RED TAPE

Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in IndiaBy AKHIL GUPTA

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5098-9

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………..ix1. Poverty as Biopolitics………………………………………………………….32. The State and the Politics of Poverty…………………………………………….413. Corruption, Politics, and the Imagined State………………………………………754. Narratives of Corruption………………………………………………………..1115. “Let the Train Run on Paper”: Bureaucratic Writing as State Practice…………………1416. Literacy, Bureaucratic Domination, and Democracy…………………………………..1917. Population and Neoliberal Governmentality…………………………………………237Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………279Notes……………………………………………………………………………295References Cited………………………………………………………………….329Index……………………………………………………………………………355

Chapter One

POVERTY AS BIOPOLITICS

Any study of the state in India must try to address one central puzzle. Why has a state whose proclaimed motive is to foster development failed to help the large number of people who still live in dire poverty? Why do regimes whose legitimacy depends upon bettering the lives of the poor continue to allow anywhere from 250 million to 427 million to live below the poverty line?= Another way to frame this question is to ask, After more than sixty years of development efforts by the postcolonial state, why do so many of India’s citizens continue to be subjected to the cruelties of endemic hunger and malnutrition and to be deprived of such basic necessities as clothing, shelter, clean water, and sanitation?

Despite being the fourth largest economy in the world, India ranks extremely low on the Human Development Index (134th among 182 nation-states, according to the Human Development Report [2009]). The infant mortality rate is around 56 per 1,000 live births (101 per 1,000 live births for the poorest 20 percent of the population); adult illiteracy hovers around 40 percent; about half of children under five suffer from malnutrition; large proportions of the urban population are homeless—fully half of the residents of Mumbai live in slums and other degraded forms of housing, while at least one-third of the population of Kolkata lives in slums—and an unknown number of rural people live in poor or substandard housing. Yet expenditures on health and education in 2007–8 amounted to less than one-tenth of the national budget. One hundred million women are “missing,” and sex ratios are declining even in areas of India such as the South, where they have not been historically unfavorable to women (Sen 1999: 104–7).

One could argue that the high poverty rates and poor social development indices are merely a residual feature of Nehruvian economic policies that muddled along not knowing whether the nation-state was capitalist or socialist and consequently delivering anemic results, which were famously christened by the economist Raj Krishna as “the Hindu rate of growth.” Now that India has settled into a period of liberalization, the GDP growth rate has shot up (over 9 percent from 2005 to 2007, followed by a mild dip in the recession years of 2008 and 2009 (IMF 2009), and between 6 and 8 percent in the past two decades), and there have been sharp reductions in the number of people living below the poverty line (from just a bit more than 50 percent in 1977–78 to less than 23 percent in 2004–5). Given this improvement, does not continuing the emphasis on poverty, rather than on the considerable achievements that have been made in other spheres, simply perpetuate the clichéd image of India as a poverty-stricken land? Should one not instead focus on the positive side of development, on the immense progress the state has engineered, and consider chronic poverty to be a colonial legacy and an intractable problem that the postcolonial state has done its best to eradicate? Rather than dismiss such objections, I acknowledge that there is much truth to them. However, for reasons that will become evident in this book, I insist that the life-denying consequences of chronic poverty, far from receiving too much attention, have in fact largely disappeared from public discussion. More important, despite the rhetorical importance given to the eradication of poverty in government policy pronouncements, the scandal of the state lies in its failure to acknowledge that condemning an estimated 250–450 million people to a premature and untimely death constitutes a crisis of grave proportions.

If there was a natural disaster—a famine or an earthquake—in which thousands of people died and many others were displaced from their homes and separated from their families, food sources, or places of employment, there is little doubt it would be considered a dire national crisis requiring massive state intervention to aid in relief and rehabilitation. Now suppose a scenario like the one I describe here actually unfolded. A disaster of this magnitude occurs not once but annually. The consensus among elites both within and outside the state is that such disasters are inevitable and that relief efforts cannot of necessity aid all those who are affected. Some experts suggest that the best thing the state can do to improve the conditions of the poor is to concentrate on facilitating the rapid growth of the economy so that the victims can at least find employment and help to better their lives. How would we react to such a solution? Would we not find such a state of affairs to be appalling and perhaps even outrageous?

