Each of the chapters in this book is presented as an ethnographic exploration into forms of regulation that produce the social and moral order in what appears to be a highly regulated and surveilled borderland society in western India. Taken together, they argued, however, that even on a hostile border between states that manifest an extreme case of “cartographic anxiety” (Krishna 1994), the state and its various arms of order maintenance (e.g., the police, border security forces, the army, and intelligence services) are not experienced as the most salient—or the only—purveyors of order and security. They demonstrate that the state may not always be a privileged site to elaborate the concept of policing as practice. Although the Foucauldian approach to governmentality has allowed us to productively theorize a shift from the concept of police as art of government to the broader idea of order maintenance, characterized as the shift from “police as governance” to “governance as police” (Garriott 2013), this very approach has perhaps allowed us to overread homogeneity into diverse forms of police practice. This homogeneity is located in the conceptual and institutional framework of the “police force” which retains a privileged site of inquiry even in an anthropology of police practice (Garriott 2013).
This ethnography of policing on a South Asian borderland opens up the scope of policing beyond the state and beyond the idea of a police force, identifying new sites for an anthropology of policing such as the family, neighborhood, or religious community. Policing is not synonymous with the state in this ethnography, not because of forms of neoliberal governmentality that privatize police functions, but because it argues that the production of social and moral order is a contested, rather than consensual, process. Policing the border in this ethnography is about managing access to cross-border mobility, the acquisition of citizenship, the multiple narratives around war and its memorialization; these actions straddle a fine line between the formally legal and the illegal. Criminalization of activity (such as the illegal crossing of borders and the trafficking of women) is one mode of policing that emanates from the state; this ethnography examined the multiple forms of policing that emerge in the decisions about the modes of filtering and sorting people across the border: whom to include and whom to exclude, whom to trust and whom to distrust, who is a nationalist and who is a traitor. The family is a site of policing, not because it acts as an extension of the state, configuring the public citizen through her intimate life, but because practices of policing that involve ways of seeing and forms of sociality that are based on suspicion and the control of information are also present within the family. By making the family as important a player as the institutional police force, the ethnography suggested that sociality within the family is not necessarily devoid of the suspicions and infelicities that are assumed to be active only in the individual’s interface with the state.
Having naturalized in modern times the idea that social order flows from the state, this became, in short, a particularly fruitful site to seek answers to the question: where might we look for the sources of social order beyond the state (Gluckman 1956)? Unlike other anthropologists working on politically sensitive borders, I did not encounter security and surveillance emanating directly from the state (e.g., Verdery 2014; McGranahan 2016); this did not mean, however, that my presence in the field went unremarked. On the contrary, in fact. However, I soon became caught up in an entire range of activities that were engaged in policing the social order on this borderland by a range of actors, each of whom had their own stakes in observing the anthropologist and through her, each other. The anthropologist became a key player in the way in which information was managed and flowed across everyday encounters. People bestowed information on me—and just as often they withheld it—keeping in mind whom I spent time with and whose homes I was seen to frequent. I became thus interpellated in a sea of sociality and information management that did not necessarily have the state as its center. This ethnography is thus also an invitation to reflect on how the anthropological method may be complicit in forms of policing that are scattered across a field of dispersal—in this case nongovernmental development organizations, state police, paramilitary and armed forces, the family, religious groups, and others. The book suggests that forms of policing do not just “spill over” from the state and circulate within society. They are not only “offloaded” from the state onto others; these techniques are ubiquitous across institutions such as the family and the state.
In villages close to the border, I often found my ethnographic tools mirrored forms of policing that are conventionally held to emanate from the state. Walking on remote and dusty tracks to reach the house of an informant, notebook and pen in hand, I was frequently mistaken for a government official or census taker. Surrounded by people who would begin telling me their problems, I had a difficult time explaining to them that I could not help them in the tangible ways they seemed to expect: a water pipeline, an electricity connection, the extension of a bus route. Yet, I was certainly not the only one interviewing, observing, and assessing. Suspicion circulated within the social fabric, but this suspicion was not only a condition of borderland lives that were interpellated with state intelligence networks (e.g., Ali 2013). Chapter 4 discussed the everyday consequences of suspicion and the breakdown of trust within the family. Although I do not suggest a direct connection between one form of suspicion and the other, the borderland context certainly did provide for an overall ethnographic context that enabled me to articulate them within a larger context of policing.
