Sovereigns Surveilled: Lawyers, Naughty Boys, and Other Parasites in an Uttar Pradesh Police Station

In India, a range of brokers, fixers and middlemen negotiate access to all levels of the state. However, little is known about how state-level bureaucrats respond to these para-state actors. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with state-level police in Uttar Pradesh, this paper parses ‘parasite’, as both a vernacular and theoretical term, to capture the ambiguous dynamics of dependency and reversal between police and alternate sources of sovereign power, which can include brokers, lawyers, viral videos and the jinns. Using a Serresian perspective, I show how the police both disavow and emulate the practices of these worldly and otherworldly sources of sovereignty, and are inadvertently pushed to the political, physical and digital edges of the city. Accusations of parasitism reveal how the brokers keep a check on the police during an era of surging Hindu nationalist politics by forcing a ‘distribution’ of sovereign power between state and parastate entities.