“The Bureaucratic Toolkit of Emergency” tracks how the bureaucratic toolkit of emergency developed between the two world wars. Focusing on India as the central case, it follows the making of blacklists and suspect lists, the proliferation of disturbed areas and closed zones, exit permits, mobility regimes, and registration practices of foreigners. It then traces how these practices diffused through the horizontal circuits of empire to Palestine and Cyprus, in times of crises, forming a conceptual grid of bureaucratic classifications of mobility according to suspicion, and differentiated practices to manage the fluid and changing categories of those designated as “dangerous populations.”

On the eve of India’s independence late on August 14, 1947, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, narrated the moment of transition from colonial rule to national sovereignty in front of the Constituent Assembly. It was a moment of great promise as India embarked on the most significant experiment with democracy in human history, the largest universal franchise in elections, and the formation of the longest-standing constitution in postcolonial history to date.2 It was also the night before India’s formal partition into the dominions of India and Pakistan, the night before waves of genocidal violence and forced migration shaped the new nations within the newly delineated territories.3

In national narratives, one rarely thinks of such a historic moment of independence and decolonization as also a moment of the transmission to the new states of colonial bureaucratic practices and routines and the politics embedded within them. The spectacle of independence, when subjects of the empire were to become future citizens of their own newly partitioned states, tends to eclipse the dimmer side of that which resists change in political life.

Part I, “Hybrid Bureaucracy: How Race and Emergency Shaped the Organization of Colonial Rule,” comprises one chapter. It stipulates the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings for the organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy to challenge the view that British colonial bureaucracy did not have a set of distinct institutional forms and theories of administration. It proposes that “looking over the shoulder of the bureaucrat” from the perspective of colonial officials provides a set of organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy that were not in and of themselves, but rather served as sources of power. It generates a synthetic model of this type of bureaucracy to provide scaffolding for the analysis of how explicitly racialized practices and a perpetual state of emergency affect bureaucratic organization and practice.

“Loyalty and Suspicion: The Making of the Civil Service after Independence” compares how colonial classifications of identity according to loyalty and suspicion were used by bureaucracies in the new states to define the administrators themselves and to shape the making of the civil services. Purification committees to vet former civil servants of Mandate Palestine, campaigns that designated certain types of corruption as disloyalty, and the explosive fight over representation by ratio in Cyprus were all carried out along the graded axis of suspicion. The chapter follows how political affiliation, mobility, and identity shaped perceptions of loyalty and belonging to the civil service that, in turn, dramatically delineated the boundaries of citizenship through mundane and routine practices of appointment and selection in the transition from colonial rule to independence.

The book’s conclusion offers an alternative conceptualization of minority citizenship that remained after partition. It proposes that citizenship in these independent states cannot be conceived in terms of rights linking the nation-state to the individual. From the perspective of the minority, citizenship is a negative relationship of non-deportability: rather than political status, citizenship is a bureaucratic construction that prevents the state from deporting citizens, thereby turning citizenship for minority populations into a regime of mobility. Although this book confines the implications of such an analysis to the former British Empire, I further outline a path towards a door we are yet to open: research querying how bureaucratic population management shapes citizenships for minorities in the contemporary modern state.

“How Hybrid Bureaucracy and Permit Regimes Made Citizenship” tracks the bureaucratic response to the violence of partition, war, and independence in each of the states, focusing on the mobility regimes established to prevent return in Israel and India, where the documents and evidentiary demands of the mobility regimes enabled claims to citizenship. Focusing on the adoption of the colonial bureaucratic toolkit of emergency by the governments of independent India and Israel to restrict the mobility of returning Muslim and Palestinian refugees, the chapter show how mobility restrictions became obstacles to claims to citizenship. Demonstrating how the transfer of bureaucratic practices governing mobility depended on the continuity of emergency laws, this chapter shows the divergent outcome in Cyprus, which relinquished emergency laws at independence.

Beginning with the transition from Mughal and Ottoman rule, this chapter focuses on the forms and schedules of the census as a site of negotiation and as a battleground infused by the axis of suspicion between administrators and communal leaderships, comparing bureaucratic negotiations and processes of separation in each of the colonies. It compares how hybrid bureaucracy deployed the census as a toolkit of government, in which categories of religion, language, and region gradually solidified into ethnonational identities. Through attempts to standardize, homogenize, and separate, communities were constituted as essentially different to justify the selective pairing of administrative practice to population. Division into majorities and minorities turned the census forms into a site for negotiation between subjects and officials, as well as an arena for rivalry between communities. Suspicion or embrace of enumeration techniques depended on one’s proximity to the negotiation over resources, amidst fears of control.