In many countries born out of colonial rule across the third world, today’s governments still carry visible traces of the administrations that preceded independence. That legacy is unmistakable in South Asia, decades after colonial rule formally ended: state institutions built for a different era, meant to serve the priorities of a colonial ruler rather than a modern civil administration serving its own citizens, still shape daily life today. A dual sovereignty – a federal system layered awkwardly over a mixed and changing population – still leans on an old colonial bureaucracy, even though society itself has moved on rapidly while the state institutions meant to serve it have been much slower to change.
Pakistan’s police force is a textbook example. It is a direct product of the colonial administrative system, and despite that system’s departure, it has scarcely changed. Eleven commissions, committees, and four internationally recognized reports have all made forceful recommendations for reforming it. None produced any real change in how the institution actually functions.
A Law Written in 1861
Four years after the uprising of 1857, in 1861, colonial administrators created the police system through a single piece of legislation, commonly known simply as “the Police Act.” Its purpose was to strengthen colonial rule. Maintaining law and order was, in effect, a secondary goal – necessary because without basic order, the deeper goal of consolidating colonial control was difficult to achieve.
That priority shows up starkly in how colonial policing actually treated ordinary people. One frequently cited incident from that era describes a young woman harassed by a soldier on a long train journey, and the older woman traveling with her too frightened to even point a finger at her attacker – a small but telling detail about who colonial-era “peace and order” was really designed to protect.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Police performance data from Punjab since independence – the province for which the most complete records exist, though the patterns broadly echo across the rest of the country – tell a striking story. Punjab’s population grew from 20.5 million in 1951 to roughly 71 million by 1995. Up until 1985, the growth in registered crime roughly tracked that population growth. After 1985, crime began rising dramatically faster than the population did.
Murder statistics follow a similar arc, with one striking exception: 1947 itself recorded the highest number of killings in the entire post-independence record – a spike that reflects the communal violence of Partition rather than ordinary crime. Registered murders then stayed comparatively low and stable from independence through 1983. After that point, the numbers climbed steadily, crossing 4,500 recorded murders a year by 1995. Two forces are usually credited with driving that rise: the loosening of restrictions on firearm licenses, and the sustained smuggling of weapons out of Afghanistan during and after the Soviet war there. It bears remembering that these are only the murders that were formally reported and registered – cases where no report ever reached police, or where police simply declined to register a complaint, aren’t captured in the count at all.
Attempted murder followed the same pattern – tracking population growth until roughly 1985, then climbing sharply on its own trajectory. Armed robbery and dacoity show an even more dramatic swing: after a chaotic spike in 1947-48 tied directly to Partition-era lawlessness, incidents fell and stayed low for decades. Population itself grew roughly 300 percent between 1951 and 1995, but recorded armed robbery in that same window grew nearly 1,000 percent – a rate of increase population growth alone cannot begin to explain, with virtually the entire surge concentrated in the years after 1985.
Bomb attacks in Punjab between 1987 and 1995 killed at least 301 people according to registered cases alone – a figure that, again, almost certainly understates the true toll, since good data for the years immediately after only comes from newspaper reporting rather than official registration. Separate records tracking violence specifically targeting students and laborers during the same period show comparable spikes concentrated around 1990-91, with roughly 230 students and dozens of laborers killed in registered violent incidents across those years.
Perhaps the most disturbing single data series concerns sectarian violence. Recorded incidents of religiously-motivated sectarian attacks in Punjab held in the low double digits through the late 1980s, then rose sharply, peaking in 1990 at 274 recorded incidents – a period that included mass-casualty attacks at places of worship in Multan and Muzaffargarh district that killed dozens of worshippers at a time. The toll eased somewhat through the mid-1990s but never returned to pre-1990 levels.
Where All the Guns Came From
One data series makes the mechanism behind much of this violence unusually concrete: licensed firearm issuance in the Dera Ghazi Khan division. Just 228 gun licenses were issued there in 1980. By 1986, that number had exploded to 26,135 licenses issued in a single year, before dropping off sharply – only to spike again to 24,181 in 1992. Across 1980 to 1996, roughly 108,157 new firearm licenses were issued in that division alone. That is on top of an unknown, and by definition unmeasurable, number of unlicensed weapons that entered the same society over the same period.
None of this happened by accident. As later sections of the police record make clear, the explosion in licensed weapons wasn’t simply a security response to rising danger – it was substantially the product of elected representatives using arms-license quotas as a tool of political patronage, handing out licenses to constituents and supporters on a scale that dramatically outpaced any legitimate security need. Combined with the flow of military-grade weapons crossing over from the Afghan war – a conflict that left rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons circulating well beyond any battlefield – Punjab in the space of a single decade went from a society with modest, tightly controlled gun ownership to one saturated with firearms, licensed and otherwise. The numbers above are, in a very real sense, the direct arithmetic of that saturation.
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