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Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis
Srinath Jagannathan1 • Rajnish Rai2
Received: 31 January 2015 / Accepted: 29 March 2016 / Published online: 7 April 2016
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract By engaging with multiple narratives of a
police killing involving questionable legal procedures,
known as a police encounter in India, we attempt to narrate
stories of what happens to those who resist organizational
wrongdoing by displaying moral anger against unethical
actions. The State enables police encounters to occur by
arguing that exceptional and alternate methods are required
to engage with the crisis of terror and crime that the nation
faces. Thus, police encounters are executed in the name of
the collective morality of the greater common good. Those
who resist police encounters argue from the standpoint of a
democratic morality by suggesting that the very efficacy of
democratic institutions will be eroded if encounters are
normalized. We explore questions of organizational ethics
from a temporal perspective while navigating between
contending moral positions regarding police encounters.
Keywords Crisis � Ethics � Moral anger � Police encounters � State � Temporality � Wrongdoing
Introduction
Police action lies at the precarious intersection of ethics,
politics and violence, as it offers a commentary on the
capacity of States and societies to engage with problems of
life and death within democratic frames. In India, there
exist a set of police actions of questionable ethical and
legal content, known as encounters, ‘‘portrayed as sponta-
neous shootouts between the police and hardened crimi-
nals’’ (Belur 2009, p. 237). In India, police encounters
become problematic on account of institutional cultures
where police officers who stand up to wrongdoing are
subjected to systematic administrative retaliation (Dhatti-
wala and Biggs 2012).
Furthermore, whenever the State in India is under the
control of right wing political parties, which espouse the
cause of cultural majoritarianism, the problem is exacer-
bated as religious minorities, particularly Muslims, are
often the target of violent police brutalities such as
encounters (Sarin 2011). Cultural majoritarianism embod-
ied in the ideology of communalism in India has often been
mobilized by the State apparatus to produce cultures of
violence against religious minorities such as Muslims
(Simpson 2006).
Police officers in India often lack independence and are
unable to express dissent, which can prevent elites who
control the State from engineering violence in society
(Subramanian 2007). In this article, our aim is to under-
stand organizational contexts which enable wrongdoing,
and whether expressions of moral anger can prevent such
wrongdoing. It has been argued that accessing justice in
India is difficult on account of class and cultural inequal-
ities (Teltumbde 2015). India’s Supreme Court has also not
progressively intervened on several issues of cultural dis-
crimination, including discrimination leading to residential
segregation (Robinson 2015). Inequities of caste, hunger
and violence inform the everyday reality of marginal sub-
jects in India (Kannabiran 2015).
The experience of inequality has been widening in
recent times as almost eighty per cent of India’s workforce
& Srinath Jagannathan [email protected]
Rajnish Rai
1 Indian Institute of Management Indore, Indore,
Madhya Pradesh 453 556, India
2 Indian Police Service, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382 019, India
123
J Bus Ethics (2017) 141:709–730
DOI 10.1007/s10551-016-3153-3
remain in poverty (Tripathi 2013); they survive on less than
a third of a dollar per day (Shrivastava and Kothari 2014).
Although India’s share of the world Gross Domestic Pro-
duct (GDP) has doubled between 1990 and 2010, economic
inequality has increased (Nolke et al. 2014). In the singular
need to achieve economic growth, calls for cultural plu-
rality and freedom may be seen as an irritant. Conse-
quently, wrongdoing on the part of actors of the State is
normalized. Thus, claims of justice emerging from those
living in the margins may be viewed as irritants which
hinder nationalist aims of development and progress
(Nielsen and Nilsen 2015).
After India achieved independence in 1947, on several
occasions, the postcolonial State has been accused of
patronizing excessive and arbitrary use of police force
against religious minorities such as Muslims (Sherman
2007). Such arbitrary use of force against Muslims emerges
from revisionist right wing projects such as that pursued by
political-cultural forces exemplified by the Rashtriya
Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and Bharatiya Janta Party
(BJP) (Simpson 2006). However, it is important to note
that these revisionist projects may also have some degree
of support from other political formations which claim to
be centrist or liberal. Scholars and commentators have
suggested that the BJP and RSS embody angsts pertaining
to the fulfilment of Hindu cultural projects, some of which
are antagonistic to the rights of minorities such as Muslims
(Jaffrelot 2010, 2012; Sen 2015; Varma and Menon 2010).
Some of these angsts involve claims pertaining to places
of worship and arguments that Hindu temples once existed
where Muslim mosques stand today (Varma and Menon
2010). Other angsts involve large scale riots against Mus-
lims in order to teach them a lesson for allegedly being
involved in violence against Hindus in some local settings
(Simpson 2006). Some other right wing Hindu angsts have
even involved supporting extremism and terrorist attacks
(Jaffrelot 2010). In other instances, the State has been
mobilized to carry out police encounters against alleged
criminals who have been predominantly Muslim (Jagan-
nathan and Rai 2014).
In general, the Indian State has also been accused of using
excessive force in dealing with people on the margins while
implementing development projects involving forced dis-
placement of people without adequate compensation and
rehabilitation (Nielsen and Nilsen 2015). Police efforts in
containing the resistance of disaffected groups have often
lacked objectivity, sensitivity and neutrality (Saxena 2009).
While engaging with resistance from the margins of the
economy, the police in India have been known to be involved
in atrocities, rapes and violence (Mukherjee 2014).
In the context of inequality and the coercive apparatus
of the postcolonial Indian State, we explore organizational
wrongdoing in the work of the police and whether such
wrongdoing can be resisted. There are two theoretical
considerations for pursuing this aim. First, we want to
understand the implications of mobilizing discourses of
crisis within organizations on cultures of permissibility and
wrongdoing. Second, we want to understand the organi-
zational conditions that enable expressions of dissent and
moral anger to prevent organizational wrongdoing.
We ground our study in the empirical context of the
police in India for two reasons. First, the empirical context
of the police allows us to explore wrongdoing on an
extreme scale pertaining to issues involving life and death.
Second, policing and surveillance are at the heart of several
contemporary debates about democracy and society, pro-
viding opportunities for exploring important ethical issues.
While we are dealing with narratives where the expression
of moral anger was eventually unable to prevent wrong-
doing from occurring, the positions taken by different
actors provide us with clues about the discursive web of
moral anger and its potential to prevent wrongdoing.
Whereas much research has focused on anger as a
response to wrongdoing (Simola 2010), we focus on the
expression of anger prior to a wrong having occurred. Also,
anger has been discussed in terms of emotional scripts
mobilized by hierarchical location, and it has been argued
that embodiments of anger are contingent on whether people
are supervisors, colleagues or subordinates (Fitness 2000).
We depart from this position to explore how moral anger
against wrongdoing may be marginalized on account of the
intersection of hierarchical imperatives and nationalist fan-
tasies. We want to access the political situatedness of anger,
both in organizational terms as well as larger societal terms.
In this context, we draw on multiple narratives of a
police encounter which occurred in a Western State in
India bordering the neighbouring country of Pakistan to
explore the organizational dynamics that structure ethically
questionable actions within the police. Specifically, we
draw on the narrative of a young police officer’s moral
angst in trying to prevent a police encounter, and the
organizational discourses that his resistance runs into. We
adopt a narrative methodology premised around stories of
various actors involved in the police encounter, as we
believe that it may be useful in eliciting a wide range of
emotions from subjects (Gabriel 2000) pertaining to ethical
dilemmas that they have confronted within the police.
We embed these narratives and stories within a broad
case study context to discern numerous accounts of how a
police encounter was staged. Since actors may be evasive
and may have constructed safe narrative facades (Gabriel
2004) pertaining to their experiences of violent events,
discussing stories about these events may be an important
source of accessing narrative entries into violent events.
These stories can help us to uncover tropes of anger, hope,
dissent and control (Gabriel et al. 2013) regarding ethical
710 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
dilemmas which influence administrative processes of
dialogue and retaliation.
These stories embody the complex intersection of
organizational dynamics with larger issues of ethical poli-
tics. While the texture of these stories engages with what
happens to those who resist police encounters through their
moral anger, the poetic articulation of these stories as facts
hopes to uncover subjective fantasies of actors pertaining
to coercion, administrative retaliation, discourses of crisis,
temporality, ethics, self-interest and moral anger.
Theoretical Approaches
A police encounter in India embodies the enactment of
exceptional authority as an alleged criminal is killed
without being subject to due processes of law (Belur 2009).
While the formal claims in a police encounter are that of
cross fire with the alleged criminal on account of which the
police had to rely on using deadly force in self-defence,
many of these claims lack credibility (Subramanian 2007).
Police encounters are thought to be stage managed pro-
cesses which are pursued with implicit sanction of the top
echelons of the State (Jagannathan and Rai 2014). Further,
police encounters may also draw legitimacy from right
wing ideologies and may be targeted against religious
minorities such as Muslims in India, and may accompany
processes through which Muslims are constructed as hos-
tile subjects (Simpson 2006).
We wish to highlight three broad theoretical streams of
thought in building our arguments around moral anger and
its potential to resist wrongdoing. First, we wish to point
out how national elites can structure a sense of crisis
around terror or crime to legitimize wrongdoing (Butler
2009). Consequently, the sense of crisis can shrink the
possibilities of dialogical time and prevent moral anger
from building a shared sense of grief that can prevent
wrongdoing (Hope 2011). Second, we explore how the
politics of moral anger may yield different relational and
ethical tropes when it is aimed at preventing an act of
wrongdoing rather than expressing resentment after an act
of wrongdoing has occurred (Simola 2010). Third, we
consider how moral anger may not be structured as much
by hierarchical location (Fitness 2000), as by political
ideals, fantasies and subjectivities privileged by actors.
Consequently, expressions of moral anger need to take into
account the complex intersections of hierarchical impera-
tives and right wing nationalist fantasies.
Temporality, Crisis and Moral Anger
Butler (2009) outlines how temporalities of war and crisis
are constructed to advance practices of the State which
curb the possibility of ethical social relations. For Butler,
temporality is related to performances of grief and how
some lives are rendered ungrievable. Time is experienced
only in terms of past angsts of wanton destruction enacted
by the Other. Consequently, the present is experienced as a
moment of rage and revenge where a sense of crisis and
war with the Other defines and forecloses alternative
political possibilities. When time is held in crisis by the
State, what is at stake is the censorship of grief itself. In the
Indian context, the censorship of grief is linked to a
restoration of political order implying a return to the
mythical imagination of a pure Hindu nation not contam-
inated by the plurality of minorities such as Muslims (Sen
2015). In order to contest such monolithic narratives
sanctioning violence, moral expressions of anger can draw
from narratives of embodied pain (Ralph 2013). These
narratives of pain keep alive a sense of grief about abuse
and torture experienced by different subjects. This sense of
grief is also necessary for us to feel angry about how norms
of justice and equity have been violated.
