Dispositifs of (Dis)Order: Gangs, Governmentality and the Policing of Lyari, Pakistan Adeem Suhail

Dispositifs of (Dis)Order: Gangs, governmentality and the policing of Lyari, Pakistan Adeem Suhail Abstract: At a moment when the violence of policing has found its locus in the bureaucratic institutions of ‘the police’, anthropology offers a more expansive idea of policing as a social function, articulated through multiple social forms, and crucial to hierarchical orders. This article draws on the idea of the dispositif to offer a processual model for understanding how non-state violence abets the maintenance of social order. Exploring the limits of biopolitics and drawing on ethnographic evidence, it uses the case of gang activity in Lyari, Pakistan, to show how gangsters maintained, rather than disrupt, the dominant social order in the city. Furthermore, it shows that those who challenged the inherently violent and exploitative order implemented by the gangs and the city's political elite were prime targets of public violence wielded by law and outlaw working together as a dispositif. Introduction The policeman who collected him from the recycling depot did not offer any explanations which made Babu Maheshwari apprehensive. Things became clearer when a few blocks away they arrived at the drainage nala. Babu saw the boy floating face-down in the murky waters amidst the thick sludge of excreta, plastics, chemicals, and once-desired objects that form Karachi’s daily discharge. This mundanely repugnant ecology had claimed and begun consuming the boy. Babu, a veteran municipal waste worker hailing from the ex-untouchable Dalit communities of coastal Sind, was brung, once more, to be the instrument that reclaimed the body, as a once-desired object, now discarded by city into its rivers of shit. To reclaim the boy, as a body, to be probed and named in death by police, who stood at the edge of the nala, beneath the oppressive sun and the revolting sludge. Babu extracted the body with a long wooden pole, wading knee deep into the nala. He then, without getting or expecting assistance, dragged the body onto the crumbling embankment. Accelerated decomposition had not yet erased the traces of several purple bruises blotted over the arms and face. The features were not quite recognizable anymore, but together with the jeans and familiar football jersey hinted at a young Afro- Baloch man. To Babu, a man, but to the policemen a procedural problem. The rotund officer in charge waddled up closer by a few feet, discernibly queasy. From a ‘safe’ distance, he directed Babu to search the pockets. Nothing. Convinced by the extent of his investigations the officer declared that the body belonged to another as-yet-unidentified gengvar. At the time, Gengvar was a curious category in popular circulation all over the city. It was the figuration of the infamous Lyari Gang War. Once in circulation, gengvar suspended young Baloch men, and especially Afro-Baloch men (because Black boys are men to power the world over) from Lyari between victim and perpetrator of violence. The Gang War congealed onto their bodies, like the purple bruises on a dead youth. Process, and event, subject, and object collapsed, one into the other. These collapses were ubiquitous to Lyari during the putatively exceptional temporality of the Gang War. A ‘war’ that was really a war on presenting as Black, identifying as Baloch, being from Lyari. Fear: spatialized, racialized, embodied, then packaged and distributed en masse. The 21st century dawned on this working-class neighborhood in the red hues of blood. Once the repository of Karachi’s old city charm, progressive political values, and harmonious diversity, Lyari transformed into a notorious gangland. Over five years of ethnographic learning and unlearning, it became clear to me that the ‘fear' identified with Lyari far exceeds the manifest sense of insecurity in people's everyday lives. This 2 article interrogates this highly constructed discursive stability where contrary discourses and paradoxical practices cohere, muddling a robust assessment of the social functions and effects of the gangs in Lyari.1 Fear was deployed in narratives about Lyari to several different and often competing ends. It catered to widely differing publics, served widely differing interests. Fear was commandment and commencement. Each "statement" equating Lyari with exceptional violence and paralyzing fear operated in surplus of material precarity faced by Lyarians. Though the horrors of gang violence are undeniable, their staging as an exceptionality and subsequent fetishization by diverse forces united only in their grotesque fascination with Lyari was indeed strange. So strong was this fetish, that in its sway, one could forget that the rest of the city of Karachi was not faring any better