Police work and the politics of expendability in India

Abstract

This article examines how rank-and-file police in contemporary India express work-related grievances regarding official neglect of their well-being, systemic exploitation by government authorities and other elites, and routinized threats of bodily harm and death. It analyzes these experiences as manifestations of a ‘politics of expendability’ through which police, conceived as security laborers, are ironically condemned to exclusion from a morally and materially ‘good life’, and only partially or superficially compensated for the often questionably licit kinds of work demanded of them. Conceiving this politics as both intersecting with and reflective of broader structures of systemic inequality and oppressive violence, I consider recent cases of constables publicly complaining about their working and living conditions through social media, quitting their jobs, and dying by suicide as signs of resignation-cum-protest. In so doing, I demonstrate how the social demands for police work as security labor are co-configured with a devaluation of police life that produces affects of despair and structures of disposability. Rethinking the globalized paradox of police demonization-cum-valorization, this study raises challenging questions about how police in India – as well as in other contexts, and especially in Global South postcolonies – may be conceived as expendable workers. It further considers how, moving forward, we must work to reimagine what policing as institutionalized security labor and police work are – and ought to be.

Introduction

In June 2020, a three-minute video montage began circulating widely on social media sites and phone apps frequently used by rank-and-file police in India. Intentionally set against the aural background of a love song from a 1999 Bollywood crime film titled Arjun Pandit, ¹ one sees a medley of still images, beginning with one of a group of police constables, almost all women, standing in a line wearing black arm bands, a now common symbol of mourning and protest. The photo is overlaid by a subtitle that says, ‘aakhir kyon?   ’ or ‘Why, after all?’ Next, we see an image of a distressed female police constable with a caption explaining that she was sexually harassed by a senior official, who demanded a ‘one-night stand’ in exchange for granting her leave from work to which she was entitled. This is followed by several ghastly images: two of female constables who apparently have hanged themselves and one of an inexplicably bloodied woman in uniform. These gruesome scenes are followed by screenshots of Hindi-language newspaper reports about sexual harassment of women constables going unaddressed or the victimized women themselves being punished with transfers to undesirable postings, and some of them dying by suicide. Then there is another group shot of uniformed constables captioned with a statement that reads, ‘dengue or chikungunya [mosquito-transmitted viruses], there is no work leave here. If you get [leave], then it is only in death [sic]. Signed, Indian Police Service.’ ² Lest one think this cri de coeur is devoted primarily to gender-based violence, in the remaining two minutes of the video we see images of male constables who have shot themselves (and, in some cases, a companion), hanged themselves, or consumed poison ‘owing to continuous stress’ (tanav). Viewers also see a headline about a sub-inspector (darogha) who was harassed by the family member of a prominent elected official, and a story about a constable’s family that has been brutally beaten by members of the public (for reasons unclear). Finally, there is a news-story reference to how the colonial ‘English government has gone, but its police are still here’.

Like others of its ilk that circulate regularly, this video aims to represent a composite voice of police constables in India as a collective of workers who suffer acute and myriad woes related to systemic harassment, neglect, and a generalized inability to realize some version of ‘the good life’, defined in terms of both moral rectitude and materially resourced well-being. These rank-and-file police in India are mostly from poor or less wealthy backgrounds. They are aspirational middle-class folk working their way up the purported ladder of social mobility through hard-won but still low-paying jobs in the security labor sector – jobs that in this context are routinely obtained through social connections with influential figures, nepotism, or raw bribery (Jauregui, 2016; Waseem, 2022). Crucially, many constables identify far more with the subaltern masses than with the powerful elites or even educated middle-class workers like medical doctors (see Arnold, 1985, 1986; Guha, 1982).

The cultural intimations of the video’s background music reflect the social fact that these low-ranking police who, crucially, constitute approximately 90% of the force have no viable channels through which to seek redress for their grievances. ³ They express a generalized experience of misery, dehumanization, and insecurity related directly to their work. These expressions may sometimes contain elements of hyperbole, or blindness to the relatively privileged position some police may have. However, it is crucial to understand that in this context – and likely in many others, especially in Global South postcolonies (Bayart, 2009; Mamdani, 2018; Mbembe, 2001; Waseem, 2022) – such laments among ‘non-gazetted’ police (i.e. in the lowest ranks of constable and sub-inspector, as opposed to the upper ranks of the Indian Police Service, literally the top 1%) – amount to more than myopic self-serving pity parties. The nature of Indian constable life and work entails forms of insecurity and expendability that connect with broader dynamics of social disposability and structural violence (Common Cause and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2019; Human Rights Watch, 2009). Drawing out these connections and their implications may be disconcerting, particularly in our current moment of a global reckoning with the systemic violence of police institutions, but it is instructive and important for nuancing and rethinking prevalent understandings of ‘security’ today in terms of the lives and labor of institutional actors supposedly providing it.

