in contemporary India generally follow a four-tiered model inherited from British colonial administrators, with an elite officers corps at the top comprising less than 1 percent of staff and making all major decisions and masses of constables at the bottom constituting approximately 95 percent of the force.Footnote ¹⁶ There is very little upward mobility among the four major levels of the police hierarchy, which translates into routinized dynamics of quasi-official servitude at the bottom to those higher up and, further, reflects and reinforces class and caste inequalities that pervade society at large. A now inextricable hybridization of colonial bureaucratic structures and indigenous modes of hierarchical sociality imbricates official police rank with unofficial socioeconomic status and also entrenches cultural patterns of senior officers ordering subordinate personnel to do domestic service work and manual labor alongside more traditional mandated police duties (Vidyasagar 1973; Jauregui Reference Jauregui2018).Footnote ¹⁷ Police of all ranks in northern India commonly refer to this as the “orderly system.”

The foundations of this stratification of police work cum status were laid in the 1860s by British colonial administrators in line with two primary demands: (1) to maximize the labor output of police while minimizing expenditure on their welfare and (2) to prevent collective discontent among subaltern security laborers generally, which included military soldiers. This framing of police workers as expendable and exploitable security laborers resulted partly in reaction to a violent rebellion by Indigenous soldiers of the British India army in the northern and eastern territories of the subcontinent in 1857. This event led to tens of thousands of military and civilian casualties and is still referred to by many people in India as the “First War of Independence.” In response, the British Crown assumed control of administration of the British East India Company colonies and, in 1860, formed the Police Commission consisting of four civil servants and two military officers (Gupta Reference Gupta1979).

The commission’s report claimed that the best way to prevent future rebellions of security personnel, while also cutting costs of administration more generally, was to reduce drastically the numbers of “native troops” in the army and to establish a robust police constabulary that would take on duties considered to be of a “civil nature” (Police Commission 1860, section 162). The report discussed at length how such a constabulary was formed a year earlier in the southern Madras presidency because Indigenous soldiers there reportedly felt “grievously overworked; that duty is constant and unceasing … their strength and energies are over tasked, and that they are plunged in irretrievable debt … permanently on duty … disheartened and dispirited” (section 157). Commission members requested that beleaguered military soldiers across the colonies receive “the relief to which in common justice and humanity they are entitled” by reassigning to police constables what some considered “non-military duties” like guarding jails and treasuries (sections 158–59). They also made explicit declarations that civil police institutions demanded less “strict discipline [than that considered] essential in a military body” and thus would require “fewer reliefs” from duty (section 161; see also Shil Reference Shil2016, 84). In short, civil police were to do more work with less rest for a lower cost.

This report led to the establishment of the 1861 Police Act, which remains the bedrock of police organization across India today.Footnote ¹⁸ Reading it through an analytical lens that is attentive to the legal subjectification of police as security laborers reveals how colonial architects molded the police institution and its agents not only through a wholesale transfer of technologies of structural and direct violence that continue into the present (Das and Poole Reference Das and Deborah2004; Wahl Reference Wahl2017; Heath Reference Heath, Heath and Legg2018) but also, crucially, through the creation and regulation of a new class of workers who were fundamentally defined by the simultaneous overextension of their labor power and minimal expenditure on their pay and welfare (Shil Reference Shil2015, Reference Shil2016). The racialized institutional scaffolding of exploiting Indigenous, and, therefore, less valued, police personnel to the greatest extent possible was thinly veiled by a discourse of “civil-izing” security, in line with what has been called a “Blue in Green” paradigm of governance marked by the “moral ascendancy of ‘the civil’” over militarized forms of order keeping that rely primarily on the potential or actual use of physical force (Jauregui Reference Jauregui2010, 64; compare Loader and Walker Reference Loader and Neil2016). In essence, the logic was to shrink the military, whose tasks would be few and more likely violent, exceptional, and expensive, and grow the civil police, whose tasks would be many, perhaps more diplomatic, mundane, and cheap. The ideally resultant legitimation of colonial rule and simultaneous maximization of revenue would be a win-win for administrative elites who desired to enlarge their moral and material capital.

