Book Review: Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023013482797 |
| Author | Tarangini Sriraman |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Studies in Indian Politics, 1, 1 (2013): 109–126
Book Reviews 119
available in the state, the leadership profile of and strategies adopted by the political entrepreneurs and
theoretical insights into the phenomenon of political party system change.
Shailendra Kharat
University of Pune
E-mail: shailendra_kharat@yahoo.com
Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
2012. 368 pages. ` 895.
DOI: 10.1177/2321023013482797
This is a lucid, powerfully original and rigorously argued book in terms of the disparate terrains of
bureaucracy, biopolitics, inscription and poverty that it traverses and in the way it frames questions of
political anthropology. The strength of Akhil Gupta’s writing springs from his consistent rejection of the
axiomatic as well as the incidental. Be it ideological truisms or empirical phenomena—literacy as
empowerment, liberalization as the new-rich-middle-class driven juggernaut of violence against the
poor, the routine deaths of the poor owing to malnutrition, corrupt lower-level officials—Gupta pauses
to patiently interrogate and often overturn dominant assumptions of the relationship between poverty
and the Indian postcolonial state.
To say that this book is empirically rich would be understating things. Gupta weaves his arguments
through example: theoretical formulations, fictional representations and journalistic observations are
all evaluated against everyday practices of the state at different levels of bureau, branch, location and
official hierarchy.
Arriving from a biopolitical standpoint that critically engages with Foucault and Agamben, Gupta
seeks to understand a paradox—of violence against the poor and official tolerance of poverty—induced
deaths in a state that regards impoverished subjects as vital to ‘projects of national sovereignty’ (p. 6).
By way of comprehending this paradox, he studies various government rural welfare programs among
which the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), Mahila Samakhya and the Jawahar Rojgaar
Yojana (JRY) prominently feature. In studying these programs, Gupta considers the various modalities
through which structural violence—a theme that runs as a motif in this book—or a violence that is
constantly but not necessarily intended, is unleashed against the rural poor. The modalities he identifies
are corruption, ‘inscriptions’ (p. 141) and governmental practices. Gupta’s approach to corruption is
innovative in that he stresses not its ‘dysfunctional aspect’ (p. 78) but its narrative dimensions. The state
and citizenship are frequently imagined in everyday encounters of rural subjects with officials and in
media reportage of popular perceptions, rumours and accounts of corruption.
Akhil Gupta’s forays into the analysis of bureaucratic inscription in the form of records, registers,
certificates, counterfeit documents, complaints filed by rural subjects against state officials and those by
lower level officials against each other complement his theoretical project to show mere literacy to be
inadequate in everyday encounters with power. Through various examples—such as the one where a
rural applicant has to struggle against odds to obtain the crucial signature of an official who in fact knows
close to nothing about the life-experiences of the claimant—Gupta argues against an unqualified under-
standing of literacy. Gupta maintains that unless it is contextualized across language and location, the
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