People in India deploy a variety of euphemisms for corruption, one of which is jugaad, which refers to goal‐oriented improvisation, especially the use of informal social networks to advance one's interests. But as often as it is conflated with corruption, jugaad is also conceived as necessary for “getting by” and even as virtuous practice. This ethnography of police practices in Uttar Pradesh shows how the contronymic character of jugaad emerges from widespread valuation of what I call “provisional agency,” which is both a capability to provide a social good and a temporary means of mobility geared toward a better future. Understanding practices that may be deemed “corrupt” as embodiments of provisional agency breaks down a clear distinction between virtue and vice and works to disaggregate a rigid inverse relationship between morality and power that assumes “elite” dominance can only be answered by resistance or acquiescence “from below.

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It is a truism that police in India generally lack legitimate authority and public trust. This lack is widely understood by scholars, policy analysts, and police practitioners as being rooted in the institution's colonial development as a means of oppression, and its alleged corruption and criminalization in the postcolonial period. The social facts of situational hyper-empowerment and the widespread decadence of police do much to explain their poor image and performance, but these explanations do not account for the fact that police in India are also structurally disempowered by cultural-political and legal-institutional claims to multiple and conflicting forms of authority that challenge and often overwhelm the authority of police. This structural disempowerment and its performances in everyday interactions between the police and the public constitute an ongoing social process of delegitimation of police authority in contemporary India. Following ethnographic analysis of this process of delegitimation, I explore the implications of focusing on police disempowerment for theorizations of the sources and capabilities of state legal authority more generally.

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