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Shailza
Hello, everybody.
Marshall Po
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Shailza
On 23 November, a small group of protesters gathered at India Gate to demand action on the alarming air quality in New Delhi. The demonstration ended with the arrest and detention of 17 people who were booked under provisions of the Bharti and Nya Sanhita for obstruction and for allegedly assaulting public servants. The root of the chaos was the demonstrators brazenness in linking the urban centric issue of air pollution with deeper concerns of capitalist exploitation and to the Adivasi struggles over jal jungle, zamin water, forest and land. Many of you may have seen the images that circulated soon after on your nearest digital devices showing a police officer bent over a protester on the pavement, pressing his hand forcefully against the side of the protester's face while two other officers dragged the person by their arms. This image was unsettlingly familiar. It echoed the photograph that came to symbolize the killing of George Floyd in police custody in the United States. Yet in India, custodial violence and the routine disproportionate use of force by the police often remain invisible, normalized or ignored. The book Policing and Violence in India intervenes precisely in this silence. It asks, why does India's police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution tasked with maintaining the law and order that has led to a normalization of daily violence. Professor Deena Heath, professor of Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool, and Professor Jini Loknita, who is the professor of Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, are the editors of this book published by the Speaking Tiger. So welcome to the podcast, Dina and Ginny.
Professor Jini Loknita
Thanks, Shailza.
Professor Deena Heath
Yes, many thanks, Shailsa.
Shailza
So the book begins with a mention of a series of workshops on policing held at the University of Liverpool and JNU between 2016 and 19. Could you take us back to that moment? What prompted you to organize these workshops? What kind of scholars and practitioners participated and what kind of concerns animated your discussions? And how did it finally, eventually evolve into this book?
Professor Jini Loknita
Thanks, Shaz. I'll just start it off. So really the Liverpool and the first JNU workshop was initiated by Dina and another colleague of ours, Santana Khanikar. And really the third one, where I also got involved in organizing, co organizing with them, is the core of this book where basically we tried to bring.
Shailza
In.
Professor Jini Loknita
Academics and practitioners, activists, sort of policymakers, as well as ex police.
Professor Deena Heath
Former.
Professor Jini Loknita
Prisoners who had now become human rights activists. And our attempt was to create points of conversation around policing across these different actors as well as different regions. So you would see people from Chhattisgarh, lawyers from Chattisgarh, Northeast Kashmir, and just those who were experiencing or thinking about everyday policing all coming together with scholars of policing in this particular workshop. And then subsequently a large part of that core became the book.
Professor Deena Heath
Thanks, Ginny. I would just add to that that one of the things that we wanted to do through these workshops was to initiate dialogue around a new body of scholarship that had begun to emerge in about the last 10 years of school. So we can see it as a new area for research really on policing and violence in India. And the challenge in terms of making that work accessible is. Well, it isn't. It's published largely by academic presses and is often highly theoretical. So we wanted to find a way to bridge that gap between this academic work that wasn't very accessible and the amazing work of so many others Gilly's just mentioned working directly in this area.
Shailza
Brilliant. Thank you so much for that. For our listeners, the book is organized into four broad sections. Part one traces continuities in police violence from the colonial to the post colonial period. Part two looks at the legal and judicial landscape, especially how courts, the law and other institutional actors, such as doctors, respond to custodial violence. Part three pushes us to think more critically and expansively about what police violence is, how it operates, and the Indian state's priorities towards policing. And finally, in the fourth part, there are interviews with scholars and experts who have been outspoken critics of police violence. So could you please walk us through the structure and explain the organizing of the book, especially the section titled Further Thoughts as a Reader. Actually it stood out for being particularly insightful. Was that a result of the workshop as well?
