Intervention Without Exposure:

Bureaucratic documents and negotiated governance in a militarised state

By Joel Rodrigues

It was a humid evening in October 2016 in a village in eastern Nagaland. The winter rain had briefly stopped. A group of students’ union members from the village had gathered in the home of their village head to explore possibilities of an ambulance long promised. Dark black tea circulated in multiple Burma mugs, and several phone torches illuminated the otherwise dimly lit room. There was no electricity in the village due to the rain, a situation that was not uncommon even without the downpour. I was part of a team of lawyers and social activists meeting the youth to collectively explore possibilities of using the law to access constitutional guarantees and welfare schemes.

The president of the students’ union came forward to produce a letter from his file. He explained, “This is the memorandum we submitted to the Health and Family Welfare Department of Nagaland two years ago asking an ambulance specifically for our range.” As we struggled to read, two men flashed their phone torches to assist us. Rather than a memorandum, it read like a letter of request. The department head had written “Received” and signed at the bottom right. This was the copy maintained by the youth, while the original letter was submitted to the department. Two years had passed without any sign of an ambulance. The solitary request remained unanswered.

Over the years, through my work in human rights activism in Nagaland, I started viewing such moments not as evidence of failed mobilisation or political apathy. Government accountability operates differently as a practice of negotiation under conditions of militarisation. While India remains the largest democracy in the world, with one of the longest constitutions, and some progressive legislation, it has specific laws that enable violence at its frontiers and on marginalised populations (Singh 2007, Duschinski 2010, Ramakrishnan 2013). In Nagaland, one such law that remains in force is the Armed Forces Special Powers Acts 1958 [hereafter, Armed Forces Act] which exempts the armed forces from prosecution for their arbitrary killings even on the grounds of suspicion (Kikon 2009, Baruah 2017). As militarisation permeates ordinary social life, people anticipate risk and articulate human rights claims through indirect and vernacular forms of engagement rather than overt confrontation (Kikon 2017).

Drawing on Philip Abrams’ (1988) argument that the state functions less as a coherent entity than as an ideological state-idea that obscures the practices through which power operates, I suggest that letters of request submitted to government departments sustain its representation as an object of negotiated governance. This essay builds on Akhil Gupta’s (1995) work which shows that most citizens encounter the state through fragmented localised practices that simultaneously render the state intimate and opaque. It heeds Nayanika Mathur’s (2016) call for a better understanding of ‘the intimate, complex, and context-dependent entanglement’ of state governance and lived experiences in India.

My analysis draws on my participation over the course of a year as a legal activist and researcher in Nagaland, a position that made visible strategies through which government intervention is pursued and the ethical calculations that shape legal action. Grounded in activist encounters shaped by militarisation in Nagaland, the dynamics traced here are processes intensified under conditions where legal recourse, bureaucratic delay, and governance can be entangled. Petitions for government interventions, and demands for accountability, do not often unfold as open confrontation with the state. They are calibrated engagements shaped by anticipation of delay, retaliation, and collective consequence. Activists and communities navigate these terrains by selectively mobilising the law while managing visibility. Sometimes, they seek intervention without exposure.

Public health infrastructure

The students that our team of lawyers and social activists met in the village in eastern Nagaland lived more than 150 kilometres from the District Hospital, a four-hour journey. In cases of a medical emergency, such as a traumatic injury or obstetric care, it was impossible to reach the facility within the golden hour to prevent further complications or even, death. The Community Health Centre (CHC), the next referral centre, was at least two hours away. Under such circumstances, the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) recommends that the nearest Primary Health Centre (PHC) should be upgraded to a 24hour emergency hospital by increasing the number of doctors and nurses stationed there. The nearest PHC was less than three kilometres away. However, the youth president and the village council head deemed this upgrade to be too much to ask. They returned to their request for an ambulance.

There was an ambulance stationed at the CHC, they informed the activists. They had the phone number of the ambulance driver. However, in a medical emergency arising in the village, people had to haggle with the driver whenever they called. The travel time on bad roads was usually the first excuse. Driving two hours to the village, and two hours back to the CHC, he insisted, was too wasteful to provide reliable service. Hence, the students decided to request a dedicated ambulance for the villages in the area. Two years after the memorandum was submitted, the request remained unfulfilled.

Sensing the need to strengthen their case, the union president told us, “Let me show you our village Sub-centre. You will know why we need an ambulance better.” Under the health services guidelines, the sub-centre is the first contact centre between the public health system and rural communities; it provides appropriate referral assistance for the next level service provider. This can be the PHC, CHC, or the district hospital. The role of a Sub-centre is primarily to provide preventive and essential curative care apart from disseminating health-promotion and educational services.

