The mimicry of the state as a state practice: the regulation of rickshaw licenses in Dhaka (Bangladesh)

ABSTRACT

Around half a million cycle rickshaws are currently active in Dhaka, Bangladesh. With only 86,000 official licenses available, different types of organizations supply licenses to most rickshaw drivers. These non-official licenses mimic the language of the state. This article argues that while these licenses appear as part of non-state, hybrid, or twilight institutions, they in fact constitute a state practice. Based on approximately 200 semi-structured interviews at six locations in Dhaka and offering a conceptualization of the Bangladesh state as a party-state, the article shows that the operation of non-official rickshaw licenses and the mimicry entailed is an inherent part of party-state governance, one which is not morally neutral. While most respondents saw the everyday benefits of non-official licenses in the absence of sufficient official ones, the latter remained the most prized and, if made available, respondents agreed that the former would become redundant.

KEYWORDS:

• Rickshaw
• language of the state
• governance
• party-state
• Bangladesh

Acknowledgements

I want to thank associate professor Aynul Islam of Dhaka University and his team from the Micro-Governance Research Initiative for their fieldwork support. I also want to thank participants in the Bangladesh Studies Network meeting in Lisbon for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bert Suykens is an assistant professor with the Conflict Research Group (CRG), Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University in Belgium). He has researched rebel conflict in central and northeast India. Currently his research focuses on Bangladesh, where he tries to understand the role of violence in the organization and maintenance of a party-state.

ORCID

Bert Suykens http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7581-8750

Notes

1 Estimates range from 300,000 to 700,000. Some newspaper reports put the figure at one million. See Ali 2016.

2 Hansen and Stepputat 2001, 5.

3 Das and Poole 2004.

4 Lund 2006, 687; see also Ranganathan 2014; Stel 2016.

5 Hunt 2006.

6 Buur 2006, 735; see also Pratten 2006.

7 Arjona, Mampilly and Kasfir 2015.

8 Podder 2014.

9 Förster 2015.

10 Mampilly 2015.

11 Raeymaekers 2013.

12 Raeymaekers, Menkhaus and Vlassenroot 2008; Meagher, De Herdt and Titeca 2014; for an overview see Hoffmann and Kirk 2013.

13 Hagmann and Stepputat 2016, 26.

14 Telle and Kingsley 2016, 173.

15 Fisher and Timmer 2013, 153.

16 Hoffman and Kirk 2013, 13.

17 Bhabha 1984. While Bhabha is an inspiration for my use of mimicry (in the sense of almost the same, but not quite), I do not want to overstate the Bhabhaian nature of my argument. I am skeptical of overextending Bhabha’s framework as it was explicitly developed to understand colonial subject-formation, including a psycho-analytical frame of reference. While this could be considered a type of governance (in a bio-political sense), simply extending his framework to other governance domains is not feasible. My use of Bhabha as an inspiration is similar to his use by Klem and Maunaguru 2017 to look at sovereignty or by McConnel, Moreau, and Dittmer 2012 to look at diplomacy.

18 For a short discussion of Bhabha in a hybrid authority context, see Petersen 2012.

19 Foxeus 2016.

20 Allen, Dinnen, Evans, and Monson 2013, 71; for a critique see Oppermann 2015.

21 Mbembe 2001, 103; see e.g. Hoffmann, Vlassenroot and Marchais 2016, 1436.

22 For the inspiration for acting “as if,” see Wedeen 1998; Mitchell 1991.

23 Lund 2006, 687.

24 Jaffe 2013, 735.

25 Ibid., 735.

26 Buur 2006.

27 Union councils, also known as union parishads, are the smallest administrative governance unit in Bangladesh. Each council has one chair and twelve members, three of whom must be women. There are currently 4554 councils in Bangladesh.

28 Roy 2009.

29 Her arguments against “unregulation” prompted me to choose “non-official” rather than “unofficial.”

30 Roy 2009, 83; my emphasis.

31 Dhaka’s general liveability and specifically its transport system have been scrutinized by donors in recent years. For example, both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have funded road and traffic projects. Many of these efforts have been geared toward reducing the number of cycle rickshaws, widely seen by planners to be detrimental to traffic flow.

32 Exchange rate at time of fieldwork.

33 Molla 2016.

34 Gallagher 1992, 88.

35 90,000 according to Gallagher 1992, 93.

36 Union Councils are the smallest rural administrative and local government unit in Bangladesh.

37 Ibid., 92.

38 As in many South Asian countries, brokers in Bangladesh play a central role in connecting citizens to the state. The term dalal refers to these brokers, but has a negative connotation.

39 These were introduced in 2009 to provide limited judicial powers to administrative officers. They are supposed to provide instant legal actions against a number of offences.

40 According to two infromants, license providers would sometimes inform their clients about where mobile courts would be located.

41 Hansen and Stepputat 2001, 8.

42 Hansen and Stepputat 2001, 5.

43 Mbembe 2001, 103.

44 Zolberg 1966. For the related notion of “partyarchy,” see Hasan 2006, 20.

45 One crore equals 10 million.

46 New Nation 2015.

47 See the International Crisis Group 2009.

48 For an overview see Uddin Hasan 2013, 141–149.

49 For a critique, see Bari and Efroymson 2005.

50 The World Bank 2013. While the World Bank initially aimed to reduce the number of rickshaws in Dhaka, it has reassessed this approach, for reasons of environmental sustainability, see Ke 2014.

51 Ahmed 1991, 84.

52 Hossain 1988, 43.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was funded by the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (FWO).