Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Contemporary South Asia)

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Seeing the State

Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state, and how are these engagements conducted? This book considers the Indian case where people’s accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by a series of encounters that are staged at the local level, and which are also informed by ideas that are circulated by the government and the broader development community. Drawing extensively on fieldwork conducted in eastern India and their broad range of expertise, the authors review a series of key debates in development studies on participation, good governance, and the structuring of political society. They do so with particular reference to the Employment Assurance Scheme and primary education provision. Seeing the State engages with the work of James Scott, James Ferguson and Partha Chatterjee, and offers a new interpretation of the formation of citizenship in South Asia. Stuart Corbridge is Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics. He is the author or co-author of five books, including Reinventing India (with John Harriss, 2000). Glyn Williams is Senior Lecturer in Geography at King’s College, London. He is the co-editor of a collection of essays on South Asia in a Globalising World (2002). Manoj Srivastava is a Research Associate in the Crisis State Programme, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics. He has worked for the Indian state for nearly twenty years. Ren´e V´eron is Assistant Professor in Geography at the University of Guelph, Ontario. He is the author of a book on Real Markets and Environmental Change in Kerala (1999).

Contemporary South Asia 10 Editorial board Jan Breman, G. P. Hawthorn, Ayesha Jalal, Patricia Jeffery, Atul Kohli

Contemporary South Asia has been established to publish books on the politics, society and culture of South Asia since 1947. In accessible and compehensive studies, authors who are already engaged in researching specific aspects of South Asian society explore a wide variety of broad-ranging and topical themes. The series will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the study of South Asia and with the legacy of its colonial past. 1 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective 2 Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy 3 Roger Jeffery and Particia Jeffery, Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India 4 Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India 5 Robert Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India 6 Atul Kohli (ed.), The Success of India’s Democracy 7 Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence and Nationalism in India 8 Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy 9 Baldev Raj Nayar and T. V. Paul, India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status

Seeing the State Governance and Governmentality in India Stuart Corbridge London School of Economics

Glyn Williams King’s College, London

Manoj Srivastava London School of Economics

Ren´e V´eron University of Guelph

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521834797 © Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, René Véron and Manoj Srivastava 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Contents

List of boxes, figures and tables Acknowledgements Glossary List of abbreviations Introduction

page vii ix xii xiv 1

Part I The state and the poor 1 Seeing the state

15

2 Technologies of rule and the war on poverty

47

Part II The everyday state and society 3 Meeting the state

87

4 Participation

121

5 Governance

151

6 Political society

188

Part III The poor and the state 7 Protesting the state

219

8 Post-colonialism, development studies and spaces of empowerment

250

9 Postscript: development ethics and the ethics of critique

265

v

vi

Contents

Appendix 1: Major national programmes and policies related to poverty alleviation, 1999

275

Appendix 2: The 1999 general election in Hajipur

283

References Index

292 314

Boxes, figures and tables

Box 2.1 Box 3.1 Box 5.1 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 4.1 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 6.1 Table 1.1 Table 2.1

Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 3.2

Seeing and measuring the BPLs page 75 Parental attitudes to education in Malda and Midnapore Districts 101 The new public administration in India and poverty alleviation in the countryside 159 The field sites 89 Schematic account of key sources of support for the poor, by District 104 An official view of the developmental state: the EAS in West Bengal 110 ‘Chapati diagrams’ of government: Midnapore field site 111 Sources of help in solving problems with education, schools and teachers, West Bengal 130 EAS spending by panchayat and village, Sahar Block, Bhojpur District, 1996–7 to 1998–9 170 EAS spending by panchayat and village, Murhu Block, Ranchi District, 1993–4 to 1998–9 171 EAS spending by panchayat and village, Bidupur Block, Vaishali District, 1996–7 to 1998–9 173 Local monitoring of the EAS in West Bengal: main actors and responsibilities 201 Rent-seeking in the tree trade 26 Social Sector Plan outlays as a percentage of Total Plan Outlays: Centre, States and Union Territories, 1951–2002 72 Literacy rates (age 7+) in 17 major states of India, 1997 81 Census household by community and levels of well-being and poverty 91 Household land ownership and income sources by poverty ranking 94 vii

viii

List of boxes, figures and tables

Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 4.1

Table 4.2 Table 4.3

Table 4.4 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5

Poverty levels of female-headed households Literacy rates (7+) by gender, class and caste School attendance by gender, class and caste Ability to support desired level of education Proportion of male and female members of sample households gaining one or more paid labour days from the Employment Assurance Scheme Number of meetings held of VECs of rural P. S. schools, Bihar study Districts, 1997–9 Awareness of the existence and principal objectives of the Employment Assurance Scheme (percentage of sample households) Evaluation of Malda village meeting: selected questions and answers Sector-wise breakdown of EAS schemes actually implemented by the Blocks, Bihar Schools with only one teacher, selected Districts of Bihar, 1996–9 Schools with a toilet for girls, selected Districts of Bihar, 1996–9 School infrastructure in Midnapore and Malda, 1998–9 School infrastructure in selected primary schools, Malda and Midnapore

96 97 98 100

127 129

131 141 163 179 180 181 182

Acknowledgements

This book draws on two linked projects supported by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (grant number R000237761) and Department for International Development (grant number CNTR 00 1553) in the years 1998–2001. We are grateful for the financial support of these institutions, while noting that they are not responsible for the findings we report here. As we also note in Chapter 1, we are especially grateful to seven colleagues who worked with us in Bihar (now Bihar and Jharkhand) and West Bengal on the ESRC project: Vishwaranjan Raju, Ashok Baitha and Rakesh Kumar in Bihar and Jharkhand and Lina Das, Md. Basar Ali, Khushi Das Gupta and Surajit Adhikari in West Bengal. We are also grateful to them and to Pramod Kumar (DPO Jehanabad), Deepak Srivastava, Sanjeev, Ramedra Nath, B.N. Patnaik, in Bihar, and Somen Dhar, Shibesh Das, Piyalee Sharma Das, Alok Kumar Mukhopadhyay and Dibyendu Sarkar, in West Bengal, who worked with us in 2000–2001 on the DFID-funded action research projects that grew out of, and developed, our original research project. In addition to these co-workers we want to thank all the people we worked with in the field localities. We cannot list everyone by name, but in Bihar and Jharkhand we extend special thanks to Ram Lakhan Manjhi, Shiv Nandan Pike, Soma Munda, Ranjeet, Sudhir Manjhi, Budhwa Lohra and Thuchuwa Lohra in Murhu Block, Ranchi District; to Ram Ballav Paswan, Sonelal Paswan, Ram Prasad Paswan, K. D. Rai, Master Bhogendra Rai, Lal Babu Rai, Chander Singh and Anant Singh in Bidupur Block, Vaishali District; and to Laxman Ram, Sundershan Ram, Lohri Ram, Ramashish Ram, Viday Paswan, Chandrageet Ram, Sriman Narayan Singh, Kesho Ray and Baidaynath Singh in Sahar Block, Bhojpur District. In West Bengal, we want particularly to thank Shibshankar Adhikary in Debra Block, Ratan Karmaka and family in Old Malda Block, and Mona Mishra, all of whom made fieldwork a pleasure. We are also indebted to Arun Mal, Katik Potar and Abani Biswas in Old Malda, and to Narayan Sur, Parbati Sing, Manbendra Sing, Rampada Tudu, Debi Sing, Pradip Maity and Himansu Sarkar Roy in Debra. We ix

x

Acknowledgements

realize that our questions must have seemed odd at times, not to mention time-consuming, and that very few of our respondents will get to see (let alone read) this book. Nevertheless, the book is very respectfully dedicated to the people whose stories are at the heart of this volume, and we hope that we shall in time be able to repay their many kindnesses in other and perhaps more practical ways. Elsewhere in Bihar and Jharkhand we are in the debt of a large number of friends and colleagues who guided our research project and helped bring it to life. Again, we are forced to single people out from among a diverse group of activists, NGO workers, government personnel, journalists and politicians, to all of whom we remain grateful, but special thanks are certainly due to Arun Das, Raghupati, Rupesh, Akshay, Pawan, Sushil Kumar, Ms Nutan, Ms Subhraja Singh, Urmila, TN Singh, Ranvindra Bharati, Sushil and Sagir Rehmani from the community of social and cultural activists (including representatives of Lok Samiti, Bhor [literacy campaign], Panchayat Parishad, the Bihar Education Project, the State Commission on Child Labour, and not forgetting the twenty-two actors from Bhojpur who staged the folk drama, Dugdugi ); to Fr Jose, Fr Francken, Fr Manthara and Ms Vizi Srinivasan from among the community of NGO workers; and to K. H. Subramanyam (Commissioner and Secretary, Rural Development), Jayant Das Gupta (Secretary, Panchayati Raj), and Vijay Prakash (Secretary, Higher Education). At the District and Block levels, we would like to thank Uday Singh, Deepak Kumar, H. S. Meena, Sudhir Kumar, Suman Kumar, the DDC of Vaishali District, and the BDOs of Bidupur, Sahar and Murhu Blocks, from among the community of government personnel, noting as well that without the help of a large number of Village-Level Workers, panchayat sewaks, junior engineers, and others it would have been difficult to carry out our work as we did. Thanks also to Pranab Chaudhury of the Times of India, Patna, to Mammen Matthew of the Hindustan Times, Ranchi, and to N. R. Mohanty of the Hindustan Times, Patna, for their advice and support, which were always welcome, and to Shaibal Gupta and his colleagues at the Asian Development Research Institute, Patna. The A. N. Sinha Institute, also in Patna, was kind enough to host a meeting we held in January 1999 at the beginning of our research in Bihar. The academics and activists who attended that meeting were collectively responsible for pushing us to rethink the direction of some parts of the planned research, and we remain grateful to them. Finally, we are pleased to thank Shri Laloo Prasad Yadav (ex-Chief Minister, Bihar; currently Union Minister for Railways), Shri Jagdanand Singh (Minister, Water Resources), Shri Ram Chandra Purbey (Minister, Primary Education), K. D. Yadav (State President, CPI-ML), Ram Dayal Munda (Jharkhand activist and

Acknowledgements

xi

politician), and Ravi Shankar Prasad (State BJP leader, ex-Minister, Government of India), from among the community of politicians, for repeatedly taking time out of their busy schedules to share their thoughts with us. In West Bengal we would like to thank Debdas Banerjee, Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, Indranil Chakroborti and Abdul Rafique for their intellectual support. We also benefited from discussions with Dr Surjya Kanta Mishra (Minister, Panchayats and Rural Development), Prasad Ranjan Roy (former Secretary, Department of Panchayats and Rural Development), Manavendra Roy (Secretary, Department of Panchayats and Rural Development), Malai De (Department of Panchayats and Rural Development), Rajiva Sinha (now with UNICEF), Jude Henrique (UNICEF), Dilip Ghosh and Bijon Kundu. At the District and Block levels we thank Shefali Khatoon, Sushil Kumar, Md. Abdul Gani, Dibyendu Das, Athena Mazumdar, Sanatan Ram, Dhiren Choudhury, Dilip Das, Abdul Malik, Dilip Kumar Sarkar, K. N. Dhar, A. C. Sikar and Munsur Ali in Malda, and Mamad Sahid, Jahangir Karim, Biman Bhumia and Robin Sing in Midnapore. Grateful thanks also to colleagues at the State Institute for Panchayats and Rural Development, Kalyani, and at the Centre for Studies in Social Science, Calcutta, who helped us with institutional support. In New Delhi, we have benefited from discussions with Gerard Howe and Arif Ghauri at DFID, with Mark Robinson at the Ford Foundation, and with colleagues at institutions as diverse as JNU and the World Bank, including Anand Kumar, T. K. Oommen and Yogendra Singh. Special thanks also to Ronald Herring, Kuldip Nayyar and A. J. Philip for their strong support of our action research project in Bihar. We have also discussed our work with a number of colleagues in Europe and North America, and would like to thank Abhijit Banerjee, Fiona Candlin, Kanchan Chandra, Sharad Chari, Partha Chatterjee, Shubam Chaudhuri, Nicholas Dirks, Chris Fuller, John Echeverri-Gent, John Harriss, Barbara Harriss-White, Walter Hauser, Patrick Heller, Craig Jeffrey, Sarah Jewitt, Sudipta Kaviraj, Steven Legg, Janek Mandel, Emma Mawdsley, John de Monchaux, Tanni Mukhopadhyay, Roopa Nair, Suppiramnaiam Nanthikesan, Ranjit Nayak, Philip Oldenburg, Johnny Parry, James Putzel, Saraswati Raju, Sanjay Reddy, Ben Rogaly, Nikolas Rose, Sanjay Ruparelia, the late Professor T. Sathyamurthy, Alpa Shah, Edward Simpson, Bishwapriya Singh, Kristian Stokke, Judith Tendler and Ashutosh Varshney for engaging critically with our work. We are also grateful to two anonymous referees for Cambridge University Press, and to our Editor there, Marigold Acland. Above all, we want to thank our partners and children, Pilar and Joanne, Paula and Anna, Nina, Saagar, Shikhar and Roshini, and Lori, Lili and Alexandre. This project has occupied us for the best part of six years, and we are extremely grateful to them for their patience and support.

Glossary

Abhikarta adivasi artha Backward Classes Bhadralok crore dada dalaal Dalit dharma dirigiste garibi hatao Gram Panchayat gram baithak gram sabha gram sansad Harijan izzat jati Kayastha kisan xii

executing agent or foreman original people; preferred name for Scheduled Tribes worldly (self-)interest the ‘weaker sections’, or the Scheduled Castes and Tribes and Other Backward Castes upper or respectable folk; gentlemen (Bengali) ten million big brother or political boss broker Marathi word for the oppressed (the ex-Untouchables) the traditional moral order state-directed or dominated, in the context of economic development an ‘end to poverty’ (slogan of Indira Gandhi) village council; the lowest tier of the panchayat system informal meeting formal village meeting provided by government statute statutory village meeting; smallest panchayat constituency ‘children of god’; Gandhi’s term for the ex-Untouchables, now Scheduled Castes honour or dignity caste in the sense of named birth group scribal caste of north India, now seen as high caste peasant

Glossary

kuccha lakh Mukhiya Naxalites neta Other Backward Classes/Castes (OBCs)

panchayat Panchayat samiti panchayati raj para Pradhan pucca pyraveekar Sabhadhipati Sabhapati sarkar Scheduled Castes

Scheduled Tribes

tola zamindar Zilla parishad ∗

xiii

unfinished (of infrastructure); often earthen works one hundred thousand headman of village, now of a panchayat organized left insurgents leader socially and educationally deprived communities, not including Scheduled Castes or Tribes, for whom compensatory actions are now authorized by the state council, official institution of local government Block-level council official system of local self-government neighbourhood President of the gram panchayat∗ ‘finished’ (of infrastructure); permanent, often concrete-built political fixer President of the zilla parishad ∗ President of the panchayat samiti∗ government those castes recognized by the Constitution as deserving special assistance in respect of education, employment and political representation (other than the OBCs); in effect, the ex-Untouchables in effect, the official term for India’s adivasi populations; those communities recognized by the Constitution as deserving special assistance in respect of education, employment and political representation (other than the Scheduled Castes and OBCs) hamlet, or small neighbourhood within a village revenue collector and landholder under British rule District-level council

– used here of West Bengal

Abbreviations

ABPTA ADM AE AEO BAO BDO BEO BEP BJP BKU CACP CDP CO CPI-M CPI-ML DDC DFID DFO DM DPEP DPSC DWCRA EAS EGS EGS(MP) EIRFP EPPG ESRC xiv

All-Bengal Primary Teachers’ Association Assistant District Magistrate Assistant Engineer Additional Executive Officer Block Agricultural Officer Block Development Officer Block Education Officer Bihar Education Project Bharatiya Janata Party Bharatiya Kisan Union Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices Community Development Programme Community Organizer Communist Party of India, Marxist Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist Deputy Development Commissioner Department for International Development, UK Government Divisional Forest Officer District Magistrate or Collector District Primary Education Project District Primary School Council Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas Employment Assurance Scheme Employment Guarantee Scheme Education Guarantee Scheme, Madhya Pradesh Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project Enhancing Pro-Poor Governance (action research project) Economic and Social Research Council, UK

List of abbreviations

GIAN GP ICDS INC IRDP JE JFM JRY KRP KSSP MCC MFAL MKSS MLA MLC MP NCPRI NDA NGO NPC NTFP OBCs PDS PPD PRI RJD RSS SAC SCs SFDA SGSY SI SIPRD SITRA SAP SSA STs TDA

Gujarat Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network Gram Panchayat Integrated Child Development Scheme Indian National Congress Integrated Rural Development Programme Junior Engineer Joint Forest Management Jawahar Rozgar Yojana Key Resource Person Kerala Sashtra Sahitya Parishad (people’s science movement) Maoist Communist Centre Marginal Farmer and Agricultural Labour programme Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan Member of the Legislative Assembly Member of the Legislative Council Member of Parliament National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information National Democratic Alliance Non-Governmental Organization National Planning Committee (of the INC) Non-Timber Forest Product Other Backward Castes (or Classes) Public Distribution System Perspective Planning Division Panchayati Raj institutions Rashtriya Janata Dal Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh School Attendance Committee Scheduled Castes Small Farmers Development Agency Swarajayanti Gram Swaroznar Yojana, a village self-employment programme that replaces the IRDP Sub-Inspector (of primary schools) State Institute of Panchayats and Rural Development Supply of Improved Toolkits to Rural Artisans Special Area Programme Sub-Saharan Africa Scheduled Tribes Tribal Development Agency

xv

xvi

TLC TI TMC UNDP VEC VHP VLW WB

List of abbreviations

Total Literacy Campaign Transparency International Trinamool Congress United Nations Development Programme Village Education Council Vishwa Hindu Parishad Village-Level Worker West Bengal

Introduction

In recent years there has been a sea-change in the ways in which the state in India has sought to present itself to its poorest citizens. To listen to leading members of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in 2004 one would think that the year 2000 (or even 2001 or 2002) was something like Ground Zero in this respect. Ministers from leading human development departments were in the habit of swatting away criticism of their ministries on the ground that everything was in flux. In a world of village education committees, citizen scorecards and newly vibrant panchayati raj institutions, not to mention a new era of public–private partnerships, it apparently made no sense to criticize ministers for faults that may or may not have dogged previous administrations. This was nonsense, of course, for many of the innovations that were being trumpeted by the NDA were first given shape by the Congress and United Front governments of the 1990s, when village education committees and joint forest management were launched with appropriate pomp and fanfare.1 It would also be unwise to assume that new rhetoric about a kinder and more responsive system of government must correspond in any clear way to the perceptions of poorer or more vulnerable people. All democratic governments are tempted by the fruit of exaggeration, and Partha Chatterjee is right to insist that poorer people in ‘most of the world’ (2004: 3) are very often compelled to meet the state as members of social groups ‘that transgress the strict lines of legality in struggling to live and work’ (Chatterjee 2004: 40). They inhabit, that is to say, the rough and tumble worlds of political society, where governmental agencies are met by wit and by stealth, and not uncommonly 1

For this reason, too, the removal from office of the NDA after the 2004 general election is unlikely to lead to a significant movement away from what might be called the ‘new public administration’, or that more or less consistent running together of agendas for public service reforms, the decentralization and devolution of government activities and budgets, and participatory development. These agendas are also said to describe a prospectus for ‘good governance’. On the election, see Ruparelia (2005).

1

2

Seeing the State

by violence.2 Civility and pluralism are not the defining features of their lives. And yet something has been going on. New Delhi can now point with pride to a significant reduction in rates of income poverty in the country, albeit that these were sustained by a period of concerted economic growth that began a full decade before the reforms of 1991.3 It can also claim that ‘Human Development’ in the country is getting better. A recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) suggests that India’s Human Development Index (HDI) score rose from 0.439 in 1992 to 0.571 in 2001.4 And, perhaps most of all, it can begin to make the argument that these improvements have been induced by a new regime of governance. Notwithstanding Chatterjee’s claim that civil society and the poor co-exist in India like oil and water, government spokespeople insist that ordinary people are being listened to at the Block, District, State and national levels. They are reaping the rewards of an electoral system that empowers even the poorest men and women as citizens of different territorial jurisdictions. Public officials at the highest levels of the state can be called to account by citizens’ organizations or through public interest litigation. In the localities, meanwhile, decisions are taken and public monies increasingly are spent by elected representatives who are accountable to villagers through gram sabhas and other open meetings.5 2

3

4

5

In his 2001 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, Chatterjee is mainly concerned with the political battles that have to be waged by groups like urban slum dwellers. In his view, the men and women who make up these groups are not treated by the state as if they were citizens. The fact that they occupy land illegally, and thus call into question the sanctity of private property, means that the state cannot deal with them as members of civil society. For Chatterjee, civil society in a post-colonial setting is limited to elite or bourgeois groups and their forms of politics. At the same time, however, the state does recognize a governmental obligation to populations of slum dwellers and other subalterns. This obligation reflects a prior commitment to practices of welfare provision and social control. The circle is squared, Chatterjee contends, in the field of political society. This is where groups of the urban poor seek the support of political parties like the CPI-M in West Bengal or Shiv Sena in Bombay (see Hansen 2001), or patrons (including ‘criminals’) from outside the formal worlds of party politics. Later in the book we shall comment on Chatterjee’s instructive but perhaps overstated division between the worlds of civil and political society – a division which is inattentive to some of the more hybrid forms of state–poor encounters that we describe in part II. UNDP (2002: 16), drawing in part on data from the 55th round of the Household Consumer Expenditure Survey of India’s National Sample Survey Organization. Critical evaluations of the poverty reduction thesis, and of some NSS data sets, can be found in Chandrasekhar and Ghosh (2002), Pogge and Reddy (2003), and Reddy and Pogge (2003). For a review, see Harriss and Corbridge (2003). UNDP (2002: 17). In addition, the reported Gender Development Index increased from 0.401 in 1992 to 0.533 in 2001. The Gender Empowerment Measure increased from 0.226 to 0.240 over the same period (UNDP 2002: 17). These formulations also skirt over the fact that accountability mechanisms have long been present within the administrative services. Even in colonial times officers would hold meetings with villagers from time to time, perhaps in the form of a janata durbar (see chapter 3).

Introduction

3

It will be one aim of this book to interrogate the optimism of the government’s account of recent developments in the fields of governance and governmentality. Is it really the case that poorer men and women are coming to enjoy the status of citizens, and are being engaged as such by government officers (and not simply as members of beneficiary or troublesome populations, as Chatterjee maintains)? And can this reasonably be described as a national story, or are we picking up the effects of policy changes, and patterns of political mobilization, that have been put in place in some regions and not in others? How do poorer people ‘see the state’, and how are governmental agencies seen by the people who advise or work for them? What would count as a convincing causal explanation, as opposed to a suggestive narrative sequence? In these regards, it is worth noting that even some of the main sponsors of the new public administration are cautious about what should and should not be claimed. Agencies including the UNDP, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), and the World Bank, cast their evaluation studies in the most positive light and tread softly around points of contention or criticism. Where possible they signal the benefits of decentralization or of enhanced participation. Yet many of the people who work for these agencies are experienced and at times rather cynical individuals who know that much remains to be done. Their work in villages in central and north India cautions them against a chorus of acclamation that mistakes promise for performance. They point gently toward continuing problems of ‘elite capture’ (of development benefits), and of the misuse of public funds by poorly trained and poorly paid government servants. They also highlight a persistent gender gap in terms of rates of participation in village open meetings. Some Left critics, meanwhile, point out that the decentralized local governance structures now lauded by New Delhi work most effectively in a state like Kerala, and perhaps also West Bengal, where there is a supportive political culture.6 It is one thing to provide institutions to promote accountability and decision-making at the panchayat, Block and District levels, and quite another to produce men and women who are able to participate effectively in these new or revamped structures. The production of skilled citizens is not something that happens overnight. Men and women have to be educated, they need to develop a broad set of capabilities, to use Amartya Sen’s term, and they need to be acquainted with the costs and benefits of new structures of rule.7 Confidence has to be built up, and it is here, say critics like Chaudhuri and Heller, that 6 7

The classic statement is that by Kohli (1987). See also Webster and Engberg-Pedersen (2002). Sen (1984).

4

Seeing the State

the comparative advantage of organizations like the Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPI-M), and associated bodies like the Kerala Sashtra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP: the People’s Science Movement), is most in evidence (see also chapter 7).8 To expect a similar level of success in Madhya Pradesh is to confuse moral exhortation around the virtues of civic society with the hard work of constructing a pro-poor political culture. (Digvijay Singh learned this the hard way in 2003.)9 Barbara Harriss-White goes even further. In her account of India Working she dismisses views of the state that she considers to be formalistic, or too focused on statutory responsibilities. She contends that the official part of the state has been hollowed out over the course of the last twenty or thirty years, and has been replaced by what she calls a ‘shadow state’ (Harriss-White 2003: 77). This vast assemblage of brokers, advisers, political workers, crooks and contractors surrounds the ‘official state’, deprives it of funds, and helps to ensure that it is run in part for the private benefit of some of its employees. The other main winners are the largely self-employed men (and some women) who benefit from a world of state-produced shortages and sanctioned fraud. They are the top dogs in India’s ‘intermediate classes’. The losers are the labouring households who make up the bulk of the ‘India of the 88 per cent’ (Harriss-White 2003:1).10 They work unprotected in India’s informal and black economies. They also need the protection of intermediaries to chart an unsteady course through what Chatterjee has called ‘the politics of governmentality’ (Chatterjee 2004: 23). To read Harriss-White is to be put in mind of a world that is far removed from that described by government boosters. States fail poorer people on a regular and predictable basis, and they will continue to do so notwithstanding recent innovations in the field of governance. Harriss-White reaches these conclusions, moreover, on the basis of an approach to social science that she describes as ‘field economics’ (Harriss-White 2003: 9– 10). Economics and political science sometimes deal with entities like ‘the economy’ or ‘the state’ as if they were self-evident or transparent; as if the conditions in the trenches, as Joel Migdal puts it, really do approximate to the textbook descriptions imposed upon them.11 Harriss-White will have none of this, and rightly so. 8 9 10

11

Chaudhuri and Heller (2002). The former Congress Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh was voted from office in December 2003. See our discussion in chapter 7. The figure refers to the percentage of people who live outside the major metropolitan cities, and thus at some distance from the centres of corporate capitalism (Harriss-White 2003: 1). Migdal (2001).

Introduction

5

We said before that a first task of this book is to interrogate ‘official’ stories about the state in India. This being so, we need to follow the lead of Harriss-White and Chatterjee and dispense with black box approaches to questions of government, participation and empowerment. Boosterism and ethnography are uncomfortable bedfellows and we shall want to exploit this tension. There is much to be said for researching political society and the local state from the inside-out. At the same time, however, as the second part of this book will make clear, we believe that the lives of poorer people in rural India are being changed perceptibly, and in some cases for the better, by the new technologies of rule that we described above. An exclusive emphasis on the shadow state, or on a relentlessly ‘vertical’ political society, sometimes fails to point up the spaces of citizenship that are being created, or perhaps widened, in the wake of the good governance agenda and the popular mobilizations to which it can give rise. These developments are happening more rapidly and more deeply in some regions than in others, but the effects are real nonetheless, including in some parts of Bihar and Jharkhand, despite popular (or stereotypical) views to the contrary. It follows that a second aim of this book will be to document these changes, and to explain their differential spatial impress. Technologies of rule, sightings of the state We take the phrase ‘human technologies of rule’ from Nikolas Rose, and in part I of the book we link it to an idea of ‘seeing the state’.12 The book ranges quite widely at this point, as befits a volume in this series. Our purpose, however, is to think about how we might make sense of the ‘facts on the ground’ that we report in parts II and III. We agree with Harriss-White that states should be understood anthropologically. Instead of thinking of ‘them’ as discrete or singular entities, we prefer to follow Foucault in speaking of dispersed practices of government. States are best thought of as bundles of everyday institutions and forms of rule.13 In part, this is for cultural or ideational reasons. Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj suggest that it is a mistake to assume that the life-worlds of elite, Englisheducated Indians coincide with those of their subaltern or vernacular counterparts.14 Very often they do not, and we should expect lower-level public officials to reinterpret and sometimes significantly to change the practices of government that are handed down to them by Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers at the District, State or Union levels. But states also need to be understood as consisting of diverse and not always 12 14

13 See Fuller and Harriss (2001). Rose (1999); see also chapter 2. Chatterjee (1997a); Kaviraj (1991). See also note (2).

6

Seeing the State

cohering human technologies of government. These are the quotidian practices of rule that structure and even produce settings for the conduct of business between ‘the state’ and its citizens or subjects. They refer not only to institutions like the IAS or the zilla parishad, but also to those forms of knowledge, vocabularies, practices of calculation and so on, that help to produce designated social groups (Scheduled Communities, for example, or households that are BPL: below the poverty line) and bring them into contact with agencies of government. They also refer to an idea of the state as an impersonal and disinterested actor – the state that claims to find expression in the Constitution of India, for example.15 We expand on this approach in part I of the book, where we consider some of the different ways in which governmental agencies in India have sought to address the question of ‘the poor’. We shall argue that poorer people very often encounter the state through technologies of rule that help to structure a war on poverty. In New Delhi during the Emergency, for example, many slum dwellers would have encountered the state in the form of a bulldozer that was being driven, metaphorically at least, by a discourse that produced urban poverty as a sin or as unsightly.16 By the same token, we believe there are good reasons to suppose that ‘state–poor’ encounters are now being restructured to some degree by new technologies of rule that seek (or claim) to produce members of the rural poor as clients of the government, and as active participants in their own empowerment. These technologies are built into a new suite of participatory development projects. Some of these are operated by external agencies like DFID and the World Bank. Others are run by the Government of India working in conjunction with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They are also built into important new ventures that have been prosecuted by ministries concerned with employment creation (the Employment Assurance Scheme) and primary education provision (the advent of Village Education Committees is said to present new opportunities for parental supervision of teachers). Our point, of course, is not that these new technologies of rule will always secure their stated effects. That is a claim best left to government boosters. But nor do we contend that they are bound to fail, or that the unintended consequences of government action must secure the further domination of the state over its (potentially rebellious) subjects. This is 15 16

On the ‘state idea’, see Abrams (1988). For India, specifically, see Austin (1966). The encounters would not have been as one-sided as this sentence implies. Chatterjee is right to insist that ‘illegal’ slum dwellers will call on such protectors as are available to them in political society, as well as on their own resources and courage, to resist the agencies of ‘urban improvement’. Sadly, however, in New Delhi during the Emergency, these battles were often lost: see Selbourne (1977) and Legg (2005a).

Introduction

7

one of the arguments that James Ferguson makes in his generally splendid account of the effects of bureaucratic rule in Lesotho, and it is one that Partha Chatterjee comes close to on occasions.17 Our argument is more modest. We consider it unwise to assume that the agenda of ‘the new public administration’ does not open up significant spaces of empowerment for the men and women it seeks to position as participants or possible beneficiaries. We make this argument, moreover, because we join with Fuller and Harriss in insisting that the ways in which technologies of rule are made flesh will depend on the manner in which they are interpreted and put into play by lower-level government workers, elected representatives and others. We also need to see why and how they are seized upon, understood, reworked and possibly contested by differently placed people within the population of ‘the poor’ (or the rural poor in this book) in both civil and political society. This is why we have chosen to adapt a phrase associated with James Scott. Instead of looking at the ways in which the state might see its citizens, which was Scott’s concern in Seeing Like a State (Scott 1998), we prefer to enquire into some of the myriad ways that the state comes into view. We are concerned here particularly, but not exclusively, with the ways that governmental agencies are seen by different groups of people within the rural poor. One of the guiding premises of this book is that ‘the state’ still matters greatly to people in rural India. It is sometimes to be feared or avoided, of course, although this is not something we pursue in detail here. Our focus is on the ‘developmental state’.18 But it can also be at the heart of people’s livelihood strategies. Richer individuals know this too, and Harriss-White rightly contends that the placing of male ‘members of trading households in the professions and the bureaucracy [including the Electricity Board and the IAS]’ (Harriss-White 2003: 113) amounts to a pre-emptive bid for state licences or contracts. For most poor men and women, however, the state has only recently been positioned as a source of social power, and then mainly by members of the political classes. A tribal woman in rural India is more likely to turn to sarkar (government) for an entitlement, such as a ration card or pension, or perhaps for employment or to register a death. Or she might want to call upon the state to enforce her right to a minimum wage, say, or for protection against an accusation of witchcraft. She might also want to send a child to school or to a health-care facility. 17 18

Ferguson (1990). Also Chatterjee (2004). Roughly, those agencies of state and governmental practices that are charged with improving or protecting the incomes, capabilities and legal rights of poorer people. Our focus here will be on government departments, but the definition deliberately reaches out to political parties and judicial bodies.

8

Seeing the State

The tangible outcomes of these encounters will matter a great deal to the men and women involved. A job or certificate gained is very different to a job or certificate that is refused. But it also matters to people how the encounter is structured and performed, and this brings us to a second premise of our work. We can learn about the practices of government by attending to the diverse ways in which ‘the state’ is experienced and understood by differently placed individuals, including by its own employees. A low-caste man who is treated with respect by a teacher or a Block Development Officer might come to see the state in a very different way than an adivasi woman who is kept waiting for hours to see sarkar, who sees gangs of males push in front of her in what passes for a queue, and who is made to touch the feet of the official she finally meets (perhaps with the help of a dalaal, or local broker) at the end of rough and uncivil language. We need to pay close attention to how and where these performances take place if we want to come to a more nuanced understanding of how people inhabit and encounter the state, and how they react to its everydayness and their senses of what it is to be a citizen, client and/or subject. This brings us to a third proposition. We shall argue that the sightings of the state that poorer people make are never straightforward or unitary. None of us sees the state (or the government, the market, even public culture) in a direct and unmediated fashion. We always see the state through the eyes of others, and with close regard for past memories, accounts that circulate in the public sphere, and how we see other people getting on or being treated. And yet this is not a trivial observation, or one without consequence. Part of the attraction of the new public administration is precisely that it expects a tribal woman in eastern India, let’s say, to see the state in terms of practices of corruption or extortion, as well as of gender bias and a propensity for ad hoc or personalized rule. It then ‘follows’ that she can be empowered by the exit option, or by a decentralized form of rule that makes the state accountable to citizens on the basis of their statutory (and thus in some respects equal) rights. This suggestion is predicated very exactly on the notion that new practices of rule will promote new and unhindered sightings of the state. But if we do not entirely share this optimism, or partake of what Chatterjee describes as the ‘unscrupulously charitable theoretical gestures [of neoliberal ideology]’ (2004: 39, and see our discussion in part II), we do accept that it makes sense to think of the co-production of state–poor encounters by three main sets of actors. We believe, that is to say, that public policy debates in India – for example, on the scope and purpose of participatory development, on the prospects for reducing corruption – can be illuminated by studies of ‘how government works in

Introduction

9

practice’ that draw on three main vantage points. These are: the sightings of the state made by poorer people both as citizens and as often vulnerable members of political society; the sightings made by government officers in different line departments, and people at different levels of authority in political society; and the sightings made by members of the wider development community, including experts from the World Bank and other lending agencies, and senior bureaucrats in the Government of India. Furthermore, because these sightings are mutually constitutive, it is a mistake to suppose that ‘development studies’ are simply a means by which people in the ‘development business’ look in on the world they seek to describe and even to mend. They are not, and we should not assume that claims on behalf of good governance are ‘mere’ rhetoric, however much these phrases are cheapened by misuse. Development studies must rather be understood as a set of human technologies of rule that help to structure and produce the worlds they aim to describe. They are not without effect, and it is unhelpful to contrast development studies as somehow ‘bad’ to a more virtuous concern for ‘post-colonialism’. Matters are more complicated than this, as we show in part III. At the same time, it is important that we are aware of what Hirschman once called the indirect or recruitment effects of new ideas or practices of rule.19 Even after the promulgation of new legislation and training manuals, a panchayat sewak or his/her supervisor might not convene village meetings in the manner that is called for in policy statements. But the fact that he or she has to hold meetings on a regular basis, and is now required to reach out to all the ‘sensitive people’ in the area (see our discussion in chapter 5), including poorer people who might make trouble for him or her, suggests that real changes are happening nonetheless. In this case, a new technology of rule has pushed a named agent to widen his or her previous circles of engagement, and perhaps also to change the terms on which these engagements are transacted. A sighting of the state by an external agency finally gives rise to a revised sighting of that state (or a slightly new version of it) by men and women who are constituted as its clients. The organization of the book We can now say that the job of part I of this book is two-fold. Chapter 1 considers in some detail what it means to talk of seeing the state, and how this lens might deepen our understanding of ‘the politics of the governed’. We review some of the existing literature on the everyday state and society 19

Hirschman (1981).

10

Seeing the State

in India. We also draw attention to the ways in which encounters with the state are produced by dispersed state agencies amid conditions of greater or lesser institutional scarcity. Finally, we consider how recent debates in development studies have sought to attend to these conditions, and provide ‘remedies’ for state ‘failure’. In chapter 2 we provide historical depth to these and other debates. A common conceit in development studies is that everything is new, when this is rarely the case. The first part of this chapter looks at the ways in which accounts of poverty in India have been produced by a very diverse set of human technologies of government, including the Census, the National Sample Survey and discourses about shame or backwardness. We also consider how, and with what consequences, certain individuals or groups have been labelled as members of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, or as belonging to the Below Poverty Line (BPL) population. Poorer people very often see the state because the state has chosen to see them. Subsequent parts of the chapter consider how various state agencies and political parties have proposed to wage war against poverty in India, and how important schemes for poverty alleviation were democratized in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in accordance with new views about the rights of the Backward Classes, and of the capacities and entitlements of poorer people. We also show how the multiplication of schemes speaks to the growing importance of visuality and presentation in the promotion of an anti-poverty agenda. Politicians need to be seen to be active on behalf of the poor. We can put this another way. The first part of the book provides us with a language with which we can approach the debates now swirling around the new public administration and the boosterism that is attached to it. Before we can evaluate this agenda we need to decide upon a framework in which such an evaluation can take shape. This is what we hope to supply with our accounts of technologies of rule and sightings of the state. But what might be described as the evaluation itself can only take place in ‘the field’, with proper regard for all of the subtleties that this phrase should call to mind. In part II we draw on two research projects that we carried out in rural eastern India in 1999–2000 and 2000–1. The first of these projects was funded by a research council. The second was supported by DFID and positioned us for a while as development consultants. We shall come back to this later and in chapter 9. Taken together, the projects allowed us to investigate the income support, empowerment and protective functions of the state. Five hundred households (400 poor and 100 non-poor) in Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal were kind enough to provide us with information on the Employment Assurance Scheme, primary education, and legal struggles, respectively, and on how different groups of rural society encountered ‘the state’ in these arenas. The information was collected in part from an extensive questionnaire survey, but

Introduction

11

also from conversations held with ourselves and with seven field assistants who lived in the villages from March 1999 to March 2000.20 This book would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts and friendship of Vishwaranjan Raju, Ashok Baitha and Rakesh Kumar in Bihar and Jharkhand, and Lina Das, Md. Basar Ali, Khushi Das Gupta and Surajit Adhikari in West Bengal, to whom we remain deeply indebted. The village-based data sets were supplemented by more than 280 taped interviews with teachers, Block Development Officers (BDOs), District Development Officers (DDOs), engineers, trade unionists, contractors, politicians, brokers and other key informants at the Block, District and State levels. This peripatetic research strategy allowed us to collect data from five field sites where we expected to find very different political cultures: from Bidupur Block, Vaishali District, Bihar, an area of considerable political competition, often along caste lines; from Sahar Block, Bhojpur District, Bihar, an area of extreme class tensions where the CPIML (a ‘Naxalite’ group) and the Ranvir Sena have been active; from Murhu Block, Ranchi District, Bihar (now Jharkhand), an area where adivasi people have long been mistrustful of the state; from Old Malda Block, Malda District, West Bengal, an area where politics are clientelistic and where state ‘failure’ is widely remarked; and from Debra Block, Midnapore District, West Bengal, an area where the CPI-M has enjoyed considerable success in mobilizing groups within the rural poor. (The location of the field sites can be seen in figure 3.1. The names of individual villages and panchayats have been held back.) When we set up this research design we didn’t know that we would write a book along the lines of this one, and this is decidedly not the book of the research project. Partly by luck and partly by judgement, however, we believe that our choice of field sites has given us a platform to speak with some confidence about the diverse structuring of state– poor encounters in eastern India, an area where rates of rural poverty remain stubbornly high. As we hinted before, however, the focus of part II is not on the poverty of poorer people in this or other parts of India, although chapter 3 does provide background data on income levels and capabilities in the study areas. Our main aim is to look at the ‘hows’ of government: how government business is transacted, how it reinforces or undermines local ideas of hierarchy, how it constructs gender relations, how it provides incentives for principals and agents, how it deals with the question of participation, how governmental programmes are involved in the production both of agents in political society and what might be 20

We will have more to say about the choice of households and the scope of the questionnaire survey in chapter 3. It will suffice to say here that the households were chosen from a full census of five field localities in different Districts of Bihar (as was) and West Bengal.

12

Seeing the State

called ‘incomplete citizens’, and how it might create – intentionally or otherwise – spaces of empowerment for poorer people. Chapters 4–6 take up these ‘how’ questions with close regard for a set of linked debates on participation and social capital; on rent-seeking, corruption and the quest for good governance; and on decentralization and the slowly changing contours of political society. It will come as no surprise that some of our most positive findings are drawn from Midnapore. But we also found spaces of empowerment in Bihar and Jharkhand, and we hope to provide accounts of ‘how the state works’ in eastern India that cut against the grain of established thinking. Although chapters 4–6 deal with a set of linked debates, we believe that each chapter can be read with profit in its own right. Finally, in chapters 7, 8 and 9 (part III), we consider some wider aspects of the politics of state–poor encounters in India. By engaging with work on Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, for example, we can relax the rather stiff test of ‘good government’ that Bihar and Jharkhand might be thought to pose. Given that we worked for DFID, we also consider it proper to reflect on our own positionalities as development researchers and even consultants. We have been prompted to reflect on what Max Weber once described – pompously perhaps, but also very usefully – as the duties of an intellectual who ‘stands in the service of moral forces’ (Dean 1999: 36, after Weber 1972). These reflections inform our concluding observations on the state of development theory and practice, as John Toye once referred to the field.21 We develop an account of the work of agencies like the World Bank and the UK’s Department for International Development that is at some remove from the more stylized accounts of their most vehement critics. While holding no brief for these organizations – indeed we are critical of many of their activities – we hope to show that they are contested institutions which do respond, in part, to the reports of their field officers, academics and, indeed, some activists and intended beneficiaries. Above all, we intend to show that they are learning institutions, and that, as such, they must be engaged with politically by those who want to take the part of ‘the poor’. The poor, after all, engage with these institutions on a daily basis, even if these engagements appear at first to be indirect and largely discursive. Their accounts of the state, and thus to some degree of their livelihoods and politics, their senses of citizenship indeed, cannot help but take account of the sightings of others. 21

Toye (1987).

Part I

The state and the poor

1

Seeing the state

Introduction We have said that one aim of this book is to consider how differently placed men and women see the state in rural India. Some of these individuals will be employees of the state, or external advisers to the Government of India and its constituent states and Union territories, although many more will be farmers or labourers. Some will be political fixers and members of the Backward Classes, while others will be farmers, Class IV government servants and adivasis at the same time. But what does it mean to talk about ‘seeing the state’? We are used to the idea of the state seeing its population or citizenry. Visuality is at the heart of many theories of power and governmentality. Michel Foucault, most notably, has shown how the birth of modern forms of education and welfare provision corresponds to the emergence of biopolitics as a ‘form of politics entailing the administration of the processes of life of populations’ (Dean 1999: 98). Populations emerge when changes in working practices give rise to economic government and the discipline of political economy, and they get bounded by new exercises in mapping and measurement, including the production of censuses, cadastral surveys and expeditions.1 Biopolitics then refers to those government interventions that seek to improve the quality of a population as a whole, and these procedures produce that which we name the state as the effect of these interventions. These can be ‘positive’ and related to questions of public health and standards of living, or even to incarceration for the purposes of reform or improvement. Such interventions might involve the inspection of men, women and children by state officials or agencies contracted by the state. Children, for example, might be required to attend for eye examinations or inoculations. Prison cells might be searched for illegal substances. But they can also be ‘negative’, as when they are concerned with the purity of the group or class. These interventions might 1

See Foucault (1997), and also Hacking (1982). On statistical and mapping exercises in India, see Cohn (1987), Edney (1997) and Barrow (2003).

