GOVERNING BY PROXIMITY: State Performance and Migrant Citizenship on the India-Pakistan Border

Abstract

This article argues that proximity is a mode of governance that both enchants aspirational citizen-subjects and exposes ambivalent state workings. I track face-to-face and digitally mediated interactions—over eight years, from 2014 to 2022—between Indian politicians and Pakistani Hindu migrants in the Thar Desert region. Officials and politicians govern by proximity when their felt presence raises hopes and generates attachments with constituents within a wider body politic. When state actors govern by proximity, they evoke what is lacking by gesturing toward the possible. If proximal encounters with high-ranking politicians offered Pakistani Hindu migrants a glimpse into potential futures that included Indian citizenship, it also reminded them that there remained an uncrossed threshold for recognition. Understanding what governing by proximity is, and the work it does, helps us think anew about questions of populist governance and popular sovereignty at the borders of nation-states