Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India

384 Pages·2012·1.09 MB·English

by  Akhil Gupta

RED TAPE
A John Hope Franklin Center Book

AKHIL GUPTA
RED TAPE
Bureaucracy, Structural Violence,
and Poverty in India
Duke University Press Durham and London 2012
∫ 2012 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on
acid-free paper !
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
To
Purnima
Always

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Part One INTRODUCTION
1. Poverty as Biopolitics 3
2. The State and the Politics of Poverty 41
Part Two CORRUPTION
3. Corruption, Politics, and the Imagined State 75
4. Narratives of Corruption 111
Part Three INSCRIPTION
5. ‘‘Let the Train Run on Paper’’: Bureaucratic Writing
as State Practice 141
6. Literacy, Bureaucratic Domination, and Democracy 191
Part Four GOVERNMENTALITY
7. Population and Neoliberal Governmentality 237
Epilogue 279
Notes 295
References Cited 329
Index 355

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The writing of this book has been a long journey. During its gesta-
tion period I have acquired many debts that I am happy to acknowl-
edge here. I ask forgiveness from all those people who have contrib-
uted in many ways to the arguments in this book but whose valuable
inputs I may not remember as I write these acknowledgments. I
have presented parts of the book at many venues and have received
helpful criticism and comments from a wide variety of scholars all
over the world.
My greatest debt goes to the lower-level state o≈cials who al-
lowed me to sit in their o≈ces and travel with them over the course
of a year. Although I cannot name them, I want to register their
tremendous generosity in having an inquisitive researcher in their
midst for such a long time. I learned more from them about govern-
ment and governance than one can learn from any report or study.
Mostly I learned that, however valuable interviews with senior,
English-speaking o≈cers of the Indian Administrative Service are
to the study of bureaucracy, they can never substitute for observing
what happens when a poor, illiterate villager walks into a govern-
ment o≈ce. The data I collected by observing these lower-level of-
ficials and by listening to their responses to my interminable ques-
tions lie at the heart of the book. Although the book in its final form
is more heavily weighted toward the conceptual, my fieldwork thor-
oughly informs every idea presented here.