Professor Deena Heath
Thanks, Shaza. So I'll talk you through a bit about our ideas for the book in terms of how we ended up with this structure. So we wanted to address a range of issues. Now the first of these is the nature of policing and violence in colonial India and what did or did not change in the transition to Indian in the this issue crops up a lot in contemporary discussions about policing and violence in India, but we wanted to go deeper into the nature of such violence, particularly in relation to the state and the rationales behind it. So therefore, the first section of Policing and Violence in India, which includes a chapter by me on the colonial origins of police violence, also includes one by Bhavani Raman on martial law and policing and one by Raja Kumar and everyday Policing in 20th century Colonial India and the early decades of post colonial India. So this whole section in these three different chapters focus a lot on things like caste and state power. Secondly, we felt that insufficient attention is generally given, at least in public debate, to the role of the law and the courts as well as non state actors in facilitating financing here. And so that's why we diverted our second section to this issue. Two chapters by Abhinav Zakri on the role of the Supreme Court in such facilitation and Sharib Ali and Ishita Chakravarti on how the courts responded to police violence in relation to the Student Anti Citizenship Amendment act protest at venue and Jami amelia Lamia in 2019. And in terms of non state actors, we focus on the medical procedure professions facilitation of police torture as it went to thanks to Guinea's excellent chat on this. Thirdly, we wanted to make it clear that we aren't trying to demonize the Indian police, but rather to understand the reasons for the extralegal and excessive legal violence that as an institution it commits. It's only possible to really make sense of this by humanizing the police and understanding the system within which they have to work and how they're expected affected the operate. So we wanted to acknowledge, in other words, that policing in India and in many ways other contexts as well, in both the Global staff places impossible demands on the police and dehumanizes those in the lower ranks. Hence, the violence they commit is in part a response to these pressures. So that's why the third section of the book seeks to, as we put it, complicate understandings on police violence. This includes issues like the role of elite politicking in facilitating police violence in a chapter by Puja Tatiyogi, and how the police themselves can be distrusted and disregarded by the state, particularly in the case of minority members in a chapter by Atarzia on the Katmiri police. This section also analyzes the complex intimacies that can emerge between the police and suspect despite, or rather as a result of police violence, which Maya Suresh explored in a chapter on terrorism trial in Denmark. And then, as you mentioned, the final sect of interviews and reflections give us the opportunity to include a wide range of voices and reflections on policing and violence in India. So this includes former Haryana police official Vikesh Narrain, activist Mangla Verma Vi Kumar Abdul Lahit Sheikh, who was falsely charged for playing a role in the 2006 Mumbai train blast and incarcerated and tortured for nine years. The author, columnist and research policy analyst Andre Hazarika, along with the human rights lawyer Shalini Guerra, the political scientist Antona Kanika and the anthropologist Beatrice J. And these first three sections include, lastly, what we refer to and as you canoted, Charles, are further thoughts. And these are by the anthropologist Veena Gast, a lawyer researching human rights activist Vinda Grover, and the feminist historian Aphabacha P. Gita. And in these, they reflect on the chapters in each section and offer suggestions for further research at the palaces. So our idea with these additions to each section was to really highlight that this is an introductory volume. This is laying out issues and themes, concerns that we've explored. But there's a lot still to think about and those further reflections are an opportunity to begin doing that.
Professor Jini Loknita
If I can add one other thing to what Deena said, which is that just, you know, the three people who did write the further thoughts were a part of the JNU workshop, the final one, and there our attempt was also to make sure that when we are talking about policing, there's a way in which a lot of the times it's the scholars who directly work on policing only become a part of these conversations. And our attempt was to actually connect the conversations on policing to different sites of understanding state power, which I think all these three are well known for.
Professor Deena Heath
Thank you.
Shailza
Thank you both. That really brings the behind the scenes of how a book progresses from the idea to, you know, in its final published form. And really it also brings into light how many people, activists, scholars, lawyers have gone into conversation in bringing this book about. So the next question in that line I want to ask you, Jenny, in your introduction, you have noted that there's a long history of resistance to state repression in India by various civil and democratic rights organizations. As you noted, their work has challenged encounter killings, brought the issues, for instance, of political prisoners to focus, but they have not necessarily brought forth an anti carceral politics. Their own work, I think, including the works that your book brings together, point to, for instance, how historically caste has been central to policing and surveillance mechanisms. Given this tremendous scholarship we now have, do you think we need to systematically build anti carceral politics that attends to South Asian particularities where policing and prisons are not just tied to national imaginaries? And what in your opinion would that look like?
