NAPOLEONIC INFLUENCE ON INDIAN POLICE

(Published in the Indian Police Journal, Oct-Dec, 2002)

We are stuck with the police the British gave us in 1861, which was not what they had back home. Theirs was an unarmed civilian ‘service’; ours was an armed ‘force’. Theirs was the people’s police; ours was the ruler’s police. The Colonial policeman was not meant to have the friendly face of the London Bobby. The paramilitary character and ‘force’ orientation of our police bore the imprint of the Royal Irish Constabulary and its parent, the Napoleonic Gendarmerie, though the British never acknowledged the French lineage.
Napoleon Bonaparte may have been England’s bete noire but for France he was her ‘saviour’. His avowed aim was to save the French from themselves after the excesses of the Revolution. At the same time that he was creating havoc on the borders of his empire through his endless wars with rival powers of Europe, Napoleon was giving those parts of Europe under his own control the highest standards of law and order yet seen on the Continent. Napoleon’s chief tool to this end was his policing policy which allowed him to restore order effectively in an even-handed, professional manner. He rejuvenated the Gendarmerie that he had inherited from the revolutionary governments and refashioned its role. He made it into an armed police force, a paramilitary force in today’s parlance, for maintaining peace and preventing crime in the French countryside. Napoleon was thus the first to create a force exclusively for police functions, leaving the military free to defend the borders and fight wars. Police was to deal with internal security and the army was to take care of external threat, a role distinction that was to become a standard practice all over the world. Soon the Gendarmerie became a solid fixture in the life of rural, provincial France and those other parts of Europe where Napoleon extended his rule. Long after Napoleon was dead and gone, the Gendarmerie became a model for police forces throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. Wherever a state had unruly rural hinterlands to deal with, and where a government was strong and solvent enough to create it, a Gendarmerie appeared. Arguably it had the widest influence of all Napoleonic institutions. Without saying ‘thank you’, the British freely applied the principles underlying the Napoleonic Gendarmerie to the police system they introduced in India in 1861. In 1869 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police did the same when they adopted the Irish model for a centralized, paramilitary force that would keep order until settlement was complete, so that Canada could avoid the experience of the United States where the Western frontier was the scene of bloody warfare between indigenous settlers and white people.
Napoleonic Gendarmerie was an elite force subject to a strict code of conduct. Gendarmes were specially chosen serving or former soldiers. They were elegantly uniformed and better armed which, combined with their height, was meant to produce an impression of reliability, professionalism and glamour. Napoleon wanted the Gendarmerie to be close to the rural communities it served but also stand apart from them. He tried his best to balance this and was largely successful. With its own hierarchy, following a pyramidal pattern, the Gendarmerie was scattered throughout the French countryside in small ‘brigades’ – units of six to ten men, so that no area was left uncovered, not very different from police stations in India. The Gendarmerie, like the police in India, was thus not only the arm of the state closest to the people but also was the most visible symbol of government’s authority. Gendarmes, including their families, were to be housed in barracks, to keep them separate from those they policed and to prevent them becoming a financial burden on the communities they served. Secondly, gendarmes were not to be local men but to come from parts of France other than those they policed. Finally, the Gendarmerie was not accountable to the civilian authorities though the latter could call upon its services.
Britain, the arch-enemy of Napoleonic France, paid the Gendarmerie a left-handed compliment when, in 1820s, Robert Peel chose the Gendarmerie as his model for the Irish Constabulary for policing rural, rebellious Ireland but developed the police of mainland Britain along very different lines. The challenge before the Irish Constabulary (Queen Victoria granted the force its ‘Royal’ prefix for having successfully dealt with the Fenian rebellion in 1867) was similar to what the Gendarmerie had been faced with – to control a hostile rural, Catholic peasantry. Like the Gendarmerie, the Constables were carefully attired, accoutered and armed. Both the forces were subject to a strict code of discipline. The Constabulary too was a centralized paramilitary force with its own chain of command and the only civilian control was at the level of the Secretary for Ireland. The men were not to be billeted on the communities they policed but were to live separately in their barracks. Each County was supervised by a County Inspector, with the counties subdivided into a number of districts, each headed by a District Inspector. At the headquarters the Inspector was assisted by a Head Constable on whom rested the main responsibility for operational policing and conduct of the men in the barracks. There were a number of barracks in each district, usually with a Sergeant and four constables.