15

16

The state and the poor

draw on discourses which see vile, corrupt or simply foreign bodies as appropriate targets for torture, eugenics or even genocide.2 Governmentality, for its part, can continue both sets of interventions. If government can be thought of as ‘the conduct of conduct’, at least in parts of Europe from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, governmentality can be defined as the means by which we ‘think about governing others and ourselves in a wide variety of contexts’ (Dean 1999: 209). It involves the internalization of norms, even where those norms (for example, of ‘proper’ models of sexual, economic or political behaviour) are always contested. If biopolitics involves the extension of sight from the sovereign to ‘the state’, we might think of governmentalization (including of the state) as involving a further extension of powers to those who profess expertise over the private body or the body public, be they aid workers, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, sexologists or public health workers. These persons also claim the privileges of sight, including those of insight, foresight and even hindsight. Foucault, of course, wrote rather little about the non-western world.3 But there is more than a hint of Foucault’s arguments in James Scott’s account of Seeing Like a State. Scott contends that: ‘The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity’ (Scott 1998: 2). In contrast, the danger of the high modernist state is that it sees too much. It engages in simplifications that have dangerous if often unintended effects for the citizenry. The high modernist state is distinguished not only by an administrative ordering of nature and society, or by an ideology that evinces a muscle-bound faith in the virtues of reason, progress and industry; it is also defined by its hubristic ability to see a better future for all of ‘the people’, whether this future consists of collective farms, villagization, the urban visions of Le Corbusier, or socialism itself. It is this weaving together of sight in its temporal and spatial dimensions that announces the high modernist era, and which paves the way for interventions that are ‘potentially lethal’ (Scott 1998: 5). These interventions are most likely to surface when they 2

3

Nikolas Rose (1999: 26) reminds us that Foucault discussed the connections between micro-fascism and macro-fascism in The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1979: 149–50). On biopolitics, archaeological practice and the politics of spatial exclusion, see Nadia Abu El-Haj’s (2001) important account of territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. We should note, too, and partly as a result, that the question of how well governmentality theory travels has been discussed recently by scholars including Chakrabarty (2000), Kalpagam (2000) and Mehta (1999). The focus of this book is less on the sovereign and disciplinary nature of colonial governmentalities than it is on the different forms of governmentality that are (or can be) embedded in a state that is ostensibly committed to the belated production of development and a more expansive conception of citizenship. We are grateful to Steve Legg for prompting on this point.

Seeing the state

17

are pushed forward by an authoritarian state that is faced by a ‘prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist [its] plans’ (Scott 1998: 5).4 The significance of Scott’s work lies in its capacity to link the brutality of the twentieth century to ‘certain schemes to improve the human condition that failed’. We will later want to consider Scott’s account of intentionality in the light of James Ferguson’s more avowedly Foucauldian account of state failures and successes in southern Africa.5 But Scott is surely right to insist that much of the violence of the twentieth century was a result of utopian visions turning into dystopian realities, and predictably so. The forcible imposition of state simplifications in place of the practical knowledge of urban dwellers and peasants facilitated a dizzying and sometimes terrifying descent into tunnel vision. This was horribly on display at the time of the Great Leap Forward in China. Amartya Sen has shown how this monstrous episode gave rise to a famine which killed more than thirty million people between 1958 and 1961.6 The famine was caused by an administrative culture that discouraged officials from reporting crises of food production and exchange entitlements. The fact that the state turned a blind eye, in other words, and put blinkers on the news media, proved in this case to be as dangerous as those cases of ‘monocularity’ where agencies of the state focused with deadly intent on supposed threats to the purity of the nation. The famine in China, together with various unrealizable attempts to tame nature, should then be seen as state-produced disasters that parallel the unspeakable acts of state violence that were fashioned by the Nazis or Pol Pot, or by those Hutu politicians in Rwanda who used discourses of tribalness or ethnic cleansing to encourage the slaughter of Tutsis and to advance their own claims over what Frederick Cooper has called the ‘gatekeeper state’.7 The scale and continuing occurrence of these tragedies reminds us that very many people experience ‘the state’ precisely and perhaps lastly as a source of physical violence.8 Even in India – or perhaps especially in India given stereotypical accounts of pacific Hindustan – it is important to insist on the physical nature of the violence that structures many exchanges between state agencies and ‘the people’. Stanley Tambiah and Thomas 4

5 8

We are mindful that a full-blown pursuit of laissez-faire can also generate damaging crises and contradictions. Marx and Engels (1967 [1848]), Polanyi (2001 [1947]) and more recently John Gray (2001) have all made this point. We see no reason, however, to endorse Susan Buck-Morss’s extraordinary claim that liberal democracies are as likely to produce social catastrophes as are systems of state socialism (Buck-Morss 2002: chapter 1). BuckMorss’s work on Walter Benjamin and the dialectics of seeing (1989) speaks directly to several of the concerns of this book, but it cannot be helpful to so blithely equate what she calls the ‘mass utopias’ of the East and the West. See also Lilla (2001). 6 Sen (1989). 7 Cooper (2002). Ferguson (1990). Sontag (2003: 60) further reminds us that Pol Pot’s murderous regime made many of its victims pose for the camera before they were executed. Stalin also used the camera in this way, as an official eye of the state.

18

The state and the poor

Hansen have reminded us of the continuing role of state-sanctioned physical violence in the production of urban space and politics, whether in New Delhi at the time of the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, or in Mumbai under the Shiv Sena.9 Paul Brass, too, has repeatedly drawn attention to the use of physical force by India’s police forces.10 Ayesha Jalal, meanwhile, has focused on New Delhi’s claims to a monopoly over the means of violence, legitimate or otherwise, in its dealings with its rebellious peripheries in the northwest and northeast. In her view, New Delhi has constructed a form of ‘democratic authoritarianism’ that has a great deal in common with the ‘military-bureaucratic authoritarianism’ of Pakistan and Bangladesh, notwithstanding ‘the meticulous observance of the ritual of elections in India’ (Jalal 1995: 249).11 This book will certainly have something to say about state-directed acts of violence against men and women in the Indian countryside. But the violence of the state is not at the heart of our concerns, at least not in the sense of physical violence, or violence that involves legal forms of coercion, such as eviction orders. In part, this is because we have not worked extensively in Kashmir, or Punjab, or along the Narmada river valley, and we cannot hope to write a book about rural India as a whole.12 But even in those areas of India where the army is in occupation, or where forms of rule owe more to ideas of sovereignty than to governmentality, it is still the case that men and women seek to engage with the state as citizens, or as members of populations with legally defined rights or politically inspired expectations. In many parts of rural eastern India, as we shall see, the problem is not that the state sees too much, which is Scott’s concern, but that it sees too little. In the familiar phrases of development studies, the countryside suffers from ‘state failure’ or a lack of ‘good governance’. And yet even in areas where government offices are badly run down, or where the forest guard has to watch his back when walking his beat (another indication of the fragility of the state), some people will be aware that they have been defined as members of Scheduled Communities. They might also 9

10 11 12

On Delhi, see Tambiah (1990); see also Selbourne (1977) and Tarlo (2001) on the city under Emergency rule. On Mumbai, see Hansen (2002). More so than Tambiah or Brass, Hansen draws on Lacan to make a broader argument about the constitutive and even pleasurable role of violence in the structuring of everyday life. We return to this argument in chapter 7. Brass (1997, 2003). See also Varshney (2001). See also Vanaik (1990). We shall explain later in the book why we take a less dismissive view of the role of elections in India. Evictions of adivasi households to make way for quarries, mines or dams have been extensive in Jharkhand, of course, and are reasonably well documented: see Areeparampil (1992), Corbridge (1993a).

Seeing the state

19

know they can make claims on reserved jobs in government or the public sector. Others will know that they have been labelled as BPLs (households below the poverty line), and that they qualify for employment assistance or subsidized food. And we might presume that rather more people will know that the government (sarkar) has some responsibility to provide villages with schools and standpipes, and perhaps even housing under the Indira Awas scheme, or rudimentary health- and child-care facilities. These people, in other words, have begun to imbibe the biopolitical discourses of ‘the state’ itself, and its attempts to seek legitimacy precisely through its wars on ‘poverty’ and ‘backwardness’. This is also the terrain of development and its modern form of knowledge, development studies. It is here that we want to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the state works and is seen in parts of rural India. In the rest of this chapter we have three objectives. We want, first, to develop a typology of the ways in which different groups of the rural poor might be said to see or to encounter the developmental state. We learn a great deal about ‘the state’ by examining its changing protocols for bounding ‘the poor’, and its plans for seeking their development, protection, empowerment or erasure (see chapter 2). For their part, the poor in India learn to see the state through their meetings with particular government officers, and with regard for those government conventions and policies with which they gain familiarity, and this brings us to our second and third objectives. When a widow goes to the Block headquarters to collect her pension she makes contact with the state in the form of a lower-level official and by entering a designated building.13 For example, she might be required to sign a particular piece of paper on an official’s desk. But these encounters are rarely conducted as the rulebook says they should be. The widow will often be kept waiting for hours in the sun or the rain, and she might have to call on a relative or fixer (dalaal or pyraveekar) to get her business moving. Small payments (baksheesh or ghus) might also have to be made to the accountant and/or his peon, and sometimes the payment she receives will be several rupees short. The widow might expect this, although her expectations will vary from place to place according to the conventions of political society (as we show in chapter 6). The point is that she will have learned to see the state not just through her own eyes, but with regard to wider understandings of government. Recent work on the anthropology of the everyday state and society in India has begun to question the view that lower-level state personnel share 13

As she would have done in Bihar in 1999/2000, at the time of our fieldwork. On pensions and the post office system, see the interesting recent article by Farrington et al. (2003).

20

The state and the poor

the ‘elite’ understandings of government that have been internalized by some well-placed makers of public policy. Our second objective will be to review these debates. We shall rehearse the argument that lower-level state officials hold ‘vernacular’ understandings of government that find little place for ideas of fairness or generalized morality. We shall also consider more general arguments about the embeddedness of the state in society. We should also note, however, that the widow we have referred to will sometimes counter vernacular accounts of the state by advancing a more rule-based understanding of her own. She is able to demand her pension, and occasionally to stand her ground, precisely because the state has defined her as a citizen with rights, and because it has given her scraps of paper to prove her entitlement to welfare benefits. It follows that our third objective will be to sketch out the sources of these understandings, and to link them to changing discourses on the civil and human rights of individual subjects. Our emphasis here will be on recent debates in development theory and policy. In particular, we will focus on questions of governance, accountability, corruption, participation and empowerment, all of which we return to in the more empirical parts of the book. Differently poor, differently sighted Most people do not see the state as a Weberian aggregate, but this is not to say it doesn’t happen. We will have cause in this book to report understandings of the state that come close to this. Among the Musahar communities of north Bihar, for example, where females suffer from especially high rates of social exclusion, and where there is little in the way of the political representation that one finds among Paswans, it is understandable that the state should be defined only in hazy terms and on the basis of a limited number of direct contacts. The state appears to function here as much as an absence as a presence. In certain adivasi communities, too, in Ranchi District, Jharkhand, a long history of direct rule through mankis, mundas and now mukhiyas has reinforced an experience of sovereignty that reaches back to Agency rule under the British and which is carried forward under the Scheduled Areas legislation. For the most part, however, the different experiences of different groups of poor people with different state agencies should caution us against a reductionist understanding of ‘state–poor’ encounters. The recent emphasis upon social exclusion in the expert literatures on poverty is one sign of this diversity, even as these new discourses themselves define

Seeing the state

21

new populations of the poor. The same would be true of participatory poverty assessments. As we shall see in chapter 2, the Government of India has distinguished itself by its insistent attention to the variegated nature of poverty in South Asia. The extraordinary range of its antipoverty programmes is testimony to this, including as it does area-based interventions, employment guarantee schemes, compensatory discrimination, resettlement programmes, provisions for women and children, and group-based participation schemes. And then there are its more general programmes of educational and health-care provision, and the enactment of laws to protect people against encroachments on common property resources, say, or the underpayment of wages. The production of these multiple sites of state–poor encounters, or of poverty itself, is something that will concern us greatly in the chapters that follow. It is not our purpose to lump together experiences that properly should be kept apart. Nevertheless, it will help our later accounts if we first deepen our understandings of what we mean by an encounter with ‘the state’. What are the stages for these encounters, and what should we look for in the performance of these exchanges? There are several ways to approach these questions and it is mainly for reasons of exposition that we have chosen to deal with them under the separate and rather mundane headings of ‘when, why and who?’ and ‘where and how?’ Clearly, these fields are interwoven, as our empirical materials will later confirm. When, why and who? As soon as we begin to think about the ‘when and whys’ of poorer people’s encounters with the state, we run into problems. These encounters will vary to a significant degree from place to place, and over time. They also depend crucially on which agency, or ‘who’, in the state is being seen. In the remote interior villages of Singhbhum District, Bihar (now Jharkhand), it was common in the late-1970s for a forest-dependent villager to see the state mainly in the person of a forest guard, or a panchayat sewak, and perhaps also in the shape of occasional meetings called by the Mukhiya (the elected head of the local panchayat). (The position of village leaders, fixers and local politicians is something we pick up in part II.) In Tamil Nadu in the 1980s a marginal farming family with children might have been familiar with village extension workers, and perhaps with local revenue officials, the Junior Engineer, and the person(s) responsible for administering the Noon Day Meal Scheme. In Gujarat, meanwhile, the gangs of migrant field labourers that Jan Breman has written about so movingly might have been most familiar with local policemen

22

The state and the poor

and the government labour officer.14 Next door, in Maharashtra, significant numbers of women might have formed an impression of the state through their encounters with the Employment Guarantee Scheme.15 Given that one of the major arguments of this book concerns the importance of specifics, we might reasonably doubt the value of making general arguments across the breadth of India. But this needn’t stop us thinking more purposefully about the ‘whens and whys and whos’ of state–poor interactions. For example, we can think in terms of typologies of the state and political society, on the one hand, and what we might call the generic basis of some of these exchanges, on the other. By typologies of the state, we have in mind charts or tables that would aim to show the strength and functions of the official state at different spatial scales. We will provide such charts in part II when we look at the organization of the official state in Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, and we will try to embed this information within a broader account of the agencies functioning in the surrounding political society (including the CPI-M in West Bengal and components of the shadow state). In terms of the generic basis of the ‘whens and whys and whos’ of state–poor exchanges, we can make a first cut at the issue by considering exchanges bound up with entitlements and economic flows (both more and less direct), and those bound up with flows of information and people (again, more and less direct). Entitlements and economic flows Consider, first, what we might call the material or ‘economic’ bases of state–poor relations. In a very real sense, a poorer person sees the state most directly when he or she registers a birth or death, receives a registration certificate, picks up a pension or some other entitlement, takes a child to school (perhaps), receives or does not receive electricity or clean water, is interrogated by a police officer, and so on. Not all of these exchanges will take place on a daily basis. To the extent that they are regularized, they can also be weekly, monthly or seasonal. Some might be annual or even decadal (the Census). Very often, too, they will be bunched and/or episodic (as we explain below, when we consider the case of a tribal villager in Jharkhand dealing with the local Forest Department). Such exchanges are also received and understood in very different ways. Johnny Parry reports that unionized male workers in the steel plant at Bhilai (now in Chhattisgarh) very often see the government in positive terms. What with reasonable 14 15

Breman (1985a, 1985b). Another way of putting this is to say that different states have become identified with different types of anti-poverty programmes – employment creation in Maharashtra, for example, nutrition in Tamil Nadu, education in Kerala, health issues in Rajasthan, and so on.

Seeing the state

23

monthly wages, dearness allowances, bonuses, sick pay and paid holidays, it is perhaps not surprising that some members of this (admittedly urban) labour aristocracy like to announce that ‘there is no mother or father’ like their public sector employer.16 We might suppose, too, that a woman who receives her pension in full on the appointed day will form a different view of the state than a woman denied these rights or courtesies. By the same token, some people will form a jaundiced view of the state precisely because members of a neighbouring family – and not their own kith or kin – benefit from a system of reserved employment in the public sector. More importantly, perhaps, calculations about the economics of state– poor exchanges take place across a number of interlocking spheres. Some are less immediate than others, and some depend on very different forms of sight (from eye-to-eye contact, through newspapers, possibly even from the Internet), which might be mediated by the comments of others or by individual and/or collective memories. This much is evident as soon as we consider matters relating to taxation or prices. It is a well-established proposition of historical sociology that modern states emerge from the need to make war, and that the legitimacy of those states depends on their need to raise funds by taxation.17 Where rule is linked to revenues in this way it will be linked to a broadening of the polity. No taxation without representation, as the old saw has it. Direct taxation, in particular, encourages a measure of scrutiny of the state by its citizens. The fact that the bulk of direct taxes will be paid by better-off men and women also lays the ground for discourses which urge the rolling back of the state, or which complain about the ‘excessive subsidization’ of some households by others who have ‘earned’ their incomes through hard work or risktaking. These discourses become the stuff of politics. They form the terrain for battles over the meaning and purpose of government and its responsibilities to its citizens. In a crude sense, too, they highlight the tensions that exist between biopolitics (and the impulse to improve a population as a whole) and neoliberal forms of governmentality (with their injunctions in favour of prudence and self-reliance). Another example concerns the terms of trade between agriculture and industry, or the city and the countryside. Marxists insist that farmers and 16 17

Parry (1996). Tilly (1975, 1985); see also Levi (1988) and Bobbitt (2002). In many parts of the world, however, as in oil-rich states like Venezuela or Nigeria, the flow of funds between the state and its population bears scant resemblance to this ‘west European’ model of government (Coronil 1997, Watts 2003). This is in large part because colonial or neocolonial forms of rule made ‘Europeanization’ difficult if not impossible, at least in the terms since demanded by modernization theorists. See also Apter (1999) and Piot (1999).

24

The state and the poor

labourers have very different class interests, as in key respects they do. But there is also evidence to suggest that labourers across India have been successfully mobilized by richer farmers in support of the ‘new agrarian politics’.18 This politics aims to pit an authentic rural India, or Bharat, against a loose coalition of merchants, city dwellers and their government supporters. An urban-dominated state then comes to be seen as ‘a vampire that drinks the blood’ of the countryside, and which enforces price-twists that damage the interests of rural producers and consumers alike. The fact that that this depiction of the inter-sectoral terms of trade might be inaccurate – recent evidence suggests that the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has been successful in lifting the procurement prices of grains above the market rate, and Jan Mooij has demonstrated that many poor people do benefit from cheaper food through the system of Fair Price Shops – is not the issue.19 Men and women will come to see the state not simply through the prices they are charged, but through the constructions of fairness that are imposed upon them in contending political discourses. Sighting is never simple or straightforward, even for people blessed with 20:20 vision. Tom Stoppard made this point very clearly in his play, Jumpers, where he had one of his characters enquire about how the sun looked after the Copernican revolution. Did people still see it the same? Did they still see it orbiting the earth? The answers, of course, were yes and no, in that order. It did still look round and yellow, but it now seemed more like a fix point around which the earth moved in orbit.20 The state in India can also take on this before and after appearance, including in the realm of financial transfers. And this is not simply because people see the state through the observations of others (politicians, media people, NGOs, kith and kin), although these mediations are vitally important. Sight is also learned and based on past experiences, and many state– poor financial transactions do not follow the rulebook. Too many studies of the geography of public spending in India fail to acknowledge the 18 19

20

See, inter alia, Bentall and Corbridge (1996), Brass (1995), Corbridge (1997), Dhanagare (1983), Hasan (1998), Lindberg (1995) and Nadkarni (1987). See Varshney (1995) on the CACP. Mooij’s (1999) account of the Public Distribution System also makes the point that men and women see the state, in the form of the operations of Fair Price Shops, very differently in Karnataka (where the PDS is subject to a good deal of corruption and elite capture) and Kerala (where accountability mechanisms are more securely in place in civil and political society). More precisely, and more elegantly: George (facing away, out front, emotionless); ‘Meeting a friend in a corridor, Wittgenstein said: “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth rather that the earth was rotating?” His friend said, “Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going round the earth.” To which the philosopher replied, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?”’ (Stoppard 1972: 75; emphases in the original).

Seeing the state

25

reverse financial transfers that send monies or goods from poorer people to politicians and government servants. Corbridge and Kumar have reported the case of Polus B—, an adivasi smallholder and teacher in Ranchi District, Jharkhand, who in the 1990s sought permission to cut down ten jackfruit trees on his homestead land.21 Polus B— wanted to sell the trees to finance a small enterprise he had in mind, and he was legally entitled to harvest the trees once he had gained the permission of the Revenue Circle Officer and the Divisional Forest Officer (DFO). But therein lay the problem. Although the value of Polus’s trees was 80,000 rupees, net of logging and transportation costs, he ended up selling them to a dalaal for just Rs. 20,000. Polus B— knew full well that it would cost him an awful lot of time and money to get the permissions he required. Some of his friends had made thirty trips to Ranchi to gain one audience with a DFO. He might also be faced with illegal demands for money at police checkposts on the road leading from his village to the timber depots in Ranchi. Better to let the dalaal take the risk and bear the expense. Corbridge and Kumar reckoned that the dalaal’s final share of the trade was of the order of Rs. 26,000. The remaining Rs. 34,000 disappeared into the pockets of officials in the forestry, revenue and police services (see table 1.1). Some of that money would later make its way to politicians. Politicians have to be able to fund their campaigns, and government officers in Bihar and Jharkhand need to secure their next postings. We comment further on these secondary transfers in part II. Our point here is that we should expect poorer people in rural India to form their accounts of the state with regard to some complicated and crosscutting geographies of financial exchange. These geographies must then become the objects of ethnography in a very exact fashion. We learn about ‘the state’ – about its different boundaries, about its workings, about perceptions of ‘it’ – precisely through case studies. Information and people This will also be the case when we come to non-financial exchanges. Although our typology of state–poor exchanges cannot hope to be exhaustive, it should be clear that these exchanges include flows of information and people. In each case the flows will be in both directions. In the case of information, agencies of the state engage in regular exercises to extract information from and about its ‘populations’. The capacity of the state is defined by these exercises. Gerard O’Tuathail reminds us of the fate of one of the first English mapmakers of Tyrone 21

Corbridge and Kumar (2002).

26

The state and the poor

Table 1.1 Rent-seeking in the tree trade

Local Sarkar 1

Revenue Dept. (Circle Office) 2

Mukhiya (a)

Clerk (Rs.1,000)

Admin (1,000)

Forest Dept. Territorial wing (Range Office) 3 Range Forest Officer (4,000) (b) Clerk (500)

C.I. (1,000)

B.O. (1,000)

Circle Officer (2,000)

Forest Guard (1,000) Check Posts (500)

Forest Dept. Territorial wing (Superior Office) 4

Police Dept. (Police Station) 5

Other expenses 6

Clerks (4,500)

Officer in Charge (2,000)

Miscellaneous payments (1,500)

Officers (5,000)

Check posts (500)

Daily expense and transport for himself @ 150 × 40 trips (6,000) Transport for verification officers @ 350 × 3 trips (1,050) Contingency/ chai-pani (1,000) Logging and Transport (20,000)

Others (500)

Summary: Estimated Net Receipt from the State Trading Office: Rs. 100,000; Expected Total Expenses: Rs. 54,050; Payment to Owner: Rs. 20,000; Expected Profits for Dalaal: Rs. 25,950 or Rs. 650 per day of labour. Note: the data here are based on the Polus B— case, but the model should not be construed as a direct representation of that encounter; rather, it should be seen as a generic model. This version of the model assumes that the dalaal will log the tree himself and deliver the timber to the FD depot. The costs would be different were he to employ the FD to do the logging. (a) This payment will often be in the form of a political donation or other favour. (b) The Range Officer might use some of this money to procure genuine administrative facilities which are not provided by the bureaucracy because of a lack of funds. Source: Corbridge and Kumar (2002: 778).

Seeing the state

27

District in the northern reaches of Ireland: he was attacked and had his head cut off. The ‘people’ refused to be mapped, at least until they had been beaten into submission.22 Similar acts of refusal have been recorded in India, and in the United States in 2000 the rate of nil returns to the Census mapped out a veritable geography of resistance to the state that peaked in the black inner cities and in various fastnesses of the west and southwest. People were more likely to make themselves known to the Census takers in middle-class suburbs and in the ‘Germanic’ states of the north, including Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Census remains one of the principal conduits of biopolitics in rural areas of India. Men and women experience it very differently, even so, in different parts of the country. In many cases, women do not experience the Census at all, at least not directly. Whether the schedules are administered by local officials, elected representatives or schoolteachers, the identified ‘head of household’ is almost always male. Women experience the state through the stories of their husbands or male relatives. The state’s preference for dealing with poorer people on the basis of defined households leads to similar maps of inclusion and exclusion when the flows of information are circular. As we report in chapters 3 and 4, some women in our field sites were in possession of cards that confirmed their eligibility for work under the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS). Others had certificates confirming their status as members of the Scheduled Castes or Tribes. These cards or certificates, however, are usually made available by the state only after it has first collected information from ‘the household unit’. EAS cards, for example, are supposed to be allocated to members of ‘registered labouring households’, and it is households that are defined as Below Poverty Line (BPL) on the basis of periodic forays into the countryside by government officers.23 On other occasions the flow of information will be from ‘the state’ to ‘the population’, but here too we need to be alert to the modalities of the exchange. We also need to pay attention to the way that information is received, translated and understood. John Reid’s Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Ranchi, 1902–1910, published by the colonial state in 1912, noted in passing that ‘forest offences’ were to be policed according to an edict which proclaimed that ‘sakhua [sal, or shorea robusta] trees could not be felled if they were of a girth of twenty-seven inches or more at a height three feet from the ground’ (Government of Bihar and Orissa 1912: 129). This information was duly 22 23

O’Tuathail (1996: 1). The military or expeditionary metaphor is overstated, of course, but not without resonance: see Driver (2000) for an interesting discussion of this sort of ‘geography militant’.

28

The state and the poor

gazetted, in English. Even where the information was passed to local Mundas or Mankis in Hindi, Mundari or Nagpuri, one might doubt that a reference to twenty-seven inches meant a great deal. Villagers and forest guards would need to translate this command into local conceptions of girth, and in the process a space might open up for misunderstandings or police actions. (Recorded forest offences in the Chaibasa and Kolhan reserves, a little further south, peaked significantly in the years 1912/13 to 1915/16.)24 The edict on sakhua fellings is an example of an indirect flow of information from the state to the population. Most of the villagers who needed to know the new rule would probably never be aware of it. The state made no effort to contact households or individuals directly. Matters are clearly very different when the state provides information on crop prices to farmers across the airwaves, or when it posts bills outside the Block Development Office, or in villages or tolas (hamlets). The experiences that men and women form of the state will be significantly different in each of these instances, but in each case the medium of exchange allows for a more direct sighting (or ‘sounding’) of the state. In those parts of rural India where even poorer families now have access to TV sets, perhaps powered by a car battery where there is no electricity supply, the possibility also exists for what Rajagopal has called, in the context of the screenings of the Ramayan by Doordarshan that began in 1987, a collective libidinal experience.25 This mode of experiencing the state reaches back to conversations that people might have on the basis of shared readings of a newspaper. Whether it also anticipates those sightings of the state that might be provided by Internet access – along the lines perhaps of the panchayat-level computer booths that have been promised in Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh – is a moot point. Much will depend on who accesses the booths, and how they share their experiences. If members of the rural poor do gain access to computer booths, will they mainly be younger males? And what consequences might this have for information retrieval, circulation and even use? It is likely that the Internet will change poorer people’s experiences of and reactions to the state, just as new technologies have done previously. Chapter 7 will discuss the accountability campaigns waged by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS) in Rajasthan, where social activists have put pressure on local government officials to place more of their budgetary information in the public domain. If villagers can see how ‘their’ (the public’s) money is being spent, and on what, they can more easily challenge ‘unfair’ patterns of government funding. To this 24

Corbridge (1993a: 141).

25

Rajagopal (1994: 1662).

Seeing the state

29

end the MKSS has committed considerable resources to the purchase of photocopiers. Photocopying allows for a sighting of the state that is continuous and more or less permanent. The retrieval of information about the state does not depend on impromptu conversations, or the memories of one or two individuals who have coaxed information from government officials. Memory is provided as paper copy and provides the basis, in this case, for challenges to the state that make use of the state’s own data. The Internet, in principle, should allow for more of the same, particularly where Internet access is connected to a printer. It should also allow for more immediate responses to the state. These responses might take the form of complaints under a citizen’s charter. They might also extend to alternative websites that seek to name and shame allegedly corrupt public servants. Here, of course, we rub shoulders with the populist rhetoric of some politicians and activists. Notwithstanding the potential for empowerment that the Internet might one day offer, it is important to insist that Internet access in India will remain uneven for years to come, and that Internet usage is rarely the unmediated activity that some of its proponents believe it to be. People’s use of the Internet will continue to be shaped by the information they receive from other sources. If we want to understand what is happening in rural India we will need to couple an understanding of information flows to an understanding of flows of people. This is true in at least three respects. Strong states are defined by their ability to set and police their boundaries. Citizens see the state through a system of passports and visas, and with regard to the state officials that monitor their movements. It might be thought that these geographies are at some remove from the life-worlds of poorer men and women in rural India, and very often this will be the case. In one of our field sites, however, in Old Malda district, West Bengal, which is close to the border with Bangladesh, the Border Security Force looms large in local imaginaries of the state. We can presume, too, that the state’s ability to command movement would have impressed itself on those thousands of men and women from Chota Nagpur who were shipped to the tea-gardens of Assam at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The mass of the population also experiences the state at ‘home’. To put it another way, the citizenry sees the state not just in terms of flows of power, money, commodities or information, but also in terms of the circulation into their domains of the men and women who represent (or who can be made to represent) the state. When we talk about seeing the state we need to press closely on whether and how certain individuals are considered to be state employees (teachers, for example). We also need to have regard for the career tracks of government servants. Some will be peripatetic and highly trained, like Indian Administrative Service

30

The state and the poor

officers. Others will not be. Assistant engineers or accountants in a Block Development Office in Bihar might remain there for many years. Most of them will have learned their jobs by shadowing others or simply by ‘doing it’.26 Local people can be expected to form their accounts of the state with regard to their encounters with these and other differently placed public officials. They will also see the state, finally, through the movements and activities of local fixers and political leaders. We shall have more to say on this later on. For the moment we should note that more and more of these leaders will be women and members of the Backward and Scheduled Caste populations. Legislation to ensure the reservation of seats in the various tiers of India’s polity is working to promote a different composition of the ‘political state’. Poorer men and women can expect to have exchanges with politicians and government servants from more diverse social backgrounds. How these exchanges are staged, however, can matter as much as the exchanges themselves, and can tell us a great deal about people’s perceptions of the state (both as ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’). How and where? The performativity of government business and politics is not a secondary matter when it comes to considering how people see the state. Consider the provisions attached to the receipt of ‘workfare’ benefits in some jurisdictions in California. Women seeking benefits in Riverside are required to turn up to interviews with service providers not just at the appointed time, but according to an approved code of dress and presentation of the self. According to Jamie Peck’s description, the woman must not wear excessive make-up. Her hair must be tied behind her head. Her fingernails must be clean. She must not wear a short skirt or spandex pants, or jeans, shorts or tennis shoes. She must not chew gum. And she must agree in principle to take a urine test for signs of ‘drug use’ (Peck 2001: 176). Peck doesn’t tell us whether the supervisor is also required to dress in a particular fashion, be it lounge suit, smart-casual or uniform. But his basic point is well made: the local state in Riverside is using its command over money to exert fierce control over the body corporeal. Of course, not all exchanges between states and poorer people will follow this model. 26

Karen Coelho also refers to engineers in Chennai’s ‘Metrowater’ who learn the job ‘on the ground’ (2004: 6). We came across this excellent paper as we were preparing the final version of our book. We are grateful to Lalli Metsola for drawing it to our attention. See also chapter 5 for further discussion.

Seeing the state

31

There will be times when the state is meant to respond to the instructions of a beneficiary population.27 We see this very clearly in part II when we come to a discussion of the Employment Assurance Scheme in eastern India. EAS legislation is written in such a way that members of registered labouring households are able to demand employment from local government officials. Village-level meetings should also be held to select the agents who will execute approved projects. The state is then to be informed of the decision. The point we wish to make here, however, is a slightly broader one about the staging of state–poor encounters. Dress codes can matter. The wording of exchanges certainly matters. Who gets to speak when and in what tones? It might also matter where the business of state is staged. Is it always in a government office, as we might expect it to be in those countries that have developed ‘scientific’ forms of government? How might people see the state if the distinction between ‘home and work’ is blurred? How, too, might officers of the state see their own buildings, in terms, for example, of the circulation of files, or the reproduction and government of hierarchical relations between staff members? And how might these sightings affect the way that government business is carried out? We will deal with some of these questions in chapters 3–6. As we said before, the devil is in the detail. But one way to sharpen the narrative is to think about something as humdrum as the queue, or what Americans call waiting in line. More even than the question of dress and self-presentation, the causes and significance of queueing (and queuejumping) are hugely neglected in the social science literature, and yet they have a great deal to tell us about how social encounters are structured.28 Consider, for example, how men might wait their turn to jump into the barber’s chair in London or New Delhi on a Saturday morning. On such occasions, queues express not only the scarcity of a resource (in this case, of barbers to customers), but also an ideology of equality, albeit one that is mediated by a shared capacity to buy a common good in the 27

28

There is some evidence, too, that government agencies and officials have increasingly to respond to complaints from ‘the public’, especially in urban areas (including urban ‘slums’) where there are now well-defined expectations that water and electricity, for example, should be provided by ‘the state’. The fact that these expectations are often frustrated – not least because of plans to charge ‘customers’ for privately provided services – leads to intense struggles in political society and around the meanings and sightings of ‘the state’. At the same time, a culture of complaint points in the direction of the more active ‘citizens’ that government reformers have been calling for. More research is needed on the making of complaints by different individuals and social groups, and on the ways these complaints are handled (accepted, avoided, resisted, deflected) by ‘public servants’. Coelho (2004) provides important pointers. See also chapters 5 and 7. For a preliminary discussion, see Corbridge (2004).

32

The state and the poor

private sector.29 If someone mistakes his turn in the queue by one place, he will be let off with a humorous rebuke. But if someone tries to jump the queue openly, and by two or more places, he would most likely be asked ‘who do you think you are?’ His behaviour would have breached a form of governmentality (the self-regulation of conduct) that marks out all customers as equals. In many other settings civility will go out of the window, and not just in New Delhi. Take a trip to any railway station in London during rush-hour and you will see middle-aged Englishmen barging women and more elderly people out of their way to secure a seat that they know instinctively they are ‘not in line for’. But if claims about English civility need to be taken with a pinch of salt, it might still be argued that the English have a respect for queues that is not often to be found it Italy, say, or Miami, and which is rarely to be seen when men and women from poorer communities try to ‘meet the state’ in eastern India. A sense that might is right is far more common, and is regularly on show in and around state buildings in rural eastern India. We learn a lot about the state, about how it works and is seen by different people, by attending to the patterns of spatial–temporal behaviour that men and women engage in to make contact with sarkar, and to conduct their business with it. How many times does a person have to turn up at the Block Development Office to see the BDO or a Junior Engineer? How long does he or she have to wait on any given occasion? How often do they observe others getting ahead of them? How do they respond to this? How are they treated when they meet an official of the state? How are they addressed? How is their use of time acknowledged or respected? Which rooms are they allowed in? Are they allowed in as ‘citizens’, or must contacts be forged by a broker? Are they seen as a nuisance or member of a ‘troublesome’ social group? How do officials deal with one another, or with the brokers and politicians who might exert pressures upon them? These are some of the questions that need to be asked when we talk about seeing the state. They can be added to questions we raised earlier about dress, language and the presentation of the self, all of which are highly gendered. But there is also the matter of the geography of the state ‘itself’ (as opposed to patterns of access to it). Later in this book we will comment on the layout and repair of government buildings, and on the passing of files between government servants. If we want to engage debates about the capacity of the state, or state failure, it helps to have in 29

Marx once described money as a great cynic and leveller, and what we observe here is an effect of the equality that money in one sense confers.

Seeing the state

33

mind a sense of the physicality of the state and its resources. But there is a prior question here as well. Just where does the state begin and end? How should we think about the state–society distinction where a significant amount of state business is transacted on the verandah of a government officer’s private residence? More to the point, how do different groups of people in rural India make sense of these entangled geographies? Raising these questions brings us face to face with a growing literature on the anthropology of the everyday state and society in India, and with questions about how ‘the state’ is seen by those who are in its employ. It also raises questions about the territoriality of the state and the politics of scarcity. State and society: embeddedness, scarcity and territoriality In some parts of Africa we might want to make sense of a raucous geography of queuing in terms of a model of the absolute scarcity of the state. In his controversial account of states and power in Africa, Jeffrey Herbst argues that the failure of many regimes in the region is to be found in that peculiar combination of circumstances which brought localized polities to power at a time when the international community insisted on dealing only with ‘nation-states’.30 The leaders of these polities were able to use foreign aid to strengthen their control over the focal points of their newly independent countries, but they were sometimes unable to extend their control of territory much beyond the capital city and its environs. The low population densities of rural Africa also conspired against the efforts of some regimes to impose a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within a given parcel of territory. In India, however, notwithstanding prolonged military incursions in the northeast and Kashmir, what might be called the scarcity of the state is best understood in relative terms. Although we shall meet severe cases of state depletion in parts of Bhojpur District, Bihar (a Naxalite heartland), or in Malda District, West Bengal, for the most part the developmental state is well entrenched and is underpinned by the All-India Services and by the far greater number of men and women working for their state equivalents (the Bihar Administrative Service, for example). In part this reflects the legacy of European colonialism in India, but it also reflects the considerable efforts at nation-building by Sardar Patel at the time of Independence and by Nehru in the 1950s. India was made to hang together.31 30

Herbst (2000).

31

Corbridge and Harriss (2000: chapter 3).

34

The state and the poor

The relative scarcity of the state in India has generally been approached in terms of large-scale models of the contradictions of India’s political economy. In the work both of Pranab Bardhan, and Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, the state in India is said to have been captured by various demand groups, including organized labour, well-paid bureaucrats, and bullock capitalists/richer farmers.32 It is then unable to prosecute the politics of command that has characterized the developmental states of Southeast and East Asia. At its best, the state in India comes to be defined by those far-reaching mammaries of welfarism that have been satirized by novelists like Upamanyu Chatterjee and Siddhartha Deb.33 The state confers the blessings of consumption upon those who are able to access and milk it. At its worst, the state simply fails to work. Unable to raise taxes from those who should be required to pay them, elements within the federal state turn instead to deficit financing or fail to pay several thousands of people who are in their employ. By mid-2003, many employees of the State Road Transport Corporation in Bihar had received less than fifteen days’ salary since 1994. Small wonder, then, that state officials fail to show up for work, or make their incomes by selling their services to those who can pay. The privatization of the state has probably gone further in Bihar than in any state in India, but not for the reasons announced by economics textbooks. People are bypassing the state because it is unable to deliver the supplies of water, electricity or security that they need, and many officials are making their incomes by providing these services by other means. The absent teacher who provides private tuition is one case in point. The looting of the state’s supplies of medicines is another. As Krishna Ananth reports, ‘Medicine packs bearing marks indicating that they are supplies to the Health Department are available for sale with chemists in Patna and elsewhere in Bihar’ (Ananth 2003: 13). Examples such as these can be multiplied across India, and point us towards a body of literature that is consistent with the models of political economy but which is more directly concerned with sightings of the state by government officials themselves. This tradition of writing reaches back at least as far as F. G. Bailey’s work on the local state in Orissa. On the basis of prolonged fieldwork in the Kondmals, Bailey was able to identify the roles played by richer peasants and village faction leaders in bridging the worlds of the state and the locality. Although most villagers preferred to keep the state at a distance, there was by the 1950s a general appreciation that this was not always possible, and that the village should make efforts to draw down state funds for a local school or post office. Perhaps more 32 33

Bardhan (1984); Rudolph and Rudolph (1987). Chatterjee (2003); Deb (2003).

Seeing the state

35

pertinently, however, Bailey observed that, ‘the link between Bisipara [his research village] and the Administration is the single thread of imperium. No-one in Bisipara is mother’s brother to the Deputy Commissioner. The social roles of the administrators and the men of the village do not overlap. Even caste is irrelevant’ (Bailey 1957: 248). He continues: The division persists inside the Administration, as one would expect, since the Administration is an organization and not a community. Those who are recruited locally as policemen or messengers remain members of their village communities and retain the outlook of a villager. Their attitude to the government (Sircar) is fundamentally the same as that of the ordinary cultivator. Their loyalty remains with the village, and this applies even to the headmen . . . There is, in fact, a parody of the four castes of Hinduism. In this parody there is the Gazetted Officer caste, the Non-Gazetted Officer caste, the Babu (clerk) caste, and the rest, comprising the menials in the Administration and the villagers. In the Kondmals they do not inter-dine and they do not intermarry, and it is very hard to get from one class to the next above. There is only one [local-born] Gazetted Officer and [he, a university graduate] is something of an outsider, since his grandfather, a Christian, came to the Kondmals in the service of the Administration. (Bailey 1957: 248–9; emphases in the original)

Although Bailey plays down the importance of caste, it is clear that his account of the relative scarcity of the state has much in common with a more recent literature on state–society interactions. This is so both in terms of the territoriality of the state and what Benedict Anderson has called a sense of the ‘imagined community’.34 One of the great conceits of government is the suggestion that the writ of London or New Delhi or Islamabad reaches without interruption from the commanding heights of the state through the agency’s central offices and dispersed field offices to the trenches that are at the bottom of the state hierarchy.35 But this will only rarely be the case. Far more often, the men and women who populate state agencies are mindful not only of the rulebook and their supervisors, but also of their need to live and work with their peers and with those they are meant to serve, as well as with their representatives. The forest guard to whom we alluded earlier might well be charged with responsibilities for forest management, and might indeed have coercive powers that he (or more occasionally she) can bring to bear on villagers. But the beat officer also has to live locally, and to this end he needs to develop the skills of a street-level bureaucrat. Failure to do so, as Vasan explains, can result in any number of difficulties, from problems in finding food or accommodation to the risk of attack in the depths of a forest.36 The forest guard thus comes to see the state as a complex organization 34 36

35 The phrasing here is after Migdal (2001: 118–21). Anderson (1983). Vasan (2002). See also Lipsky (1980) on street-level bureaucrats.