Beyond realizing colonizing desires to buttress legitimacy and build treasury, the reconfiguration of security labor in colonial South Asia also generated new anxieties among British colonial administrators about the potential for discontent among Indigenous security laborers accustomed to experiences of having some power in determining their livelihood. In his history of the colonial security labor market, Shil (Reference Shil2016) demonstrates that many of the workers who comprised the constabulary in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century northern India came from a pool of migrant laborers who over generations had become used to collectively and periodically renegotiating their terms of service with local power holders who held their employ (compare Kolff Reference Kolff1990). He further notes that many of these laborers belonged to social groups that were particularly concerned about status and prestige while also often lacking material wealth. People in this class idealized by British administrators as the “upper-caste poor” were thus socioeconomically desperate enough to be paid at, or just above, the level of unskilled workers for doing strenuous labor that was associated with duties and demands historically placed on the relatively exalted and influential castes of warriors and landowners (Shil Reference Shil2016, 35–36). Security laborers in this time space were recruited primarily among classes of people well versed in demanding and receiving social and legal recognition. But colonial administrators chose not to proceed along the pre-existing pathways of mutual recognition between employers and employees by investing in things like adequate wages and benefits or functional channels for work disputes and grievance resolution. Like their forebears and counterparts in the metropole (Thompson Reference Thompson1963), British administrators in India chose instead to ignore the problem, most likely because there was such a large pool of expendable labor to tap and perhaps also because of racist assumptions about “uncivilized” Indigenous peoples being ill-equipped to negotiate the terms of their work. This set the stage for smoldering suspicion and occasional outright conflict between senior officials and subordinate police personnel. Predictably, “post-mutiny panics” by English colonists about potential rebellions among an increasingly Indigenized security labor force became a perennial problem in the region, and demands to suppress “disaffection” among rank-and-file police became a structuring principle of institutional oversight and regulation of police workers and their work (Shil Reference Shil2016, 133, 216–17).

An anxious institutional ideology calling on law to prevent uprisings of disaffected police workers in the British colonies became especially acute in the years immediately following the end of the First World War. Globally, the period from 1918 to 1920 saw severe rates of inflation and resource scarcity as well as a general rise in trade unionism, unemployment, and social problems associated with gluts of demobilized soldiers. There also emerged at that time an increasingly vocal and organized anti-colonial nationalist movement across South Asia and in other British colonies in southern Africa. Following police strikes and the founding of police unions in 1918 and 1919 in the London metropole, and in several British settler colony cities like Boston, Toronto, and Melbourne, police constables in urban Madras and its surrounding rural districts formed their own unions in 1920, threatened work stoppages, and won increases in wages and allowances (Arnold Reference Arnold1986). In what is now the Indian state of Bihar, constables formed a Police Workers Association in early 1921, and when their demands for pay hikes and other accommodations went unheeded, they staged a protest on March 5, the same day that railway workers and jail wardens also went on strike in the region (Singh Reference Singh2002). Later that same year, as an increasing number of people across South Asia began to express sympathy with the anti-colonial Non-Cooperation and Khilafat social movements, scores of police constables in the northern and eastern regions of the country also responded vigorously to a call from Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi and other emerging nationalist leaders for Indigenous government actors to resign from the service (Singh Reference Singh2002; Silvestri Reference Silvestri2017). These momentous mass protests of colonial police occurred amidst various forms of more “everyday resistance” by perpetually disgruntled constables, such as widespread foot dragging, absenteeism, and defections. Constables also expressed work-related grievances more directly, if somewhat understatedly, by circulating protest pamphlets among themselves and having secret meetings in their barracks where they would take “strike oaths,” continuously exhibiting “vague discontent” that senior administrators considered an ongoing “potential danger,” even if actual work stoppages ultimately never occurred (Shil Reference Shil2016, Reference Shil2017).

These interwoven mundane and extreme expressions of police worker discontent in early twentieth-century South Asia led directly to one of the first and most lasting forms of statutory lawfare implemented by the colonial (proto) state against its own security laborers—namely, the 1922 Police (Incitement to Disaffection) Act (IDA).Footnote ¹⁹ The IDA codified penalties of imprisonment for up to six months and fines of up to 200 rupees (approximately twenty times the monthly salary of a constable at that time) for “any member of a police force [who may] withhold his services or [may] commit a breach of discipline” (Kabir Reference Kabir2005, 312–13). Notably, the Act made provisions for police acting in

The IDA thus accommodated some existing police workers organizations, many of whose membership included senior officers that could use their authority to steer organizational policies and practices in directions that might be more amenable to British colonial administrators. This accommodation thus opened a space for the exemption of “lawful” police unions from prosecution and eradication and made the IDA the first statute that explicitly distinguished legal forms of PWP in South Asia as only those ideologies and actions officially “recognized” and “approved” by the governing executive and senior police officers.

