This article reads the unusual public nature of a recent event of capital punishment in India to think about the modes of postcolonial biopolitics in this age of globalization. It engages with influential theoretical work by authors such as Foucault, Agamben and Mbembe to articulate its own position and to suggest new theoretical paradigms. It argues that contemporary modes of postcolonial biopolitics need to be seen as emerging from and somewhat repeating the contiguous but affiliated histories of colonial penal reform and legislation. The governing paradigm for such colonial practices was provided by the multivalent phenomenon of racism, and this emphasis on race as a practical means of population management and ordering had profound impact on postcolonial penology. The crucial questions of 'making live' or 'letting die' in the postcolonial world, or the civil authority of the postcolonial state, and, most crucially, the exclusive claim of such states to legitimate violence, the article argues, need to be contextualized against such elaborate historical networks. Though the emphasis on race has been replaced in the postcolonial era with more pressing concerns of class/caste apartheid, the racist nature of the postcolonial state—a legacy of congruous but affiliated histories of colonialism—is prominently visible in provisions like the death penalty. The Indian state, on its way to defend the provision of the death penalty in this era of globalization, repeats a colonial moment in legal history and attempts to define both postcolonial biopolitics and sovereignty through the dark and slippery notions of race.
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