36

The state and the poor

buffeted by contending social forces. This sighting conditions the way that he deals with his charges, and with how they in turn come to see the state. The relative scarcity of the state, however, is not simply a matter of local resistance to its attempts to put down roots that are independent of political society. According to Sudipta Kaviraj and Partha Chatterjee, the workings of the local state must also be understood in terms of a model of embeddedness that highlights a sharp disjuncture between elite and vernacular understandings of the state-idea. Their analysis takes on a Marxian hue that we don’t find in Bailey, drawing as it does on Gramsci’s ideas about ‘passive revolution’. Kaviraj and Chatterjee maintain that the weakness of the bourgeoisie in India at Independence was sufficiently profound that it had to seek the capitalist transformation of the country with the help of a rising rich peasantry and a supposedly progressive state. The vehicle for this model of structural transformation was the Planning Commission, and the idea was circulated that citizens should ‘Place [their] prayers at the feet of the sarkar, the omnipotent and supremely enlightened state, [where they would] be duly passed on to the body of experts who [were] planning for the overall progress of the country’ (Chatterjee 1986: 160). The problem was that most ordinary Indians refused to play the game. Not only was their experience of government very different – sarkar being resented where it was not seen as a source of immediate funds or as a site for venality or of the absurd – but they had few expectations that it should behave in this ‘modern’ fashion. Kaviraj maintains that the upper echelon of the state-bureaucratic agency was infused with a colonial mentality that separated it from the life-worlds of the social majorities and the state’s own lower-level officials. The failure of the state to secure its stated outcomes was not simply a matter of resource scarcities, at least in a pecuniary sense; it also reflected the fact that the state ‘had feet of vernacular clay’ (Kaviraj 1984: 227). The English-speaking elites who formed the shock troops of the Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian states found their mandates being ‘reinterpreted beyond recognition’ by the ordinary Indians who worked ‘very low down in the bureaucracy’ (Kaviraj 1991: 91). A large number of these men and women, Kaviraj suggests, would no more have thought outside the cellular structures of Indian social life – a life structured by family, kin, caste and community – than they would have conceived of their bosses as superiors only in terms of their position in a graduating batch or the government Gazette. As Satish Saberwal further observes, state institutions such as the courts and bureaucracies have not had the ‘normative support necessary for their reliable, effective functioning’ because their western logic ‘does not command much of either

Seeing the state

37

understanding or respect on the ground’ (Saberwal 1996: 150; quoted and discussed in Fuller and Harriss 2001: 9). To the extent that the life-worlds of the superior and the subaltern do depart in this manner it is vital that research pays close attention to the language and staging of state–society interactions. The relative scarcity of the state might have as much to do with (mis)understandings as with the distribution of resources, even allowing that the two spheres will be closely linked. But there is a further sense in which the seemingly unequal and sometimes humiliating encounters between citizens and state officials, or between officers within the state, are shaped by the production of ‘scarcity’, and this has to do with politics. F. G. Bailey recognized this, of course. His work is closely attentive to the ways in which members of the Congress Party articulated the exchanges that bound the Kondmals of western Orissa to a ‘state’ – and did so in a manner that did justice to each side’s needs and expectations. But it is only in the more explicitly pluralist work of Myron Weiner, or of later writers like the Rudolphs (or, indeed, Chatterjee and Kaviraj), that one finds an account of the politics of scarcity that is sensitive to the effects on the state of the mobilization of ascriptive identities.37 Perhaps the signal virtue of this body of work is that it links the study of political economy to that of identity politics. Weiner’s work also triggered a greater realization that the bottlenecks that produced so much uncivil behaviour in or around government offices was the result of scarcities produced by an inefficient economy and an overdeveloped polity. The weakness of the private sector in India propelled the country’s new citizens towards sarkar for all manner of benefits and safeguards that the state could not meet in full or even in large part, and which perhaps no state could ever meet. Politics then degenerated into a form of competitive populism that pushed voters to seek the support of those politicians who could best deliver the resources which the state was meant to disburse objectively and without partiality. What Bailey later called ‘the civility of indifference’ gave way to forms of behaviour characterized by rudeness, shoving and a heightened sensitivity to group differences.38 Weiner’s argument has recently been extended by Kanchan Chandra, and with considerable ethnographic acuity. In contradistinction to Bailey’s earlier argument about the irrelevance of caste, Chandra’s work in Uttar Pradesh shows how the mobilization of horizontal ‘ethnic’ groupings like the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or the Scheduled Castes has been the most important vehicle for the capture and reworking of the 37 38

Weiner (1962); Rudolph and Rudolph (1967). See Bailey (1996); see also Weiner and Katzenstein (1981).

38

The state and the poor

state at Block, District and even State levels.39 The extension of quotas to the OBCs in the 1990s has given further impetus to the development of a ‘patronage democracy’ in which access to state resources is fiercely controlled by ruling-group politicians acting in a discretionary manner. The difference now is that numbers are counting, and the Forward Castes in north India are losing out, or are required to make new alliances. In Mayawati’s Uttar Pradesh, or in Laloo Yadav’s Bihar, this argument further suggests, more and more citizens are forced to pay homage to their MPs or MLAs, or indeed to the highest-ranking politicians in the state, if they want to secure even the most meagre benefit. The perversity of these arrangements can be so great that Laloo Yadav might seek to run down the system of public health-care in Bihar in order that he or his acolytes can provide scarce hospital beds for their supporters. In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh the chief minister can insist that village leaders approach her (or him) directly if they want a new handpump to be constructed. The queueing behaviour that we began to sketch out earlier is then produced by this deepening politics of scarcity, and not simply as result of cultural understandings about hierarchy or equality. Just as importantly, the pressures upon politicians to contest elections on a regular basis are so strong that pressures are in turn brought to bear on state officials from the trenches all the way up to the commanding heights of the Secretariat. The power of politicians to transfer government officers is just one indication of the three-sided relationships that hold between elected representatives, citizens and public officials. If we are to understand how the state works, and how it presents itself to various groups within the rural poor, we need to understand that the rulebook and the training academies at Dehra Dun are just one source of its selfunderstandings.40 If the argument of this section is right, sightings of and within the state take shape within regimes of relative scarcity that are produced in three dimensions: by the uncertainties of understanding and translation that structure exchanges between elite and vernacular groups; by the inefficiencies of India’s public sector (with its tendencies both to rent-seeking behaviour and real capacity constraints: see chapter 5); and by the pressures that are brought to bear on government officials by ‘ethnic’ and other interest groups and their political representatives and antagonists. 39 40

Chandra (2004). At the time of writing this book was unavailable to us, but we believe that we are correctly summarizing one of its major arguments. Albeit, these are powerful sources for the self-understandings of all-India officials, as we confirm in chapter 5. The culture of ‘batchmates’ and ‘seniors/subordinates’ is not to be underestimated: see Potter (1996).

Seeing the state

39

Mending the state? Views from outside It would be wrong to suggest that the relative scarcity of the state that we find in some parts of Bihar or West Bengal is replicated in the same degree across India. We shall comment in part III on recent experiments with decentralization in states including Kerala and Madhya Pradesh. At the same time, however, we need to pause before dismissing out of hand Vijay Nambisan’s suggestion that Bihar is showing the rest of India its political future.41 Barbara Harriss-White’s corruscating analysis of society and economy in Tamil Nadu confirms that the criminalization of politics is well established in parts of South India, where ‘The State is [also] used by the intermediate classes for accumulation rather than for legitimation’ (Harriss-White 2003: 47). In her view, this large grouping of self-employed business people and surplus-producing farmers depends for its survival on the continued production of state subsidies for water and electricity (most notably) and state restrictions on competitive market structures. These classes thus define themselves against big business and economic liberalization, on the one hand, and against smallholders, the landless and the working class, on the other. In Tamil Nadu they also engage in precisely those social practices that we have come to associate with Bihar or UP: economic misdemeanours of all sorts (including adulteration, arbitrary deductions, tampering with weights and measures); economic crimes such as theft, fraud and unlicensed activity (including the tapping of electricity and TV cables); ‘mafianization’, or the pursuit of organized crime based on the privatization of physical security measures (usually with the direct or indirect involvement of MPs and MLAs); tax evasion on a dramatic scale; and the continual oppression of labour through low wage rates, causalization of contracts, the use of child labour, and the watering down of health and safety regimes.42 Harriss-White has no truck with the idea that liberalization is the solution to the problems of the state and politics in India. In her view, the continuing de facto privatization of the state in Tamil Nadu has been enhanced by the doctrines of economic liberalism, which have only worsened a more fundamental problem of state depletion (what we have called the production of the relative scarcity of functioning state institutions). For our purposes, however, it matters rather more that the state in India is now being produced amid a competing set of discourses which challenge many previous assumptions about the ways that ordinary people should 41 42

‘Bihar is developing into one of the political possibilities open to democracy which increasingly looks like coming to fruition’, Nambisan (2000: 8). This listing after Harriss White (2003: 64).

40

The state and the poor

be asked to encounter the state. Some of these discourses propose only minor changes to the existing optic, as when parts of the organized labour movement seek a divorce between the trade unions and the political parties that have traditionally held them captive. On other occasions we can detect a more determined tack away from ‘the state’ in favour of ‘the market’ or ‘the people’ (or even both), and since we shall meet these ideas later in the book it makes sense to introduce them here. These ideas are important because they help to define the sightings of the state that are made by many of the people described within them. Exit, Voice and Loyalty We can usefully begin by revisiting a famous book by Albert Hirschman, a scholar whose work defies crude attempts to pigeon-hole the discourses of development studies in terms of Left and Right. Hirschman’s account of Exit, Voice and Loyalty was first published in 1970 and returned him to problems he had encountered previously in the Nigerian railway system.43 What interested Hirschman was the fact that the Nigerian Railway Corporation performed so badly even though it was faced with competition from long-distance road haulage companies. In his view, this paradox was explicable only in terms of the peculiar combination of exit and voice that he found in Nigeria: ‘exit did not have its usual attention-focusing effect because the loss of revenue was not a matter of gravity for management [which could dip into the public treasury in times of deficit], while voice was not aroused and therefore the potentially most vocal customers were the first ones to abandon the railroads for the trucks’ (Hirschman 1970: 45). Nigerians were then saddled with an inefficient and oversubsidized public railway system, and an arena of exchanges between officialdom and ordinary citizens which encouraged ‘an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy’ (Hirschman 1970: 59). The endless delays that railway users encountered, which began with long and perhaps unruly queues to get tickets in the first place, was caused, finally, by a ‘combination of exit and voice [that] was particularly noxious’ (Hirschman 1970: 45) and which made recovery unlikely. In less subtle hands than Hirschman’s this combination of exit and voice considerations is reduced to one or the other, with little attention being given to the ways in which the two can be combined to promote loyalty. For many neoliberals the overriding concern has been to secure a rolling back of the state in the developing world. The failure of the 43

Hirschman (1967).

Seeing the state

41

state is here diagnosed in terms of an excess of rent-seeking behaviour by public officials, and an absence of effective competition from or within the private sector. Ordinary people are bound to confront the state as a site of inefficiency and corruption as long as they are unable to exit from it. The promotion of quotas or affirmative action is precisely the wrong way to empower poorer people, for it further protects state agencies from effective and generalized public scrutiny. What starts as a system of compensatory discrimination designed to bring beneficiary populations up to the level of the average in ten or twenty years, is extended ad nauseam by the ‘creamy layers’ of the special interest groups that are thereby produced. What is required instead is the concerted promotion of employment opportunities in the private sector, and to this end a responsible state must first put in place responsible fiscal, monetary and foreign trade policies. Empowerment, in this discourse, need not begin in ‘the locality’ or with policies that are directly focused on the poor (in the sense of classic poverty-alleviation schemes). The geography of empowerment rather begins at the international and national levels with the prosecution of economic reforms. Disempowerment is a result of economic distortions, or distortions of an economic regime that would secure the maximization of individual utilities through unfettered markets. At its crudest, a discourse of economic liberalism encourages a view of the state as a dead weight, or, worse, as the promoter of economic unreason, special interests and the continued impoverishment of the masses. Evan Osborne draws on this line of reasoning when he declares that government-dispensed rents of the order of 30–45 per cent of national income are channelled through India’s reservations system and account for the ‘inevitable Balkanization of Indian politics’ (Osborne 2001: 679). In this specific respect his analysis comes close to that of Kanchan Chandra, but it is not clear from Osborne’s paper that he accepts Chandra’s suggestion that the continuation of the reservations system will empower (give voice to) a widening circle of ethnic groups in a second-best world of limited privatization. In any case, there is now growing recognition within the neoliberal camp that markets cannot be promoted in the absence of effective structures of governance. This moment of recognition falls short of Karl Polanyi’s insights about the institutional, and thus irreducibly social, nature of real markets, but it has encouraged the World Bank, especially, to discount its earlier support for shock therapy in favour of sequenced economic reform initiatives that pay at least some attention to the political conditions and consequences of liberalization.44 It has also encouraged the World Bank to fund surveys of public officials, as it 44

Polanyi (2001 [1944]); see also Platteau (1994). See also World Bank (2001).

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The state and the poor

has done in Uttar Pradesh, in an attempt to see rather better how and why those officials might be persuaded to serve their ‘clients’ in a more transparent manner. Accountability, participation and decentralization Whether or not the World Bank will get its way on public service reforms in India is a moot point. Central government has long since declared its support for a gradual package of economic reforms, and if Barbara Harriss-White is right it will be the vested interests of India’s intermediate classes, as much as the compulsions of ‘centrist’ politics, that will push the state to continue with a process of economic reforms that is distinguished by its partiality and uneven tempo. What is more certain is that the World Bank’s strictures on good governance have been mimicked, joined, critiqued and rejected by a range of non-state actors (including opposition parties) that look at the problems of poverty alleviation and empowerment from a more heterodox stance. What then obtains is a continuum of reform proposals or political initiatives that begin on ‘the Right’ and which work their way round to the point where ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are almost joined. Support for a strong exit option is only the most obvious expression of this tendency. Although post-developmentalism shares little in common with the Washington Consensus, the former favouring community where the latter favours markets, there is a strong measure of agreement in their shared disdain for dirigisme, or the idea that states can directly empower poorer people. In both cases, an agenda of state reform is viewed with deep suspicion.45 The anti-state agendas of the radical post-Left have undoubtedly coloured the perceptions of the state of at least some villagers in areas like Uttaranchal (the Chipko movements), the Narmada valley (the antidams struggles), and in and around firing ranges in Orissa or Jharkhand (including those at Balaipal and Neterhat).46 We can assume, too, that some parts of this discourse will have played well in those areas where people have long expressed a strong distaste for outsiders, or where dalits and adivasis have been mobilized by Naxalite groups. The front cover of Ashis Nandy’s recent book, The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics, features a photograph by Krishna Murari Kishan which depicts a muscular village labourer being beaten by four policeman, one of whom stands poised to bring down his rifle on the man’s head or shoulders. For Nandy, the state is an originary source of violence, and in his 45 46

See Corbridge (1998); Kiely (1999) for commentaries. For an overview, see Routledge (2005).

Seeing the state

43

vision of empowerment it must be opposed by a Gandhian moment of recovery of the self. This recovery happens through a process of psychic cleansing which rejects ‘The beautiful prose, the laudable sentiments, and the languages of rationality and science [which] cover up . . . [the] criminal enterprise [which is everywhere built into] state formation and nation-building’ (adapted from Nandy 2003: x). For the most part, however, Left political parties, activists, and NGOs in India have been committed to an ideology of improved service delivery to the poor which makes demands of the state, rather than being straightforwardly against it. In the 1950s and 1960s this agenda was mainly concerned with increasing the share of total state resources that was available for spending on the poor. More recently there has been a concerted effort to bring pressure to bear on the state to make it responsive to the accounts that poorer people offer for their own poverty. It is here that hands are occasionally joined with the World Bank and other development agencies. We see this clearly in the clamorous demands that have been voiced recently for participatory development initiatives.47 Participation can mean different things to different people, as we shall see in part II, and can be more or less intensive.48 It is evident, even so, than an ideology of participatory development sits easily beside demands for the greater voice of men and women in the political process, and in the selection of particular development projects. As we noted previously, the Employment Assurance Scheme is distinctive precisely because it is built around the assumption that registered labourer households should demand employment from the local state when they are in need of work. The EAS also calls for villagers to hold public meetings for the selection of work schemes and executing agents (contractors). In the Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project, meanwhile, a substantial UK-funded aid project in Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal, well-defined groups of poorer men and/or women are required to be formed in order to make demands of Project officers.49 The Project assumes not simply that poorer villagers will learn to deal with one another by forming these groups, but that they will gain bookkeeping and leadership skills and learn to deal with authority figures. The exit strategy of the Project calls for poorer villagers 47 48 49

See our discussion in chapter 4. For a reasonably dispassionate overview, see McGee (2002). Perhaps the most incisive treatment is by Brett (2000). See also Platteau and Abrahams (2002). Kumar and Corbridge (2002). The EIRFP has backing from the Government of India and we come back to it, briefly and as part of a broader discussion of participation, in chapter 4.

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The state and the poor

to strengthen their stocks of linking social capital in order that they can make demands of the state when the aid money dries up.50 What is interesting about these interventions is that they constitute members of the rural poor as individuals who have a right to be treated as equals by the state and Project officials with whom they come into contact. The supposition, indeed, is that it is members of the rural poor who should be dictating to the state, and exercising their statutory rights and preferences. It is this suggestion that apparently stands behind the widow’s claim to her pension as of right, and it is a supposition that is strengthened by linked demands for the greater accountability of public servants. As we said before, the strategy of the MKSS in Rajasthan is to make the state acutely visible to its clients and customers. In this vision, technology (a photocopier, the Internet) can be one means for bringing the citizen and the state into a supposedly unmediated encounter that offers each party an undistorted sighting of the other. Politicians and dalaals are cleared out of the way, and political society is made both more civil and transparent. In another vision the politicians remain in the picture, but they are supposed to be accountable to their electors through the panchayati raj institutions now in place across India. This is the agenda of decentralization, the precise meanings of which will vary sharply from place to place.51 (The levels of decentralized decision-making and revenue control that are to be found in Kerala are only weakly copied in some other states, including in CPI-M-dominated West Bengal.) All of these discourses are intent on changing the conditions under which different groups of poorer people are coming to see the state. Development studies must then be understood not simply as a discipline which looks in upon different societies in the ‘Third World’, or even as the locus of a set of policies which seek to repair the state and ‘civil society’ in some of those countries. Development studies must also be understood as a set of contending discourses which help poorer people to make sense of the state according to different accounts of gender, personal autonomy and the intrinsic worth of individuals. The interventions to which they give rise – including the many ‘failures’ which Ferguson reports, and which we document in part II – become part of the technologies that people make use of to see the state and to make demands of it. They 50

51

Linking social capital refers to the mainly vertical ties that poorer people have with those in positions of power and influence. Bridging social capital refers to the ties between people from different community backgrounds, while bonding social capital refers to the much thicker ties that exist between people in a given family, kin or community group. We comment on these agendas in chapters 5 and 7. We would simply point out here that they make an appeal to an idea of direct or unmediated sight that we find instructive and yet unconvincing.

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are as much constitutive of the process of sighting as they are a set of observations of those sightings. Conclusion We have tried in this chapter to provide a preliminary sketch of some of the issues that are involved in speaking about seeing the state. Sightings are always complex and take shape against the sightings of other individuals, communities and institutions. They also take place over the airwaves and on computer screens, as well as in paper copy, memory, speech and other direct interactions. The issues they engage, moreover, are very often deeply contested, and point in the direction of diverse political agendas. James Scott reminded us in the 1980s that peasants do not usually engage in highly visible or openly rebellious forms of politics. More often, they engage their antagonists by stealth and behind the scenes, mobilizing what he called ‘the weapons of the weak’.52 This is surely what we should expect. It is at one with what we know of rural or agrarian politics in India (allowing for the fact that some exchanges are open and aggressive), and quite consistent with the multiple sightings of the state and other political targets that we have pointed towards here. To better understand how these multiple sightings are staged it is important that we turn our attention to specific localities and forms of encounter. This will be our task in part II, where we will focus in turn on questions of participation, governance and the contours of political society. We will show how recent accounts of the merits of participatory development are beginning to impact on at least some of the encounters that poorer people have with state officials. By the same token, we will maintain that demands for the increased ownership of development by participating poorer men and women itself constitutes a technology of rule (a structuring of state–society relations), and one that is sometimes radically at odds with the ambitions and capabilities of poorer people and state officials alike. A similar argument will be advanced in respect of good governance. Akhil Gupta is right to maintain that ‘the discourse of corruption, by marking those actions that constitute an infringement of [legally defined] rights . . . acts to represent the rights of citizens to themselves’ (Gupta 1995: 389). At the same time, however, as we shall show, the practices of corruption are always complicated by the multiple pressures which bear upon government staff occupying different positions

52

Scott (1985). We cannot say for sure when this phrase was first used, but Gandhi referred to ‘the weapons of the weak’ in Hind Swaraj (1997 [1908]).

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The state and the poor

in a line department, say, or as a result of their links to (or dependence upon) local politicians. Before we turn to this task, however, or to a more general discussion of the politics of state–poor encounters (part III), we want to consider how several key sites for state–poor interactions have been produced by the state itself through its longstanding, variegated, and recently changing ‘war on poverty’. In chapter 2 we consider how different governments and state agencies have sought to define, bound and even invent ‘the poor’ by means of interlocking and sometimes conflicting discourses about depravity, demography, income levels and affirmative action. We also report on how the war on poverty has been waged since the end of the 1960s. At this point, too, we direct attention towards several of the spaces for state–poor interactions that we consider further in part II, and which make particular claims about the importance and merits of good governance and participation. Here, of course, is our link back to the concerns of contemporary development studies, always a focal point for analysis, and to the work of scholars as diverse as Merilee Grindle, Arturo Escobar and Robert Chambers.

2

Technologies of rule and the war on poverty

Introduction In his now-famous account of the making and unmaking of the Third World, Arturo Escobar argues not only that an era of developmentalism was inaugurated by President Truman in his Point Four speech of 29 January 1949, but also that the aid programmes which followed were justified by ‘the discovery of mass poverty’ in the less economically accomplished countries (Escobar 1995: 21). In making these claims Escobar directs us to the production of poverty as part of a wider (geo)political discourse, and this is a central theme of this chapter. The production of poverty as a failing, or as an incomplete set of capabilities, is linked to the production of persons who can be labelled as poor, and who can either be reproached for being the bearers of certain pathologies – the illiterate man who has to be educated, the overly fecund woman whose body has to be disciplined – and/or acclaimed as people who deserve the help of others. Whether or not members of rural society are unaware of their poverty before they are labelled as such by outsiders, as Lakshman Yapa maintains was the case for him, growing up in Sri Lanka, is something we consider later.1 But it is clearly the case that the production of poverty by various government and other agencies creates many of the spaces within which ‘poorer people’ are bound to see ‘the state’. The designation of households in India as Below Poverty Line (BPL) positions them as beneficiaries of developmental programmes which require them to have contact with sarkar. The same might be said of households belonging to the Scheduled Castes, although in this case various agencies of the state are committed to the disappearance of an entire category of persons. Members of the Scheduled Castes are to be lifted out of poverty, and spirited away from their negative social identity as erstwhile Untouchables. Escobar’s work on the production of development and poverty is a useful corrective to accounts that seek to naturalize these social constructions. In this chapter we shall also find it useful to follow Escobar’s 1

Yapa (1996); see also Shrestha (1995) ‘on becoming a development category’.

47

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characterization of the ‘age of development’ in at least one further respect. We accept, that is to say, that an ideology of developmentalism is distinguished by its optimism regarding the malleability of internal and external nature (roughly, ‘human nature’ and the ‘physical environment’). The productions of development and of poverty alleviation that take shape under the Pax Americana are made possible, in part, by an insistence on the potential equality of all human beings, regardless of their geographical location or genetic backgrounds. This is very different from the years between 1860 and 1940, when most western accounts of ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’ were produced within discourses which emphasized the permanent and disabling effects of ‘race’ (social Darwinism, with strong links to the White Man’s Burden, eugenics and even genocide) and geography (‘tropicality’, or environmental determinism).2 The idea of development is predicated on the view that men and women can be created afresh, as modern subjects able to take their place in a world defined in relation to the hyper-modernity of the West, and the United States especially.3 Education and industrialization are obviously central to this endeavour. Escobar and his fellow post-developmentalists are less reliable, however, as guides to the complexities of social thought and action that are to be found within what he calls ‘the discourse of development’ (Escobar 1995: 4). In this book we reject the idea that it is helpful to reduce more than fifty years of governmental interventions in the South to a single technology of rule. Nor do we think it sensible to declare that development has produced only a nightmarish combination of debts, impoverishment and malnutrition (Escobar 1995), or to imply that such anti-poverty schemes as have been tried since 1950 have always been failures, or have been radically at odds with the accounts that poorer people have given of their own difficulties. Poverty is always a social production, but it is nonetheless real in important respects, and is generally described in negative terms by the 2

3

This is not to say that elements of these discourses do not survive, albeit in mutated form. Andrew Kamarck’s book, The Tropics and Economic Development: A Provocative Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations, was published by the World Bank in 1976, but would not have looked out of place sixty years earlier. Work by Jeffrey Sachs and colleagues (2000, 2001), however, on ‘tropicality’, or even by William Easterly (2001) on ‘tropical misadventures’, poses ‘geography’ as a problem, but presents the economy and technology as its redeemers. Sachs’s work is flawed in important respects, but his outlook on environment and development issues is more Promethean than determinist. See also, and more widely, Drayton (2000) and Stepan (2001). On the nineteenth-century origins of some developmental thinking, see Cowen and Shenton’s account of the Doctrines of Development (1996). This book offers an incisive critique of post-developmentalism. Its major weakness is that it does not take seriously enough the challenge posed by modernization theories to biologized accounts of social development. See also Cooper and Packard (1998).

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people trapped in its clutches. We instead take a position that is more in tune with the Foucauldian stance that Escobar wished to adopt. David Lehmann has suggested that Escobar’s work was a ‘missed opportunity’ in terms of applying Foucault’s ideas to the study of development.4 By this he meant that Escobar fails to recognize that development is not a singularity that can reasonably be described with a capital D. It is more instructive to think of ‘developmentalism’ as a set of discourses which can combine various accounts of progress and social transformation with elements of evolutionism and teleology, but which don’t have to make this commitment. To put it another way, it is important to think about developmentalism as a set of discourses that are united in some respects, but which are contending in others: for example, around questions of sustainability, or the proper role of the state in managing industrial development, or the best way to define and measure human well-being. These discourses are not simply the bearers of particular class, sectional or geopolitical interests, although these are important; they are also put into play in relation to discourses about human rights, inter-generational equity, the functioning of markets, the virtues of participating in civil society, and so on. Over time, some of these discourses will gain the upper hand, and will take on the appearance of stability or even inevitability. We saw this during the 1980s when the counter-revolution in development theory and policy gained in strength amidst a more general revival of ideas about free markets and sound money.5 But we also need to bear in mind that an appearance of stability or coherence can be deceptive, and that ideas emerge and contend on a more ad hoc basis. Nikolas Rose has made this point very well in relation to the policies of Britain’s Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s. Although Thatcherism has become known as a form of politics which mixes neoliberalism with social conservatism, it is important to insist that some of the programmes for which it is best known were not ‘realizations of any philosophy, [so much as] contingent lash-ups of thought and action’ (Rose 1999: 27).6 Rose’s point, following Foucault, is that it is more useful to talk about ‘technologies of government [which are] imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events’. Human technologies of government can then be understood ‘as an assemblage of forms of practical knowledge, 4 6

5 Toye (1987). See also Lal (1983) and Stewart (1985). Lehmann (1997). Rose is right in respect of privatization, but it would be a mistake to discount the role of ideas (philosophy), in this case of public choice theory (Buchanan, 1967, 1987), in the production of the community charge/Poll Tax. On Thatcher, see also Hugo Young (1990); on Thatcherism’s edgy combination of ideas about ‘free economies and strong states’, see Andrew Gamble (1988).

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with modes of perception, practices of calculation, vocabulary, types of authority, forms of judgement, architectural forms, human capacities, non-human objects and devices, inscription techniques and so forth, traversed and transected by aspirations to achieve certain outcomes in terms of the conduct of the governed (which also requires certain forms of conduct on the part of those who would govern)’ (Rose 1999: 52, emphasis added). Rose illustrates this argument with reference to Ian Hunter’s work on the emergence of popular schools in European states like Prussia. Hunter is well aware that the government school was promoted ‘as a means of the mass moral training of the population with a view to enhancing the strength and prosperity of the state, and thereby the welfare of the people’ (Hunter 1996: 148–9; quoted in Rose 1999: 53). But the fact that states may have wished to promote the strength of their populations does not ‘mean that they can simply whistle the means of moral training into existence’ (Hunter 1996: 149). The ways in which different systems of schooling were produced in Europe had more to do with a complex ‘series of exchanges and trade-offs between the administrative apparatuses of states that were beginning to governmentalize themselves and religious institutions, practices, knowledges and techniques for the spiritual disciplining of souls’ (Rose 1999: 54). (In England and Wales, there were also exchanges with the trade union movement and with ideas emanating from the statistical movement of the late nineteenth century.) In other words, the technology of schooling was ‘not invented ab initio, nor was it implanted through the monotonous implementation of a hegemonic “will to govern”: the technology of schooling – like that of social insurance, child welfare, criminal justice and much more – is hybrid, heterogeneous [and] traversed by a variety of programmatic aspirations and professional obligations’ (Rose 1999: 54). The same might be said of the technologies that have emerged to govern development or the alleviation of poverty. These technologies are not simply the result of a class-based or imperial will to govern, which seems to be the suggestion of some Marxists and many post-developmentalists.7 We need to understand not just why, but also how various agencies of the state in India have produced different groups of the population as ‘poor’, or ‘Backward’, or ‘disadvantaged’, or ‘Scheduled’, and how and why they have proposed to deal with these ‘conditions’. Later in this chapter we will focus on the explosion of anti-poverty schemes that emerged in India in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Far from continuing a common logic of rule, these schemes have embodied very different assumptions about the 7

Which is not to say that power is not linked to interests: we will come back to this in part III.

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capacities of state agencies, the voluntary sector, and poorer individuals, groups and communities. To begin with, however, we focus on the contending and sometimes cohering technologies of rule that have combined to produce different accounts of poverty alleviation in post-Independence India. These technologies have made use of the Census, the National Sample Survey, and forms of calculation designed to produce headcounts of those in ‘absolute poverty’. They have also comprised various discourses about the obligations of a post-colonial state to its ‘ethnic minorities’, as well as those referring to the imperatives of democratization, economic improvement and population biology. Needless to add, these technologies have structured the encounters and sightings that have followed between different poorer persons and their counterparts in ‘the state’. From charity to capabilities The British were certainly aware of the existence of mass poverty in their South Asian colonies, just as they were at home. The authorities in England had been exercised by the question of the relief of the poor since at least the seventeenth century. Malthus wrote memorably on the topic in 1798, and in the nineteenth century his views about the self-cancelling effects of poor relief were confronted by an agenda for social reform that would not have looked out of place in the writings of his principal antagonists, Mister Godwin and Monsieur Condorcet.8 The interventions of Edwin Chadwick, and later Charles Booth and Robert Mayhew, were not based in accounts of ‘the perfectability of man’, but they did focus attention on the threat which the poor posed not only to themselves but to members of the higher social orders.9 The cholera epidemics in London and Liverpool in the 1840s helped to focus the attention of the authorities on the need for better sanitation provision for the labouring poor. In much the same vein, the threat of crime and physical violence, and later of social and political unrest, prompted photographic essays on the slums of Glasgow and expeditions into ‘Unknown England’, as areas including the East End of London were sometimes known.10 It also spurred the beginnings of the social liberalism by means of which reformers like Sidney

8 9

10

Malthus (1970 [1798]). Godwin and Condorcet were celebrants of the French Revolution. See Porter (1999) for a lively review. Susan Chaplin (1999) has written an interesting account of the strategies used by middle-class Indians (use of antibiotics, bottled water, etc.) to insulate themselves from similar threats of contagion in the contemporary era. Keating (1976).

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and Beatrice Webb, Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge hoped to save capitalism from itself.11 At least some of these proposals spilled over to India, where the Webbs were influential in designing a town plan for Tatanagar, and where Keynes was concerned with the currency. The British were also made aware of the condition of the poor by their own instruments of rule and revenue: by the Reports of the Famine Commissioners, for example, or by references to irregularities in the recruitment of free labour to Assam that were written into some reports on Inland Emigration (see chapter 1). The need to hospitalize victims of the plague in the Bombay Presidency in the last years of the nineteenth century also caused the British to reflect on the connections between disease and destitution and apparent threats to the social order.12 But the recognition of mass poverty did not lead inexorably to the promotion of human technologies of government that would seek its abolition, and in this respect Escobar is right to point to a watershed in ‘official’ thinking about poverty since the late 1940s. In her important account of the politics of the urban poor in early twentieth-century India, Nandini Gooptu suggests that a minor key in British anti-poverty discourses was focused on the ways in which poor surroundings and a lack of space produced behavioural traits that were said to be indicative of ‘depravity’. At its best, the social liberalism of the Webbs, or of the town planner Patrick Geddes, resisted the biologized accounts of urban poverty that were common among imperial officers (and some Indian academics too, it has to be said).13 But while Geddes’s proposals for a garden city movement in urban India were consistent with his ‘grand vision of civilisational transition and civic nationalism’ (Gooptu 2001: 83), the reluctance of the British to spend money on proposals that could be represented as ‘radical, a trifle dangerous and impractical’ (Gooptu 2001: 83) ensured that Geddes returned to England a disappointed man. The authorities preferred to think of urban reform in terms of models of confinement and zoning that enjoyed considerable support as well, among the Indian middle classes. The poor were to be kept in their place, and subjected to regular police actions. Away from the city, the British relied more on a model of poverty that placed blame on the ‘ignorance’ of the poor themselves, especially the ‘Untouchables’, and on the ‘backward’ customs of some members of India’s ‘feudal elites’ (and, more rarely, European landowners). Given 11 12 13

See Dahrendorf (1995) and Skidelsky (1992). As discussed by Klein (1973, 1988); Harrison (1990); and Arnold (1993). At its worst the politics of the Webbs was also strongly informed by eugenics.

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that India was produced at the end of economic arrangements that limited the pace of industrialization, it is unsurprising that the British preferred to focus on poverty in the sub-continent as an effect of Indianness itself. Even Max Weber referred to the Hindu’s apparent ‘dread of the magical evil of innovation’.14 The alleviation of poverty was thus confined mainly to famine relief, or to urban-based interventions that mixed a fear of the undisciplined body of the native with a growing emphasis on the virtues of private and/or religious philanthropy. In some cases, too, the apathetic Hindu was urged to reform him- or herself by embracing the more worldly traditions of Christianity, especially in its Protestant incarnations. It was largely in opposition to these approaches that the nationalist movement began to advance its own agendas for dealing with poverty. The drain of wealth theory that Dadabhai Naoroji put forward in the late nineteenth century was a staple part of an account of the impoverishment of the masses that refused to locate the most fundamental causes of poverty within India itself, or at least within an India that could be made to rule itself.15 And later on, of course, in the inter-war period, the need to win votes in municipal elections encouraged many nationalist politicians to make an appeal to ‘the poor’ that ostensibly refused the blandishments of the imperial power. Jawaharlal Nehru clearly had an eye on the broader politics of the nationalist struggle when he told a reporter for The Hindustan Times in October 1920 how much he objected to: The lady who visits the slums occasionally to relieve her conscience by the performance of good and charitable deeds. The less we have of this patronizing and condescending approach to the problem the better . . . . there are large numbers of earnest men and women who devote themselves to the service of their fellow creatures . . . They do good work . . . Yet, it seems to me, that all this good work is largely wasted, because it deals with the surface of the problem only. Social evils have a history and background, roots in our past, and intimate connections with the economic structure under which we live. (Nehru, quoted in Agarwal and Aggrawal 1989: 206)

The fault-line that appears here between surface appearances and their structural determinants is instructive for another reason, too. Nehru imbibed the distinction from the leftist texts he was then reading, but his appeal to root causes was to become a staple of development thinking more broadly. Post-colonial countries of all stripes – capitalist, socialist and ‘mixed’ – were enjoined to throw off the shackles of tradition; whole economies had to be structurally transformed, entire peoples 14

See Inden (1995).

15

Naoroji (1901); see also Dutt (1904).

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subjected to modernization.16 But how, exactly? This was the question that faced India most acutely at the time of the Constituent Assembly Debates (1946–9), and the answers that were mapped out there run counter to much conventional wisdom about the discovery of mass poverty in the 1940s and 1950s. They did so, not least, because they described an agenda for improving the capabilities of poorer men and women that has more in common with Amartya Sen’s approach to ‘development as freedom’ than with less expansive notions about the raising of per capita incomes.17 They also developed an agenda that recognized precisely those community-based rights that are not fully addressed in Sen’s work. Special provisions for the Scheduled Communities helped to ensure that the production of ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’ in independent India would be marked by crosscutting, if sometimes reinforcing, human technologies of government. Provider, protector and promoter Jawaharlal Nehru gave a glimpse of his version of the new agenda for poverty alleviation when he closed the debate on the ‘Resolution of Aims and Objects’ of the Constituent Assembly. He declared that: ‘The first task of this Assembly is to free India through a new constitution, to feed the starving people, and to clothe the naked masses, and to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity’ (Constituent Assembly Debates: 22 January 1947). This is often dismissed as so much cant, on a par perhaps with Truman’s rhetoric two years later, and just as lacking in ‘real’ political content. Ambedkar, after all, who shared with Nehru many of the responsibilities for constructing a new India, would later tell the Assembly that: ‘On 26th January 1950 we are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality . . . In our social and economic life we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man, one value’ (quoted in Khilnani 1997: 35). But we should tread warily before dismissing either Nehru’s intervention, or various constitutional provisions, as mere rhetoric. There were certainly inconsistencies 16

17

The second article to be published in Economic Development and Cultural Change, the first journal of development studies, made this point very clearly. Its author, Morris Watnick, also insisted that the West would have to work hard to displace the appeal of communist strategies for modernization in the Third World. Much like Escobar, he was acutely aware of the geopolitical significance of ‘Truman’s plea for a “bold new program” of technical aid to backward areas’ (1952: 22). Sen (2000).

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in Nehru’s accounts of socialism in India, and all manner of problems in the translation of his ideas into policies for the redistribution of land to the tiller, say, or for the promotion of universal literacy. We must remain alert to the gaps that opened up in Plan promise and performance, or between the rulebooks of the state and the actions of state officials. At the same time, however, we need to take rhetoric seriously, the more so where it is linked in some degree to the promotion of named technologies of rule. The fact that agrarian reforms in India were sabotaged in the 1950s by richer farmers does not gainsay the fact that land reform is a continuing objective of the central government, as stated in successive Five Year Plans, and that the efficiency and equity arguments for agrarian reform remain part of a broader political vocabulary (not least in Bihar). Important laws remain on the statute book, just as they do in regard to encroachments on common property resources. If we return to the Constituent Assembly we see that the state was positioned there as a provider, protector and promoter for groups of people who were still referred to as ‘the masses’ or ‘the millions’. This perspective was restated by the Planning Commission, which declared that the central objective of development in India was, ‘to create conditions in which living standards are reasonably high and all citizens, men and women, have full and equal opportunity for growth and service’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 29). The references here to citizenship, equality and service to the nation were by no means accidental, nor were they without consequence. Nehru had declared at Independence that, ‘The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity’ (quoted in Agarwal and Aggrawal 1989: 241). And now the Planning Commission proposed to add its weight to those provisions which had been written into the Constitution with the stated aim of securing an adequate means of livelihood for all citizens, as well as of the minimization of inequalities of income, status and opportunities, free and compulsory education for all children, improvement of public health, and social justice for the Backward classes. The Commission declared that India’s problems were a legacy of ‘a traditional society and static economy in the past, petrified to some extent by colonial rule’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1961: 1). It was, ‘The evolution of the social structure during centuries of feudalism, in regions which were not then developed by communication, [that had] led to the existence of large communities which suffered handicaps and disabilities imposed by other economically and culturally dominant groups’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 634).

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Poverty was thus defined as a broad-based set of absences, or missing capabilities, that were produced not by ‘the poor’ themselves, but by oppressive social forces (Empire, feudalism, casteism, perhaps even religion) that could quickly be removed. Particularly in the years 1946 to 1956, the war on poverty in India was conceived in terms that proposed a close link between the remaking of India and the making of modern citizens. The promotion of economic growth and of household incomes was one part of this agenda, but it was by no means the major element. To some degree this reflected the weakness of the state’s financial position, and the fact that industrial growth would take some time to promote. But it also spoke to a real concern for social justice and the rights both of individual citizens and of corporate social units. This concern was expressed not simply in legislation to secure the abolition of zamindars, supposedly the main depressors of agricultural productivity in the countryside, but also in a raft of measures designed to address the problems of India’s ‘weaker sections’.18 These initiatives varied significantly between the Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the Scheduled Castes (SCs). The debates of the Constituent Assembly also revealed a division in attitudes to India’s adivasi populations that still continues. The extreme paternalism that has produced the poverty of these people as a product of their location (remoteness), mode of subsistence (forest-dependence) and general ‘primitiveness’ (India’s junglees), has coincided with a penchant for exoticism which has celebrated the ‘genius of the tribal people’ (a favourite phrase of Nehru’s) and their right to be different.19 The Oxford-educated tribal leader from Jharkhand, Jaipal Singh, also claimed that the ‘republican and egalitarian traditions of adivasi society’ could be adopted with profit by caste Hindus.20 These contending discourses have helped shape the particular technologies of rule under which many tribal people meet the state. In addition to the labour and immigration officials who have long rubbed up against populations that were anything but sedentary, the state has presented itself to many adivasis through the slow accumulation of Block Development Officers and District Development Commissioners who staff the Scheduled Areas, and who join the police and forestry services in providing comparatively executive forms of rule. Perhaps most importantly, a significant number of STs have been brought into the state as recipients of reserved seats and jobs. A version of the republican ideals that Singh claimed for tribal India was also deployed on behalf of the Scheduled Castes. Nandini Gooptu writes 18 19 20

Thorner (1956); see also Harriss (1992). Singh (1989); see also Corbridge (1988, 2002a). See Volume IX of the Constituent Assembly Debates: 653–4.

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that ‘a pre-Aryan identity of the untouchables as the original inhabitants – Adi Hindu – of India’ (Gooptu 2001: 144) was constructed in the towns and cities of the United Provinces in the early twentieth century. Elements of this ideology later informed the politics of the Republican Party of India (set up in 1957 after Ambedkar’s death), and the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra. For the most part, however, this construction was rejected by other caste groupings and by the colonial power. The poverty of the ‘Untouchables’ was explained by the British as being a result of their oppression by caste Hindus (hence the Depressed Classes), and by Brahmanic scriptures as a form of punishment. They did not live in particular regions, as seemed to be the case with most tribals, and they generally did not own land. In addition, they were discriminated against in terms of access to places of worship, schooling and even water. It followed that the battle against Untouchability had to be waged in more diverse arenas than would be the case with the ‘tribal problem’. Access to reserved seats and jobs would be common to both enterprises, and would ensure continuing struggles around the designation of different groups as SCs or STs, and the acquisition of pieces of paper to certify group membership. (These struggles would be expanded in the 1990s in the wake of the Mandalization of politics.) Members of the Scheduled Castes, however, would also need to call upon agents of the state – including schoolteachers, health workers, the police and officers of the court – to ensure their access to the public sphere, and to enforce claims on government resources. Whereas members of the Scheduled Tribes were thought to be open to abuse because of their ‘innocence’ (which was a value worth preserving), the poverty of the Scheduled Castes was defined by patterns of social exclusion enforced by others. The one sure way to remove their poverty was to remove the caste system itself: a conclusion, or an ideal, that appealed to Ambedkar as well as to Nehru, albeit in slightly different ways. Gandhi, of course, did not endorse this conclusion. He preferred to look for the erosion of ‘Untouchability’ within India’s villages, perhaps as a result of social welfare efforts that would cut across caste and community boundaries. A thin version of his faith in ‘community welfare’ was later made flesh in the Community Development Programme that was launched in 1952. The First Five Year Plan declared that, ‘In view of the large unutilised and under-utilised resources in the system, schemes for mobilizing local effort for local development have to receive high priority’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 45). Appealing, again, to the idea that poverty in the Indian countryside would be curtailed as soon as various burdens were removed (including rackrenting, caste competition, and colonial taxes), the Planning Commission

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further declared that, ‘It is schemes of this type spread all over the country, more than development projects, which are likely to activate these resources’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 45). Such a view, however, with its touching faith in the ‘cumulative psychological effects’ of inter-caste cooperation (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 45), was set to recede when planners received word that ‘the benefits [of CDP] did not reach the less privileged sections of the village community in adequate measure’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1961: 291), and as soon as funds were in place for a more resolutely ‘industrial’ assault upon the ‘traditional’ structures of rural life. Economy, demography, poverty It is important at this point to note that recession does not mean disappearance. The technologies of government that were put in place to deal with poverty in the 1940s and 1950s have largely survived to the present. The Scheduled Communities have continued to be defined by state legislative bodies, albeit with occasional changes in their numbers, and they have continued to receive ‘special treatment’ under Part XVI of the Constitution of India. The extension in 1969 of the system of reserved jobs to include employment in public sector enterprises marked a significant expansion of the technologies of compensatory discrimination first enacted in 1943 for the SCs, and in 1950 for the STs. These (largely national) technologies of rule have mandated the continued collection of statistics on the populations of the Scheduled Communities, most notably in India’s decadal Censuses.21 The Government of India is also required to receive periodic reports from a Special Officer for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Under Article 338, the Commissioner of Scheduled Castes and Tribes is required to review the standing of the constitutional provisions put in place to ‘safeguard’ the Scheduled Communities, and to report his findings, via the President, to each House of Parliament. The Commissioner is also able to push central government to release grants from the Consolidated Fund of India for the purpose of promoting the welfare of the Scheduled Communities of particular states. These grants would be expected to augment the more general Plan spending on education and health-care which has also threaded its way through the state’s anti-poverty programmes from the 1950s to the present. 21

Instructively, demographic statistics on castes other than the Scheduled Castes were not collected in the Censuses from 1951 to 2001. In the wake of V. P. Singh’s decision to act upon some of the recommendations of the ‘Mandal Commission’ Report (see below), this might soon change; certainly there are pressures in that direction.

