Citizens, clients or supplicants?
The promise of the Constitution of India was for the transformation of a hierarchical society through the establishment of a civic community of equals. Anthropological studies show, however, that the status of citizenship in India and the bundle of rights associated with it, constitutes a terrain of claims-making and of everyday contestation. On this terrain intermediation is very important, partly because of the relatively limited infrastructural power of the state, and its failure to ensure the basic literacy and education of the population. The consequence is that through the negotiations in which ‘citizens’ must engage with the state, and the ways in which they are so frequently mediated, a hierarchy of citizens (or, more accurately, of citizens, clients and supplicants) is established rather than the equal citizenship promised in the Constitution.