This sense of grief keeps the memory of resentment
against wrongdoing alive. In India, such resentment has
been seen as a reparative act of dignity that challenges the
dehumanization of social action (Vajpeyi 2009). When the
war for justice is unequal and appears ‘‘unwinnable by the
weaker side’’, resentment keeps alive the memory of his-
torical wrongs (Vajpeyi 2009, p. 27). Activists in India
such as Arundhati Roy have been at the forefront of con-
serving a sense of anger and resentment against the vio-
lence of the State. Roy (2011) argues that legal and
constitutional processes in India have legitimized violent
interventions of the State which prevent marginalized
people from pursuing livelihoods of dignity and vitality.
Collective acts of remembering violence prevent the nat-
uralization of State violence directed against minorities
(Ralph 2013). Grief is an enactment of collective memory
that energizes anger against the actions of the State which
produce violence as a pedagogy of citizenship (Butler
2009).
In the context of violent interventions of the State, the
role of the police in a democratic society needs to be
debated as the public imagination of the police is linked
with the identification, pursuit and murder of enemies
(Natarajan 2014). Within the crisis of terror, democratic
societies may allow exceptional authority to police,
including the authority to execute murders within the frame
of police encounters. In a crisis situation decisions are to be
taken at a rapid pace (Laux 2011). The pressure of time
makes decision making incompatible with the ethics of
democratic deliberation, and cultures of violence involving
majoritarian constructions of the State may become nor-
malized. When violence inflicted by the State is normal-
ized, the least we can do is keep a sense of collective grief
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 711
123
alive (Butler 2009). When grief slips into silence, our
ability to resist violence declines (Ralph 2013).
The production of change against a culture of violence
engendered by majoritarianism depends on how organiza-
tional actors respond to members who are angry about the
unethical contents of the status quo (Geddes and Stickney
2011). Majoritarianism itself embodies a crisis in terms of
democratic temporalities. The project of majoritarianism is
linked to building discourses of grievance and anger
against the minority (Simpson 2006). This involves
reconstruction of historical times in terms of neat stan-
dardizations of the minority as an enemy. Discourses of
grief offer a possibility of resistance against discourses of
grief (Butler 2009). Discourses of grief are able to over-
come cultures of silence through which hate and violence
are tacitly normalized (Ralph 2013). When we are silent,
we are complicit in approving acts of violence carried out
against minorities (Butler 2000). On the other hand, our
grief keeps alive a sense of anger and disapproval for
regimes of violence, giving energy to a variety of actors
who show the courage to stand up against injustice.
These acts of resistance are important for questioning
the use of violence such as police encounters which may
often be seen as legitimate by the State. In the context of
such legitimization of violence, right wing mobilization of
State action is often articulated as the time for action and
not the time for debate, ensuring that democratic institu-
tions and processes are labelled as slow and obsolete in
responding to the current crisis (Laux 2011). Public
approval in India has often taken the form of media nar-
ratives which have endorsed the violent actions of the
police as necessary for preserving the State (Jagannathan
and Rai 2014). This has encouraged cultures of irrespon-
sibility where violence against minority figures is legit-
imized (Ralph 2013).
Moral anger against acts of violence such as police
encounters may be necessary for contesting the normal-
ization of violence directed against minorities. Police
encounters are a ‘‘powerful example of the cultural pro-
duction of a spectral sort of monstrosity that obscures and
justifies police violence and state killing’’ (Linnemann
et al. 2014, p. 506). In an organizational sense, this is
linked to the suppression of primary emotions such as
anger and dissent leading to commodified emotional tropes
becoming the dominant consensus (Lindebaum 2012). The
commodification of emotional tropes is achieved through
cultures of retaliation against dissenters who dare to speak
out (Ralph 2013). When dissenters are punished for
speaking out, it is clear that only emotions which are
officially sanctioned can be expressed. Expressions of grief
contest the reduction of emotions into majoritarian arte-
facts and enable solidarity to be expressed towards those
who have been wronged (Butler 2000).
Expressing Moral Anger Prior to an Act of Wrong
In many instances where the State has been implicated in
wrongdoing, people on the margins in India have reacted
with anger and resentment to the coercive violence of the
State (Vajpeyi 2009). In order to understand what becomes
of such anger, it is useful to consider Simola’s (2010)
analysis of activist anger directed against corporations. She
argues that while activists step up their displays of anger
against corporations, corporations label these amplified
forms of anger as the ultimate proof of the irrationality of
activists.
From Simola’s (2010) analysis, we can conclude that
activists are given ample time and enough opportunities to
articulate their moral anger so that they are eventually
shown up to be irrational. This is an analysis of emotional
reactions to wrongdoing after they have occurred. How-
ever, this does not illuminate tropes of anger which are
mobilized to prevent acts of wrongdoing before they have
happened. In this instance, those who wish to do wrong
may not want to provide adequate time for a resisting
figure to enact her moral anger because they understand
that anger is affective and transcends rationality, and has
the potential to expose the injustice of their actions (Lyman
2004). Consequently, they may be anxious to prevent
moral anger from being articulated by limiting the time
available with the resisting figure to express moral anger.
A narrative which shows us the importance of express-
ing moral anger before a decision is taken is the launch of
the Challenger space shuttle by National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) in 1986 (Vaughan 2004).
Several contract engineers pointed out to NASA in a
midnight conference that they apprehended technical
defects which compromised the safety of the Challenger
launch. However, NASA ignored the evidence provided by
the engineers and went ahead with the launch. Eventually,
the launch became a tragedy as Challenger blew up within
73 s, creating serious questions about decision making
processes in NASA. While a contract engineer had outlined
the possibility of a disaster, the ‘‘warning of ‘catastrophe’
held a different meaning in NASA’s culture. The word
‘catastrophe’ was a formalism, stripped of emotional
meaning by its function in a bureaucratic tracking system’’
(Vaughan 2004, p. 327).
Thus, the cleansing of emotions prior to making deci-
sions meant that NASA did not have the discursive
resources to apprehend wrongdoing. Within the culture of
NASA, the launching of Challenger was normalized as a
mistake which failed to assess the magnitude of risk. This
was of course a culture driven by production pressures and
a perennial sense of crisis, thus stripping warnings of their
emotional content and evaluating the articulated risk from a
bureaucratic perspective. We argue that before a decision is
712 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
taken, if the expression of moral anger is able to stall the
act even for a while on the basis of a call for greater
compassion and care (Jaggar 1989), some doubt may be
created about the rationality or the affect of the wrong.
Even if some time is bought in terms of momentary ten-
sions of doubt, it may be possible to mobilize resources,
actors, narratives and politics to prevent the wrong.
Such discourses of doubt produced by moral anger and
ethical grief may be important in inducing organizational
enterprises such as the State away from several regimes of
injustice in which it is currently implicated. Roy (2011)
describes the State as being complicit in regimes of vio-
lence that do not show adequate respect for the rights of the
marginalized. Visvanathan (2015) notes with anger about
how the State casually goes about its actions of everyday
violence, ‘‘Violence is liveable and consumable. All it now
needs is a cost-benefit analysis, a census of the dead … Such an attitude provides a touch of machismo to our
technocratic elite as they plan new wars, new dams and
even new security establishments’’. Analysis of anger in
India relies on understanding how elites have used policy
and State discourses to further their own interests, but this
is still an expression of resentment after the act of
wrongdoing has already occurred. However, in this article,
we depart from such resentments to explore what happens
to anger which is expressed before an act of wrongdoing is
performed, and what discursive processes can enable or
arrest the emotional performance of such anger.
Moral Anger and the Problematization
of Organizational Hierarchy
Right wing discourses create a panoptical notion of time by
contending that the nation is facing a crisis and right wing
politics alone can authentically save the nation (Simpson
2006). Dhattiwala and Biggs (2012) have shown that right
wing ideologies operate by hierarchical forms of discipline
which are structured in State agencies such as the police.
Those police officers who refuse to look the other way
when right wing discourses engineer mass violence are
often punished by the State. Thus, hierarchy is justified and
dissent is made more difficult in right wing enactments of
the State.
Parker (2009) has argued that managerial justifications
of hierarchy have often relied on notions of angelic obe-
dience. This may be true in the context of police violence
orchestrated during right wing atmospheres as well. Those
police officers who are willing to carry out the violent
agendas of purging society of the figure of religious
minorities (Jagannathan and Rai 2014) may be described as
demonstrating angelic obedience to hierarchical diktats. On
the other hand, those who stand up for preventing violence
may be described as fallen angels who are problematically
exercising their free will and standing against the project of
the mythical, pure nation from being realized.
In the context of right wing narratives of the State, the
relationships between anger and organizational hierarchy are
likely to be ambiguous. Fitness (2000) provides a conceptual
framework where the expression of particular forms of anger
is correlated with organizational hierarchy. According to
Fitness, while supervisors are likely to be angered by the
incompetence of their subordinates, subordinates are likely
to be angered by a sense of being treated unfairly. Supervi-
sors are also likely to be angered by morally reprehensible
behaviours exhibited by subordinates. However, these pro-
totypical intersections of anger and organizational hierarchy
may be more ambiguous within the context of right wing
atmospheres in agencies such as the police.
Police officers who are engineered by right wing dis-
courses are likely to feel a sense of moral reprehension to
any calls for showing fairness, care and ethical concern for
antagonistic subjects such as alleged terrorists (Jagan-
nathan and Rai 2014). Thus, even if immediate supervisors
make a call for ethical concern and fairness, subordinate
officers may view such calls as being morally reprehensible
and detrimental to right wing nationalist projects (Belur
2009). Consequently, unlike the arguments advanced by
Fitness (2000), within the temporality of a crisis structured
by right wing discourses, the moral emotions displayed by
a subject may not be purely contingent on hierarchical
locus. On the other hand, the justifications they build for
their moral anger may depend on the political subjectivi-
ties, fantasies and yearnings they espouse.
There are many problems for subjects who wish to contest
organizational wrongdoing. On the one hand, there is
nationalist anger based on right wing ideologies which cuts
across different levels of organizational hierarchy (Simpson
2006). On the other hand, right wing political forces which
use organizational hierarchy to activate violence and
wrongdoing (Jagannathan and Rai 2014). It is interesting to
consider these tensions in the light of Parker’s (2009) theo-
rization of organizational hierarchy as angelic obedience.
Parker describes how blind obedience to a hierarchical
power often led angels to commit mass murder and other
psycho-pathological acts. Thus, mere obedience to hierarchy
without bringing ethical agency into play may be a psy-
chopathological act that fails to consider how hierarchy may
often be complicit in the production of organizational wrong.
In the context of hierarchical sanctions, discourses of
resistance against wrongdoing may be seen even by sub-
ordinates as morally reprehensible. They may view it as a
form of misplaced idealism which is treacherous of the
nationalist cause (Butler 2009). The opportunity to engage
in wrongdoing, sanctioned in subtle ways by senior levers
of the State administration, can produce a distorted sense of
agency among police workers (Jagannathan and Rai 2014).
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 713
123
This is similar to the anonymity that mystifies the legiti-
macy of angelic hierarchy (Parker 2009). While angels
represent God, it is not clear how they receive God’s
instructions in the first instance. Similarly, instructions
pertaining to wrongdoing in the police are never articulated
formally and clearly. There is a sense of mystery about
how police workers receive and execute them. This sense
of mystification produces networks and conduits through
whom hierarchical superiors whisper commands of what
needs to be done. In turn, the power and authority of
angelic conduits expands within the organizational hierar-
chy of the police.