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Notwithstanding these continuities, however, there was an observable shift in the way that different agencies within the Government of India began to think about poverty during the period of the Second and Third Five Year Plans (1956–66). In some degree, this involved a narrowing of the definition of poverty. In the First Plan period, especially (1951–6), and to a lesser degree under the Second Five Year Plan, the Planning Commission had proposed that, ‘A comprehensive concept of living standards [should certainly] include the satisfaction of basic needs like food, clothing and shelter’, but linked this ‘as well [to the] normal satisfactions of family life, enjoyment of physical and mental health, opportunities for the expression of skills and recreational abilities, and active and pleasurable social participation’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 613). By the time of the Third Plan, however, the government was insistent that poverty was mainly the result of low productivity and a lack of continuous work. Consistent with its new focus on ‘the economy’ – a form of practical knowledge which must itself be seen as a human technology of government – the Planning Commission urged that there should be additional opportunities for work to ‘enable the lowest income groups to earn enough through productive employment to meet their minimum needs’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1961: 11). The significance of this discursive shift is apparent as soon as we recall the ways in which ‘the economy’ functioned in the rhetoric of the nationalist movements. For most Gandhians, the commitment to industrial modernity that was announced by the Nehru–Mahalanobis model of structural transformation was threatening in itself. Gandhi saw in large-scale industrialization the foundations of the ‘loss of self’ to which true anti-poverty programmes would be opposed. For other wings of the movement, however, whether under Patel, Nehru, Ambedkar, Bose or Savarkar, the weaknesses of India as a nation, and of the individual bodies within it, were straightforwardly a result of the country’s lack of industrial prowess. The ‘economy’ functioned here as an absence, or as a signifier of the fetters which were imposed on the country by systems of imperial preference and agrarian involution. The fact that food production struggled to keep pace with population growth in the years 1900–40 was one vital, and impoverishing, outcome of this system of misrule; another, famously, was the ruination of India’s handicraft industries, and the deliberately stymied growth of its manufacturing industry until at least the 1920s.22 22

For a considered review of the issues, including the onset of some measure of industrial protection in the 1920s, see Tomlinson (1988). See also Blyn (1966).

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This constitution of the economy as an absence also allowed it to function as an extraordinary site of potential enrichment, and this is how it came to be written in the mid-1950s. The economic case for land to the tiller land reforms was now boosted by work which claimed to show an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity.23 Agrarian reform made sense for efficiency reasons, as well as for reasons of social justice. More significantly, perhaps, at least in terms of practical impacts, there was a potent coming together of a number of the ideas that sustained a first generation of development studies: the importance of planning and savings, for example, and of import-substitution industrialization. Indeed, the new orthodoxy came to maintain that, ‘a precipitate transformation of the ownership of productive assets was . . . detrimental to the maximization of production and savings’ (Chakravarty 1987: 10). The economy itself, suitably protected from foreign competition in the short run, would do the job. Unemployment would decline once labouring people were put to work in the consumption-goods industries that would spring up in the wake of the capital-goods-based revolution. Poverty in turn would ebb away in the 1960s, save perhaps in some parts of the countryside. It would affect those people unable or unwilling to find work in the cities, or in the modern sector of the economy.24 This production of the ‘poverty problem’ had significant implications for how poorer people would be defined and presented to different agencies of the state. In geographical terms, there was a palpable shift in public expenditure patterns in favour of the city. There was also a new emphasis on the labour exchange as a site for the collection of statistics about the working and non-working poor, and of encounters between poorer people and sarkar.25 Less obviously, perhaps, there was renewed attention to what the First Five Year Plan had called ‘the pressure of population in India’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 23). In the run-up to Independence most nationalists had been at pains to deny the importance of ‘overpopulation’ as the principal determinant of India’s ‘mass poverty’. Palme Dutt noted in India Today that ‘nine out of ten Western readers, who have not had the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the facts’ were only too happy to jump to Malthusian conclusions about excessive population growth in India (Palme Dutt 1989: 48, quoted in Krishnaji 1998: 385) – even though ‘the facts’ suggested that a much larger population could be fed once all cultivable lands were brought under the plough, and once the zamindari system was abolished. 23 24 25

The best reviews remain those of Thorner (1956) and Harriss (1992). A similar view was expressed by W. A. Lewis in his two-sector model of economic growth: Lewis (1955). For recent work that touches on this subject, see Parry (1999) and Breman (2004).

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Many nationalists did contend, however, that the rate of economic growth could not be maximized in India amid high rates of population growth. Under the Chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru, the National Planning Committee (NPC) of the Indian National Congress concluded in 1935 that, ‘the size of the Indian population is a basic issue in national economic planning, in so far as its unrestricted increase in proportion to means of subsistence adversely affects the standards of living, and tends to defeat many social and ameliorative measures’ (quoted in Krishnaji 1998: 386). Nevertheless, the NPC went on to suggest that: ‘While measures for the improvement of the quality of population and limiting excessive population pressure are necessary, the basic solution lies in the economic progress of the country on a comprehensive and planned basis (quoted in Krishnaji 1998: 386). Growth, in other words, would provide a contraceptive effect of its own, although the state would be required to promote birth control on a voluntary basis. This conclusion neatly anticipated the demographic transition model of the 1940s. In the 1950s, however, the causal relationships assumed to obtain between economic growth and population growth were significantly reversed, in India as in much of the developing world. One of the authors of the demographic transition model, Kingsley Davis, now began to suggest that rapid and excessive population growth in India would produce social conditions favouring the rise of authoritarianism.26 As Simon Sretzer has shown, this fear expressed a deeper unease in the United States about the ‘massing hordes’ in South and East Asia, a fear that would later be exploited by population biologists like Paul Ehrlich in their frankly racist accounts of the ‘population bomb’.27 But causality was also reversed for economic reasons. The new growth models placed a 26

27

Davis (1951). Sretzer makes the important point that the work of the Office of Population Research in Princeton was closely associated with the State Department, and may have come under pressure from that Department to strike a more interventionist note regarding the desirability of ‘speeding up’ the demographic transition in Asia. ‘In the course of late 1948 and 1949 those in the United States still dreaming of a globe emerging from colonial servitude into a regime of liberal democratic free trade were awakening to a nightmare, experiencing a strong sense of loss of control in a dangerous and alien world’ (Sretzer 1993: 676). No less than ‘development studies’, or the mathematization of economics (which Mirowski links to funding from the RAND Corporation and the military in the early 1950s: Mirowski 2002), ‘population science’ was constituted in part as a Cold War technology of government. Sretzer (1993). Ehrlich’s account of The Population Bomb provides a garish rendition of ‘one stinking hot night in Delhi’ when his taxi ride through the dust, noise, heat, and above all people, left him ‘frightened’. Since that night, he continued, ‘I’ve known the feel of overpopulation’ (Ehrlich 1968: 15). His failure to note that he might have met with still larger crowds in (then) largely white London or lower Manhattan was neatly taken to task by Mahmood Mamdani in his cutting and often funny account of The Myth of Population Control (1972).

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The state and the poor

particular emphasis on physical capital formation, and in this framework it was easy to conclude that rapid population growth must represent a loss of savings to the more productive parts of an economy. This would be especially acute in a country suffering from a scarcity of capital in general, or where poorer people had to propel themselves out of a low-level equilibrium trap.28 Spending on dependent populations could then be presented as a luxury that countries and families should do without, at least until the benefits of rapid economic growth had been secured. This presentation of the ‘population problem’ was tempered in India by a strong commitment to voluntarism when it came to family sexual matters, aided no doubt by a measure of prudery.29 It was only during the years of the Emergency (1975–7) that this commitment was suspended in favour of the savage and humiliating assaults on male and female bodies that were sanctioned by Sanjay Gandhi and his henchmen. But the importance of demographic issues as a site of state–poor encounters should not be discounted. In many rural areas of India, as in many urban slums, poorer women are brought into regular contact with health-care workers who profess concern for their bodies, and above all their reproductive health. In some cases these interventions will be welcomed, as when women have been coerced into having large numbers of children by their husbands. It would also be a mistake to suppose that health-care professionals are unconcerned with a woman’s health, or are simply using this issue for the purpose of population control. At the same time, however, it would be na¨ıve to assume that anti-natalist policies are never seen as a threat. Many Muslim families feel under pressure from the Sangh parivar, which has repeatedly drawn attention to their supposed proclivity for large numbers of children (and which constitutes the rapid growth of ‘Muslim India’ as a threat to the body of the (Hindu) nation).30 Still others will see anti-natalist policies as being against their best interests, and will sometimes express a sense of puzzlement when faced with campaigns to distribute condoms, for example, or IUDs. Regardless of how such programmes are judged, the state’s expressed concern with the body corporeal always leads to a heightened concern for 28 29

30

The model is discussed in Nelson (1958) and Enke (1971). See also Elvin (1973) for an application to ‘the Chinese past’. Such prudery, along no doubt with caste and religious concerns, continues to inform the attitudes to HIV–AIDS of leading members of the government and opposition in India – see Dube (2000); see also Farmer (2003) for an account of what he calls ‘the new war on the poor’. For an innovative and witty account of sexual panics in the West, see Lacqueur (2003). See Jeffery and Jeffery (1997: chapter 6). The Sangh Parivar is that body of organizations, including the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS, which is committed to the ‘Hinduization’ of all politics in India – see McKean (1996).

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the production of numbers: numbers of women aged between 15 and 45, say, or of men and women who have been sterilized. These figures have to be collected, and they bring the state into further and repeated contact with its target populations. Certain members of the rural or urban poor might also be made the beneficiaries of anti-natalist interventions which link material incentives for the poor to performance quotas for named bureaucrats. As Emma Tarlo has shown, the attempt to link different agencies of the state to the disciplining of individual bodies reached a peak during the Emergency, when thousands of victims of slum clearance in Delhi were promised resettlement plots if male householders ‘volunteered’ for sterilization. In just one colony in East Delhi, Tarlo and her co-worker, Rajinder Singh Negi, found 3,459 personal files from 1976, 975 of which contained a DDA Family Planning (FP) Centre Allotment Order. By this order, the Delhi Development Authority sought to collect information on the applicant’s: Name and Age, Father’s Name, Plot, Number of Family Members, Date of Voluntary Sterilization and Nature of Assistance Claimed. A Resettlement Order might then be made by the Officer in Charge (Tarlo 2001: 79).31 This bringing together of economic and population-based accounts of poverty also led to the production of poverty lines and poverty headcounts. Very much in line with its view that poverty resulted from low levels of productivity and a lack of continuous work, the Third Plan document urged that additional opportunities for work would ‘enable the lowest income groups to earn enough through productive employment to meet their minimum needs’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1961: 11). This pushed the government to define what it meant by minimum needs, and to specify the means by which information could be collected (the National Sample Survey, for example), and the proper units of analysis (villages, households, individuals, etc.). Consistent with what was by then a more narrowly economic conception of poverty, the Perspective Planning Division (PPD) introduced the notion of a minimum level of living in 1962. This set the national monthly minimum level of consumption in rural areas of India at Rs. 20 per capita. Individuals falling below this line were said to be ‘poor’, or suffering from ‘absolute poverty’. While other advisory bodies suggested a different rupee figure – the Nutrition Advisory Committee declared that it would cost Rs. 35 at 1960–1 prices to provide for a balanced diet and modest consumption of non-food items – the government’s preference for a definition of poverty on the basis of ‘basic minimum needs’ was 31

See also Selbourne (1977). For more on the authoritarianism that has often been latent in India’s family planning programmes (outside the Emergency), see Vicziany (1982–3).

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The state and the poor

now established. Throughout the 1970s the major effort of government was directed to further refinements in the measurement of a poverty line defined in terms of calorific norms, rather than to a more comprehensive assessment of living standards. The PPD’s Task Force on Projections of Minimum Needs and Effective Consumption Demand decided in 1979 that in rural areas a person would need to have sufficient income per month (Rs. 49.09 at 1973–4 prices, using the NSS Round of that year, Rs. 56.64 in urban areas) to command a daily calorie norm of 2,435 in rural areas and 2,095 in urban areas. And in the 1980s and 1990s these assessments were updated on the basis of progressively more robust price deflators, at the state as well as at national levels, as the debate on India’s ‘absolute poverty’ scaled new technical heights. Garibi Hatao As it turned out, the production of statistics about the state of absolute poverty in India could not have come at a worse time than the late 1960s. The non-foodgrains sector of the rural economy performed quite well in the 1950s, but the rate of growth of cereals and pulses between 1952–3 and 1964–5 only just kept ahead of the rate of growth of the country’s population. When the rains failed in India in 1965 and 1966, the country had to be bailed out with grain transfers from the United States. The situation in the countryside was a long way from the picture that had been promised in the Plan documents of 1956 and 1961. Rice riots broke out in Kerala in 1966, and in one of her first acts as Prime Minister Mrs Gandhi ‘announced that she would not eat rice until there were adequate supplies of rice available in [that state]’ (Frank 2002: 295). The theatricality of Indira’s attempts to take the part of the poor would become more blatant still in the 1970s, when she demanded an end to poverty (Garibi Hatao). In the late 1960s, however, she was faced by the more immediate problem of famine in Bihar, and the threat posed to Congress rule in Uttar Pradesh by the decision of the Jat farmers’ leader, Charan Singh, to leave the party in 1967.32 The suspension of planning between 1966 and 1969 further symbolized the seriousness of the issues confronting a weakened polity. It came as little surprise that Dandekar and Rath’s famous article on poverty in India, published in Economic and Political Weekly in 1971, confirmed not only that many millions more Indians were in ‘absolute poverty’ in 1970–1 as compared to 1960–1, but 32

Amartya Sen has famously argued that famines cannot happen in democracies, but the famine in parts of Bihar in 1967 would seem to indicate otherwise (Singh 1975). There was also a continuous state of famine and ‘near-famine’ in parts of Orissa in the 1990s (Sainath 1996).

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also that the incidence of absolute poverty had increased to 54.8 per cent from 45.4 per cent in the countryside, while staying close to 45 per cent in the towns. India seemed to be going backwards, and was increasingly being seen on the international stage not as an emergent great power, but as something of a ‘basket case’ (to use the unpleasant language of the time). Mrs Gandhi responded to the electoral setbacks of 1967 and 1969 by splitting the Congress Party and by seeking to reclaim the socialist credentials of her father. Morarji Desai and the Congress-(O) replied by joining forces with the Jan Sangh and the Swatantra and Samyutka parties to fight the general election that Indira called on 27 December 1970; they did so, moreover, under the slogan ‘Indira Hatao’ (get rid of Indira). Mrs Gandhi hit back with the ‘simplistic but effective battle cry of “Garibi Hatao” (Remove Poverty)’. According to the most recent of her biographers, ‘“Garibi Hatao” was a call for the eradication of India’s worst evil. And as a vote-winner it worked. Garibi Hatao “was a thunderbolt . . . a revelation . . . a revolution”. Its impact was “instant and electric”. The poor, who were the vast majority of India’s electorate, now saw Indira as their saviour’ (Frank 2002: 325, quoting in turn from Narasimha Rao 1998: 621–2 and Malhotra 1989: 128). Even allowing for the exaggeration of a biographer, there are some interesting things going on here. Those scholars who compare Mrs Gandhi unfavourably with Nehru sometimes fail to acknowledge that the daughter had to operate in a political landscape that was quite different to that facing her father in the 1950s.33 Indira had to revamp the Congress machine in the context of what Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph have called ‘demand politics’.34 Charan Singh, of course, symbolized the switch from command politics to demand politics very well. His campaigns on behalf of the richer peasantries of north India were indicative of a new political landscape in which ‘interest groups’ could force the hand of government agencies which previously had sought to dictate to groups in civil and political society. The abandonment of India’s obsession with capital-goods-based industrialization was one sign of this, and was more or less announced at the time of the Fourth Five Year Plan (1969–74). But that Plan also confirmed that the government had embraced the Green Revolution, and was now paying attention to the poverty of the countryside. The setting up of the Public Distribution System (PDS) in 1966 was indicative of this shift, and the PDS, of course, 33 34

This would be true of Paul Brass (1994), notwithstanding his generally excellent analyses of India’s politics post-Independence. Rudolph and Rudolph (1987); see also Byres (1988).

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The state and the poor

as Jan Mooij has shown, from then onwards would be a major site for poor people’s encounters with ‘the state’ in urban and rural India.35 With it came yet another set of cards that defined the poor and their entitlements. Mrs Gandhi’s genius, if such it was, was to ride the first waves of the new demand politics. She recognized that the Congress-(R) would need to develop new campaigning styles and vocabularies if it was to put together a political coalition that would reach beyond its traditional support bases in the Forward and Scheduled Castes. Interestingly, Garibi Hatao emerged as a slogan before Mrs Gandhi acquired real popularity as the ‘liberator of Bangladesh’.36 To the extent that it did have an ‘electric and instant’ impact, and positioned her as ‘the saviour of the poor’, this is surely also because ‘the poor’ had been invented as a political constituency in the 1960s. And this in turn reflected two major developments: the diffusion of democratic ideas and the slow erosion of vertical voting blocs, to be sure, but also the production of new technologies of government which defined a Below Poverty Line (BPL) population even as that population was set to grow in size and to announce its voices. There was a dialectical relationship between the production of the poor and the capacity of Mrs Gandhi and others to take their part. This being the case, we must treat very carefully the rhetoric of Garibi Hatao and other slogans that seem to want the eradication of poverty. Whether or not the poor must always be with us, as many conservatives like to suppose, there are strong reasons for insisting that some politicians would look with alarm on their diminution or disappearance. Concepts of inequality, deprivation or relative poverty function in part to make this impossible. We shall come back to this observation soon enough. For the moment we should note that the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Five Year Plans, all 35 36

Mooij (1999). Nandini Gooptu notes that appeals to the garib janata (poor common people) ‘emerged at the heart of political discourse’ in the late 1930s, which is precisely when Indira Gandhi was learning the ‘grammars’ of modern politics. In the 1930s, the garib janata ‘referred to the morally superior, deserving simple folk, who were excluded from power and denied their due’ (Gooptu 2001: 425). As Gooptu explains, this language of ‘poor but deserving’ (and also ‘poor and cheated’), drew on a tradition of nautanki theatre that was deployed by proponents of Adi-Hinduism as part of a wider repertoire of nirguna bhakti, ‘a heterodox devotional alternative . . . to brahmanical Hinduism . . . [that espoused] an egalitarian religious message’ (Gooptu 2001: 148). It is doubtful that Mrs Gandhi paid much heed to what might today be called ‘first nation’ sentiments when she appealed directly to the garib janata. In addition, while it is true that nationalist politicians of various stripes made rhetorical appeals to the garib janata in the 1930s and 1940s, it is not inconsistent to say that ‘the poor’ emerged as a political force in their own right – as a group or set of groups with political voice – only after another twenty or thirty years.

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of which took shape under Mrs Gandhi’s leadership, were also distinguished by their continued dialogues with the concerns of development economists and the major aid agencies. The Fourth Plan was ahead of the game in suggesting that ‘neither agricultural or industrial growth would be sufficient to generate productive employment enough to do any more than contain the problems of unemployment and underemployment’, and in proposing ‘special programmes . . . to provide for what amounted to “redistribution with growth” (later the slogan of the approach to poverty alleviation favoured by the World Bank’ (Corbridge and Harriss 2000: 85). The Fifth Plan continued this theme, and insisted that India’s national planning should ‘not only raise the per capita income but also . . . ensure that the benefits are evenly distributed, that disparities in income and living are not widened but in fact narrowed’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1974: 8). And the Sixth Plan announced that, ‘There is . . . convincing evidence which points to the limited effectiveness of “trickle down” effect . . . Thus specific programmes meant for selected target groups of population are essential components of a strategy designed to assist in the removal of unemployment and poverty’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1981: 17). As always, there are important areas of continuity in these proposals. Inequality had long been a stated concern of the Government of India, and the importance of employment provision, as we have seen, had been a central component of India’s poverty discourses since the 1960s. But this is to be expected. Old technologies of government rarely make way for new ones in a one-to-one fashion. Far more often the process is gradual, and it involves a measure of additionality as well as a replacement effect. Nevertheless, the changes of the 1970s and also the 1980s were real and substantial, and they were produced in part by changes in the discourses of development studies, and indeed of intellectual life more generally. Marxism was a growing force in the 1970s, and the rise of a feminist movement, and of feminist development studies, would slowly push the Government of India to at least some recognition of the needs and experiences of ‘women’, and even of different groups of women. The setting up of a sub-scheme of the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), in 1982–3, to deal with the Development of Women and Children and Rural Areas (DWCRA), was one sign that women were not only to be approached by state agencies in terms of their fecundity. The IRDP, moreover, which was set up on a pilot basis during the Emergency (in 1976), and which was extended to all parts of the country from 1980, was not only India’s most important anti-poverty programme in the 1980s, but was also considered by many to be a model for rural development programmes across the ‘Third World’. As with Redistribution

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The state and the poor

with Growth, India’s prosecution of ‘integrated rural development’ was at least as influential within the World Bank (which proposed a sectoral approach to rural poverty alleviation in 1975) as were the ideas that began to flow in the opposite direction.37 The extraordinary diversity of the anti-poverty schemes which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s has to be seen in this broader context. The schemes that were set up in the late 1960s or early 1970s to deal with the problems of small farmers (the Small Farmers Development Agency: SFDA), marginal farmers and agricultural labourers (Marginal Farmer and Agricultural Labour Programme: MFAL), or tribals (the Tribal Development Agency: TDA), undoubtedly spoke to some very real problems that were facing these groups. The same would hold true of the special area programmes that took shape at the same time. These were focused on particular geographical regions that were considered to be marked out for ‘backwardness’ by dint of their location – tribal areas, once more, but also drought-prone areas, desert areas, hill areas and border areas. (The argument can be extended to include important and influential state-directed schemes for poverty alleviation, including the Employment Guarantee Scheme in Maharashtra, which was made statewide in 1972/3 in response to the extended drought conditions of 1971/2.) It is also proper to insist that these programmes be judged according to the conventions both of project analysis and political science. We benefit from being told that different projects have had a low or high take-up rate, or that the leakage of funds to non-intended beneficiaries is 10, 20 or 30 per cent (see part II of this book). There is even merit in those critiques of the reluctance of successive regimes to deal with the ‘real’ or ‘underlying’ causes of India’s poverty, whether this is understood in terms of a failure to support the institutions of a developmental state or of a less regulated market.38 At the same time, however, an appeal to the real causes of poverty, while it calls to mind Nehru’s advice to do-gooders in the 1920s, misses something important about the importance of appearances.39 Perhaps most of all, it misses the importance of words and images, and of the need to take these seriously, not least in the realm of government. When Nehru later asked the Constituent Assembly to ‘clothe the naked masses’, he was invoking an imagery of poverty as disgrace that has continued to be 37 38 39

Drawing on Corbridge and Harriss (2000: 85). Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974 by Hollis Chenery and colleagues. See Bardhan (1984) and Bhagwati (1993) for opposing perspectives. We take our cue, in part, from Nikolas Rose: ‘Against interpretation, then, I advocate superficiality, an empiricism of the surface, of identifying the differences in what is said, how it is said, and what allows it to be said and to have an effectivity’ (Rose 1999: 57).

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powerful. The disgrace, of course, attached not only to the naked themselves – and consider how differently Nehru and Gandhi saw the absence of clothes as signifiers of value – but to those who looked upon them.40 The naked masses had to be clothed, uplifted and disappeared. Much the same view coloured the Planning Commission’s account of urban poverty at the beginning of the First Five Year Plan. ‘Most of the towns of India [it suggested] . . . have a large proportion of sub-standard houses and slums containing insanitary mud-huts of flimsy constructions . . . The disgraceful sights presented by the ahatas of Kanpur and the bustees of Calcutta are conspicuous examples of this state of affairs’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1952: 593–4). During the Emergency, this dialectic of disgrace was shrunk so badly that a progressive discourse of human rights (the right not to be shamed in public) was again submerged beneath a contemptuous and frankly punitive account of the urban poor as polluters of good taste. To make New Delhi modern – visibly modern – the slums had to be bulldozed away. Matters improved in the 1980s, but a perception of the poor as a deficient social mass continued to dominate official discourses about poverty until at least the end of that decade. (It still continues, of course.)41 To the extent that real changes could be observed, they were to be found in a transferral of the site of disgrace from the body corporeal to the asset base of poorer households. During the Sixth Plan Period, the Planning Commission promised that, ‘Programmes . . . will be drawn together so that they focus upon the level of the individual household, and raise at least 3000 of the poorest households above the poverty line in each block during the Plan’ (Government of India, Planning Commission 1981: xxi). The war on poverty now spoke of the ‘removal’ of poverty and of ‘direct attacks’ upon it. Poverty was once again conceived as being something 40

41

Gandhi tended to equate poverty (but not exploitation), with simplicity and authenticity, and thus an absence of clothes with a kind of purity or child-like innocence (see Alter 2000). For Nehru, in contrast, nakedness was more often seen as a symptom of extreme religious asceticism (the irrational), or, more usually, of a degree of deprivation that hindered human development. In urban areas, of course, nakedness could also be associated with lewdness, and with an inability on the part of poor labouring males to avoid the temptations of the brothel and the bottle (see Gooptu, 2001: 67–8). Here, perhaps, the instincts of Gandhi and the social-religious reformers (including members of the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha) coincided in some degree with those of Nehru and the proponents of modernization. On clothing and politics more generally, see also Cohn (1996) and Tarlo (1996). Not least in New Delhi, where businesses and middle-class residents are once again invoking images of order, cleanliness and rationality in support of their campaigns to widen roads and displace poorer people from their (permanent or temporary) settlements: see Baviskar (2003) on the making of metropolitan Delhi. Chatterjee (2004: 61) also draws attention to the unpleasantly named Operation Sunshine in Calcutta in 1996.

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The state and the poor

like a physical object separated from social relations, and households were to be treated to schemes that would ‘raise’ them above ‘the line’. It was only in the 1990s that poorer individuals or households, or even social groups, were allowed to function seriously as active agents of their own empowerment. An emphasis upon roots rather than surfaces also conceals the importance of visuality in politics. Politicians have to know how to work a crowd. Long before politicians like Laloo Yadav dreamt of attending political rallies by helicopter, or even in a Tata Sumo, Mrs Gandhi liked to descend upon ‘the masses’ from the skies, like a goddess.42 Television was her ally in projecting this image to a much wider audience. But Mrs Gandhi also knew the importance of reaching specific groups within ‘the poor’, and of appearing to be active on their behalf. The multiplication of schemes for named groups of the poor needs to be understood in this context as well. Schemes for Tribal Development added to existing programmes of compensatory discrimination. The Small Farmers Development Agency, meanwhile, imposed new systems of registration and sighting, with only those farmers working one to three hectares of land supposedly being eligible for its dispensations of irrigation equipment, credit, supplies and (other) technology. Schemes like this and the Marginal Farmer and Agricultural Labour Programme (targeted on the landless and those with less than one hectare of farming land), had the effect of disaggregating the poor and of inventing more specific sites for state–poor encounters. This trend was further continued in the 1980s when the BPL population was targeted en masse, through the IRDP, but also in terms of its component groups: BPL rural youth (ages 18–35) through a scheme for the Training of Rural Youth for Self-Employment; groups of BPL women through DWCRA; BPL rural artisans through a scheme for the Supply of Improved Toolkits to Rural Artisans (SITRA), and so on. The multiplication of these schemes spoke for sure to problems identified by development experts, non-governmental organizations, and even ‘the poor’ themselves. But they were also multiplied by politicians anxious to present themselves as gatekeepers of the welfare state, or of a patronage democracy. The naming of schemes thus came to matter precisely because of its superficiality. The more schemes, the more clearly was government seen to be working for the poor. James Ferguson makes a similar point about the extension of bureaucratic power in Lesotho when he listed the extraordinary number of development agencies – seventy-two – that were active in that small landlocked state in the years 1975–84.43 He makes the point that these agencies constituted Lesotho as an empty 42

See Rajagopal (2001).

43

Ferguson (1990: 6–7).

Technologies of rule and the war on poverty

71

space that needed to be filled by expert bodies, whether from abroad or from within the state. The nameplates advertising the arrival of these agencies then proclaim that new presence, and function as an apparent source of comfort and perhaps even of development. Appendix 1 provides a partial listing of the major programmes for poverty alleviation that were operational in India in 1999, at the time of our fieldwork. In addition to pointing up one of Indira Gandhi’s legacies to the country she ruled for so long, it also helps to describe a new and expanded geography of state–poor encounters in contemporary South Asia. Democratizing poverty The proliferation of poverty-alleviation schemes under Mrs Gandhi was not complemented by significant budgetary transfers in support of the war on poverty. During the Fifth Plan period the Plan Outlays for Social Sector Spending as a percentage of Total Plan Outlays fell to 25.5 per cent, having been above 30 per cent during the first four Plan periods (table 2.1). Spending on Social Services, which includes spending on education, health, housing, and special programmes for the Scheduled Communities and other ‘disadvantaged groups’ (including women), fell to just 12.1 per cent of the Total Plan outlay at this time, as against 19.7 per cent during the Second Plan period. This is consistent, perhaps, with Mrs Gandhi’s preference for spending on named schemes, such as those that took shape from the time of the Fourth Plan under the Special Areas Programmes (albeit the resources that were committed to the SAPs were and remain relatively insubstantial). In addition, while it is true that spending on Agriculture remained high during the first five Plan periods, there was a switch under this heading from spending on the Community Development Programme to more general support for farmers, including better-off Green Revolution farmers. Insofar as Mrs Gandhi’s governments did commit significant funds to its multiplying and highly visible schemes for poverty alleviation, it was during the Sixth Plan period under the heading Rural Development: this covered spending on special poverty alleviation and employment-generation programmes. The governments of Rajiv Gandhi and V. P. Singh ensured that spending under this heading, and that of social services, would account for more than 20 per cent of Total Plan Outlays in the Seventh Plan period. It was not until the 1990s, however, that spending on the Social Sector as a whole climbed back above 30 per cent of Total Plan Outlays. Several factors account for this upward trend, but first among them would be what commentators have called the Mandalization of politics, and what Christophe Jaffrelot refers to as the triumph of quota politics over

11.8

17.4

34.0

Total Social Sector

30.2

12.7

17.5

31.2

14.7 0.3

16.2

25.5

12.3 1.1

12.1

29.2

14.4 5.5 5.8 1.5

29.6

17.5 4.9 5.8 1.6

32.9

18.2 7.9 5.2 1.6

33.9

20.7 8.6 4.2 0.4

Sixth Plan Seventh Plan Eighth Plan Ninth Plan (’80–’85) (’85–’90) (’92–’97) (’97–’02)

Source: Planning Commission data, quoted in Government of India: Ministry of Finance, 1998.

31.5

19.7

16.6

Social Services Rural Development Agriculture Special Area Programmes

First Plan Second Plan Third Plan Fourth Plan Fifth Plan (’51–’56) (’56–’61) (’61–’66) (’69–’74) (’74–’79)

Table 2.1. Social Sector Plan outlays as a percentage of Total Plan Outlays: Centre, States and Union Territories, 1951–2002

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kisan (farmer) politics in north India.44 Geography matters here because the slow rise to power of the Backward Castes in India happened much earlier in the south than in the north. Non-Brahmanism has been an important force in Tamil Nadu since at least the 1920s, and this is reflected in the high percentage of government jobs that are now reserved in the state. In Karnataka, too, and in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, important Commissions were set up in the late 1960s or early 1970s to determine who might belong to the Backward Classes and for what reasons (they varied significantly from state to state).45 The major significance of V. P. Singh’s decision in 1990 to act on at least some of the recommendations of the Second Backward Classes Commission (the Mandal Commission Report) was that it extended the scope of reservations at an all-India level. Singh’s National Front government proposed that 49.5 per cent of jobs in central government services or the public sector should be reserved for members of the Socially and Economically Backward Classes. Since 22.5 per cent of such posts were already reserved for members of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, this implied that a further 27 per cent of posts would be reserved for members of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Singh’s own Janata Dal party gained votes disproportionately from the 3,743 castes, tribes or communities that Mandal had identified as Backward and which made up 52.4 per cent of the population. Indeed, his party had its major sources of electoral strength in those rural, Shudra, north Indian, OBC communities that were also about to propel Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav to power in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The Yadavs, of course, were the best-positioned of these communities, and were soon established as the major recipients of the new posts that each government created, whether by expansion or by transferring out members of the Forward or ‘Intermediate’ castes. In Uttar Pradesh, Jaffrelot reports, ‘Out of 900 teachers appointed [by Mulayam Singh Yadav’s] second government, 720 were Yadavs’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 380). In Bihar, meanwhile, Laloo Yadav moved to ensure that, ‘an IAS from the Scheduled Castes replaced a Brahmin as Chief Secretary [in 1993] and an OBC took over the charge of Director General of Police from another Brahmin’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 380). He also ensured that of the 1,427 lecturers recruited to Bihar’s universities and constituent colleges in 1996, ‘most candidates [and appointees] were OBCs and, more precisely, Yadavs’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 380). The number of jobs allocated in this way probably matters less than the broader effects that this second democratic upsurge has had on 44

Jaffrelot (2003).

45

For discussion, see Galanter (1991).

74

The state and the poor

state–poor encounters in India. One of Laloo Yadav’s most insistent claims is that income poverty in Bihar is not of great concern; what matters, and what has driven his politics, is the fact that members of the Backward Classes have been engaged in a struggle for power and a search for honour (izzat). The major contribution of his governments has been to ensure that members of the Forward Castes cannot mistreat the Backward Classes in a sustained or systematic manner. Similar confrontations are in play across north India, and they are likely to get more heated as the size of the government cake refuses to keep pace with the numbers of people who can claim to be poor, backward or disadvantaged. This is where the logic of demand politics collides with the politics of scarcity. It is only central government that seems to have the resources to cope with the pressure of reservations while also funding an expansion of the Social Sector budget, both in absolute and relative terms. Interestingly, this expansion has coincided not just with pressures from below, or from the OBCs, but against a backdrop of economic reforms and liberalization. Despite the predictions of some commentators, the 1990s saw a significant increase in spending on India’s social services and rural development programmes. It is possible that this extra spending has been made necessary by an increase in ‘absolute poverty’ brought on by the reforms themselves. This would be the view of many on the Left and it is probably not at odds with what happened in the first two or three years of the reforms.46 What is certain, however, is that the debate on ‘what’s been happening to poverty in India’ has been recharged since 1990. It has also coincided with a more general assault on the ‘quota and BPL’ economy by certain groups within India’s business and upper caste elites who feel threatened by the steady rise to power of the OBCs. This fight-back has taken several forms, not all of which sit easily together, but at its core, significantly, there has been a concerted challenge to the ways in which poverty and deprivation in India are defined, measured and treated. This is evident in the decision of the Jats of Uttar Pradesh to give up their quest for Kshatriya status in favour of being included in the state’s list of OBC communities. It is also evident in the support offered by some Forward Caste communities for the idea of reservations for women, including high caste women, and indeed for some ‘twice-born’ communities.47 It is further apparent in the fact that many members of India’s economic elites are keen to shrink the state, and to declare success in the war on ‘absolute poverty’, even as some 46 47

The best review is probably that by Sen (1996). For example, recent campaigns on behalf of Rajputs in Rajasthan, and Brahmans nationally.

Technologies of rule and the war on poverty

75

members of locally dominant farming castes will go to great lengths to get themselves listed as BPL. It is at this level, we would contend, at the level of the production of identities and numbers, that the war on poverty is now increasingly being fought, and where the state is most often sighted.48 In a very real sense we can say that the war is being fought over such matters as the production of the BPL schedule, as well as over the mechanics of its collection and later use (see box 2.1). There are clearly forces at work that want to see the numbers of people in absolute poverty driven down, and who might want to put pressures on the lower-level state officials charged with identifying BPL households to act sparingly. These surveys are carried out every few years, and the administrator might be told to look out for a bicycle or other such item as proof of the non-existence of poverty or BPL status. At the same time, there will be forces working in the opposite direction. The administrator is likely to hand over the job to influential village members, many of whom might know that bikes should be hidden, and almost all of whom will know the advantages of getting friends and supporters listed as BPLs. The production of BPL statistics takes shape within the vortex of these social forces, and at once defines a major arena of state–poor encounters and sets the scene for further encounters for those who can get their names registered as BPL.

Box 2.1 Seeing and measuring the BPLs When the state in India in 1992 wanted to see and measure the BPL population in various states it did so by looking inside household cash boxes. District Magistrates/Collectors were told to instruct their enumerators to collect information on household earnings from land, wages, remittances and other sources. Many DMs realized this was an impossible task. Some of them told their enumerators to use their eyes, and warned them ‘if I visit your village and find out that what is visually decisive has been left out in order to preserve the sanctity of the schedule, you will be in trouble’. Similar sentiments were doubtless expressed in 1997 when the government called for a survey to be based on household expenditures, or the ‘cooking pot’. In 2002 the government changed its approach for a third time in ten years. An

48

This is also true in the United States. Forty years after President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, significant and often unpleasant battles are being enjoined around affirmative action, workfare (see chapter 1), and the responsibilities that poor people are said to have for availing themselves of opportunities in a market-access society.

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The state and the poor

Expert Group recommended that BPLs should now be counted on the basis of a definition of relative deprivation which scored households from 0 (very poor) to 4 (not poor) on 13 dimensions. Five of them are listed below for illustrative purposes: Score Sl. no. Characteristic 3

0

1

2

3

4

Availability of Less than 2 normal clothing wear: per person in pieces Sanitation Open defecation

Between 2 Between 4 Between 6 10 or above and 4 and 6 and 10

6

Ownership of consumer durables

Nil

Any one

8

Status of household labour force

Bonded labour

Female and Only adult child females labour and no child labour For Borrowing production for other purpose purposes from from informal informal source sources

5

11 Type of indebtedness

For daily consumption purposes from informal sources

Group latrine with irregular water supply

Group latrine with regular water supply

Clean group latrine with regular water supply and regular sweeper Two items Any three only or all items

Adult males only

Private latrine

All or most items on a long list including computers, TVs, and tractors Others

Borrowing No only from indebtedness; institupossess assets tional agencies

We have not spoken to DMs in Bihar, Jharkhand or West Bengal about how this schedule is completed in the field, but we can guess that similar ‘short-cuts’ will be used and that richer households will again put pressures on enumerators to be listed as BPLs. In any case, the Government of India gave discretion to the states to decide the cut-off points that would convert this 52-point classification into a working definition of ‘very poor’ and ‘poor’ at the District, Block and even

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77

panchayat scales. Having made this concession, however, which would seem to disable any attempt to think about ‘poverty’ on a consistent basis across a state, and far less across India, the Centre also instructed DMs to ensure that any number they came up with should not be more than 10 per cent higher than the poverty estimate that had already been calculated by the Planning Commission for the year 1999–2000. The DM was also instructed to compare his/her figure with the relevant figure given in the NSSO survey of consumer expenditure for 1999–2000. Somewhere in between these competing pressures and definitions, it is fair to say, figures for BPL populations are produced and designations are made. Whether and to what extent those designations or certificates are then used for public policy decisions is, of course, another matter, as indeed is the question of whether a BPL household becomes aware of its status. Source: based on interviews, and Letter No. Q-16205/4/2002-AI(RD), dated 13.9.02, issued by Dr P. V. Thomas, Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, to all Secretaries of Rural Development, State Governments, providing guidelines for the BPL survey for the Tenth Five Year Plan (2002–7).

Empowering the poor The fact that some BPLs are active in the matter of their designation is also curiously, if perhaps not intentionally, bang up to date with the thinking which has informed the design of many poverty-alleviation programmes since about 1990. The ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ are seemingly agreed that the state should not be in the business of dictating to ‘the poor’, or of providing resources for them in the top-down fashion that once prevailed. Poorer people are rather to be protected against the rent-seeking behaviour of state officials. They are also encouraged to voice their own accounts of what it is to be poor, and what they might need from agencies in the government and voluntary sectors. Participation, accountability, decentralization and democratization have become the new watchwords in a discourse which promises that poverty will be reduced by good governance, and by people doing it for themselves. As the World Bank puts it, ‘The poor are the main actors in the fight against poverty. And they must be brought center-stage in designing, implementing, and monitoring anti-poverty strategies’ (World Bank 2001: 12). The thinking behind this new technology of government has emerged from several quarters, and is still contending for power with more

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The state and the poor

traditional accounts of the relationships that should hold between poorer people and representatives of the state. A cynical view of the neoliberal agenda might suggest that its insistence upon poorer people solving their own problems is consistent with its broader assaults upon public spending. But this would underestimate the ideological power of the counterrevolution in development theory and policy. The neoliberal agenda also mobilizes a concept of empowerment which puts particular emphasis upon the self-worth of the individual. It suggests that the maximization of a person’s potential is held back by oppressive or simply incompetent government as much as it is by a lack of education or health care (although these capabilities are acknowledged to be important). The key point is to put oneself in the position of the customer rather than that of the service provider.49 When monopoly powers accrue to government servants the stage is set for state–poor encounters that are abusive and inattentive to the real needs of the customer. What the customer needs most is alternative service providers, or sufficient voice that he or she can hold state agencies accountable for their actions. A democracy that functions properly at the local level is one way to ensure such accountability. This is one reason why the sponsors of economic reform in India have generally also been proponents of Panchayati Raj and the devolution of administrative powers and budgets to local authorities. These arguments, which we shall expand in part II, have also been deployed by those who are mistrustful of the reforms, albeit with considerable shifts of emphasis. Robert Chambers has been a pioneering figure in this regard. His work on participatory poverty assessments, and on the question of ‘whose reality counts’, has been cited regularly by those who wish to insist on the need to work with different groups of poorer people around their own agendas for empowerment.50 But whereas the neoliberal agenda is interested in improving the capabilities of poorer people to work in and through markets, and in designing formal institutions for good governance, the emphasis of many on the post-Left is on capacity-building initiatives that aim to resist these seductions. The emphasis is on community, and on the possibility of poorer people taking charge of their lives within a well-defined locality.51 More moderate accounts within this tradition call upon non-governmental organizations 49

50 51

A point made long ago, we seem to recall, by W. Arthur Lewis in an exchange with Thomas Balogh on the nature of ‘socialism’. For a contemporary view from a very different perspective, see the essays in Krueger (2002). Chambers (1983, and 1988). See, for example, Chakrabarty (2003), Friedmann (1996). Also Vyas and Bhargava (1995).