In this article, I argue that the most productive way to understand and explain widespread experiences of insecurity and hopelessness among rank-and-file police in India is to delineate what I call a ‘politics of expendability’. Conceiving the masses of police in India as people doing the work of security provision (Jauregui, 2022, 2023), I consider how this politics demands particular forms of ill-defined labor time and problematic practices by workers who assume extraordinary risks and experience devaluation and demonization of their labor and life. Of course, police are hardly the only people in this (or any) context who suffer structural and direct violence as part and parcel of their job expectations; and, obviously, one may cite numerous examples of people who are far worse off. Many people in other lines of paid work – or those who lack access to gainful employment at all – are significantly more vulnerable than police, physically, fiscally, socially, legally, and politically. This ‘relative deprivation’–oriented outlook need not mean that we ignore the exceptionally poor living and working conditions of the vast majority of police in India and some other contexts. Moreover, we must consider that recognizing the work-related grievances of rank-and-file police and providing space in which they might voice them need not equate to elevating or valorizing or otherwise valuing their lives over and above the lives of others. The analysis conducted here is not a call to place police on a pedestal and claim that their rights matter more than others, especially people from marginalized communities who often suffer greatly at the hands of police and others whose work reproduces a status quo of inequality, discrimination, and oppression wrought by longstanding and well-entrenched systems of colonial capitalist production and consumption. Rather, what I aim to do here is illuminate how various forms of systemic violence are not merely enforced by police as vessels of state sovereignty, but also visited upon police as vassals of a social order that subjectivizes most of its people as legitimately dispensable, replaceable, and consumable to the point of extinction. I further aim to draw attention to how the quotidian expendability of police life and work in India reflects and intersects with broader moral and political economies of (in)security and labor.

I have been conducting ethnographic research with police in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and other regions in India for the past two decades. To date, my research publications have been based primarily on direct observations and interviews ‘in the field’. Some of the insights shared here will derive from these data collected since 2004. However, owing in part to travel restrictions wrought first by the COVID-19 pandemic and later by targeted politicized attempts to curtail research by persons like myself who have been openly critical of the right-wing governments in power at the national and state levels, this discussion will involve mostly ‘digital ethnography’ – that is, content analysis of ‘documents’ like the video montage described above, or what we may call ‘cultural texts’ circulated among police on quasi-private social media groups (which I was invited to join during research trips to India that I made in 2016 and 2017). Most of these texts began circulating on platforms like WhatsApp and Kutumb in May 2021, at the height of the devastating second wave of the pandemic, which some sources estimate killed approximately four million people across India, ten times the numbers of deaths officially reported by the government during that period (Pathak et al., 2021). ⁴ I analyze these social texts as indices of police expressions and experiences of the politics of expendability, at a time when they are also reminded that they are legally and socially ‘essential’ to provide security. In the sections that follow, I first contextualize the structural expendability of rank-and-file police and demonstrate how their institutionalized vulnerability emerged historically as part of a colonial capitalist social order. I then examine several mediatized expressions of grief and despair regarding routinized harassment and oppression inherent in the police profession and systemic neglect of their well-being. I conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of conceiving police life and work in terms of a politics of expendability.

‘Gulaami hai, kaam nahi’: Subordinate police as security ‘serfs’ and postcolonial expendability

Soon after beginning fieldwork in 2004, I was struck by the daily observation of brown tents that housed thousands of police constables stationed outside residences and offices of governing elites in Lucknow, the UP state capital. They were assigned to camp on these premises ostensibly to provide 24-hour security to the state’s chief minister and other political leaders such as serving or retired senior police officers, civil servants, judges, and other people considered ‘VIPs’ who theoretically might be targeted by opponents, but mostly were not under any kind of active security threat. I also learned that these constables were routinely ordered to do an array of tasks beyond state-mandated sentry duties, especially domestic service work like cleaning the premises, procuring food and other household goods, chauffeuring family members around town, tending gardens and domestic animals, and other mundane odd jobs. While some did not mind this work, or even preferred it since it was relatively ‘safe’ or might provide access to influential persons (see Waseem, 2022), others complained that it was ‘not right’ (thiik nahin) or compared it with forms of begaar, which translates to forced servitude or uncompensated labor. One constable I spoke with said, ‘yeh toh gulaami hai, kaam nahin’: ‘this is serfdom/slavery, not [police] work’. ⁵ This statement resonates with others I have heard countless times and analyzed in depth elsewhere, such as ‘is naukri ko shishtaachaar (anushaasan) ke naam par shoshan (utpiidan) hai’ or ‘this job is exploitation (harassment/oppression) in the name of civility/good manners (discipline)’ (Jauregui, 2016, 2022).

Police claiming a status as bonded labor may seem outrageous and offensive. But in postcolonial India their complaints, while hyperbolic, stem from real vulnerabilities and inabilities that are rife among this class of workers. Returning to the video described in the introduction, the montage ends with a caption that reads, ‘Non-gazetted police workers’ primary demands: (1) Remove the “border scheme”! (2) Give us our full rights for leave from the job! (3) Ensure that duty hours are set and clear! (4) Remove wage disparities!’ The term ‘border scheme’ refers to a UP state regulation that police constables may not be posted in their home district or even in a district that borders it, since this may allow informal relationships and what many refer to as ‘vested interests’ to interfere with their work and foster ‘corruption’. The scheme’s efficacy in preventing untoward activity is questionable at best. But one thing is certain: it keeps most police itinerate and separated from their families and communities of origin, which breeds feelings of isolation, depression, anxiety, and resentment. These indices of poor mental and physical health are compounded by generalized stress and overwork, as reflected in the second and third demands regarding leave and work hours. Police job benefits of course include provisions for occasional days off; but, in practice, state appeals to ongoing and emergent needs for ‘security’ and ‘law and order’ in the face of persistent understaffing and under-resourcing are routinely used to override these entitlements, which many police complain ‘exist on paper only’. And, perhaps surprisingly to some, in this context there is generally no clear delineation of ‘shift work’ for police, producing a de facto ‘24/7’ or ‘on call’ structure of daily labor time (Common Cause and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2019). The fourth demand regarding ‘wage disparities’ points to how police salaries and benefits compare unfavorably with those of other public servants, including but not limited to government schoolteachers and public healthcare workers. It also reflects patterned and prevalent problems of inexplicable or involuntary reductions in constables’ salaries and allowances, sometimes with state appeals to a need to conserve or reallocate resources, sometimes accompanied by underhanded promises from clerks that they will find a way to ‘cook the books’ and supplement the lowered income if they can get a small ‘cut’ for themselves.