Professor Jini Loknita
Thanks, Shaza. That's a really important question. I think you're absolutely right that when we are thinking about police violence and state violence more broadly, there is a very rich history of civil liberty and democratic rights organizations, particularly the post emergency period, though of course the groups existed even earlier. You know, whether we think about pudr, pucl, apclc, cpdr, apdr. Right. But also in different regions which you think about Nagaland or Kashmir, again, very particular groups. And some of the richest analysis, I think, which doesn't get as much importance at times, was actually done in these civil liberty democratic rights reports, which are both situated in the methodology of fact finding missions, which is an extremely innovative method, but also really linked it to a more political economy perspective. So we do have that rich history. But as you said, I think one of the, maybe I'll put it a little differently, which is that there wasn't an analysis of state violence on its own terms or police and prisons as institutions. Because what you ended up seeing was that oftentimes state violence was seen as a response to movements. So a formulation that often came up was that of state repression. And so the state repression was often in relation to anti development movements or anti development movements of particular kinds or sort of struggles for basic land rights or other things. And sure, that is a very big part of how we must understand state violence, but what it didn't allow was the kind of sort of autonomous understanding of how police and prisons and in our book it's much more sort of thinking about policing as a site of state power. And that's sort of something that we really wanted to emphasize.
Marshall Po
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Professor Jini Loknita
Now to come to what does it mean to understand sort of the.
Shailza
Particular.
Professor Jini Loknita
Institutional history of policing and prisons in the South Asian context and especially in the Indian context? You of course, can't understand it without thinking about the importance of caste historically, but also other kinds of identities. Right. So, you know, caste, class, gender, sexuality, I would say, you know, religion is a big part of, you know, how who gets targeted. We see that in many of the chapters, whether it's by Sharia Bali or, you know, if you think about even the chapter by or the interview with Shalini Ghetto, she talks about how Christians are targeted as well. So I think what that does is to situate how policing functions both in relation to historical hierarchies, but also in terms of what the ideological orientation of particular political parties and governments are. So that's another very important element of how to situate it. So when we think about anti castral politics, I think we have to situate it both in terms of sort of the colonial continuities, the post colonial politics, and the societal hierarchies which keep shifting in different kinds of configurations depending on what the particular moment is. And that is sort of the framework that the book tried to adopt. And so even as to go back to where we started with this question, even as we see a very rich analysis, we draw from that, but also somehow want to bring particular attention to understanding policing and violence in India.
Shailza
Thank you. That's really insightful and gives us a lot to think about. And for our listeners, I just want to say, and going back to what you said, Ginny, the particular mode of fact finding, I know that the University of Pune has a rich archive of historical fact finding reports which have recorded documents on human rights violations and they're freely available on the Internet. So I encourage young lawyers and activists to explore that archive because it has a wealth of information documented through these kinds of fact finding reports. Coming back to you, Dina, could you talk about the nature of colonial policing and why it is important to make the connection to make that connection to understand police violence today?
