I

Shripad Amrit Dange was an Indian anticolonialist, trades unionist and founder of the Communist Party of India. During the Second World War he campaigned for Indian independence among unionized workers in Britain. In one of his speeches he claimed ‘the existence of a secret agency in this country, financed by the Government of India’,Footnote ¹ which was actively opposing the Indian National Congress. His instinct was correct: there was a secret agency headquartered in Britain but financed by, and serving the interests of, the Raj: Indian political intelligence (IPI).

IPI was, between 1909 and 1947, an integral part of India’s colonial security architecture and a major British intelligence agency with global activities and networks which could, at times, rival those of MI6. IPI’s files were declassified in 1997 and have attracted some scholarly attention. Michael Silvestri shows how IPI helped globalize intelligence ‘expertise’ developed in Bengal while Daniel Brückenhaus has explored the impact of IPI upon European policing and the lives of mobile Indian activists.Footnote ² Kate O’Malley has uncovered the agency’s surveillance of Indo-Irish collaboration and goes the furthest in demonstrating the richness of IPI’s archive.Footnote ³ O’Malley concludes, however, that IPI remains ‘an agency about which very little is known and one almost entirely overlooked in intelligence historiography’Footnote ⁴. This is particularly true of its activities in Britain which this article uncovers as evidence that IPI was a concrete example of an ‘imperial boomerang’: a rebounding into the metropole of the authoritarian, ethnographic, and racial governmentality of the colony which in turn corroded the quality – especially the universality – of liberalism in Britain. It also measures IPI’s power in Britain, not by its small office staff but by its ability to direct considerable police resources and win the cooperation of the wider British state.Footnote ⁵ The starkest evidence of this is the free hand IPI enjoyed in criminalizing Indians in Britain, culminating in its successful sponsorship of defence regulation 47AAD. This law sought to both recolonize the Indian diaspora and police the boundaries of race in Britain through mass deportation.

The idea that colonialism overseas corrupts liberty at home is not new. It was what Edmund Burke greatly feared and has appeared in several influential theorizations of colonialism.Footnote ⁶ Taking a more empirical approach, Bernard Porter has shown how the migration of Fenianism to Britain led to the transfer of colonial personnel (and their dubious methods) from Dublin Castle to Whitehall and Scotland Yard, leading to the formation of a secret and political section of London’s metropolitan police. Special branch was originally the special Irish branch, but its mission soon extended to the disruption of ‘almost any anti-establishment group or movement’,Footnote ⁷ often by perpetrating ‘utterly unlawful things’.Footnote ⁸ This was not a singular phenomenon: Alfred McCoy has explored how surveillance and political policing techniques pioneered in the Philippines were returned to the United States.Footnote ⁹ More broadly, Julian Go has found that American and British police militarization over the nineteenth century was ‘a colonial boomerang, brought home in the face of racialised threats’Footnote ¹⁰. This article offers a parallel argument, using IPI to uncover the bureaucratic and methodological continuities between colonial ethnographic policing and ‘racializing surveillance’Footnote ¹¹ practised by the police and intelligence services in Britain. This equates the colonial rule of difference with racialized state practices in the United Kingdom, which severely tests the universality of British liberalism.Footnote ¹²

Britain enjoys a liberal self-image and does have liberal traditions dating back to – at least – the 1688 Revolution and finding skilful expression in the writings of John Locke. As a result, and notwithstanding the many racial exceptions in English philosophical liberalism, there was a dangerous contradiction between universalist metropolitan liberalism and colonial authoritarianism.Footnote ¹³ Ranajit Guha described the British claim to have reconciled this as, simply, an absurdity.Footnote ¹⁴ This absurdity was masked by colonial difference: native deficiency precluded the political modernity of free self-government, necessitating an indefinite period of colonial tutelage. Linda Alcoff, Charles Mills and Tavia Nyong’O, to take but three examples, note an adjacent theoretical problem. To stake its claim to universality, modern liberalism must operate through an undifferentiated and transparent human subject, and yet human difference and hierarchy – often racial – persists, which liberalism must therefore trivialize or ignore, creating unsolvable antimonies.Footnote ¹⁵ For IPI, a colonial security organization operating in a liberal environment with the twinned objectives of racially subordinating Indians in Britain and protecting British colonialism in India, the racial antimonies of liberalism and the contradictions of liberal imperialism are the same. IPI repatriated the ethnographic and authoritarian methods of the Raj, justified by colonial difference, creating a differentiated and demonstrably colonial surveillance, policing, and even legal regime around racialized Indians in Britain. In demonstrating this, I first explore IPI’s origins and continuities with the colonial state before showing how IPI redeployed its characteristic modalities against the working-class Indian diaspora, culminating in the issuing of defence regulation 47AAD, long sought by IPI, and its resulting programme of racializing and recolonizing deportation.

