Provisional Authority. Police, Order, and Security in India. By Beatrice Jauregui. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016.

• Date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12288
• Published date: 01 September 2017

Book Reviews

Jennifer Balint, Editor

Provisional Authority. Police, Order, and Security in India. By Beatrice

Jauregui. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Mark Brown, School of Law, The University of Sheffield

For many among us the idea of police authority being anything but

secure would be novel. Shored up on the one hand by the state’s

monopoly of force and on the other by unwavering commitment

from democratically elected governments, the notion that police

authority may be in some way provisional barely merits thought.

Indeed, the very firmness of this presumption is reinforced and

made manifest by its occasional disruption, such as in the case of the

violent protests against police brutality in the United States in

recent years and the concomitant rise of the #BlackLivesMatter

movement. The exception confirms the rule.

My first experience of the provisionality of police authority —

its contingency and conditionality — took place on a very cold and

bleak afternoon in January 2005 in the city of Srinagar, Kashmir, a

disputed region of Northern India. As I stood in a city street an

armored police vehicle rounded the corner and came upon a car

double-parked, the driver at the wheel but the car blocking the way.

The scene that followed undid my understanding and presump-

tions about policing. First, the driver of the police vehicle honked

and honked, while the car driver studiously ignored the implicit

demand to move on. Second, the policeman at the wheel exited the

vehicle, lathi (long baton) in hand, smashed the offending driver’s

window, dragged him from the car and began to beat him on the

ground. Third, thinking that my presence as a westerner might in

some way temper the exercise of police violence I stepped forward,

making myself clearly visible on the pavement. The police officer

looked up at me, then got back down to the job of beating the

errant driver. As the bloodied driver was shoved back behind the

wheel to clear his obstruction I walked away, chastened yet

powerless.

Beatrice Jauregui’s Provisional Authority: Police,Order,and Security

in India considers each of these phenomena as well as a host of

Law & Society Review, Volume 51, Number 3 (2017)

V

C2017 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

735