This ethnography argued that border work is also about forms of policing that emanate from the community, especially those that have a stake in border management because they live in villages dotting the international boundary. Practices of policing this border bring together formal institutional and organizational aspects of police work with other dimensions of policing that operate at the level of the community; these practices create important points of conjuncture between state and community but not in any uniform or predetermined way. The community is heterogenous, as is the state: forms of suspicion, surveillance, and means of policing the social and moral order flow through each of these domains, rendering it difficult to talk about policing as being either state or community directed.
On this borderland, the big question for the state is, what are the contours of belonging? Who belongs to the nation and who does not, and how is this to be policed? For the family, the same question is posed and answered differently. Practices of policing involve ways of seeing, learning to see differently, but they also relate to the control of information. If policing is related to a “phenomenology of fear” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016), then one of the questions addressed by this ethnography is, who deploys this fear? As seen in the chapters, the affective experience of fear, dread, suspicion, or lack of trust is not wielded solely by the institutional arm of the state police. Not only do these affects structure the intimate life of the family, even formal practices of policing are often forged through relations of friendship and cooperation between hosts and guests, policemen and key stakeholders in the community.
By entering into the field of everyday sociality within Muslim families, the book interrogates and challenges the canonical exclusion of Muslims from the mainstream—of academic literature as much as policy within India. Departing from the lens of marginality and exclusion alone, the chapters on the family and policing have examined how everyday aspirations, hopes, and desires configure both middle-class urban as well as rural Muslims on this borderland. An important conclusion of this ethnographic exploration into policing practices in India is to focus on how Muslims are constituted in addition to being targets of the state’s policing. Although policing Muslim migration into India constitutes the raison d’être of postcolonial India’s citizenship regime (Jayal 2013), this book seeks to examine the myriad ways in which Muslims on the border become subjects and agents of policing in a variety of everyday contexts. Practices of policing—such as the use of suspicion, fear, and the management of information—are attributes that circulate beyond the formal confines of the police as an arm of the state alone: they can be located within families and communities.
Border management practices in India have defined the Muslim as the suspicious “other” from the very earliest articulation of citizenship rules and border control (Chatterji 2007; Roy 2010; Jayal 2013), and more recently, sites of policing such as counterterrorism and the military security network of the state target the Muslim as an always-already suspicious subject (Sethi 2014). On the other hand, I argue that suspicion may also be deployed within the Muslim family and community, thus breaking apart the notion of a homogenous group that is bound together in an intimacy that is produced as a consequence of being policed by the state.
Broadening the scope of practices of policing beyond the state does not intend to overlook the extraordinary reach of the state in its security and surveillance operations, during moments of crisis, but also in the everyday forms of prejudice and harassment of targeted populations in the name of counterterrorism and security (Sethi 2014). On the contrary, it enables us to observe the manner in which suspicion, surveillance, and other components of everyday peacekeeping are forms of practice that are not in exclusive use by what we deem to be the “police” or the “military” but are forms of social practice that are more generally disbursed in this borderland society.
The production by the state of the borderland resident by way of the generic term Muslim is without a doubt shorthand for invoking a particular vision of demographic management and border policing that has been in place since the late 1940s at least. However, this view does not do justice to the diverse ways in which the Muslim border residents produce themselves or tell us how they do this in relation to which antagonists. What relationships do they negotiate with various competing or adjacent forms of sovereignty? Even though the state produces them as objects of pacification, co-option, even elimination, for the production of order in the borderlands, what does this do for the production of community among a group of citizens thus policed? Does the reduction of the Muslim citizen to “bare life” enable forms of collective solidarity within them as the despised “other”? Or on the other hand, do they emerge not just an object of policing (by the state) but also as agents of policing—vis-à-vis each other but also toward the state? Rather than one homogenous category (the “Muslim”), they appear in a field of dispersal, even when a pragmatic response may appear to be one that would suggest that those who are reduced to “bare life” must stick together. The larger impetus behind this argument is to ask how one might reclaim agency for the Muslim citizen in these times of heightened state surveillance. How totalizing is this articulation of state sovereignty that does not allow the subject to respond in any form other than bare life? The answer may lie in this ethnographic exploration of forms of policing—as a subset of sovereignty—that are adjacent to one another rather than locked in dyadic battles that envision only one victorious side. The family, the religious community, and the state are all sovereign agents—they have power over life and death—and they exercise this power in modes that are not necessarily doomed to be consumed in oppositional conflicts. Muslims on this borderland are interpellated in the state’s project of policing, but they also engage the state in their own policing projects. If forms of recognition are critical to the successful performance of sovereignty (Maunaguru 2020), then the manner in which the object of surveillance conscripts modes of sovereign power that are usually associated with the state into its own forms of policing (within the family, for instance, or within the religious community against members of different maslaks [sects]) is also instructive.
