Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India

Abstract

This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An analysis of various forms of waiting-'on the day', 'to and fro', and 'chronic' waitingreveals how temporal processes operate as mechanisms of power and control through which state actors and other mediators produce differentiated forms of citizenship and citizens. Temporal processes and their material outcomes, we argue, are shaped by class, caste and religion, while also drawing on-and reproducing-gendered identities and inequalities. However, rather than being 'passive' patients of the state, we show how ordinary people draw on money, patronage networks and various performative acts in an attempt to secure their rights as citizens of India.

Transparency, exclusion and mediation: how digital and biometric technologies are transforming social protection in Tamil Nadu, India

“…The authors have conducted field research here since 2008, on a range of topics including changing livelihood strategies (Carswell & De Neve, 2014a), MGNREGA (Carswell & De Neve, 2014b), voting and elections (Carswell & De Neve, 2014c), and labour bondage and indebtedness (Carswell et al, 2021). The background to this paper is thus a longer-term understanding of different aspects of villagers' lives, and their multiple interactions with the state (Carswell, Chambers, & De Neve, 2019).…”

“…It is precisely this lack of transparency about the process that often leaves problems unresolved for months or even years. This not only makes it inadequate to label these issues mere teething problems, but such labelling also erases the human interventions of re-applying, providing documentation and endless waiting that typically ensue (Carswell et al, 2019).…”

“…It did require a payment of Rs 500. In many ways, what Karpagam went through was the very opposite of what ordinary people experience when encountering state bureaucracy: processes of waiting and queuing, being sent back and forth, being made to wait and beg, and having to rely on the goodwill of patrons or the payment of brokers (Carswell et al, 2019;Hull, 2012). By contrast, at the internet centre, mediation was removed from the social networks of power, caste and class that typically mark villagers' engagement with local state officials and rural intermediaries.…”

Affective bureaucratic relations: File practices in a European deportation unit and criminal court

“…Such approaches often tend to understand bureaucracies as sites lethal to human spirit and the imagination (Graeber, 2015) or as instruments of dehumanization and rationalization (Bauman, 2000). As sites too, that may elicit fear on the side of the ‘clients’ of bureaucracies, located in the threat that bureaucrats will ‘wrap you in paper’ (Gefou-Madianou, 1997: 139), or will ‘waste your time’ (Carswell et al., 2019). What fuels these understandings of bureaucracy might be what Michael Herzfeld (1992) described as ‘the social production of indifference’: an indifference of state bureaucracies to their subjects that can only be experienced as humiliating and, at times, violent.…”

The Making of a Work-ready Individual: The Political Economy of Time in a Workfare Program in Israel

“…Despite scholars' intensive examination of the technologies of power involved in neoliberal governance of the long-term unemployed, only over the past decade have scholars begun to address the politics of time embedded in such technologies. For example, a number of recent studies attend to the amount of time claimants and recipients spend waiting at welfare offices, identifying waiting as signifying asymmetrical power relations and serving as a technique of power for constituting citizens as submissive subjects of the state (Auyero, 2012;Carswell et al, 2019;Grill, 2018;Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, 2016). Boland and Griffin (2018) and Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald (2016) also show how, in making people wait, these programs constitute individuals as simultaneously calculating and passive.…”