For almost a century, the IDA has served as a cornerstone of lawfare by the state against its own security laborers in India.Footnote ²⁰ In October 2018, the Uttar Pradesh state government arrested and detained Brijendra Singh Yadav and Avinash Pathak, the unionist leaders quoted earlier in this article, charging them with violating the IDA as well as the aforementioned 1980 NSA,Footnote ²¹ which is most commonly invoked for accusations of terrorism, extremism, sedition, and insurgency. The state government alleged that Yadav and Pathak had engaged in activities that “were prejudicial to the maintenance of public order and have disturbed the normalcy of the society” by posting statements on social media that allegedly instigated or encouraged mass protests among rank-and-file police in Uttar Pradesh. The trigger for the protests was the arrest and detention of two constables, Prashant Chaudhary and Sandeep Kumar, who were involved in the extrajudicial death of a civilian, colloquially known as an “encounter,” in late September 2018.Footnote ²² In a context where police perform these kinds of killings routinely and with impunity, many rank-and-file police considered the detention and rapid charges of murder levied against their colleagues to be unjust (see Eckert Reference Eckert2005; Belur Reference Belur2010; Jauregui Reference Jauregui2015). The “agitations” that followed mostly involved images circulated via WhatsApp, Facebook, and other social media platforms of uniformed police holding protest signs or wearing black armbands and of individual constables’ bank account statements verifying their modest contributions of a few hundred rupees each (mostly in amounts equivalent to less than five US dollars) to an independent crowd-sourced fund to support Chaudhary’s and Kumar’s criminal defense.

Several in-service constables and sub-inspectors were reportedly suspended from service (which generally entails a 50 percent pay cut) for participating in, or ostensibly allowing, these protests (Chakraborty Reference Chakraborty2018; Shukla Reference Shukla2018). But the brunt of the punishment by the state government came down on Pathak and Yadav. Even though they had been working mostly separately toward similar goals, the government identified them as “birds of a feather” and coordinated an exceptionally harsh and punitive attempt to suppress their unionist-driven activities as the police protests heated up across Uttar Pradesh and started making news headlines across India. Following their arrest and detention, Yadav and Pathak were denied bail and remained in jail for twelve months without ever appearing in court to face charges.Footnote ²³ They were treated like the worst “anti-national” insurgents, and they were not the first police unionists in India to experience such treatment. In the next section, I will examine how for decades PWP activists in India have been subjectified through lawfare not only as expendable servants from who maximum labor must be extracted at minimal cost but also as internal “enemy-of-the state” figures, threatening the very government they have sworn to serve.

POLICE INSURGENTS: SECURITY LABOR AS A NATIONAL DANGER

The most significant piece of legislation delimiting police worker associations in India was passed by the Lok Sabha (national parliament) in December 1966, two decades after the country gained independence. Entitled the Police (Restriction of Rights) Act (RORA), it bans police personnel from publicly criticizing their government employer, and from founding or joining any organization “that is not recognized as part of the force … or is not [of] a purely social, recreational or religious nature” (Kabir Reference Kabir2005, 318).Footnote ²⁵ Building on the colonial lawfare strategy of preventing “disaffection” among subaltern security laborers, RORA has been especially vexing for rank-and-file police unionists who wish to have their own organizations distinct from those of senior officers who, along with other government leaders, generally refuse to approve any police karamchari(yon) or worker(s) association that is not open to all ranks. To the countless constables who routinely complain of being abused by their bosses, such an association would be analogous to a trade union with an oppressive corporate management and top executives among its leaders and members. Notably, senior police officers have their own officially recognized “professional associations” that exclude rank-and-file personnel.

