– Firasha Shaikh
Recent pro-Palestine solidarity demonstrations across the world share a disturbing common denominator, i.e. egregious police brutality.
The visuals of American police officers violently bashing college-going youth with batons, disrupting their encampments, and storming campuses armed to the hilt with weapons and gear that are meant for riots and military operations, against unarmed university students and other protestors, evoked uneasy déjà vu.
Four years ago, the Indian police stormed the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia, a Central University, in the national capital city of Delhi. Students protesting against the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act, a discriminatory citizenship law, were violently attacked and beaten up, and many were left with fatal or long-lasting injuries. The incident was by no means the anomaly and nor would it be the last. It was in keeping with the long legacy of excessive use of force levied against citizens exercising their democratic rights to protest against injustice.
This is an established pattern in other student-led protests on various issues, the farmers’ protests or the protests by the Dalit-Bahujan community against caste-based atrocities. And who can forget, the uniquely horrific use of pellet guns that blinded and maimed thousands of Kashmiri people, most notably in 2016?
The other chilling similarity, particularly regarding the American university protests, is the way the police stood as silent spectators as mobs of violent Zionist/pro-Israel supporters attacked pro-Palestine protestors.
It was eerily reminiscent of how, in India, time and again, majoritarian mobs attack Muslim localities, burning and destroying Muslim homes and businesses. In the majority of the cases, the police not only stand idly by, ghostly spectators to ghastly violence; but they have been repeatedly accused of aiding and abetting the aggressors.
What is disturbing is that despite such instances, the idea that the police are inherently neutral and good-faith actors is overwhelmingly taken for granted. The occasional incidents of police brutality are seen as justified, even necessary because the protestors were the ones at fault for turning “violent”.
The burden of nonviolence is placed on those whose entire lives are shaped and impacted by the violence of protracted socio-economic and political injustices. However, the violence of the state and its agencies is rarely questioned.
While the use of police for clamping down on political protests is as old as the history of the nation-state itself, the recent protests are a revelatory moment. They are a moment of “sharpening of contradictions”, in the sense, that now, more than ever, it has become increasingly clear that the police as an institution can no longer claim to be a good-faith actor anymore.
If it were true that the police existed for the protection and security of common citizens, why were police with military-grade guns and ammunition deployed against unarmed college students who had a simple demand: stop funding Israel’s genocide and divest that aid to the Palestinian cause?
The theme remains the same; peaceful and reasonable demands are met with unbelievable levels of aggression and violence, be it the demands of the anti-CAA protests, the farmer’s protests, Dalit-Bahujan protests against caste-based injustices, among others.
From New York to New Delhi, from Amsterdam to Amman, to occupied Palestine, there seems to be little that sets apart police forces and their violent tactics across nations.
Police and IDF in the occupied West Bank routinely arrest Palestinians on fake charges, similar to the incarcerations on fabricated charges of terrorism of Indian Muslims, which in turn, mirrors the surveillance and policing of Black localities in the US.
The similarity in police tactics should be a wake-up call for all of us.
The refrain that ‘no one is free until all of us are free’ takes on a whole new meaning when we realise just how interconnected systems of oppression are. They fuel and fund each other. Israel funds violence in other nation-states, by way of arms exports, joint defence and security collaborations, surveillance and weapons technologies, etc.
India is now following Israel’s lead in the violent dispossession and demolition of houses of Indian Muslims. Indian security agencies have been collaborating with Israeli defence agencies for many years. It is a matter of great shame that even as the genocide of Gaza is being live-streamed, Indian police once again conducted a collaborative exercise with Israel.
Such collaboration also takes place regularly between the police forces of the United States and Israel.
It is therefore clear that the police exist to uphold the hegemony of the ruling class, at the expense of marginalised and occupied communities. They are, in Brazilian academic, Acacio Augusto’s words, “the technology of government, practitioners of violence, and bureaucrats with weapons”.
The modern state contains resistance to its hegemony and the ruling classes safeguard their wealth, via the institution of the police.
It’s not that the police show their true nature only during protests.
The violence engendered by the police is sustained and perpetual. In the Indian context, a large volume of literature and evidence exists as to how the police are structurally biased and specifically violent towards the Muslim community. Most recently, in Sambhal, UP, police have been accused of engaging in violent voter repression, even bringing in PAC (Provincial Armed Constabulary), allegedly, since far greater levels of force are used in Muslim-majority areas.
The masses decry the violence of the nation-state when it is no longer possible to look away, like in the case of governments collaborating over genocide and police brutality when the genocide is condemned.
But what we don’t realise is that this violence did not happen overnight.
It was many decades in the making; the constant police-state regime of surveillance, arrests, incarcerations without trial or bail, denial and deprivation at the socioeconomic level, marginalisation, forced displacement, the promise of any resistance to the oppression being met with brutal force; all of this is precisely the kind of injustice at a lesser but sustained level, that eventually paves the way for injustices of greater proportions.
In India, any possibility of alternative political futures; of forming even the most rudimentary forms of ‘peaceful’, ‘nonviolent’ resistance measures is thwarted by the constant fear of police repression.
To echo Angela Davis, we can no longer afford to accept the things we cannot change. We have to change the things we cannot accept.
And it is unacceptable and unconscionable that a supposedly democratic institution should be able to exercise such brute force with impunity against the people.
Practically, at the most basic level, we can make two major demands from the Opposition, who are claiming to be an alternative to the present regime. We have to intervene at the structural level.
First, re-imagining police reforms.
While there have been several police reform committees, such as the National Police Commission (1977), the Padmanabhaiah Committee on Police Reforms and Malimath Committee on Criminal Justice System (2000) and Review Committee (2004), and others, their recommendations are yet to be implemented.
The problem, however, is not implementation, but the nature of the reforms being suggested itself. Police brutality exists because of disproportionate power coupled with a lack of accountability.
The solution then, would not be increasing police capabilities through technology, training, or even, increasing representation within the police force, as these committees suggest.
Therefore, secondly, we need to defund and dramatically scale down police power. To increase transparency and accountability from the institution.
Most importantly, to invest in the project of elimination of socio-economic inequalities, building social harmony, and reducing anti-Muslim bigotry and casteism, and the onus of doing so lies on the majority community.
Rather than increasing the number of cops, what if we tried addressing the root causes of crime, lawlessness, violence, bigotry, and fascism in society?
It is incumbent on us to imagine and work towards a world without the threat of this violent repression ever-looming in our midst.
There has never been a more critical juncture in our recent history to seriously question the institution of the police and its role in the oppression of marginalised communities.
[The writer holds a postgraduate degree in Political Science and is currently working as Research Associate at the Centre for Study and Research (CSR), New Delhi.]
