Civil Services, Army, Police and Judiciary

The British built a "steel frame" of civil service, army, police and judiciary to rule India, and each pillar had Indians in the lower ranks and British in the highest posts.

The Civil Services

• Cornwallis separated the Company's commercial and revenue/judicial services and gave high salaries. Indians were kept out of the higher posts (those paying above 500 pounds a year). He is called the "Father of the Civil Services in India".
• Wellesley set up Fort William College (1800) to train recruits; later Haileybury College in England (1806).
• Charter Act 1853: open competition. The Macaulay Committee (1854) recommended exams in London. The exam age was 21, later reduced to 19 (1878, Lytton).
• Satyendranath Tagore was the first Indian to pass the ICS (1863). The exam was held only in London until 1922, when it began in India too (by the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms), and the Lee Commission (1923 to 1924) recommended that the ICS become half Indian over 15 years.
• Public Service Commission: Aitchison Commission (1886), Islington Commission (1912), Federal Public Service Commission (1926, by the Lee Commission, under the 1919 Act).

The Army

• The Company's army had Indian sepoys under British officers. After 1857 the proportion of British troops was raised (one to two in Bengal Army), key weapons (artillery) were in British hands, and the "martial race" theory led to recruiting Sikhs, Gurkhas, Rajputs and Punjabi Muslims.
• The Peel Commission (1859) advised on army reorganisation. Under Curzon, Kitchener reorganised the army (1902 to 1909).
• The Indian army was used for British wars in Asia and Africa, paid by Indian revenue.

The Police

• Cornwallis introduced a police force with a thana area under a daroga. The district got a police superintendent.
• Charles Napier's Sindh model (1843) of a separate force influenced the Police Act of 1861, which created the provincial police under an Inspector-General. In 1902 the Fraser Commission advised reform. A Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was set up at the same time.

The Judiciary

• Warren Hastings set up civil and criminal courts (Diwani Adalat and Faujdari Adalat) in each district (1772).
• Cornwallis separated the roles of the Collector and the judge, and brought in the Cornwallis Code (1793) based on the rule of law.
• Supreme Court (Calcutta 1774), then High Courts at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras (1862, under the Indian High Courts Act 1861).
• Codification: the First Law Commission (1834) under Macaulay drafted the Indian Penal Code (enacted 1860). Civil Procedure Code (1859) and Criminal Procedure Code (1861) followed. A Federal Court came in 1937.
• Criticism: The law was costly, slow and uncertain, favoured the rich and the British, and racial discrimination in cases involving Europeans was open (this led to the Ilbert Bill controversy in 1883).