These kinds of problems resemble those that have pervaded many police organizations globally since they emerged across various European colonies in their modern forms in the 19th and 20th centuries (Bean, 1980; Brown and Brown, 1973; Brown and Haldane, 1998; Ichniowski, 1988; Lyons, 1947; Marks, 2000; Marks and Fleming, 2006; Mitrani, 2013; Russel, 1975; Shil, 2016; Singh, 2002). But the extraordinarily poor living and working conditions of constables in India result in part from the specific ways that governance and security institutions developed under colonial rule and evolved as the region began to decolonize in 1947. This longue durée cultural history is critiqued explicitly in another telling caption at the end of the aforementioned video, which overlays a selfie of a constable who has died by suicide and reads: ‘The atrocious British colonial 1861 Police Act must end. . . . [W]e [police] are priests [pujari] of discipline, not slaves [gulaam]’. This sociolegal demand-cum-identity claim reflects how the low status and high vulnerability of rank-and-file police derive directly from an imbrication of colonial capitalism, a militarized chain of command, and cultural relations of patronage and social hierarchy. It is within this broad nexus of institutional, ideological, and cosmological inequalities that the politics of expendability has formed and metastasized.

It is widely known that the 1861 Police Act remains the bedrock of police organization and regulation today across the subcontinent (Common Cause and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2019; Dhillon, 2005; Gupta, 1974, 1979; Verma, 2005). ‘Law and order’ in the colony meant constructing a ‘secure’ space in which to generate profit for the British Crown, which wrested administrative control from the British East India Company after the 1857 rebellion of Indian Army sepahis (the Urdu term that is still routinely used to refer to both police constables and military soldiers in South Asia). The new imperial police institution was designed to minimize expenditure and maximize revenue (Jauregui, 2023; Mangla, 2023; Shil, 2017). For the masses of lower-class people recruited to the subordinate ranks of the police, this meant few to no welfare programs, especially work leave, because such ‘provisions’ and ‘relief’ would diminish profit margins. ⁶ Over the long 20th century, this sociolegal structure of security labor evolved into an organizational culture demanding that ‘cutting edge’ police, as they are locally known (i.e. at the edge of the imagined boundary between ‘the state’ and ‘society’), must work without clear distinctions between times they are on or off duty. Intertwined with this temporal blurriness around labor, and notwithstanding some specific tasks clarified in legislation, there is built into the profession a lack of clear limits on what precisely police duties may include, a problem that is not unique to South Asia (Beek et al., 2017; Cooper-Knock and Owen, 2015; Hinton and Newburn, 2009; Marks and Fleming, 2006). In the Indian context, though, this sociolegal fact of amorphous and seemingly boundless duties has long allowed governing elites to demand that constables do all kinds of ‘non-mandated’ tasks, from the domestic service described above to manual labor like digging ponds and mining in quarries, and also, crucially, widespread illicit orders to act as ‘enforcers’ of the will of the current powers that be. This last form of ‘mission creep’ routinely manifests in a host of police malpractices that worsen public insecurity, from extrajudicial killings and fabrication (or purposeful neglect) of evidence, to routinized bribe-taking and discriminatory treatment of common citizens (Dhillon, 2005; Human Rights Watch, 2009; Jauregui, 2016, 2018; Verma, 2005).

Policing in India today thus evinces a deeply entrenched structure of unequal power relations in which cultural systems of kinship, patronage, and ‘donor–servant’ hierarchies that far pre-dated and have outlived the period of European colonization (Piliavsky, 2014) have merged with formalized discourses of military ‘discipline’ and institutions of state sovereignty supposedly maintaining ‘law and order’ in ways that generate insecurity for all, including the masses of security workers themselves. In short, if you complain about the system, you are engaging in ‘indiscipline’. For subordinate police, this structure manifests most prominently in what has come to be known colloquially as the ‘orderly system’, a ‘colonial hangover’ from the times when lower-ranking employees in the army, police, and some civil service divisions were expected to act as lackeys for their superiors, sometimes referred to as ‘batmen’ (Shil, 2015, 2017; Varghese, 2018). Some senior officials in India today claim that this system of servitude has been regulated out of common practice. But it clearly survives in more or less overt forms, from the aforementioned tent camps serving VIPs to the commonplace convergence of official and unofficial commands that render ‘cutting edge’ police de facto peons and ‘yes men’. This structure of servitude is foundational to the politics of expendability, which is constituted through everyday interactions configured by a broad-based social order of extraction and disposability of the lives of members of many communities of marginalized people (Bandyopadhyay, 2020; Biehl, 2005; Butt, 2019; Roy, 2021; Scheper-Hughes, 1997). In this social order, police are just one small piece of a much larger puzzle, a piece that most people assume to be far more powerful and privileged than is actually the case; and this assumption is precisely why their grievances are ignored, their distress dismissed, their calls for help construed as unwarranted, self-serving, and even misappropriating ‘real’ laborers’ laments and claims of oppression.

