Useful Notes / Khakis Carrying Lathis

Much like the United States, Law and Order in India is a State Subject. Which is to say, most States and Union Territories have their own police services, and are responsible for training, equipping and maintaining them. This results in a pretty diverse police service with varying levels of competency and calibre, but with Jurisdiction Friction being an expected problem.

The Boys in Khaki carrying Lathis

• The Mumbai Police generally tend to be the poster-child of Police services, with an air of Consummate Professional and Hardboiled Detective who takes no nonsense from anyone, is upright and honest, and relentlessly pursues their objective no matter what obstacles are in their way. This is Truth in Television for anyone who has actually been to Mumbai, and their sheer guts in facing down terrorists while armed with little more than sticks, bolt-action rifles and pistols - and still coming out on top - has won them considerable praise from damn near everyone.
• On the other side of the spectrum is...well, ask anyone who isn't Maharashtrian or a Mumbaikar and they'll say "our own boys suck". Not always true, but it's weird like that. Most forces are quite competent though, problems aside.
• The Punjab Police have earned fame for single handedly curbing the Khalistan insurgency, under the leadership of a legendary Director General KPS Gill. This was not an easy task, considering that it normally takes decades of concerted effort between the military, police and political leaders to end an insurgency. The Punjab police were given a free hand to curb Sikh nationalism by any means necessary and the mostly Sikh police force accomplished it in three years; between 92 and 95.

• They're nicknamed Khakis because of the Iconic Outfit of most police services. That said, the Uniforms change depending on the State and Territory, so you have Goan Police who dress in Whites, Mumbai Metrocops who wear black berets, and Delhi police, who wear peaked caps (even the constables!). It really depends on where you go, but the standard Uniform is Khaki Pants and Shirt with a beret, forage cap or peaked cap.
• The Police services tend to be split between the following -
  • Beat cops, AKA your rank-and-file Policemen and Constables.
  • Traffic Police - every driver's nightmare in India, with good reason. For the Traffic Police, not the drivers, since Indian drivers make the stuff you see on those Russian Dashcam videos on YouTube seem positively tame in comparison.
  • Detective Service - This one kind of depends. Some states let the Police Officers investigate the crimes fully, and some have a separate detective service. Maharashtra and Delhi are the most famous ones, but quite a few other states do keep separate services for investigation and regular policing.
  • Rapid Action Force - Deal with riots, natural disaster and other civil disturbances that are severe, but not bad enough to Summon Bigger Fish.
  • Central Armed Police - These are the “bigger fish that are summoned” when a situation is getting too big and widespread for state cops to handle. More on them below.
  • Most Metrocops have their own SWAT Divisions as well, though the concept is fairly recent in India and rose explicitly because of the increase in terrorist activity. Mumbai, as usual, got first dibs and created a full-fledged SWAT Team before every other Police service, mostly in response to the 26/11 Terrorist Attack in 2008. They don't usually call them SWAT, though - it's some variation on Task Force in most cases, usually because calling them SWAT makes it look like the American version, and the Indian police regard American cops as trigger-happy nutters (thank you, Hollywood!).
• Most Indian policemen and officers do not carry weapons, and have shown no real interest in doing so. The most they'll carry would be a truncheon or baton or Lathi as it's called - and the sight of them losing their temper and coming after someone waving those sticks is quite enough for people to not antagonize them. While Police Officers are expected to be packing heat (usually a revolver or a semiautomatic pistol), it is unusual enough that if they're seen with heat, it means things have gone seriously wrong somewhere. If the Constabulary absolutely have to carry arms, they normally use L 1 A 1 SLR Rifles, the locally-made INSAS Rifles or SMLE MkIII* Lee-Enfields (yes, they still use them).
• Indian police also generally tend to fall into two stereotypes - brutally corrupt and petty thugs in uniform or jaded but still noble enforcers doing a thankless job that they don't get respect for.
  • One of the reasons for this is that the modern Indian Police Services were left mostly unchanged from the British system, then known as the Imperial Police and who were regarded as The Quisling at best and outright traitors and sociopaths at worst by Freedom Fighters, since they were helping keep the Empire's grip over the subcontinent without question. The fact that both services share the same acronym (IPS) has not helped matters in the slightest.
  • The other (and the main one) reason for this is the nature of the service - with State Governments in charge, they're often used as dogsbodies and personal security by Government Officials and Politicians as a way of flaunting their status, and are often used to settle political and personal scores as opposed to actual policing - to the detriment of everyone else.
  • While it has improved considerably since the bad old days, and the level of corruption depends from place to place, it's still an unfortunate problem with law enforcement in India in general. While not approaching Russian levels of ludicrous, it's still prevalent enough that not a few leaders and voices have asked that the Police be portrayed somewhat better, since an erosion of respect for the Khakis is hardly a healthy attitude, since low morale and disrespect simply makes it easier for them to turn bad. Critics counter that respect is earned, not demanded. So it's still very much a work in progress.

