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

Anyone familiar with South Asian bureaucracy will nod in recognition when reading Red Tape, an ethnographic exploration of local-level governance in India.While considering these pervasive but understudied bureaucratic processes, Akhil Gupta takes on scholarly debates about governance and structural violence.Why are grinding poverty and intense human suffering met with bureaucratic indifference?Gupta points out a painful paradox: citizens engage actively in Indian politics, and the democratic state explicitly aims to bring development to the poor, but the government structure impedes the care it officially intends to deliver.Framing his analysis of bureaucracy within a discussion of governmentality, Gupta suggests that people who take Foucault seriously need to interrogate their assumptions about the unitary nature of the state.Drawing on vividly detailed ethnographic material, Gupta shows that "the state" in India is composed not only of the three branches of government (administrative, legislative, and judiciary), but also of multiple levels (federal, state, district, subdistrict, and block) and numerous bureaus and programs (dealing, for example, with education, medical care, housing, agriculture, and commerce).Far from operating as a seamless, purposeful, and well-integrated whole, the Indian bureaucracy instead bumps along in fragmented, uncoordinated, and decentralized fashion.Caught up in overlapping and sometimes contradictory bureaucratic mandates and structures, even well-meaning administrators end up dispensing uneven, arbitrary, and often harmful forms of governance.Theories of disciplinary power often assume that states exercise penetrating biopolitical surveillance over citizens.Effective biopower requires classification and enumeration through accurate statistics, censuses, and maps in order to control the intimate, bodily lives of those administered.Gupta shows that the Indian bureaucracy generates a great deal of data, and in the process creates reified images of the state and its populations.But the low-quality information is rarely checked or verified, often originating as guestimates by workers who care more about generating a report than about making sure of its accuracy.Instead, dominant narratives (about gender, caste, and education, for example) set up expectations about the poorest citizens; the higher in the structure one works, the more likely one interacts with stereotypical representations of the poor rather than with the poor themselves.Data inaccuracies leave room for resistance but also provide a source of the arbitrariness that inflicts structural violence on the neediest citizens.Pervasive corruption, one source of the failure of the Indian bureaucracy, systematically disempowers the poor by making essential (and supposedly free) goods and services unaffordable.Siphoned off on their way down through the system, govern-