Policing and Pluralism in South Asia

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Policing is a core state function and public-facing agency that shapes citizens’ experience of the state. Practices of inclusion and exclusion, both within the police force as well as in its treatment of citizens, are consequential to how citizens experience and perceive public security. Our panel, Policing and Pluralism in South Asia, explores this theme. In India, violence against women and protest activity have risen steadily in the past decade. Police agencies are first responders in both arenas. Four empirically-driven papers engage distinct, but interrelated questions on policing in a plural society: How do police agencies implement measures to improve officer gender sensitivity and responses to crimes against women? What is the efficacy of these strategies? Why does gender inclusion in the police force not necessarily translate into gender integration? Finally, how does the caste and religious identity of protesters influence police permissions for peaceful protests? Accessing police administrative records is particularly challenging in India since police agencies are wary of outside scrutiny. Still, all four papers draw on a rich array of new qualitative and quantitative field evidence. Our panel also highlights the advantages of methodological pluralism by studying policing through multiple methods and analytical lenses.

Women are among the least likely to approach the police for assistance, evidenced by globally low levels of reporting of crimes against women. These dynamics are particularly acute in India. Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, Akshay Mangla, and Sandip Sukhtankar examine state initiatives in Madhya Pradesh to make the police force more responsive to women through the creation of Women’s Help Desks (WHDs): dedicated spaces within police stations staffed by trained officers, along with the deployment of additional female personnel. The study combines a large-scale randomized controlled trial (covering 180 police stations in 12 districts serving a population of 26 million) with citizen (n=6500) and police (n=1900) surveys, and over 18 months of qualitative research in police stations, to examine the impact of the WHD intervention on: officers’ views on gender, crime registration and police handling of women’s cases; the rates at which women approach the police and their satisfaction upon doing so.

How does the state administer women’s rights against violence? Using twenty-six months of participant observation and interview data with Indian law enforcement personnel, Poulami Roychowdhury details an alternate system she terms incorporation: where police officers eschew control and integrate women with organizational connections into regulatory practices. Incorporation responds to specific challenges, namely the limited capacity of the police to enforce laws in the face of organized demands for women's rights. Through these findings, she theorizes how institutional conditions shape the governance of gendered violence by altering the perceptions and tactical interests of the front-line state.

How and why women are marginalized within public agencies remains understudied. Using original micro-level data on crime in India, Nirvikar Jassal highlights the patterns of exclusion faced by women in the police force. By classifying India's Penal Code, he uses an instrument to demonstrate that women are tasked with specific cases, especially 'non-heinous' gendered crimes that the bureaucracy prefers to address informally. Because policewomen are tasked with---rather than self-select into---arbitrating sexual- or dowry-harassment, they are impeded from serving in cases seen as high-prestige, including investigating murder and rape. Nevertheless, female supervisors are able to mitigate such occupational segregation; regression discontinuity estimates reveal that they are more likely to allocate policewomen diverse tasks, and they play a causal role in assigning female investigators more cases. He argues that without an equitable division of labor or female leadership, a 'representative bureaucracy' may not translate into an egalitarian institution because newly represented groups may simply be pushed toward tasks seen as low-prestige.

A common form of policing protests in cities is requiring permits be issued for them in advance. Amit Ahuja, Rahul Hemrajani, and Rajkamal Singh study protest policing. Protest organizers apply for protest permits to the police, who hold the discretion over either granting or rejecting the application. The authors ask, why are some protests allowed by the police while others are rejected? To answer this question, they use police records to build an exhaustive dataset of 4921 proposed and actual protest events between 2016 and 2019 at Jantar Mantar, the most prominent state designated protest site in India’s capital, New Delhi. They evaluate how the caste and religious identity of a protesting group, its size, demands, and tactics affect its likelihood of obtaining police permission.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Chair

• Devesh Kapur Johns Hopkins SAIS

Discussant

• Susan L Ostermann University of Notre Dame

Individual Presentations

• Engendering Policing: Evaluating Reforms to Increase Women’s Access to Security - Akshay Mangla, University of Oxford; Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, University of Virginia; Sandip Sukhtankar, University of Virginia

• Incorporating Organized Women: Theorizing Police Responses to Domestic Violence - Poulami Roychowdhury, McGill University

• Policing and Violence Against Women: Gendered Patterns of Case Disbursal in India - Nirvikar Jassal, Stanford University

• Policing Peaceful Protests in a Democracy - Amit Ahuja, University of California, Santa Barbara; Rahul Hemrajani; Rajkamal Singh, University of California, Santa Barbara