II

Although IPI was headquartered in Britain, its origins lie in the particularities of the Raj. Information was crucial to British power in India as ideologies of racial and civilizational hierarchy made liberal, democratic or even consensual rule impossible and so penetrative intelligence took the place of associative or voluntary relationships between the population and the government. The Raj’s intelligence activities were, therefore, expansive: checking up on collaborating elites, manipulating politics and anticipating resistance to help allocate the coercive resources of a parsimonious and violent colonial government.Footnote ¹⁶

While the East India Company had initially coopted the intelligence practices of Indian kingdoms, the Raj also pioneered the bureaucratic forms of a modern ‘intelligence state’.Footnote ¹⁷ Both IPI and the present Intelligence Bureau (IB) of India can trace their origins to the 1826 anti-thuggee campaign led by William Sleeman, enabling the IB to claim to be the oldest continuously-existing intelligence agency in the world. By 1835 Sleeman was general superintendent of the thuggee and dacoity department, founded to eliminate thugs, an allegedly hereditary fraternity of itinerant strangling thieves.Footnote ¹⁸ The creation of this department ‘led to the formation of an archive of criminal ethnography and the designation of an increasing number of people as members of “criminal tribes and castes”’.Footnote ¹⁹ Throughout British rule, native deficiency constituted the ethnographic ‘fact’ that certain ethnoreligious groups were hereditary or habitual criminals. Ethnographic accounts of ‘the innate cruelty of the people and the unrestrained barbarity of their manners and morals’Footnote ²⁰ populated police manuals and even the law. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 gave local authorities in India the discretionary power to declare ‘a tribe, gang or class’ to be a ‘criminal tribe’.Footnote ²¹ These ‘tribes’ were then rigorously policed through a passbook system, severe criminal penalties and even collective incarceration in a ‘reformatory settlement’.Footnote ²² Criminality was often political: some groups were securitized due to inveterate disloyalty, subversive mobility or, in the case of the Pathans, alleged fanaticism.Footnote ²³ This was justified by the rule of colonial-difference-as-native-deficiency. One official cited the ‘depraved state of society’ to be found ‘throughout the whole continent of India’Footnote ²⁴ to justify the brutal punishment of thugs, the awesome power awarded to local officials and the abridgement of evidentiary requirements: thuggee could be established by coerced confessions, traveling with a gang, the word of an informer or mere notoriety.Footnote ²⁵ Spatially, this was enabled by the suspension of ordinary law and judicial principle through the creation of ‘non-regulation territories’, the terms of which were later extended, by law, to the whole of British India and, as I argue below, to Britain by the activities of IPI.

By 1887 the thuggee department had a central special branch which became the Raj’s main intelligence agency. Its creation was kept secret because the viceroy feared Indian reaction to a ‘Third Section after the Russian Pattern’.Footnote ²⁶ Like London’s Special Branch, the scope for intelligence gathering found little limit, taking in ‘all political movements’, ‘native societies’, religious sects, the movements of ‘suspicious characters and foreigners’ and extending to ‘rumours or published opinion disturbing the public peace’ as well as ‘popular feelings’. One viceroy admitted that the department was ‘our secret police’,Footnote ²⁷ and it soon became responsible for the political policing of India, with the Indian National Congress as a major target. In 1903, only a few years after his pledge to destroy Congress, Lord Curzon turned the thuggee department into the department of criminal intelligence (DCI), which collated information from a growing number of provincial police intelligence organizations. Ethnographic ‘expertise’ continued to underpin the growth of this modern intelligence regime. The head of the Bengal police intelligence branch, for example, distilled an influential ethnography, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, into a ‘practical guide for police officers’.Footnote ²⁸ As Indians travelled abroad, this process globalized. In 1908 the secretary of state wrote to the viceroy, complaining that

A year later – and only six years after Curzon’s reforms – this ethnographic ignorance was corrected by the transfer of John Wallinger from the Bombay police’s intelligence wing to London, where he became the first IPI. While Wallinger reported to the India Office in London and his Indian financial sponsor, DCI, he was embedded in special branch and worked with provincial police forces across Britain. The ease of collaboration might be surprising given the contrast between British ideals of decentralized, unarmed, locally accountable and consensual policing and the ‘Irish’ model used throughout the empire.Footnote ³⁰ Both the Indian and Irish police were highly centralized under an inspector-general, a title alien to Britain, and focused on defending the state rather than the community through excessive surveillance, political policing and, at moments of confrontation, violent militarization.Footnote ³¹ IPI was doubly Irish in that its methods in Britain reflected the ‘Irish’ characteristics of the Indian police, but it also followed Ireland into Britain: IPI occupied a space carved out by an Irish policeman and spymaster, Edward Jenkinson, who had been sent to counter Fenianism in Britain. Jenkinson’s methods soon brought him to grief, but he ‘provided the guidelines’Footnote ³² for IPI while his network was taken over by the special Irish branch. By 1905 the now special branch was trying to penetrate India House, though not always successfully: Indians went to great lengths to expose, and even attack, its spies. Four years later, the branch had a dedicated Indian section which Wallinger was sent from India to work with, forming the ‘kernel’Footnote ³³ of IPI.

