The colonial policing roots of today’s data politics

Data is at the top of everyone’s mind this year: how it’s collected, where it’s stored, who can access it and how it’s used.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a data rights NGO, warns in a new report that law enforcement agencies have been partnering with tech companies to collect large swaths of data on private citizens without warrants under the guise of “fighting crime” or “reducing lawlessness.” Police have been using facial recognition software, audio recording devices, automatic license-plate readers and other “dragnet” technologies to aggregate huge databases on the habits of everyday Americans.

Watchdog organizations like the ACLU have sounded the alarm that these databases have already been weaponized against the public by organizations such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

One might be tempted to conclude that this is unprecedented, an outgrowth of the panopticism of the Information Age. But debates about privacy, free speech and data governance have been ongoing for centuries. These debates were especially fraught in the colonial context, where individual rights, national security and public interest were often in conflict.

The British first established police forces in India in the late 1800s, after nearly two centuries of bloody succession conflicts. In 1857, a great rebellion almost dislodged the British from the subcontinent entirely. Initially disgruntled Indian East India Company soldiers led the rebellion against their white commanding officers in a mutiny. However, the conflict quickly spread across the subcontinent, uniting competing segments of Indian society against the British establishment. Though this rebellion didn’t succeed, it left a lasting political and psychological impact. British accounts describe a sense of helpless horror, a feeling for the first time that their place in the world was no longer secure.

The British establishment in India believed that the rebellion occurred due to a failure of British intelligence. They had erred by trusting their Indian allies and intermediaries too freely and missed obvious rumblings of disorder. The crown took direct control of India from the East India Company and began to build a new system of governance from scratch.

The British Raj established its first official police departments in India in 1859, modeled on the Royal Irish Constabulary. The police understood that their job was to maintain order rather than to serve the public. Most departments’ first project was to assemble official statistics and compile them into annual reports. This data, aggregated and synthesized, became the lifeblood of the Empire.

Nowhere was this development more apparent than in the use of crime statistics. In the 1860s police forces in Northern India reported a supposed explosion in crime, perpetrated by wandering gangs, “criminal tribes” who were criminals by birth. Unlike the “ordinary” criminals of Europe who fell into crime by chance, the criminals of India were born into their “professions.”

Officials felt that by bringing quantitative data to policing — counting and tracking crimes, where they occurred, and who committed them — allowed them to more fairly and effectively allocate resources. In truth, though, police and other officials used data to reinforce existing biases, arguing that the numbers showed that race, caste and other “biological traits” could be used to predict criminality. Hyper-policing of certain populations produced even more data “proving” that these populations committed more crimes. This decontextualized data gave the government the veneer of objectivity, while serving as the basis for many harmful and discriminatory policies.

In 1871, the legislative assemblies of three provinces passed the Criminal Tribes Act into law. The Act defined a “criminal tribe” as a “wandering gang, community, or group of persons addicted to the commission of non-bailable offences,” a definition that targeted groups already socially disadvantaged by the caste system.

In truth, “criminal tribes” as described by British administrators probably never existed. Instead, nomadic and semi-nomadic merchants or artisans, groups of religious mendicants, highway men (usually unemployed former soldiers), pastoralists and any other group who did not fit were all folded into the “criminal tribe” label. Unlike settled agriculturists within the dominant caste order, these groups were difficult to control due to their mobility and lack of social or economic capital. Under the law, they were criminalized and subject to extremely intrusive regimes of surveillance. The police tracked the most minute details of the lives of targeted groups: their fingerprints, their bodily measurements, their habits and their preferences.

The impact of the state’s surveillance campaigns was that these communities lived in a state of hypervisibility. Communities complained that they were unable to live, work or travel without being disproportionately targeted by police. The increase in police interactions eventually led to a corresponding increase in arrests—which, in turn, was used to justify further surveillance and policing.

One police officer recounted in the early 1900s that he recommended a whole nomadic community be criminalized under the Act and forcibly settled. The reason? They were reportedly adorned in silver finery while living in weatherworn tents with sparse and shabby furnishings. The only reasonable explanation, he claimed, was that the jewelry was stolen loot.

Data gave the government the visibility and the leverage required to recruit collaborators. Police relied upon wealthy and landed (“trustworthy”) communities to identify “criminal tribes,” and recruited officers from their ranks. In return, the police offered elites protections against peasant uprisings or labor disputes. Data ownership was thus not just a privilege but a favor, doled out by the state to its allies in exchange for “good behavior.”

Data collection and policing transformed everyday life. Community and family spaces—town squares, local government offices, playgrounds, parks, schools, shops, even streets—went from being “private” spaces, governed by the people who inhabited them, to “public” spaces subject to the control and surveillance of the state. Regular community events like food festivals, religious processions and public gatherings often felt distinctly different in the presence of police. People knew they were being watched.

Disputes at street processions and festivities frequently became highly publicized court cases, written about in the newspapers and read aloud in coffee shops and tea stalls. In turn, groups began to use processions to garner such publicity and “make a point” in the first decades of the 20th century: “cow protection” parades by Hindu extremists to intimidate religious minorities, festivals commemorating anti-British war heroes like the Maratha King Shivaji, even protest marches by Muslims against the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. Divisive political processions came to replace weddings, funerals and naming ceremonies that had been common in the 19th century.

At a time when it was considered both scientifically sound and fashionable among the Western-educated class to believe that Indians were too loud and disorderly to govern themselves, public gatherings became performances to authority rather than community events. As debates raged about whether India was ready for independence in the 1920s and 1930s, communities policed themselves and each other, critiquing rituals and expressions that were too loud, too emotional, too rowdy.

Where there were multiple communities in conflict over public spaces, police involvement caused small disagreements to escalate. In March 1925, a small fight during a religious procession in Delhi sparked communal riots across Northern India that lasted periodically until late September, causing dozens of casualties and at least six deaths.

Class, caste and religious divisions hardened throughout the 1930s and 1940s, leading to the segregation of formerly integrated spaces. In these ways, the British used information to divide and rule communities, to target the vulnerable, and to suppress dissent. These efforts prolonged the British presence in India for decades, until its hasty exit in 1947 after overseeing a violent and bloody partition of the subcontinent. The ghost of the Empire continues to haunt the region today.

One critical lesson the Indian public learned during this era was that the collection of information is never neutral. Power shapes how information is collected, stored and interpreted, and information can be used and abused to protect those in power.

Today every app, website and device contains a back door to collect and sell our information. Companies and officials tell us that these capabilities are benign, used to improve our lives and make us safer—and we believe them at our own peril.

Niveditha (Nive) Senthilvel is a 2026-27 Fulbright-Nehru scholar and PhD Candidate in South Asian History at Boston University.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.