Description

It is a truism that police in India generally lack legitimate authority and public trust. This lack is widely understood by scholars, policy analysts, and police practitioners as being rooted in the institution’s colonial development as a means of oppression, and its alleged corruption and criminalization in the postcolonial period. The social facts of situational hyper-empowerment and the widespread decadence of police do much to explain their poor image and performance, but these explanations do not account for the fact that police in India are also structurally disempowered by cultural-political and legal-institutional claims to multiple and conflicting forms of authority that challenge and often overwhelm the authority of police. This structural disempowerment and its performances in everyday interactions between the police and the public constitute an ongoing social process of delegitimation of police authority in contemporary India. Following ethnographic analysis of this process of delegitimation, I explore the implications of focusing on police disempowerment for theorizations of the sources and capabilities of state legal authority more generally

Beatrice Jauregui is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests involve ethnographic and historical study of the lived experiences of persons working in police and military bureaucracies to understand the everyday dynamics of authority, security and democratic order. Her forthcoming book, with the working title Provisional Authority: Policing and Order in India, is based on more than two years of fieldwork with police in Uttar Pradesh.