III

IPI greatly extended the Raj’s police authority and intelligence activities outside of India, but this only formalized a longstanding phenomenon. Papers from the India Office’s political and secret department indicate that ‘secret service money’ was as old as the East India Company. There was a lot of it, even under the crown. The council of India voted £2000 for ‘secret service money’ in 1859, rising to £5000 in 1875.Footnote ³⁴ IPI was also only part of the wider process by which the Raj helped build Britain’s secret state. The secret department was the province of Colonel Edward Bradford, formerly of the thuggee department in India. After the India Office, Bradford became commissioner of the metropolitan police, replacing James Monro, a former inspector-general in India and founder of the special Irish branch.Footnote ³⁵ To help him with his secret service work, Monro had chosen ‘Melville MacNaghten, whom had had known as a planter in India, and whose firm way with the natives he particularly admired’.Footnote ³⁶ This process continued for some time: both Edward Henry and John Nott-Bower led the Met after careers in the Indian police.

If the metropolitan police was riddled with colonial policemen, this was equally true of the intelligence agencies, where circulation between colonial and metropolitan service was common.Footnote ³⁷ Charles Tegart’s career took him from the Bengal police – where he established its special branch – to London in the service of IPI, followed by a posting to his native Ireland under another Indian policeman, Ormonde Winter. This was followed by a notorious stint in Palestine before he ended his career dismantling black markets in wartime Britain. Robert Nathan’s success in repressing Bengali revolutionaries led him to New York in the service of IPI and MI6, where he established a significant network.Footnote ³⁸ Nathan then took over MI5(G), the service’s Indian section which ran alongside MI5(D), which dealt with ‘Orientals’. A third of MI5(G)’s officers came from India, and it even produced a 71-page-long Indian blacklist, which must have been intended for wide circulation.Footnote ³⁹ After MI5(G), Nathan led MI6’s political unit, Section V, eventually becoming SIS’s ‘second most important officer’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The list goes on: Valentine Vivian began his career with the DCI in Simla and IPI in Constantinople, before taking over Section V and rising to be vice-chief of MI6.Footnote ⁴¹

MI5(G) was led for a time by Vernon Kell, the future leader and principal shaper of the wider ‘domestic’ security service which, nevertheless, proudly declared itself ‘more than national’ because it was ‘imperial’.Footnote ⁴² Churchill replaced Kell with David Petrie, a fiercely political Indian policeman who had even been wounded in a violent confrontation with Ghadar activists. Petrie had already led the Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB: the former DCI) and declined the IPI position before being appointed head of MI5 in 1940. Petrie would soon be pressuring the Home Office to intern or prosecute British Indians for their political speech based ethnographic assertions that ‘the mind of the Indian of a certain type’Footnote ⁴³ would lead them on to violence. Naturally, Petrie formed a close working relationship with the second IPI, Phillip Vickery. As IPI developed, therefore, it found powerful allies in the British state who were unlikely to raise liberal objections to its colonial methods.

During the First World War, IPI worked extensively with military intelligence, establishing a European network to rival that of the young MI6.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was also active in North America: ‘During the 1914–1918 war it became necessary for this officer to arrange for surveillance in the USA of the activities of fanatical anti-British Sikhs [Ghadar] and for assistance to US authorities in bringing some of these persons to trial for war-time offences.’Footnote ⁴⁵ William Hopkinson, a former Punjabi policeman, was an agent for IPI and a Canadian immigration official, repressing Ghadar through cooperation with immigration authorities. Seema Sohi argues that this process, the securitization of Indians in North America as ‘dangerous and subversive, and therefore excludable and deportable, consisted of a new kind of racial formation’.Footnote ⁴⁶ IPI thereby aided in the globalization of the colonial rule of difference, making it constitutive of the racial orders of liberal states.

In 1926 a liberal viceroy turned off the taps, making IPI reliant on the secretary of state’s own grant, reducing it to a single officer with no deputy and ‘4 or 5 female clerks’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the same year, Wallinger retired to be replaced by Vickery, a former Indian policeman who had already served IPI in London, Canada, and the USA.Footnote ⁴⁸ By 1939 Vickery’s office was funded by DIB again and was spending £500 on subsidizing Special Branch, £5500 on European operations and £1500 in the USA.Footnote ⁴⁹ Staff numbers remained small but this is not the best way of measuring IPI’s power which came from a large network of informants and the ability to call up the resources of larger organizations. Never formally avowed, IPI described itself as both DIB’s ‘representative’ in Britain and the ‘Indian section of the Security Service [MI5]’.Footnote ⁵⁰ It worked with provincial Indian police, the government of India, European police forces, Canadian immigration services, British embassies and, in New York, the home office’s secret agency and the British library of information, which it subsidized from Indian taxes.Footnote ⁵¹ IPI also worked with Singaporean political intelligence and MI6 on ‘political movements in the countries adjoining India’.Footnote ⁵² In Whitehall, IPI worked with the ‘India Office, Burma Office, Foreign Office, Passport Office, Colonial Office, Home Office, War Office and Admiralty’. This extraordinary bureaucratic privilege, established with no act of parliament or order in council, was a ‘privilege not enjoyed by any empire intelligence organisation’, making IPI an ‘integral part of the Commonwealth Security Intelligence system’.Footnote ⁵³