In India, the East India Company had been tinkering with police reforms right from the time of Cornwallis but, in the absence of an existing model or a ready blueprint to copy from, only ad hoc measures could be taken. The motley crowd that passed as policemen was under the District Collector who was too busy with his other responsibilities to be able to control the Thana Daroga who behaved like a despot. The public suffered in silence. It was in this background that Charles Napier came to India fresh from the reforms instituted by Robert Peel in England and Ireland. He had seen the police at home regenerated from a state of notorious inefficiency into a fine body of men under proper supervision. No sooner had Napier conquered Sind (now in Pakistan) in 1843 than he set himself to the task of introducing an efficient police on the model of the Irish Constabulary, itself a replica of the Napoleonic Gendarmerie. Police was to be a separate force under its own officers and employed solely on police work. It had to have nothing to do with military or revenue functions. Though the policemen were to be available for assistance to the chief civil officer of the district, yet in each district they were to be supervised by an officer whose sole duty it was to control and direct them. The paramilitary character of the force was reflected in its deportment, weaponry and drilling. The Gendarmerie had made its proxy debut on the Colonial subcontinent.
Enthused by Napier’s successful experiment in Sind, the Court of Directors of the East India Company wanted the Government of India to have one general plan of police organization for the whole country, preferably on the pattern of the Irish Constabulary, read Gendarmerie, but modified according to local conditions. Police was to be taken out of the control of the Magistrate of the district and made into a separate department under a European officer seconded from the military. The reform would have gone through but the Sepoy Mutiny a year later led to reconsideration of certain principles that had been accepted earlier. With the Mutiny still haunting them, the Police Commission toned down the Irish model. They felt that, politically, while the civil constable was more useful he was less dangerous than a military policeman, who was in effect a ‘native’ soldier. They recommended complete separation of a military armed force with military duties under military command and a civil constabulary with civil duties, evoking memories of Napoleonic France. They wanted to combine features of the English and Irish Constabulary Acts so far as they were capable of adaptation to India. Under the Act of 1861 the new police was to be an armed civil constabulary not independent of civilian control. While the Gendarmerie was under the direct authority of the central government, in view of India’s size the new police was placed under the executive governments in the provinces. The general management of the force in each province was entrusted to an Inspector General who was to be a European civilian. While not letting go of magisterial supervision, police in each district was placed under the control a District Superintendent, also a European, seconded from the military. Borrowing the rank structure and even the nomenclature from the Irish constabulary the subordinate force was to comprise of Inspectors, Head Constables, Sergeants and Constables, the Head Constable being in charge of a police station, and the Inspector of a group of stations. Police stations corresponded to ‘brigades’ in France and ‘districts’ in Ireland. India had a long history of village policing which France and Ireland did not have. The new Thana police was therefore to be linked to the village police so as to make the latter a useful supplement to the former. So far the army alone had been housed in barracks; keeping policemen in barracks was Napoleon’s idea he applied to the Gendarmerie. Ireland had followed suit and now India too. The Colonial constabulary was to be paid, like the gendarmes, directly from the government treasury so that they did not become a burden on the local population.
Napoleon had also inherited from the revolutionary governments a less well-known ‘administrative police’, a civilian force which served partly, but not entirely, as the secret police of his sinister Ministers of Police, Joseph Fouché and Jean Marie Savary. In its seedier role, this force coordinated informers and spies, received and evaluated denunciations of one person by another, and enforced state censorship. Britain would have none of this on their mainland, in Ireland or in India. Under the new dispensation there was to be no detective body, no spies and informers, who had been the curse under the later Mugals and continued under the East India Company. Of course, political situation at home and in India was in due course to force the British government to bring in the spies and the censorship.
Napoleon was proud of his elite Gendarmerie; no one was enamoured of the new constabulary. Appearance and efficiency weresacrificed in the name of economy. Despite attempts at ‘civilianization’ the new police could not shake off the imprint of the Gendarmerie and the Irish Constabulary and took on a distinctly paramilitary appearance. As the officers entrusted with putting the new police in place were all Europeans seconded from the military, at least in the initial stages, some degree of militarization was inescapable. The uniform and the badges of rank adopted by the police bore close resemblance to that of the army. Police followed the army drill manual and there was too much emphasis on the physical aspects of training. The ‘service’ orientation expected in a civilian constabulary was never encouraged. Gradually the Colonial police developed the psyche of a ‘force’. The arrangement suited the British rulers and has continued to find favour with successive Colonial governments since independence. Police in India remains an ‘armed police force’ of the state, ‘paramilitary’ in body and mind. The ghost of Gendarmerie continues to haunt.