When we started heading to the village Sub-centre, it was already dark. The union president took us some distance away from the home, our path lit with torchlights. The electricity was not back yet and there were neither roads leading to the centre, nor streetlights along the pathway. The Sub-centre had corrugated asbestos sheets for walls on the outside, and panelled wood inside. It seemed like a Sub-centre (Type A) since it did not have a dedicated labour room. Taking a cue from this initial observation, the activists started taking notes on the numerous ways in which the centre failed to meet IPHS guidelines.

The centre had neither an electricity connection, nor a toilet for patients. It received free medicines from the government only erratically. Infant and childhood vaccinations were not undertaken every month. The stationed nurse did not live nearby. She visited for a few days a month and returned to the town for the rest of the time. The union president showed us the attendance register in the dark. Therefore, he reiterated, their need for a dedicated ambulance. When a caesarean section was required for childbirth in the village, “We arrange for vehicles to take the mother to the District Hospital. Four hours. There is a CHC along the way, but they refuse to admit mothers from our village. We do not come under their jurisdiction. The CHC in any case cannot handle surgeries,” he explained.

Without reading the IPHS guidelines, the village youth were aware of the absences in the infrastructure and manpower at the centre. It was common sense to them. In a few minutes, the activists prepared a list of possible demands for the centre. However, discussions repeatedly return to one critical request: ambulance. The village had deliberated on it many times in the past. Only an ambulance seemed reasonable, ethical, practical, and urgent. It was something they were determined to pursue with endurance.

A vindictive state

Given the condition of health infrastructure in the village, and villages around, the youth were clear about their next move. Either they would submit a fresh memorandum or ask someone else to file a legal case remotely without their names involved. They suggested that we file a Right to Information (RTI) application to receive in writing from the health department the already known fact, “There is no government ambulance in these villages.” They advised us to build a legal case based on the geographical distance and bad roads that made calling an ambulance from other parts of the district a cumbersome affair.

My colleagues began discussing the possibilities of a litigation and evaluating the prerequisites already fulfilled. Before a case could be file, we needed to prove that a representation was made to the concerned department. Thereafter, in the absence of the necessary government intervention, we were filing the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) as a last resort. The request submitted to the health department fulfilled the criteria of representation. However, the union president refused to part with the letter. He did not want it to be used as evidence in court. He said, “If you submit this in the court, they will know we are the ones who complained to you. They might take away something else from us without even giving us an ambulance. No one can guarantee us anything, can you?” Legal remedies were known to be available, yet fear loomed large over future consequences. In the past, through generations, the students were aware that legal action could escalate to reprisal, unpredictable outcomes, and/or long-term vulnerability. Anticipating a negative response from a vindictive state was the governing logic of the village rather than an individual’s emotion.

In Nagaland, submission of petitions and memoranda directly to the concerned departments remains the preferred mode of political assertion. This is despite their failure at times to attend to a problem adequately. It is well understood that government officials have no legal obligation to act on these submissions. Yet, people often engage with the state pragmatically rather than through formal confrontation. Bureaucratic engagement is partial and calculated. These petitions are framed as request or survival rather than rights-claiming. After decades of being denied human rights by the Indian state under militarisation, the role of the government is seen as that of benevolence. Another example in this light is what Tinyi and Nienu (2018, 164) point out that ‘many Naga villagers thought (and continue to think) that the state is first and foremost a job-giving and money-giving agency.’

Similarly, the students’ union in the village did not want to irk any government officials or ministers for fear of jeopardising existing benefits and future possibilities. Government departments and offices in Nagaland regularly appointed people through ‘backdoor.’ These appointments defied guidelines on recruitments based on merit, motivation, skills, and loyalty or commitment to the state (Wouters 2018, 150). In 2016, across rural Nagaland, while there was an acute shortage of doctors, village health centres had over recruited people in positions of paramedical and support staff. As activists, our team filed several Right to Information (RTI) petitions with the province’s health department requesting information about these. Over the year, we cross-verified this data with daily attendance registers at various health centres we had visited. These inflated recruitments were clearly in defiance of IPHS guidelines but were made through kinship and political networks. These realities demonstrated the possibilities of a permanent job in the village school, health centre, or other government office. The consequent predicament is similar to what Berlant (2011) posits as ‘cruel optimism’ as these strong attachments to a government job and the fantasy of the resultant ‘good life’ are no longer sustainable in the political status quo.

The group of activists and lawyers, including me, returned to the district headquarters late at night wondering if a court case could still be filed demanding an ambulance alone. It seemed to require too many staff and much time and effort for a single ask. However, the students’ union was clear that they did not need anything else. A few days later, they asked us not to file the case. The students deliberated on all the possibilities of future harm or retaliation and decided to step back. Instead, they decided to submit another memorandum to the department in the following weeks and chose not to escalate the matter any further. The withdrawal from pursuing the case, even from the sidelines, became an ethical, strategic, and political decision. It was a way to protect the collective interests for the future by deferring resolution.   