The "Encounter" Specialists

• What happens when the Cowboy Cop meets Vigilante Man.
• As you've no doubt noticed, India isn't exactly a bastion of good governance - there's an endemic streak of corruption and inefficiency across most sectors, and the Police and Judiciary are no exceptions. This means that quite a few people just get clean away with crimes, simply because they have the right connections or a lot of money or because they are the rule-makers.
• The result is Encounter Killings. Basically, if a Police unit or individual cops thinks that some crook is going to get away, they don't bother with the whole business of hauling them to court - they just blow them away the first chance they get. This is depressingly common across much of India, and worse, the public approves of it, since they have very little faith in the notoriously slow legal system that is India's judiciary, and they don't trust the Government to punish wrongdoers because of endemic corruption and inefficiency.
• The Mumbai Police was notorious for this, even setting up a "Special Encounter Squad" unit which focused exclusively on killing gangsters and Mafiosi, and they racked up a massive kill-list of mobsters during their time of operations (more than four hundred of them). Views on their operations aside, they genuinely did make Mumbai safer and cleaned out the Mafia from many parts of the city, so the public greatly approved of their work, feeling that The Extremist Was Right and it was the only way to clean Mumbai's entrenched organized crime. The State Government also tacitly supported them, since it meant that a lot of Mafia-backed Politicians got their feet cut out from under them, and a number of the members of the Unit went on to become Mumbai's top cops explicitly as a result of their work as "Encounter Specialists". Make unkind comments about them in Mumbai at your own risk.
• To say that all of this is controversial is putting it mildly. Violation of due-process aside, it also happens that a number of those "Encounters" are simply the Police settling scores with someone they don't like, a frame-up job, or with substantial collateral damage. It hasn't dampened the public's enthusiasm for it, with "do an Encounter" being a euphemism for solving a problem that won't go away because of corruption or political influence. It also doesn't help that most of the critics tend to be the sort of Upper-Class Twit that an American would call "snooty liberal elites in their ivory towers". Some things don't change across the world.

Central Law Enforcement

CRPF:

BSF and ITBP:

CBI:

NCB:

Enforcement Directorate

NIA:

The Khakis in fiction

• Many Bollywood movies feature an intrepid khaki clad peaked cap wearing Inspector fighting all movie long to bring down the Big Bad and his entire gang. Famous examples being
  • The Thakur played by Sanjeev Kumar in Sholay.
  • Amar played by Vinod Khanna in Amar Akbar Anthony
  • Both Ram and Lakhan in Ram Lakhan. Ram is a By-the-Book Cop while Lakhan starts out as a Corrupt Cop, but changes.
  • ACP Rathaud played by Aamir Khan in Sangharsh.
  • Inspector Karan Saxena played by Sunny Deol in Tridev
  • Inspector Ganga played by Madhuri Dixit goes Dirty Harriet in Khalnayak.
  • In the Girls Behind Bars movie Anjaam, Shivani takes down two corrupt khaki clad cops - the sadistic warden of her prison and the Dirty Cop who arrested her on made up charges.
  • Akshay Kumar mostly played Inspectors in his early roles; the more notable being Mohra and the “Khiladi” trilogy consisting of Khiladi, Main Khiladi Tu Anari (a remake of The Hard Way) and Sabse Badaa Khiladi a noir film.