Introduction

Summary

The title of this book is drawn from a fieldwork episode during which the Indian state was adjudged, loudly and angrily, to be nothing but a paper tiger (kaghaz ka bagh). The episode was the arrival of a human-eating big cat in Gopeshwar resulting in multiple deaths and injuries and the commencement of what was popularly described as a ‘reign of terror’. The big cat's reign appeared to, perplexingly, go unchallenged by the Indian state for well over 2 months. This period was defined by paper and tigers – in the most literal sense. The papers required included the all-important hunting permit that would allow the district authorities to legally kill this state-protected species. The feline in question was a leopard, a species that has the same legal protection in contemporary India as tigers do, and in addition is called bagh in Hindi, as the tiger also is. More generally and beyond the individual case of the human-eating big cat of Gopeshwar, ‘paper tiger’ is descriptive of the series of sophisticated plans and laws drawn up by the developmental Indian state, which consistently underperform, if not collapse outright. My intention in this book is to provide an ethnographically derived, situated analysis of this paper tiger-like nature of the developmental state. This I do by focusing on precisely those repetitive, mundane, banal, and seemingly innocuous practices of local government offices that the bureaucrats I met adjudged as amounting to ‘nothing’ (kuch nahin). I show the consequences of these practices to be far reaching, ranging from the provision of employment and the payment of basic wages to the protection of humans from predatory animals. Ultimately, I propose that in the evaluation of the developmental Indian state, we refocus our critical attention on hitherto neglected sites and devise languages to express the truths that they produce.

My focus is on the process of enforcement, as well as the particular effects, of two widely commended laws: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (henceforth NREGA) and the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 (henceforth WPA). The NREGA was the original object of my anthropological attention. The WPA, on the other hand, I stumbled onto.