As O’Malley has shown, IPI was particularly paranoid about communism,Footnote ⁵⁴ and one of its early triumphs was the Meerut trials. Wallinger worked tirelessly to gather evidence for these great showpiece prosecutions of communist activism in India and his work was instrumental in convicting the British defendants.Footnote ⁵⁵ IPI was also active in the passport and censorship regimes between Britain and India, helping to prevent British activists, journalists, and information from reaching India. IPI was, therefore, most active not at periods of confrontation between the British and Indians, but at moments of the most subversive political friendship. IPI’s vast archive (another indication of its importance) includes extensive files on British supporters of Indian independence such as Agatha Harrison, Benjamin Horniman, and H. S. L. Polak. Naturally, the India league was a particular target. Between the early 1930s and 1947, IPI, helped by MI5 and special branch, spent immense time and resources pursuing V. K. Krishna Menon’s organization. In turn, the India league’s successful cooperation with trades unions and the Labour Party meant that the lawful British left was often caught in IPI’s net, including sitting MPs like Fenner Brockway, William Dobbie, or Reginald Sorensen.Footnote ⁵⁶

In 1932 IPI leaked to the press, the Conservative party and the para-fascist anti-socialist union intelligence material gathered in India which discredited the views of former Labour MPs – including Ellen Wilkinson – who had visited India with Menon and were now espousing anticolonial views.Footnote ⁵⁷ IPI also supported the India-Burma Association (IBA), a pro-imperial pressure group secretly run out of the India Office. Funded by British capital in India, the IBA worked with right-wing political organizations across Britain and would report back to the India Office on anticolonial meetings or seek to disrupt them, with IPI telling them where to go.Footnote ⁵⁸ The IBA included Conservative MPs who would counter parliamentary questions critical of British rule in India. Their interventions were camouflaged to appear distinct from the official line but were secretly drafted by the India Office with input from IPI.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1944, for example, IPI was collecting information from ‘a very delicate source’ that required ‘careful handling’ to prepare answers to questions being drafted by the India league for a Labour peer to ask about the Bengal Famine in the House of Lords.Footnote ⁶⁰ IPI’s interference with the Labour Party and Parliament climaxed after the 1945 election, when the India League held a reception for one hundred Labour MPs ‘sympathetic to the cause of Indian independence’.Footnote ⁶¹ This was being watched by IPI: an astonishing situation where the Raj’s intelligence agency was spying on elected MPs from the party now governing the United Kingdom.

IV

IPI had developed the functional role of shielding colonialism in India from British democracy, as utilized by Indian activists and their British supporters. This role included the suppression of Indian working-class anticolonialism in the west Midlands, a mission which was transformed into the policing of the boundaries of race in Britain. By 1942 Indian migrants had, in some numbers, found employment in the war industries of Birmingham and Coventry. There they had unionized, forming the Indian Workers Association (IWA), which campaigned against the racist treatment of Indians in Britain and for Indian independence. The IWA was connected to the India league, local trades unions and the Birmingham Labour Party, holding anticolonial meetings which were intellectually sophisticated and attracting luminaries like Brockway and even representatives of the powerful transport and general workers union.Footnote ⁶² This was intolerable to IPI, that was also coming under pressure from the chief constable of Birmingham, a politically repressive ex-Irish policeman called Cecil Moriarty,Footnote ⁶³ who confided in IPI his fears ‘about the extensive Indian colony engaged in industrial work in his area’. Laughably, Moriarty warned that, should Britain’s military situation worsen, the IWA ‘might present considerable danger’Footnote ⁶⁴ to the nation. Petrie was also demanding that ‘some action be taken against disaffected Indians in the Midland regional area’,Footnote ⁶⁵ though IPI resisted MI5’s demand for ‘numerous or indiscriminate arrests’.Footnote ⁶⁶ This was, nevertheless, a debate between Petrie and Vickery – two colonial policemen now holding considerable secret power in Britain – about the best way of criminalizing Indian activism in Britain. In India, they would have had recourse to repressive laws like the Seditious Meetings Act, the newspaper (Incitement to Offences Act), the Press Act and various criminal law amendment acts which gave officials and police the power to criminalize any political or press activity they didn’t like.Footnote ⁶⁷ As these methods were unavailable in Britain, IPI began making creative abuse of the extraordinary legislative powers that the war cabinet had awarded itself through the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act of 1939. In a theoretical sense, IPI had merely colonized the generalized emergency which was the Second World War: IPI could never have orchestrated the 1939 Act, but it was able to coopt its powers. As we will see, however, the impact of IPI’s colonial project lasted long after the war ended, which supports theorizations of empire as a permanent emergency or state of exception which could rebound upon the west.Footnote ⁶⁸