RORA came into being following several incidents of reported “indiscipline” among police personnel in Delhi, some of which were associated with a group called the Delhi Police Non-Gazetted Karamchari Sangh (Delhi Police Non-Gazetted Workers Union). This group reportedly became active in 1964 and, within a couple of years, tried and failed to register with the Labour Commission of India (Delhi Police Commission 1968, 1.4, 2.48–2.51). After RORA was enacted, thousands of Delhi police constables gathered in protest in March and April 1967, shouting slogans demanding an end to (1) “afsar [tana]shahi” (domination/dictatorship by senior officers) and (2) “goonda raj” (rule by goons) (Hindustan Times 1967a, 1967b). Approximately one thousand constables were arrested, and more than fifty were reportedly dismissed without further inquiry (Hindustan Times 1967c). In the end, the protests petered out, many absentee and absconding personnel trickled back into work, and most constables remained at least superficially “loyal” to the government and retained their jobs (compare Kaplan and Kelly Reference Kaplan and Kelly1994). Still, the foundation laid by the IDA and reinscribed through RORA further entrenched an esprit de contre insurrection by the state against its own law enforcement officers that had begun under colonial rule. The expressed attitude of government leaders, then as now, was that the punishment of actors engaging in such politics should be firm and swift and the path of trade unionist agitation should never be open to police because of their “special responsibility … to offer protection and maintain law and order” (Hindustan Times 1967d).Footnote ²⁶

In 1968, as the Sangh-associated agitations in Delhi died down and suppressive regulation and protracted litigation ramped up, some civil police constables in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh attempted to found and register a union of their own, the Rajya Police Karmchari Parishad (RPKP). Over the next five years, the RPKP claimed to have acquired moral or monetary support from approximately thirty thousand Uttar Pradesh police personnel (The Pioneer 1973a).Footnote ²⁷ The RPKP’s leaders and members wrote organizational bylaws, created a logo, circulated pamphlets, had secret meetings, lobbied lawmakers, and opened a collective bank account. On March 13, 1973, the RPKP even managed to officially register itself under the national 1860 Societies Registration Act, via which many nongovernmental organizations in India continue to use in order to be formalized and legally recognized today.Footnote ²⁸ However, the juggernaut of counterinsurgency lawfare soon began to crush the budding police union. According to scores of archived official memos, and to information shared in my interviews with more than a dozen RPKP leaders and former members, most senior police officers were vehemently opposed to the association for fear that it would disrupt the “orderly system” described earlier, which still allows senior officers to compel subordinate police to serve their personal demands and breeds resentment “from below.” This entrenched class warfare among the police frames narratives of both current and historical events, one of the most notable of which was a violent uprising of Uttar Pradesh police constables in 1973, which remains a taboo topic of discussion to date.

For reasons unknown, the Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha (state legislative assembly) did not ratify RORA—which, recall, passed in the Lok Sabha (national parliament) in December 1966—until March 28, 1973, which was only two weeks after the RPKP registered as a non-governmental organization, so very likely not a coincidence.Footnote ²⁹ On April 12, Uttar Pradesh Police Inspector General Amarjit Kumar Das made a public address on All India Radio in which he expressed personal support for, and the possibility of government approval of, an association for rank-and-file personnel (reportedly to the chagrin of many of his senior officer colleagues). However, he seemed to have reservations about the RPKP:

Note Das’s use of the term “unrecognized” (apatrit) and how it invokes the IDA’s distinction of “lawful” police associations requiring official recognition by the state government. Almost everyone I interviewed agreed that Das, who was from the minority Christian community, was exceptionally sympathetic to, and concerned about, the welfare of rank-and-file police. Many unionists read his statement as a moment of sincere outreach and hope. But those hopes were dashed just over one month later, when what one police historian and retired senior officer labeled “the greatest of the police agitations” to hit independent India began to spread across Uttar Pradesh (Ghosh Reference Ghosh1981, 4).Footnote ³¹

Police unionists who I interviewed argue that the 1973 uprising of Uttar Pradesh police constables was in no way preplanned by the RPKP’s leaders or members. They further allege that there was a nefarious “conspiracy” (saajish) led by some senior officers to make it appear as if unionists wanted only to incite a violent “revolt” (vidroh). “How would armed revolt serve the Parishad [RPKP’s] purpose?” one former constable heatedly asked me. “We wanted to gain legal recognition and negotiate the terms of our job, not call in the national army.”Footnote ³² But that is exactly what happened when Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kamlapati Tripathi declared a state of emergency on May 20. Rather than occurring within the ranks of the civil police, as had happened in Delhi six years earlier, the 1973 Uttar Pradesh police uprising began simultaneously on two different sites: (1) the campus of Lucknow University in the Uttar Pradesh state capital, where for weeks students had been protesting institutional exam policies, and (2) various battalion grounds of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC),Footnote ³³ where constables took over the official armories and refused to lay down their weapons at about a dozen locations across the state.Footnote ³⁴ It was an extraordinary moment, not only because of its extremely lethal combat, involving shootouts between police constables and army soldiersFootnote ³⁵ but also because it involved political activities that engendered strange bedfellows, such as university students and uniformed police marching together shouting slogans like “long live the united police and students … PAC constables and students are brothers … Officer dictatorship shall not continue” (The Pioneer 1973d).Footnote ³⁶

