The administration of public order in colonial India used the law by way of a twin strategy. On the one hand, it emphasised an ideological notion of ‘the rule of law’ whilst, on the other hand, it created a catalogue of exceptions through the delineation of certain problem categories to which the rule of law did not apply in the usual way. Ever since the formation of the first Law Commission in 1835, the colonial administrators in India argued for the necessity of a new legal code that would deliver impartial justice, even though it took until 1893 for this promise to be truly realised, eventually leading to the removal of racial exemptions to the rule of law. At the same time, the operation of colonial law always remained dependent on a basic premise of exclusion. It started with creating problem categories like the Thugs and other criminal tribes in the nineteenth century. However, it later extended – as the nationalist movement was gathering force – to include, at least potentially, an entire disloyal indigenous population. The initial marking of such problem categories for the colonial state depended on a moral distinction between criminality and non-criminality. The later extension of legal exceptionalism to potentially the entire population introduced a new language of governance predicated on notions of war and emergency and a categorical separation between friends and foes in Carl Schmitt's sense. The central question that the chapter aims to investigate is the nature of the tactics that the colonial state would resort to to maintain what it termed public order. Also, can a state of exception be unleashed without a necessity? The chapter will highlight that when the authority of the colonial state was challenged, it resorted to three different tactics. It could declare an emergency, granting special powers to civil authorities; call in the military to aid the civil administration; and declare a state of martial law. The underlying logic of order was often based not on any principle of ‘the rule of law’ at all, but on risk-management calculations that depended once again on the demarcation of certain classes of people as problem categories. The exceptional laws designed to deal with such people involved a short-circuiting of standard procedures of law.