Through these conduits, police workers may be
encouraged to read their participation in the police
encounter as the enactment of a nationalist cause. In such
circumstances, it is only when coalitional and dialogical
forms of moral anger can be mobilized, that wrongdoing
can be resisted (Geddes and Callister 2007). In the absence
of such coalitional forms of anger, societies may be unable
to evolve institutional maturity to engage with terror and
violence and may sanction random acts of murder and
revenge (Subramanian 2007). When majoritarian nation-
alism acquires hierarchical legitimacy within the State and
the police, wrongdoing may be normalized. Parker (2009)
argues that hierarchical legitimacy is often equated with
divinity and sacredness.
In this context, a police encounter is an important site
for examining questions about the temporal politics of
crisis, organizational wrong doing, moral anger and the
possibility of transforming organizations into ethical fields
of deliberation. We reiterate three main theoretical posi-
tions which we use to frame this study. First, the discursive
production of a sense of crisis shrinks the dialogical time
available to articulate dissent and moral anger. Conse-
quently, negotiations and ethical dialogues that can contest
wrongdoing are prevented from being staged. Second,
while adequate time may be available for expressing moral
anger after an act of wrongdoing, the opportunity for
articulating moral anger before a decision is made is
restricted. This is on account of the fact that if moral anger
is able to stall a decision of wrongdoing even for some
period of time, it may become impossible to rebuild
momentum for the act of wrongdoing afterwards. Third,
right wing fantasies and the punitive prospects of organi-
zational hierarchy may discursively reinforce each other in
enabling wrongdoing to occur.
Method
In this article, we describe different stories pertaining to a
police encounter which occurred in a state on the western
frontier of India which shares territorial borders with the
neighbouring country of Pakistan. One of the authors of
this article is an officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS)
(henceforth Ram) and has worked in policing roles in
different regions in India. He has also worked with dif-
ferent police agencies in India. His experiences in the
police have been varied and punctuated by ethical conflicts
with others within the police and the State administration.
On account of the ethical positions he has taken, he has had
to approach courts of law or administrative tribunals to
protect himself from vindictive harassment. Consequently,
others in the police or broader locations in society under-
stand his identity as that of an officer who has had the
courage to take on the State and suffer personal conse-
quences with respect to career and other aspects of orga-
nizational life.
As a result, he understands what it means to be hunted
by the violence that the Other wishes to enact and what the
politics of survival means. His situatedness within the
police force is thus that of an officer who yearns to bring
about some change while recognizing the difficulties
associated with a hostile environment (Subramanian 2007).
At one level, his situatedness provides us access to the
setting of the police. At another level, access also becomes
difficult with respect to several police officers, adminis-
trators or politicians who identify with right wing dis-
courses and hold the ethical positions of this author as
being problematic and deviant. The other author (hence-
forth Laxman) has taught in a social science university in
India. Both of us met while completing our PhDs and our
friendship led to collaborative research projects in themes
of common interest.
Story Telling Approach
We follow different stories pertaining to the police
encounter because stories are narrative resources through
which subjects are able to voice their emotions (Clancy
et al. 2012). Since there were multiple ethical positions at
play pertaining to different accounts of the police
encounter, the methodology of engaging with stories was
particularly useful. Gabriel (2000, p. 239) describes stories
as plots which entail ‘‘conflicts, predicaments, trials and
crises which call for choices, decisions, actions and inter-
actions, whose actual outcomes are often at odds with the
characters’ intentions and purposes’’.
In our empirical material as well, there were several
contradictions between characters’ intentions and actual
outcomes. While there were police officers who felt that
they were serving a nationalist cause, they may have
actually weakened democratic institutions through their
actions. Similarly, there were other police officers who
were arguing against an unethical use of deadly force, but
whose dissent failed to persuade others within the police
714 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
organization. Therefore, we were interested in under-
standing the stories being shared with us as narrative and
discursive resources through which subjects constructed
meanings, cultural spaces, ethical and political constraints
and a sense of agency (Polkinghorne 1995).
We were interested in understanding ‘‘organizational
stories as poetic elaborations on actual events, as wish-
fulfilling fantasies built on everyday experience and as
expressions of deeper organizational and personal reali-
ties’’ (Gabriel and Griffiths 2004, p. 124). Thus, our nar-
rative accounts focus on organizational stories which are
based on the actual event of a police encounter. However,
these stories can be seen as poetic elaborations connected
to the fantasies and desires of different actors. The stories
of resisting the police encounter form the fantasies of
contesting administrative hierarchy which is imposed from
above and is complicit with the vitiation of democratic
norms. On the other hand, the stories defending the police
encounter embody the poetics of nationalism.
Both sets of stories are connected to alternative ethical
projects. While one ethical project is that of democratiza-
tion of society, the other ethical project reflects the
necessity of placing life at the service of the nation. We
were able to access narratives pertaining to these conflict-
ual ethical projects by speaking to multiple actors who
offered different stories about the police encounter. While
these narratives may not appear to be explicitly connected
to fantasies and poetic accomplishments that are a part of
the storytelling approach of Gabriel (2000), we argue that
the poetry is embodied in the factual tropes deployed by
subjects.
The poetic presentation of fact occurs in two ways.
First, we believe that facts or actions are not disconnected
from underlying fantasies and desires of actors. The
underlying fantasies and desires of actors can be narra-
tively uncovered when they present poetic stories as facts,
given that these facts are structured by ethical and political
decisions. Second, all facts are embedded in ambiguities
and paradoxes, and stories which invoke facts, can help us
uncover poetic aspects in terms of factual tensions about
extreme decisions concerning life and death. The credi-
bility of these stories is sustained on account of actors
articulating their experiences in factual terms. However,
these factual tropes embody poetic dimensions of ethical
and political tensions, as extreme decisions of violence are
likely to be connected with deep underlying fantasies.
Initial Conversations About Accessing Stories
of a Police Encounter
Our interest in areas of organizational ethics and admin-
istrative practices was known to colleagues in our respec-
tive workplaces. During a conversation with Ram, a police
officer currently working in a police agency in India
mentioned details of a police encounter he had been
involved in. We have anonymised the details of the police
officer who provided us access to primary data about the
encounter and refer to him as Sanjay in this article. After
Sanjay’s conversation with Ram, we approached Sanjay
requesting him whether he could provide us with more
details of the police encounter and whether we could use it
as empirical material for research purposes.
We promised him complete confidentiality and outlined
the research strategy that we wanted to adopt. We promised
confidentiality to all other participants as well. We gave all
our participants a written undertaking of the purposes of
our research and the broad questions we were pursuing. We
also assured them that they could ask us to not use the data
provided by them at any point of time during the research
process. We also shared a draft of our analysis with them.
Most of the respondents were familiar with our political
and ethical positions. Consequently, our conversations
involved discussion around our different perspectives.
There are a few specific challenges to anonymity in our
study, which are provided below.
We have felt it necessary to anonymize the province in
which Sanjay works, because the State is known to retaliate
against public servants who have spoken out against it. The
State has put several public servants, who spoke out against
it in jail under one pretext or the other. Several other public
servants have been arbitrarily transferred, denied promo-
tion, terminated or have voluntarily taken premature
retirement from public service in the province. Since sev-
eral individuals involved in the police encounter agreed to
speak to us, we think it necessary to conceal the identity of
the province. The disadvantage of concealing the identity
of the province is that we are unable to satisfactorily dis-
cuss the political and cultural context in which the police
encounter was staged. However, where we are silent, we
are sure readers will be able to make productive meaning of
right wing political genealogies we refer to, and make
connections, which we cannot explicitly allude to.
Accessing Stories about the Encounter from Sanjay
While accessing stories shared by Sanjay, we were aware
that these stories contained emotions at multiple levels, in
terms of ‘‘the emotions recollected by the narrator; the
emotions which the story seeks to communicate to the
listener; the emotions which the listener experiences while
hearing the story; and the emotions which he/she later feels
on recollecting it’’ (Gabriel and Griffiths 2004, p. 121).
Thus, with respect to the police encounter, Sanjay recol-
lected emotions of despair as he could not intervene in
preventing it. The story was meant to produce an emotion
of anger in terms of a collapse of serious conversations
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 715
123
around ethics within organizations. While listening to the
story we felt emotions of moral resentment at the ways in
which organizations could be used as instruments of
wrongdoing to pursue right wing political projects. As we
sifted through the story later, we experienced emotions of
resistance and reparation in trying to understand strategies
through which cold administrative rationalities could be
overcome to build grassroots collectives based on cultures
of deliberation and democracy. Similarly, other stories
pertaining to the police encounter were sites of uncovering
a variety of emotional insights.
Our conversations were structured around common
experiences shared by Ram and Sanjay. Both of them have
a shared analysis of several actors within the police,
administration and politics. Consequently, at the level of
affective experiences and political subjectivities, we were
able to bond at a deeper level with Sanjay. Ram has faced
victimization on similar lines as Sanjay, and many of our
conversations revolved around administrative processes of
retaliation and tactics of survival. Thus, our conversations
with Sanjay revolved around common anxieties and we
were intuitively able to access insights and relate to Sanjay
in the spirit of friendship and camaraderie.
Sanjay provided us with an important narrative resource
to reconstruct his experiences during the police encounter.
He provided us access to a diary he had maintained about
the police encounter. We had several conversations with
Sanjay about the police encounter and the role of various
actors involved in the encounter. The case pertained to an
alleged terrorist who had been arrested by Sanjay. Sanjay
had spent a month’s time in a district with a difficult terrain
accessing intelligence about the alleged terrorist. After
Sanjay arrested the alleged terrorist, there was a lot of
pressure from the State government and senior police
officers to eliminate the terrorist in a stage managed police
encounter.
We spoke to Sanjay several times after he provided us
access to his diary to understand his story of the encounter
in detail. Since Sanjay is still employed with the police,
initially we did not approach anybody else connected with
the incident to access their perspective of events. However,
in order to access plural entries into the incident, we felt
that we should speak to others connected with the event.
We felt that this would give us deeper insights into the
normalization of organizational wrongs. We discussed our
strategy with Sanjay and after obtaining his consent,
approached others associated with the event.
Speaking to Other Actors for Accessing Stories
about the Encounter
As a part of our research strategy, we spoke to a wide
variety of actors, and did not restrict ourselves to only
those who were connected with the incident. We intro-
duced ourselves as researchers who were interested in
understanding the emotional labour of police workers,
particularly in the context of ethical dilemmas. We pro-
mised confidentiality to all police workers interviewed by
us in our study. We told the police workers that we were
interested in stories, experiences and positions rather than
concrete notions of truth and lie. We told them that even
with respect to stories, while the job of the police was to
investigate, our job as researchers was to understand dif-
ferent perspectives around an issue. By evoking these
stories from different actors, we recognized that ‘‘human
beings exist in an environment of meanings. They do not
simply react to interpersonal, social, and physical events;
rather they respond to the meanings they attribute to them’’
(Polkinghorne 2004, p. 86).
