Beatrice Jauregui is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is focused on studying police and military personnel’s experiences to better understand the relationship of authority, security, and democratic order. Recently she spent two years in Northern India conducting field research on local policing culture and institution, as well as collecting information for her two upcoming books. In this interview, Professor Jauregui discusses the main themes of her two books, the challenges she encountered in India, and provides a comparative analysis of policing in India and North America.
In Jauregui’s first book, Provisional Authority: Policing and Order in India, she delves into the issue of India’s police force and its power and authority. She says that most Indian police exhibits what she refers to as “provisional authority” – power that depends on the political climate, personal status, and the institutional capability to provide a social good. As a result, the police are paradoxically disempowered while being hyper-empowered. The idea of “provisional authority” is explored extensively in Jauregui’s first book, especially how low-ranking police officers perceive their social role, their responsibilities, and their capabilities in relation to “provisional authority”. In this book, Jauregui uses the ethno-historical approach to research because of its ability to connect the anthropological and historical aspects of policing. This particular method establishes the context in which events are taking place, and Jauregui says “it is impossible to analyze the current culture without studying the historical forces that have shaped the present”.
Another book is also in the works for Jauregui: this one will be focused on police labor politics, especially police unions and strikes in India. Again, the ethno-historical approach is used, this time to study how historical conditions and events help explain the findings of contemporary ethnographic fieldwork. For example, Jauregui examined a police uprising that took place in May of 1973 in Uttar Pradesh, a state located in Northern India, consisting mainly of constables attempting to form a police labor union in order to bargain for better working conditions. The uprising, which occurred throughout the state, was ultimately repressed by the Indian state military but many were killed or injured in the process. Since then, the working conditions of low-ranking police officers in India have not improved noticeably. Constables are still subject to very poor living and working conditions, and are often mistreated by senior officers. Although the 1973 uprising was an important historical event, as Jauregui points out, “there has been very little consolidated research on its causes, its aftermath, and what it tells us about some bigger issues, such as police authority and possibilities for police reform.” This event has been mostly erased from public memory and there is little to no ongoing discussion of it in relation to current calls for police reform. Through the ethno-historical perspective, Jauregui seeks to put Indian policing history back into discussions of contemporary policing issues. She chose this particular incident as the focal point of her second book to illustrate the importance of historical causes when examining today’s police disempowerment in India. By being cognizant of events in the past, it allows one to study the possibility of history repeating itself.
The policing situation in Northern India is obviously different than that of North America. Jauregui says that the biggest difference besides access to resources is probably the exercise of police patronage. While this activity is considered corruption in North America and is widely condemned, patronage is culturally routinized and pragmatically normalized in India. Jauregui traces this difference to the interplay between local culture and colonial history. While Canada was a settler colony where immigrants from Europe eventually became the social majority and their cultural ways dominated, India was a ruler colony where the masses of indigenous people eventually became independent and incorporated their own traditions into self-governance. Thus, the way that policing developed and was practiced by these different types of colonial governments still impact today’s policing structure in both places.
For Jauregui, there is an important message that she would like to get across with her research. Police forces are commonly perceived as an excessively powerful entity with a great deal of authority to do whatever they please with impunity. However, Jauregui’s research reveals significant challenges that face police in India and elsewhere. They are often disempowered due to the interplay of institutional structures and cultural histories; this research finding has important implications for Indian society and for policing as a global form.
-written by Lily Li, a second year student majoring in criminology and double minoring in contemporary Asian studies and psychology, and Katy Wang, a fourth year student in English and psychology at the University of Toronto
This article is part of a series of articles written by undergraduate students affiliated with the Asian Institute about Asian Institute affiliated faculty.
