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Accepted Paper:

'JESTERS' AND 'LITTLE SOLDIERS': Understanding the National Register of Citizens in India through the lower bureaucracy  
Bhargabi Das (Shiv Nadar University, Delhi)

Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to understand how through the ambivalence of lower bureaucracies, examined through their functioning, positionality and their imagination of state and a citizen, one can locate varied narratives of workings of state-making, violence and debates surrounding citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

The Indian State's citizenship project in Assam, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) got published in August 2019 and has left out 1.9 million people. A massive exercise of state-making, it relied extensively on infrastructure of technology and documents. Particular softwares were used to collect, segregate and verify the documents that were used to examine one's citizenship. This also makes the process extremely 'rigid', 'rational' and hence 'error-free' (at least believed to be so). However, the involvement of various levels of bureaucrats adds interesting complexities to this narrative.

This paper will understand the NRC through the functioning of the lower bureaucracy. Moving away from a Weberian understanding of an ideal-typical bureaucracy and moving closer to the understanding of a bureaucracy through its encounters, experiences and performances in the everyday as exemplified by F. G. Bailey, Akhil Gupta or Nayanika Mathur, I argue that the lower bureaucracy involved cuts through the understanding of the NRC as 'scientific' and 'rigid'. I understand how the lower bureaucracy brings in this disjuncture into the narrative. Further, based on my interactions with lower officials and observations in NRC centers, I argue that this lower bureaucracy displays ambivalence in both its beliefs and practices. The question that is further explored is what does this ambivalence reflects about notions of state-making and the state in South-Asia and how such ambivalence of lower bureaucracy adds in to this crisis of citizenship. This will further enrich us on how infrastructures get performed, adapted and imagined on the ground.

Panel IN02a
Infrastructures: Anthrogeographies of the state as an absent presence
  Session 1 Monday 14 September, 2020, -