In all, we interviewed 15 police workers between July
2014 and October 2014, out of whom six were directly
connected with the police encounter. We contacted four of
these police workers on the basis of our earlier familiarity
with them. Through introductions obtained from these four
police workers, and a few more secondary introductions,
we contacted the other eleven police workers. In accessing
accounts from police workers, we were building different
narrative accounts embodying multiple facets of the case
study to understand intersections between moral tensions
and police actions. The case study embodies a network of
stories which speak to each other to indicate how the
violence of the encounter was enacted. The case can be
entered through the particularity of any story and then other
stories and emotional tropes can be read in the context of
our initial entry. In this sense, similar to the ethical and
political tensions within different stories, the case study
itself embodies tensions between different stories.
One of the six police workers was Sanjay’s immediate
supervising officer during the police encounter. While he
initially declined to speak to us, he agreed to speak to us
after we showed him other examples of similar studies. We
have anonymised the details of Sanjay’s supervising officer
and refer to him as Prasoon in this article. Ram has an
uneasy relationship with Prasoon. While there have been
no direct conflicts between them, yet they know that they
have divergent positions with respect to the State on a
variety of issues. However, while accessing data, these
differences in positions were not channelized in the form of
open cultures of debate.
Instead, these positions were labelled in the form of
specific predispositions and political subjectivities. Our
conversations with Prasoon were in the form of formal
interviews with questions being often shared in advance.
We could not engage in free flowing conversations with
Prasoon and he often gave carefully worded or cryptic
responses. While Prasoon alluded to the encounter in which
716 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
Sanjay had been involved, and implicitly justified it, he
never went into details of what actually happened during
the encounter or from where he received his instructions to
facilitate the encounter.
In our conversations with police workers, we discussed a
variety of questions pertaining to stress levels, emotional
unpleasantness, ethical dilemmas, relationships with col-
leagues, role of the media, expectations of citizens and
legal challenges, and shared detailed questions in advance.
These conversations were in the form of formal interviews.
None of the interviews were recorded and we maintained
detailed field notes of the interviews. The first interview
lasted between 30 and 45 min. In the first interview, there
was only one question about police encounters that we
explicitly asked.
We asked the police workers to share with us emotional
difficulties faced by police workers involved in police
encounters. We requested for more conversations with
police workers who were forthcoming in their replies on
police encounters. We had multiple conversations with six
of the 15 police workers who shared with us stories of
police encounters in which they had been associated. Three
of these police workers were associated with the same
encounter for which Sanjay had provided us details. We
have anonymised the names of all respondents in our study.
Apart from Sanjay, we include the narratives of three
other police workers in this article. While Prasoon was
Sanjay’s supervising officer, Rajesh and Abhimanyu had
worked in the crack team under Sanjay. Initially, Rajesh
and Abhimanyu were also reluctant to speak to us. But
after we built rapport with them around the issue of emo-
tional labour, they were willing to participate in the study.
Ram introduced Laxman as a teacher and a researcher
during the conversations with Rajesh and Abhimanyu.
Laxman’s presence led Rajesh and Abhimanyu to perceive
the research as a formal exercise of producing knowledge
around a host of ethical, managerial and administrative
issues.
Rajesh and Abhimanyu had never worked under Ram
but had heard about him. Again, they were not comfort-
able with the conflicts between Ram and the State. But they
respected him for the values of honesty and competence he
stood for. Rajesh and Abhimanyu opened up about their
emotional responses to the encounter, when they under-
stood that we were engaging in a process of dialogue,
rather than an exercise of finding the truth of what had
happened in the encounter. Since they were aware about
our positions pertaining to violence, they defended their
own positions in strong, emotional terms.
Apart from police officers, we also interviewed several
politicians, lawyers, human rights activists and journalists
regarding themes pertaining to ethical dilemmas faced by
the police. Several lawyers, human rights activists and
journalists respected Ram’s role in several cases which had
led to conclusive action in the interests of upholding ethics
and justice. Ram shared a sense of community with several
of them as they were involved in resisting the wrongdoing
of State actors at different levels in their own vocations.
They wanted to contribute to the research by sharing their
analysis and understanding of the issues at hand.
With respect to our conversations with right wing
politicians, Laxman approached them directly and indi-
cated his interest in studying issues pertaining to the police.
The politicians treated these interviews as a journalistic
process of clarification and rhetoric. They defended their
positions in rhetorical terms and thus provided access to
discourses that lay at the heart of police action and the
State. We draw from our conversations with two politi-
cians, one lawyer and a journalist for this study. These
participants were familiar with the police encounter with
which Sanjay was associated.
In all we draw from the accounts of four police workers,
two politicians, a lawyer and a journalist as the principal
sources of empirical material for this study. While inter-
viewing these respondents was purposive in the sense of
these eight respondents being familiar with the police
encounter which we were studying, it is true that we have
not been able to interview several others who were familiar
with the police encounter such as the then Chief Minister,
Home Minister and Director General of Police of the
province. Thus, the number of respondents with whom we
spoke is a limitation of the study and even in terms of
emotions and fantasies, we have only accessed a partial
account of the police encounter.
Analysing Stories About the Encounter
Gabriel (2000) indicates that researchers must make a
choice regarding the unit of analysis while analysing the
stories that they have accessed. We analysed the stories by
framing the unit of analysis as the police encounter around
which we were accessing narratives and ethical positions.
The stories provided by police workers, politicians, jour-
nalists and lawyers embody the concrete practical knowl-
edge of the context in which the police encounter was
resisted and authorized. Our case study stitching together
contradictory stories about the police encounter was an
attempt at privileging intuitive and emotional aspects of
analysis over an analysis of rational motives. For analysing
the stories in our case study, we followed the broad
methodological principles outlined by Gabriel (2000).
While Gabriel (2000) categorizes stories into broad types
which generally prevail in organizational contexts, we
categorized stories on the basis of political and ethical
tropes that they embodied with respect to the police
encounter.
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 717
123
Following Gabriel (2000), we also wrote short notes on
the themes that a story embodied. Next, we categorized the
emotions which the story embodied and the fantasies that it
advanced. Emotions and fantasies are important parts of
cultural contexts which structure our ability to resist or
orientation to conform to dominant frames of existence and
social relations. According to Polkinghorne (2004), an
analysis of narratives can help us to understand affective
processes which produce the compulsion to conform.
Another aspect of our analytical notes embodied the
opportunities for resistance that each story provided.
For instance, in one of the stories that we will discuss
later, the Home Minister calls for tough measures against
terrorists and criminals. While the call for toughness
framed the permissibility of the deployment of exceptional
measures such as police encounters, in our analytical notes,
we read this call for tough measures as embodying emo-
tional tropes of cold hostility towards suspected criminals.
We also read these emotional tropes of cold hostility as
embodying larger fantasies of right wing projects where
exceptional measures could imply the construction of the
Other as an enemy who is only worthy of repugnance and
contempt. Consequently, with every act of destroying an
embodied Other, the right wing project could reiterate the
legitimacy of its own rage, identity and existence.
However, we felt that these very fantasies opened up the
possibilities of resistance. If identity was to be defined only
in terms of emotional rage and contempt for the Other, then
the very basis of democratic deliberation would be lost. If a
sense of moral anger could produce a sense of grief about
this loss, then alternatives of engaging with the Other in
more democratic forms could be opened up. Our analytical
notes embodied similar attempts at engaging with emo-
tional tropes, fantasies and opportunities for resistance that
different stories presented. We indicate some of these
analytical processes while presenting our narratives.
Narrating the Stories about the Encounter
We reconstruct the memory of the police encounter by
providing conversational narrative excerpts of the actors
with whom we engaged. By providing these narrative
excerpts we wish to pursue inquiries of how actors
assemble facts and draw upon cultural resources to justify
their actions (Riessman and Quinney 2005). The
researcher’s position plays a crucial role in activating
specific political tropes of memory (Gemignani 2014), and
thus our own positions influenced the reconstruction of the
narrative of the police encounter. These narrative excerpts
are not a coherent reconstruction of events, but draw from
different fragments of conversations with actors with
whom we engaged.
Different actors reconstructed the events surrounding
the encounter differently and responded to the ethical
questions we were raising using a variety of tropes. While
some provided justifications for the encounter using tropes
of national security, emergency measures and the crisis of
terror, others raised questions about the sanctity of police
encounters and the breach of law these processes cemented.
Narrative(s) of the Police Encounter
We narrate the stories of the police encounter in terms of
three broad themes. First, the theme of national security
and crisis is useful to understand the stories and discursive
processes through which tensions pertaining to national
security were produced. Second, the theme of anxiety
about organizational wrong provides us with stories of how
the crisis of national security produced pressures to engage
in organizational wrongdoing. Third, the theme of con-
versations on the ground about wrongdoing mobilizes
stories about ethical and political tensions on the ground in
the form of structuring everyday conversations between
different actors.
Security, Crisis and the Domestication of Morality
The language of crisis can often be mobilized by admin-
istrative elites to domesticate morality. A journalist artic-
ulated how the State normalized the language of crisis
while responding to the murder of a prominent politician.
According to the journalist, the State used the crisis to
mobilize the possibility of using exceptional tactics to
respond to crime and terror,
A prominent politician had been killed in broad
daylight. The state wanted to act tough. The Home
Minister was personally calling young police officers
and telling them about the need to be tough against
crime and terrorism. The Home Minister was
engaging in a posture of nationalist righteousness. In
several statements he was saying that there should be
no political colour in dealing with terror. Essentially
he was saying that if the State adopted dubious tac-
tics, no questions should be asked. Anybody who
asked questions was anti-national. But once you gave
the licence to kill, could you seriously control it?
What was the guarantee that no innocent lives would
be lost?
By articulating the need for acting in a tough way, the
Home Minister is articulating a trope of horror and siege. A
senior police officer described how the right wing gov-
ernment wanted to exploit the defence related
718 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
vulnerabilities at the border into a source of hostility and
rightist administration,
The Home Minister wanted results. He wanted action
at the border. Maybe a few police encounters that
would turn the media spotlight on the competence of
the government.
In the light of the Home Minister demanding results, it is
interesting to consider the metaphorical figure who
demands results from us. A figure implicated in the politics
of demands is the Mafioso. Just like the Home Minister
here, the Mafioso also demands results in terms of the
Other being murdered.
A lawyer who is known for his human rights interven-
tions outlines the transformation of the State into the
Mafioso,
There are many ways to deal with smuggling, arms
and ammunition, explosives, counterfeit currency,
narcotic drugs and terrorism. Police encounters are
the least helpful way. Police encounters do not
enhance the majesty of law; they are an admission of
defeat, they tell us that that the state apparatus is
incompetent of upholding the due process of law.
The lawyer argues that the police encounter will lead to
the collapse of law, and consequently the national security
crisis will reiterate the rise of the Mafioso. Just like the
State, the Mafioso is also driven by a logic of territories.
Where the territory of one Mafioso ends, the territory of
another Mafioso begins.
