The dictionary defines a police State as “a political unit characterised by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.” Meaning a nation where government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. Also described as a place where there is “little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.”
There are examples of police States, which are usually not democracies. China today, Cuba under Castro, North Korea under the Kim dynasty, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar are police States.
Is India a police State? This can be answered by first asking another question: Can a democracy be a police State? The answer is yes, and in our time Russia is one such example. One could argue that Russia is not a real democracy and its elections are flawed but that same argument could be made for many other States including our own. The real question is whether the impulse of the State is to move towards greater liberty for individuals or greater restrictions and a police State.
On 11 July 2022, India’s Supreme Court said “democracy can never be a police State.” This statement was made on the issue of bail to individuals, and the court noted that most of India’s prison population comprised of undertrials, meaning those who had been accused but not convicted. The court said that arresting people and jailing them before trial “certainly exhibits the mindset, a vestige of colonial India, on the part of the Investigating Agency, notwithstanding the fact that arrest is a draconian measure resulting in curtailment of liberty, and thus to be used sparingly. In a democracy, there can never be an impression that it is a police State as both are conceptually opposite to each other.”
What the court appears to be indicating is that we are behaving as a police State though we are a democracy. A few days after this, the Supreme Court in another bench sent down a judgment which has validated the Enforcement Directorate’s near-unlimited powers in attaching properties and detaining people. This judgment undid a previous Supreme Court judgment which was in favour of individual liberties. Now, once again, the individual facing money laundering allegations can be jailed and, once jailed, will find coming out impossible even without conviction because of a reversal of burden of proof. This is similar to the condition, also validated by the Supreme Court, in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or UAPA where people once jailed on suspicion can forget about being released.