ABSTRACT
Many of the tricks of the trade in relation to bribery and the use of police violence are very similar in both countries except that in India the practice of staging extrajudicial killings – ‘encounters’ – has become almost an unofficial policy. In contrast, there seems to be a degree of intolerance towards unlawful/excessive police violence among the Chinese masses. The reasons for the persistence of police corruption lay in factors such as the ubiquitous nature of the Chinese and Indian police means that they impact more aspects of the daily lives of the population than is expected in Western societies, thus affording them more opportunities for confrontation and corruption; police attitude of father versus child (China) and master versus servant (India) leads to a culture of tolerance towards corruption/malpractice but in India this is underscored by the notion of jugaad; the politicisation of police and criminalisation of politics further compound the risk of rule by man rather than the rule of law in both countries.
