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.