If you are the victim of a crime, there is a proper sequence of events to follow. If, for example, you discover a thief has made off with the money you had hidden away in your house, you go to the police, give them 1,000 rupees and tell them who you think did it. The police will arrest this person, take them to the police station, and beat them up. At this point, friends and relatives of the arrested person will usually bring a further 1,000 rupees to the police, who will set the first suspect free, but come and arrest you, take you to the police station and beat you up. At this point, you need to find another 1,000 rupees. Few crimes are solved, and even fewer produce convictions before the courts, while even the emotional satisfaction of revenge is purely temporary. All that really happens is the police get richer. Or, in the fastidious phrasing of a senior British diplomat I once met in Colombo, the problem for the police in a country like Sri Lanka, is that they ‘lack forensic capacity’.

I thought of this story (first told to me in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s) in September 1997, when I attended a training course in human rights and gender awareness for senior police officers in Sri Lanka. I was interested in policing as an aspect of the ‘everyday state’.