Shoes, Uniforms, Salutes and the Slippage of Police Discipline

Chandigarh: A policeman’s uniform and deportment are the ultimate badges of his office: the former identifies the wearer and establishes his rank, while the latter reflects his standing, bearing, and place within a disciplined institution, where appearance and conduct are governed by strict etiquette and rules, rather than personal preference.

Rajbir Deswal, a retired senior police officer from Haryana, has highlighted the steady erosion of these standards in his op-ed in The Tribune on Wednesday, using something as seemingly mundane as the regulation brown Oxford shoe as his starting point. 

For him, the Oxford particularly, alongside properly turned-out uniforms and the manner of saluting and greeting a superior police officer, were once part of a hoary tradition in which dress, deportment and respect for rank were closely intertwined. But over the years, Deswal lamented in his article, the gold standards of turnout, drill, bearing and protocol have steadily given way to informality and subjective individual preference in most police forces across India, adversely denting the image and authority of the uniformed law-keepers. 

The Government’s Indian Police Service (Uniform) Rules, 1954, prescribe different forms of dress, detailing everything from footwear and headgear to belts, badges, medals and ceremonial dress. According to these Rules, the brown Oxford is no sartorial appendage, but an integral part of a carefully prescribed dress code intended to reinforce the identity and discipline of the nationwide police force.

Yet it is precisely this regulation that, the former additional director general of Haryana Police argues, has been bypassed. Gazetted police officers he said had switched to designer brown shoes with brogue patterns and pointed toes – some adorned with buckles – and more suited to the boardroom than uniformed personnel. The other, non-gazetted ranks, required to wear regulation brown Derby Oxfords with open lacing, had increasingly taken to juttis, Punjabi gurgabis, and even sports shoes while on duty.

“How can a force claim to be in uniform, when its feet are not?” asks an incensed Deswal.

Such laxity, he goes on to argue, does not just end at footwear, extending even to the regulation police belt and trousers, which are formally mandated to have a straight cut, with creases “sharp enough to be called weapons”. But officers, Deswal laments, have increasingly succumbed to the latest fashion trends, becoming, at times, partial to bell-bottomed versions and to shirts whose collars are given extra padding to make them last longer and, for the lower ranks, reduce frequent laundry. 

Similar deviations, Deswal notes, are evident in the tailoring of shirt pockets mandated to have functional slots for pens and reading-glasses, alongside the aberrant practice of stuffing mobile telephones into them, rendering the wearer’s appearance “unwieldy and comic”. “A uniformed officer on duty with a bulging shirt pocket is not a picture of alertness,” he observes.

Furthermore, for Deswal, the breakdown of police standards goes far deeper than uniforms to the erosion of established hierarchical etiquette.

The firm handshake, he states, has increasingly given way in the police to obsequious deference, with juniors clasping a senior’s hand in both of theirs, bowing or bending forward, sometimes virtually folding themselves around their superior. Moreover, bouquets and garlands had increasingly replaced the formal salute whenever an officer assumed or remitted charge, celebrating the individual rather than acknowledging the office, in keeping with earlier tradition and norms.

The former police officer also delves into the seemingly arcane question of which side of his senior should a junior walk. Deswal points out that established police practice requires the latter to walk on the senior’s left, leaving the latter’s right-or historically his sword hand free. “This is not British nostalgia,” he writes "but functional etiquette that signals who is in command.”

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However, today, Deswal observes, such formations have given way to “huddles,” with officers either walking behind political leaders or crowding around senior dignitaries from all sides, particularly when a photograph is being taken, in scenes resembling a durbar.

These changing norms had even disparaged official honours, with officers now given to pinning miniature models of their service medals onto party blazers and even casual kurta-pyjamas, treating hard-earned decorations like fashion accessories. According to Deswal, a medal was not a piece of jewellery, but an honour earned through blood and sacrifice, one belonging strictly- and exclusively-on a formal uniform.

Deswal’s core message is straightforward: appearances matter, and when police officers look sloppy, their work eventually becomes sloppy too.

And, ultimately, if officers do not take pride in their uniforms, their salutes, and their traditions, they cannot expect the public either to give them respect on the street. Moreover, he unambiguously argues that the police uniform does not make the man; the man makes the uniform. Therefore it is time, he suggests, to bring back the quartermaster to enforce the prescribed uniform rules and concomitantly re-teach policemen the traditions, manners and, above all, the decorum that once went with wearing it.

Gurbachan Jagat, former director general of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, concurs and attributes much of this overall decline to the laxity of senior officers. He said that established tradition and police rules once demanded weekly kit inspection parades which were also conducted at all individual police stations. 

“Officers and men were expected to maintain their personal appearance, with shaves, haircuts, turbans and shoes, all of which were subject to inspection,” said Jagat, who was initially commissioned into Punjab Police in the late 1960s and later served as director general of the Border Security Force. Such practices continued into the 60s, he recalls, before the slippage gradually began, eventually producing many of the lapses in dress, bearing and etiquette that Deswal now describes. 

What followed thereafter, Jagat lamented, was a gradual abandonment of standards that eventually became visible in the most basic details: constables walking around with towels draped over their shoulders, while officers designed their own headgear, caps and even insignia.

 Moreover, the image of the police itself had transformed in recent years to that of a pot-bellied figure with a badly tied turban or lop-sided cap, wearing poor-quality shoes, often without socks. For Jagat, who was also Manipur Governor till 2013, this was not merely ‘untidiness and slovenliness’ but the visible expression of the wider deterioration in professionalism within the police, and, most importantly, of the declining supervision by senior officers who were supposed to enforce these standards.

But this is not to say that individual police officers have not, in recent years tried, albeit feebly to rectify but in isolated pockets. 

Online research has revealed that in April 2025, Ludhiana’s police commissioner in Punjab ordered personnel working in police stations to stop wearing jeans, T-shirts and sports shoes and instead dress formally in uniform, saying that a disciplined force needed to maintain decorum before the public. And, more recently, in July, Kolkata Police ordered personnel engaged in law-and-order duties to abandon colourful dressing and don the prescribed khaki or white uniform with regulation equipment, citing discipline, professional standards and authority.

But such instances remain isolated interventions, bringing the argument back to the humble regulation brown Oxford, which, as Deswal reiterates is merely a shoe, but a symbol of the discipline, bearing and professional pride expected of policemen-qualities that are, sadly, irreversibly lost. Hence, when even these basic standards are no longer retrievable, the police uniform becomes little more than an outward shell, leaving behind a force that is increasingly indistinguishable from the very disorder it was created to control.

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