An opposition politician argues that just like the
Mafioso, the State is complicit in eroding cultures of safety,
Muslims did not feel safe in the State. They felt that
the government had sponsored riots, rape, looting,
arson and massacre against them. They felt that the
government had given complete freedom to Hindu
fundamentalist organisations to carry out violence in
the State to polarize the electorate in view of the
forthcoming assembly elections.
Further, the opposition politician felt that the approach
of the State was different with respect to majority and
minority communities,
Also, there was a difference in the way in which the
State dealt with alleged terrorists from the Hindu and
Muslim communities. There was no hesitation in
carrying out illegal police encounters of alleged
Muslim terrorists. However, this was not even an
option that could be considered against alleged Hindu
terrorists.
When the State fails to protect religious minorities such
as Muslims, it may not be able to address the sense of
grievance and angst among them. A young police officer,
Sanjay who was appointed as the Superintendent of Police
of a district bordering the neighbouring country of Pakistan
pointed out how riots against Muslims were feeding into a
sense of angst,
The district where I was posted had become an
operating ground for terrorist organisations from
Pakistan. They were operating in nexus with local
people and religious organisations. The recent riots in
the State had not helped. On the contrary, it had
fomented the situation; there was a strong sentiment
of injustice and revenge.
Sanjay is concerned about linkages between riots and
the politics of revenge. By themselves, riots signify a
carelessness towards life. Life, which has been nurtured
over a period of time, is destroyed within moments, in the
enactment of a riot. A riot also signifies the breakdown of
the grammar of the neighbourhood. In the enactment of a
riot, every neighbour is suddenly transformed into a
potential enemy.
Another police officer Abhimanyu, who worked under
Sanjay was however oblivious of the destruction caused by
the riot. Abhimanyu was plagued by the acts of destruction
being sponsored by the neighbouring country,
Pakistan had opened a new front in the district.
Infiltrators and terrorists were coming into the district
with arms and explosives. Terrorist acts, assassina-
tion and sabotage had already been planned. Sanjay
had been appointed to create a special team to deal
with these challenges and I worked in close cooper-
ation with him.
Thus, Abhimanyu refers to Pakistan as being responsible
for opening new terrorist fronts. Perhaps, in such a context,
the activation of democracy becomes even more important.
One imagination about the terrorist may be to destroy her.
Another imagination about the terrorist may be to bring her
to justice. When we bring a terrorist to justice, we engage
in a social dialogue about what activated the possibility of
terror in the first place.
A lawyer, who worked in the district indicated the lack
of organizational capacities within the police for bringing
terrorists to justice,
It was an unequal battle. The police force of the
district was inexperienced and largely unprofessional.
They did not have the skills, resources and man-
power, while the enemy was powerful, trained and
highly motivated.
Thus, the lawyer points out that there were several
organizational challenges confronting the police. The
inability to inspire confidence in the community meant that
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 719
123
the objectives of the community and the police did not
converge. An antagonistic relationship informed the rela-
tionship of the police with the community creating a sense
of distrust between the community and the police. Prasoon
who was the Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIGP) of
the range, and Sanjay’s immediate supervising officer said,
The terrorists were driven by religious fervour and
highly indoctrinated. The terrain was hostile. The
topography was difficult. We did not have enough
manpower. We did not have enough equipment.
Many times the morale of the police was low.
Motivating them required effort. The community and
the police also did not share a cordial relationship
always. There was tension and doubt.
Prasoon deals with the imagination of the terrorist in
militaristic terms. He speaks about the terrorist in terms of
difficult terrains and topographies. He fails to appreciate
that while the terrorist is trained to kill, the terrorist is not
trained to hold a political conversation. When the terrorist
is asked to speak, perhaps there is no coherent political
message that the terrorist delivers. If several terrorists are
made to stand trial, then the hollowness of terrorist vio-
lence would perhaps be exposed. The inability of the police
to apprehend terrorists and submit them to trials before
courts of law is an opportunity that has been lost to expose
the shallowness of terrorist discourses.
Abhimanyu spoke about the strategies that the police
were beginning to adopt in the same militarist vein as
Prasoon. He did not speak about the necessity to expose the
discursive void of terrorism,
Sanjay’s success was in using local knowledge. Much
of the district was marshy land without any vegeta-
tion. It was easy to track the footprints of people who
travelled through the area, and there were local
people who had been trained to track footprints.
Thus, even Abhimanyu is able to recognize that the
materiality of local knowledge is a protection against ter-
ror. This indicates that rather than the militarization of
border zones, perhaps it is deepening the social space of
border zones that is important. When social spaces in
border zones are culturally resilient, they have the capacity
to resist terror. On the other hand, it is the emasculation of
social spaces that leads to their inability to resist terror. The
emasculation of social spaces then becomes a ruse for the
militarization of border zones.
In the light of local knowledge enabled by resilient
social spaces, Sanjay spoke about his interventions,
Till then footprint trackers had been used to track
burglars. I decided to use them to track infiltrators.
The number of reports of infiltration had increased
steeply during the previous two years, and I decided
that it was useless to simply pass on information to
the lower police machinery who did not have the
skills to deal with infiltration.
Thus, a sense of crisis informed the functioning of the
police with respect to discharging its responsibilities. There
were everyday dilemmas with respect to the professional
expertise of the police and its relationship with the com-
munity. Sanjay attempted to reconcile these dilemmas by
building a partnership with the community and mobilizing
the expertise of the community to supplement the expertise
of the police. On the other hand, the diktat of the top
echelons of the State was to retain executive control over
the functioning of the police within a hierarchical
framework.
The top echelons of the State believed that the image of
the State and the police could be improved if a few
extraordinary and exceptional successes could be demon-
strated. This was different from Sanjay’s project of build-
ing a sustainable partnership with the community. Ethical
dilemmas could arise if the State did not provide space for
actors to raise questions while pursuing the extraordinary
and exceptional projects which had the implicit sanction of
the top echelons of the State.
Such sanction of the State is evident in the Home
Minister’s calls for results at the border zone. However, it
will take us time to feel angry about the regimes of
violence instituted by such sanctions. It will take us time
to realize that when the State implicitly sanctions
encounters in the name of dealing with a national security
crisis, the State is being transformed into a Mafioso. The
same State which permitted riots to be directed against
Muslims now takes upon itself the contours of a Mafioso.
Riots themselves are a production of rage that carelessly
destroy life.
In this context, when a national security crisis focuses
on the anxiety of terrorism, again it will take us time to feel
angry that the police killed the terrorist not because this
was in national interest, but because the police were
incapable of bringing the terrorist to justice. It will take us
time to recognize that deepening and strengthening social
spaces in border zones is a far more effective way of
engaging with terror than militarizing border zones. But in
the atmosphere of a national security crisis, all that is
immediate is the rage of destroying the Other. And by the
time we recognize that an alternative to this rage was
possible, too much violence would have already been
inflicted. The anger against wrongdoing takes time because
recognizing alternatives takes deep forms of dialogue. And
our capacity to engage in deep dialogue, particularly in
organizational spaces such as the police, leaves much to be
desired.
720 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
Anger, Anxiety and Organizational Wrong
Organizational wrong is normalized when the organization
can be constructed as a homogenous actor under threat
from others outside it. Organizational wrong is also
authorized by the fear of failure. With respect to the
responsibilities of the police, Sanjay described that it was
vital to not allow terrorists to succeed. Sanjay described
what happened when the police had detained an infiltrator,
We had intelligence about him. We knew that he was
a hard core terrorist. We had been making efforts for
almost a month and finally we were able to catch him.
It is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks at all costs.
Terror increases conflicts. The sense of distrust and
conflict between communities and nations increases
due to terror. Fundamentalist forces benefit from
terror. The common man suffers. Terror can bring
about a vicious cycle of violence.
Sanjay wanted to arrest the terrorist and bring him to
justice since he was aware of the viciousness of terror.
Particularly since terror has the capacity to produce a
vicious cycle of violence, it was vital that a terrorist was
not killed using extra-judicial means. It was vital to
bring the terrorist before a court of law. It was necessary
to make the terrorist speak. It was necessary to make the
terrorist listen. When the terrorist speaks and listens, we
can contemplate on the ethical possibility of remorse,
dialogue, resentment and reflection. This can produce a
long lasting effect on preventing terror.
However, Rajesh, another officer who worked with San-
jay was more interested in the militaristic potential of the
terrorist. He referred to the terrorist in militaristic terms,
We were surprised at the amount of military grade
explosives he was carrying. The Indian government
had already suffered by that time. The Parliament had
been attacked and an airplane had been hijacked,
terrorism was on the rise.
In the face of the national crisis of terror, Rajesh is able
to identify destruction caused by terror. As yet, he is not
able to see the ethical potential of bringing terrorists to
justice so that terror can be answered by justice, and not by
revenge. A journalist spoke about the lack of such ethical
agency and how it had been replaced by an unlawful spirit
of vengeance,
It had become the unwritten policy of the government
to eliminate infiltrators who were suspected to be
terrorists. It was felt that there was no point in
bringing them to trial, and it was better to kill them
summarily. The court of public opinion also backed
this.
For an organizational wrong to occur, it may be neces-
sary to build a constituency which will back the wrong. It is
necessary to mobilize constituencies of nationalist anger in
order to sustain the infrastructure of wrong. Abhimanyu’s
views embody how the anger of citizens and police
workers in the grassroots could be mobilized to endorse
ethically problematic right wing agendas. Abhimanyu
spoke about the dilemmas facing the police once the
infiltrator had been arrested,
Many of us told Sanjay that we saw no point in
keeping the terrorist alive. The only good terrorist
was a dead terrorist. We wanted to kill him at that
very moment. If he had succeeded, he would have
killed several innocent people. Why should he be
kept alive? A strong message was necessary from our
side. We are seen as soft. Therefore they take
advantage of us. There needs to be parity between our
actions and theirs.
Abhimanyu is driven by the desire for revenge. But
revenge is a far weaker discourse than justice. Revenge is
about the politics of destruction as a response to injury. Jus-
tice is about the politics of reparation as a response to injury.
Sanjay was interested in the discourse of justice and
spoke about the pressures he was facing to give into the call
for revenge,
I was receiving telephone calls from senior officers in
the government. They wanted me to kill the terrorist
in a purported police encounter. I was in a dilemma –
as a chief of operations, do I authorise an unlawful
killing, even if the killing was in public interest?
Sanjay is torn between the desire to uphold justice and
the administrative pressures to give into the call of murder.
He recognizes that giving into the call of murder is
becoming immune to the call of the Other. When we
become immune to the call of the Other, what is corroded
is the possibility of engaging in conversation itself. The
call of murder is eventually a call of hate which does not
recognize the possibility of conversational transformations.
A right wing politician familiar with the case, and who did
not share Sanjay’s sense of ethical dilemma said,
What is wrong in killing a terrorist? Am I killing a
political rival? A terrorist is not democratic, there is
nothing undemocratic in killing him.
In the views of the right wing politician, anxieties for
morally appropriate actions are seen as politically naı̈ve
and lacking in pragmatic value. The branding of dissent
against organizational wrong as being idealist is presented
as the debate between the realist and the dreamer, the
difference between the man of action and the poet. Sanjay
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 721
123
described how others sought to label him as an idealist and
advised him to focus on his career and not worry about
broader organizational or social issues. Sanjay spoke about
police subcultures and the difficulties faced by a young
police officer,
Often, they will say, don’t do this now, don’t raise
this issue now. You are still young in the service,
don’t get into conflicts now. You have a long way to
go, don’t do this at this stage of your career.
