SEEN through the lens of cynical observers, it would appear that the police are destined to act out the role of permanent villain in the wider canvas of our increasingly confrontational political scenario. Admittedly, this is not a desirable profile of a vital organ of the state, particularly when demands for good governance are made in public interest. Under such circumstances, it might be in public good to venture into the origin and growth of our police force from a historical perspective.

When the East India Company took over diwani in 1765, the Mughal police system was under the control of the faujdars, who were in charge of their sarkars or rural districts; the kotwals were in charge of towns, while the village watchmen were paid and controlled by the zamindars. This system continued for some time under the authority of Muhammad Reza Khan acting as the Naib Nazim with his station at Murshidabad. But the old system could hardly function effectively, as the growing power of the Company had thoroughly undermined the authority of the nawab.

Crime rates began spiraling upward after the famine of 1770, and the general state of 'law and order' declined day by day with an alarming rise in the rate of crime against property. For the Company officials, like other departments, the police administration too seemed to be in need of European supervision, as every crime was a direct affront to their authority. The faujdari system continued with minor modifications until 1781, when the faujdars were finally replaced by English magistrates. The zaminders retained their police duties, but were made subservient to the magistrates.

The above limited reform of Warren Hastings could not solve the problem, as the establishments of the magistrates proved to be too inadequate for the purpose, while the zaminders abused the system and freely took advantage of its weaknesses. So Lord Cornwallis in 1793 decided to divest zamindars of their policing duties, and instead divided the districts into thanas or units of police jurisdiction of twenty to thirty square miles, each placed under a new officer called daroga, who was to be appointed and supervised by the magistrates.

The daroga thus became a new instrument of control for the Company's government in the diwani provinces, or as the peasants looked at them, as the local representatives of the "aura and authority of the Company Bahadur." A new and alien element in the countryside, they could hardly ignore the powerful local-landed magnates, who retained much of their extra-legal coercive powers and in most cases made alliances with them.

By the nineteenth century the daroga-zamindar nexus thus emerged as a new instrument of coercion and oppression in Bengal rural life. But on the other hand, when the resourceful contestants for power in the countryside, the zaminders and the planters, both having posses of mercenaries or lathiayals at their command, got embroiled in fierce battles for territories, the ill-equipped and poorly provided darogas stood as helpless onlookers.

The daroga system was extended to Madras in 1802 and the tehsildari system to the Ceded and Conquered upper Provinces in 1803 and 1804 respectively. But everywhere the system produced devastating results because, as Thomas Munro diagnosed, it was "not founded in the usages of the country."

The daroga system was formally abolished in 1812, and the supervision of the village police was vested in the collector, who was now responsible for revenue, police and magisterial functions at the same time. This extreme concentration of power led to other problems. The subordinates in the revenue department, who were now in charge of revenue collection as well as supervision of rural policing, became the new agents of oppression and coercion.

In Bengal, where there was no subordinate establishment in the Collectorate offices, because of the Permanent Settlement, the darogas were retained and allowed to perform police duties, although after 1817 they were placed under a more regulatory regime closely supervised by the district magistrates. But such patchy reforms were hardly satisfactory and the colonial state clearly needed an appropriate and uniform police system that would assert its authority, secure property and ensure the introduction of its version of the 'rule of law' throughout the empire.

Sir Charles Napier in 1843 discarded the previous practice of trying to adapt the indigenous systems to the needs of the colonial state, created a separate police department with its own officers, following the model of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which he found to be ideally suited to the colonial condition.

It needs to be mentioned here that while English political opinion remained ideologically averse to the idea of a professional police force, it was in Ireland, in view of the growing sectarian and peasant movements, that a regular police force was created in 1787 as an apparatus of colonial intervention.

The revolt of 1857 had shaken the foundations of British rule and had made it more conscious of the need of effective machinery for collecting information and policing the empire. The Police Commission appointed in 1860 provided for a basic structure of a police establishment for the Indian empire that was enacted in the Police Act of 1861. And that structure, with only minor adjustments, remained unchanged for the next century of British rule.

Distrustful of the Indian subordinates and subservient to the civilian authorities, the Indian police system was tellingly reflective of its colonial nature. Although not a police state in a conventional sense, a "Police Raj" gradually emerged between the revolt of 1857 and the transfer of power in 1947. Faced with recurrent peasant rebellions and mounting political resistance, the police became the foremost tool of repression in India, with the colonial state retaining total monopoly over its coercive power. Regrettably, the state of affairs has not significantly altered for the better since then.

The writer is a columnist for The Daily Star.