Technologies of rule and the war on poverty

79

to play a central role in capacity-building initiatives as well as in running service delivery schemes. More radical accounts might express scepticism about the possibility of poorer people (especially women, and members of the Scheduled Communities) being able to voice their concerns effectively in aam sabhas or gram sabhas, or indeed in meetings with the panchayat sewak or the Block Development Officer. The emphasis here might be on spatial closure strategies that seek the empowerment of ‘the oppressed’ by removing them from contacts with ‘the state’ and ‘the market’ alike. Participation would then no longer be oriented to the agendas of Others.52 In practice, these more radical agendas soon run up against their internal contradictions (how can states, markets or hierarchies be avoided?), and cede ground to mainstream accounts of the merits of participation and accountability. This mainstream, however, which enjoys strong support now from the World Bank and most development agencies, is itself proposing a radically new account of the ways in which different groups of poorer people might come to see and meet the state in a country like India. As we have suggested several times already, newer technologies of rule are rubbing shoulders with, and sometimes are jostling, older forms of government. The picture does not remain the same. Joint Forest Management is a case in point, although we shall have cause to refer to it only fleetingly in this book. JFM emerged in a government circular of 1990 as a middle way between state control of the forest usufruct and full control by local user groups. The circular called upon state governments to implement JFM systems in order to regenerate protected forests and reduce rural poverty. The guidelines asked state governments to devolve everyday forest protection, management and development responsibilities to local community institutions (cooperative or committee-based) at the village or panchayat levels. These institutions would include serving Forest Officers and would prescribe benefit-sharing arrangements following regeneration.53 Unlike community forestry, which would take the state out of the picture entirely, JFM proposed that villager understandings of sylvicultural practices were extensive but not complete. Poorer people would still benefit from the professional advice that Forest Department officials could offer, and 52 53

See Esteva and Prakash (1998); Rahnema and Bawtree (1998). By the end of the first quarter of 2001, ‘there were 44,943 official JFM groups (village forest committees, or VFCs) protecting over 11.63 million hectares of governmentowned forests, or 15.5 per cent of the recorded forest area of the country, making it one of the largest such programmes in the world’ (Corbridge and Kumar 2002: 767, drawing on Borgoyary 2001).

80

The state and the poor

which would in time build up their own stocks of forest knowledge. The State Forest Department’s Trading Wing could also provide villagers with information on the price of timber and non-timber forest products (NTFPs) at different locations. This same emphasis on the state as a facilitator and partial stakeholder is also to be found in a number of recent initiatives in the fields of primary education provision and employment assurance, two areas that will feature strongly in part II. Nehru and Ambedkar put particular emphasis on education as a core component of India’s anti-poverty programmes. The Constitution of India directed in 1950 that ‘the State shall endeavour to provide within a period of 10 years . . . free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14 years’. This goal was restated in the National Resolution on Education of 1968 and the National Policy on Education of 1986. India failed lamentably to meet its performance targets, however, and the gap between rhetoric and reality in the education sector was exposed with particular vigour in the 1990s, not least by those impressed with Amartya Sen’s account of poverty as capability deprivation (see also table 2.2).54 The new public education agenda proposes to deal with this learning deficit, in part, by encouraging educational provision in the private or not-for-profit sectors, which should increase parental choice; but there are also provisions for states to empower the parents of children in government schools through Village Education Committees (VECs) or their equivalent.55 Given that many poorer villagers come to see the state most often and directly in the figure of the schoolteacher, the suggestion that they might have power over him or her through a VEC proposes a radical reworking of this optic. The directness of this relationship stands in sharp contrast to the statutory provision for inspections of schools and their employees by the Sub-Inspectors of Primary Schools employed by a state’s Department of Education. When combined with mobilization campaigns (some of which are aimed at improving adult literacy, as for example in the Total Literacy Campaign), the devolution of powers to a VEC suggests that parents and children might at last be empowered to challenge the power of the teaching trade unions, and to get to grips with problems of poor quality schoolteaching and even teacher absenteeism. An insistent emphasis on participatory development is also to the fore in India’s largest anti-poverty scheme of the post-reform period, the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS). The EAS began life in 1993 54 55

Sen (1985); see also Dr`eze and Sen (2002: chapter 5). For example, the School Attendance Committee in West Bengal.

Technologies of rule and the war on poverty

81

Table 2.2. Literacy rates (age 7+) in 17 major states of India, 1997 Overall

Male

Female

Kerala Himachal Pradesh Assam Maharashtra West Bengal Tamil Nadu Gujarat Punjab Haryana Jammu and Kashmir Karnataka Madhya Pradesh Uttar Pradesh Rajasthan Andhra Pradesh Orissa Bihar

93 77 75 74 72 70 68 67 65 59 58 56 56 55 54 51 49

96 87 82 84 81 80 80 72 76 71 66 70 69 73 64 64 62

90 70 66 63 63 60 57 62 52 48 50 41 41 35 43 38 34

ALL-INDIA

62

73

50

Source: National Sample Survey Organization, 53rd Round, quoted in http://www.education.nic.in/htmlweb/iamrstat.htm (Courtesy: Institute of Applied Manpower Research)

when it was deployed by the Ministry of Rural Development in New Delhi, ‘to provide gainful employment during the lean agricultural season in manual work to all able-bodied adults in rural areas who are in need and who are desirous of work, but who cannot find it’ (Government of India 1993b: 1). In important respects it drew on state-level schemes to provide employment in the off-season, including the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in Maharashtra.56 The EAS was distinctive, however, in its ambition to provide sufficient resources (80 per cent from New Delhi; 20 per cent matching funds from state governments) to provide up to 100 days of waged employment for a maximum of two adults per household in need, wherever these household members voiced a demand for work. The scheme would be triggered by demands from below, by men and women who could not otherwise find work banging on the door 56

On the EGS, see Echeverri-Gent (1993), Herring and Edwards (1983), Joshi and Moore (2000).

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The state and the poor

of their local government office and asking for assured employment.57 Ideally, this work would be provided from existing plan and non-plan works in progress, but if these schemes did not allow EAS monies to be used so that at least 60 per cent of funds were spent on ‘unskilled labour’, other schemes would have to be found. The selection of these schemes, moreover, would also bear the imprint of local people. The EAS guidelines stipulated that village open meetings would have to be called to decide on the sorts of schemes that villagers might like to see commissioned (the results to be passed upwards to higher-level panchayat bodies and Block Development Office), and for the selection of the contractor charged with executing a scheme. They also required that the accounts of EAS schemes be presented to villagers each year through their open meetings (the gram sansads of West Bengal, for example). In sum, EAS schemes would be triggered by local demands, given shape through public meetings, and made accountable in the same forums. In terms of state–poor encounters, they would constitute members of the labouring poor as prime movers in a large-scale anti-poverty initiative, the major outcomes of which would also be chosen, very largely, by members of village society. Instead of being supplicants of the state, the poor were to be its customers and even its masters. Conclusion Very much in opposition to Escobar, we have argued in this chapter that the production of poverty in India, and of various sites where the poor encounter the state, have not stayed still over the past fifty years. The antipoverty agenda in India is made up of several technologies of government, some of which have gained in strength recently as others have receded, and most of which survive in sometimes uneasy proximity. It would be absurd to deny that poverty isn’t mainly defined by the Government of India in income or calorific terms, or that absolute poverty isn’t still seen as a disgrace by many of those charged with its alleviation. In any case, this definition speaks to an important understanding of poverty, and there are good reasons for welcoming the sharp declines in absolute (income) poverty that have recently been reported for both rural and urban areas. At the same time, however, it is clear that agencies within and without the Government of India have begun to rethink their anti-poverty agendas quite radically since the late 1980s. This is partly in recognition of what Yogendra Yadav has called the second democratic revolution in India, or 57

Sometimes literally, but more often through intermediaries and contractors: see chapter 4.

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83

the fact that the Backward Classes are now making much greater demands not just of the state but within the state.58 The pervasiveness of ‘quota politics’ is one important sign of this; another is the severity of the political struggle that is being waged for control over the local state. In addition, the government’s thinking on poverty, and the presentation of its antipoverty agendas, has been influenced by the voices that have been raised on behalf of civil society and the voluntary sector, and by those who have urged that the poor should be allowed to speak for themselves. In theory, these voices of the poor have lent considerable weight to the promotion of the EAS, or JFM, or VECs as new vehicles for the selfempowerment of disadvantaged individuals, households or social groups. They have done so, not least, because they have mobilized some quite radical assumptions about the rights and capacities of poorer people, some of which were already present at the time that the Constitution of India was promulgated in 1950. One suggestion of this book is that these new technologies of government cannot be reduced to a singular discourse of development, nor can it be assumed that they are without effect. Jaffrelot claims that India is undergoing a silent revolution, and this is surely correct. The fact that India’s revolution doesn’t share the qualities of speed and extreme violence that we associate with revolutions elsewhere is less important than the fact that power is leaching steadily, and in some respects ineluctably, to the lower castes, and has been claimed by them in terms which often resist the presumptions of a benign and disinterested state. A second suggestion of this book, however, is that we learn about the state not simply through an analysis of its published technologies of rule – its guidelines for JFM or EAS, its recruitment and training practices, its systems of reward, sanction and promotion, its means of registration of men and women as SCs, STs or BPLs, its name-plating of visible schemes for the alleviation of poverty – but also through the ways that it works in the trenches. The failure of land-to-the-tiller land reforms in the 1950s showed how named agents of the state come under pressure from competing forces in political society. (Some officers will also have been major landowners themselves.) If we want to understand how the state works from the point of view of the rural poor, we need to focus in depth on certain initiatives like the EAS or the VECs which claim to bring poorer people into contact with the developmental state in the most enlightened fashion. These initiatives provide something of a test case for investigating state–society relations more broadly. We also need to do this in different locations, so that we can isolate more clearly the 58

Yadav (1996).

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The state and the poor

effects of particular political regimes and the technologies of government with which they are associated. Before we turn to these tasks, however, we need to do something else: we need to consider to what extent the poor see and rely on the state at all, and for which reasons and in which circumstances. We need first, in other words, to say something about the livelihood strategies, capabilities and contact networks of different groups within the rural poor, including those networks that take shape away from the eyes of state agencies. This will be our task in chapter 3.

Part II

The everyday state and society

3

Meeting the state

Introduction In this part of the book we draw on fieldwork in Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal to comment in more detail on how different actors come to see and engage the state in eastern India. Chapters 4–6 offer different and yet complementary takes on what is necessarily an interlocking set of issues. In chapter 4 we consider why and how (and if) people participate in a range of ‘development’ schemes, including the Employment Assurance Scheme and Village Education Committees. These schemes make important assumptions about the construction of citizenship and civil society in rural India. In chapter 5 we direct our attention to the career paths of various government servants, and to the ways in which they construct working lives and practices that may or may not agree with the agendas of good governance now being promoted by New Delhi and the international development institutions. In chapter 6 we focus on the ways in which poorer people’s encounters with the state are structured with close regard for the conventions of the political societies that operate in our study areas. We also take up the question of corruption here, as we do in chapter 5. In this chapter we want to say something about the livelihoods and social networks of poorer people in our study areas. We will introduce some of the individuals (for example, brokers and ‘local uppers’) who become key figures in the stories we tell in chapters 4, 5 and 6, and we shall comment on the ways in which poorer men and women use their non-state social networks to access the state or keep it at a distance. In all of these tasks we find ourselves moving away from the ‘macro’ views of the state that dominated part I of the book. Our focus now is on the ‘micro’ operations of the everyday state in eastern India, and the way these operations are understood, reshaped and contested by ordinary people. (We recognize, of course, that the macro and the micro are not easily separated, for conceptions of one affect sightings of the other.)

87

88

The everyday state and society

Throughout this part of the book we draw on fieldwork that was mainly conducted in the period from February 1999 to March 2000. This work was supplemented by studies carried out from September 2000 to July 2001 as part of the action research project we discuss in chapter 9. As we explained in the Introduction, we worked in five Districts that were chosen to exemplify different political regime types in Bihar and West Bengal (see figure Figure 3.1). Within each District we identified a single Block, and within it a village or ‘locality’, in which we could get to grips with these political cultures in a more concerted fashion.1 It wasn’t easy to choose these localities (or indeed the Blocks), and the final choice was made only after extensive discussions with local activists, journalists and government officers, and after several alternative field sites had been visited.2 We must emphasize, too, that we didn’t know in advance how the state was working in these Blocks, and certainly not from the point of view of different groups within the rural poor; we simply hypothesized that effective pro-poor governance was most likely to be found in Midnapore District, West Bengal, and in Bhojpur District, Bihar, where there have been long histories of pro-poor mobilizations.3 There are between 250 and 350 households in each locality. The research programme began with a household census that provided basic information on the livelihoods of every family. This was followed up with group interviews and by detailed questionnaire work with a sample of 100 households in each field site. The samples were put together on a stratified random basis and included 80 ‘poor’ households in each case. Members of the research team stayed in the localities throughout the fieldwork year. We needed to win people’s trust in order to build up a depth of ethnographic understanding on livelihoods, social networks, and the everyday 1

2

3

The term ‘locality’ is more accurate in the case of the West Bengal field sites. The three field localities in Bihar are discrete villages. Each is made up of a number of different tolas (neighbourhoods) that generally are defined on caste or ethnic grounds. In West Bengal, our localities are defined by the boundaries of the electoral wards of a Gram Panchayat. Each locality contains a number of small, discrete settlements (referred to as villages by their inhabitants), that have neighbourhoods differentiated by caste or religion. There is clearly substantial variation in the political cultures of even one District, not least when it is as large in spatial and population terms as Midnapore District was in 1999. (The District was then home to around 10 million people. Also written as Medinipur, it has since been sub-divided.) Our decisions were also influenced by a range of practical concerns. Most importantly, we needed to have a degree of interest in and cooperation with our work from villagers and local power-holders. Beyond this, our localities needed to have safe, available accommodation and be reasonably accessible to Kolkata/Patna. These demands were fairly modest, however: for example, the Bhojpur locality was more than a two-hour drive on non-metalled roads to the nearest rail station, and our accommodation in Midnapore was in a room borrowed from a junior school. As we report, too, in part II and chapter 8, our hypotheses were not confirmed, at least not in such simple terms, and certainly not in Bhojpur.

Meeting the state

89

Figure 3.1 Map of the studied Districts

functioning of the state. Intensive work in each locality was also combined from the outset with interviews conducted at the Block-, Districtand State-levels. About 280 interviews were conducted across the field sites with government officers and local politicians, as well as with the contractors, brokers, teachers, engineers and others who are key players in the de facto operations of the local state or political society. We begin this chapter by reviewing the livelihood options of our sample households and the experiences of poverty that commonly are made by poorer people. We then consider how people use their non-state social networks to support their livelihood strategies, and to access (or avoid) the state. Lastly, we consider how ‘the state’ makes itself visible to people in our localities, and how government agencies initiate

90

The everyday state and society

and/or respond to encounters with poorer people. By looking at poverty and the state from below we are not aiming to privilege the views of poorer people. That would repeat a failing of an earlier generation of village ethnographies and would reinforce a populist strand in contemporary development studies. Our ‘poor person’s’ perspective is rather to be seen as a first cut through a range of empirical materials that we will examine from different points of view in subsequent chapters. It also enables us to highlight certain blind-spots within the state’s own accounts of state–poor relations, and this too will be a recurrent theme of later chapters. Experiencing poverty: livelihoods, inequality and social networks Men and women in rural eastern India undoubtedly learn to describe their life conditions and opportunities in terms of categories provided for them by state agencies – as members of the socially marginalized Scheduled Communities, for example, or as BPL households. But their descriptions of their life-worlds are not limited to these forms of biopolitics, nor are their experiences of hardship or social exclusion a product of discourse alone. The relationship between the word and the world, to put it crudely (and as Foucault well understood), is hardly accidental, and the daily lives of people are indelibly shaped by pervasive, and in several respects slowly changing, patterns of structural inequality in terms of access to land, or what Marxists have called the means of production. These patterns of inequality will vary significantly from place to place, as our own field studies make clear, and are mediated by the social structures of accumulation described recently by Harriss-White – by caste, gender, religion and ethnicity, for example. In Old Malda Block, Malda District, West Bengal, we worked in a peri-urban locality about five kilometres away from Malda town. The town sits astride a national highway and is a key source of casual work. Agricultural production here, as in most of the eastern part of the District, is based primarily on the cultivation of monsoon rice and winter vegetables for local consumption: the commercial mango farming or sericulture found elsewhere in Malda is not present. The population of the ward we worked in is made up predominantly of adivasis and Scheduled Castes (table Table 3.1). It also includes a significant number of recent migrants. These households have come from elsewhere in West Bengal and (illegally) from Bangladesh, attracted to the area in part because of economic opportunities in Malda town.

Meeting the state

91

Table 3.1. Census households by community and levels of well-being and poverty Malda Non-poor Poor Destitute

GC

SC

ST

Other

Total

33 18 16

53 51 32

13 46 58

67 (20%)

136 (41%)

117 (35%)

10 (3%)

N = 330

132 12 5

3 14 5

52 83 28

– – –

187 (56%) 109 (32%) 36 (11%)

147 (44%)

22 (7%)

163 (49%)

20 54 1

5 62 1

– – –

24 148 3

49 (15%) 264 (83%) 5 (2%)

75 (23%)

68 (21%)

–

175 (55%)

N = 318

71 32 0

9 105 8

– – –

8 86 7

88 (27%) 223 (68%) 15 (5%)

103 (32%)

122 (37%)

–

101 (31%)

N = 326

Ranchi Non-poor Poor Destitute

– – –

2 37 7

19 137 11

11 33 0

32 (12%) 207 (81%) 18 (7%)

Total

–

46 (18%)

167 (65%)

44 (17%)

N = 257

Total Midnapore Non-poor Poor Destitute Total Vaishali Non-poor Poor Destitute Total Bhojpur Non-poor Poor Destitute Total

3 6 1

102 (31%) 121 (37%) 107 (32%)

N = 332

Notes: GC – General Caste, SC – Scheduled Caste, ST – Scheduled Tribe. Source: Initial household census.

Our other field site in West Bengal, Debra Block, is located in the centre of Midnapore District, in a region that has benefited from the spread of micro-irrigation and the recent growth of flower cultivation for the Kolkata market. The locality that we worked in is made up of three hamlets that are eight kilometres distant by non-metalled road from the nearest small market centre on the Kolkata–Kharagpur rail line. The locality includes significant populations of Santal and Bhumij ‘tribals’ whose ancestors migrated as agricultural labourers from further west in

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the District, and who settled permanently in the area over a generation ago. Socially, the ward is a lot more cohesive than the Malda field site. Bidupur Block, in Vaishali District, Bihar, is about forty kilometres from Patna and fringes the northern bank of the Ganges. Agriculture here is more capital-intensive than in our other Districts, and benefits from canal irrigation and ready access to markets. The southern part of the Block is largely given over to the cultivation of bananas. In caste terms, the Block is dominated politically by the Yadavs, albeit in circumstances of extensive competition, and this community, which we have classified as Other Backward Caste (OBC) in table Table 3.1, provides 99 of 318 households in the research locality.4 In Sahar Block, Bhojpur District, Bihar, the poor quality of roads means that our field site is relatively isolated, but even here irrigation ensures that double-cropped agriculture (wheat and rice, with some additional winter vegetables) is widespread. After three decades of sporadic violence, class tensions in the area have improved recently following the institution of ‘people’s courts’ and the participation of the local CPI(M-L) in electoral politics.5 Nevertheless, the very geography of our field panchayat is structured around enduring caste and class divisions. The land-owning Bhumihars make up almost a third of the village’s households, and the large Dusadh community, one of the lowest-status Scheduled Caste groups in Bihar, has taken the lead in a string of labour agitations. As will be clear from what follows, caste relationships continue to be important in both Vaishali and Bhojpur in shaping poor people’s social networks and their interactions with the state. Finally, in Murhu Block, Ranchi District, Bihar/Jharkhand, we worked in a village in which locally dominant adivasi communities are mixed with sadans, or long-settled households from within the caste Hindu population. The adivasi communities are themselves quite diverse: Manjhi and Munda communities each make up about 20 per cent of the village, but there are also significant numbers of Oraons and Lohras.6 In contrast to some other parts of Ranchi District, our field locality has a relatively dense population that is supported mainly by rain-fed rice production. It also has good access to the market and services of Ranchi city, some fifty kilometres away. 4 5

6

For confidentiality reasons, the field localities are not named. Despite the fact that many CPI-ML party workers still faced criminal charges and were effectively forced in to hiding, the Block at this time had an elected CPI-ML Member of the Legislative Assembly. It should be noted that Mundas and Oraons generally do not consider Manjhis and Lohras to be adivasi in this part of Jharkhand, although they are classified as Scheduled Tribes by the state. They are not seen as original settlers or clearers of the forest.

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Income poverty and livelihoods Severe income poverty is a fact of life for people in all five localities. When we worked there in 1999–2000 we took account of government definitions of poverty, as well as local people’s descriptions of their own circumstances. But since we wanted to work in depth with members of 80 ‘poor’ and 20 ‘non-poor’ households in each Village-Block-District, we also developed a working definition of poverty for our own (comparative) purposes. In effect, we developed an income poverty line that made reference to a household with unskilled labour as its only source of income, full employment, and a favourable ratio of earners to dependants. Households falling below this reference point were classified as poor, and those falling significantly below this reference point, and particularly those with highly insecure incomes or showing other signs of distress (food scarcity, dilapidated housing) were classified as destitute.7 As table Table 3.1 makes clear, a majority of the poorest households belong to the Scheduled Communities, although in Bidupur and Sahar Blocks a significant percentage of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) falls below our poverty line. Table Table 3.2 expands on the sources of household income across the field sites. The general patterns are not surprising: richer households have higher incomes and in many cases enjoy a degree of security from salaried jobs and pensions, small businesses, and/or landholdings. Because of the severity of our poverty line, some households that are fully dependent on unskilled labour have been classified as non-poor (where most household members were of working age and were fully employed), but dependency on unskilled labouring work and landlessness is most highly concentrated in poor and destitute households.8 Given the low wages that prevail in all these areas, seasonal variations in employment can rapidly push many of the poorest households into distress.9 Problem times vary across the Districts and Blocks, of course. 7

8

9

This is a particularly strict definition of income poverty, given the low wages that prevail for unskilled labour in all five localities. A number of our non-poor households would fall below the World Bank’s ‘$1 a day’ poverty line (World Bank, 2000: 17). We used this narrow definition primarily as a ‘quick and dirty’ means to focus subsequent interviewbased work on poorer households, and we specifically do not assume that income and assets are the only important dimensions of poverty. In group interviews, poorer villagers evaluated the different income-earning opportunities open to them. Cultivating their own land was deemed most desirable as it offered flexibility and independence: most of our respondents viewed white-collar jobs as completely unattainable. Wages for unskilled labour were generally at or below the government minimum wage of Rs. 48 (US $1) per day in 1999/2000. ‘Casual’ labour contracts vary dramatically across

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Table 3.2. Household land ownership and income sources by poverty ranking

Field locality

Poverty level

Number of households

Land ownership1

Unskilled labour only

Salaried2

Malda

Non-poor Poor Destitute

102 121 107

23% 15% 8%

8% 53% 80%

30% 0% 0%

Midnapore

Non-poor Poor Destitute

187 109 36

90% 82% 53%

3% 7% 33%

19% 1% 0%

Vaishali

Non-poor Poor Destitute

49 264 5

78% 40% 20%

0 30% 20%

45% 0 0

Bhojpur

Non-poor Poor Destitute

88 223 15

91% 34% 13%

0 39% 53%

27% 0 0

Ranchi

Non-poor Poor Destitute

32 207 18

84% 57% 22%

0 42% 78%

28% 0 0

Notes: 1 Land ownership refers to agricultural land, rather than ownership of household plots. Land ownership among poor and destitute households is high in the Midnapore field site in part because of the government-sponsored land distribution: these were largely marginal holdings under 1 acre. 2 Salaried employment is predominantly government jobs and pensions, but includes other salaried jobs or businesses of equivalent security. Source: Initial household census.

In Murhu, unemployment is high between the main rice harvest and the following year’s planting; in Old Malda, flood disruption during the monsoon affects both on- and off-farm employment; and in Bidupur and Sahar secure irrigation means that unemployment patterns are less seasonal in nature. Where distress is felt, reduced consumption is a common first response but, beyond this, household-coping strategies vary greatly between Districts and communities.10 Some individuals or families will reduce their savings and/or take loans from employers at high interest rates. Others will engage in temporary labour migration, home-based craft work (such as bidi-making or weaving rush mats) and, particularly for eastern India, but it is worth noting that women’s wages are typically significantly lower than men’s. 10 A first response is to reduce food intake and variety significantly: a minimal diet of rice, chillies and salt is typical, supplemented in some cases by gathered foods. Where households face particular hardship they eat only once a day.

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adivasi households, the gathering of wild foods.11 In Debra, Old Malda and Murhu Blocks, a lack of employment was deemed to be a major constraint on well-being, and migration for unskilled work beyond the village – ‘being forced to go outside’ – was reported as a key indicator of economic hardship.12 For the poor, however, poverty is felt not only in the stomach and the pocket, but through markers of social distinction that are vital to their experience of well-being or ill-being. In part, these markers are material: being shabbily dressed, living in dilapidated housing, or being unable to provide a guest with basic hospitality, amount to publicly performed indications of a person’s poverty.13 Furthermore, these experiences are not simply the result of individual economic status, but are expressions of deeper divisions within society. In Bihar, caste is important in structuring these experiences of poverty: to be a chamar or a dusadh is to be of low social worth – polluting, even – in the eyes of higher-caste villagers. These prejudices are being challenged in Bhojpur, especially, where slights to the honour of the Scheduled Castes can escalate quickly into public confrontations, but these changes are occurring in a context where caste remains ever visible as a social marker. Elsewhere, caste or ethnic divisions are not as actively politicized, but they are far from being insignificant.14 In both West Bengal Districts, and in Ranchi District, adivasis are marginalized for not having Bengali or Hindi as a first language, or because of their religious beliefs and cultural practices. Stereotypes of tribals – at best as simple and reserved, but more commonly as profligate

11

12

13

14

Many of the wild foods (such as snails) gathered by adivasis are associated with social taboos for other ethnic groups: for a fuller discussion of the use of such common property resources, and their physical and social costs, see Beck (1994: chapter 7). Although distress migration was widespread, not all migration was of this form. Some households – particularly in Vaishali, Bhojpur and to a lesser extent in Malda – had members working in relatively skilled jobs outside the village. In Vaishali and Bhojpur, the extent of this migration, combined with agricultural intensification, was having a tightening effect on local labour markets. Seating one’s guest on a stool or chair, and serving them tea and snacks, would constitute proper hospitality in eastern India, yet even this would stretch the resources of many poorer households in our study areas. However much Bengali society prides itself on its indifference to caste, indigenous social markers remain imbued with caste values. The term chhotolok (literally, ‘little people’) is used to describe the poor, but applies primarily to the scheduled communities. Categories of munish/mazdoor, chasi/kisan and malik (labourer, farmer, landowner) at first seem class-defined, but they are often applied to jatis as well as to individuals, and are inseparable from notions of cleanliness. To move between categories is not simply to change position within the labour market, but also to some extent to participate in a process of Sanskritization (see Ruud, 1999). Ironically, it is probably only among the bhadrolok (‘cultured or higher people’), the urbane and primarily urban intelligentsia, that questions of jati membership are largely irrelevant.

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Table 3.3. Poverty level of female-headed households Malda

Midnapore

Vaishali

Bhojpur

Ranchi

Non-poor Poor Destitute

9 (23%) 14 (37%) 15 (39%)

7 (29%) 11 (46%) 6 (25%)

0 (0%) 3 (100%) 0 (0%)

2 (15%) 6 (46%) 5 (38%)

2 (12%) 10 (59%) 5 (29%)

Total

N = 38

N = 24

N=3

N = 13

N = 17

Source: Initial household census.

drunkards – circulated unchallenged within mainstream society and in the offices of government agencies. Gender relations within and beyond the household are highly unequal in all localities, and the experience of poverty is particularly harsh for women. Income poverty rates are significantly higher among the small number of female-headed households we interviewed (primarily widows and divorcees) than for the locality as a whole (table Table 3.3). Even where these households own land, they are often unable to earn incomes from their holdings.15 Within all households, it is also women whose food intake will be cut first and hardest at times of scarcity. Although Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women do not face the same restrictions on working outside the home that confront higher-caste women, they risk harassment and abuse for the public display of ‘one’s poverty’. Local constructions of proper female behaviour also discourage General Caste women, in particular, from participating in public events. Even among groups where social taboos are weaker it is difficult for women to raise their concerns directly.16 Education and capabilities Gender, caste and ethnic differences also structure access to education in all five field areas, much as one would expect. According to official statistics, literacy rates for adults and children aged 7 or up were lower in Bihar in 1997 for both men and women than in all other major states (see table 2.2). An average literacy rate of 49 per cent, however, conceals male/female levels of 62 and 34 per cent respectively, which are close to the levels we found in our field sites (table 3.4a): the total literacy rate was marginally higher in Vaishali but so also was the gender gap. Literacy 15 16

For a classic discussion of the issues, see Agarwal (1994). One example would be in the conduct of our own research: interviews with poorer women often attracted richer, male caste Hindu observers who took it as their natural right to interpret the women’s views for us.

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Table 3.4a. Literacy rates (7+) by gender, class and caste: Bihar field sites Bhojpur

Vaishali

Ranchi

All

M

F

All

M

F

All

M

F

Destitute households Poor households Non-poor households

14% 45% 78%

25% 58% 86%

4% 29% 69%

33% 52% 60%

70% 66% 83%

0% 34% 39%

25% 52% 79%

31% 65% 92%

19% 39% 64%

Scheduled Tribe Scheduled Caste Minority (Muslims) OBC General Caste

– 34% 41% 45% 81%

– 49% 55% 59% 76%

– 18% 22% 26% 74%

– 22% – 58% 70%

– 34% – 74% 88%

– 7% – 39% 50%

54% 48% – 66% –

65% 63% – 83% –

42% 33% – 48% –

All households

53%

65%

43%

53%

69%

35%

55%

68%

42%

Source: Household census, 1999.

Table 3.4b. Literacy rates (7+) by gender, class and caste: West Bengal field sites Midnapore ward

Malda ward

All

Male

Female

All

Male

Female

40%

55%

26%

26%

32%

19%

55% 79%

69% 90%

42% 66%

42% 74%

51% 82%

32% 64%

Scheduled Tribe Scheduled Caste General Caste

52% 61% 85%

69% 74% 93%

34% 50% 76%

24% 60% 63%

33% 71% 65%

14% 48% 60%

All households

68%

81%

54%

48%

56%

39%

Destitute households Poor households Non-poor households

Source: Household census, 1999.

rates in West Bengal rank fifth among the seventeen major states, but here too an average figure of 72 per cent conceals figures of 81 per cent for men and 63 per cent for women. In West Bengal, too, as we quickly discovered in the field, literacy rates among adults had been raised markedly in some Districts by the Total Literacy Campaign (TLC) of the 1990s. This is one reason why literacy rates (7+) were significantly higher in our Midnapore field site (where the TLC had been active) than in Malda (where it had not been: see table Table Table 3.4b), even though the rates of school

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Table 3.5a. School attendance by gender, class and caste: West Bengal field sites Midnapore ward

Malda ward

School attendance (age 7–12)

All

Male Female All

Male Female

Destitute households Poor households Non-poor households

44% 59% 83%

63% 25% 68% 50% 90% 74%

53% 63% 91%

61% 73% 87%

43% 54% 95%

Scheduled Tribe Scheduled Caste General Caste

51% 79% 81%

64% 37% 100% 57% 92% 83%

36% 83% 84%

48% 87% 86%

21% 80% 82%

All households

68%

78% 56%

67%

72%

61%

Source: Household census, 1999.

Table 3.5b. School attendance by gender, class and caste: Bihar field sites Bhojpur All

M

F

Vaishali All

M

Ranchi F

All

M

F

Destitute households Poor households Non-poor households

11% 10% 13% 27% 57% 0% 30% 26% 36% 31% 34% 28% 57% 63% 50% 55% 59% 51% 55% 59% 50% 36% 55% 25% 88% 93% 79%

Scheduled Tribe Muslims OBC Scheduled Caste General Caste

– 23% 31% 27% 56%

All households

36% 38% 33% 52% 61% 43% 58% 62% 53%

– 31% 31% 34% 57%

– 14% 31% 23% 55%

– – 68% 16% 58%

– – 74% 25% 76%

– – 62% 5% 42%

68% – 75% 56% –

59% – 80% 60% –

49% – 71% 51% –

Source: Household census, 1999.

attendance of children aged 7–12 were remarkably similar in both wards (table 3.5a). Despite popular conceptions about gender equality in adivasi communities, gender disparities in literacy among the Scheduled Tribe (ST) populations remained high (35 per cent in Midnapore, 19 per cent in Malda, and 23 per cent in Ranchi). In all five field sites, the relationship between literacy and our income classes was strong. In Bhojpur, the destitute were more than five times as likely to be non-literate as were non-poor villagers.

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Of course, these figures present only a first cut at estimating school attendance rates in our study areas. Trying to work out how often a child attends school isn’t easy. Interviews we carried out with parents in West Bengal suggested that children are attending school on a more regular basis in Old Malda than in Debra Block, but this was not confirmed by our field observations. We formed the distinct impression that children in Old Malda were often missing school to find work in the hotels and teashops of the nearby town. They did so, moreover, without their parents finding out. Many adults were also working outside the locality. Bunking off was less easy for children in Debra Block, where adult employment was more often provided in the local agricultural economy. The fact that some parents in Old Malda were not aware that their children were missing school is something we take up in chapter 4. We should not assume that all decisions about schooling are made by parents. It needs to be firmly noted, however, that in all of our field areas a clear majority of parents (over 70 per cent of respondents) expressed a desire for their boys to be educated to Class 10 or higher. In West Bengal, it was only among the Malpahariya (ST) community in Old Malda Block that a significant minority of parents (22 per cent) suggested that their sons could do without any formal education (as opposed to 34 per cent of households who thought their daughters could be unschooled). This was mainly for economic reasons (what job would my son or daughter get even if she or he was educated?), or for reasons of language (teaching in Bengali), or opportunity cost (earnings forgone). Among the poor more generally, there was a clear feeling that boys should be educated in order to take advantage of new jobs that were opening up in the non-agricultural economy. Questions of empowerment/self-respect were also important: education was thought to provide some protection for the boys and their families against being cheated. There was little expectation that female children would be directly productive in Midnapore (especially), and family-related advantages were more often cited as a reason to educate girls. This refers to the advantages that a minimum level of education might confer on a girl in marriage and dowry markets. The fact that children are receiving less education in our field sites than would be considered desirable by their parents is mainly a product of economic hardship. Economic constraints appeared to be especially strong in the Midnapore, Malda and Vaishali field sites (table Table 3.6). Parents also voiced concerns about the quality and utility of the education that children were receiving in government schools, particularly in Malda where there was widespread disquiet about the performance of two public schools. Parents in both West Bengal localities thought it was necessary for them to supplement (in Midnapore) or supplant (in Malda, in effect)

3% 100%

– –

30% 0%

53% 19%

101%

–

70%

26%

Non-poor

Source: Village questionnaire surveys, 1999.

Total

Desired level can be achieved Not sure Desired level cannot be achieved (No desire for education) N. A.

Poor

Midnapore

100%

14% 1%

56% 16%

13%

Poor

100%

– –

30% 5%

65%

Non-poor

Malda

Table 3.6. Ability to support desired level of education

74%

100%

– –

–

26%

Poor

60%

100%

– –

–

40%

Non-poor

Vaishali

8%

22%

100%

–

–

70%

Poor

10% 100%

–

–

90%

Non-poor

Bhojpur

10%

3%

101%

–

–

88%

Poor

8%

2%

100%

–

–

90%

Non-poor

Ranchi

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the public educations their children were receiving with private tuition. This generally cost Rs. 25–30 per month for a child at the primary school, which was a significant disincentive for poor families. In chapter 4 we shall discuss the matter of loyalty to governmentprovided education, and the possibility that parents might take steps to improve their local public schools by taking part in Village Education Committees (or School Attendance Committees in West Bengal). At this point, we simply note that the exit option was attractive to many parents in our field sites. In some cases this was expressed in terms of a preference for private tuition, or for the sort of ‘segregated schooling’ that saw parents of General Caste pupils in our Malda field site opt to educate their children in a neighbouring (and better provided) Gram Panchayat, leaving the ward’s own schools almost entirely to children from the Scheduled Communities. In other cases it was expressed in a sort of weary fatalism that refused to accept that education was within everyone’s reach. In the words of one respondent in Malda. ‘If you can’t afford the tuition, what is the use of sending your children to school when they do not learn anything there? In this case, it’s better for them to stay at home and help their parents’ (see also box Box 3.1).

Box 3.1 Parental attitudes to education in Malda and Midnapore Districts Gathered below are some of the responses that we collected from poorer villages in Old Malda Block, Malda District, and Debra Block, Midnapore in 1999 when we asked them about the value of education. The responses are representative but not exhaustive. Malda: The prospect of unemployment hampers the interest in secondary and higher education here. As we are poor, we cannot afford to pay the bribes that are necessary to get a job. A person who has ‘outside knowledge’ has a good chance to find some job, for example, helping out in a shop, doing accounts, etc. We should be able to get some ‘return’ from the education of our children. Earlier, there was just agriculture. Now, there are different kinds of works. For these jobs, one has to go outside and to be literate is more important. Literate people cannot be cheated so easily while we illiterate people are cheated in every sphere of life. Our children will be able to mingle with children of more educated classes. They will be less isolated. They will be more aware and have more general

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knowledge. This will enable them to give their parents advice. They will also be able to write [official] letters. An educated person is less dependent on others. ‘The boy’ can help his parents with paperwork such as looking after land records, measurements, etc. He also can teach the next generation. An educated person cannot be cheated so easily. Being able to write and read also means that the person can maintain certificates and deal with offices. This will be of use for the whole family.

Midnapore: The present age is the age of literacy and education. Being educated, one can achieve self-confidence and [better] mentality. [One can] build up towards better understanding for one’s own betterment. Education for girls is needed for marriage purposes only. Education up to class VI to VII is sufficient. We do not want higher education, because we can’t afford it. The girls won’t get a job anyway, so higher education is useless.

The non-state social networks of the poor This contrast between the school and the home exposes something else besides, which is that for many poorer people the state is not at the heart of their social imaginaries or livelihood strategies. Notwithstanding the ambitions and reach of the developmental state in India, most poor people (indeed, most people) do not look upon sarkar as a first port of call when they face difficulties or want something doing. The social networks of the poor form a backdrop of ‘spontaneous participation’ that will often eclipse more formal participatory encounters with agencies of the state or the broader development community. This is an obvious point, perhaps, but it is one that is understated in the participation literature that we review in chapter 4. Given the nature of the poverty we have reported for our field sites, it will be obvious that gaining access to employment and credit is a major concern for many poor people. The support of local patrons and employers is key here, as it can be when it comes to getting a child admitted to school. Opportunities for poor labourers to work as year-round farm servants are limited in all five areas, and the days of labourers being bonded to particular employers through debt obligations have more or less ended. Nevertheless, investing in good relationships with key employers is seen as a practice that can provide mutual benefits. In Vaishali and Bhojpur

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Districts, where the labour market is relatively tight, employers play an active role in maintaining these relationships. Members of some poorer households stated that they would not go cap-in-hand to employers to seek work. This would insult their honour and might weaken their wage bargaining position. In the other Districts the opportunities for slack season work are more limited and labourers can ill afford such pride. Government public-works programmes are periodically undertaken in all five field sites, but even in Midnapore, where these schemes have created the most work for local labourers, the state’s role as a direct employer of the poor is by no means extensive (see chapter 4). The importance to the poor of locally powerful individuals is further underlined by the search for credit. Loans for poor Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households come mainly from their regular employers, particularly to meet seasonal consumption needs. These loans are repaid with interest, sometimes by giving ‘free’ labour instead of cash.17 Loans from neighbours and relatives are also important, although these are generally for smaller amounts than are those obtained from employers. If neither source is available or sufficient, known moneylenders inside or beyond the village are approached. Government loans from schemes such as the Integrated Rural Development Programme provide credit on softer terms but, again, they are not sufficiently available to take the place of richer villagers who can provide ‘ready money’.18 Importantly, throughout all our Districts, what can be described as private, market-based relationships dominate transactions in the spheres of work and credit. The relative bargaining power of the parties involved varies, and in some cases the support that landlords and employers give to their workers shows a degree of care that reaches beyond a narrowly economic relationship. There is also a degree of mutuality in developing these networks of support. Trustworthy labourers are valuable to their employers, whose behaviour in respect of labour should not be construed as altruistic. The transactions, however, remain the private business of the parties concerned. Although no one talked about richer villagers having a generic duty to help the poor, they emerged nonetheless as key individuals within poorer people’s social networks. 17 18

Typical interest rates for these loans would range between 5 and 10 per cent per month. Significantly, schemes such as the IRDP are specifically intended to provide productive assets, and as such give loans of the order of a few thousand rupees to a fortunate few households. Although many of these loans are diverted by the poor into short-term consumption needs (cf. Williams, 1999), the design of the IRDP and equivalent schemes does not meet the general need for seasonal credit.

104

The everyday state and society Traditional institutions

Economically powerful individuals

Political workers and brokers

Individual civil servants

Formal government institutions

Malda

Tribal councils (minor role in dispute resolution)

Key providers of work and credit: power relatively unchallenged

Few individuals active, but hold great power

Little direct contact with poor

PRIs weakly instituted; near defunct School Attendance Committee

Midnapore

Tribal councils (minor role in dispute resolution)

Key providers of work and credit: land reform slightly limits their power

Various CPI-M members active; fewer opposition activists

Little direct contact with poor

PRIs strong in most areas of village life; active School Attendance Committee

Vaishali

Caste councils (some dispute resolution)

Key providers of work and credit: also act as village mediators

Various active: support divided by caste

VLW main source of direct contact

VEC present and partly functioning; PRIs dissolved in 1999, reinstated in 2001

Bhojpur

Non-existent (rendered ineffective through caste violence)

Key providers of work and credit: power restricted by extreme-Left (Naxal: here CPI-ML) actions

Various active: support divided by party lines, overlapping with caste configurations

Various officers relatively accessible

Janata Durbar active; Peace Committee and weak VEC present; PRIs dissolved in 1999, reinstated in 2001

Ranchi

Tribal councils (active)

Key providers of work and credit: little role in other spheres

Mukhiya powerful: other party activists marginal

Little direct contact with poor

VEC present, but weak; PRIs dissolved in 1999 and reinstated in 2001

Figure 3.2 Schematic account of key sources of support for the poor, by District

Commonalities between the field sites in the provision of work and credit dissolve when we look at the sources of non-financial support upon which the poor are dependent (figure Figure 3.2). In Vaishali, higher-caste individuals are able to project their power beyond the economic sphere of work and loans. As informal leaders they still play an important role in mediating village disputes and manage to retain a degree of respect and standing for doing so. Their power, however, is eclipsed in the sphere of government-funded development programmes: rich and poor villagers alike recognize that connections to powerful political figures are central to controlling such funds. The local Member of the Legislative Council (MLC), BB, who belongs to Laloo Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, has a particularly important role to play, although he must have regard for other local brokers and intermediaries. The government Village-Level Worker

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is also a key source of support for poorer villagers. Payments to him are often necessary if villagers are to access those individualized aspects of state support, such as pensions, loans or improved housing under the Indira Awas Yojana, which are aimed at the poor. Formal government institutions are weak in the study village. Bihar’s panchayats were finally suspended in 1999, leaving unelected caste councils with some residual influence over village affairs.19 In Bhojpur, three decades of intermittent but violent conflict between Naxalite forces (the CPI-ML) and the Ranveer Sena had only recently quietened down when we conducted our fieldwork. Agricultural relations had ‘normalized’ in 1999–2000, and labourers and landlords were more aware of the need for generalized exchange. But the legacy of the conflict had a lasting impact on the social networks of poorer villagers. Despite an uneasy truce over agricultural pay and conditions and the ownership of land, the violence had undermined any legitimacy that higher-caste villagers or traditional institutions might once have enjoyed. Class- and caste-consciousness were high, with lower caste groups actively pressing for their rights, particularly in relation to political and developmental activities. In this still volatile situation, the police and other formal government agencies, such as the Janata Durbar (‘people’s courts’), were key sources of help in resolving disputes. The Janata Durbars are discussed further below, and in chapter 6, but they had the effect of making higher-level government officers much more visible here than in the other Districts: villagers were more aware of the presence of these officers, and were sometimes able to petition them directly for different forms of government support. These occasional meetings aside, a breadth of local political intermediaries had emerged to represent different caste groups within the village and to press their claims on the state. In Murhu Block, Ranchi District, contact with government officials was far less direct than in Sahar Block, Bhojpur District. Despite the suspension of the old panchayats, the Mukhiya (panchayat headman) of our field site still acted as virtually the sole conduit to the government development bureaucracy. His reputation within the local Block office for being ‘developmentally minded’ had allowed the village to draw down significant resources through various development programmes (see chapter 5). The benefits of these programmes had been broadly distributed between different social groups within the village, and the Mukhiya’s role had until 19

Prior to the 2001 elections, Bihar had last held panchayat elections in 1978. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of panchayats had been effectively inoperative many years before their official dissolution.