than Lyari in combatting spectacular acts of violence. The fetish animated a powerful fascination with public violence and transformed gangsters that were, not too long ago, petty criminals into all-powerful monsters with the capacity to challenge the very foundations of the Pakistani state and its social order.2 In 2014, when the military crackdown against the gangs commenced, this same discourse legitimized the weekly tallies of young men from Lyari killed extra-judicially, disappeared without a trace, or apprehended with dubious access to legal representation. Pakistan's draconian security apparatus, its ‘progressive', left- liberal scholarly community, the politicians hailing from the city's historic elite, crime-beat journalists out for scoop, and many civil society figures and organizations who, on most issues saw themselves as fiercely adversarial to one another; completely concurred on the spatialization and ethnicization of fear and violence in Lyari. How do we explain the coherence of antagonistic formations—progressive, right-wing, parliamentarian, or suspected agents of the military establishment—in discursively producing Lyari as a subject of fear and violence? This article addresses that question. It explains how the gangs were one amongst many social formations involved in policing and maintaining the boundary between Lyari and the city. This policing function, as we will see, is one of the most critical subroutines in the reproduction of power.3 It reproduces the social boundary between government and the governed, state and society, order and disorder, and thus between Lyari and the city of Karachi. These social locations that stand in for social ‘order' acquire concreteness and appear orderly precisely by defining places like Lyari, and social formations like the gangs, as the opposite of order. However, the establishment of order through boundary-making is a contradictory process. It inherently involves the orchestration and application of hyper-visible, spectacular forms of violence at multiple 1 c.f. Tsing, Anna L. "From the Margins" Cultural Anthropology 9(3):279. 2 I Discuss the racial Dimensions of this fetish, which is strong, important, anD Deserving of full analysis in Detail elsewhere (see Suhail 2016; 2018). That scholars of South Asia rarely engage with the literature on race or explore the significant homologies between race, ethnicity, anD caste is quickly changing (see, for example, PanDey 2014). However, ‘race' remains an undertheorized variable in research on South Asia. This is astounding when studying categories like the gang, the genesis, and of which occurs in 1920s Chicago and which later becomes a fetish object for the ‘science' of criminology, both unDer the circumstances completely governed in the absolute by racial politics in the UniteD States. That the ‘gangs' of Lyari consist of the Doubly markeD Afro-Baloch youth of Lyari, constituting a racialized minority and affiliated with an ethnic group long associated in Pakistan with suspicions of anti-state, communist and separatist proclivities makes it all the more salient. Remarkably, despite becoming a destination for scholars of Pakistan, no stuDy of Lyari has remotely mentioneD the ethno-racial Dimensions of social organization there. 3 Mitchell, T. (1991). "The limits of the state: beyonD statist approaches anD their critics." The American Political Science Review: 77-96 3 scales.4 The orchestration of spectacular violence allows ‘order' to be identified, defined, established, and maintained through the continual staging of chaotic, ostensibly senseless acts of brutality.5 Often, the curators of these theaters of violence outsource the policing function to groups better situated to perform the dirty work. All over the world, we find illicit groups, shadowy figures, and shady organizations recruited for such functions, in each case blurring boundaries between state, society, and criminality.6 In this paper, I argue that the gangs of Lyari were precisely that: an agent of order, a mechanism of social control. They were a part of what I identify as a ‘dispositif.' They wielded spectacular violence to reproduce, rather than challenge, the extant relations of domination through constructing and policing the social boundaries between Lyari and Karachi, and effectively articulating processes of political subjection therein. Furthermore, the gangs were only the most recent iteration in a series of social formations that performed the policing function in Lyari by reproducing it as a wild frontier consistently in need of ordering. Moreover, the gang sustained its position within the dispositif by convincing one and all that they were the only formation capable of effectively reproducing power relations and strived to distinguish themselves from other formations that

Load more