Thus, careerist pressures are built on Sanjay so that he
can be made to conform. When we are asked to postpone
raising issues, an element of infantilism is involved.
Essentially, it is forgotten that the anger and energy of the
young or the naı̈ve is sometimes necessary to advance
claims of justice. By refusing to be bound by codes of
silence and expressing their anger in provocative ways,
those who are young in terms of organizational career can
advance important ethical claims. In the context of ethical
claims being hierarchically repressed, a journalist spoke
about the intersection of the media and the state,
Officers who are involved in police encounters obtain
instant fame. We don’t question the official state-
ments of the police. If it is in national interest, then
we don’t go around trying to obtain alternate
versions.
The journalist refers to how officers engaging in
encounters are celebrated in society. The production of
fame for being involved in an encounter embodies the
celebration of death over life. It is also the celebration of a
spectacle of violence. A right wing politician described the
necessity of such a spectacle of violence,
Every day a terrorist is alive is a victory for him.
Pakistan is trying to destroy our nation. It is a reality
that many Muslims in our country have more affec-
tion for Pakistan and terrorists than our motherland.
While on the one hand, right wing political projects
advance a project of religious tensions and antagonism,
organizational subjects are disciplined to adhere to these
projects by enforcing norms and regimes of career. Pro-
fessional accomplishments and organizational legitimacy
are linked with discourses of career. Thus, in order to have
a say in organizational decisions and policies, it is neces-
sary to keep marching on the journey of career and earn
one’s right to speak and deliberate. Resistance against
organizational wrongdoing which protests against hierar-
chically sponsored wrongdoing through acts of whistle-
blowing or conscientious action is asserted as a
dishonourable shortcut within discourses of career.
While Sanjay faces such careerist pressures to distance
himself from wrongdoing, he is aware of the need to bring
the terrorist to justice. For angers anchored around a sense
of justice to become prominent, a variety of organizational
and nationalist pressures have to be overcome. Overcoming
a sense of right wing rage to destroy the Other also
becomes important in such a context, and therefore may
require extensive time and dialogue.
Will, Morality, Power—Conversations
and Wrongdoing
Power is often enacted and negotiated through informal
conversations in organizations. Conversations become
sinister when they pretend to be well meaning and inter-
ested in the welfare of the dissenter. The message is clear
that if the dissenter does not relent then s/he will be ‘ap-
propriately’ dealt with. Conversational attempts at per-
suading dissenters are often embedded within majoritarian
public discourses which sanction wrongdoing. Thus, dis-
senters are lonely subjects both within their organizations
as well as in broader social processes. Prasoon, who was
the DIGP Range, admitted that he tried persuading Sanjay
by engaging in informal conversations about his well-
being,
I told Sanjay that it was no use resisting the depart-
ment. Sanjay was a good officer. I had his interests in
mind as he had antagonised several powerful
bureaucrats in the State during his earlier stint in the
anti-corruption wing of the Central Bureau of
Investigation. If you stay in the service for a rea-
sonable period of time, you can do a lot of things.
There is no point in being overzealous. There is no
point in trying to point out the wrongs that your own
colleagues are engaging in. Otherwise, very soon you
will be isolated in the service. You will be able to
achieve nothing.
While Prasoon claims to have Sanjay’s interests in
mind, he is mobilizing a sense of fear and intimidation to
engineer conformity. Sanjay talked about these threats,
I had acted against the bureaucrats against whom
corruption charges were pending. Prasoon told me
that they would get an opportunity to get back at me
if I did not eliminate the terrorist. Both my wife and I
worked in the same district, the easiest way to trouble
me would be to transfer me.
Thus, Sanjay’s past where he has acted independently,
comes back to haunt him once again. Prasoon described the
arguments that Sanjay had with him,
Sometimes it is best to be pragmatic. I also under-
stand human rights and the distinction between right
and wrong. Sanjay’s basic argument was – can we
722 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
allow the rule of the mob and kill anybody whom we
want to kill?
Prasoon’s proposal of pragmatism was essentially an
attempt to label Sanjay’s actions as embodying misplaced
idealism. Sanjay described how he felt angry with what
Prasoon was proposing,
At one point of time, I lost my cool. I asked him
whether the government was threatening me. Was the
government trying to behave like a thug? It was
precisely this mentality that asked for the terrorist to
be murdered. I told him that the government was free
to act like a thug. But I had a conscience. I had sworn
my allegiance to the constitution. I would not comply
and act like a thug. There would be no difference
between the government and petty criminals if the
government started sanctioning murders.
Thus, Prasoon frames Sanjay’s assertion of ethical
norms as being idealist. A sense of power informs which
ethical norms are deemed to be idealist and which are
deemed to be practical. Often the morality of the powerful
and the conversations engineered by them are evaluated as
the embodiment of wisdom, while the morality of the
marginal are evaluated as naı̈ve emotional outbursts.
Conversations are political moments inside organiza-
tions lying at the intersection of will, morality, power and
wrongdoing. Actors can persuade and intimidate each other
through the travelogue of the conversation. Conversations
are transformed into statements of power in terms of how
interests and will are evaluated. In this context, Sanjay
describes the arguments he made to Prasoon,
I reasoned with him that we had to uphold the rule of
law. The authority of investigator, prosecutor and
judge could not be vested in one individual. No
matter what the gravity of the purported crime, the
sanctity of human life was absolute.
Sanjay is passionately arguing about the necessity to
uphold the rule of law. A right wing politician however
rejected these arguments and said,
The moment you have decided to kill others, you lose
the right to claim legal processes for oneself. What
about the human rights of thousands of victims who
are killed by terrorists? If Muslims don’t show
respect for others, why should their lives be
respected?
The same right wing logic was internalized by several
officers working with Sanjay. Abhimanyu pointed out how
Sanjay tried to reason with them,
He told us that a police officer treads a knife’s edge
throughout his professional career. Once he makes a
crossover in becoming a criminal, the transition is
made. And, remember - the process is irreversible.
But we were not convinced.
Sanjay is making an emotional argument with Abhi-
manyu that if the distinction between the police and the
criminal needs to be maintained, then the police need to
adhere to ethical norms. However, it is not emotions alone
that determine positions taken by actors inside organiza-
tions. Thus, Abhimanyu and others are not persuaded by
the emotional and moral arguments made by Sanjay.
Wrongdoing draws from two broad organizational pro-
cesses which are immersed in both emotion and rationality.
While wrongdoing itself proceeds from the anger manu-
factured against the Other, organizational arguments which
legitimize wrongdoing are immersed in pragmatic
rationalities. A right wing politician defended the legiti-
macy of these pragmatic rationalities and labelled dis-
senters as being agents motivated by the desire for cheap
publicity,
The problem with our country is that we have no
respect for authority, government and the prestige of
the Chief Minister or Prime Minister. By disobeying
authority we feel we have achieved something big.
Police officers want to become famous by levelling
charges against the Chief Minister and the Prime
Minister.
The right wing politician is indicating how right wing
discourses are also hierarchical discourses and eventually
aimed at legitimizing the contemporary status quo. A
journalist indicated that there was a possibility that San-
jay’s passionate arguments might have halted the
encounter,
From what I came to gather, a compromise had been
struck between Sanjay and Prasoon. Sanjay would
hand over the investigation to a Special Investigation
Team, which would expedite the investigation and
the trial would take place in a fast track court. The
DGP appeared to have accepted the solution, but it
was at the highest political level that the compromise
was rejected and the encounter was sanctioned.
While refusing to confirm whether such a solution had
been worked out, a right wing politician close to the then
Home Minister said,
Everything was as per procedure. The media treats us
enemies because we love our nation. Why is the issue
of secularism raised only when a terrorist is killed?
Thus organizational wrongdoing is justified as being the
embodiment of love for the nation. While wrongdoing is an
act of will, there is still an attempt to embed it within
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 723
123
narratives of procedural propriety. Wrongdoing is com-
plexly assimilated into the everyday narratives of the police
organization by articulating it both as an act of adminis-
trative will, as well as the only normal thing to do in the
context of a specific contingency. Abhimanyu spoke about
how this sense of normality enabled the police encounter,
Sanjay left late in the night after the case papers
were prepared to produce the terrorist in the Court
on the following day. He called all of us and
insisted that we should not do anything illegal. But
there is something beyond the law, something we
should also feel good about doing. There was a
strong consensus among all of us. We did not
believe that what Sanjay was telling us had any
value. Yes, the support of the top levels of the
government matters. But we did not do anything
only on account of the pressure of the government.
We did it because we believed in it. Sometimes it is
necessary to teach our enemies a lesson. Sometimes
the message is more important than the action itself.
Abhimanyu indicates how his own sense of nationalist
agency was fulfilled by executing the encounter. Rajesh
added that the support of the higher administration of the
police helped,
We had the support of the DIGP and the government.
We filed an encounter report early next morning at 4
am. The terrorist had grabbed the gun of a guard of
the police station, while answering the call of nature
and tried to escape by taking advantage of the dark-
ness. We had no option but to kill him.
While confirming Rajesh’s narrative, Abhimanyu
expressed his own anger against terrorists in strong terms,
There is nothing wrong in killing terrorists. They are
not innocent. When they can think of destroying our
country, why should we keep them alive? Suppose if
a deadly snake comes into your home, will you keep
it alive or kill it? I didn’t understand what Sanjay told
us. Sanjay was angry that the government was putting
pressure on him to kill the terrorist. But suppose if he
had lost somebody from his family in a bomb blast,
would he have been angry with the terrorist or with
the government? Here, the government was providing
us with an opportunity. Why should we leave it? So
many times, we want to take action against criminals.
But due to political pressures or orders from higher-
ups we have to lock our hands and keep quiet. Here,
the government was willing to cooperate. Why
should we leave the opportunity? When a terrorist
can kill innocent people, why should his life be
spared?
Abhimanyu’s expressions of anger want to make use of
the opportunity to act against terrorists when the bureau-
cracy itself appears to be providing scope for his agency.
Rajesh also expressed his anger against Sanjay and pointed
out how his own actions belied the ethics of team work,
At one level, I also felt angry with Sanjay. He spoke
about democracy. But all of us had staked our lives in
capturing the terrorist. If he was so interested in
democracy, how could he insist on what was right
and wrong? He had to listen to us as well. Moreover,
if the terrorist was produced before court, the trial
would drag on for ever. Meanwhile other terrorists
would hijack a plane or kidnap somebody and
demand his release. He would walk away scot free. I
was not willing to be defeated. The only way out was
to kill him. When there was no doubt about his
intentions, what was the point of waiting?
While his own officers like Rajesh were expressing their
resentment against him, Sanjay spoke about the dubious
nature of the narrative of the encounter,
I was shocked when I was called early in the morning
about the encounter. The infiltrator had been shot in
the front, not in the back. The story appeared to be
fabricated. There was no evidence of cross fire. The
DIGP was already present. Everything appeared to
have been stage managed.