In order to make use of these wartime powers, often held by other ministries, IPI had to first establish the criminality of the IWA. Bernard Cohn, in his classic study of colonial knowledge in India, demonstrated how ethnographic surveillance stigmatized whole communities as criminal.Footnote ⁶⁹ John Fiske, writing about the Black experience of policing in the United States, makes the striking claim that ‘surveillance enables different races to be policed differently’.Footnote ⁷⁰ IPI’s surveillance moved between such ethnographic parsing and lumping racialization, though both were crucial to its colonial project of collective criminalization. IPI began by obtaining reports on the origins of the IWA’s leadership from DIB.Footnote ⁷¹ The result was that V. S. S. Sastry, despite his education, journalism, English wife and leadership of the IWA in Birmingham, could not escape the colonial ethnographic matrix, remaining fixed as a ‘Brahmin of Rajanpeta’.Footnote ⁷² IPI’s wider surveillance achieved what C. A. Bayly called the ‘epistemic Balkanisation’Footnote ⁷³ of India as it broke down a nationalist group with members drawn from Gujarat, Bengal, and South India into ethnographic units, ranked on a colonial scale:

This fantasy denied the possibility of any political association that could transcend colonial ethnographic categories, reducing the IWA to one such category: the Punjabi Sikh. This enabled IPI to render the IWA members guilty by association with Udham Singh (the assassin of the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer) because he was ‘one of their number’. IPI further balkanized the IWA into geographic particularity by claiming that its members were largely from ‘the Jullundur and Hoshiarpur districts of the Punjab which have for many years been hotbeds of violent political agitation’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The IWA’s political criminality did not derive from admissible evidence, judicial process or liberal principles of individual responsibility, but from ethnographic ‘facts’ about their identity. If the Sikhs of Jullundur and Hoshiapur were ethnographically and, therefore, innately violent political criminals, then they must remain so in the Midlands.

IPI was now free to construct a differentiated legal and security regime around Indians by drawing on both the substantive Defence Regulations and the summary procedure used to enact new ones. Defence Regulation 18B permitted, in the event of a German invasion, the internment without trial of persons deemed likely to collaborate with the Nazis. IPI tried to add the names of six IWA leaders to the internment list because ‘the best way to deal with them would be to make an example of the leading figures’.Footnote ⁷⁶ IPI had no evidence of enemy association, because there was none, which meant that 18B could not apply. The Home Office was, as a result, reluctant to act, and so IPI paid them a visit, supported by a lawyer from Petrie’s private office.Footnote ⁷⁷ The problem was solved by an Irish precedent: the Midlands regional commissioner had given chief constables carte blanche to ‘arrest suspected Irishmen’ in case of an invasion, even if their recent activities did not fully qualify under 18B. All that IPI needed to do, therefore, was treat ‘Indians in the same way as Irish are treated in the Midland area’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Relative to the surrounding legal orders, the Indians of the IWA were increasingly resembling a criminal tribe as IPI encased them in a zone of exception: a ‘non-regulation territory’, perhaps. This racialization of the ethnographic modalities of the Raj reveals the degree to which the universality of British liberalism was corroded by the ideological, methodological and bureaucratic continuity between domestic racial policy and the rule of colonial difference.

The German invasion never came. IPI then tried a new tactic: abusing the Ministry of Labour’s wartime powers of employment conscription to politically police and criminalize Indians. This was first tried out on Thakur Singh Basra, a leader of the IWA who had sought release from his employment because he could not afford to support his family. The national service office had turned him down, but this was not enough for Vickery, who was outraged by even this mild attempt by an Indian to improve his economic position. He decided that ‘an example should be made of him to prevent similar cases occurring in future’.Footnote ⁷⁹ IPI decided that Basra’s real motivation for exiting his job was to ‘resume his peddling business’, which was a front for black market activity. This was a fabrication because, if IPI had evidence to support his claim, Basra would have gone to trial. IPI, instead, leant on the Ministry of Labour to issue a deliberately unreasonable work-order, calculated to be disobeyed: Basra was soon sentenced to hard labour. The impact on his family is not recorded but IPI was delighted that the ministry had the ‘necessary power’ and was even ‘prepared to exercise it’, forcing ‘refractory Indians’ to take up employment ‘in districts far removed’ from the Midlands. At IPI’s behest, the ministry then ordered Sastry to ‘take up a course of training in London’, but he evaded the order by citing ill health. They tried again in 1944 with ‘the Ministry of Labour and National Service endeavouring to find suitable employment for him in the North East counties’.Footnote ⁸⁰ This was labour conscription as racial subordination and political policing. In IPI’s words, ‘successful action of this nature in a few isolated cases will do much to deprive the movement of its effective leadership’.Footnote ⁸¹ This tactic was not limited to the IWA: for example, Rewel Singh, a member of the India league, was ‘ordered to work on the land’.Footnote ⁸² Thus, IPI’s practices matched the extensive powers enjoyed by the Raj to extern Indian activists from politically sensitive areas. They also recall Section 110 of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code under which an innocent person but with a ‘bad reputation’ (usually an annoying agitator) could be required to submit a surety for good behaviour which they could not afford and then be imprisoned without the rigmarole of the courts. Thus, the illiberal methods of the rule of colonial difference were applied to Indians in Britain, becoming tools of both recolonization and racial subjugation.

