Sarah Hodges (King’s College London) 

Policing fakes in India: Notes on the spectacle of the spurious drug bust 

The spurious drug bust in India has emerged as a peculiar media spectacle. On the one hand, these images hew closely to the visual idiom that we are far more familiar with from the US-led global ‘war on drugs’: images of uniformed officers with spoils of their most recent raid announce that the police are protecting the public from the scourge of fake (or ‘spurious’) pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, even a cursory examination of legal records shows the ephemerality of these spectacles. These news items are followed by very few court cases and almost no convictions for purported fraudsters. What are we to make of the mis-match between the emphatic display of law enforcement-in-action alongside a near complete lack of subsequent judicial process? In this talk I seek to make sense of this by situating these spectacles within a set of broader forms of discourse and practice: the unsteady terrain of visual evidence, global intellectual property enforcement for pharmaceuticals, the nature of police power in India, and the work that worries about fakes there do.