According to a retired Uttar Pradesh police senior officer, following the weeklong uprising, approximately five hundred people were dismissed from the Uttar Pradesh police service and more than two hundred were prosecuted in criminal courts (Arun Reference Arun1995). My interviews and reviews of confidential internal police memos suggest that the government response was even more fiercely punitive with regard to known or suspected police unionists specifically. Intelligence units were rapidly mobilized to track down RPKP leaders, and, in late June 1973, the Parishad was officially declared illegal by executive order. RPKP leaders were detained indefinitely under the controversial Maintenance of Internal Security Act and the Defence of India Rules, both of which had passed in 1971 (when India went to war with East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) as revived and revised versions of laws aimed at quelling political dissent and protecting national security (Hindustan Times 1973a, 1973b, 1973c, 1973d).Footnote ³⁷ In this context of heightened tensions around conflicts with neighboring countries and other internal political disturbances—especially armed insurgencies by Naxalites in northeastern India, which are also still ongoing more than fifty years later—more than one thousand constables who were alleged to have participated in the 1973 uprising in Uttar Pradesh were reportedly arrested, charged, and dismissed from police service under a broad swath of laws.Footnote ³⁸

This historical moment marked a shift from long-standing discourses about police “disaffection” threatening “public order” toward national security logics being forged in the crucible of the ongoing Cold War. The associated transition in lawfare logics in India set the stage for more coercive and extralegal forms of suppression of PWP in concert with the quelling of other forms of dissent. Only two years after the police uprising in Uttar Pradesh, the central government in New Delhi under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a national state of emergency, citing both internal and external threats to Indian sovereignty. Democratic elections were suspended; the press was censored; thousands of strike leaders across labor sectors and known political opponents of the regime were arrested and detained; and general unrest and human rights violations pervaded, tainting the Indian National Congress party and leading to its ouster in the next national election. This was the first time that the Congress failed to win a parliamentary majority following India gaining independence in 1947.

During the almost two-year period that officially constituted what people now know as “The Emergency” (June 25, 1975 to March 21, 1977), there were no major police protests or uprisings similar to those that occurred in 1967 and 1973. However, there remained rumblings of discontent among rank-and-file police, often manifesting in forms of “civil disobedience” like hunger strikes or refusals to perform work duties following localized offenses such as senior officers or other elites mistreating constables (Ghosh Reference Ghosh1981). Within a year of the official end of The Emergency, another set of police protests began in the state of Punjab and eventually spread across fourteen other states as well as within some of the central police forces. Just prior to the incitement of these protests, a National Police Commission (NPC) had been formed, which eventually issued eight reports between 1979 and 1981. Analysis of the poor living and working conditions of constables formed the introduction to the very first NPC report, and the commission subsequently issued many recommendations for reforms, most of which were shelved and have never seen the light of day.Footnote ³⁹

State government lawfare against the specter of rank-and-file police insurgents continues today. As I learned through ethnographic observations and interviews, some in-service police personnel have been “working underground” with activists like Yadav and Pathak to recruit support for police unionist causes. Some police have also memorialized constables who died in the 1973 Uttar Pradesh police uprising as “martyrs,”Footnote ⁴⁰ and others have litigated to overturn the statutory, executive, and administrative bans on police workers associations. One of my key interlocutors— RPKP General Secretary, Ram Ashish Rai, who was detained for more than four years following the 1973 uprising—has continued to devote the greater part of his life to demanding legal and political recognition for the association he cofounded, at great personal cost. Rai, who at the time of writing is still alive and survives mostly on alms and a meager pension he won through decades of civil litigation, continues to write letters to government leaders, to do interviews with anyone who will give him time, to seek out comrades among in-service and dismissed police, and to organize meetings and perform yatras (pilgrimages) around the region to try to gain support for a police union. In June 2016, at the age of seventy-five, Rai composed and had notarized a letter officially transferring power of attorney of the RPKP to none other than the aforementioned Avinash Pathak and one other constable.Footnote ⁴¹ They both pledged to continue to file writ petitions in the Uttar Pradesh High Court to overturn the ban on the RPKP and to advance police unionist causes, especially regarding fair wages and work leave policies. To date, all of their efforts have failed or, at best, are languishing in judicial backlogs.