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recently been unchallenged. The village still had strong indigenous tribal institutions for dealing with conflict resolution and other major decisions, and a range of community-specific traditional leaders were key sources of support for rich and poor villagers alike. Support in the search for slack season migration opportunities usually came from immediate neighbours or relatives. Given the dominance over public affairs that was exercised by the Mukhiya and some other community leaders, there was little scope for a wider range of political intermediaries to become established. One might have expected that village social networks in the West Bengal Districts would have been reshaped by the presence of active panchayat institutions, and in Debra Block this was indeed the case.20 Panchayat members and party workers dominated many areas of public life. Six male CPI-M activists and the party’s female council member lived in the ward. As a group, their social and economic backgrounds reflected those of their constituents, and they were active in helping households in all manner of tasks, from school registration to settling wage disputes.21 Interviews with villagers suggested that these people generally were trusted, and were seen to be playing a valuable social role.22 Many villagers pointed to the female Gram Panchayat (GP) member as a person to turn to if there was a dispute, and this would seem to signal respect for her office over and above ascriptive sources of power: her gender, caste and poor economic condition appeared to be no impediment to her playing a public role. More generally, a range of local party workers (including some less active opposition members) provided a broad base of contact points between poorer villagers and different branches of the state. The lowest-level government workers could often be seen within the villages or the local panchayat office, although other civil servants would generally have to be contacted through panchayat members. Panchayat representatives had thus displaced the leadership roles played by larger landholders before the 1970s, and it was only within the Scheduled Tribe communities that 20

21

22

Despite West Bengal’s good record in innovation with PRIs, the decentralization of responsibilities to the grassroots was not matched by devolution of financial resources equivalent to that in Kerala’s recent experiment with grassroots planning (see chapter 7). The senior party worker, NS, had completed secondary school, and owned a small amount of land (one acre): he and two other paid party workers enjoyed some security through their party connections, but were not significantly well off. The remaining party members all came from households that suffered from seasonal unemployment: three fell below our poverty line, and only two were caste Hindus. Particular value was placed on party workers’ knowledge and experience of government and their engagements with poorer households. Typical comments made about one of the full-time party workers by poorer interviewees were that: ‘He is the friend of poor, knowledgeable and a good person. All people respect him’, or more simply: ‘He is my neighbour. He knows my condition.’

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indigenous institutions retained some importance, primarily over cultural issues.23 In stark contrast, the same framework of political institutions within the Old Malda field area was associated with a very different pattern of social networks. A single panchayat samiti (Block-level) member cultivated direct and personal loyalty from people in the locality.24 We return to the mediation of power in chapter 6, but it is worth noting here that while many poorer households might have been aware of panchayat institutions, and the presence of other political figures, for most such people this man was the de facto boss of the locality. Other figures were important by virtue of their control of Gram Panchayat programmes, but this power was also personalized in large degree. Although these new political representatives had displaced an earlier generation of high-caste village leaders, they had done so without producing public support for functioning panchayati raj institutions. Politics remained clientelistic, which is to say that services or goods were geared very directly to political supporters of the patron. For the poor in each of our Districts, groups of ‘local uppers’ – individuals with economic and/or political resources – are important sources of support. Although the social networks these individuals produce vary greatly, a number of general points still emerge. First, the resources controlled by employers and moneylenders are key to the survival strategies of many among the poor. Government assistance provides access to work, credit and other benefits for some people, but it does little to diminish the roles of the economically powerful. Second, where poorer people do require help from government agencies, their contacts with the state are for the most part routed through low-level intermediaries. The very poor thus face a double burden: not only are their sources of livelihood highly insecure, but their social networks are often less able than are those of richer households to provide access to key resources and support in times of crisis. From their perspective, staying on the right side of powerful intermediaries – political workers and richer villagers – is an essential part of their everyday participation in village life. Finally, the degree to which the social networks of the poorest have been penetrated by sarkar does not simply reflect state-level differences in regime type, or the current 23

24

Conflicts over personal relations – such as marital infidelity – might be turned over to traditional leaders and priests. Nevertheless, CPI-M penetration of public life went as far as sponsoring elements of tribal festivals. When villagers were asked about who they would turn to for help in various fields – accessing health-care, work, loans, sorting out village disputes – this individual dominated in almost all cases, and to a degree that was not matched in the other Districts. The one exception was education: state schools were failing miserably in the locality but he had not chosen to intervene here, perhaps because of the limited opportunities for kick-backs and skim-offs.

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institutional arrangements of local government. Important differences within Bihar and West Bengal are also shaped by experiences of political mobilization, as well as of localized patterns of leadership and social dominance, and past government arrangements, among other factors. Within the uneven geography of state–poor encounters that emerges, the range of aspects of public life within a village over which sarkar exercises some direct influence also varies greatly: this much should be apparent from our discussion of Ranchi, Bhojpur and Midnapore. Nevertheless, the experiences that poorer people form of the state are not simply demand-led. In addition to being a (sometimes minor) part of their livelihood strategies, government imposes itself on villagers in other ways, as we shall now explain. Seeing the state from the villages Chris Fuller and John Harriss have suggested that to enter a local administrative office, a government school, or a police station ‘is to cross the internal boundary into the domain of the state, whose conceptual separation from society is perhaps most ubiquitously symbolized by all its specialpurpose buildings with their painted notice-boards outside’ (2001: 23). But they go on to note that the everyday state remains a difficult object of study in spite of these official attempts to mark out its distinctiveness. Part of the difficulty arises because the state is simultaneously a dispersed collection of institutions of government (the ‘state system’) and a powerful myth about their imagined unity and purpose (the ‘state idea’). In addition, when poorer people meet local state officials, they do so with reference to their non-state social networks. They draw on the same social and organizational practices that help them to negotiate their poverty. For the most part the state is met through the persons who bring these practices to life, as well as through a broader range of caste leaders, brokers (dalaals) and political fixers (pyraveekars). We will expand on the role of mediators in shaping patterns of rule in chapter 6, but whether the poor engage sarkar directly, or via an intermediary, many encounters with lower-level state officials will blur the boundaries between the state system and what lies outside it. Akhil Gupta argues that, in the conduct of government business, these officials consciously adopt the practices of traditional patrons: they are willing to take bribes, and they are as likely to operate from their homes or tea-shops as from their desks. He goes on to note that the performances that are required when meeting with government officers (in official and unofficial spaces) blur these boundaries still further: although impersonal norms should prevail in these encounters, poorer men and women may touch officers’ feet

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and present their relationship with government as one of supplication and not of citizenship.25 In telling the story of the ways in which poorer citizens see the state from the villages, we need to pay careful attention to the details of these encounters and their implications for both the state idea and the state system. As will become clear below, poor people are not always passive supplicants when they meet the state in eastern India, and their contacts with the everyday state are important in informing their ideas of how sarkar does and should work. The expansion of the technologies of rule described in chapter 2 not only extends the state’s reach towards the poor, it also provides poor people with glimpses of how power operates and how they might work the system to better advantage. But we begin our discussion with a brief account of the geography of local government institutions in our study areas, for this is where the poor see the state in the very tangible forms that Fuller and Harriss describe. Geographies of the state The geography of the local state includes a vast array of institutions that runs from the District, where government offices fill an entire campus and where the staff can number several hundred persons, to the Block and (in West Bengal at least) the humble anchal office, which might be staffed by a handful of the lowest-grade government workers. It is not possible here to provide a full institutional mapping of government in each of our five study sites, but figure Figure 3.3 outlines the organization of the Employment Assurance Scheme in West Bengal from the perspective of the ‘official’ state. From a bureaucratic point of view, the range of elected representatives and government personnel listed here is significant and well-ordered. Institutions and people are arranged into clear hierarchies from the IAS-cadre District Magistrate down to the lowliest peon. For many poorer people, however, and many women especially, a geography of the state which runs from the commanding heights of the state capital down to the extension workers in the trenches is not at all what they see. Figure Figure 3.4 shows the government in West Bengal as it is viewed by two adivasi women in our Midnapore field site. For Debati and Rani, the people who really matter in their lives are the local panchayat member and 25

Gupta (1995) more often refers to ‘discourses’ than to ‘performances’. Fuller and Harriss argue (2001: 13) that ‘discourse’ is somewhat carelessly used in Gupta’s work to refer to both practice and action. We prefer the idea of performances as this explicitly highlights the importance of practice and action. Furthermore, performances can involve the deliberate playing out of roles for public consumption, regardless of private motivations to the contrary (see Scott, 1990).

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District Level

Block Level

Anchal Level

Ward Level

The everyday state and society Panchayat Bodies

Key Political Representatives

Planning Committees

Key Administrative Staff

Zilla Parishad (District Council)

Sabhadhipati (Chair of ZP)

District Planning Committee

District Magistrate

Chairs of Standing Committees

Planning Standing Committee

ADMs and AEO

(MPs, MLAs, and ordinary ZP members)

Public Works Standing Committee

(Other District Level staff)

Sabhapati (Chair of PS)

General Meeting of Panchayat Samiti

Block Development Officer

Chairs of Standing Committees

Planning Standing Committee

Sub-Assistant Engineers

(MP, MLAs, and ordinary PS members)

Public Works Standing Committee

(Other Block level staff )

Pradhan

Gram Panchayat meetings

Panchayat Secretary

Gram Sabha (public meeting)

Job Assistant

Panchayati Samiti (Block Council)

Gram Panchayat

Panchayat member(s)

Gram Sansad (public meeting) Beneficiary Committee (lay membership)

Note: An anchal is a ‘village cluster’. It consists of about a dozen wards, and up to two dozen villages or smaller hamlets.

Figure 3.3 The EAS in West Bengal: key actors and institutions

the panchayat pradhan. The Block- and District-scales of government, still less Kolkata and Delhi, are notable only by their absence. Of course, getting villagers to map the state in this way is subject to all sorts of methodological difficulties. The visual impression given is clearly one of absence, and this paucity of information might be at odds with the verbal accounts that such women can offer of the state. In this case, both women knew the names of the Pradhan and the Gram Panchayat (GP) member of their electoral booth, and they considered both of them to be important people. The GP member, a tribal woman, is the person

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Figure 3.4 ‘Chapati diagrammes’ of the government: Midnapore field site

they turn to first if there are problems, or if there are quarrels between villagers about land or some other issue. The Pradhan is also seen on a regular basis. He comes to official meetings in their neighbourhood a few times a year, accompanied by the Panchayat Secretary and other officials, and is often seen outside these formal settings. The former GP member of their booth, RT, is known to them as someone well-versed in government matters. They have also visited the anchal office, although they are not acquainted with the purpose of the Block office. But if ‘other government people’ are occasional visitors to their neighbourhood, the women have no idea who they are or what position they have, a situation they blame on their own illiteracy. They know that government sees them as STs and BPLs, but they have only a hazy understanding of how this is supposed to feed through into concrete rights and benefits. Accounts such as these raise a number of important issues. Very obviously, they highlight the isolation of the poorest families, and poor women in particular, from higher-level government officials (compare with the

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male CPI-M supporter in figure Figure 3.4). These women are socially and economically active within and beyond their neighbourhood and village, and yet the Block – still less the District – offices of the state are not an important part of their life-worlds. For them, the state is experienced very directly and very locally, and not very often. Their accounts would surely resonate with those of women in the Lohra (ST) community in Murhu Block, Ranchi, where views of government were typically limited to the person of the mukhiya himself. Many of the Lohras we spoke to assumed that government development schemes were undertaken as a direct result of his personal work and benevolence. Once again, engagement with the state system was limited and ideas of government or authority are often indistinguishable from individual holders of an office. Nevertheless, it is important that these perceptions are not merely seen as a lack of awareness, or as the leftovers of a ‘pre-modern’ consciousness. Rather, they are actively produced through current patterns of social and political exclusion: although Debati and Rani may blame their own lack of education, their views of the state reflect broader aspects of their (dis)empowerment. Not all villagers suffer this degree of isolation. A good number of the people we spoke to were familiar with the Block office, and some villagers were making careers as ‘party’ or ‘social’ workers, or informal brokers, who could link other villagers to government officials and services. In any case, the government centres, services and staff that are most visible to poor households beyond the pradhan or mukhiya are primary schools and anganwadi centres, which feature alongside the occasional presence of a Village Level Worker (Bihar in 1999), or Gram Panchayat staff members (West Bengal). For poor men, especially, the Block is also an important site for encounters with the state, and in both Bihar and West Bengal the Block Development Officer (BDO) is the best-known figure in the civil service. He or she acts as a combination of development planner, local magistrate, and manager of other civil servants. Alongside the BDO, the Block is also the lowest point at which many government departments have officers, and India’s developmental Blocks are in many cases contiguous with that other key state institution, the thana or police station. The District offices are generally more distant and only a small proportion of the poor will make this journey to visit government officials or to participate in a court case. For the villagers we worked with in Debra it involved a 30-kilometre train ride; villagers in Sahar were faced with a three-hour walk and bus journey. The District offices are imposing and potentially impenetrable. Access to key figures at this level is unlikely to occur without a mediator. This will be especially true of the

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office/home of the District Magistrate (DM), or collector, which in Bihar will be guarded by jawans carrying sub-machine guns. (In West Bengal the DM is often no more accessible to ordinary citizens, but his or her office is more likely to call to mind that of a Chief Executive Officer.) As in the Block Office, the browning walls of the Collector’s main room will be decorated with the occasional photograph of Gandhi and Nehru, and perhaps also of the Prime Minister of the day. There will also be a wooden plaque upon which will be listed the DMs who have served in the area since 1947, or still earlier in many cases. The continuity of the state, and of the all-India services, is clearly a source of pride. Given the remoteness of the District- and state-levels of government, differences between the lowest tiers of the development state in West Bengal and Bihar can be especially important for the poor. Making up the front line of the state in Bihar are Block-based staff. The VLWs and karamcharis make their peripatetic rounds to the villages they are assigned to, but villagers might need to contact them at the Block office if they shirk their duties or if they need assistance on a more urgent basis. Although staffing levels might be roughly equivalent in West Bengal, the panchayat secretary and panchayat karmis are physically closer to villagers there because of the network of anchal offices, of which there will generally be between six and twelve per development Block.26 The anchal staff might only perform basic tasks, and most offices will be simple tworoom buildings with the most rudimentary facilities (in 1999 computers were unheard of, and telephones by no means universal), but this at least provides a convenient site at which government officers and Gram Panchayat members can be contacted. The transaction costs of meeting the state are therefore lowered, and the physical linkages between the bureaucracy and elected panchayat members are demonstrated on a more regular basis.27 As we will note further below, it would be wrong to infer that poor people’s greater proximity to the local state leads directly to a more active sense of citizenship, as some of the good governance literature perhaps 26 27

Anchal offices will generally be within 6 km of most villagers. Block offices can be up to 25 km away. West Bengal’s anchal offices typically contain a room for the pradhan and one for the office staff. At the Block level too, panchayat samiti members and Block civil servants will often share the same building. In the panchayat rooms, walls are again adorned with a roll-call of past chairpersons, mirroring the list in the BDO’s chamber. The symbolism is probably not lost on the majority of those visiting these offices: elected members are an official part of sarkar, working alongside civil servants, and they are there as a permanent fixture. Although the infrastructure of the state is lacking below the Block level in Bihar, the times at which the village extension staff are present in the Block offices are at least meant to coordinate with local market days, thus widening villagers’ opportunities to contact public servants.

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suggests (see chapters 4 and 5). Placing the structures of a decentralized state on the statute book in West Bengal does not always mean that offices are fully staffed and functional on the ground. Even when they are, their presence does not automatically empower women hurt by high levels of social exclusion like Debati and Rani. Conversely, at the time of our fieldwork in Bihar, it was in part the very distance between villagers and the lower reaches of the state (the BDO, say, and the MLA) that made poor people’s agency in targeting the state so visible in terms of journeys made or brokers used. (Recall Polus B— in chapter 1.) Encountering the developmental state To understand what these geographies of the state mean for poorer people we need to move on from mappings of state institutions to a consideration of how poor people encounter government personnel. The range of people’s encounters with the state across our field sites is vast, and extends far beyond the developmental institutions described above. Alongside these officers and offices, the poor will have day-to-day encounters with schools, health services and various arms of the state’s disciplinary apparatus, all of which will contribute to their sense of how, and for whom, government operates.28 We shall hope to touch upon some of these encounters later in the book. Nevertheless, our focus here is on the developmental state, and we conclude the main part of this chapter with three brief vignettes from our field sites in Ranchi, Bhojpur and Midnapore. We consider how poor people access the state’s developmental institutions, and whether and how their access to state-sponsored development opportunities rubs up against that reliance on ‘local uppers’ that we described earlier. We also focus on the proactive roles played by some individuals within a very heterogeneous population of poor people. Challenging the Mukhiya in Murhu We begin with our Ranchi field site, as it was here (and in Malda) that the developmental activities of the state were most clearly monopolized 28

In Malda, in particular, ‘the state’ was experienced through the location of a Border Security Force barracks adjacent to our field site – an important presence when the traffic of people and goods across the border with Bangladesh is commonplace. In Ranchi, the disciplinary arm of the state would be felt more often through the presence of forest guards and the multiple army bases that fringe Ranchi city. In Bhojpur the police and various paramilitaries have been an occasional but important presence in the area during recent conflicts between the Ranveer Sena and the CPI-ML.

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by a single person. Block officers in Murhu described the Mukhiya of our panchayat as a trusted individual with a reputation for being developmentally minded. For most villagers, his past record of drawing down benefits from the state meant that his expertise in these matters went largely unchallenged. As we noted above, this record of achievement led some Lohras to conflate the position of the Mukhiya with sarkar more generally. Notwithstanding the fact that the District Magistrate (DM) had visited the village to inaugurate the completion of an Indira Awas housing scheme, many STs thought these houses had been provided by the Mukhiya himself. Not everyone in our field locality was prepared to accept this interpretation. Sudhir M–, an educated and unemployed young man, used the opportunity of the SDO’s visit to press for the construction of a girls’ toilet for the village school. The SDO encouraged him to carry out the scheme, and Sushir approached the Block office to formalize things. This wasn’t easy: initially, the Block staff were not willing to pass schemes to someone other than the Mukhiya, and it was only Sudhir’s threat of going back to the SDO that enabled him to be handed the project. Sudhir later prepared and submitted the pension applications of a group of Lohra households to the Circle Officer (CO). The CO happened to be a college friend of his who had recently been recruited to the Block. Sudhir’s chance meeting with the SDO, along with his frustration at seeing the Mukhiya control affairs within the village, was beginning to turn him into a fixer in his own right. Encounters with the state can be more difficult for those without Sudhir’s education or contacts in government. Ranjit M–, another unemployed tribal youth in the village, told us that he had repeatedly visited the Block office over the course of a year to question the dominance of the Mukhiya. The Block officers taunted him at first. He was curtly told ‘Chappal ghis jayeaga chakker katete per tumko scheme nahin milega’ (You can wear your sandals out coming here, but you won’t get a scheme). But Ranjit persisted. Eventually, after talking to Block-level Congress party workers, he found out about the existence of the official roster that detailed when aam sabhas – the village open meetings that are meant to decide upon the selection of executing agents for development schemes – should be held. A proper aam sabha had never previously been held in the village. The Mukhiya and members of the Block staff had simply concocted minutes of meetings to keep the official records straight. Armed with this information, Ranjit pushed for a proper meeting, and was successfully elected as the executing agent of the next development project in the village.

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Neither Ranjit nor Sudhir acted out of altruism. Sudhir collected Rs. 50 from each Lohra household to get their pensions processed, and both men expected to earn more than prestige from managing a small development scheme.29 Given the limited means of their families it would be wise to skim off some financial benefits. We return to the motives and careers of such small-time fixers in chapter 6, but our point here is rather different. For some among the poor with drive and insight, chance meetings with powerful outsiders can be a first step in targeting the state. The politicized poor in Sahar Sahar Block has seen a long history of collective actions on the part of the poor, mainly around land and labour issues. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that poorer people have more champions than would commonly be the case in Ranchi District, including Scheduled Caste members of the CPI-ML. Nevertheless, the connections between a career in agrarian politics and confidence in encountering the developmental state are far from direct. The violence of agrarian politics means that many grassroots activists have been driven underground after being listed, falsely or otherwise, on police First Incident Reports for charges such as rioting or murder. In any case the ideological thrust of the extreme Left has been towards overthrowing the state rather than engaging with its developmental agendas.30 One way in which the legacy of agrarian politics has assisted state– poor encounters is through the practice of Janata Durbars. These public hearings have been widely used in Bhojpur and other ‘troubled’ Districts. They are a means of diffusing sources of tension before they break out as episodes of public unrest or organized violence. These meetings bring higher-ranking officials, including the DM, closer to the villages, and they have given the most astute members of the rural poor a degree of understanding of how the state system works. On occasions, too, poorer villagers have been able to appeal directly to a DM for the redress of certain grievances.31 29

30

31

The money Sudhir collected was described as money for chai pani – literally a payment for ‘tea and water’ for the Block staff. These would have been small bribes, of which Sudhir would have most likely retained some amount for himself. (See also table 1.1.) The area’s MLA was a case in point. Although a competent leader of agrarian struggles in the area, he appeared to be coping less well with the task of using the developmental state in favour of the poor. At one such meeting, Laxman, a Scheduled Caste leader, managed to ensure that a community building was placed inside the harijan neighbourhood of the village. He had convinced one of his Scheduled Caste colleagues to donate the land on which the building was to be built. The DM approved the deal and granted money for its construction under

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The confidence gained by using the developmental state in this way can lead to more direct challenges to the power of landowning Bhumihars. We saw this in a public meeting to select an executing agent to run a Rs. 70,000 irrigation tank repair project under the Million Well Scheme. A Scheduled Caste leader (neta), NR, led a campaign to put himself or another Musahar forward as a rival to the Bhumihars’ chosen candidate. NR said he didn’t want someone to be elected who would be a stooge for the landowners. It was important that labourers on the scheme received the full minimum wage. By arranging for a large number of women from his own community to attend the meeting, NR helped to ensure that the vote went in favour of his community. Although many Bhumihars complained that the election was unfair, the poorest and socially lowest group in the village gained control of the tank repair project. In this and other less dramatic examples from Bhojpur we see that a section of the poor is trying hard to get the state system working in its favour. Placing polite requests for community assets in front of the DM, or knowing how to gerrymander public meetings, suggests a nuanced understanding of the rhetoric and practices of the official state’s descriptions of itself. The success of such tactics, however, ultimately relies on the understanding, won through years of agrarian conflict, that the Scheduled Castes must protect themselves against the Bhumihars when the state is not around to act as a referee. There is a saying in Bhojpuri that ‘only when every head is broken will everyone see sense’, and the threat of broken heads is precisely what has forced some members of the Bhumihar community to concede ground to the Scheduled Castes when dealing with the developmental state. The power of the panchayats in Debra Our final snapshot of poor people’s encounters with the developmental state is in the more mundane form of a gram sansad meeting in Midnapore. These meetings have been mandatory since the early-1990s in West Bengal, and the Left Front Government has seen them as one important mechanism for extending poor people’s engagements with the panchayat system. They are also meant to enhance the accountability of elected the EAS. Unknown to the DM, Laxman had pulled off quite a coup: the donated land was about to be the subject of a court case, and potentially was going to be lost by its owner after what would inevitably be a difficult and costly legal battle. Both the donation and the building had been given the DM’s public approval, and would thus be the unquestioned property of the harijan community. It would also provide a public meeting place away from the control of Bhumihars. Laxman would get some personal profit from arranging to have the building constructed.

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members and increase the transparency of panchayat decisions. Meetings should be held twice a year in a public place – a school building or a patch of open ground – in every ward of every panchayat.32 We observed a meeting in May 1999 that was attended by a little under eighty villagers in our ward, most of them from poorer households, and various local CPI-M party workers. The meeting was chaired by the ward Gram Panchayat member, with the support of the panchayat secretary. Representatives of the Block-level panchayat and government staff were also present. The proceedings were formal and business-like: the Gram Panchayat member acted as chair, and the Block panchayat member reported on general progress in village development. He reported a decrease in development funds from the government over the past few years, and gave exact figures about how much money flowed to the panchayat under various government schemes. He also mentioned the Gram Panchayat’s efforts to raise its own money (through afforestation schemes, a toll tax, and other measures), and told the villagers to be more health conscious and make use of the GP sanitary scheme. The meeting then moved on to discuss development priorities in the area. Lay participants, and particularly women, were expressly invited to air their views and make suggestions. The elected GP members and other party workers remained surprisingly silent throughout this discussion: as we found out later, they had already primed villagers to put forward suggestions for development work (see chapter 4). From the perspective of poorer villagers, this everyday contact with the state acts to reinforce a set of norms and expectations of government. Meetings can be ritualistic, and the contributions made by poorer villagers might indeed derive from prior prompting by party workers, but the discussions we observed still managed to break away from a scripted performance. Figures for government spending were contested and the failings of panchayat members were pointed out. Alternative plans were also proposed, particularly by wealthier, educated villagers, and members of the opposition parties. These and other ‘disruptions’ were handled in a professional manner by the elected members who chaired the meetings. Debate helped to entrench certain norms of democratic governance: of civil behaviour in meetings (where opposing views are dealt with respectfully), of the idea that people’s input into development 32

In Midnapore and Malda in 1999/2000, panchayats were being monitored by the Block office to ensure that meetings were held and were fulfilling their proper functions. Draft agendas for the meetings were produced centrally by the government of West Bengal to ensure that core business was attended to: these were altered to fit locally relevant subjects by the Block office, and villagers themselves could (in theory) add additional business for discussion.

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decisions should be rational and needs-based, and of the duty of citizens to contribute to local government through panchayat-level taxes. Most poor people remain passive participants in these performances, but we should not forget that grassroots party workers are also drawn from their ranks. Just as importantly, even the people who stayed quiet could see their fellow labourers and sharecroppers presenting opinions on an equal footing with their maliks, and the latter’s views did not always prevail. As a piece of social theatre, this may be less dramatic than the arrival of the District Magistrate at a Janata Durbar, but it reinforces the normality of the developmental state’s active presence in village life. Conclusions Several of our respondents in eastern India would tell the story of these different encounters in terms of an evolutionary model of state–poor relations that moves from tribalism through confrontation and on to some sort of social-democratic settlement.33 In our view, this model is mistaken. If the Mukhiya is a major power holder in our Murhu field site this is less the result of his traditional role within adivasi society than it is a function of his power to monopolize the funds and information that arrive at the Block office of a developmental state. What we see in all three Districts is the playing out of power relations between government officials, local power holders and the poor – a power-play that has important implications for the state’s reproduction, both as a system and as an idea. As poor people retell, compare and discuss their sightings of the state within the villages, it should come as no surprise that the lessons learned from each encounter will be carried forward into fresh ones. The personal characteristics of key individuals – a pro-poor labour officer, a corrupt sub-inspector of police, a politically neutral BDO – will often loom large in the minds of poorer people, and as such their reported views of the quality of government are likely to be highly discontinuous or fractured. Encounters with the developmental state also build up a dynamic picture of ‘it’, both as an idealized set of values and practices (the state as it should work), and also as its flawed but more commonly experienced counterpart (the state as it does work). The sense of what Akhil Gupta calls translocality is important here: ‘The state requires us to conceptualize a space that is constituted by the intersection of local, regional, 33

In Ranchi, Block officials repeatedly referred to tribal communities as ‘simple’, ‘innocent’ or ‘naturally disinclined’ to political activity. Midnapore, in contrast, was often described as being ‘mature’ in its government and politics.

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national, and transnational phenomena . . . Bringing the analysis of public culture together with the study of the everyday practices of lower levels of the bureaucracy helps us to understand how the reality of translocal entities comes to be felt by villagers and officials’ (Gupta, 1995: 392). Experiences of these everyday practices (of officials who are democratic, discriminatory, or corrupt) and of public culture (of the heterogeneous ‘local values’ that penetrate the state) contribute to an imagining of the state among the poor that is far richer than is conveyed in the chapati diagrams of Debati and Rani. Women like this see the painted signboards that mark out the state from society, but they also have a fairly shrewd idea of how these distinctions break down in practice. What is now being proposed in India is that understandings such as these will be deepened as poorer people come to meet the state through participatory development schemes and the agendas of good governance. As we shall see, however, the state’s attempts to present itself as a new agent of participatory development are read by poorer people against their previous and possibly negative experiences of ‘participation’, and with close regard for the vitality of their non-state social networks. This is one reason why poorer people do not always greet ‘participatory development projects’ with the sort of acclaim that government boosters would like to see or hear. This is certainly true of the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS), and it is largely true of attempts to set up Village Education Councils (VECs) or their equivalents. Exactly how this is so, and for what reasons, is something we discuss further in chapter 4.

4

Participation

Introduction The idea that ordinary people should have a say in the ways in which government programmes in the United Kingdom are run on their behalf is so well established that it has become a commonplace. Parents there have long been afforded some of the rights of scrutiny and decisionmaking which are now being extended to parents in rural Bihar through Village Education Committees. In principle, too, they are able to exercise some control over local planning and budgetary decisions through their participation in local government elections – again, just as in India. We know, however, from the UK and other richer countries, that turnout rates in local elections are often quite dismal, and that the democratic process can be undermined by backdoor deals with commercial interests, including property developers. It would be odd, then, if we didn’t expect similar patterns of disinterest, subversion, and/or elite capture to hold in rural India. And yet even a cursory reading of some of the more ebullient texts of the Government of India, or of development agencies like DFID or the World Bank, suggests that such recognition is often played down or is simply missing. ‘Participation’, according to Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, is threatening to become a ‘new tyranny’.1 It is a discourse that wishes away conflicts of interest and power, and which promises the poor not just direct sightings of the state but powers of oversight as well. It also protects itself from critical comment by daring people to speak against participation. Tyranny or not, we shall have cause in this chapter to disrupt at least some of the claims made on behalf of institutionalized participation. We shall also want to consider why it is that so many poor people ‘fail’ to engage directly with the Employment Assurance Scheme, village education committees, or even with the social groups that are at the heart of many ‘non-state’ development interventions (not excluding those run by 1

Cooke and Kothari (2001).

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NGOs or similar bodies). Some of the reasons for non-participation are well known and have been rehearsed in the general literatures on participation that we review in the next section. They include supply-side issues like information circulation and uptake, and the expectation that benefits will be creamed off by government officers, politicians and richer villagers (something we consider further in chapters 5 and 6). They also relate to the assessments that people make of the appropriateness of the good or service on offer, and of the costs and benefits of getting involved in the ‘proper fashion’. All too often, the projects that are trumpeted by New Delhi are not working effectively for poorer people. They are not central to their political or economic concerns as we began to outline them in chapter 3. At the same time, however, we see no reason to speak ‘against participation’ as if it was a singularity. More people are engaging with educational issues in parts of north Bihar and Jharkhand than we might have reason to expect, and a version of participation seems to work quite well for some poor households in Midnapore (see below). In any case, the fact that most people in the UK don’t vote in local council elections doesn’t mean they are unconcerned about town or village affairs. Some people will buttonhole their representatives directly, or make their views clear in a letter to a local newspaper. Others will clean up litter in a local park without being asked to do so by a formal organization. They participate, that is to say, informally, at a distance, or behind the scenes – and the same holds true in parts of eastern India. We shall contend that in all of our research areas, with the possible exception of Midnapore, it has been the indirect effects of a discourse of participation that have been most effective in carving out spaces of citizenship for poorer people, however small and disappointing these spaces might seem to be. The fact that people in Vasihali and Bhojpur are not generally active in school oversight committees does not mean they are happy with the standards of their local schools or that they are unprepared to voice their discontent. People participate in public life in more varied and less predictable ways than either proponents or critics of participatory development seem prepared to admit. At times, indeed, their participation is expressed in forms of resistance to government. On such occasions, it is common to find people taking aim at official programmes for participatory development in the name of a broader technology of rule that is meant to endow them with certain rights and expectations. In some cases, too, these acts of resistance force a reassessment of the merits of ‘participation’ in the broader development community, a point we take up in the conclusion to this chapter.

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Pathways to participation Participation is not a new idea in the context of state–poor relations in rural India. As we remarked in chapter 2, the notion that poorer people should contribute in some way to community development was enshrined in the programmes that took shape under that name in the 1950s. The communitarian strand of Indian planning failed to achieve parity with the top-down structures of rule associated with the Second and Third Five Year Plans, but it was still assumed that villagers would cooperate to maintain free-flowing canals or functioning grain stores.2 This assumption rehearsed ‘a typically Gandhian view of the Indian village as virtually free from social conflicts’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 35). This was also the case, as Jaffrelot reports, when a committee appointed by the Legislative Assembly of the United Provinces called in 1948 for the abolition of zamindaris and for ‘the revival of the village republic’ and a ‘theory of trusteeship’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 35, citing Government of the United Provinces, 1948: 519). To the extent that Nehru’s wing of the Congress Party engaged this viewpoint it was to suggest that the introduction of universal suffrage, land-to-the-tiller land reforms, and compulsory primary education would reduce the need for trusteeship. Poorer people would be empowered to participate on a more equal footing in the organization of village life. The passing of an Untouchability Offences Act in 1955 came too late to dissuade Ambedkar from his view that the Congress Party, much like Mr Gandhi, was ‘Tory by birth and by faith’, but it was doubtless seen by Nehru and the Congress socialists as a further nail in the coffin of high-caste power in the countryside.3 Nehru understood, as Gandhi apparently did not, that spaces for popular participation in India’s political economy had to be sustained by politics and institutional change, and not only by moral exhortation or appeals to the better nature of members of the landed elites. We will come back to this distinction soon enough. It bears repeating that the rhetoric that surrounded community development in the 1950s generally did not extend to the programmes that emerged in subsequent decades for the alleviation of poverty in either rural or urban areas. The slum clearance programmes that Sanjay Gandhi unleashed on Delhi during the Emergency (1975–7) made this point with unpleasant clarity. Half way around the world, in Central and South America, urban 2 3

For discussion, see Frankel (1978); Hanson (1966). Ambedkar had made this jibe against Gandhi in the 1930s after Gandhi had refused the British offer of separate electorates for the Depressed Classes: Ambedkar, quoted in Dube 1998: 83.

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planners were taking note of the work of the British architect-planner, John Turner, as well as that of Charles Abrams and William Mangin.4 Their research had suggested that poorer people used their limited capital to build settlements that corresponded to their existential needs. When access to jobs was a priority they would live in city-centre slums. But when a concern for safety and security became more important they moved to a peripheral settlement where they could slowly improve their dwellings. The poor were cast as authors of their own fortunes, and were applauded for the ways in which they committed human and other capital to the building of appropriate urban and peri-urban settlements. The job of government, Turner argued, was to provide these pioneers of participatory development with legal titles to land, and with urban services like water, electricity and transport. In Delhi, meanwhile, and quite tragically, the authorities were encouraged during the Emergency to code the urban poor as threats to disorder, or even to the aesthetic of the newer parts of the city. Many of their settlements were trampled out of sight. If ever ‘high modernism’ visited post-colonial India it was during this period, and it was further evident in the plans of the city authorities to build public sector housing to specifications that put it beyond the reach of the labouring poor. A World Bank report of this time, authored by Oscar Grimes, estimated that the cheapest public housing in New Delhi was beyond the reach even of most working households in the ‘formal’ sector.5 Matters were rarely this bleak in the countryside, but even here the notion that poorer people could contribute effectively to the shaping of government programmes on ‘their behalf’ took several decades to dawn. The preference, rather, as in the raft of schemes pushed forward by Congress governments in the 1970s and 1980s, or in Tamil Nadu’s Noon Day Meal Scheme, for all its successes, was for a model of governance that constituted beneficiaries as recipients, and which assumed that expert knowledge remained the preserve of government servants.6 It was only in the 1990s that this began to change in significant ways. Pressed in part by Robert Chambers and his many followers in the NGO community (and latterly in the major lending institutions), the Government of India began slowly to decentre the role of ‘government experts’. Chambers called for 4

5 6

Turner (1967, 1968), Abrams (1964) and Mangin (1967). It should be noted that this work had little to say about the organized nature of land invasions in many cities in Latin America; it ignored, that is to say, the ways in which individuals and households were situated in local political societies. Grimes (1976). Successfully so, in some cases. Dr`eze and Goyal (2003) have argued that a version of the Noon Day Meal Scheme in Madhya Pradesh has fared quite well, though see also Singh (2004).

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a new attitude of mind on the part of public officials.7 He reached back to Gandhi’s injunction to connect public politics to changes in the personal morality of people in authority. In particular, he reminded his readers that few presumptions should be made about how the poor experienced ‘poverty’, or wished to see it addressed. An attitude of humility had to be struck that would encourage outside observers to engage in participatory assessments of rural poverty, or exercises that would transfer leadership and voice to members of poorer households themselves. These exercises were supposed to lay the basis for a new generation of project interventions. They would involve beneficiaries in the choice, design and implementation of schemes that would address their most pressing needs. Suppose poverty was experienced mainly in terms of ‘coercive mobility’. Poorer households might then plump for social and economic interventions that would protect the rights of migrant labourers in their new places of work. More generally, the impetus of Chambers’s work, and that of Michael Cernea, Norman Uphoff or Anil Gupta, was to reclaim (or reposition) the targets of government (and other) interventions as knowledgeable and skilled agents in their own right.8 This being the case, participation could be phrased as a positive end and not simply as a means to something more tangible. In seeking to change ‘whose reality counts’ proponents of participatory development have argued that the world-views of the ‘lowers’ (in this case, the beneficiaries/subjects of development programmes) should dominate those of the ‘uppers’ (development practitioners and other important outsiders). Participation would then have the potential to change power relationships dramatically within mainstream development practice. Some critics of Chambers have complained that his focus on individual moralities takes the place of a more sustained commentary on the production of power differences within village communities. Others suggest that the participatory development paradigm is a natural bedfellow for neoliberalism.9 Both stand accused of a form of ontological voluntarism 7 8

9

Chambers (1983, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c). Cernea (1985), Uphoff (1996, 2002); Gupta (1981, 1987). We mention here three influential and in key respects very interesting individuals, who draw variously on the work of Freire, Berry, Gandhi and others to make their arguments. Cernea’s work was and remains influential in World Bank circles. Uphoff and Gupta have also tried to put their ideas into action. Uphoff has a longstanding commitment to participatory irrigation management in Sri Lanka and Nepal. Gupta, meanwhile, set up the Honey Bee network in Gujarat in the 1980s to collect and disseminate the insights of best-practice or simply ‘odd’ (that is, innovative) farmers, and, later, with the government of Gujarat, the Gujarat Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN). We come back to the important question of academics ‘getting involved’ in these and other fashions in chapter 9. See Guijt and Shah (1998) and Welbourn (1991) for the basic arguments; see also Henkel and Stirrat (1999) and Wright (1996).

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that privileges the supposed autonomy of individual agents. Be this as it may, it has been Chambers’s consistent reply that modern accounts of development cannot reasonably be prosecuted without close regard for the importance of popular participation. Participation might not be a panacea for development, but Chambers’s more important suggestion, as we understand it, is that systematic and repeated efforts to involve members of the rural poor in the execution of development projects and programmes are likely to be empowering. The major argument in favour of participatory development is that it forms part of a broader process of social capital formation that works slowly but surely to undermine, and perhaps even to overturn, existing hierarchies of power and rule.10 Put another way, it is a process of development that should bring the state more clearly, and more evenly, into the sightlines of citizens. Rates of participation Assessing the effects or effectiveness of participatory development schemes is no easy matter. Some of the outcomes that proponents associate with ‘participation’, including more balanced sightings of the state, might be caused by factors external to specific development schemes, or take several years to mature. Even the assessment of rates of participation can be difficult. There is a world of difference between the simple fact of attendance at a meeting, and the ability to contribute effectively to that meeting or to shape its conclusions. Participation can be more or less active, and more or less passive. It also matters a great deal who gets to set an agenda, and who is able to call a vote or structure a discussion. Nevertheless, it makes sense to start our discussion of participatory development schemes with the issue of attendance, or physical presence and absence. We do so, moreover, with our eyes firmly on ‘development-cumempowerment’ schemes such as the Employment Assurance Scheme, school oversight committees, and Joint Forest Management initiatives. In this chapter we are not concerned with rates of attendance in the broader sweep of local government meetings. The very different experiences of men and women in terms of participating in panchayati raj institutions are something we discuss in later chapters. 10

This would seem to be the position of agencies like the World Bank (1995) and the Government of the United Kingdom (1997). What this position neglects is the need for concerted political actions to aid patterns of participation that can begin to challenge entrenched hierarchies of rule. We discuss this later in the chapter; see also Williams (2004). A sophisticated account of how the participation agenda is beginning to move on – and does respond to criticism – can be found in Booth et al. (1998); see also Holland and Blackburn (1998).

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Table 4.1. Proportion of male and female members of sample households gaining one or more paid labour days from the Employment Assurance Scheme

Bidupur-Vaishali

Sahar-Bhojpur

Field site: Poor Non-Poor Poor Males Females

0% 0%

0% 0%

Murhu-Ranchi

Non-Poor Poor

25% 0% 2.5% 0%

DebraMidnapore

Old MaldaMalda

Non-Poor Poor Non-Poor Poor Non-Poor

20% 15% 2.5% 0%

60% 0% 41% 0%

21% 14% 14% 0%

Source: Village surveys, 1999 (n = 100 for each village: 80 poor, 20 non-poor).

