Dialect of the bureaucrats

Blurred Boundaries

Ethnographic study of the state by examining the discourse of corruption in contemporary India.

The practice of bribe giving was not simply an economic transaction but a cultural practice.

If corrupt officials are seen as thoroughly blurring the boundaries between the state and civil society it is perhaps because those categories
are descriptively inadequate to the lived realities that they purport to represent.

The discourse of corruption, however, went far beyond just setting the terms of electoral competition between political parties. It not only
helped to define "the political" but also served to constitute "the public" that was perceived to be reacting to corruption. (pg.386)

Ethnography of the state in everyday life

despite the existence of purportedly uniform guidelines. In the loose fabric of daily practice, guidelines do not protect refugees from
prejudice or corruption; to the contrary, they create benefits for which desperate refugees are willing to bargain, putting yet more power
in the hands of bureaucrats. Pg.8

Paperwork, patronage, and citizenship

many actors who provide political mediation in India operate as a state ‘outside the state’. Pg.1

we explore the multi-scalar processes, actors, and materialities that make up the bureaucratic encounters experienced by ordinary
Indians.

Shed light on paperwork as a tool through which a range of political mediators facilitate or obstruct people’s access to state resources, and
include people in or exclude them from meaningful citizenship, how political recognition and citizenship are actively pursued and shaped
by marginalized communities themselves. Pg.2

the ways in which paper documents are implicated in the constitution of relations of power and patronage, often engendered through
social, embodied, and affective processes of applying, approving, and rejecting. the state’s ability to make people wait, to reschedule their
appointments, and to repeatedly ask them to return reflects its far-reaching control over people’s time and hence the working of state
domination. This power, Auyero concludes, turns people into ‘compliant clients’ or ‘patients of the state’ rather than citizens with the
ability to make rightful claims.

female and lower-caste villagers are routinely made to apply, wait, beg, and return to obtain cards and welfare. They do so in a
multilayered bureaucratic network, dominated by male and higher-caste officials, ranging from local village clerks and presidents to
higher-level government bureaucrats, party political actors, and brokers. Pg.3

.Through begging, praise and flattery, a ‘model of pleading’ is mobilized to activate bureaucratic processes and make those in power
respond beggars in India typically bless and praise their targets in order to make them generous. This amounts to what he calls ‘coercive
subordination’, in which subordination is performed in order to force the dominant to show kindness and compassion and to respond to
the pleas of supplicants. Pg.5

As most ordinary people cannot access the state through civil society channels, they take recourse to actors in political society to make
state institutions and actors more responsive to their needs. Others are more critical of this political mediation and show how it is shaped
by localized power relations, can divert resources away from the poor, and makes entitlements dependent on political loyalty or votes.
Pg.6

the poor are anything but despondent. There is plenty of evidence that ordinary Indians persist in making claims to state resources and in
struggling for recognition as ‘fully fledged members of society and rightful citizens of the state’. Much of this struggle for citizenship and
welfare is an ongoing process, experienced by ordinary citizens through routine practices of applying, queuing, waiting, and begging
around documents and paperwork. Very few – if any – welfare entitlements or citizen rights can be obtained without a string of paper-
based bureaucratic interactions. Pg.7-8

‘You need a recommendation’: the politics of accessing cards and resources In order to get almost anything done in relation to the state in
India – such as buying rations, changing schools, or applying for a pension – people need a signature or a recommendation. To steer their
way through the labyrinth of forms, offices, and approvals, applicants need to mobilize any networks and patrons available to them. A
powerful person can move a “stuck up” file. Those without influence have to “put wheels on it” [bribe]’. Pg. 9

The panchayat president emerged as a key figure in people’s narratives of bureaucratic encounters as most cards, certificates, and
schemes require his signature or recommendation, and without this support paperwork can easily ‘get stuck’. Getting on the ‘wrong side’
of the president – whether owing to caste affiliation, party politics, local electoral politics, or personal relations – can be a costly affair and
cause exclusion from key state resources, even with the right documents in hand. Pg.10

ordinary people exploit the disjointed nature of local state bureaucracies, and turn this fragmentation to their advantage. the multiple
strategies used by the urban poor for gaining securityoflivelihoodandresidenceinthecity,including‘simulationanddissimulation, feigning and
duplicity, and passing and pretending’. Pg. 14
It is precisely in the ‘gaps’ between social and paper identities, or heartfelt and handheld identities, that a space for political agency
emerges, and it is in this space that ordinary people navigate official documents and their meaning. The Christian Adi Dravidas in
Allapuram were acutely aware of their entitlements as Dalits and how best to ‘adjust’ their paper identity in order to access state
resources. People clearly strategize around their cards and adapt their paper-based identities in order to access benefits and resources.
Pg.15

Cards and paperwork are inscribed with the cultural politics of identity, while simultaneously acting as the medium of agency through
which identities can be recrafted and resources can be accessed. Pg.16

Waiting for the state

the welfare office was not a space of bargaining or negotiation, but ‘of compliance, a universe in which you “sit down and wait” instead of
attempting to complain or negotiate with welfare authorities’ (2011: 21). Subjugation was created through waiting and compliance, with
such practices constituting a ‘governing technique’ through which state power was articulated and a ‘docile body of welfare clients’
created. Pg 599

Waiting produces differentiated citizens and ‘hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which matter and those which do
not’. Waiting – and being made to wait – is an ‘everyday’ governing technique through which subjects and citizens are created, and
subordination and compliance produced. Pg. 600