Paper struggles: documents, inscriptions, and citizenship negotiations in Delhi

Abstract

The paper analyses how documents, particularly ration cards and voter IDs, mediate and constitute urban citizenship claims, especially on the part of the poor to gain access to welfare services in Delhi. It examines how citizenship is claimed, negotiated, performed, and realized through various documentary, inscriptive, and enumeration counter-tactics. Enumeration counter-tactics include letter-writing, office visits, self-surveys, the solicitation of information through the Right to Information policy, and the production of counterfeit documents. In this respect, I argue that the bureaucratic calculations marked by arbitrariness and indeterminacy remain a predominant mode of urban governance and dispossession. Yet these calculations also precipitate counter-tactics by the poor, drawing our attention to the heterogeneous character of the state. The counter-tactics provide an understanding into the ways in which communities implicate themselves with the state by forging relationships, establishing and inventing kinship ties, and subverting social hierarchies in unanticipated ways.