Understanding the life and work of rank-and-file police in India through the lens of a politics of expendability is inspired in part by the work of Achille Mbembe, who, drawing on Georges Bataille, has theorized a logic of ‘expenditure’ to explain social life in turn-of-the-21st-century ‘postcolonial’ Africa. Mbembe argues that ‘the giving of death has become a prime means of creating the world’ in a context of mass-level extraction, consumption, and excretion of natural – and human – resources (Mbembe, 2006: 299, emphasis in original). Linking what he calls ‘the general psychic economy’ of the contemporary African subject with a host of political economic developments and structural inequalities in the late-20th and early-21st centuries, Mbembe (2006: 300) aims to explicate ‘that for which a society, a community, indeed individuals are prepared to live and die’. Applying this explication to the context of subordinate police life and work in contemporary India, I aim to theorize not only who may be considered disposable because of some kind of ascribed negative quality like disability or poverty (see Biehl, 2005), but a fortiori who may be considered consumable and replaceable through an institutionalization of performatively elevated status as security providers. In other words, I want to further our understanding of that for which a society, via the state as a network of channels for sovereign command and popular demand, is prepared to employ and only partially compensate a specific class of people to live and die as morally repugnant and materially underserved expendables who labor en masse in the name of values supposedly reflecting and reinforcing ideals of lawfulness, peace, and justice – what I have glossed elsewhere as democratic security and order (Jauregui, 2018).

This analysis considers how the forces and relations of security labor as a life course have emerged in line with the ongoing production of what I call provisional authority, a form of governance that configures police power through compounded, competing, and contingent demands, and a multiplicity of top-down and bottom-up pressures and claims on sovereign decisionmaking and intervention (Jauregui, 2016). Rather than conceiving policing as the sovereign power to ‘make law’ (Benjamin, [1922] 1978; Das, 2004; Derrida, 2002), and rather than considering police employees as mere ‘violence workers’ (Seigel, 2018) whose power emanates from state authorization to use non-negotiably coercive force (Bittner, 1970), I consider police authority in India as structurally weak (see Martin, 2020), constantly in flux, and potentially manipulable by both dominant elites and subaltern masses. This answerability to a polity’s pluralistic, and often conflicting, demands for various forms of police ‘service’ as security labor is a crucial component of the politics of expendability and its ubiquity. Like so many other people, police in India are routinely expected to serve society not merely ‘at their own expense’ (à la clichés of self-sacrifice for the ‘greater good’), but moreover as, at best, ‘necessary evil’ expendables. Therefore, I ask: How might conceiving police, too, as political subjects whose welfare and work are configured by forces and relations of both ‘service’ (sewa) and ‘servitude’ (gulaami) reorient our thinking about the polysemy and inequality of in/security in this context?

Paths to extinction and the unbearable oppression of security labor

In May 2021, several other notable videos lamenting police life and work began circulating through popular social media networks. In one of them, a news journalist interviews a UP police constable in uniform about his impending resignation from the job. The constable explains that in retaliation for his refusal of (quasi-official) orders to make a ‘voluntary’ contribution from his paycheck to a state pandemic relief fund, his boss transferred him to a district considered particularly dangerous for police because of prevalent Naxalite (Maoist insurgency) activity. Such reactionary ‘punishment postings’ are a notoriously common practice among police across India (Dhillon, 2005; Jauregui, 2016; Verma, 2005). The constable justifies his refusal to contribute to the fund by saying, ‘the government does not pay me enough. . . . I am in debt for expenses associated with caring for my family and meeting other basic needs. It is purely a voluntary contribution, but they are pressurizing us to contribute.’ He goes on to remark:

I am resigning. We low-rank employees are always targeted and tortured. Senior officers always impose their arbitrary will upon us. If we require a vehicle for duty, we do not get one, while vehicles are made available for [senior officers’] families to roam around. . . . I cannot work under such pressure. I have already been tortured too much, and I am fed up with all of this. Punitive action is always taken against us, whereas they [senior officials and elites] always get away with things scot free.

The same week this video appeared, another far more disturbing video was making the rounds. A young constable in uniform had recorded himself while riding in a moving car visibly and audibly weeping. As we watch, his cheeks are streaked with tears, his brow contorted with emotional pain, his body frequently wracked by sobs while his face fills the frame. In the first 24 seconds, he says, ‘I am a police constable, experiencing a lot of trouble from this department. I am going to take my own life. I am suffering such harassment; it is causing so much anxiety and worry. Today, I am going to end my life.’ Then he does not speak for more than two minutes, just sits and looks ahead through the windshield, occasionally looking down at the camera, crying. Just before the video ends, he says ominously, ‘Brother, I am going to do it. I am going to end my own life today,’ and again looks off into the distance.