Prasoon spoke about the importance of his being present
in the site of the encounter,
In times of crisis, we have to have a hands on approach.
Sanjay is a good officer but he appeared to be confused.
He was not in line with our zero tolerance approach to
terrorism. I could not understand why he was being so
emotional and angry with me. But the other officers
were angry about what terrorists were doing to our
country. They realized the importance of what needed
to be done. My presence only helped in emphasizing
the threat our country faced and the importance of the
national security scenario. Besides, it also gave con-
fidence to the officers that even though their immediate
supervisory officer Sanjay was against the encounter, I
was there to protect them.
Thus, Sanjay was unsuccessful in preventing the police
encounter and the right wing political infrastructure was
successfully mobilized to kill the infiltrator. People inside
organizations are energized in committing wrong when
there is a political infrastructure associated with the wrong.
The social space for expressing moral anger which can
prevent organizational wrongdoing recedes when the anger
does not have a clear political logic associated with it.
724 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
Right wing political infrastructures rely on history,
memory, strong discourses of love and hate, organizational
support, and decisive actions as a part of producing
coherent discourses. Thus, the stage managed encounter in
this case is presented as a patriotic act and has the tacit
support of politicians and the media. Sanjay spoke about
his disillusionment with the stage managed encounter,
It appeared to me like cold blooded murder. I was
disappointed that I had failed to convince my crack
team for standing up for the right thing. In our soci-
ety, respect for the rule of law is still not strong.
A journalist said,
Before investigations into the police encounter could
begin, Sanjay was immediately transferred. He was
transferred to a post which had never been filled by
an IPS officer. The government was clearly punishing
him for failing to cooperate. While his wife continued
to work in the same district, he was posted to another
district 700 km away.
Prasoon said,
There was a little bit of trouble after we transferred
Sanjay. The local people called for a strike. He had
become popular among them. But fortunately, the
media was on our side. The media carried stories
about how the terrorist was ideologically indoctri-
nated and how he had come with concrete plans to
carry mass devastation. The arms and ammunition he
had could have come only from the military. Clearly
the Pakistani military was supporting terrorism. This
was a war. In a war, either you kill, or get killed. We
did not do anything wrong.
Sanjay said,
I did not feel that much angry about my transfer. But
I felt angry about the cold blooded murder. I felt
lonely and isolated. Nobody else appeared angry
about the murder. Even if one more person had felt
what I felt, I would have been at peace. I had worked
with my colleagues for some time. Yet they appeared
like strangers now. I felt lost and let down. I had
failed to understand them. I could no longer be sure
about people.
Thus, the metaphor of war was mobilized to present the
encounter as being inevitable. There is a paradoxical play
on will and power in the context of the police encounter. At
one level, the police encounter is articulated as an act of
will as several actors come together to transcend Sanjay’s
ethical dissent in carrying out the encounter. At another
level, since the encounter is described as being a part of a
war, Prasoon and others argue that they could have done
nothing else but carry out the encounter. From this per-
spective, the encounter was not an exercise of will or
choice but an inevitable thing to do in a war like context.
Sanjay felt a sense of grief in being unable to prevent the
police encounter from occurring. Perhaps, it requires
entrenched cultures of dissent to contest wrongdoing.
Perhaps, provocative questions need to be raised to prob-
lematize the organizational common sense that sanctions
wrongdoing. Also, wrongdoing still relies upon networks
of secrecy even when the narratives which sustain such
secrecy are dubious. There is a reluctance to share specific
details about how the wrong was engineered. Instead there
are rhetorical articulations of why the encounter was not
wrong, and was necessary to preserve larger interests. The
performance of the police encounter thus relied on a
paradoxical intersection of secrecy, agency, politics and
administrative silencing.
Discussion
We discuss stories pertaining to the police encounter
within three broad themes. First, we discuss how the
temporal production of crisis enables the normalization of
the police encounter and arrests Sanjay’s anger against the
encounter. Second, we discuss the difficulties that San-
jay’s expression of moral anger runs into when it is
expressed prior to the act of wrongdoing. Third, we dis-
cuss how Sanjay fails to build coalitions of dissent against
the police encounter and consequently fails to inspire a
culture of ethical dialogue.
Temporality, Crisis and Arresting Sanjay’s Anger
The normality of the police killing begins with the senti-
ment of the Home Minister wanting to act tough against
crime and terrorism. Toughness is perhaps the metaphor of
the exceptional act, a rhetorical move towards normalizing
violence which may otherwise be unacceptable. Toughness
embodying the times of responding to a crisis militates
against the texture of moral emotions. Haidt (2003, p. 853)
defines moral emotions as ‘‘those emotions that are linked
to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or at
least of persons other than the judge or agent’’. In a display
of moral emotions, Sanjay argues with his supervising
officer Prasoon that if the police go ahead with the
encounter by combining investigation, prosecution and
judicial roles, trust in the police apparatus will be dimin-
ished. While Prasoon responds to the call of crisis, Sanjay
responds to the call of justice.
The different responses of Prasoon and Sanjay indicate
the tensions in the unfolding of a national security dis-
course of crisis. A crisis heralds differences in
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 725
123
temporalities by holding what has happened in the past
and what is likely to happen in the future in flux (Farred
2004). Both Sanjay and Prasoon speak about prospective
times. While Sanjay speaks about prospective institutional
times, Prasoon speaks about prospective personal times.
Prasoon indicates that the State will retaliate against
Sanjay while Sanjay indicates that the ethical agency of
the State will collapse if the police encounter is carried
out.
Crisis is associated with several negative emotional
affects such as evil, brutality and disaster (Vincze 2014).
Prasoon’s use of the war metaphor is to remind society of
the evil and brutality of terror, and thus legitimize the
police encounter as a crisis-time response. Within the
frame of a crisis, elites accelerate the speed of decision
making (Hope 2011). Time is not allowed for deliberation
and the expression of anger about the destruction of
ethical responsibilities. Thus, the State does not want to
give any time for considering the alternatives of following
the processes of law suggested by Sanjay.
Sanjay is situated against the dominance of right wing
discourses that have gained approval in the functioning of
the State. At one point of time, Sanjay is extremely angry
and points out to Prasoon that there will be no difference
between the State and thugs, if the plan of going ahead with
the encounter is executed. He points out that the alleged
sponsorship of terrorist activities by Pakistan aids right
wing forces in the Indian State who want to react aggres-
sively and articulate themselves as defenders of the Indian
nation. The language of crisis dissolves ambiguity from
questions involving life and death (Solomon 2006), and
engages with these experiences through the lens of hate and
revenge.
Apart from transforming violence into enactments of
hate and revenge, the language of crisis also structures the
experience of time as a war like situation. In such a war
like context, the institutional constraints facing the police
are mobilized as an important discourse for legitimizing
wrongdoing. Consequently, the police encounter is articu-
lated as a pragmatic craft. The ethics of idealism is posed
against the ethics of pragmatism, and idealism is catego-
rized as a stubborn discourse that is not relevant for pre-
serving the self against injury from others.
Within an ethics of pragmatism, the alleged criminal or
terrorist has already been killed. The dead have no voice,
no right to articulate their narratives in the play of the
police encounter. It is against this absence of voice that
Sanjay feels angry. Anger can help us to stand up for the
redressal of injustices (Tavris 1982). However, Sanjay’s
anger runs up against the crisis of national security
engineered by the State. Within this sense of crisis,
Sanjay’s anger is unable to prevent the encounter from
occurring.
Difficulties in Sanjay’s Expressions of Moral Anger
Prior to the Encounter
Sanjay has to confront emotional discourses of cultural
prejudices that have been cemented against Muslims.
Sanjay is described as having betrayed the organizational
cause and aided the consolidation of threats to national
security. Rajesh expresses his anger against Sanjay and
reads Sanjay’s ethics as elitist and individualist discontent
against democratic aspirations. Sanjay’s act of standing up
for the right is articulated as a deviant enterprise, and an
organizational calculus of punishment and marginalization
is put in place to address such deviance. In a war like
situation, Sanjay’s dissent is labelled as being irresponsi-
ble. The State decides that it is not going to provide Sanjay
enough time to articulate his dissent.
In order to ensure that Sanjay is provided very little time
for articulating his anger and grief about the potential harm
that is likely to be inflicted on the Other, the State acts
swiftly. The police encounter is carried out immediately
after Sanjay has returned home after completing his day’s
work. By accelerating time within the frame of a crisis,
organizational elites prevent the expression of anger and
ethical deliberation. Anger has been conceptualized as a
form of care-based moral agency that is situated within the
practice of resistance against injustice (Simola 2010). In
exercising this sense of care-based agency, Sanjay is angry
about the carelessness of a police encounter in disregarding
the sanctity of life and the law.
The right wing capture of the State advances the
encounter as the acceleration towards instant justice and
the time of peace and order. A right wing politician indi-
cates the contours of such acceleration when he asserts that
police officers like Sanjay raise questions about encounters
because they have little respect for democracy and
authority. He argues that police officers like Sanjay are
chasing cheap publicity by making allegations against right
wing politicians.
In the discourse of the right wing politician, the actions
of police officers like Sanjay are not in national interest.
Such an argument is indicative of the monopolization of
national interest. At the same time, there is also a sense of
fear within the right wing argument. If alternative counter-
points such as that of Sanjay are allowed time and dis-
cursive space, right wing views of national interest are
likely to be problematized. Therefore, the focus of right
wing politics is on justifying why the magnitude of terrorist
violence warrants exceptional means such as police
encounters.
Abhimanyu points out that the magnitude of the problem
was serious as terrorists with arms, explosives and con-
spiracies were infiltrating into India with concrete agendas
of destruction. Thus, Sanjay’s dissent against police
726 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
encounters is inhibited by the culture of approval that
encounters enjoy (Belur 2009). This is particularly the case
since officers like Abhimanyu label the terrorist as a fig-
ure whose agendas of destruction make him unworthy of
any ethical concern or compassion.
In the context of right wing discourses such as the one
articulated by Abhimanyu which constructed the arrested
terrorist as an enemy figure worthy of being murdered,
Sanjay outlines how several officers advised him not to
raise dissenting issues and instead told him to focus on his
career. Thus, Sanjay is socialized into status quo thinking
rather than reflecting on his experiences in ways which can
problematize what has become common sense within
police cultures. Prasoon militates against a sense of ethical
reflection when he asks Sanjay to not resist the department
and bear in mind that several bureaucrats are antagonized
with him. Sanjay had acted against senior bureaucrats in
the past while investigating corruption charges against
them. As a lawyer points out, these personalized cultures of
retaliation and lack of open dialogue lead to the general
impression of the police force being unprofessional,
unskilled and incompetent.