For Ann Laura Stoler colonialism is characterized by a ‘protective architecture and anticipatory fear’.Footnote ⁸³ IPI’s policing of the IWA was never based on evidence of what its members did, but the anticipatory fear of what they might do, given the (ethnographic or racially asserted) deficiency of natives. According to IPI, the ‘average Indian worker in this country is very ignorant’, and IWA speeches were ‘obviously designed to work on the emotions of the impressionable and ignorant’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, the IWA’s expansion would have an:

The IWA had no weapons, training or gun-running network and had identified no strategy or target for political violence. The likelihood of a future political assassination depended, therefore, on colonial-difference-as-native-deficiency: the official ‘fact’ that Indians were impressionable, ignorant and deluded. This was sufficient grounds for IPI to construct an extensive protective architecture, beginning with a conference on the IWA. This included ‘Regional Security [MI5] and Police Officers from Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry and Wolverhampton’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The main aim of the conference was to police Indian speech: to halt ‘revolutionary utterances in Urdu and Punjabi’ by interning ‘most of the leaders of the movement’. This proved impossible, however, because nobody at the conference had any evidence of a crime, even though they had sent ‘policemen in plain clothes’Footnote ⁸⁷ into every public meeting of the IWA. As a result, IPI, MI5, and the police were not confident of their ability to convince even a wartime tribunal to intern Indians for crimes they had not, in fact, committed.

V

While the conference had failed to find a way of repressing the IWA, IPI used its report to convince the Home Office that the very presence of Indians, as a race, presented social and political problems. The report described Indians, as a racial group, as having gambling problems and drunken brawls.Footnote ⁸⁸ They lived ‘under extremely filthy conditions and drink to excess. They seek the company of prostitutes and numbers of them suffer from venereal disease. An alarming feature is that young [English] girls seek the company of Indians and the police can do little … one can hardly condemn the Indians, but the girls must be protected against their own foolishness’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Colonial states always policed the racial boundaries of sex lest miscegenation disrupt the ‘Manichean categories of ruler and ruled’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The presence of Indian men without Indian women in the Midlands appears to have intensified these anxieties: the conference lamented the existence of ‘certain young women, not prostitutes, but of low intellect, who make a habit of seeking out Indians’. The attendees deplored English women who lived with Indians ‘without the formality of marriage’, but the real fear was racial pollution, as ‘even in the case of legal marriages, the position is far from satisfactory’ because ‘the possibility of half-caste children being born is a matter of grave consequence’.Footnote ⁹¹

IPI’s colonial policing of the IWA had transformed the rule of colonial difference into the defence of the racial ‘interior frontiers’Footnote ⁹² of Britain from the threat of the ‘moral laxity, filth, drunkenness and disease’Footnote ⁹³ of Indians.Footnote ⁹⁴ This raised the racial contradiction, as described by Winston James, between the logic of empire, which told colonial subjects that they were British, and that of the metropole, which ‘persistently and often violently’Footnote ⁹⁵ told them that they were no such thing. Vickery had long been frustrated that he lacked the power to remove Indians from Britain and was resolved to ‘so direct their lives that they will … want to go back’.Footnote ⁹⁶ This represents the utmost form of recolonization: the forcible removal of a colonized race from the liberal metropole to the colony. Discussions of deportation were given urgency by official panic over rising numbers of Indian seamen jumping ship in Britain, which threatened to expand the India league or the IWA’s membership. The Birmingham conference proclaimed the ‘grave danger of politically minded Indians … organising these Indian seamen and using them directly or indirectly against the interest of Britain’.Footnote ⁹⁷ There is little wonder that Indian sailors were fleeing their ships. They had no unemployment insurance or pensions and were paid between one-third and one-fifth of their white counterparts. By law, the minimum space afforded an Indian onboard was less than a white sailor, while the food served was almost always poorer. Combined with overwork in harsher conditions, this led to a higher death rate for Indian sailors. Although they had launched an impressively global strike in 1939, winning some concessions, conditions remained so dire that they were brought up in Parliament.Footnote ⁹⁸ Even the India Office (privately) conceded that ‘little had been done to improve their conditions of service during the past 20 years’.Footnote ⁹⁹ As the war progressed, the risk from the Kriegsmarine (the German Nazi navy), increasingly militarized discipline and rising anticolonial awareness led many Indian seamen to choose to break their contract and remain in Britain which, as British subjects, they were entitled to do.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

