“Loyalty and Suspicion: The Making of the Civil Service after Independence” compares how colonial classifications of identity according to loyalty and suspicion were used by bureaucracies in the new states to define the administrators themselves and to shape the making of the civil services. Purification committees to vet former civil servants of Mandate Palestine, campaigns that designated certain types of corruption as disloyalty, and the explosive fight over representation by ratio in Cyprus were all carried out along the graded axis of suspicion. The chapter follows how political affiliation, mobility, and identity shaped perceptions of loyalty and belonging to the civil service that, in turn, dramatically delineated the boundaries of citizenship through mundane and routine practices of appointment and selection in the transition from colonial rule to independence.

Chapter 2 explores how in 1940s and 1950s South Asia thinking about Indian or Pakistani identity as a mirror of the ‘other’ country affected broader understandings of citizenship and belonging. It highlights the extent to which everyday public opinion could be conditioned by localized reactions to people arriving from other places or others leaving their families and goods behind, particularly in relation to UP and Sindh. The creation of two independent countries meant that the movement, displacement and rehabilitation of migrants became an integral part of the wider process of formal citizenship definition, as did the status of minority communities who did not leave. The chapter therefore also considers how far the physical movement bound up in the creating of two separate states at Independence shaped quotidian meanings of ‘citizenship’ as people competed for space and resources.