Guided by a national, and sometimes international human rights agenda, activists often believe that they know what people at the grassroots should have or at least rightfully desire. However, activism risks getting self-absorbed, including in my own case, by larger ideals without considering everyday governance. In doing so, it may redistribute some of the burdens of ethical calculations onto those who seek accountability rather than reprimand the government or its bureaucracy. The Armed Forces Act which makes militarisation possible, and creates an everyday reality to negotiate, has been challenged in various courts and forums several times. However, it remains intact with no institutional accountability in sight despite sustained efforts by activists. Dolly Kikon (2017) argues that people’s understanding of human rights is therefore informed by their everyday experiences of violence and trauma.

As they know the local situation better, citizens believe that they are more competent to devise their own strategies to ensure public services. Marginalised communities encounter the state in their relationships with government bureaucracies at the lowest level of administration (Gupta 2012). People at the local level have a more nuanced understanding that openly acknowledges the contradictions in which their own discourses of corruption and transparency are enmeshed (Das 2015). Therefore, even if the village cannot be implicated in acts of commission or omission, the fear of being unemployed in rural Nagaland acts as a deterrent to challenging the existing system. The role of fear and punishment, and the backlash of a vindictive state, has produced this situation.

Amidst this, activists and lawyers from urban centres have been engaging in an exhaustive, time- and resource-intensive process of petitioning Nagaland’s Kohima bench of the Gauhati High Court for intervention with the help of RTI. However, even in the cases of PIL, one cannot be assured of a favourable decision. In March 2017, the Kohima bench dismissed 26 cases filed by an organisation on technical grounds stating that the petitioners had not exhausted all their means of representation before petitioning the court. Some of those cases had been pursued for over two years following the regular recourse of filing affidavits and counter-affidavits through stretches of adjournments. Derisively, while there are stipulated deadlines to respond to an RTI, the delay in filing government’s counter affidavits can extend much longer based on the discretion of the court. Finally, in an eureka moment, one of the government advocates realised the procedural flaw in the petitions: lack of representations to the government before approaching the court. In one major swoop, the cases were collectively dismissed.

While filing such cases, groups of social activists petitioning the courts fail to understand how enmeshed the militarised economy is, or the significant number of people engaged in government jobs or contractual labour that government tenders create. The support base for litigations does not extend much beyond social media groups and urban pockets. Some litigations are financed through national-level, international-funded NGO projects that fail to address the local repercussions of these cases. In one of these cases, the State government submitted a counter-affidavit alleging that the villagers were responsible for siphoning of funds and the department had documentary evidence of it. This was despite the clear framing of the legal petition that had left out any references to the grassroots government machinery and requested the correction at the state department. No one had foreseen the possibility of government advocates in a public interest litigation moving the court to add more defendants to the case while being one themselves. 

Conclusion: accountability as negotiated governance

Like the youth gathered around a signed memorandum, seeking intervention without exposure, activism in Nagaland unfolds through careful negotiation with the state—where action is desired, visibility is feared, and accountability remains perpetually deferred. Government accountability in militarised societies unfolds less as an overt confrontation with state power, and more as a sustained practice of negotiation shaped by anticipation, risk, and uneven responsibility. There are surely exceptions involving major protests in this northeastern region of India which have been a direct confrontation with the Indian state. Nevertheless, legal action typically generates prolonged engagement rather than resolution.

Activists and communities pursue accountability by carefully calibrating visibility, often seeking intervention without exposure, and action without attribution. These strategies do not signal political apathy or resignation; they reflect a practical understanding of how the law operates when legality, coercion, and social life are deeply entangled.

By foregrounding negotiation, this essay reiterates accountability as a relational practice embedded within governance. Legal mechanisms invite participation, but they do so by redistributing some burdens of ethical calculations and potential fallout onto those who seek redress. Activists become intermediaries who manage expectations and risk. Communities are drawn into cycles of anticipation that precede and often forestall action. In this sense, government accountability is not simply constrained by bureaucratic delay or procedural failure; it is actively reorganised by them. The law does not silence critique outright. It absorbs critique while converting demands for accountability into extended processes of waiting, accommodation, and retreat.

Activism does not always discipline the state or produce incremental reforms. Instead, it highlights how legal engagement can become a mode of governance in its own right, sustaining participation while deferring closure. Under conditions of militarisation, where histories of violence shape both political imagination and everyday decision-making, negotiation emerges as a dominant form of action precisely because it appears safer than refusal and more viable than confrontation. Activism thus becomes oriented toward managing consequences rather than securing outcomes.

When participation itself becomes costly, and visibility carries collective risk, political action is shaped as much by anticipation as by aspiration. Attending to these negotiations allows us to move beyond narratives of failed activism or resilient resistance, towards a more nuanced understanding of how power is reproduced through the very practices meant to contest it. Activist interventions become folded into the state’s everyday manifestations, sustaining engagement even as resolution remains elusive.

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