Professor Deena Heath
Yes, shelza happy to think about this issue a bit more. I think it's important to make sense of the nature of colonial policing in order to understand police violence today, because we need to toss out long discredited ideas about random bad apples. Being responsible for police violence, which is the explanation that's given anytime a police officer is in a rare moment of accountability. Police brought before this is a useful, a useless, I should say, and even a harmful way of understanding police violence because it lets the system that produces it off scot free. To make sense of police violence, in other words, we need to understand the systems that produce and enable it. And since India's system of modern policing originate in the colonial era, we need to go back to that in order to help make sense of the contemporary era. And this requires looking at things like the nature and operation of colonial state powers. Jeanne was talking about previously in terms of the state in which, because colonial states were regimes of conquest, was predicated on violence. So what I tried to do is elucidate the role of the police within such systematized violence. Their role, as I put it, was to act as violent workers to keep the Indian population in a state of terror, to facilitate the operation of colonial power. So the Indian police were never conceived of, in other words, as a civil police such as that which emerged in Britain in the first half of the 19th century, but as a semi militarized force to maintain Britain's occupation of India. And this meant that police violence was enabled and facilitated through a variety of means, including law and judicial system, both of which were in turn designed to maintain British power. And these served to legalize a variety of forms of violence and to enable the perpetuation of illegal forms such as torture. But police violence was also facilitated through a range of means that were then inculcated within the system of policing in India, ranging from the dire pay and working conditions, which at the lower levels included starvation wages and dehumanizing treatment for the Indian police, in addition to poor supervision, divided loyalties and caste and clannishness, all of which created an in group dynamic in which violence was normalized. Police violence, in other words, was a product of the system into which all members of the Indian police were inculcated and which they needed to enact in order to survive and thrive within it. And since it's that system that continued in post colonial India, notwithstanding some changes, that's why we need to understand it in order to grapple with the ongoing problem of police violence today.
Shailza
Thank you, that's really helpful. And so to bring us to the current moment from there, given the expansion of police investigative powers under the new criminal code, along with the growing use, use of digital and technological infrastructures in policing, what do you see as the key implication for scholars and activists working on police violence today? How should this changing landscape shape the way we think about research, resistance, and accountability?
Professor Jini Loknita
So I think that's a really important question. I think there's a separate question on, you know, what has really changed in the new codes and what hasn't happened. But for now, I'll just go back to the question that you're asking, which is really about digital infrastructure. And I do want to just briefly say that whenever there has been an impulse to emphasize sort of a kind of a scientific development or a modernization of sort of infrastructure in policing, and we see different versions of that during different phases of policing. I mean, even in colonial times, when you think about the emergence of sort of particular ways of fingerprinting, or later, in more recent years, sort of thinking about scientific methods of investigation meant going to forensic techniques which were like narcoanalysis, brain scanning and others, all of which always come in the name of somewhere giving the appearance of being, you know, modern, scientific, technologically advanced, and in the process, almost creating a kind of a spectacle of moving forward from what is seen as very archaic forms of state or policing functions. And part of what one has to remind oneself of this history is to recognize that a lot of the times, particularly in the Indian context, it's often meant to show the uneven nature of policing as well, right? So just to take a very concrete example, there is the question of sort of, let's say, under the new laws, right? Under the new codes, actually, you're supposed to have a lot of digital videos, right, as forms of investigation. And when we look back in, for instance, the kind of videos that were originally a part of policing around custodial violence, right? We had this, for instance, this particular rule that postponed postmortems of custodial deaths would be sort of in the form of videos, and those would be shared. You found that actually a lot of the times they would not know who's going to videograph it. And so surveys have shown that basically they would get a sort of a wedding photographer or videographer to come in to do this postmortem of a video, basically. Video the postmortem. And there basically, the focus is on the head, right? Even if the injuries are all over the body. So the absurdities that can emerge when there is emphasis on creating a digital infrastructure without actually creating the conditions for it, often makes it a kind of appearance or a spectacle of digital progress, quote unquote, rather than substantively actually shifting anything. I do think that this is something that needs to be looked at very closely and not completely ignored, because that's really the sort of realm in which a lot of the future conversations on digital policing are going to be, which we had only mentioned a little bit in the book. But I think that is one area that needs further attention.
Shailza
Thank you. That's a fascinating little snippet of the videography incident. And I believe you've weaved in your previous work on truth machines and spoken about the current landscape. So let me bring you to the work in this book and your chapter and ask you to take us through the stages of medical checkups in the pre trial phase of criminal cases and the importance of relationship between the arrested person and the medical officer. For instance, in the Jairaj Binik's case, which you talk about in the chapter, why do existing procedures so often fail to provide any real space or forum to document and challenge egregious forms of custodial violence?
