The khawaja sira often find themselves on the receiving end of disproportionate administrative burden, hyper-surveillance, and moral policing by frontline workers of government. An important consequence of these administrator–citizen interactions is the curtailment of their everyday citizenship and social inclusion. Although one can romanticize the idea of resistance and ‘speaking truth to power’ (Farmer 2003), and academics are perhaps guiltier of it than anyone else, the harsh reality of the lives of most marginalized individuals is that they have to enact ‘cost reduction’ strategies (Emerson 1962) when confronted by the threat of power by the state officials. As Scott (1992) argues, ‘[w]ith rare, but significant, exceptions the public performance of the subordinate will, out of prudence, fear and the desire to curry favor, be shaped to appeal to the expectations of the powerful’ (55). That is why various performative and verbal ‘gestures of submission’ (Held 1999) are often the typical response of the khawaja sira when they encounter bureaucrats with the power to detain or arrest them. These gestures of submission, often a combination of bodily and speech acts (such as falling to the feet or imploring loudly), are quite common among the individuals of lower socio-economic status when confronted by those in authority in Pakistan.

These gestures of submission are meant to reaffirm the status and self-image of the police officials. For the khawaja sira, these act as short-term rational cost strategies that minimize the cost of compliance to the ‘powerful other’ (Emerson 1962, 35), in this case the cis-gendered police officers acting on behalf of the state. However, as Emerson (1962) notes, cost-reduction strategies seldom act as balancing operations in asymmetric power relations.