The Employment Assurance Scheme The Employment Assurance Scheme is an excellent place to begin a discussion of sightings of the state in relation to ‘participatory development’. We said in chapter 2 that the EAS took shape in 1993, and was at the time of our fieldwork the largest employment provision programme in India. It was also a major component of the country’s anti-poverty policy. In 1999, each of our study Blocks was meant to receive between Rs. 7 and 9 million per year under the EAS (that is, close to $200,000), which was a significantly greater sum than was committed to other programmes, including the IAY, JRY or IRDP (see Appendix 1). The EAS guidelines called for at least 60 per cent of these funds to be spent directly on the wages of employed persons. This was to ensure that non-poor households had few incentives to capture EAS funds. Remuneration was tied to the performance of ‘unskilled labour’, and it was the unskilled labourers, of course, who were meant to trigger the flow of funds in the first place. The EAS guidelines required poorer men and women who were suffering from a lack of paid work in the lean season to demand employment from officers of the local state. The Block Development Office, in particular, was required to be responsive to these demands ‘from below’. We return later on to the question of people’s participation in the matter of scheme selection, and the system of village open meetings that was required to support this process. But what of the more straightforward question of gaining access to work under the Employment Assurance Scheme? As table 4.1 suggests, the pattern of uptake of employment under the EAS varied significantly across our five field sites, although in only one case (Debra Block, Midnapore) did a majority of ‘poor/destitute’ households find work for one or two people from this quarter. In Old Malda, Murhu and Sahar Blocks, about a quarter of poor/destitute households received work from the EAS, while in Bidupur

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Block, Vaishali District, not a single person from our sample households received employment in this way (at least not within their own locality). This pattern of uptake cannot be explained in terms of a lack of demand for lean-season employment in the study areas, or a greater need for such work in Debra Block. Off-season unemployment was seen as a major problem in all five areas, including in Blocks where double-cropping was common. If the problem was reported to be less intense in Murhu Block this was because local people had long been migrating for work in the lean season. The low rates of take-up had more to do with patterns of information supply and circulation, and ‘demand management’, as we shall see in the next section. By the same token, the fact that more EAS work was carried out in Debra Block by members of the most destitute households (90 per cent of which received some work), when compared to other poor households (69 per cent), reflected the efforts at targeting that were made by party workers and local government officials. These factors also help to explain why poorer households in Old Malda Block that were in receipt of work from the EAS gained on average only 5.7 days of paid work in the period 1995–9. (Put another way, this amounts to 1.4 days over the same period for the ‘average’ poor household, whether or not any work was received from the EAS.) Even in Debra Block, the corresponding figures of 12.8 and 9.6 days were well short of a maximum of 200 person-days per year per unskilled labouring household. The EAS did not employ many people for very long. Participatory school management An approach to rates of participation that is focused on direct beneficiary outcomes works less well for school oversight committees. In this case benefits do not always accrue to named households, or even to the poorest or most excluded families. But even here we can make a preliminary assessment of rates of participation. In Bihar, we have data on the number of Village Education Committees that were formed in each of three successive years (1997–8 to 1999–2000) in all of the Blocks in our research Districts. A total of 5,234 VECs were set up in these Districts by 1999– 2000, out of a planned total of 5,503 VECs. This implies that more than 50,000 villagers would have been members of educational committees in Bhojpur, Vaishali and Ranchi Districts by the year 2000. Impressive as these figures are, however, the government of Bihar’s own data reveal that many VECs have met only rarely, and in some cases not at all (see table 4.2). In 1997–8 two-thirds of the VECs of rural public schools in Bhojpur District failed to meet at least once, and in 1998–9

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Table 4.2. Number of meetings held by VECs of rural P.S. schools, Bihar Study Districts, 1998–2000 Number of Bhojpur meetings held 1997–8 1998–9 0 67.4% 1 1.5% 2 7.1% 3 2.8% 4 3.6% 5 3.3% 6–9 6.3% 10–13 8.0% More than 0.2% 13 Total

74.3% 4.2% 5.7% 2.1% 3.6% 2.5% 3.3% 4.1% 0.1%

Vaishali

Ranchi

1997–8

1998–9

1999–2000 1998–9

1999–2000

12.2% 2.5% 13.7% 8.5% 9.5% 10.7% 29.2% 13.4% 0.3%

19.4% 17.4% 19.8% 8.0% 8.0% 6.9% 15.0% 5.4% 0.2%

18.9% 7.5% 23.0% 12.9% 11.0% 9.6% 13.6% 3.4% 0.2%

15.9% 5.1% 12.8% 10.4% 10.3% 10.2% 24.2% 10.1% 1.1%

n = 2143 n = 2113 n = 1328 n = 1338 n = 1368

12.1% 2.7% 10.2% 9.2% 9.5% 9.2% 25.8% 20.4% 1.0%

n = 1723 n = 1718

Source: Bihar Education Project, State Office, Patna.

this figure rose to nearly three-quarters. In both Vaishali and Ranchi Districts, in contrast, it was common to find VECs that met more than six times, although in Vaishali there was a noticeable tail-off in interest in 1999–2000 as compared to 1997–8. The Block-level data we have seen broadly confirm these District patterns, although in Sahar in 1998–9 fully 80 per cent of VECs failed to meet even once. We discuss these patterns later in the chapter. At this point it will suffice to say that our village-level data and ethnographies are largely consistent with these officially reported patterns. They also reveal that such meetings as did occur in our Ranchi field site were dominated by local teachers and the Mukhiya, while in Bhojpur they were run by two upper-caste landlords and their kinsmen. The VEC of our Vaishali field site was more balanced and included members from the Rajput, Yadav and harijan communities. The vice-chairman of the committee was an influential harijan leader. In West Bengal the picture is rather different. As in Bihar, a formal system of schools inspection reaches down to the field-level in the form of Sub-Inspectors of Primary Schools (SIs). We shall have more to say about them in chapter 5. At the community level they are complemented by School Attendance Committees (SACs). We are unable to present data on these Committees for the generality of our Districts and Blocks. We can say, however, that in the Midnapore field site we observed SACs that were active and well integrated into the local education system. The

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Figure 4.1 Sources of help in solving problems with education, schools and teachers, West Bengal

committees comprised the headmaster as secretary, the Gram Panchayat member of the respective ward as chairperson, the local SI, two ‘educated villagers’ and eight guardians. The thirteen-member committees met six times a year, and ten of the members were selected annually in parents’ meetings. Although the committees worked well, it is important to note that many parents turned directly to their panchayat member when they had an issue to voice (see figure 4.1). They did not confine their participation around educational issues to the SAC. In Old Malda Block the performance problems that we reported in chapter 3 were not being addressed by active SACs. The SACs that were meant to be attached to the primary schools we studied were defunct, and the District Primary School Council (DPSC) chairperson of Malda District suggested this was the case in most parts of the District. We were told that Malda’s SACs had last been rejuvenated in the late 1980s, when headmasters acted on directives received from the Department of Education. In 1999–2000 we could identify the chairs and secretaries of the SACs in our wards, but we could find no evidence of poorer people being involved in the committees, or, indeed, of current guardians of

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Table 4.3. Awareness of the existence and principal objectives of the Employment Assurance Scheme Bidupur- SaharMurhu- DebraOld MaldaVaishali Bhojpur Ranchi Midnapore Malda

Field site: Heard of the EAS

Poor 6% Non-poor 25%

7.5% 25%

Aware of the major employment provisions of the EAS

Poor Non-poor

5% 10%

2.5% 5%

14% 15%

30% 45%

1% 25%

5% 0%

6% 15%

1% 25%

Source: Village sample surveys, 1999 (n = 100 for each village; 80 poor, 20 non-poor).

school-going children being committee members.11 Ensuring high participation rates among poor households is a significant and widespread problem, and is it is one that is accentuated by a lack of direct or quickly realized benefits. Information circulation The patterns of participation that we have just described are hardly surprising, even if they are in some respects disappointing. The World Bank likes to maintain that ‘People are the means and the end of development’, but it is wise enough to acknowledge that ‘they have different amounts of power and resources’ (World Bank 1997: 110). Some people also know more than others and are able to control, in some degree, how information circulates across a space-economy. This was apparent in all our field areas when it came to the Employment Assurance Scheme. Table 4.3 provides some basic and rather striking data on patterns of knowledge about the EAS. As will be quickly apparent, it was only in Debra Block, Midnapore, that more than 15 per cent of poor households reported knowledge of the Employment Assurance Scheme (30 per cent, with 45 per cent of non-poor households). And even in Midnapore only 6 per cent of poorer households (15 per cent of non-poor households) could offer an informed account of the major provisions of the EAS (in the sense of knowing about its demand-led components, or its provision 11

The fact that most villagers named the school secretary as the primary source of support for the resolution of school problems is indicative of how little notice panchayat members and local politicians pay to educational issues in Malda; it should not be read as evidence of the efficacy of the local SAC.

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for up to 100 days’ paid employment). In Old Malda Block only one poor household reported knowledge of the EAS, and in Vaishali and Bhojpur Districts, Bihar, the figures were scarcely higher. These figures, moreover, including those for Midnapore (though not Vaishali), were actually lower than those suggested by our first index of participation. In Debra Block, that is to say, we were able to ascertain that 75 per cent of poor and destitute households had gained work from the EAS, while only 30 per cent of these households were able to name the scheme as such. For the most part, the beneficiaries of the EAS simply knew the scheme as ‘government work’, and were largely unaware that it was not provided as part of the JRY or any other programme. Interestingly, the highest level of awareness of the EAS, but not of its specific provisions, was among the sample non-poor population of Old Malda Block, where people linked to local contractors were well informed about it. We need to be careful, then, before jumping to a conclusion which suggests that a lack of awareness leads to low levels of uptake of work under the EAS. The supply of information is a serious issue, and the broader development community would be right to point to it here, as in many similar cases. But the fact that people are getting work from a scheme they cannot name suggests that something else is going on. Government is being sighted in some cases, but not as the government’s own rhetoric would lead us to expect. Very few of the households that had gained work from the EAS were in possession of an EAS card, for example, although some non-participating households were able to show us their cards.12 In most cases, the government was not being sighted at all. Labourers were recruited and paid by contractors, much as they always had been. A similar disjunction between ‘participation’ and ‘information supply and usage’ was apparent in the VECs we looked at, as well as in some Village Forest Protection and Management Committees with which we are familiar. The proposition that ‘participation’ can or should lead to ‘development’, or even social capital formation, depends upon a conception of informed involvement. In the case of the VEC in our Bhojpur field site, as we have reported, a number of Scheduled Caste men and women were listed as members of the Committee without being aware of 12

The ability of a labourer to demand work from an EAS scheme was supposed to be linked to possession of an EAS card, which was provided by the Block office. Among our Bihar field sites, EAS cards were most in evidence in Vaishali, notwithstanding the fact that not one labourer there had gained work on a local EAS scheme. In West Bengal, 53 per cent of our respondents in Midnapore, all from poor households, had EAS cards, as against 0 per cent in Malda.

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the fact, and far less of the remit and purpose of the institution. But this in turn spoke to the fact that an enormous number of VECs had been formed very quickly in Bihar. In the Ranchi field site, for example, we discovered that the VEC had been formed in one day, and then without prior notice being given to villagers. Members were nominated by the Mukhiya. This was completely at odds with the guidelines that were supposed to be followed by officials of the Bihar Education Project. These called for trained catalysts (utpreraks) to work in each village for at least a week before a VEC was constituted and members were elected. We will explain in chapter 5 why so few BEP staff were minded to take their responsibilities seriously. (Capacity constraints were a factor, but more important was the fact that BEP officials were insulated from political pressures at the Block level.) In the case of Joint Forest Management, meanwhile, Manish Tiwary has reported that the best organized Village Forest Protection and Management Committee (VFPMC) in his Bihar (Ranchi District) research area, Vanadag, had been started by a local Oraon leader, and was at the time of his research (2000) unregistered by the Forest Department.13 Elsewhere in Ranchi District he found very few examples of VFPMCs that met on a regular basis, or whose members were properly informed about their purpose, responsibilities and possible future gains. In contrast, several of the Village Forest Committees (VFCs) he studied in Midnapore District worked rather well in all these respects. Sarah Jewitt has presented similar findings from Bero Block in Ranchi District.14 The VFPMC that the Forest Department had registered in Nehalu Kaparia had a mixed record when it came to holding open meetings, or involving villagers actively in planting decisions. Although most households were aware that ‘Nehalu jungle’ was under something called Joint Forest Management, very few had clear ideas about the benefit-sharing arrangements that the legislation called for; nor did a majority of ‘participating’ households supply men or women for forest guarding patrols, as they were supposed to. Matters were very different in Jamtoli, another village in Bero Block that is just ten kilometres from Nehalu as the crow flies. The residents of this village could see the benefits that forest protection had brought them over a period of forty years. They were surrounded by mature stands of sal (shorea robusta) forest. According to Jewitt, they were also well informed about their forest protection responsibilities. Here, too, an Oraon leader, Simon Minz, had formed an unregistered forest protection committee, 13 14

Tiwary (2001, 2004). Jewitt (2000); see also Corbridge, Jewitt and Kumar (2004) and S. Kumar (2002).

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and knowledge about environmental issues had been circulated through traditional village meetings and at local fairs. The point we are making, of course, is not that information circulation is unimportant, but that it is (and needs to be) actively managed. To be fair, this is a point that Chambers and his supporters would be keen to endorse. Chambers might argue that the sorts of information gaps that we have just described are likely to arise when projects impose forms of knowledge on local people, when what is required is a less extractive process of knowledge production. This would help to explain why information loss was less of a problem within a ‘non-state’ development project like the Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project (EIRFP), a joint initiative of DFID and the Government of India.15 According to Kumar and Corbridge, most households in the village ‘clusters’ where they worked had come to a reasonable understanding of the aims of the Groups that Community Organizers were trying to form. Most participating individuals understood that they were required to join one or more groups to make demands of the project, whether for a bee-box (hive), a checkdam, improved seeds, or something else.16 We would argue, even so, that this sort of position, while it highlights the connections that can be forged between information and participation from the ‘bottom-up’, is strangely silent when it comes to the management of information by members of the different social groups that must rub shoulders with one another in the organization of any large-scale social intervention. It also tends to constitute the problem of information loss in a passive voice, or one that blames the designated information provider (usually a government department). The possibility that men and women might sometimes choose not to collect the relevant information is not seriously considered (see chapter 4). Managing projects and project management We have said that the Employment Assurance Scheme calls for poorer people to have direct interactions with officials of the state, and to make demands of them. But we have also seen that this can be difficult when people are poorly informed about the scheme, and this difficulty is 15

16

We first mentioned the EIRFP in chapter 1. Although it is not a standard state-run development scheme, it does have backing from the Government of India and was active at the time of our research in Bihar (Jharkhand) and West Bengal, as well as in Orissa. We believe that it provides a useful comparative perspective. Kumar and Corbridge (2002), drawing on fieldwork carried out in Bero Block, Ranchi District, in 1999–2000.

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compounded by the fact that sightings are only rarely one-to-one. We didn’t come across a single case of an unskilled labourer demanding work directly from a panchayat or Block Development Office. For the most part, poorer people gain their knowledge of a programme like the EAS from local village leaders, labour contractors, party officials and so on (see chapters 3 and 6), and it would be unwise to assume that these people have no personal interest in the scheme. They plainly do: even if EAS schemes are run as per the guidelines, they can provide a considerable sum of money to builders and other contractors, and the durable assets that they are meant to provide can be a source of social power. It matters who claims credit for bringing a check-dam or a school building to a village. As we saw in chapter 3, this can develop or maintain someone’s standing as a key player in the locality. Even supposing, then, that government officers have the time or the inclination to act as ‘community organizers’, patiently explaining the aims and objectives of the EAS to a beneficiary population (something which presumes a level of state capacity that is nowhere met in the field: see chapter 5), an ideology of ‘direct participation’ further assumes away the problem of conflicting interests, just as Chambers’s critics have maintained. Of course, these conflicting interests come in different shapes and sizes, much like participation itself. It would also be misleading to suggest that public meetings are not sometimes held to identify and prioritize projects that the public deem important within their own area. In the Midnapore and Ranchi field sites it was clear that new forms of learned behaviour had arisen around repeated acts of participation. Beneficiary Committees have been formed in Midnapore to oversee the work of a Job Worker who is selected in a public meeting. He or she is required to act as a foreman responsible for hiring labourers for the scheme and directing their work. Some Job Workers here and in Ranchi have also come from the ranks of registered unemployed labourers, and some have tried to ensure that registered unemployed labourers from the area in which the project takes place carry out the designated work. At the same time, however, some Beneficiary Committees have found it hard to verify the quality of the physical assets produced in more complex schemes. In Midnapore District, the Committees were able to use the services of a Sub-Assistant Engineer and Gram Panchayat staff to help them in this task. They then joined with the Job Worker and elected members of the local council, as required, to sign off a project’s accounts, or to publicize individual project budgets at the time of implementation. In Vaishali District, these guidelines largely went by the board, in a context (see chapter 5) in which the District Magistrate and the de facto MLA of the area responded to a

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series of ‘bids’ from their supporters (and those they had to keep on-side) in the local political society.17 Even in Midnapore, however, an apparent willingness to run EAS schemes as per the guidelines concealed a high degree of political management, and this is the point we want to develop here. There are some interesting comparisons to be drawn with Vaishali, not all of which work to Midnapore’s advantage (see chapter 5 on the physical outputs produced by EAS projects in Bidupur). It was certainly the case that a higher percentage of poorer people attended EAS village meetings in Debra than in the other field areas. Seventy-five per cent of poorer respondents in Debra had attended a gram sansad, and panchayat members who we spoke to confirmed there were no difficulties in ensuring that meetings were quorate. Of those attending, women made up about a fifth of all participants, at least in the meetings we observed directly. For many poorer villagers, however, attendance at meetings was generally passive. Some told us that they were attending a meeting primarily because party activists had told them to. A larger number had attended on a voluntary basis but felt unable to speak up, mainly, they said, on account of their ‘illiteracy’ or uneducated status. Furthermore, a number of key decisions regarding the EAS, including the prioritization of schemes, the selection of the Job Worker, and the election of a Beneficiary Committee, had effectively been taken out of the control of the public meeting. Villagers told us that the main purpose of the gram sansad was to endorse the suggestions of panchayat members, or ‘the party’, which made the important decisions. Significantly, they expected little else, or perhaps we should say no less. Elected panchayat members confirmed this perception. They maintained that a good gram sansad was one in which people were able to suggest several development projects that could be considered further for possible action. Much like Kenneth Arrow, however, they rejected what might be called the hard-line populist or participationist fantasy that the individual preferences of attendees could be simply aggregated into a social welfare function that all would agree upon.18 17

18

We comment further on this in chapters 5 and 6. To anticipate: the EAS in Bidupur was largely redefined as a road-building scheme, and most of its immediate benefits went to non-SC households (chapter 5). That said, the leading power brokers in the District and the Block, including the District Magistrate and BB, the local Member of the Legislative Council, took great care to respond to a series of demands that were placed upon them by brokers, contractors, influential caste leaders, teachers, village leaders and others lower down in political society. The distribution of EAS ‘benefits’ was also made to respond, in large part, to competitive processes of ‘participation’ that took shape outside the EAS guidelines. As we shall report in chapter 6, these processes extended to a series of discussions on the location and type of specific EAS projects. For the Arrow–Debreu theorem, see Arrow (1951) and Debreu (1959).

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Keeping a firm eye on their standing as politicians and party members, a number of panchayat members told us that a ‘bad’ meeting would be one in which too many schemes got proposed, or where villagers spent time raising other, more contentious issues, such as arguments about the quality of past development works or the performance of elected members. Higher-level cadres were concerned that false expectations should not be aroused in the broader population, and especially among party supporters. The party wanted to cultivate a reputation for efficiency, as well as for taking the part of the poor, a theme we develop further in chapter 6. Senior members were thus properly sceptical of the suggestion that all labouring households could be found work – let alone 100 days of paid employment – in a short period of time, even if New Delhi did make available fresh tranches of funds to the state government. Similar noises about ‘knowing what is best for the poor’ were made by key power brokers in Ranchi and Vaishali Districts (see also chapter 5). Before rushing to condemn this judgement, however, it is important to consider how and why it might be deployed. We hold no brief for the CPI-M, and we shall later be critical of some aspects of its stance on educational issues in Midnapore. Party members are also not above corruption. But the CPI-M’s stance on the EAS makes good sense for a political party that has to set priorities, and which refuses the rather na¨ıve assumption that people always know what is best for them. This assumption, which features strongly in the most strident prospectuses for participatory development, ignores the asymmetries of knowledge that inhere in any large-scale system of social production and exchange, and which can make a space for expertise and a measure of delegated powers. In any case, the CPI-M has not refused a measure of participation around the EAS. In Debra Block, it organized a series of party-run gram baithaks. These allowed poorer individuals who were not opposed to the party to take part in public meetings where they could be sheltered from the ego-clashes that typically break out between political ‘big men’. The gram baithaks also enabled the party to prepare for, and perhaps even rehearse or stage-manage, official village open meetings. For example, the baithak would decide which individuals should propose EAS schemes in forthcoming gram sansads. This gave poorer men and women a measure of confidence that they might not otherwise have had, and, importantly for the CPI-M, it ensured that not all schemes were proposed by party activists themselves. In a sense, of course, this stage management can be seen as something akin to the training in participation that is offered by community organizers in the EIRFP, or by NGOs working for joint forest management. Whether the CPI-M needs to be as fearful as it is of ‘unrestricted

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participation’ is a moot point, and an important one, but there can be little doubt that its agenda in Debra Block was carefully thought out, and in its own terms pro-poor. In our Murhu Block field site, too, most villagers looked with approval upon the Mukhiya’s (rather successful) efforts to draw down resources from the state on their behalf. Adivasi families required their traditional leader to play this role. They expected to have their say about matters of concern through a system of rule that provided for regular inter-village councils that would be presided over by a Parha Raja.19 This was assuredly not the case in Vaishali District, where BB, the local Member of the Legislative Council (and de facto MLA), took care to direct control of EAS projects to a large and diverse group of his political supporters, and to some antagonists, rather than to the Scheduled Castes or members of the labouring poor (for more on this, see chapter 5). And it was not the case either in the Nehalu and Boda clusters of the EIRFP in Bero Block, Ranchi District. The structuring of participation there by members of local (tribal and non-tribal) elites had close regard for status and power, and for what might be called the languages of engagement. These languages, as David Mosse has reported for the Western India Rainfed Farming Project, work to forge a connection between ‘lay’ villagers and development professionals in two main directions.20 Consider, first, the case of the community organizers, or, analogously, the lowranking (non-gazetteered) staff who are entrusted with holding EAS public meetings. Many versions of participatory theory call for the state to be sighted on something close to equal terms, and meeting non-gazetteered staff can be less intimidating for labouring men and women than meeting 19

20

The chief (‘king’) of a group of villages, usually eleven to thirteen, that traditionally has been ruled by a council of elders. By the same token, some government officers delighted in working in a Block or District that exhibited fewer apparent signs of political competition – and thus legal or illegal pressures on government officers – than would be likely in north or central Bihar. The DC of Ranchi District had worked previously in Vaishali and Nalanda Districts in Bihar. He told us that: ‘There is a marked difference in the working environment here [Ranchi]. We hardly feel any pressure from politicians. In fact, most of them know very little about funds and schemes, and rather I have been educating them as to how much they could claim for their areas under what programmes.’ Interestingly, a female BDO in a Block closer to Ranchi city than Murhu, put matters rather differently, in the process confirming how difficult it is to generalize about the ‘nature’ of political society across a District. ‘There is so much of pressure. It is difficult to work. Higher officials do not also cooperate much. We have to find our own ways, which is very difficult. You come to Block on a working day and you will find hundreds of people around, many of them claiming to be representative of this or that political party demanding for award of schemes to their henchmen. Few of them come with letter-heads with their names printed along with the designation as student leaders! If you don’t accommodate their request, they would send frivolous complaints to DDC. Higher officials consider this to be headache, and instead of appreciating our efforts to counter such pressures, feel we are tactless.’ Mosse (2001).

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a BDO or District Magistrate. We might also agree to the suggestion, which is implicit in many accounts of the formation of linking social capital, that villagers will gain the confidence to deal with the latter after first engaging the former. The problem, however, is that forging this connection requires very particular forms of performance from lower-level government officers or their equivalents. In Bihar, it was the Block-level staff who were charged with organizing the public meetings to select both the EAS schemes and the foremen (abhikarta) who would oversee the work. A number of these officials found it difficult to run public meetings in such a way that they could make space for the voices of the poor in anything approaching an orderly fashion. They simply didn’t command the respect, or even the fear, that can attach to offices associated with higher and more ‘spectacular’ levels of the state.21 Similarly, the community organizers of the EIRFP tend to be distant in social and educational terms from the adivasi communities they are mainly required to work with and for. The COs of Nehalu and Boda clusters in Ranchi District needed the support of local village elites, and they chose to work through such persons when establishing project groups. Knowing they would be evaluated, in part, on the basis of targets (number of check-dams sanctioned, number of livestock loans distributed), the COs also expressed a need to work with more ‘educated’ villagers, including those from non-adivasi communities. The idea that they might make progress with more obviously disadvantaged communities, like the Mahlis in Boda or the Lohras in Nehalu, was dismissed out of hand. One CO told Kumar and Corbridge that: ‘yeh log apne khane-peene me hi mast rahta hai, group ke kaam se inko koi matlab nahi hai’ (these people are only interested in drinking and eating among themselves, they don’t have any interest in group activities). Try as the CO might, it was difficult to instil a sense of cooperation in a community known mainly for its ‘drinking, quarrelling, dirty houses and pig-keeping’. He (or she) had to work instead with a jankar (village motivator) from the dominant groups within the village, and to offer periodic 21

While working in our Ranchi field site, we heard reports that rival factions elsewhere in the District had mobilized several thousand people for the selection of their chosen abhikarta. This had caused some EAS meetings to be cancelled. Block-level officers lacked the authority and training to deal with such instances of disorder. Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that many EAS meetings existed only on paper. We were also told by the Circle Office of Patepur Block in Vaishali – a Block which we visited several times before settling on Bidupur – that he ‘would run away’ if he was transferred to Bidupur Block, a locality that he considered to be dominated by non-official (and sometimes armed) members of political society. Exaggeration aside, we note that neither proponents nor critics of participatory development pay much attention to the problem of an excess of participation.

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training to that person (this section after Kumar and Corbridge 2002: 84). These acts of translation are matched by the efforts of villagers, and especially better-placed villagers, to learn the languages of development projects, and of the wider paradigm of ‘participation’ in which they sit. Mosse contends that, in regions where there are significant inequalities in terms of access to land or the public space, ‘it is farmers [not those without land] who acquire “planning knowledge” and learn how to manipulate it’ (Mosse 2001: 21). The formal exercise of participation then ‘serves to represent external interests as local needs, dominant interests as community concerns’ (Mosse 2001: 22), as better-off households quite understandably seek to pass themselves off as ‘poor’, or to claim that an entire village is poor or undivided. In adivasi areas this is not difficult, since it is commonly assumed that ‘tribal’ societies are not stratified (including by many community organizers, who are themselves mainly caste Hindus). The more powerful households also take steps to control and perhaps contain what can be construed as a new source of social power in their locality. They learn the languages of the project, that is, not simply to draw down resources for themselves and their favoured contractors, but also to ensure that no other group is well placed to play this role. A project does not come innocently into a locality. To the extent that it brings with it a promise of new resources, individuals and social groups who are not its intended beneficiaries will see it as a source of social power or funds. Participation cannot then be confined to ‘the poor’. Participation is always met with ‘counter-participation’, and the proper role of project managers, as several of them now recognize, is to work as effectively as they can in the world of the second best.22 Participation describes a spectrum of social actions, and it is unrealistic to assume that it can, or even should be maximized in all circumstances. Costs and benefits Proponents of participatory development can also be reticent about the costs of participation, whether these are financial or non-financial, or are direct or in the form of opportunities forgone. In our experience, however, the intended beneficiaries of participatory projects often have a good sense of the costs and benefits of participation, even when they are unable to name a scheme correctly or spell out its statutory provisions. Lack of information isn’t the only reason why they ‘fail’ to engage the state or a development project. 22

See note 10; see also our more general conclusions in chapter 8.

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Table 4.4. Evaluation of Malda village meeting: selected questions and answers Female

Male

All

1) Did you like the village meeting on 12.11.00? Yes Ok No

91% 9% 0%

100% 0% 0%

94% 6% 0%

2) Did you come to know anything new from this village meeting? Yes No

88% 12%

95% 5%

91% 9%

4) Do you remember who are to be called for the gram sansads? All voters (right answer) Wrong answer Don’t know N.A.

71% 6% 21% 3%

80% 5% 15% 0%

74% 6% 19% 2%

4a) Before coming to this meeting were you aware of this? No Yes

85% 15%

47% 53%

72% 28%

5) You were told that at the Block level there is an elected panchayat institution. Can you name it? Yes, panchayat samiti Don’t know Wrong answer

44% 53% 3%

55% 40% 5%

48% 48% 4%

6) Do you remember what is the minimum wage rate fixed by the government for panchayat work? Right answer Wrong answer Don’t know

84% 3% 13%

94% 0% 6%

88% 2% 10%

6a) Did you know of the minimum wage rate before the village meeting? No Yes

70% 30%

73% 27%

71% 29%

Source: Village workshop (2), December 2000.

Consider the Employment Assurance Scheme from this perspective. The acquisition of robust information about the scheme would clearly have helped it to function better. As part of the ‘action research project’ that we carried out for DFID in 2000/2001, we ran a workshop in our Malda field site on 12 November 2000 where we fed back information on such things as the minimum wage rates for panchayat work, and rights of attendance at gram sansads. We then returned to the village one month later and asked about the information we had presented. As table 4.4

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makes clear, recall rates were high among the fifty-four respondents. More than 80 per cent of females and 90 per cent of males correctly remembered the minimum wage rate fixed by the government for panchayat work. The internalization of this information did not mean, however, that these men and women would be strongly placed to demand work from the panchayat in the next lean season. Information has to be carefully digested, and set against a person’s understandings of their broader social needs and networks. As we explained in chapter 3, labouring households might need to make demands of party members at times of crisis, and some of them will not exercise a demand for ‘panchayat work’ until it has been clearly advertised. In any case, the costs of providing information are not trivial. When they fall on government servants, party workers or panchayat members, they impose tariffs (on time, mainly) that will not always be welcome or even manageable (see chapters 5 and 6). Even assuming that a meeting can be called at a time and date when most interested people can attend, and when the appropriate public official(s) can be present, the opportunity costs of that meeting can be considerable. One of the gram sansads that we attended lasted for four hours, and was dominated by perhaps five or ten of the one hundred people who turned up. Participation has to promise something tangible if people are going to consider this a good use of their time. Whether they do or not depends on how they estimate the likely benefits of participation. In the case of the Employment Assurance Scheme there is something akin to a chicken and egg situation in many areas. Some of the poorest villagers in Vaishali District might value a chance to participate in local planning decisions, but as things stand they are unable to do so. For the EAS to work in anything like the terms it is meant to, the initial push must come from above, from government servants, politicians or perhaps even from NGOs. Before a beneficiary can hope to calculate his or her likely costs and benefits of participation, he or she needs a prior set of participants to have decided that participation makes sense for them. Chambers is right in this respect, and we return to this issue in chapter 5. In Midnapore District, meanwhile, the CPI-M has made this prior commitment, and this is one reason why the EAS appears to work so much better there (at least in terms of the indicators that we introduced earlier). By the same token, many of the CPI-M’s poorer supporters in Debra Block had already learned to see the state in ways that would be unusual in Bidupur. The EAS took shape in Midnapore in a context in which the ruling Left Front government had done considerable work in preparing the ground for poorer people to participate in public meetings. In Midnapore, too, notwithstanding the fact that many gram sansads were

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carefully staged by party members, there was a commitment on behalf of the political elite to the public display of a progressive state regime. The benefits for the CPI-M of advertising their commitment to what might be called due process, or even the rule of law, were not inconsiderable. The cost of not doing so would be to suggest a form of political clientelism, or simple bad governance, that party leaders were keen to avoid. The differential performance of the EAS across our field sites would not be that difficult to predict. When it comes to the constitution and work of school management bodies, however, matters are more complicated. It is true that the SACs we observed in Debra Block work quite well. They are properly constituted, meet regularly, and help local people to raise issues about the quality of their public schools. Set against this, the VECs and SACs that we observed in Sahar and Old Malda Blocks were performing poorly. In our Sahar field site the VEC of one school was run by an imperious upper-caste landlord. He had dealt with a case of teacher negligence by slapping him. Unsurprisingly, the teacher put in for a transfer. The VEC of a second school was chaired by the son of another upper-caste landlord, a graduate in this case, who was related to one of the teachers at ‘his’ school. The teacher even lived in his house. Several parents told us that the teachers were negligent in their duties, but few were prepared to take the matter further. In part this was because they were aware of the social and economic power of the landlord’s family. But it also spoke to the fact that most villagers were unaware of the full composition of the VEC (as well they might be, given that all the SC and female ‘members’ of the VEC were unaware of their status). As in Old Malda Block, the idea that ordinary villagers could take some control over educational issues, and in a sense therefore over the state, was grossly overstated. The one exception to this generalization might have been the VEC for the ‘tola school’ in our Sahar field site, or the school that was used by children from the harijan or SC population. In this case a VEC had been constituted at a mass meeting after several days of mobilization activities involving senior officials of the Bihar Education Project (BEP). Its first chairman, moreover, Raghav, was an active leader from within the tola. He tried hard to voice the concern of many villagers about the ‘lady teacher’ who ran the school and who was often absent. The committee fell into disrepair, however, when Raghav relocated to Dhanbad (now Jharkhand) to look for work. District and state education officials also failed to respond to the VEC’s demands for a second teacher to be posted at the school. Not unreasonably, villagers took the view that attendance of VEC meetings was not worth their while when the committee could not secure this most basic goal.

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But what of our Ranchi and Vaishali field sites? We saw before that a significant number of VECs in these Districts, and indeed in Murhu and Bidupur Blocks, had met six or more times. This would seem to indicate a strong and continuing interest in educational issues. And this was partly the case, including in our specific field sites. What was also apparent, however, was that cost–benefit calculations were working against the longrun effectiveness of the VECs. In Ranchi District this was partly because the BEP had failed to follow up on its early work (which was in any case pretty minimal). There was also a continuing problem of teacher transfers in Murhu. Villagers were rightly confirmed in the view that key decisions about education – not least about the supply and quality of teachers – were being taken elsewhere. In the Bidupur field site, meanwhile, we discovered two issues that speak to wider debates about participation and seeing the state. On the one hand, and perhaps predictably, we found that the vibrancy of local VECs (in terms of meetings held and diversity of membership) was more apparent than real. Meetings were often being held to give life to castebased conflicts. The representatives of the Yadavs, the Scheduled Castes and the Rajputs each used the VEC to block initiatives from other quarters. On the other hand, and perhaps more significantly in the longer run, we discovered that a group of Yadav farmers had spontaneously formed a committee to deal with teaching issues. The children of these mainly poor households went to a school on the north side of the village that was without a formal VEC in 1999–2000. What concerned them most was the question of teacher attendance. Committee members agreed to visit the school on a regular basis to put pressure on the teacher. They set up a roster to share this load and kept to it. This effort at ‘participation’, however, had a perverse but not atypical consequence: the teacher was said to have paid a bribe to a DSE officer to secure his transfer out. In addition, he put the word out among his fellow teachers that the school was not a good place to work. The result, according to villagers, was that several more teachers paid bribes to the DSE in order not to be posted to the village, and the school was forced to close for several months. To the extent that some families were not inconvenienced by this closure, or closures like it, it would mainly be families from among the Musahar communities that we met in Bhojpur and Vaishali. Many of these families felt it made little sense to educate their sons and daughters when the parents were desperately poor and unschooled, and when skilled jobs were scarce. Even in a village immediately adjacent to our Sahar field site, where the local school was in the Musahar (SC) tola and was staffed by a Musahar teacher, a large majority of households saw the costs of educating their children (mainly the opportunity costs of wages

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forgone) but not the potential benefits. The idea of participating in a Village Education Committee seemed far-fetched, and perhaps even absurd, to members of families with almost no assets to their name.23 A similar regard for costs and benefits is apparent, finally, in a development project like the EIRFP, albeit in reverse (that is, from the point of view of active participants). As we have explained, community organizers are often reluctant to reach out to some of the most excluded individuals in a cluster. It is much easier to work with literate men and women, and people who reside close to the village school or post office. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that differential rates of participation in the EIRFP’s groups are a function of information supply problems alone, or of a lack of effort on the part of COs. This is to constitute non-participants and active participants alike as little more than ciphers, or perhaps even as dupes. We would prefer to suggest that poorer people sometimes choose to avoid the project for good reasons. It would take a considerable investment of time and effort for such people to learn the ways of the project, and even then they could have little expectation of leading the groups they might join. In any case, the tangible benefits of project innovations seem small – as they are: this is a no-subsidy project, supplying in many cases low levels of ‘input’ to beneficiary populations – or of little relevance, such as a check-dam for a non-farming family, or a household cultivating only uplands in the season when they are resident in the village. (Interestingly, some of these families had availed themselves of ‘information’ in the case of the Indira Awas housing scheme, where they saw that BPL status could translate into a claim on a tangible and very visible asset.) In contrast, Kumar and Corbridge (2002: 86) found that the project was of great interest to those families which ran the unlicensed stone quarries that supplied boulders for the government’s Indira Awas and jaldhara (irrigation well) schemes, and which were well placed to meet the project’s needs for building materials for check-dams. As ever, and quite predictably, an informed if always imperfect appreciation of future costs and benefits 23

Craig Jeffrey and Patricia and Roger Jeffery have reported that some Dalit families in western Uttar Pradesh are acquiring a formal education in part to gain a sense of distinction (in Bourdieu’s sense of that word), or improved self-worth and possibly also social capital (Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery 2004). To this end they have been keen to enhance their stocks of literacy and numeracy. Sadly, we did not see evidence of this among the Musahar communities of north (and to a lesser extent, central) Bihar. In part, this may have to do with the poor quality of public education available to them, which in turn is partly reinforced by the weakness of the private sector (at least when compared to western UP). But it probably reflects, rather more, the hard cost–benefit calculations of Musahar adults. Most of the adults we spoke to could not imagine their children gaining the sorts of jobs for which literacy would be an advantage.

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had a great deal to do with observed patterns of participation, and these departed significantly from those promised (or demanded) by a project’s sponsors.24 The tyranny of participation? Initiatives like the EAS and VECs are meant to help poorer people gain paid employment and empower themselves. But they also propose a reengineering of established relationships between ‘government’ and ‘the governed’, and this is what we want to consider further in conclusion. Has ‘participation’ become a new technology of rule that substitutes a fantastical projection of a benign and responsive state for ‘real’ actions that would disturb enduring structures of hierarchy and social exclusion? Has it become a new form of oppression? The ‘new tyranny’ argument is not without merit. Kumar and Corbridge report that the Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project is in danger of being coded as a failure by its major funding agency, the UK government’s Department for International Development. The project’s logframe demands that improvements in livelihoods in the cluster areas should be the direct ‘result of villagers’ participation and enhanced skills and capacities’ (Kribbhco et al. 1999: 5), but poorer villagers are generally not active in project groups. This doesn’t mean, however, that poorer villagers haven’t sometimes gained from project interventions, or that some of them won’t find work in fields watered by a project check-dam. Kumar and Corbridge suggest that the EIRFP has worked extremely well as a conventional (livelihoods-based) aid project. The elements of tyranny, such as they are, reside in the fact that villagers are required to join in groups to get inputs that they would prefer to receive directly, and in the implicit suggestion that ‘development without the participation of the poorest’ is no development at all. A group-based approach to participation was not a feature of the Employment Assurance Scheme or Village Education Committees, or Joint Forest Management for that matter. But here too we can see how the ‘tyranny’ argument might be broached. The notion that poorer people 24

Sanjay Kumar (2002) has published a path-breaking paper on JFM in Jharkhand which suggests that villagers might be right to assume that the long-run costs of forest protection (in terms of time and non-timber forest products forgone) will not exceed a future stream of benefits from regenerated timber. He does not argue that villagers are making the same calculations as he has been able to make (using different timber yield tables and social rates of discount, for example). Nevertheless, the fact that they are coming to the same conclusion through a different process of reasoning confirms that an apparent unwillingness to participate in JFM activities is not only or simply a function of a lack of information supply.

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should join in forest patrols to help regenerate the timber stocks of richer farmers or the Forest Department can be read this way, and the cooptation of Scheduled Caste men and women to VECs in Bhojpur can likewise be dismissed as so much fluff, or even camouflage, when one recalls that many of their children are unable to attend local schools. There is clearly a measure of disguise in the rhetoric of ‘participation’, and it is right that social scientists ask questions about whose interests are served in this way. That said, we cannot bring ourselves to endorse Cooke and Kothari’s critique in full. We need to recognize that ‘participation’ is not a singularity, and that there are cases in eastern India where poorer women and men have been able to engage development interventions in ways that can be more or less fruitful, and more or less empowering. In our case, these ‘success stories’ are to be found mainly in Midnapore District, much as Kohli’s work would predict. Tiwary uncovered VFCs that did call regular meetings and which kept records of them. He was also able to document cases where VFCs had distributed thinnings and cash to poorer families that had participated in forest patrols, precisely as the law demanded (Tiwary 2001: 59–63). There are also reasons to believe that some hitherto excluded people, including some women, have come to see Forest Guards and DFOs in a new light as a result of JFM. Tiwary inspected the record books of some of the FPCs that he studied in West Bengal. He found evidence of villagers engaging more forcefully over time in the design of forest micro-plans, and of poorer people pressing a demand for particular types of trees or ground-based crops. Pressing demands, of course, is not the same thing as exercising power or taking decisions and it would be wrong to read too much into these discussions. Nevertheless, JFM has been successful in parts of West Bengal in bringing the state to ‘the people’, in the sense that forest officers, including some quite senior officers, are now required to sit with members of forest-dependent households in the villages themselves. The signing of a minute by both parties, while apparently trivial, also hints at a reshaping of a relationship that has traditionally been tense and coercive. In Midnapore, too, we found that the CPI-M had sought to engage people who were not its active opponents in a structured dialogue around EAS projects. Party activists did not go out of their way to advertise the EAS to labouring households, nor did they hold village open meetings in a way that gave villagers full and direct control over key project decisions. Many senior cadres cling to the view that the ‘party knows best’, and it is well known that the CPI-M is reluctant to confront its many supporters in the teaching profession. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to ignore the efforts of the CPI-M to hold gram baithaks in which poorer men

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and women can make their views known to party activists. Our evidence suggests that less powerful villagers have used these forums to make a case for Project A or Project B, and for the most part their views (‘demands’ in EAS terminology) have been heeded by party members. This is partly because the CPI-M has to compete from time to time in a reasonably competitive democratic framework. It has to behave like one among many political patrons. But this is not the whole story. Senior cadres of the party have long been supporters of a form of managed participation in the institutions of panchayati raj, and at least some of the demands of the EAS can be comfortably accommodated in that framework. The EAS has presented an opportunity for the party to again ‘take the part of the poor’, and it is likely that such participation as has been fostered in this way has further encouraged ‘the poor’ to see state functionaries (or, here, party workers) as possible conversationalists. In other words, there is some blurring of the boundaries between civil and political societies. (We return to the implications of this remark in chapter 8.) Matters are very different in Bihar and Jharkhand, and indeed in Old Malda Block. The picture is not uniformly bleak, and it remains to be seen whether the reintroduction of panchayati raj institutions will widen such spaces of empowerment as can sometimes be observed in erstwhile Bihar. The fact that VECs were not especially active in our field sites might also speak to local particularities. It is possible that some VECs in Murhu Block are more active than the one in our particular locality because villagers have more reason to be active (because a local school is failing, for example). As we have seen, the government’s own data suggest a reasonable and continuing level of activity in Murhu and Bidupur Blocks taken in the round. We are not convinced, however, that this is the case, and we did not find confirming evidence in the villages that surrounded the panchayats where we worked. What we did find, and have reported here, are significant examples of participatory institutions being formed and resourced by villagers outside the formal frameworks of state programmes. These ranged from autonomous forest protection committees in Ranchi District to the (mainly) Yadav education committee that was formed in our Vaishali field site. In addition, as we shall report further in chapters 6 and 7, ordinary citizens, including large numbers of poorer men and women, are also participating in political movements in these and other Districts. Why, then, are the government’s own vehicles of participatory development failing so badly (as they are also in Malda District)? The answer, of course, is that Nehru was right all along. People will be reluctant to jump through hoops – which is how these exercises in participation are sometimes seen – if they are poorly informed about the schemes that are

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on offer and the benefits that might be attached to them.25 To expect Musahar children – boys as well as girls – to go to school in Bihar, or, still more optimistically, to expect their parents to take part in VECs, is to miss the very obvious point that these families lack even the most basic assets: land, of course, but also a sense of self-worth and the prospect of secure and properly paid employment. This in turn leads to something of a vicious circle, for many Musahar households are then poorly placed to deal with agents of the state or to demand employment from it under the EAS. The high levels of social exclusion which they endure also contribute to their much lower levels of political awareness and involvement when compared to another SC community like the Paswans. The obverse side of social exclusion is pervasive state failure, particularly from the point of view of the very poor in Bhojpur (for reasons to be explained further in chapter 6) and in Malda. In our Ranchi field site this was countered to some degree by the effectiveness of the Mukhiya in drawing down resources from the state. But here too the exit option was widely favoured (or had become necessary) for poorer men and some women. To speak of the tyranny of participation in Bihar or Malda is to miss a more important point. It is hard to credit a discourse of participation with being a technology of rule when schemes like the EAS are run by one or two key individuals, or where less than 5 per cent of the intended beneficiary population is aware of the scheme’s existence, or where poorer people disregard many of the rules that are supposed to reposition them vis-`a-vis the state. Participation rather functions as an absence, and it is equally hard to credit the idea that this might be legitimizing state power in some more subtle or perhaps unintended fashion (as James Ferguson’s work might lead us to suppose). For reasons that we explore further in chapter 6, most MPs and MLAs don’t care greatly about education or forest issues, and they see the EAS as yet another source of patronage that they must control. The key battles in Bihar and Jharkhand tend to be fought between villages or panchayats, rather than between ‘the people’ and ‘the state’ in some more abstract sense. In any case, as we go on to explore in chapter 5, many Block Development Offices are simply not set up to deal with the EAS in the way that New Delhi and the major development agencies would like them to be. One of the main lessons of this chapter, which will surprise only the most committed advocate of participatory development, is that participation is costly. Many of the intended beneficiaries of the EAS, or JFM, are poorly 25

Tiwary refers to villagers in Ranchi District, and indeed in Midnapore, complaining of JFM, ‘that too much demand is made on their time. There is, for example, an obligation to attend meetings, which is an obsession with the leaders of the NGO-run forums [especially]’ (2001: 259).

