Concept, category and claim: insights on caste and ethnicity from the police in India

Abstract

Drawing upon contemporary conceptual understandings of race and ethnicity, this essay examines their relevance to ways in which the meaning and effects of caste are transformed within the everyday Indian state. Ethnographic insights from the police in Karnataka demonstrate the continuum of analytical concept, social category and political claim: different moments along this continuum allow for specific individual and institutional constructions of identity. Analysing caste and ethnicity in this fashion pushes further the porous boundaries of affinity and identification with concept, category and claim, i.e. with the politics of participation, representation and inter-relations. ‘Training’ processes to engender change and lessen discrimination by the police, therefore, need to use this complexity as a starting point, and root their methodologies in the notions of ‘dignity’, rather than ‘diversity’, critiqued for being flawed in its assumptions of difference and multiculturalism, and its inability to invoke a sense of social justice.

Keywords:

• Race
• caste
• ethnicity
• police
• diversity
• India

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank this journal's anonymous reviewers, Paul Amar, Barbara Harriss-White, Vijayendra Rao, Pradeep Chibber and colleagues in the South Asia Colloquium at Berkeley for their comments on this paper.

Notes

1. A clear distinction is drawn here between the ‘state’ and a ‘State’: the ‘State’ refers to the constituent units of the Indian federation, in this case the province or State of Karnataka; these are further divided into administrative units known as ‘districts’. The term ‘state’ is used technically for public authorities, or the state apparatus as a set of political, administrative and coercive institutions and organizations, headed and co-ordinated by an executive authority, the government (based on Skocpol's ‘state-centred’ definition [1985]).

2. The conceptual and ethical dilemmas, coupled with the realities of such ethnographic research, have been extensively explored elsewhere, including in Gunaratnam (2003) and Young (2004). Marks (2005), in particular, looks at these issues while studying the police in a multi-racial society such as South Africa. Feminist critiques of knowledge production have long problematized the notion of ‘objectivity’ and affirmed the partial and situated nature of research (Haraway 1991; Harding 1991; 2004; Ali 2006).

3. The project is officially called the Gender Sensitisation and People-Friendly Police Project (Karnataka State Police–UNICEF); it began in Bangalore in 2001 out of informal discussions between senior police officers and UNICEF members of staff, and went on to become a State-wide training project in 2002. I was part of the project from its inception, jointly coordinating it till 2004, when I became sole coordinator, working with the Additional Director General of Police (Recruitment and Training), the designated Nodal Officer for the project, as well as the Programme Officer (Child Protection), UNICEF Hyderabad, along with colleagues who are variously activists in child rights, sexual rights and activism around queer politics, and community mobilization for rural development. I resigned from the project in 2007, to continue with my doctoral dissertation on the police, and to enable interviews that might have been difficult to do, from an ethical perspective, while still working on the project.

4. Collated from the Annual Report of the Police Department for the year 2007, Karnataka State Police, Government of Karnataka (2007).

5. Collated from Data on Police Organisations in India, a report put together by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D), Government of India, as of 1 January 2005 (Government of India 2001).

6. The All-India services are so classified because officers serve in both the Central and the State governments; they include the IAS, the IPS and other such services like the Indian Forest Service. Government of India, or Central Government services include, amongst others, the Indian Foreign Service, the Railways and Customs and Excise.

7. For the purposes of this essay, by junior officers I mean here Deputy Superintendents and below; while with the senior officers, I mean Assistant Superintendents and above.

8. In fact, as mentioned earlier, British India re-invoked the varna system during the census process in order to make ‘sense’ of this complexity (see Dirks 2001); it would be misleading, however, to overstate this argument to the extent that Dirks does, in claiming that ‘caste’ was entirely a colonial construction.

9. Both Kothari (1964) and Srinivas (1987) have demonstrated the mutability of the caste system, the latter by theorizing the process of adopting cultural characteristics through which castes achieve upward mobility (‘Sanskritization’) and the former through his detailed work on the electoral politics in India.

10. Religious conflict has included both Hindu–Muslim clashes, but also increasingly, discrimination against the negligible proportion of Christians in the State; in September 2008, for instance, there was violence in Mangalore and elsewhere in Karnataka, with the desecration of church property by right-wing Hindu groups and threats against practising Christians (see, for instance, The Times of India, Bangalore, 16 September 2008).

11. I have put down Thimmaiah's projected estimates and the test survey results of the 1989 Chinappa Reddy Commission Report, as it clearly demonstrates the unreliability of data and the differences of order depending on what criteria are used (see Thimmaiah [1993] for details). Such ‘defective data’ are politically sensitive and can do ‘considerable injustice’ (Thimmaiah 1993, p. 140). However, they give an estimate of the relative importance of these groupings.

12. While this is intuitively understood, I am currently working on a more analytical exposition of these notions in my forthcoming doctoral dissertation, tentatively entitled ‘Bringing the police back in: policing and the state in India’.

13. Frequently in India, in common parlance, but particularly with those who inhabit the state and use technical or bureaucratic terms, people mix English and the local language(s); this combination of Kannada and English, therefore, is unsurprising. Most of my conversations and the workshops conducted during my time with the Gender Sensitisation and People-Friendly Police Project (2001–2007) and interviews after my resignation in 2007 slipped in and out of English, Kannada and, occasionally, Urdu or Hindi. However, there is a language division based on position, status and class: these conversations were conducted primarily in Kannada with the junior officers, and primarily in English with the senior officers.

14. See, for instance, the attempt of Kodagu Gowdas from the district of Kodagu (formerly known as Coorg) to move their classification from Category IIIA to IIA claiming both a different caste ancestry from the Vokkaligas, and a greater level of economic deprivation (‘Kodavas seek change in BC category’, The Hindu, 26 November 2004).