In the absence of professional forums for discussing
questions of ethics, the police force in India can be easily
engineered around right wing discourses. The right wing
political project in India is linked to majoritarian Hindu
mobilization which renders democracy as a fragile and
precarious project (Simpson 2006). The sanctioning of
police encounters suspends democratic rights of a fair trial
before an independent court of law and activates primitive
forms of violence which are difficult to justify. Since police
encounters are more directed against Muslims, it advances
the violent project of what Quaiser (2011) describes as
construction of the Hindu-Muslim divide in the vein of a
master–slave divide. When Abhimanyu indicates that he
felt good at carrying out the encounter, he feels that he has
helped the nation in its time of crisis, thus normalizing
police encounters as an appropriate strategy. Yet the
patriotic agency appropriated by Abhimanyu is linked with
numerous practices of suspension of democracy and com-
munal violence.
The suspension of democracy is also embodied in the
retaliation faced by Sanjay. Since he refuses to fall in line
with the organizational truths that the elite want to produce,
he is punished. Sanjay is removed from the scene of the
encounter, as his embodied presence can create tensions
and uncomfortable questions may be asked. Sanjay’s
resistance is towards establishing ethical accountability, of
making the nation accountable to the claims of the margins
(Hope 2009). Articulating claims from the margins may
embody slow temporal rhythms of deliberation (Hope
2009), yet these claims of dissent are necessary in the
context of public interest and democracy. The police
encounter, while pretending to accelerate public interest
slows down democracy, dissent and moral anger in ethi-
cally problematic ways.
Failure to Produce Coalitions of Ethical Dissent
Moral anger embodies a care-based agency which can
resist organizational decisions that are unfair and wrong
(Lyman 2004; Simola 2010), and if coalitions of dissent are
built around expressions of moral anger, it may be possible
to prevent wrongdoing. Consequently, those who do wrong
seek to curb the dialogical space for moral anger to be
articulated. Sanjay explicitly instructs his crack team to
refrain from doing anything illegal. But, as Abhimanyu
indicates, the crack team wanted to go beyond the law and
feel good about what they were doing. Sanjay’s anger
could have re-introduced ethical ambiguity, made the crack
team feel less good about the encounter. Yet the lack of
dialogical time constrains Sanjay from challenging right
wing discourses implicated in organizational wrong. Con-
sequently, Abhimanyu and other officers continue to
remain immersed in the nationalist consensus which
licenses police encounters.
As a senior police officer indicates, the Home Minister
wanted results as a part of the project of fulfilling this
nationalist consensus. It did not matter whether the results
where ethically justifiable or not. The articulation of moral
anger was needed to disrupt the potential of harm activated
by the consensus of national security. The command of
national security is linked to the performance of crisis that
the nation faces. Since the atmosphere of a crisis has to be
performed, there is a good chance that the performance of
the crisis may fail (Butler 1996). If the performance of
crisis fails, then the possibility of counter-speech such as
that being enacted by Sanjay can be enabled.
The crisis calls for a suspension of processes of care, life
and even the formal operation of the law itself. On the
other hand, Sanjay articulates a performance of caring for
justice, ethical agency and resisting wrong. Even a crisis
can reproduce itself only by the continuous repetition of the
performance of commands. The performance of commands
must continue without interruption. Thus, Prasoon comes
to the site of the encounter to reproduce the processes of
command in an uninterrupted fashion. The politics of
commands is also a theological narrative requiring ethical
agency to be surrendered (Parker 2009). The presence of
ethical agency embodying free will is articulated as the
arrogant error of an individual within a larger hierarchical
calculus.
We see the intersection of right wing discourses and
organizational hierarchy in the narrative of the police
encounter. The sense of right wing nationalism and the
atmosphere of a crisis fractures Sanjay’s relationships with
Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis 727
123
the police officers working under him. The sense of crisis
produces extraordinary dilemmas for the relationship
between supervisors like Sanjay and their subordinates.
Unlike Fitness (2000) who finds that it is supervisors who
often experience feelings of moral reprehension when they
are angry with their subordinates, we find that a sense of
crisis fractures emotional scripts in organizations. In the
context of the police encounter, subordinate officers also
evaluate Sanjay’s actions with a sense of moral
reprehension.
Abhimanyu angrily asks whether Sanjay would have
been able to demonstrate the same sense of ethical mag-
nanimity if somebody from his family had been killed in a
terrorist attack. Abhimanyu is not merely labelling San-
jay’s anger as being misplaced idealism, he is also ques-
tioning the democratic credibility of Sanjay’s anger. In
some sense, Sanjay’s anger is not informed by the context
of personal loss. Many in the country have suffered per-
sonally on account of terrorist attacks that have killed
innocent people. Since Sanjay has not been affected by
such loss, his moral anger is tainted by the absence of the
loss of innocence that violence produces. Sanjay’s moral
anger is also tainted by the lack of hierarchical approval.
Hierarchical considerations are important for vertical
authority and stability (Parker 2009). Most contemporary
organizations, especially those like the police are moti-
vated by these considerations of vertical authority. In these
contexts, hierarchical approval is often deemed to be more
proximate to ethical considerations rather than the exercise
of individual will.
As a consequence of charges of elite individualism,
Sanjay finds himself to be a stranger in the midst of his own
colleagues. His failure to produce constituencies of shared
moral anger against the act of wrongdoing indicate the
collapse of democratic mourning (Butler 2000). His own
moral anger is being seen as an elite expression that is
innocent of the sense of loss experienced by democratic
publics in their everyday lives (Honig 2009). On the other
hand, the nation and the State themselves can be articulated
as hierarchical fantasies with minorities constituting an
inferior situatedness in a right wing imagination of the
nation (Simpson, 2006). Parker (2009) contends that the
naturalization of hierarchical discourses militates against
ethical agency as hierarchy represents an epistemological
ordering of life conflating images of righteousness with
divine authority. Free will in the midst of such hierarchical
truths is seen as an unwarranted act of instability that
threatens collective good and the ethical judgment of
legitimate organizational actors governing social order.
At the same time we must recognize that the emotional
responses of those working with Sanjay are embedded
within fantasies of responding to a national security crisis.
They fail to appreciate that democracy is not merely about
conforming to the will of majoritarian angsts. The solidity
of our own violence is confirmed by our inability to contest
hierarchical normalizations of unethical authority (Parker
2009). When we refuse to contest hierarchy on ethical
terms, we reproduce the fantasies which permeate the
consolidation of hierarchy. Every act of hierarchy involves
simplification and reduction, often complicit in the pro-
duction of concretely embodied Others as antagonistic
figures to hierarchical orders.
Instead of being ethically pained by the command to
engage in violence (Butler 1993), when a sense of agency
is discovered in being violent, our capacity to engage in
ethical deliberation has been mutilated. Once our capacity
to engage in ethical deliberation has been mutilated, we
become machines of violence, willing to be engineered by
the fantasies of enemies that the right wing State conjures
up for us (Butler 2009). The only ethical counter that is
possible in these circumstances is the resentment and anger
of those at the margins (Roy 2011; Vajpeyi 2009).
The right wing State manages these resentments by
advancing discourses of national security crisis and a war
like situation, where several enemies are on the lookout to
destroy the nation. These discourses of national security are
also positioned as battles between right and wrong or good
and evil. Whenever battle lines are drawn so clearly,
hierarchical forms of organization involving war and vio-
lence get cemented (Parker, 2009). Consequently, moral
anger which can problematize hierarchically sanctioned
violence is marginalized by the popular nationalist fan-
tasies as well.
Conclusion
By engaging with multiple stories of a police encounter in
India, we hope to have shown the complex ways in which
the expression of moral anger resists wrongdoing, and the
conditions under which wrongdoing may still be enacted.
We outlined three broad theoretical positions, and hope to
have mobilized evidence and arguments to discuss these
positions in the light of stories pertaining to the police
encounter. First, we argued that a sense of national security
crisis produced by national and organizational elites alters
ethical temporalities within broader levels of society and
organizations such as the police. As a consequence of the
temporalities of crisis, agents such as police officers find
that they do not have enough dialogical time to raise ethical
questions premised on moral anger.
We showed how Sanjay had very little dialogical time to
persuade his colleagues about his ethical call for refraining
from murder. Eventually, right wing identities fuelled by a
sense of crisis triumphed and police officers working with
Sanjay went ahead in executing the police encounter.
728 S. Jagannathan, R. Rai
123
Second, we argued that there are some indications in lit-
erature about how ample time is provided for the expres-
sion of moral anger in the aftermath of wrong. This leads to
processes through which the expression of moral anger is
labelled as being irrational and hysterical. On the other
hand, the temporality that is constructed for the expression
of moral anger prior to an act of wrong may be different.
We showed how very little dialogical time was available
with Sanjay in initiating a strong, affective ethical dialogue
with his colleagues. Sanjay’s moral anger also ran into
several difficulties of administrative retaliation and right
wing ideologies which produced the Other as an enemy
only worthy of destruction. Third, we argued that a sense of
crisis fractures the ways in which prototypical forms of
anger have been correlated with organizational hierarchy.
While hierarchical considerations are important, anger
draws from a wider range of political subjectivities and
fantasies. We showed how Sanjay’s political subjectivities
of justice did not resonate with the right wing political
fantasies of those working with him. Consequently, Sanjay
was not successful in building a coalition of ethical dissent,
and the failure to build such a coalition arrested his
attempts of preventing the police encounter.
We hope to have outlined that methods must be found to
situate moral anger within relational possibilities of a
dialogical community. Within this dialogical community,
the normality of an atmosphere of crisis and right wing
logics of retaliation and violence must be constantly
questioned. When dialogical forms of questioning violence
are available at the grassroots, it may be possible to resist
the commands of hate and wrongdoing that emerge from
hierarchical imperatives in organizations. On the one hand,
we will be able to move away from faster times of a crisis
to slower times of democracy and justice if the dialogical
breadth of our ethical problematization is deep and strong.
On the other hand, the affective politics of moral anger is
unlikely to prevent wrongdoing if we are not able to build
dialogical communities that can resist the call for violence
engineered by right wing discourses.
Acknowledgments Our particular thanks to Yiannis Gabriel whose careful reading and generous comments helped us to improve the
manuscript significantly. Our thanks also to the other editors of the
special issue, Dirk Lindebaum and Deana Geddes for their encour-
agement. We sincerely thank two anonymous reviewers for providing
us with extremely interesting comments and insights which greatly
helped us in reworking our thoughts and arguments.
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- c.10551_2016_Article_3153.pdf
- Organizational Wrongs, Moral Anger and the Temporality of Crisis
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Theoretical Approaches
- Temporality, Crisis and Moral Anger
- Expressing Moral Anger Prior to an Act of Wrong
- Moral Anger and the Problematization of Organizational Hierarchy
- Method
- Story Telling Approach
- Initial Conversations About Accessing Stories of a Police Encounter
- Accessing Stories about the Encounter from Sanjay
- Speaking to Other Actors for Accessing Stories about the Encounter
- Analysing Stories About the Encounter
- Narrating the Stories about the Encounter
- Narrative(s) of the Police Encounter
- Security, Crisis and the Domestication of Morality
- Anger, Anxiety and Organizational Wrong
- Will, Morality, Power---Conversations and Wrongdoing
- Discussion
- Temporality, Crisis and Arresting Sanjay’s Anger
- Difficulties in Sanjay’s Expressions of Moral Anger Prior to the Encounter
- Failure to Produce Coalitions of Ethical Dissent
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
- References
