The management of public order thrives on a two-pronged approach of the state. One sustains the narrative of its necessity, and the second involves strategies and tactics that maintain it. These strategies involve violence of various kinds and range from the spectacular to the quotidian. Across scholarship on colonial India, emphasis is laid on the spectacular. The book began with a discussion on a similar premise, and as it progressed, it began to move away from it and showed that the state of exception in colonial India established itself in an order. It was first institutionalised and then normalised in the everyday discourse of the colonial state. To make sense of colonial violence, its form must be understood. The colonial state did resort to exemplary and spectacular violence, as shown in the discussion on Ghadar, Jallianwala Bagh, the Defence of India Act and the Rowlatt Bills in the first chapter. Another set of examples from the United Provinces (UP) followed in the second chapter, where the provincial government, after 1937, frequently invoked section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), instituted curfews, and defended lathi charges and police firing on protestors. The understanding is complicated with the arrival of provincial ministries, where Indians became politically responsible for governing many aspects of their lives. The career of public-order laws like section 144 CrPC, curfews and police firing saw not only growth but a renewed force that became increasingly intolerant to political opposition. Opportunities for the decolonisation of the colonial order ended in reifying it. This is evident in the second chapter, where a discussion on the Kanpur labour strikes and the Madh-e-Sahaba controversy took place.

In UP, the Congress ministries felt it necessary to resort to police repression of its citizens. Provincial ministries could not escape the tropes of violence deployed by the colonial administration. Chapter 2 is instructive in understanding the perception of law and order amongst nationalist stalwarts such as Jawaharlal Nehru and G.B. Pant. Public-order laws at once became convenient for the provincial government to regulate political opposition. Three forms of violence of law can be noted in the career of the state in the early twentieth century