Professor Jini Loknita
Thank you. Shailza. I think you raise a really important question about the role of medical doctors. I think we still haven't had a lot of focus on the role that doctors play in sort of the pre trial process in particular. And that's the part that, you know, this particular chapter focuses on. Just very briefly. Jairaj and Benix were both shopkeepers in Tamil Nadu, just as in 2020. 2020 is something we remember both, of course, for the pandemic, but also for the protests against police violence first in the US against George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. Basically we saw a kind of a similar outrage around Jairaj and Bennik's case where basically the father and son were picked up on a made up pretext, as investigations later showed, taken to the police station in Satankulam. And basically they were beaten sexually, tortured for many hours through the night and the next morning, as the rule is, before a person is produced in front of the magistrate, they have to be taken for a medical exam. And witnesses later said family members and others who were at the hospital that they were bleeding profusely and the relatives were asked to bring in the clothes for changing. In other words, there was visible evidence of the injuries, the severity of the injuries. And yet when the medical practitioner, a doctor in the hospital, examined them, she ended up giving a certificate which saw them as fit for remand, which is that they were all right enough to be taken to the next stage in the pretrial process which is to be brought in front of the magistrate. And the magistrate merely looks at the mlc, the medico legal certificate that the doctor gives. In this case, the magistrate actually was on the second floor of the building, didn't even physically examine them, just saw them from above, you know, this is during the pandemic and basically sends them to the jail. And you know, the irony of the process also is that the two police who take these two to entry for the sub jail even co sign the register which actually mentions the severity of the injuries that were visible when the father and son were put in jail. The two were subsequently taken to the hospital later, once their conditions worsened and died in custody. So in this whole process, while the emphasis often is and of course should be on the police who were involved in the torture. But I think part of what one wanted to emphasize was to think about the role of the doctors. Right. You know, also because I think the doctors are somewhere both sort of, you know, have to both respond to the pressures of their profession which actually ask them to follow the Hippocratic oath of saving people's lives versus the pressure that they might feel from the state and the police. Because as we know, a lot of studies show, and you know, Amar Jaisani and others have done some work on this, on the role of doctors in the Indian criminal justice system and have pointed to the fact that sometimes the, you know, the detained wool would be brought in handcuffs or fetters and are asked and the doctors are asked to question them in front of the police, which is something that makes it very difficult for even the doctors to have that autonomy. So really this chapter was meant to point to the role of doctors in this structure of policing. And where does one find accountability in this context?
Shailza
Right, thank you for that. And just small things, I think what you've noted here, the location of the magistrate on the second floor and also going back to the first part of the book, where one of the chapters also talks about historically how police stations are stationed in particular areas, also brings forth, I think, something that we don't immediately think about the legal infrastructure, the infrastructure of the police stations that have an impact on the trajectory of cases that we see. So thank you for taking us through that. Now in the next sort of section of our conversation, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk to you and the listeners about your writing processes. As an early career academic, I am interested to understand how do you both approach writing itself and what's one key piece of advice you'd offer to young researchers who are still finding their voice as writers.
Professor Deena Heath
I think this is an interesting question in relation to this book, which has been quite a long time in the making because Ginny and I have quite different writing styles. I think I'm quite an obsessive perfectionist, and I don't start writing until I've done just about everything I feel I can do in terms of research. And then I meticulously plan out what I'll write with a detailed outline, and I'll write and rewrite, edit until I feel I've got a draft that I'm happy with and can share. I seem to need to see everything in my head before I can start writing and planning and so on. But then I'm an overly obsessive and detailed oriented editor as well. In terms of finding your voice as you write, I would say I'm not the best role model, but I encourage my PhD students to do a lot more freeform writing to jot down ideas, start writing bits of the chapter or other drafts in response to inspiration and so on, and to do some writing while you're researching, help them to elucidate their ideas. I don't think waiting until your ideas are fully formed is the best approach, but that's just the way that seems to work for me.
