ABSTRACT
The Indian police are inadequate – structurally and ideologically – to meet with the policing needs of a prodigiously plural, economically aspirational and politically empowered democratic India. It has been scrambling, through trial and error, to cope up with the tensions unleashed by the dialectic between an inequitable social and economic order and a vibrant democratic polity that empowers its citizens to be aspirational. Conceived and created primarily to meet the needs of the British Empire in its largest colony, the police is class riven and yet to shed its feudalistic orientation.
