Book review: Beatrice Jauregui,Provisional Authority: Police,Order,and Security in India

Policing occupies a central space in governing modern societies, and yet an in-depth ethnography of policing is still a rarity, especially in the South Asian context. Beatrice Jauregui’s ethnography of the police in the most populous state of India, Uttar Pradesh, not only works towards filling this gap but in the process offers a captivating analysis of police authority. While strictly speaking this is an ethnography of police in one district of Uttar Pradesh, the findings have wider relevance and thus gives a clue to police authority in India in general and even beyond. Jauregui beautifully weaves theoretical analysis to field encounters to present the core argument of her book that police authority in India is not secure but is provisional and shifting in several senses of the terms. The argument for provisionality of the authority of police is developed through a linguistically and culturally informed analysis of terms such as jugaad and chalta hai [moves/shifts].

Jauregui picks up four aspects of police practice for analysis: corruption, discrimination, violence and bureaucratic entanglements—aspects which have assumed the status of some kind of a ‘global form’ in the practice of policing—and shows through grounded theorizations how all four of these aspects are mediated through the politics of jugaad in practice. She beautifully brings forth the socio-cultural concept of jugaad—which does not have an exact equivalent term in English—developing it through insights coming from the field. Jugaad is about the ‘social practice of provision’ (p. 35, emphasis in the original) or providing, through whatever resources available. It is not limited to producing makeshift or working material objects such as a vehicle made from spare parts in villages of India instead of factory-made vehicles but connotes ‘patterns and possibilities of social relationships and interactions’ (p. 35). Jugaad also has an expression of a capability of bringing in some kind of good, thus remaining not only a skill but a moral virtue as well.

Jauregui argues that most aspects of police functioning—beginning from appointments to the force, promotions, posting, and transfers, to going about day-to-day police investigation and crime prevention—have to rely on jugaad. While sometimes it is in the form of knowing who to approach and how to approach for a job or a transfer, or having the required social connections, at other times it is about arranging informal understandings of give and take between the police and those who are policed. Even the codes of law, prescribing procedures for arrest, interrogation, and evidence collection, are adhered to through ingenious jugaadi ways of doing police work.

This jugaadi policing on the one hand points towards the severe lack of government funding to the police department especially at the bottom level as well as widespread corruption, and, on the other hand, also towards a certain instability in the authority of police themselves. Police authority is chalta hai, it moves, or shifts, depending on the context or condition of the moment. Since this authority is based on constantly precarious arrangements and is negotiable and not based on rational–legal norms in a Weberian sense, this authority is also not stable.

In the chapter titled ‘Orderly Ethics’, Jauregui discusses how while working towards maintaining law and order, the police themselves become orderlies, having to follow orders from officers higher up, from politicians, from powerful social forces as well as from various common publics who routinely call upon the police to intervene. At the same time, this disciplined orderly force also produces lives that are expendable without a fuss, both in the sense of physical death as seen in high number of police deaths as well as the rhetorical death in the sense of loss of a good life owing to multiple aspects of terrible work condition. Despite such widespread bureaucratic violence, there is no dearth of people who are even ready to pay huge bribes to get into the force, because it offers access to, and the capacity to deploy, various types of social and material resources. It is also a resource that others in the community want to use, often in exchange for material goods or relations.

Two crucial takeaways from Jauregui’s book are, first, that the legitimacy of police is an ongoing, partial, and uneven social process, and secondly, that the various citizen publics play a crucial role in reinforcing police discrimination by demanding various goods from the police in the context of their specific social positioning vis-à-vis various others. The police are, Jauregui argues, a uniquely condemned group of people, if not a subaltern in the Gramscian sense, being denied a critical political voice, while at the same time working towards restricting and destroying voices of others who are most often further subjugated socially, politically and economically.

While police in India has been studied with respect to its structure and organization, its colonial heritage and lack of reform therein, and its practices of violence, the kind of ethnographic work that Jauregui’s book exemplifies, is relatively rare. My own ethnographic work with police in Delhi (which forms a part of my recent book on state violence in India) found many comparable practices and events and affirms many of the findings of Jauregui’s book.

Jauregui’s book is a very important contribution to the field of policing studies specifically and to the study of the state in India more generally. The work is remarkable for the depth and nature of fieldwork that was conducted. The common belief about state institutions in India is that they are hard to access. Jauregui not only successfully glides through the Kafkaesque corridors of state bureaucracy, but her fieldwork approach also lends to her theory-building by showing how informal jugaad works better in achieving access than repeated attempts through official means. The author’s command over Hindi that allowed her to understand the nuances of various terms and to theorize on them is commendable.

One limitation in the analysis is that it does not adequately explore the nature of the police as a state institution distinct from various other state institutions. The jugaadi ways of police practice that Jauregui takes as the basis of her argument about police authority is often evident in the practices of many other state institutions and social relations. Other than that, it is a very readable book with lucid language and an excellent style of weaving ethnographic field narratives with theory.