Independence from British rule ushered in an era of unprecedented opportunity to construct a new polity in India according to the principles of democratic citizenship and nationalism. However, not all civil servants of the new state were equally enthusiastic about the new political climate. Many of them maintained an underlying distrust of ordinary Indian citizens that would have been more appropriate for colonial times. Ram Kinker Singh, the district magistrate of Etah in the United Provinces (UP), for instance, lamented in official communication in 1949 that since independence, ‘the Police does not inspire fear’ among the masses. He further deplored that ‘ignorant and illiterate people have got erroneous and perverted conceptions of freedom’ and believed that they now had ‘no respect for authority’. Many police officers in the new nation also did not have a favourable opinion about the general public order and the citizen population in particular. The superintendent of police (SP) of Bahraich, for example, concluded that ‘with the advent of freedom the public at large had developed peculiar psychology of confusing liberty with license’. He felt that this resulted from a fundamental distrust between the police and the public that had remained unchanged since the British departed. For this reason, the public did not cooperate with the security forces when dealing with criminals.

These comments came in the wake of a complex discussion between various departments of the bureaucracy responsible for maintaining public order and peace in what was soon to become the state of Uttar Pradesh. These high-ranking bureaucrats sounded uncannily like their erstwhile colleagues of the British Raj, who had stressed many times before that Indians could only be given good government because they were unsuited to enjoying free government. For the colonisers, Indians could not be trusted with their freedom. Engaging with historical contingencies of the politics of public order in India, the main question that this book investigates is: what are the practices of sovereignty that sustained colonial governmental attitudes in a postcolonial India? To this end, it surveys colonial legality and its evolution. It will reveal the nature of legality, both colonial and postcolonial, and how exceptions or extraordinary measures became an integral part of it.