I learned from some interlocutors that the constable’s name was Jitendra Kumar Chauhan. His body was found by local villagers in a car on the day of the recording’s time stamp, a gunshot wound through his head (Kumar, 2021). Chauhan was reportedly 30 years old and had been posted about 350 km from his home district (Lokmat Times, 2021). His wife was also reportedly a police constable, and they had a two-year-old son. Chauhan’s boss made a public statement denying harassment within the department and suggesting that Chauhan’s motivations may have been ‘due to matrimonial discord . . . that senior officers attempted to resolve’ (Singh, 2021). At the time of this writing, no new information has come to light regarding the harassment to which Chauhan referred in the video, and his death was ruled a suicide. According to one of my interlocutors who follows these kinds of cases closely and is actively working to establish a constable union (such unions are illegal in the majority of Indian states and union territories), ⁷ the district police did not conduct a full investigation of Kumar’s death, but simply recorded written statements from his mother and sister, who alleged that he ended his life because of marital problems. My interlocutor echoes others in surmising that Kumar’s wife may have been warned to be quiet or else she could lose her job or, worse, perhaps even face criminal charges herself related to his death, based in part on the statements taken by Kumar’s family members, who also likely expect her to continue to contribute to the joint family household income.

There are multiple realities shaping these two cases, and much remains unknown. That said, they both serve as exemplars of what we might call ‘exit strategies’ from rank-and-file police employment, and what we also might call ‘paths to extinction’ for some persons engaged in security labor. I want to be clear from the outset that job resignation and death by suicide are neither equivalent nor the only forms of exit or extinction that need to be critically examined; nor are they unique to police workers, of course. ⁸ There are also numerous police deaths, corporeal injuries, and other types of physical and mental harm following from ‘attacks’ or ‘accidents’ or ‘job stress’ that allow (or force) a permanent exit from police work (National Crime Records Bureau, 2020). We must further consider the slow violence of decades of neglect of police welfare referred to in the previous (and following) sections of this article, and the impact this abandonment has not only on the health of police employees themselves but also on social life more broadly (Chande, 1997; National Crime Records Bureau, 2020). For now, though, I wish to focus on these two extreme and immediate forms of police extinction. I would also note that, at the time of this writing, the government of India does not track the total number of police resignations or suicides nationally in any comprehensive way, nor does any other interested party or program (Jauregui, 2023).

Non-gazetted police in India have very limited agency in transcending their role of ‘oppressed oppressors’ because of institutionalized constraints that pre-exist and permeate their employment. As mentioned, many if not most rank-and-file police hail from humble class backgrounds of either low social/ethno-religious status or low income (even if, in the latter case, they may have relatively ‘high status’ in terms of jati, occupational community, or varna, caste, assuming they identify as Hindu). If one is ‘fortunate’ enough to get a police job at all, the general rule is ‘once a constable, always a constable’, and the same usually applies to sub-inspectors. There are strict official quotas on promotions through the ranks – never mind the unofficial cultural-political obstacles to such rewards – and only a very small fraction of subordinate police will advance to a significantly higher title or pay grade before they reach the age of mandatory retirement. So, there are very few channels upward from or out of marginality, and those that are open and accessible often push police to do various kinds of ‘dirty work’, potentially exacerbating their moral marginalization and expendability even further (Jauregui, 2013; Waseem, 2022).

Thus, the long-existing, deeply entrenched, and often invisible forms of relationality that constitute police work in this context offer limited pathways out of the security labor sector, which many rank-and-file police come to experience as an oppressive and harmful way of life that they feel unable to escape (see Jauregui, 2015). In this case, then, the politics of expendability is compounded by a shared sense among many police of existential despair, which shapes security labor as both an individual life course and a collective space of social reproduction, and in turn shapes the ways in which police practices and institutions reproduce social violence at large. Police expendability manifests in a peculiar economy of their labor and life being simultaneously demanded and devalued. This is a moral economy of exchange relations and expectations more than a monetary economy, though the two spaces of (e)valuation are not unrelated. Indeed, there are very real and hard distinctions shaping how the value of police life may be assigned a monetized number (including, and very often, zero), depending on which path one takes (voluntarily or by force) out of the security labor sector.

The two paths to extinction poignantly illustrated above – resignation and suicide – do not result in any compensation or pension for the former police worker or their next of kin. Nor do forced dismissal or dishonorable discharge from service, which some police who ‘doth protest too much’ have experienced in retaliation for their activities criticizing the institution. If it is determined that a police officer dies ‘in the line of duty’ – which is itself a shifty category considering the aforementioned lack of clear temporal demarcations provided by ‘shift work’ and the orderly-system ‘mission creep’ making indefinite how precisely police ‘duty’ may be delimited – then their family is supposed to receive a one-time ex gratia (literally: from grace/kindness) payment from the state as compensation for the life lost. In UP, the ex gratia amount increased dramatically in 2016 from Rs 10 lakhs (1 million) to Rs 30 lakhs (3 million). ⁹ We must dig further into what is behind this morbid surge, and reflect on what it means that while the deplorable living and working conditions of police have remained constant for decades, ‘the one notable change that has occurred is greater benefits to the next of kin of those killed in the course of duty’ (Ahuja and Kapur, 2023: 33–34). ¹⁰

