Abstract
Why is it that ‘a state dedicated to development appears to be incapable of doing more to combat the violence of chronic poverty’ (p. 279)? In addressing this concern, Akhil Gupta in Red Tape questions the ontic status of the state and interrogates the construction of the unitary state and its reification by piecing together in fine ethnographic detail, the everyday, routinised practices through which state officers construct the boundaries between state and society—each site not necessarily connected to the other in a grand super structure, but each creating a regulatory system and protocols that define the characteristic of the state at that level.
As a stark point of departure, witness the deaths of millions of poor people in India. Witness the violence of exceptional poverty that annihilates entire communities. Rather than seeing this as an inevitable situation from which the poor have no escape, Akhil Gupta argues that the death of the poor is a form of thanatopolitics1—and that ‘extreme poverty [is] a direct and culpable form of killing made possible by state policies and practices’ (p. 6). While it is not possible perhaps to identify a single perpetrator, human complicity and agency are clearly identifiable in the perpetration of extreme suffering; despite being preventable, these deaths are not prevented; and these deaths are seen as outside the orbit of violation—the extremely poor represent bare life—life that can be killed without it being considered a sacrifice. Unlike the context within which Agamben locates his writing, the poor in India, Gupta argues, suffer state arbitrariness even while they are included in projects of national sovereignty and are killed despite their centrality to democratic politics:
If the state in India were ideologically opposed to redistributive measures…it would make the lack of urgency in eradicating poverty much easier to understand. It is this commitment to equality, to the redistribution of dignity, and to the inclusion of the formerly marginal in the national project that makes the continued violence enacted on the poor so paradoxical (p. 222).
Investigating the juridical and social conditions that make the violence of such exceptional poverty normal through ethnographies of state practice, Gupta approaches the question of structural violence through three intersecting themes—corruption, inscription and governmentality; through ethnographic accounts of state practices; and through narratives of state practice ranging from public culture to creative writing.
Folklore around corruption abounds—and stories of corruption circulate incessantly, embellished in each successive cycle. Sidestepping stereotypical representations of corruption as a characteristic of Third World nation-states, Gupta approaches this subject by combining ethnography with an analysis of texts—and the task at hand is specific: ‘investigating the wide range of meanings attributed to the term in the context of structural violence’ (p. 80). The relevance of this lies in the fact that corruption serves to exclude the poor from access to free and subsidised services even while they are included in the national developmental project—enabling ‘the very gestures of inclusion to produce an outcome that is its opposite’ (p. 110). The recognition by ordinary people of the multiple layers and centres of the state, their consciousness of the relative habitations of corruption across these layers and their absorption of representations of these habitations in public culture speak of a common understanding of the state as a disaggregated, multi-layered institution. The multiple, simultaneous, intersecting locations of the state—local, regional, national, transnational—and its multiple, simultaneous protocols is a theme Gupta returns to often and demonstrates through his ethnographic journeys across bureaucratic habitations in Uttar Pradesh.
Inscription is at the core of bureaucracy—the file, registers, memos, notings, reports, complaints, petitions, ‘paper work’… The proliferation of writing that is labyrinthine, repetitive and mundane, far from being a substitute for bureaucratic action, is bureaucratic action in itself and constitutive of states. What are the specific ways in which writing functions as a key modality for the perpetration of structural violence by the state? What are ‘the consequences that forms and styles of state writing have for poor people?’ (p. 143). In a society where the curtailment of access to public goods by the poor is the norm, literacy—the ability to read and write—vests power in the bureaucracy and is a source of domination over the largely illiterate poor. Yet, as Gupta argues, the relationship between literacy, education and poverty is complex—literacy by itself cannot mitigate structural violence. The distinction between political literacy and functional literacy merits serious attention—what is important is not literacy itself but the political contexts in which it develops (p. 218).
Drawing on Foucault’s work on governmentality, Gupta uses global governmentality to index a different approach to the question of regulation that ‘acknowledges that transnational linkages in the movement of ideas, material resources, technologies, and personnel are critical to the care of populations’ (p. 239). Looking closely at two programmes (ICDS and Mahila Samakhya) that belong to different moments of globalisation and had vastly differing design, objectives and ideologies, he demonstrates continuities in biopolitics and violence through this entire period. The attempt is also to underscore the specificity of neoliberal global processes by mapping the different impacts at different levels and in different state sectors, complicating thereby overarching notions of state reform based on Western liberal democratic policies.
A careful examination of these anti-poverty programmes, Gupta argues, demonstrates that ‘[t]hanatopolitics…is built into the design of government programmes to the extent that the “difficulty” of removing poverty is normalized in the discourses of political and bureaucratic elites’, leading to ‘a bureaucratic culture in which failures of implementation are not merely tolerated but expected’ (p. 275).
We return to the point of departure with a twist. The casual reference to failures in implementation that perpetuate the violence of poverty—of legislation, policy, schemes, entitlements generally—splice the realm of state action into two parts that never meet: the realm of the proactive state that has everything good and desirable already written into the books of government; and the realm of the implementing agencies (as if this were not also the state) that use every trick from corruption to coercion to subvert the good of the written word. Gupta provides a refreshing analysis rich in detail and one that dismantles these separations. The book both enables a more nuanced and productive understanding of the habitations of structural violence and points to different possibilities of theorising the state.