As Laura Tabili has shown, colonial seamen were always a threat to the empire which needed to counter their mobility, which was so dangerously subversive to the spatial and racial subordinations necessary to imperial political hierarchies and labour orders. The presence of non-white seamen in Britain had been restricted by the Coloured Seaman’s Order of 1926, which lapsed around the time that IPI began discussing a replacement.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Some deportations could also be made under defence regulation 47A, which allowed the courts to order sailors (whether British or colonial) back to their ship if they were found in breach of contract. This proved inadequate as the war brought greater numbers of Indian seamen to Britain and more hectic shipping schedules. This meant that Indian seamen could not be returned to their original ship, either because they could not be found or because that ship had already sailed. Moreover, 47A could also result in their imprisonment in Britain when ‘what is much more important is that they should go back to India’.Footnote ¹⁰² The law had to be amended to send an Indian to any ship bound for India and to detain them in the meantime. There was a recent precedent for the use of deportation as political policing: Tahsil Miya, a link between seamen and the India league, had already been deported as a ‘preventative’ measure (as opposed to a ‘judicial penalty’Footnote ¹⁰³). Two Indian seamen had, however, beaten the charges of desertion at the Thames police court, showing the weakness of the existing law.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Based on the Birmingham conference, IPI submitted a draft regulation to the India Office, which was widely circulated in Whitehall, gaining the crucial support of the Home Office.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A sequence of major conferences followed, involving large numbers of civil servants, police, and security officials from London to Cardiff, Liverpool, and even Scotland. Their discussions were variations on the theme that ‘the presence of Indians in large numbers, especially in the Midlands, is troublesome for both political and social reasons’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It became increasingly clear that the regulation was not designed to reinforce maritime contracts but to ethnically cleanse the Midlands, as officials declared that ‘most of the Indians in the Midlands are, in fact, deserters’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Colonial governments, particularly of settler colonies, were past masters at drafting law that discriminated against the native population but appeared to be race-neutral. This was a new challenge for Whitehall. Officials conceded that they were introducing a ‘new principle into English law’ and were therefore anxious to avoid the ‘appearance of racial discrimination’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The solution was to make the Ministry of War transport sponsor the regulation, camouflaging it as a neutral measure to protect war shipping from labour shortages.

IPI’s draft travelled far without passing through the hands of a single elected official. It eventually won enthusiastic support, however, from Leopold Amery. This was not just because he was Churchill’s diehard Secretary of State for India, but because he was MP for the Birmingham constituency of Sparkbrook. Amery wrote in his diary that ‘I shall not regret their departure’ as they ‘are mostly in the Midlands as black marketeers, pedlars etc. and … interrupt my [constituency] meetings’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Amery asked for Delhi’s help to ‘break up these colonies’ because ‘a considerable problem is presented by congregation in Birmingham of large numbers of seamen deserters. Their presence constitutes a serious social and police problem and they may be got at by agitators’. Delhi supplied Amery with a reciprocal act against British seamen in India, which obscured the fact that the measure would ‘discriminate against Indians’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Amery could then claim in Cabinet that ‘the proposed regulation hardly constituted an act of racial discrimination against Indians’, even though the supporting War Transport memorandum made the racial claim that Indian men ‘in colonies in various industrial towns of this country has given rise to a number of social problems’.Footnote ¹¹¹

The regulation sailed through the War Cabinet’s small legislative committee and on 14 January 1945 the king-in-council amended the 1939 act to allow the police, a commissioned officer in the armed forces or even a superintendent in the merchant navy to ‘arrest without warrant any person whom he has reason to believe to be a lascar or native of India who has come to the United Kingdom … as a seaman’.Footnote ¹¹² The term ‘native of India’ is striking as it operates without reference to any formal legal citizenship but only an intuitive racial category making profiling a precondition of the arrest. 47AAD then required that the ‘native of India’ be ‘brought before a court of summary jurisdiction’ – precluding a jury – after which ‘he be conveyed on board a ship bound to a port in British India’Footnote ¹¹³ as a bound member of the crew. The reasoning behind this was that conveying Indians as passengers ‘would look very much like deportation’. It would also be easy for passengers to leave the ship, whereas as crewmen they ‘would be under the discipline of the Master’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Before being placed on board, the ‘native’ could be ‘detained in any prison or police station or in any other place authorised by the Secretary of State’ Footnote ¹¹⁵ for a renewable term of twenty-one days. In a series of circulars to chief constables, a comprehensive process was developed by which Indians would unwittingly criminalize themselves. All that was needed was for an Indian to apply for a ration card for a police investigation to be launched.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This involved ships’ records and identity papers which were deliberately withheld from Indians – and not just sailors – to deter them from settling.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Although those who had been resident in Britain for two years were safe, there was no provision for marital status or parenthood. In 1945, 176 Indians were deported under 47AAD and 29 under 47A.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This was the rough equivalent of a fifth of the Indian population counted by the police in Birmingham in 1942 or a quarter of those in Coventry.Footnote ¹¹⁹ That was not all: The police claimed that the ‘great consternation’ that these arrests caused led to a further 227 Indians returning to sea ‘voluntarily’.Footnote ¹²⁰