This political and purposeful ‘price rise’ for work-related death provides further substantial support to a critique that a politics of expendability shapes the lives of police, their families, and other close associates in this context. While a threefold increase in ex gratia payments might seem like a boon, it could be read another way something like a corporate ‘buy-out’, as state governments placing a finite value on these employees’ lives and deciding that it is far more cost effective to pay an occasional and singular ‘tax’ for someone’s untimely death and then perhaps replace them (offering the job to the dead’s next of kin first before opening it to the public) than it is to invest in the welfare infrastructure required to significantly and substantively improve rank-and-file police’s living and working conditions. And yes, of course, it is important to ask critical questions about whether police institutions and welfare are the things that most need investments from government coffers, in this or any context, when there may be strong arguments for ‘defunding’ police and placing resources elsewhere. But let us be clear that in India, and in many other parts of the world, especially Global South postcolonies, state and national governments are not withholding funds for police employee welfare in response to redistributive demands by progressive social justice advocates. Police welfare programs, along with so many other pro-social programs like public health and education, are grossly underfunded as part of the same hierarchical (and, in India specifically, capitalist, casteist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and misogynistic) ‘social values’ that have long shaped whose lives matter, and whose are always already expendable. This is not to draw a false equivalence between police and all other marginalized communities in India or anywhere else. Rather, what I am arguing is that cutting-edge police are, quite ironically, in some ways even more vulnerable to these forces and relations of devaluation and inequality precisely because of the work demands placed on them in the guise of their having ‘authority’ backed by state sovereignty to provide security as ‘law and order’. This exacerbated vulnerability also stems from the sociolegal fact that police have long been considered an ‘essential service’ with special restrictions on their rights as workers. ¹¹ In the next section, we will consider how being essential-cum-expendable manifested on a day-to-day basis during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Expendable essential workers and police identification with the ‘subaltern’ masses

The videos discussed in the previous section demonstrate some of the routinized hierarchical harassment inherent in police work and life in this context, along with its sometimes tragic consequences. The other side of this experience of systemic oppression is the structural-historical problem of neglect of police workers’ welfare, as reflected in some other self-recorded videos that were circulating at the same time. In two of them, we see a constable in uniform out on the street in the middle of a long day’s work. We hear the drone of engines and sharp honks of horns in the background, aurally indexing the buzz of everyday traffic. The constable looks directly and purposefully into the mobile phone camera and speaks quickly and urgently, his tone increasingly angry and anguished, his black medical mask slipping down from his nose as he gives a spontaneous speech, his index finger pointing accusingly and sometimes wagging admonishingly. In one video, the constable sits in an old wooden chair on the roadside and says:

people are very troubled in this country . . . very troubled and sad. The doctors get hefty amounts [of money], and they enjoy quality food . . . with paneer in their daal [cheese cubes in their lentils, considered a luxury]. The poor are the worst hit. My father died, and even my sister-in-law has died. . . . [T]here is no system here. Elections were conducted in school premises where police employees were deployed for duty . . . but we did not get any food to eat. . . . [T]here is no oxygen in this country [to treat people afflicted with COVID-19]. . . . The system is very bad now. . . . [C]orruption has increased manifold. . . . [O]ne day we all will die. . . . I will die too.

In a second video, the same constable is standing next to a motorcycle with a ‘police’ license plate on the front, perhaps his own vehicle, perhaps borrowed, since many constables cannot easily afford a motorbike on their regular salary and they are not provided by the state government. As the recording begins, he gestures toward a man sitting on the road who appears to be destitute, and moves his index finger between the man and the camera, yelling:

Someone is dying here outside. . . . [Look], he has nothing to eat. . . . [T]his poor mad man is sitting on the side of the road; he has nothing to eat. . . . [Y]ou [government leaders] have imposed a four-day lockdown [for COVID-19] . . . but it has no meaning. . . . [E]ither impose it fully or remove it completely. Doctors, teachers are having a merry time, while the poor police is dying, is constantly on duty, has nothing to eat, while performing 24-hours duty. . . . [U]nderstand my point! . . . [O]xygen supply in the country is decreasing, people are dying. These MLAs, MPs [members of state legislative assembly, members of national parliament] after they win their seats, they do nothing in this country! Understand my point! One day, all these MLAs and MPs will die. . . . I will die too! . . . Wisdom is the opposite of destruction. . . . [T]he days of destruction have come, disaster is near . . . mark my words.

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic both highlighted and exacerbated long-existing social problems and systemic injustices, including but hardly limited to the ubiquitous and long-reigning neglect of rank-and-file police welfare in postcolonial India. For two decades, I have been listening to rank-and-file police officers in UP compare their salaries and working hours with those of government schoolteachers when complaining about their earnings – and also when rationalizing their routine taking of bribes to supplement their income (Jauregui, 2016). The comparative allusions to medical doctors (who straddle the public and private sectors depending on their place of employment) have not been as common, however, even though both public health and police/security institutions are listed in national and state Essential Services Maintenance Acts (ESMAs) in India. It might be more apt for police constables to compare themselves with nurses who assist and ‘take orders’ from doctors. Indeed, such comparisons have been made in other contexts to provocative effect by police sociologists (Bittner, 1990); and, importantly, the gendered nature of this comparative analysis of police work has yet to be adequately explored (see Herbert, 2001). That said, the comparison of rank-and-file police work with that of physicians in the era of the pandemic is apropos because of the parallel heightened risks of infection from being ‘frontline workers’, intensified staffing shortages, long working hours with inadequate relief, and resultant fatigue of their work leading to extreme physical and mental distress.

