Book review: Beatrice Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India
| Author | Santana Khanikar |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023019838732 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Beatrice Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
2017. 216 pages. `695.00.
Policing occupies a central space in governing modern societies, and yet an in-depth ethnography
of policing is still a rarity, especially in the South Asian context. Beatrice Jauregui’s ethnography of the
police in the most populous state of India, Uttar Pradesh, not only works towards filling this gap but in
the process offers a captivating analysis of police authority. While strictly speaking this is an ethnogra-
phy of police in one district of Uttar Pradesh, the findings have wider relevance and thus gives a clue to
police authority in India in general and even beyond. Jauregui beautifully weaves theoretical analysis to
field encounters to present the core argument of her book that police authority in India is not secure but
is provisional and shifting in several senses of the terms. The argument for provisionality of the authority
of police is developed through a linguistically and culturally informed analysis of terms such as jugaad
and chalta hai [moves/shifts].
Jauregui picks up four aspects of police practice for analysis: corruption, discrimination, violence
and bureaucratic entanglements—aspects which have assumed the status of some kind of a ‘global form’
in the practice of policing—and shows through grounded theorizations how all four of these aspects
are mediated through the politics of jugaad in practice. She beautifully brings forth the socio-cultural
concept of jugaad—which does not have an exact equivalent term in English—developing it through
insights coming from the field. Jugaad is about the ‘social practice of provision’ (p. 35, emphasis in the
original) or providing, through whatever resources available. It is not limited to producing makeshift or
working material objects such as a vehicle made from spare parts in villages of India instead of factory-
made vehicles but connotes ‘patterns and possibilities of social relationships and interactions’ (p. 35).
Jugaad also has an expression of a capability of bringing in some kind of good, thus remaining not only
a skill but a moral virtue as well.
Jauregui argues that most aspects of police functioning—beginning from appointments to the force,
promotions, posting, and transfers, to going about day-to-day police investigation and crime preven-
tion—have to rely on jugaad. While sometimes it is in the form of knowing who to approach and how to
approach for a job or a transfer, or having the required social connections, at other times it is about
arranging informal understandings of give and take between the police and those who are policed. Even
the codes of law, prescribing procedures for arrest, interrogation, and evidence collection, are adhered to
through ingenious jugaadi ways of doing police work.
This jugaadi policing on the one hand points towards the severe lack of government funding to the
police department especially at the bottom level as well as widespread corruption, and, on the other hand,
also towards a certain instability in the authority of police themselves. Police authority is chalta hai, it
moves, or shifts, depending on the context or condition of the moment. Since this authority is based on
Studies in Indian Politics
7(1) 90–99, 2019
© 2019 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
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DOI: 10.1177/2321023019838732
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