BEYOND LAWFARE: RETHINKING SECURITY LABOR, POLICE REFORM, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

This ethnographic and historical case study of PWP in India demonstrates how successive governments have subjectified police through law both as exceptionally exploitable and expendable laborers and as anti-national insurgents if they dare to speak out about their rights as government employees. The multifaceted ironies of this subjectification and subjugation of police personnel in this context spotlight how police constitute a devalued and discredited part of the global labor movement. They also sound a clarion call for broader, deeper, and comparative studies of police unionism across world regions. This analysis of how lawfare has been waged over time between various branches of the Indian state and still struggling police unionist movements helps us to reconsider police workers—and police work—in ways that may reframe some debates around potential transformations of policing institutions and the inclusion of police workers themselves in social justice movements.

Competing conceptions of law as a political technology play a central role in these debates. It is a veritable cliché at this point to declare that changes in law do not equate to changes in long established cultural beliefs and social practices, at least not immediately. And, yet, the law seems to be the supreme, if not the only, beacon of hope to which police unionists in India look for meaningful transformation in their living and working conditions. Brijendra Singh Yadav’s statement that opened this article—“Bhadoria did battle with bullets. I do battle in the courts”—implies the moral elevation of supposedly non-violent lawfare over violent and potentially lethal warfare. His statement echoes those of other police unionist leaders in India who sometimes work to delegitimize rival leaders by claiming to have a monopoly on doing things “the legal way … using the law, not violence or protest.” This ironic opposition drawn between legitimate “legal” action and other illegitimate means of conducting “politics” generally, and PWP specifically, shows how the history of lawfare between state leaders and security laborers in India has framed law qua law as the primary or even sole pathway to police workers improving their living and working conditions. I would argue that lawfare as a broader structure of relational praxis shapes, and, indeed, negatively limits, the ways in which we all think about police reform. In the Indian case, the delimitation of “lawful” associations as the only morally upright mode of PWP reinforces a dialectical structure of relations positing a Manichean “us/them” binary not only of police workers versus other workers but also of the police versus public at large, such that one can only win if the other loses. This lawfare structure serves to continue the exclusion of police from political society and to make them feel like they have to “defend” themselves against social justice movements, particularly in the context of ongoing calls to “defund” police institutions and other debates around police reform (see, for example, the Blue Lives Matter countermovement in the United States, which has also spread to the United Kingdom and other British settler colonies like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand).

A few scholars have examined the potential for rank-and-file police personnel in various world regions to participate more directly in dialogues around police reform (Sklansky Reference Sklansky2008; Marks and Sklansky 2012) and to actively contribute to, and positively exchange with, activists engaged in other social justice movements (Fleming, Marks, and Wood Reference Fleming, Monique and Jennifer2006; Marks and Fleming Reference Marks and Jenny2006a, Reference Marks and Jenny2006b, Reference Marks and Jenny2008). These comparative studies support the argument that in many contexts some police unions could, and perhaps should, receive increased support from, and be better integrated with, other social justice movements, including, but not limited to, those dedicated specifically to police reform. Theoretically, this could foster a more democratic work culture within police institutions and result in greater rights-based awareness and more humane police work (see also Adams Reference Adams2008). And, yet, as stated above, police unions the world over are usually considered one of the greatest obstacles to progressive reforms by most social justice activists. At best, they constitute the “black sheep” of an imagined community of global organized labor. At worst, police worker associations constitute an insidious force that potentially appropriates the form of organized labor for the re-inscription of power asymmetries and authoritarian governance. Police appear to be such an “other” to society that many claim they should not be considered “workers” at all (Marks Reference Marks2002; Hayes Reference Hayes2020).