The lone constable in both of the videos described above expresses resentment that (in his opinion) rank-and-file police seem to be more expendable than other essential workers like doctors. It is unfortunate and disagreeable that his expression invalidates the struggles and systemic neglect of other public health workers in a misinformed ‘relative deprivation’ argument. That said, it also seems clear that his real target is not the doctors and teachers ‘having a merry time’, but rather more pointedly the influential and high-status folks – including and especially elected politicians – who make decisions that marginalize and harm ‘the poor’, among whom he clearly counts himself as a member. Particularly striking is his call to government leaders regarding the COVID-19 lockdown to ‘impose it fully or remove it completely’. He does not explain exactly what he thinks this would mean. However, by framing the demand with direct reference to an unhoused person on the street who apparently lacks any ability to protect themselves from exposure to almost any threat, we may infer that the constable is demanding that the government needs to provide for the welfare of everyone – not only people like the impoverished man featured in his video commentary, but also police officers like him who are exposed and vulnerable to myriad threats, especially but not exclusively COVID-19. If the government does not provide, he suggests, then state claims that the lockdown is intended to keep people safe and secure have ‘no meaning’.

The ‘mad’ ¹² constable is calling on state leaders to provide opportunities for people like him and the unhoused man he has encountered to experience a general sense of well-being that they are currently lacking. He is arguing that ‘the state’ in India (on local/municipal, provincial, and national levels) is failing to meet its responsibility to play a vital role in what might be called a ‘politics of care’ (Martin, 2019). Instead, he suggests, the state continues to engage in a politics of expendability, not merely by allowing some to die while others live, à la necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003), but moreover by actively demanding that specific actors like him engage in work that compels them to give themselves over to death – both physical death from contagion and ‘living death’ as separation from ‘the good life’ – in the name of public security. He also suggests via invocations of impending doom and disaster – which resonate with what many Hindu devotees understand our present era to be, the Kali Yuga or Age of Destruction (Jauregui, 2015) – that the politics of expendability not only renders security itself as a provision or ‘good’ that is inequitably distributed, but also ultimately harms everyone and (re)produces public insecurity at large.

His admonition moves beyond the tired trope of the police officer working ‘on the street’ who sacrifices his or her life for some greater good. He notes specifically that ‘poor police are dying’ not as valorized state agents signifying the ideal citizen of the sovereign nation-state, but as historically devalued and demonized expendables whose life is reduced to being some kind of buffer-enforcer-servant so that others might live well. The suggestion that police are structurally separated from aspirations to the moral and material good life could not be more clear. This constable force-feeds viewers a harsh reminder of the dehumanizing realities of the life and work of subordinate police as a layered and seemingly endless subjection to demands for more and more labor time without sufficient provisions for basic needs and an ongoing series of exposures to threat, including but not limited to deadly disease (see Bell, 2012). Note especially his repetitions of ‘nothing to eat’ applied to both subordinate police and the unhoused man on the street, with whom he seems to feel empathy and identification, not merely socially distant sympathy or pity.

While decades of fieldwork and countless conversations have shown me how commonplace this feeling is among rank-and-file police, it is hard to overemphasize how unusual it is for them to engage in such open criticism and complaint about it. Indeed, speaking out publicly is banned by administrative codes of conduct and statutes like the Police (Restriction of Rights) Act of 1966. I have been unable to learn the identity of this lone constable, let alone whether he was sanctioned for his recorded outburst that ‘went viral’ on social media (pardon the pandemic pun). What I do know from immersive longitudinal research with his colleagues is that most police officers in India are reticent to speak out like this against the state that employs them, for fear of severe reprisals, from suspension or dismissal from the job to criminalization and detention as a security threat (Jauregui, 2018, 2023). The day-to-day insecurity of rank-and-file police who suffer systemic neglect of their welfare is compounded by the threat of punishment and harassment for any sort of perceived critique or infraction, to the extent that many feel hopeless, and some take extreme measures, like those described in the previous section.

Systemic inequality, violence, and im/possibilities for security, justice, and transformation

Globally, police institutions and workers often reproduce and reinforce social orders of systemic inequality and violence as part of their provisional authority to meet demands for public security (Ericson, 1982; Fassin, 2013; Jauregui, 2016). The social orders that police reproduce vary contextually, despite the transnational and historical homologies of police institutions and practices (Loader et al., 2016). In India, South Asia, and other Global South regions, security labor performed by subordinate police constitutes a ‘service’ that blurs boundaries between un/official, il/licit, and non-/mandated work, and also those between labor and leisure time. These indistinctions mean that the masses of police are expected to expend their lives and labor without relief or questioning, even beyond the point at which the vitality or value of an individual constable-cum-servant seems to have vanished. This leads to another indistinction: that between the security and insecurity of security workers themselves. This ethnographic analysis reveals a structure of inequitable and oppressive relations in which rank-and-file police are disposable and replaceable like so many other ‘lower-class’ laborers. Moreover, while occasionally and performatively valorized as ‘martyrs’ if they happen to die or become disabled as a result of their work, more often than not police are demonized and disparaged, their well-being neglected in large part because their work involves, inter alia, the legal authority to deploy potentially lethal physical violence against members of the public they are surveilling and supposedly protecting. This means that police expendability may be more likely to be dismissed that that of others, in line with the ‘long arc of the moral universe’ that renders their work always already unjust and oppressive, in this (and likely in other) context(s).