Yet this is precisely the situation in postcolonial India. Using a very crude calculation, I estimate that the number of “excess deaths”—the number of people missing from the population because of malnutrition and morbidity —is approximately 140 million. This translates to over 2 million untimely deaths annually, a figure that overshadows the loss of human life resulting from all natural disasters globally. In the decade between 1991 and 2000 the annual global death toll owing to natural disasters, technological mishaps, and human conflict totaled just over 300,000 (Calhoun 2004: 382). Nevertheless, the system of checks and balances composed of the free press and the democratic, multiparty, competitive political system that, as Amartya Sen (1999: 180–82) claims, has been so effective in sounding the alarm of impending famine, drought, or natural disaster has failed to mobilize state and private resources to prevent a disaster of these proportions.

I am concerned, in other words, with what should be considered exceptional, a tragedy and a disgrace, but is not: the invisible forms of violence that result in the deaths of millions of the poor, especially women, girls, lower-caste people, and indigenous people. What makes such violence invisible? How does one think about not only deliberate acts of violence such as police brutality, but also political, administrative, and judicial action or inaction that prevents poor people from making a living, obtaining medical aid, and securing such necessities of life as food, clothing, shelter, and sanitation? Why is faster, more effective state intervention not forthcoming to relieve the suffering of millions of the poorest and most disempowered? How does one describe violence in the absence of events like communal riots, or the displacement of people by dams and other spectacular development projects, or police or army brutality? What are the juridical and social conditions that make the violence of such exceptional poverty normal? Most important, how is violence like this taken for granted in the routinized practices of state institutions such that it disappears from view and cannot be thematized as violence at all?

Engaging the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I argue that extreme poverty should be theorized as a direct and culpable form of killing made possible by state policies and practices rather than as an inevitable situation in which the poor are merely “allowed to die” or “exposed to death.” Seeing the death of the poor as a form of thanatopolitics enables several important interventions. First, it draws attention to the fact that such deaths are not inevitable: far from it, despite being preventable they are not prevented. This is where the contrast with natural disasters is so clear: if the poor were equated to victims of a natural disaster, the urgency displayed in ameliorating their situation and the scale of intervention employed would be of a completely different magnitude. Similarly, if one compares the complacency toward endemic poverty with the impatience displayed toward impediments to growth and accumulation, the disparity is striking. How does one account for the enormous gap between the Indian state’s indifferent response to poverty on the one hand and its much more proactive responses to natural disaster and liberalization on the other?

The usual answer to this question is that it must be because the poor are excluded from national projects of development, democratic politics, and cultural citizenship. Agamben suggests that exclusion is the basis for violence in states of exception. For example, the killing of Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies in Nazi Germany was possible because they had been legally excluded from the German state and reduced to “bare life.” Contra Agamben (this is my second major point), the paradox of the violence of poverty in India is that the poor are killed despite their inclusion in projects of national sovereignty and despite their centrality to democratic politics and state legitimacy.

I am not blaming bureaucratic attitudes for such perverse outcomes. Without doubt state officials who are uncaring or indifferent to extreme poverty and are interested merely in advancing their own fortunes and careers do exist. However, even if all state officials were sincerely devoted to the task of eradicating poverty, the question is whether the procedures of the bureaucracy would end up subverting even their best intentions. I draw upon a theme first articulated by Michael Herzfeld (1993) in which state bureaucracies are considered to be machines for “the social production of indifference,” and the idea proposed by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock that “bureaucratic responses to social violence intensify suffering” (1997: x); but I modify those lines of reasoning in this book. I argue (this is my third major point) that bureaucratic action repeatedly and systematically produces arbitrary outcomes in its provision of care. While indifference does indeed play an important role in this story, the indifference to arbitrary outcomes is central.

To illustrate and develop these theoretical points, I begin with an extended description of an event that took place during my fieldwork. I choose this event not because it exemplifies what I argue below about the systematic production of arbitrariness but because it is a good example of the kind of antipoverty activities engaged in by the state in India. My description of a development camp has to be put in the context of other prominent recent studies of the camp as an archetypal space created by modern states.