This subjectification of police as enemy number one of a greater kind—that is, the enemy of social justice per se—results in large part from the widespread discursive and ideological reduction of police work to violence work generally (Seigel Reference Seigel2018; compare Jauregui Reference Jauregui2016; Martin Reference Martin2019). It also emanates from a long history of police mostly working on behalf of public or private power holders, especially, though of course not exclusively, in ways that suppress labor protests and other social movements rising up “from below.” Police generally, and police worker associations specifically, still have a long way to go in acknowledging their structural complicity and active role in histories of state violence against various marginalized groups. And they need to go beyond merely acknowledging it by apologizing for this complicity. Police must actively work against their complicity with coercive governance in ways that people from marginalized groups will read as sincere and as possibly forming a pathway for collaborative work. Until this happens, police will remain outside the demos and continue to experience ideological tensions and identity crises within their own worker organizations (DeLord and York Reference DeLord and Ron2017). Some scholars have analyzed police worker tensions and crises in terms of a “Janus-faced” character of police unions, “simultaneously looking backward and forward: sometimes progressive, sometimes reactionary, sometimes in self-interest and occasionally in pursuit of social justice issues” (Fleming, Marks, and Wood Reference Fleming, Monique and Jennifer2006, 73). Such tensions may also manifest other kinds of social divisions among police workers that are less about an ideological war between “conservative” and “progressive” values and more about context-specific ethno-racial, religious, or other cultural distinctions that configure inequality, discrimination, conflict, and structural violence in particular ways in particular time spaces. All of these disjuncts around PWP occur in a “security delivery landscape,” suffused with law that, as this analysis has shown, subjectifies, and, in some cases, ironically and alarmingly subjugates, police as workers without workers’ rights (73).

Police workers globally have long been figured in direct opposition to organized labor and broader social justice movements through an integration of (1) a longue durée “us/them” structure of relations between police and most other laborers; (2) an association of politicized security labor with insecurity writ large; and (3) context-specific forms of social inequality and conflict that are imbricated with the state security apparatus. What if we changed this oppositional narrative to one conceiving police worker rights as having generative synergies with broader concerns about social welfare and justice? Might collaboration among some police workers and social justice movements, if guided by progressive principles, actually enhance, rather than compromise or eclipse a sense of security and well-being for all? As illustrated by this study of lawfare between the state and security laborers in India, the analysis of some forms of PWP, especially in global South postcolonies, compels us in unexpected directions by raising our consciousness about forms of injustice that may not be immediately apparent or that have been historically dismissed or ignored as being outside the purview of decolonization or other social justice movements. This is especially true in contexts where official police hierarchies have been historically shaped by, and remain inextricable from, unofficial social inequalities, a condition that is not unique to India (Marks Reference Marks2002; Fleming, Marks, and Wood Reference Fleming, Monique and Jennifer2006; Marks and Fleming Reference Marks and Jenny2006a, Reference Marks and Jenny2006b, Reference Marks and Jenny2008; Marks and Sklansky 2012).

In a speech at the Central Police Training College at Mount Abu on October 18, 1958, the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared: “[I]n a democratic state, the police are different in essence from the police in a state that is not democratic. The police are citizens, as much as others, of the democratic state.”Footnote ⁴² If we recognize police worker organizations as being comprised of rights-bearing citizens with common cause and concerns about social well-being—rather than simply as hyper-empowered state violence workers intent on (or even subconsciously) reproducing authoritarian governance via any means necessary—then what kinds of alliances might be possible as we proceed in our discussions of governance reform? Does alliance building with police unions or other kinds of security labor associations inevitably allow or encourage the misappropriation of social justice demands from more vulnerable populations? Does it accomplish nothing but the unjust cooptation of grassroots activist technologies and the reinscription of power inequalities? Or, as suggested by thinkers like Roy Adams (Reference Adams2008), might such collaborations between police workers and other activists sensitize police to the need to protect civic and labor rights for all, thereby forging new paths for sweeping and substantive transformation? Since police have more official authority, how might they be encouraged to reach out or “extend the olive branch” first in light of the social fact that most police still feel an existentialist need to “defend” themselves from the calls to “defund” or “abolish” their work and livelihood? Just as importantly, how might leaders and members of social justice campaigns be encouraged to open up to police outreach rather than remaining mired in the trenches of political cultural warfare, which is intimately intertwined with the binding ties of lawfare? What generative and progressive possibilities might emerge if we shift away from a view that PWP is the enemy of both security and social justice and instead include calls for transformed and improved provisions for police welfare in broader discourses and movements for social reform, at least in some cases? In so doing, how might we not only transform current path dependencies on subjectifying (and, in some contexts like India, subjugating) police through lawfare but also reframe understandings of what police and social justice are or could be? Finally, what role does, and should, law play in concert with other forms of politics oriented toward the realization of a more just and equitable world?