Professor Jini Loknita
Yeah, I'll just add, I mean, you know, one of the very interesting aspects of this process. Right. For me, it was actually my first or maybe my second, you know, attempt to do a edited book. Dina has been part of other projects. I've only been a part of another one very early on. So it was interesting to sort of think through this process. So I would say that a lot of the people in the workshop mode, right, we were able to get a very good group of people together, but they all, including me, have very different writing styles. And I would say that our attempt, as Deena said at the beginning, was that this book was meant to be for a more popular audience. So it was both a question of clarity, but also accessibility. And I would say that Dina worked tirelessly on everybody's chapters to really make it the way it is. We both, of course, read, gave comments, but really, I would say that the accessibility piece of it, clarity piece of it, is something that Nina worked really hard on. And that was very, very, you know, sort of slow, but also very, very important process where, you know, the book has got much more of a popular engagement, in part thanks to that. I will also say that we wanted to have that other format of sort of interviews in order to just make sure also to recognize that sometimes we only think of essays in one way. And so the interview format allowed us to also sort of be creative about different kinds of ways of engaging with materials. So that was another thing that we tried out. And I think it feels like that's also resonated with everybody.
Professor Deena Heath
Let me just add one thing to that, Ginny, that's really helpful. So I suppose for us, one of the Challenges book was not just that we had academics from different fields, but we had contributors from all different walks of life. Right. Some of whom write a great deal for their. In relation to their work and their activism, but in those cases, often very legalistic language, for example, language that isn't widely accessible beyond, say, the law profession. And we had others who were far more familiar with and brilliant at engaging people in a way that I would certainly struggle with, for example. So that in itself was a challenge. How do you bring all those different disciplinary expertises and styles of writing and ways of communicating with particular audiences to as widespread an audience as possible? So that's. That's one reason why, for this book, definitely, there was a lot of back and forth in the communicating and rewriting until we felt we had a voice, a collective voice that communicated everything we wanted to communicate in as accessible a way as possible. Yeah.
Shailza
And as a reader, I can say that all of that is visible in the sense that the collective voice is there, and one doesn't really pay any attention to the difference in expertise of the various authors who've contributed to the volume. Finally, I want to ask both of you, if a listener, especially a young student or an activist, had to take one key lesson or a central idea away from our conversation and your entire collection of work, what would you want that to be?
Professor Jini Loknita
I think for us, one of the reminders is that, you know, this book was conceptualized in its current form in 2020. Right. Where basically a lot was going on in terms of people's outrage globally. And interestingly, in India as well, there was far more conversations on films, on, again, a torture bill, on what happened in Jaraj and Bennik's. And yet the outrage doesn't stay. Right. So you have routine cases of police violence, custodial deaths, encounters, and yet you don't see the kind of outrage. And if this sort of brings attention to the enormity of police violence, the normalization of police violence in India, that would be something that would be really important for us.
Professor Deena Heath
I would agree with that. Ginny And I suppose I would say in a more general sense to just keep asking why things are the way they are and how they got to be that way. Is that always a good starting point for research and writing? But also the potential for positive change. And there are so many aspects of policing and violence and making sense of that that we really haven't even begun to tackle yet. And Ginny was talking there about really the passivity or the acquiescence or the relative silence in India about policing and violence, despite the horrific levels of it, if we're frank, that India experiences. So just thinking of a question which Ginny raised there about why that is so why is the Indian public, for the most part, willing to tolerate this? Right. Whereas we saw Black Lives Matter movements globally, we saw them in other parts of the global south, which. And with that, defund the police movements and so on, in India, those protests are muted. So why is that the case? For me as a historian, I would want to go back historically to think through these issues in terms of certainly for a people who were occupied and had a policing system that was designed to facilitate that occupation, the level of, I would say, to some extent, complicity, but certainly support for a lot of that violence definitely is something that really needs to be looked at and explored and. And for us to make sense of the here and now and to really tease through the here and now a lot more.