The book began by setting out the contexts within which border work is constituted as police work—and other way around—from the perspective of the state’s territorial sovereignty. If it is in the nature of sovereignty to continually perform itself—with or without the use of violence—then one of the ways in which territorially constituted states perform their sovereignty is by continually iterating their borders. The border provides the limiting frame for sovereignty imagined in a nationalist vein and also throws into stark relief zones of contested jurisdiction (e.g., in South Asia, the most obvious zones are Kashmir or Arunachal Pradesh where India, Pakistan, and China compete for territorial sovereignty). Territorial borders are where the state performs its sovereignty through all the means available to it, ideological (advertisements, tourism brochures, textbooks, maps) or military (armed occupation). It is not only at its borders that the state’s sovereignty is vulnerable, but these territorial limits produce special test cases for an analysis of sovereignty: it is here that several adjacent sovereignties may encounter each other, their impulse not necessarily to engage in annihilatory violence toward the other—as is often the case when nation-states encounter each other—but in fact they may choose to accommodate each other in diverse forms of coexistence.1
A borderland is unique, therefore, not just for what it can tell us ethnographically about the state, territoriality, and forms of regulation (van Schendel 2004; Gupta 2013; Reeves 2014; Jusionyte 2015; Cons 2016; Ghosh 2017) but also for what it reveals about the flow of everyday life within more intimate spaces such as the family and the neighborhood. How does suspicion and distrust configure itself within the warp of the family’s interior life, not necessarily as a response to forms of state surveillance but existing alongside it? How does this particular context allow us to examine forms of distrust, suspicion, and bad faith that occur as part of the normal weave of everyday life within the family? Thus, I suggest not that distrust and betrayal within the universe of kinship are produced as a consequence of living on a border but that this site allowed me to draw certain connections between the practices of policing that I observed across domains. The work of policing in this ethnography does not relate only to boundaries that are territorial in nature.
The borderland provides a nuanced understanding of policing as a more general social concept/practice not because it constitutes a geographic margin (as we know, the margin is not in fact about geography as argued by Harms et al. [2014] and Das and Poole [2004]), but because it permits a thick description of the various ways in which the circulation of trust and friendship, deception and detection, suspicion and surveillance become forms of capital that are deployed in the management of the legal and the illegal—in the perpetuation of those forms of sociality that are desirable and the disciplining of those that are not.
Citizens of borderlands are thus not only at the receiving end of the state’s policies and programs or constituted solely as objects of surveillance or protection, but they are in fact central to the military-bureaucratic regime that produces territorial borders as both objects and instruments of rule. They constitute alternate loci of sovereignty, but these loci are not necessarily either offshoots or oppositional to the state; the book proposes the concept of adjacent sovereignties to understand the coexistence of multiple forms of sovereignty that are not easily sorted out into orders of priority. Although their strategies may mirror each other in terms of the deployment of fear and suspicion or the use of bureaucratic practices such as enumeration and documentation, these forms of mimicry and citation are seemingly endless in scope. The jural, domestic, and religious order constitute themselves as forms of sovereignty that are adjacent rather than nested within one another.
The book should be read as an addition to existing literature on borderland populations’ engagements with the state and to ethnographies of policing. It seeks to dislodge the state as the primary frame of reference for borderland studies. It builds on arguments that propose that surveillance is a relation of power that is not always hierarchical but also “lateral,” not just a coercive relation but may enable creative forms of practice, and that securitization is a discourse that may co-opt a range of other actors conventionally thought of as “nonstate.” It suggests that surveillance and policing come in many forms; the category must be expanded to include so-called “nonstate” purveyors of securitization and surveillance: tourism, journalists, development organizations, the roving anthropologist, and finally, residents of the border themselves.