ABSTRACT
This work has argued that India’s coercive network was both more expansive and more vulnerable than has previously been acknowledged. This final chapter draws together the conclusions of this work by tracing the changes which occurred in the coercive network over the years between 1919 and 1956. These conclusions, it is proposed, have ramifications in two areas of scholarship. First, they call for a significant expansion of the study of punishment and state violence not just in the British empire, but across the colonial world. Second, this work casts a new light on the difficulties faced by India’s twenty-first century coercive network. In turn, this final conclusion suggests that the nature of the postcolonial state more generally deserves careful reevaluation. At the beginning of the period under consideration, the mechanisms
designed to shepherd individuals impartially and systematically through criminal justice institutions regularly seized up under the pressures generated by large-scale unrest. As a result, incarceration coupled with a quotidian jail regime aimed at instilling discipline in individuals was not the predominant form of punishment in India. For the satyagrahis who did manage to get into jails the disciplinary regimes which they followed were often of their own design. For the majority of the population involved in large-scale unrest, penal tactics tended to be spectacular and collective. Police used prisons to house people whom they had rounded up en masse without evidence. Even the punishments of those convicted and sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment were calculated as part of a larger equation of justice which had little to do with the crimes allegedly committed. When this type of justice eluded the authorities, collective fines proved a ready substitute. Bodily humiliations were inflicted indiscriminately under the assumption that such spectacular sanctions would restore ‘law and order’. The use of firepower and airpower was considered appropriate punishment for collectives whose members threatened persons or property. Over the next forty years punishment remained collective to a surprising degree. Fines imposing joint liability on residents were adapted to the industrial era, and, with the rise of identity politics, co-opted by political parties. Firepower remained a common punishment for large-scale violence.
