Vernacular theodicies in Gujarat’s front-line bureaucracies

When bureaucratic processes stall for days—servers are down, requirements seem constantly shifting, and no one is able (or willing) to say why—what keeps citizens from abandoning the process altogether? Dependency may explain why citizens cannot easily exit stalled bureaucratic processes, but it does not explain how encounters repeatedly close without resolution yet avoid rupture—i.e., the interpretive and moral work that makes continued participation bearable and even livable at times. Based on fieldwork in Ahmedabad’s citizen service centres, I illustrate how everyday welfare governance in Gujarat depends on vernacular theodicies that make delay and non-resolution bearable. In these moments, secularity is not the absence of religion (i.e., transcendental power) but the redistribution of transcendence into procedural abstractions, promissory timelines, and moral horizons that exceed the office. I argue that vernacular theodicies are how secularity is practically sustained within one of India’s prevalent forms of secularism: managerial secularism.