Drawing upon the history of Nazi concentration camps, Agamben writes, “The camp is the nomos of the modern” (2000: 36). In stating this, Agamben effectively extends the space of the camp, via detention centers for immigrants at airports and sports stadiums, to any space where the state of exception is materialized (1998: 174). Although in Agamben’s work the camp is closely connected to thanatopolitics and the state of exception, others have investigated camps of different kinds where the utility of Agamben’s insights can be broadened and questioned. Lawrence Cohen’s (2004) notion of “operability” links forced sterilizations during the Emergency in India in 1975–77 with eye camps and other sites of mass operations. His work demonstrates the continuities in biopolitical processes between the period of emergency and normal times, which underlines one of Agamben’s key arguments, while at the same time highlighting the intimate connection between care and repression. Similarly, Ananya Vajpeyi’s (2007) discussion of internally displaced people points out how, although state violence is often responsible for forcibly evicting people from their homeland and from their homes, refugee and relief camps set up by nongovernmental agencies and aid organizations slowly restore their rights as citizens. The camp, therefore, is not only a space where citizens are stripped of their rights and rendered into bare life, as Agamben argues, but also potentially a place from which the painstaking restoration of those rights becomes feasible. Didier Fassin (2005) carefully distinguishes camps in contemporary France set up for refugees from their counterparts in the Nazi era. However, he points out that in both cases the political life of citizens in the polis was built on the exclusions practiced through the construction of bare life in the camps. As a final example, I turn to Veena Das’s (2007) sensitive portrayal of “resettlement colonies,” so named because their inhabitants are former slum dwellers who have been forcibly removed from their homes by state agencies. Das shows how the residents of these colonies experience the state of exception repeatedly through communal riots in which the police openly side with the majority religious community. Das’s concern is with how people construct a semblance of normality after such riots, how they go on living with neighbors who they know are the murderers of their family and friends. Here, the resettlement colony itself becomes a camp where the state of exception is actually the norm. Thus, there are many types of camps whose specificity is important and whose form does not simply reproduce the Nazi death camp. The camp I describe is a so-called development camp, one whose register is both tragic and farcical at the same time.

Camp

One hot April morning, as I was sitting in the office of Satendra Malik, the Block Development Officer (BDO) of Mandi, a man walked in to inquire about a camp that was to be held there the following week for providing pensions to indigent, elderly people. The BDO did not know about it and was alarmed to learn of plans for holding such a big event at his office. However, experience and good sense taught him to ask his staff if they had received a message about the camp. When the BDO asked two of his senior staff about it, they did not recollect having seen any notice. The two officials then went to the inner office to search for the notice. When they did not come out for several minutes, the BDO himself went in and some minutes later emerged with the notice in his hand.

The notice took the form of a letter written by the Subdistrict Magistrate (SDM) to the head of the Land Records Office (Tehsildar) informing him of the date at which a camp for elderly pensioners was to be held at each of the four blocks in the subdistrict (tehsil). The SDM had scheduled the meeting for Mandi Block the following week.

Malik turned to me and complained loudly that, as usual, the date had been set without consulting him first. He had already scheduled a meeting of his field staff on that very same day and now would have to reschedule. “Just wait and see,” Malik grumbled, “next there will be a notice from the District Magistrate [DM] saying that he has called a meeting on the twenty-first, which will have been set, naturally, without consulting the SDM.”

Malik failed to understand why they were scheduling the camp in his office. His staff had nothing to do with the camp except to certify the eligibility of applicants. They were involved in neither the processing of the paperwork nor disbursing the money to beneficiaries.

The notice Malik retrieved clarified the conditions for eligibility: the beneficiary had to be at least sixty years old, own less than one and a half acres of land, and have no adult son (balig ladka na ho) who could look after the beneficiary. The pension amounted to RS. 100 a month and would be paid directly to the beneficiaries by the Social Welfare office at the district headquarters.

Malik sprang into action and immediately dictated two letters. They were addressed to subordinate officials who maintained the Economic Registers and Family Registers. The letters urged both sets of officials to be present at the camp the following week with their respective registers. Malik delegated responsibility for delivering each of the two letters to a different individual in his office.

After a short while, the official who had been delegated the task of delivering the second letter entered Malik’s office to consult him about something else. When Malik inquired about his progress in delivering the letter, the official said he had given the letter to the clerk to dispatch (a record of all incoming and outgoing correspondence has to be made), and the clerk had not yet returned the letter to him. However, he had informed some officials verbally about the camp.

(Continues…)

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