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| Sir Charles Tegart, Colonial police officer iart uk |
During the colonial rule in India directly under the
British Crown in London soon after the famous Indian revolt of 1857-58,
it became a necessity for the British Government to have an efficient
police department with a separate section for detective work to keep an eye
on the Indian nationalists and freedom fighters who wanted to get off
the British yoke. In Charles Augustus Tegart, they found a superb police officer
who was very particular about upholding Britishness
and safeguarding
Britain's quest for imperialistic ambition. Considering his temperament
and natural ability, for the tough police work in India, no person was
better qualified than Tegart who would never compromise on ethics and professionalism.
Unfortunately, the black mark he had was his overwhelming enthusiasm and
dedication in his work pushed him to the extreme of brutality
bordering on madness.
Son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, Charles Tegart (born in Derry), upon graduating from Trinity College, Dublin,
joined
the Calcutta Police in 1901. Later he headed the Detective Department
and his continuous service in Calcutta police department for 30 long
years gave him lots of experience in the area of policing and tailing
criminals. Later he became a member of the Secretary of State's Indian
Council in December 1931.
Being
the first officer of the Indian Police (IP) in the organization on his
recommendation, the Special Branch was created to track revolutionary activities in Bengal. After getting the
King's Police Medal in 1911 for his dedicated services to the Crown, his
career saw upward mobility and Tegart's promotion was purely on
merit. Finally, he ended up becoming the Commissioner of Calcutta
Police from 1923 to 1931.
When it
came to official duty as a leading cop, at that point of time in
colonial India, no police officer had earned more notoriety and
devilish image than Charles. For the terrorists and opponents of
British rule in India, in particular, ''Indian Nationalists'', he was a
terror, a devil on prowl. In the eyes of Indian Nationalist, Charles
Tegart had no sympathy for them, a staunch opponent of Indian
nationalism. Quite uncompromising and ruthless with Indian nationalists
and other leaders, the very mention of his name gave them nightmares and jitters. In
1930, he had a special reputation for his brutishness and savagery
when arraigning the criminals and freedom fighters.
During
his time, Bengal was a hot bed of nationalism, India's quest for
freedom had begun to take shape and native Indians had developed a sort of
abomination for the English officials for their arrogance, open racial
discrimination against various ethnic groups and, above all, their
dishonest wheeling and dealings with right from Maharajahs to poor Indian farmers.
They ran the British administration and made money here to improve the
economy of Britain. In a nut shell, they kept India for the benefits of
the British back in England, of course, at the cost of India's
depredation, a sort of thievery.
As
for Sir Charles Tegart, he was doing his duty in a
volatile situation and almost daily he was facing threats to his life
as he happened to be cop with flint-hard courage and a stone heart. His
active involvement in tracking down the revolutionaries in every place
and the large scale detention of them won him bouquet from the senior
British officers, but on the other hand it won him brickbat from the
Indian natives. This ultimately led to a series of confrontations with
hardcore revolutionaries led by Jatindranath Mukherjee at Balasore in
Orissa on 9 September 1915.
That
Tegart was reported to have come out unscathed in six assassination
attempts on him in India is itself a proof that how much the Indian
nationalists hated him and his guts. Unmindful and undaunted, he liked
driving around Calcutta in an open-top car. Some years later on
12 January 1924, at Chowringhee Road in Calcutta, Tegart was shot at
by
Gopinath Saha, an Indian revolutionary. He escaped unhurt as Saha
erroneously shot down a
white man, Mr. Ernest Day, whom he mistook for Tegart. It was a close
call, but luck was on the side of this fearsome cop. He had yet another
close brush with the death when, on 25 August 1930, at Dalhousie Square in Calcutta, a bomb was hurled at him by a revolutionary while traveling in a car, He escaped unhurt and he fired at the revolutionary.
Tegart's
efficiency and dedication in curbing the freedom-fighting activities of
the Indians in Bengal left a lasting impression on Lord Lytton, then
Governor of Bengal. He was awarded the KCIE in 1937. In view of his
reputation as a tough police officer, to whom compromising and leniency
were anathema, the British Government sent him to the ''British Mandate
of Palestine'', to subdue the the Arab Revolt and to advise the
Inspector General on matters of security. He arrived there in December
1937. The rebellion was brewing in Palestine in protest at the British decision to allow Jewish migration into the Holy Land from Europe. In the 1930s, Tegart
came up with a drastic and expensive solution - a network of fortresses
that today stand as monuments to a lost empire. Those monuments are
called Tegart forts, quite famous even to day.
