WOMEN IN POLICE IN INDIA: A Journey from Periphery to Core

The police in the contemporary society are the most visible part of the bureaucracy symbolizing authority, stability and order. Policing is one of the world’s most masculinized occupations and the struggle for opening this masculine domain to women has been long and hard. The factors responsible for such change are better education, legal enactments, and changing socio-cultural values. The philosophical root of this ‘integrated model of policing’ is liberal feminism which emphasize that women ought to be treated exactly the same as men and perform all the mainstream police duties like their male counterparts. However, in a country like India, it is still debatable whether an ‘integrated model’ or ‘gendered model’ should be followed while assigning duties to women in police.

In an effort to attend to Jennifer Brown’s western model of integration of women in police to the Indian context, the book Women in Police in India. A Journey from Periphery to Core explores the power structures that define and circumscribe the lives of women in the police force and how women negotiate within the patriarchal structure of the police force in India.

The book deals with the issue of an intersection between class, rank, and gender in understanding the professional lives of women police personnel in India. These issues are not only seen from the feminist perspective, but also from the administrative point of view to understand its impact on the governance of the country. How the presence of women police force will impact the public policy? What problems do they confront in trying to influence decision making? The book addresses all such issues and more.