The moral-political economy of police expendability in India evinces how the violence that is entailed in the intertwining of statist sovereign command and colonial capitalist social reproduction may be visited upon police officers themselves in ways that are routinely ignored and exacerbate insecurity in society at large. Explicating this relational structure need not lead to reactionary calls that ‘police lives matter’ as a distraction or detraction from pressing campaigns for social justice. But it does propound challenging questions about the multiple meanings and inequitable distributions of ‘security’ both within policing institutions and without them (pun very much intended). Readers of this publication are likely more acutely aware than most people of the variegated and problematic polysemy of ‘security’ as both an ideal and an everyday social practice. Global North or ‘Western’ European sensibilities continue to dominate how scholars, policymakers, and multiple publics think and talk about security, whether one is citing ‘classic’ theories of neorealism (Waltz, [1979] 2010) or critiquing more recent concepts like ‘securitization’ (Baele and Jalea, 2023) or liberal humanist calls for ‘human security’ broadly defined (Duffield and Waddell, 2006; Edwards, 2009; UNDP, 1994). Many people still associate the provision of security as a ‘good’ with the social contract of the Hobbesian Leviathan, the obligation of the state to provide protection from harm for individuals and communities within a bounded territory, nowadays most commonly through policing and criminal justice systems (Van Kempen, 2013). Recently, some policing scholars (Martin, 2019) have drawn our attention to how the Latin-derived English word security means ‘without care’ (se-curitas), a state of being free from anxiety (see Neocleous, 2012). This idea highlights how in/security is an affective experience as well as an ontological set of conditions in the world, or what Loader and Walker (2007) call the ‘objective security situation’. The double sense of ‘in/security’ as both perception and reality suffuses the expressions of police in India analyzed here, which convey a despairing structure of feeling as well as a dire structure of relations that makes little to no space for rank-and-file police in this context to legitimately voice their work-related grievances alongside other workers. This problem is not unique to India, or to South Asia more broadly, even if it not necessarily a universal condition for all police in all times and places.

It is important to underscore how police in India are, like so many other people, subject to forces and relations of social inequality that perpetuate and exacerbate insecurity, not only to reconsider theoretical concepts of security and/as social inequality and violence, but also to rethink how we engage in dialogue and praxis oriented toward policy reform and cultural transformation oriented toward social justice. Police-reform policies enacted by state governments tend toward directing more resources to recruitment and training to fill vacancies and rectify ‘manpower shortages’ that allegedly explain inadequate police responses to public demands. Added to other reform programs like recurrent ‘modernization schemes’ aimed at updating equipment technological capabilities, incremental (and, many argue, grossly inadequate) salary raises, and the aforementioned increase in ex gratia payments if a police officer dies (which, in India, they do in alarming numbers; see Jauregui, 2023; National Crime Records Bureau, 2020), the valuation of police life and work across India continues to be reduced to a numbers game of ‘investments’ and ‘settling accounts’ by producing ever more disposable and replaceable ‘docile bodies’ to do security labor, continuing and worsening the cycles of social inequality and violence legitimized by the politics of expendability. Government leaders try to boost morale among these ‘expendables’ by publicly appealing to notions of ‘heart’ and ‘sensitivities’ and alleged ‘successes’ in decreasing crime by ‘instilling fear in criminals’. ¹³ But many security laborers themselves know better than to buy into this sentimental logic. Some ‘play the game’ and do whatever they can to grab their crumb of the power pie. Some drag their feet or do the minimum necessary and just try to survive long enough to retire and receive pension payments. Some try to organize collectively, either calling for unions where they are illegal or working through existing associations that often serve as little more than parallel highly politicized police hierarchies. ¹⁴ Police unions often are narrowly focused on employment contracts and defending against misconduct charges, rather than broader social justice issues. However, comparative research in regions like Latin America and Southern Africa, as well as in nation-states like the Netherlands, the UK, and New Zealand, has also shown significant variation in police-union aims and principles, including groups organized around marginalized identities and leftist ideologies, and some even oriented toward progressive ideals and social transformations (Berry et al., 2008; Durão and De Souza, 2020; Jauregui, 2022; Marks, 2000; Marks and Fleming, 2006). In India, police unions are at best a questionable ‘answer’ to the politics of expendability, especially in a political-cultural era marred by the surge of Hindutva ideology (right-wing Hindu nationalism and majoritarianism), which over the past decade has captured the reins of power at the state and national levels across the subcontinent, with disastrous effects. ¹⁵

If bottom-up collective organizing is not the best answer, then a logical question that arises from this analysis is the Tolstoyian clarion call: What is to be done? First, we might consider advocating for inclusive programs and engagements that recognize how social inequality and structural violence as systemic problems are not merely perpetuated by police but also infect the lives and labors of these (and other) workers. At a policy level, we could start by including rank-and-file police – rather than just the top brass, as has historically been the case in India – in substantive dialogues around security sector and governance reform. At a theoretical level, we could advance more comparative critical research that examines how police lives and work in various contexts may be counter-intuitively co-configured with inequitable and violent concepts and practices of security that have emerged globally amid colonial capitalist expansion intersecting with racism and other forms of xenophobia. We can learn a lot simply by attending to the vernaculars of calls for transformation by police officers themselves. For example, in many (Hindi-speaking) regions of India, police officers often frame demands for change in terms of ideals like kalyan (welfare, well-being) and appeals to human rights (manvaadhikar) for police as workers (karmchariyon). Recognizing and critically analyzing the principles and mechanisms perpetuating a politics of expendability enables us to consider how police may be figured less as the enemy of ‘the people’ and ‘social justice’, and instead conceived as potentially productive participants in ongoing dialogues around transformations in governance that might advance a sense of solidarity and security for all.