In 1947 IPI was dissolved into MI6 as Vallabhai Patel took over the home brief in Delhi and Krishna Menon the High Commission in London, making the agency’s imperial structure untenable. As 47AAD was camouflaged as a measure to protect wartime shipping, it could not be extended into peacetime.Footnote ¹²¹ Despite this, the regulation’s bureaucratic structure was preserved and transferred to London, justified by colonial anticipatory fear:

After 47AAD had been issued, the metropolitan police had built the Indian Seamen’s Bureau (ISB) out of the existing Aliens Registry Office (ARO). The ARO had been chosen as a ‘convenience as being akin to deportation’Footnote ¹²³ because it had the necessary experience, having taken over ‘deportations of a political nature’ from special branch. The ARO had been receiving ships’ records of Indian seamen, or ‘nullies’, from at least 1943, and from this the ISB kept ‘a book of current Indian seaman deserters’ along with ‘notebooks of addresses of lodging houses, cafes or other places frequented by Indian seamen’ which were then regularly visited by the police.Footnote ¹²⁴ This record keeping was necessary because ‘it is not easy to identify Indians; names and faces are similar and they are great liars’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The record also prevented the number of arrested Indians from exceeding available ships’ berths, which would clog up police jails. If shipping became available, the ISB would then direct chief constables to arrest their assigned quota of Indians, ensuring that ‘the seamen arrested should only be those of the appropriate race or caste which is specified in the notification from the central office’.Footnote ¹²⁶ It was, therefore, colonial ethnographic and racial categorization – rather than individual, juridical, liberal personhood – which would determine the rate and incidence of arrests and deportations from Britain. The system was not foolproof: in 1946 the number of berths dropped due to a dock strike so ‘large numbers of Indian seamen’ were interned in a camp near Liverpool.Footnote ¹²⁷ In some ways this camp was different from a concentration camp – it was a reactive, temporary measure and the former inmates would be at liberty in India – but it does fulfil other criteria, of internment without proper procedure of large numbers of a group deemed to be undesirable. The archival references to this camp are scanty and oblique but it is possible to claim that, in certain important senses of the term, there was a concentration camp in Britain for the internment of a race.

The deportation project continued until at least 1953. Given the reaffirmation of a shared Commonwealth citizenship by the 1948 British nationality act and the lapse of 47AAD in 1947, the programme was, for at least five years, illegal.Footnote ¹²⁸ The objective remained, throughout, the preservation of British racial purity: officials still believed that ‘the problem of coloured seamen deserters’ was that they were living with English women ‘of a very low type, usually of the prostitute class’.Footnote ¹²⁹ By the 1950s a different imperative to arrest was operating, seemingly without any judicial involvement at all. A shipping company would simply inform the police what job needed filling on board, after which the police would ‘search and find the men fitting the needs of the Companies, which was so often done late at night’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Thus, Britain’s merchant navy continued to enjoy access to colonial labour even after the independence of India: as late as 1953, some 133 Indians were deported in this way.Footnote ¹³¹

The colonial rule of difference had become indistinguishable from official British racism and this had repercussions beyond Indians. The ISB supplied information to an interdepartmental committee contemplating the ‘immigration of coloured people into this country’. The committee asked whether ‘the coloured community … are addicted to drug-trafficking or other types of crime?’.Footnote ¹³² The reply was ‘that the very noticeable influx of coloured people’ into London ‘principally West Indian and African negroes, had had a bad effect on the conduct of female aliens of non-asiatic origin. Dangerous cases have passed through my hands in which girls of nordic origin are living with and/or pregnant by coloured men.’Footnote ¹³³ This consultation occurred only a few months before Britain issued the 1953 Aliens Order. Another law passed without parliament, the order joined the practices of the ISB with the principles of the 1905 Aliens Act (intended to prevent persecuted Jews from entering Britain) in affording the Home Secretary the absolute power – without recourse to the courts – to detain and deport aliens deemed detrimental to public order, making the masters of ships and aircraft responsible for their carriage.Footnote ¹³⁴ Although the 1953 order applied to those without Commonwealth citizenship, the ISB’s input does reveal the importance of colonialism to Britain’s wider immigration regime.

VI

As a result of IPI’s recolonization project in Britain, a British subject could be arrested at night and without a warrant, detained without charge, tried without a jury, convicted without evidence and deported due to their ethnographic or racial identity. This was not due to evidence of individual criminal responsibility, established through judicial procedure under the fair operation of law, but due to colonial, ethnographic, racial constructions of collective criminality. This was largely put into place at the behest of IPI, an ex-colonial secret policeman serving the interests of the Raj and whose extensive power in Britain had no statutory basis or public accountability. This racial policy did not respond to the arrival of the Empire Windrush or even ‘rivers of blood’ as it was the pure product of the imperial boomerang. Colonial authoritarianism, ethnographic rule and racism had triumphed over parliamentary sovereignty, civis britannicus, legal equality and the universality of metropolitan liberalism, demonstrating the indispensability of racism to British imperialism, especially in Britain.