Shailza
I really appreciate both your reflections on this. So I'd like to end our conversation today by encouraging the listeners to spend some time with this very important book. To put it simply, come for the depth of expertise, but stay for the incredible ways in which the book prompts you to think about policing in India today without academic jargon, a strong historical lens, and with real political urgency. Thank you so much, Ginny and Dina, for your time and this conversation.
Professor Jini Loknita
Thanks so much, Elza.
Professor Deena Heath
Yes, many thanks.
Episode:
Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, "Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Origins and Contemporary Realities" (Speaking Tiger, 2025)
Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Shailza
Release Date: January 2, 2026
This episode dives into Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Origins and Contemporary Realities, a new edited collection examining the persistence, normalization, and roots of state violence in India. Through the voices of editors Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, the discussion explores the book’s genesis, its unique multidisciplinary structure, the colonial inheritances of Indian policing, and the urgent need for new frameworks to analyze and resist police violence. Thoughtful attention is paid toward how caste, law, medicine, and political structures reinforce legacies of brutality and impunity.
Workshops as Crucible:
The book emerged from a series of workshops at the University of Liverpool and JNU (2016–19), which brought together a cross-section of academics, practitioners, activists, policymakers, police officials, and former prisoners—creating unique interdisciplinary and regional dialogue.
Bridging the Accessibility Gap:
Editors aimed to make recent scholarship on policing more accessible, breaking out of the confines of academic presses and theory-heavy writing.
Four-Part Organization:
Inclusion of Diverse Voices:
Chapters and interviews progress from scholarly analysis to personal narratives (e.g., ex-officials, activists, torture survivors). “Further Thoughts” sections feature responses from prominent activists and thinkers to propel discussion.
Intent:
To raise big questions, lay groundwork for further inquiry, and prompt a reader’s own critical engagement.
Limits of Rights-Oriented Activism:
Civil and democratic rights organizations have historically focused on “state repression,” particularly in response to movements, but not necessarily on critiquing police and prisons as autonomous oppressive institutions.
Need for South Asian Frameworks:
The discussion urges building anti-carceral politics attentive to Indian realities: caste, class, gender, religion, and postcolonial state formation.
Deconstructing the ‘Bad Apple’ Myth:
Police as ‘Violent Workers’:
The Indian police, from inception, were a semi-militarized colonial force meant to terrorize and control, not serve as a civil police. This violence became normalized and systemically reproduced post-independence.
Collaborative Challenges:
Advice for Researchers:
Central Lesson:
India’s police violence is enormous and normalized; outrage is sporadic and quickly fades, allowing routine abuse to persist.
Invitation to Critical Inquiry:
Continuously question why systemic violence is tolerated and how historical complicity shapes the present; positive change is possible through persistent critical engagement.
On the Failure of Official Procedures:
“They were bleeding profusely… And yet when the doctor examined them, she ended up giving a certificate which saw them as fit for remand…”
— Jinee Lokaneeta, recounting the Jairaj and Bennix case [29:43]
On Systemic Nature of Violence:
“Police violence was a product of the system into which all members… were inculcated and which they needed to enact in order to survive and thrive within it.”
— Deana Heath [22:37]
On Muted Outrage:
“The outrage doesn’t stay… you have routine cases of police violence, custodial deaths, encounters, and yet you don’t see that kind of outrage.”
— Jinee Lokaneeta [41:23]
On Research and Change:
“Is that always a good starting point for research and writing? But also the potential for positive change.”
— Deana Heath [42:30]
Policing and Violence in India is a much-needed intervention that confronts how the Indian police force, shaped by colonial priorities, continues to carry out daily acts of violence that are systemically normalized and broadly ignored. The book (and this conversation) emphasizes the importance of moving beyond episodic outrage; instead, India must develop a deeper anti-carceral critique attentive to the realities of caste, law, and state power, as well as to ongoing technological changes in policing. The editors urge listeners and readers alike to continuously interrogate systems of violence and collectively imagine paths toward accountability and change—rooted in rigorous research, lived reality, and historical awareness.