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informed about these schemes, although we suspect that participation rates would improve markedly if villagers thought that the expected benefits would significantly exceed their costs. But this is only part of the story. As things stand, most poorer men and women in Bihar, and indeed in Malda District, West Bengal, are continuing to see the state as they saw it before the advent of participatory development programmes: at a distance, episodically, often roughly and through intermediaries. And this will only change, the World Bank and other donors now suggest, if a discourse of participation is allied to reforms of government itself. For poorer people to see the state more evenly and directly, the state first needs to provide incentive systems for its employees to see the poor as clients or citizens. What is needed, in short, is an agenda of good governance.

5

Governance

Introduction Michel Foucault once told an interviewer that it was important to be humble in the face of apparent social irruptions.1 We should be properly alert, he said, to continuities of history and geography, and not constantly on the look out for markers of ‘the new’ or what today might be called ‘the post-’. This is surely good advice, and we need to bear it in mind when discussing issues like participation and good governance. The idea that states in the past have not been concerned with good government is clearly wrong. The emergence of biopolitics is one strong indicator of the responsibilities that governments are meant to have to their populations. Nevertheless, there is a strong perception in the development community that state failure and bad governance have become important issues since the 1970s, and this perception has been linked to a broader critique of rent-seeking behaviour, simple predation, and dirigiste development. In the next part of the chapter we review some of the debates that have attended the rise of the good governance agenda. We shall also follow Adrian Leftwich and Rob Jenkins in drawing attention to the ways in which the agendas of good governance can be said to depoliticize accounts of development and rule.2 They do so, not least, by refusing to pay close attention to questions of state capabilities, and the incapacity of some regimes to secure control over their territories. This matters most in parts of post-colonial Africa, as we indicated in chapter 1, but it is of significance too in parts of eastern India.3 They also make quite far-reaching assumptions about the self-regulating properties of the economy and civil 1

2 3

‘I think we should have the modesty to say to ourselves that, on the one hand, the time we live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again. We must also have the modesty to say, on the other hand that . . . the time we live in is very interesting; it needs to be analysed and broken down, and that we do well to ask ourselves, “What is the nature of our present?”’ (Foucault 1983: 206). Leftwich (1993); Jenkins (2002). For example, in Sahar Block, Bihar and in some of the more remote Blocks of Jharkhand.

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society, and thus about the production of modern subjectivities. Roberto DaMatta suggests that in Brazil ‘the individual is considered an unpredictable and unstable force that must be contained through incorporation into the collective social body’ (after Nelson 2003: 12–13). The individual is someone who is not incorporated in a home and who does not enjoy the protection of membership in a social group. Such a person, DaMatta suggests, belongs to the masses, and finds him or herself at the mercy of the police and the law. For everyone else, ‘the laws seem not to apply, a concept captured by the Brazilian saying, “To our enemies, the law; to our friends, everything!”’ (Nelson 2003: 13, quoting DaMatta 1991: 168). Should we assume that matters are very different in India? In the middle parts of the chapter we consider how the new governance agenda might look from the point of view of some of the key individuals at the Block and District levels who are charged with making it work. Instead of thinking of government actors in impersonal terms, we want to give a stronger sense of their embeddedness in local society. We can then begin to describe the contrasting and often competing pressures that are brought to bear upon them: pressures from their seniors and communities of experts, for example, and pressures from important actors in political society, and perhaps even from some poorer ‘clients’, citizens and family members. We do this first in regard to the Employment Assurance Scheme and discourses that circulate about corruption and development. We show that the good governance agenda presupposes the construction of a type of individual that is uncommon in our field areas, and the manufacturing of which is hampered by a lack of state capacity. Government officers will find it hard to behave like a Weberian bureaucrat when they lack the support of a Weberian bureaucracy. At the same time, however, it is not clear to us that subaltern officers subscribe straightforwardly to the tenets of vernacular society (as described by Chatterjee and Kaviraj, in unconscious recognition, perhaps, of DaMatta), or that they are opposed in principle to some of the developmental concerns that are voiced by higher-ranking public officials. We will maintain that neither perspective on governance (or rule) pays sufficient attention to the diverse ways in which government officers come to see the state. We make this argument, moreover, not simply in relation to the EAS, but also in regard to education. To a lesser degree, we are also able to report some of our findings about the ‘protective’ function of the state, or the ways in which the legal system is constituted, understood and occasionally put to use by different actors. We conclude by returning to the critique of the good governance agenda that has been voiced by scholars and activists who prefer to concern themselves with politics (and political society). We have already said that

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we share this preference in some degree, and we shall elaborate on the assumptions about the codes of conduct that are central to the new public administration. There are financial costs associated with what has been called the deepening of democracy. But we also want to make the point, which we develop further in chapters 8 and 9, that a degree of romanticism about politics is present in the claims of those who shout loudest about the dangers of depoliticization. These claims speak to an account of politics that makes reference to what we shall call an ‘ideal outside’, or a world where politics can be properly constituted and made to secure its desired effects.4 Our perspective is less enchanted. It is geared to thinking of politics as a continuum of practical and not always additive actions around the construction of social and economic relationships and forms of rule. Good governance Governance is generally understood as ‘the prevailing patterns by which public power is exercised in a given social context’ (Jenkins 2002: 485). As such, it has been a concern for all ruling parties and states. It is equally the case that all governments have concerned themselves with questions of good governance. Since there is no clear definition of ‘the good’, it is possible for totalitarian regimes to make claims about efficient rule, just as corrupt and inept governments can make it look as though they are addressing important issues of statecraft. As Jenkins reminds us, it is the chameleon-like quality of the good governance agenda that makes it so attractive to ‘stakeholders’.5 This is certainly the case when it comes to the Bretton Woods institutions, which are bound by their articles of agreement from intervening in a country’s politics. Politics is the preserve of sovereign countries. Institutional change and good governance supposedly are not. 4

5

We will comment in chapter 8 on the analysis of political society developed by Chatterjee and others. Romanticism is less evident here than a prevailing pessimism. This is the counterpart, in some degree, of a particular reading of Foucault on power, albeit one less imbued with the agentless and non-intentionalist reading of history that led Edward Said to criticize Foucault in the 1980s ‘for [his] refus[al] to consider the space of existence beyond the power of the present’ (Legg 2005a: 10, summarizing Said 1984: 245–7). We are being polite. Jenkins refers to development agencies drawing ‘promiscuously’ on ideas that have sometimes emanated from the West’s largest consultancy firms, and which are then applied ‘to constrain the performance-inhibiting instincts of southern (and northern) governments by subjecting them to multilateral policy “disciplines”’ (Jenkins 2002: 486). The involvement of firms including Arthur Andersen (as was), Price Waterhouse Cooper and others, in the restructuring of forms of government in southern (and northern) countries, has not yet received the attention from academics and activists that it deserves.

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This is a fiction, of course, albeit a necessary fiction, for it was precisely a concern for politics that prompted the most recent invention of a good governance agenda. This first became apparent when the counterrevolution in development theory and practice began to speak about ‘the economy’, and indeed of political economy. Writing in 1974, Anne Krueger suggested that trade distortions in India and Turkey were practised on a massive scale by governments that were content to abuse the privileges of sovereignty. The ‘total value of rents’ in India in 1964 was estimated to be Rs. 14.6 billion, or ‘7.3 per cent of national income’, of which more than two-thirds came from a system of import licences that favoured only a small minority of the population (Krueger 1974: 295). This in turn encouraged a ‘political “vicious circle” [wherein] people perceive that the market mechanism does not function in a way compatible with socially approved goals because of competitive rent-seeking. A political consensus therefore emerges to intervene further in the market, rentseeking increases, and further intervention results’ (Krueger 1974: 301). Krueger would later serve as the Chief Economist of the World Bank during the Reagan years. She would then press Bank directors to wean countries away from ‘inwardly-oriented’ development policies. She was helped in this task by the debt crisis of the 1980s. This paved the way for structural adjustment programmes that sought the liberation of ‘the economy’ from the public sector and government misrule. The World Bank also declared that oppressive marketing boards and overvalued exchange rates were responsible for a growing crisis of food production in subSaharan Africa. This pattern of ‘urban bias’, however, could not survive rising food prices. Food riots might break out in the cities, and regime change, to use the modern parlance, would create a space for external agencies to impose adjustment programmes.6 Devaluation could be pushed through, and marketing boards or their equivalents broken up. ‘The market’ would then do its work, and development would resume what Michael Beenstock called ‘its normal course’, undisturbed by the mistaken or simply venal claims of politicians.7 The idea that sovereign misrule could be turned so rapidly into governmentality (as expressed in the self-regulating capacities of ‘the economy’) was shaken for a while by the experience of Russia with shock therapy measures. The major architects of the ‘Washington Consensus’ 6

7

The economic analysis can be found in the so-called Berg Report (World Bank 1981); the politics of urban bias was explored more assiduously, and from within a rational choice framework, by Robert Bates (Bates 1989). Beenstock (1984) made this remark in the context of the debt crisis, where he was concerned to argue against proposals for greater regulation of the international economy. Nevertheless, the remark was clearly intended to have wide purchase.

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now insisted they had been misunderstood and took care to distance themselves from the utopian project put forward by Jeffrey Sachs and his colleagues.8 Jeffrey Williamson declared that his original account of a Washington Consensus had not intended to prescribe a set of correct economic policies for all countries. He was mainly concerned that countries should avoid policies that were straightforwardly wrong, like running consistently high trade or budget deficits, or failing to deal with ‘sick’ industries.9 But a more significant change to the governance agenda was brought about by the end of the Cold War. Confident that socialism had been defeated, and yet mindful of the need for effective government to support ‘free’ or ‘freer’ markets, an agenda for good governance now took shape which married respect for the market’s power to create modern subjects to an insistence that those subjects would flourish best in vibrant civil societies. Good governance, then, came to define those patterns of rule which protected the individual citizen from political society (politics still being seen in essentially negative terms) and from unrepresentative government.10 In sub-Saharan Africa and the ex-USSR this led to a particular concern for multi-party politics and democratization. In Latin America and South Asia attention was focused more often on the institutions of democracy, and on the need to strengthen civic associations. Side by side, then, with policies that were put forward to privatize or at least deregulate some parts of the economy, measures were proposed to transfer some of the powers of the central state to local government institutions and non-governmental organizations. As James Manor has shown with great clarity, the agenda for decentralization describes a range of policies that may or may not be pursued in tandem. It is important, at a minimum, to distinguish between: (a) deconcentration, or the dispersal of agents of higher levels 8

9 10

Even so noted a supporter of free trade and free markets as Jagdish Bhagwati was unimpressed with Sachs’s activities in Russia. Alarmed that he might offer similar advice to his new ‘interest’, India, Bhagwati wrote that: ‘The last time that technocratic full-speed ahead advice to a reforming government backfired badly was when shock therapy for macro-stabilization was prescribed for Russia, with a backlash that gave Russia much political turmoil and little economic progress while returning Jeffrey Sachs unceremoniously . . . to Harvard. [He would later join Bhagwati at Columbia University.] I am reminded of his famous line: “You cannot cross a chasm in two leaps”, to which Padma Desai replied: “You cannot cross it one leap either unless you are Indiana Jones; so you drop a bridge instead”’ (Bhagwati 1993: 37). ‘I can see no advantage to democracy having major parties spouting economic nonsense’ (Williamson 1993: 1330. See also Williamson 1990). In the World Bank’s formulation it defined, ‘political institutions such as constitutional rules, the division of power among levels of government, independent agencies, mechanisms for citizens to monitor public behaviour, and rules that inhibit corruption . . . . [all these] succeed in restraining officials of the state from arbitrary action’ (World Bank 2001: 115).

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of government to lower level arenas; (b) fiscal decentralization, or the transfer of budgetary resources to lower level arenas; and (c) devolution, or the transfer of democratic and administrative powers to lower levels of government (after Manor 1999: 5, citing Rondinelli 1981). Perhaps more important, however, is the fact that one or more versions of this agenda are now circulating widely in both northern and southern countries. They have the imprimateur not just of the Bretton Woods institutions but also of the world’s leading consultancy companies (keen to make money from applying the lessons of the ‘new corporate governance’) and academic units like the Harvard Center for International Development.11 In a striking demonstration of one of this book’s central theses, indeed, it is clear that Merilee Grindle at Harvard has played an important role in ‘challenging the state’ (the title of one of her books) to do better. She has acted as a consultant to a number of countries, helped teach senior officials in short courses at Harvard, written widely on the need for public sector reforms, and become a champion of the view that a new generation of public servants must have a sense of ownership of the ‘new governance’ agenda. (This might be done by linking pay more clearly to performance and by sensitizing officials to their responsibilities to those they serve.) We would also maintain, however, that the agendas of good governance are constantly in flux, and are open to at least some degree of critical reflection by their proponents. Judith Tendler’s book, Good Government in the Tropics, provides a case in point. Her study of a preventive health project (Health Agent Programme) in Ceara state in Brazil in the early 1990s suggested that very significant health-care improvements had been secured by thousands of highly motivated field agents, including mainly female nurse-supervisors. Vaccination rates soared and infant mortality rates fell. Although poorly paid, these agents showed a ‘strong commitment’ to the programme because they had been engaged through a ‘remarkable process of merit hiring’ (Tendler 1997: 28).12 More so than some other writers, however, Tendler was reluctant to focus only on questions of cost or the fact that the state had surrendered one of its traditional functions to a non-state actor. She also noted that the project has worked well in Ceara because higher-level state functionaries had taken actions to marginalize the role of local mayors, or political actors who might otherwise have seen it as a new source of patronage. Politics might remain a source of intrigue or even damage, but the suggestion 11 12

Jenkins (2002: 485) refers to inputs from the fields of ‘corporate governance’ and ‘network governance’, but neglects the role of academic centres and the courses they provide. Although Tendler does not give it the same emphasis, she also points out that ‘healthagent jobs offered full-time work year-round, in an agricultural economy where employment was highly seasonal’ (Tendler 1997: 29).

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that a strong (central) state might be required to make a space for nongovernmental activities begins to point away from the middle ground of good governance studies. Whether it also begins to point towards a more robust understanding of political society is less clear, and is something we shall come back to. Good governance in India Significant elements of the new public administration are now recognizable in India and are being pushed quite vigorously by New Delhi. It is important to understand, even so, that the good governance agenda in India has taken shape with reference to a long tradition of concern about state–society relationships. The leading lights of India’s anti-colonial struggles all spoke about the importance of good government, and suggested that power had to be used for and by ‘the people’. The debates which surrounded this platitude related mainly to the site of empowerment. Gandhi pointed to the village and the panch, while Ambedkar looked to District and state-level institutions to break the power of locally dominant castes.13 By the 1960s, moreover, the question of corruption was forcing itself onto the national political agenda. The setting up of the Santhanam Committee in 1963 was one indication that the postcolonial state was not living up to its lofty ideals. Its report on the prevention of corruption recommended the setting up of a system of Chief Vigilance Officers (CVOs) to review existing ‘opportunities for corruption and malpractices’ (Government of India 1964: 289). The CVOs were also required to maintain ‘proper surveillance on officers of doubtful integrity’. Gunnar Myrdal later generalized some of the Report’s conclusions in his account of the ‘soft state’ in India (and other countries in Asia).14 His calls for less government, for government that avoided administrative delay, and for government that reduced the scope for personal discretion on the part of its officers, anticipated some of the concerns of the new public administration. The relevance of these calls was highlighted again in the 1970s and 1980s as concerns grew about the abuse of executive power and the criminalization of politics.15 By the end 13

14 15

Ambedkar referred to India’s villages as ‘dens of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’ (Constituent Assembly Debates, quoted in Galanter 1991: 3). He looked to strong, rational and centralized rule as a means of empowerment and enlightenment for the rural poor. Myrdal (1968). The offices of the Indian Express were raided in 1987 precisely and ironically because the newspaper was seeking to expose the government of Rajiv Gandhi over the Bofors affair. On the criminalization of politics, see especially Bardhan (2001), Brass (1997) and Kohli (1990).

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of the 1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was sufficiently convinced that decentralization would be a vote-winner that he built it into his electioneering slogan: ‘We have given you power’, he took to saying. In fact, nothing much changed under Mr Gandhi, and it was left to Narasimha Rao in the 1990s to turn promises into policies.16 The economic reforms that were introduced by his government were at first intended to deal with India’s balance of payments problems, but a broader programme of administrative and economic reforms was also meant to address what Atul Kohli had called India’s ‘growing crisis of governability’. It did so, however, in a manner that might have surprised Kohli. Kohli had suggested that widespread administrative failure in India was being produced by an absence of enduring coalitions and a structural incapacity to accommodate political conflict without violence (Kohli 1990: 23). It followed that a solution had to be found in the field of politics. Narasimha Rao, on the other hand, and the prime ministers that followed him in the 1990s, preferred to follow the logic of the new public administration. They looked, that is to say, to a slowly evolving mix of deregulation, privatization, civil service reform and decentralization to produce the administrative and political effects that Kohli had deemed necessary. Embedded officials and the Employment Assurance Scheme It is not possible here to comment on all or even most aspects of this new agenda (see box 5.1). In particular, we cannot discuss the local consequences of macro-economic policy changes, although we recognize that these might be significant for poorer people. Much will depend on how state governments amplify or dampen these changes in terms of their public spending decisions. We do note, however, that some very severe objections have been raised against the good governance agenda, several of which turn on the assumptions it makes about state capacity and the world-views of public officials. In the context of sub-Saharan Africa, especially, Rob Jenkins follows Robert Jackson in talking about the ‘quasistates’ that are often to be found there.17 Unable to enforce even ‘minimal levels of social penetration’ across the territories they are meant to 16

17

This, at any rate, is the judgement of James Manor (1999: 44–5). It would perhaps be fairer to Mr Gandhi to point out that it was under his leadership that six Technology Missions were set up (to explore, for example, C-DOT connections to remote locations), and that the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments were prefigured by the PM-DM workshops that he instituted. Jenkins (2002: 486), citing Jackson (1991).

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Box 5.1 The new public administration and poverty alleviation in the countryside In addition to a new emphasis on privatization, deregulation of labour markets, a slimmed down and more responsive civil service, and new initiatives in the fields of education and health-care, the Government of India has redesigned some of its poverty alleviation programmes, not least in the countryside. Very much in line with participatory development philosophies, and with ideas to the fore about the formation of self-help groups and social capital, the Ministry of Rural Development has launched two initiatives that have taken shape since the time of our initial fieldwork. India’s wage-employment schemes, the EAS and JGSY (formerly JRY), have been reformed as two ‘streams’ of the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana (SGRY), which was launched in September 2001. The SGRY is self-targeting and has the primary objectives of providing additional rural employment and ensuring food security at the household level. Wage payments now include an in-kind component; that is, workers under the SGRY are partly paid in food grains from the Food Corporation of India. The scheme is decentralized and demand-led. Only those districts that demonstrate a popular need for the programme, by swift utilization of funds and a capacity to administer it, receive a second yearly instalment. SGRY projects are put forward by the panchayats, and the ‘second-stream’ village-level schemes require the approval of the village assembly (gram sabha). The panchayats are responsible for the implementation of SGRY schemes, but the execution of works can also be entrusted to wellestablished Self-Help Groups of the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) (SGRY Guidelines, Ministry of Rural Development, http://rural.nic.in/g1.htm). The SGSY is India’s other main poverty-alleviation programme. This self-employment scheme was launched in April 1999, and replaced the Integrated Rural Development Programme and a few other self-employment schemes. The SGSY is implemented in partnership between the District Rural Development Agencies, the panchayats, banks and NGOs. The programme’s objective is to lift and keep swarozgaries (self-help families) above the poverty line by ‘organising the rural poor into Self Help Groups (SHGs) through the process of social mobilization, their training and capacity building and provision of income generating assets’. The expectation is that the SHG approach will help ‘the poor to build their self-confidence through community action’, establish a large number of micro-enterprises,

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and ‘ultimately lead to the strengthening and socio-economic empowerment as well as improve [the] collective bargaining power [of the rural poor]’ (SGRY Guidelines, Ministry of Rural Development, http://rural.nic.in/g1.htm). Although the SGSY had given loans to over two million individual swarozgaries by 2004, the discursive emphasis has been on SHGs, of which almost 1.3 million have been formed since 1999. These groups have between ten and twenty members and at least half of them should be women-only SHGs. The groups are supposed to go through four ‘stages’: (1) formation: where groups are mobilized and motivated by facilitators (including NGOs); (2) stabilization: where groups begin with savings and intra-group borrowing; (3) micro-credit: where the SHG gets access to revolving bank loans; and (4) microenterprise development: where the SHG takes up income-generation activities in a sector that has been identified as economically suitable for the region by the Block SGSY committee (SGRY Guidelines). The ‘new paradigm’ of development is also reflected in the evaluation of the SGSY. This tends to highlight the number of SHGs formed rather than the disbursal of funds or the value of assets created. The Ministry of Rural Development only notes the following regarding SGSY on its ‘Achievements at a Glance’ website (http://rural.nic.in/rd2.htm): ‘Since the inception of [SGSY] – a holistic programme for promoting self-employment in rural areas – 11.45 lakh Self-Help Groups (SHGs) formed till date and about 1.00 lakh Groups have been constructed.’ (Sources: as in text.) command, these quasi-states are ill-equipped to govern, let alone govern well. Instead of strengthening local infrastructures of rule, however, the Bretton Woods institutions are now demanding that the governments of these quasi-states surrender such economic powers as they have to external agencies. Ever neglectful of political realities, these institutions fondly assume that structural adjustment programmes will pave the way to good governance, even when the evidence points in the opposite direction.18 Barbara Harriss-White, meanwhile, writing of India, argues that 18

The World Bank has acknowledged that ‘The state cannot provide costly public goods without the power to tax individuals and companies to raise public revenues’ (World Bank 2001: 99). What it neglects is the difficulty that many states face in raising taxes when a climate of opinion has been created which favours tax and spending cuts. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US, where George W. Bush exploited this climate to push through a fiscal regime which cut the taxes of the super-rich (and especially those trousering $300,000 or more) before ‘discipline’ was restored by attacks upon the surpluses which working- and middle-class Americans had built up in the social security system. The most effective critic of Bush, by far, has been Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times (see Krugman 2003, 2004).

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‘The World Bank’s project for the State is the opposite of what is needed’ (Harriss-White 2003: 100). She also contends that the World Bank is missing two more important points when it talks of corruption and the need for new and more efficient forms of government: firstly, that tax evasion is far more disabling of government than is corruption, and, secondly, that the so-called state in India has already been privatized and turned into a vehicle (the shadow state) for the accumulative projects of local capitalist classes (Harriss-White 2003: 100–1). We shall come back to these broader observations at the end of the chapter. We shall repeat here only the rather cryptic remark that we made earlier on; namely, that while we are sympathetic to significant parts of this analysis, we are not fully in agreement with its political or policy-related undertow (see Conclusion). For the moment, however, we want to focus on larger issues by means of a much smaller lens. We want to consider the question of good governance at the local level, and with close regard for the ways in which government officers understand some of the ‘new’ initiatives they are meant to preside over. This will take us back to the Employment Assurance Scheme and village education councils, both of which advertise the concerns of the new public administration for flexible bureaucracies and the responsiveness of officials to the broader public. Is it the case that the local state is inefficient, overstaffed and fundamentally venal, as the new governance orthodoxy so often assumes, and if so, why? Is this likely to change as government servants are required to respond to citizens as clients? And is it sensible to assume that directives from New Delhi or state capitals will have the impacts at local level that are intended (or supposedly intended) by senior-level bureaucrats? Might there not be other pressures which affect the actions of members of what Kaviraj has called ‘the vernacular state and society’? Might it be the case, as Ronald Inden has argued even more strongly, that men and women from this quarter are unimpressed by ideas of generalized morality, and are opposed in important ways to what he calls the grandiose discourses of planning, development and nation-building?19 These questions are not easily answered, for much will depend on the characteristics of local political societies. But consider how the Employment Assurance Scheme was redesigned in several of our Districts, and how this reworking speaks to questions of corruption and possible 19

Inden suggests that these discourses are underpinned by a concept of Reason that is every bit as transcendental as the religious progresses that endowed the medieval king of kings with the ‘luminous will’ of Vishnu (Inden 1995: 271). In each case, particular pilgrimages or progresses (small-scale developments) are sublimated into a grander idea of Progress or Modernity, a grander idea that turns its back on the lives and wishes of a majority of Indians who are expected to heed their master’s voice and respond dutifully.

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gaps in understanding between elite and subaltern officials. We know that the first aim of the EAS was to set up a demand-led system of employment provision. But an important second objective was to make sure that any schemes sanctioned under the EAS guidelines would be labour-intensive. Thus, while the Government of India insisted that ‘the provision of employment under this scheme results in the creation of durable productive assets in the Block area’ (Government of India 1993b: 3), it also required that: ‘Only labour-intensive works of a productive nature which create durable assets should be taken up for sanction under EAS and included in the shelf of works/projects’ (Government of India 1993b: 4). In practice these guidelines gave District-level officers considerable room for manoeuvre, as we shall see later, but the bias to employment creation was clear nonetheless. Section 3.10 of the guidelines states that: ‘All works started under EAS should be labour-intensive works only. Labourintensive works are defined as those which have a ratio of unskilled labour to equipment, material, and other skilled work of not less than 60:40. Works requiring a larger component of materials like cement, steel, etc., should not be sanctioned under the EAS unless the excess cost on material components is provided from other sectoral programme funds’ (Government of India 1993b: 5). The guidelines further suggested that this ratio of 60:40 could be met if new works under the EAS were distributed as follows: 40 per cent on water and soil conservation measures, including afforestation, agro-horticulture and silvipasture; 20 per cent on minor irrigation works; 20 per cent on link roads (as per the District’s Master Plan guidelines); and 20 per cent on primary school and anganwadi (health-care) buildings. Now consider table 5.1. This makes it clear that the schemes that were run under the EAS in our Bihar (and Jharkhand) research Districts (from 1993–4 in Ranchi, from 1996–7 in Bhojpur and Vaishali) were designed mainly to run as material-intensive projects. In Murhu Block (Ranchi) 156 schemes were sanctioned in the years 1993–4 to 1998, and of these schemes only seventeen could be described as labour-intensive (the pond or ahar schemes). A further ninety schemes worth Rs.18.5 million generated a demand for unskilled labour that cannot have amounted to more than 30–35 per cent of spending, and this percentage declined over time as individual road-building schemes became more expensive. In Bidupur Block (Vaishali) just fifty-seven schemes were sanctioned in a three-year period, and 90 per cent of the funds was spent on road projects that were often all-weather and black-topped. This did not deter the relevant officials from declaring that 58 per cent of the budget had been spent on the wages of unskilled labour. (In Sahar Block the figures were shown to be

156

20 8 3 2 62 24 9 17 11

29 2 – – 23 3 2 3 6 68

11.0% 4.3% 2.6% 0.5% 29.0% 28.1% 13.4% 7.2% 4.1% 100%∗

100%

42.6% 1.3% – – 37.2% 4.9% 2.2% 4.9% 6.9%

57

12 – – – 42 2 – – 1

Number of schemes

100%

8.6% – – – 90.0% 1.2% – – 0.2%

Share of total budget

Bidupur Block, Vaishali 1996/7–98/9: Average EAS spending per year – Rs 5.0 million

Notes: PCH = primary health centre; ICDS = integrated community development scheme∗ = all totals are rounded Source: District and Block statistics.

Total

School building Community hall PHC ICDS Road Check-dam Bridge/ culvert Pond/ahar Other

Share of total budget

Number of schemes

Number of schemes

Share of total budget

Sahar Block, Bhojpur 1996/7–99/00: Average EAS spending per year – Rs 3.6 million

Murhu Block, Ranchi, 1993/4–99: Average EAS spending per year – Rs 5.2 million

Table 5.1. Sector-wise breakdown of EAS schemes actually implemented by the Blocks, Bihar

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exactly 60:40; a District-level officer in Vaishali told us that he favoured a 58:42 split on the ground that it ‘appeared more credible’.)20 What accounts for this bias towards ‘big’ projects, and what does this tell us about the local state and the good governance agenda? It might be thought that a bias of this sort reflects a lack of understanding among Block-level workers. And it is true that none of the Block Development Officers to whom we talked had a good understanding of the EAS, despite the fact that they had the assumed the responsibilities of the Pramukh (the elected chief of the Panchayat Samiti) in the wake of the dissolution of the panchayats in Bihar in 1998. The BDOs knew that the EAS was about employment provision, but they were poorly informed about the demandled or guaranteed nature of that ‘provision’. The BDOs rather understood the EAS to be a sister programme to the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) programme, with the former taking up ‘big schemes’ and the latter ‘small schemes’ (interview with BDO, Murhu). Levels of understanding were still less clear lower down the government ladder, and we were assured by a Block Agricultural Officer in Sahar that ‘EAS mein sunishchit samay per scheme ko poora ker dena hota hai’ (EAS means that we have to complete the scheme in the assured time frame). Misunderstandings of this sort should indeed set off alarm bells when it comes to the assumptions that are currently being made about information flows in decentralized government structures. But they cannot explain the preference for ‘big schemes’ that is evident at the District level. The Block and village-level workers, after all, were receiving their information from their superiors at the District-level; they did not have access to the same manuals as their bosses. So why did District-level officers act as they did when sanctioning material-intensive schemes? Part of the answer is to be found in the technical imperatives of the Employment Assurance Scheme. The District-level officers who we spoke to in Bihar were well aware that the Block was the main implementing agency for the EAS. They also knew that many Block offices were overburdened. In the 1970s the Block office was required to deal with relatively few poverty-reduction schemes. In the 1980s and 1990s these schemes were significantly expanded, and, increasingly, were supposed to be run on a decentralized basis. By 1999 a typical Block was receiving six to eight times the funds flow it would have received in 1979, and the Block office might be asked to run 100–130 schemes under JRY and EAS, as well as providing 1,000 houses under the Indira Awas scheme and 500 wells under the Million Wells scheme. 20

Wherever possible, we prefer not to state the name or the precise job title of our interviewees, many of whom talked to us on condition that they would not be identified. In some cases, however, as with well-known politicians who are easily identified, our rule had to be relaxed and this was explained to the respondent.

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In a Block like Sahar these schemes were supposed to be spread across fifty-five villages in twelve panchayats, many of which are very difficult to access. The Block office in Murhu is responsible for 141 villages in twentyfour panchayats, while in Vaishali there are 133 villages to serve in twentyfour panchayats. Despite repeated and sometimes justified claims about government overstaffing in India, these workloads had to be shouldered by about the same number of workers as would be found in a Block in 1980. In Murhu, for example, the complement of civil staff in the Block office ran to the Head Assistant, the Nazir (accountant) and two assistants. On the technical side there were four Junior Engineers and one Assistant Engineer (who also worked for the neighbouring Khunti Block), while the complement of field staff ran to twenty-four Panchayat Sewaks and nine Village-Level Workers. The BDO of Murhu despaired of the situation. He told us that the better able and connected of his workers were trying to find work in urban areas, and that his accountant was not up to the task of handling cash transactions in the sum of Rs. 3–4 crores.21 The situation was not much different in Bidupur or Sahar. In Sahar there were only two Junior Engineers to deal with between 300 and 400 schemes. These men were expected: (a) to prepare estimates for proposed schemes (prior to any approval being granted at the District level); (b) to prepare the layout for a scheme and to work with the chosen contractor; (c) to supervise in person the most crucial stages of construction, which might include foundation casting, the fixing of a lintel, and roof casting; (d) to inspect and measure the progress of a scheme (in part to secure future fund flows to the executing agent); and (e) to assist senior engineers (including the Assistant Engineer) in their inspection visits. Naturally, these tasks could not be completed properly, even where the Junior Engineer was working to the best of his ability. If there is state failure – and significant leakage of funds – it is at least in part because the local state is underdeveloped in relation to the tasks set for it. And this will be true even when supervisory staff from the non-technical side are deployed to help the process of scheme inspection. But it is not just technical or capacity problems that incline Districtlevel officials against the sanctioning of a large number of labour-intensive (and kuccha) schemes. A Block-level officer in Murhu told us that: ‘We tried to include proposals of morum [unmetalled] roads and irrigation ponds in our proposal as they generate maximum employment. But, during the scrutiny at the level of the DDC [Deputy Development Commissioner], those were struck off the list. In fact, in 1997, DDC gave an oral instruction that henceforth no earthwork schemes should even be 21

About $800,000 at 1999 prices.

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The everyday state and society

proposed.’ When pressed on why he thought this was, the officer replied that: ‘They [District-level officials] worry about misuse of money if more kuccha works are executed . . . [This was] not simply because they want to save skins [but because] they genuinely believe that kuccha works will always be subject to siphoning off of government money, and they wish to safeguard against that.’ This understanding of the motives of a (senior) District-level officer proved to be extremely accurate. In our conversations with District Magistrates and District Development Officers we found that political considerations loomed large in their decision-making. Contrary to the assertions of some neoliberals, it is a mistake to assume that government officers in India are intent on maximizing the rents they can extract from the misuse of a public office. It is clear that a scheme like the Employment Assurance Scheme does lend itself to a system of institutionalized cuts and commissions, much as Robert Wade has described in the case of a south Indian irrigation department (Wade 1982). Junior Engineers regularly mark up the costs of a scheme, and there are significant opportunities for BDOs, JEs and others to receive a cut from the monies that are then spent. Nevertheless, we estimated that the magnitude of fund leakage from EAS schemes in Bihar was of the order of 30–35 per cent of the total flow of funds, and that (or rather ‘but that’, given received views about Bihar) we found no cases of outright looting where a scheme existed only on paper. (Matters were worse in Malda District, West Bengal.) Even corrupt officials find themselves in a more complex set of relationships than is acknowledged in a simple theory of predation. Perhaps especially in Bihar, given the publicity that has been given to the cattle fodder scam, government servants are mindful that they might be found out if they engage in corrupt behaviour, or that they might be informed upon by one of their colleagues.22 This cautions them against excessively predatory forms of behaviour. In the case of District-level officers, moreover, there are strong pressures not just to exact rents (which might be needed to maintain close links with sympathetic politicians, or to help secure better postings), but also to clamp down on the corrupt activities of their subordinates.23 Thus, while it is clearly the case that some bribes (ghus) are channelled up the hierarchy of Bihar Administrative Service and Indian Administrative Service officers to the District and state levels, it was equally clear to us that District-level officials were pressing for pucca EAS schemes as a way of guarding against what they saw as the 22

23

A scam that allegedly involved the looting of state budget funds (possibly $200 million) that were meant to pay for livestock improvements in Bihar. On this and other scams, see Nambisan (2000). For a more nuanced account of corruption and rent-seeking, see the collection of essays edited by Mushtaq Khan and Jomo Kwame Sundaram (2000).

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twin evils of kuccha projects: the fact that they provide so much scope for corruption (on account of being difficult to inspect), and the fact that some of these schemes will be built to fail (or to fall down), thus denying any visible evidence of ‘development’. What we observed here was a lack of trust in Block-level officials by their District-level bosses. But this lack of trust also extends upwards from the District to the governments sitting in Patna and New Delhi. When we pressed District-level officers on their efforts to reshape the aims and objectives of the EAS – efforts that were freely acknowledged – they focused on what they saw as the lack of credibility that surrounds the issue of the flow of funds. All of our respondents challenged the idea that New Delhi or Patna could ever hope to fund sufficient schemes to employ two adult household members for up to 100 days each year throughout India, and then mainly in the lean season. The DDC of Ranchi was adamant that the Centre simply didn’t have the resources to direct more than two instalments of funds to any District of Bihar in a given year, a view based, no doubt, on his difficulties in acquiring a third tranche of funds for Ranchi District. When we put it to him that some Districts in Andhra Pradesh were reputed to have received five or six instalments, he countered by saying that he had visited New Delhi to press for a fresh round of funding, and had been told by the Secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development that this was so much rhetoric: no District had received more than three instalments of EAS funds in a year. Whether or not this is true is not really the issue. The point is that DMs and DDCs in Bihar don’t trust the authorities in New Delhi or Patna to provide sufficient funds to ‘check the out-migration and exploitation of akushal mazdoor [unskilled labour]’ – which is how, in 1995, the Government of Bihar described the main purposes of a programme that would be ‘demand-driven and [with] no financial limit’ (Government of Bihar, Secretary – Rural Development, Letter No.3248, 17 June 1995, sent to all DMs and DDCs, Bihar).24 They also doubted whether their own Blocks and Districts, or indeed the government of Bihar, had the means or the drive to make demands of New Delhi at the right time. The DM of Bhojpur told us that even if the EAS could draw down unlimited funds from the Centre, those funds were still budgeted on an annual basis and would be taken up on a first-come, first-served basis. In his view, Bihar was too slow in making its demands for further instalments of funds. By the time it was ready to claim a third round of funds it was too late in the financial year: other states had got in ahead. 24

It is significant here, as Ben Rogaly and colleagues (2002) have emphasized in their research, that the state is coding migration as a problem, even as a pathology.

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The everyday state and society

Whatever the truth of the matter – and the fact that some Blocks always have EAS funds unspent suggests that local capacity is key – the fact remains that District-level officers are wary about advertising the EAS too widely. In their view, it is better to plan for a small number of wellcosted and at least partly monitored pucca developments than to plan for a large number of kuccha schemes that will generate kickbacks and local conflict, and which cannot hope to soak up the local demand for paid labour. As the DM of Vaishali summed up: ‘The fund that we get now, two instalments, can hardly generate 100 days’ employment. In fact, with these limited resources available under EAS, the approximate labour days generated are around 200,000 man-days, and, the surveyed number of labourers being close to this figure, approximately one manday for each labourer has been created in this District. If one looked at the man-days generated in the entire State, and the figure of the Statewide registered labourers, then by and large the same ratio would be observed.’ Counting on development? Politicians and the rural poor The problem of trust that we have just described is bound up with the classic problem of principals and agents, and it is perfectly reasonable to maintain that the ‘new public administration’ has addressed itself to this issue. Indeed, it would be a disservice to the good governance agenda to maintain otherwise. Proposals for performance-related pay, and for regular information-sharing meetings between senior and junior officials, are geared in part to reducing the importance of inadequate and sometimes deliberately blocked information flows between the juniors (the agents) and the seniors (the principals). What this agenda seems to neglect, however, is that both principals and agents must also have regard for their relations with key actors in political society. Their calculations can never be confined to the circuits of government rule. Moreover, as we have seen (chapters 3 and 4, but see also chapter 6 for extended discussion), the structuring of political society in eastern India is often at odds with the descriptions that are put forward in the literatures on participation and good governance. In our Bidupur field site not a single person had taken up work under the Employment Assurance Scheme within the village, and yet there were few complaints about the workings of the scheme there, nor were there in Sahar or Murhu.25 Part of the reason for this has 25

Some work was obtained by a group of Harijans on another (non-EAS) road scheme connecting the village school to the western Yadav tola. They were promptly dismissed when it came time for black-topping the road, and skilled labourers were brought in from outside.

Governance

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to do with lack of information about the scheme, as we have reported, but this is only part of the story. There were also pressures from within village communities, and from their political representatives, to see the EAS as a scheme that would create durable assets, and which would bring ‘development’ to rural communities. In an important sense, people were more interested in outcomes than in processes. These pressures played themselves out in different ways. In Sahar Block, contrary to our expectations, there was only limited evidence of political mobilization around the benefits of EAS schemes. Such activities as there were took the form of direct petitioning of senior government officers through the institution of the Janata Durbar. There were efforts too by some Musahars in an adjoining village to make sure that someone from that community was appointed as an executing agent of an EAS scheme.26 But in the poorest tola of the village where we worked no benefits from major government schemes had been received over the course of twenty years, despite this tola (with its high population of Scheduled Castes) being a stronghold of the sitting Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), himself a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). In this case a lack of mobilization did spring from a lack of information, as well as from reluctance in some quarters to engage with the state. The local MLA was unfamiliar with the demand-led provisions of the EAS guidelines, and had ceded responsibilities for the selection of schemes to District-level officers. They in turn ensured that every panchayat in Sahar Block had received some EAS funds by 1999, even if nearly half of all the tolas within the villages of these panchayats (including in the locality where we worked) received no funds at all (see figure 5.1). As we intimated before, the concern of the District-level staff was to ensure that ‘development’ was visible in the field, and, in Sahar especially, to make sure that ‘development’ did not stoke up political tensions or rivalries.27 In practice, though, at least in the panchayat where we mainly worked, there were almost no efforts to ensure that schemes were placed in the poorest tolas, or to inform poor villagers of their right to demand work. 26

27

We do not wish to underestimate the significance of this challenge. The fact that the Musahars successfully challenged the power of the Bhumihars in an open village meeting (see chapter 3), in the process mobilizing their women in an effort to secure the election of a managing agent, is remarkable, and is testimony to the concerted strength of CPIML activities in the area. It also suggests a deepening of civil society in the locality (see also chapter 8). Here, as elsewhere, District officials were wary of schemes that demanded the active participation of groups of villagers (or village factions, as they might be described). Many officials preferred to work with and through established village leaders or local politicians, the better, they said, to get the job of development done.

170

The everyday state and society Resource Distribution by Panchayat

(a)

1500 1000 500

Sahar

Perhaap

Korandehri

Kolodehri

Guljarpur

Ekwari

Dulamchak

Dhanchhuha

Chauri

Baruhi

Andhaari

0 Amhruha

Rs. in thousands

2000

Panchayats

Resource Distribution by Village

(b)

Percentage

50 40

% of amount % of villages

30 20 10 0

Figure 5.1 EAS spending by panchayat and village, Sahar Block, Bhojpur District, 1996–7 – 1998–9

A lack of awareness of the demand-led nature of the EAS was also apparent in Murhu Block (Ranchi District), but in several of the panchayats in this Block the Mukhiya (elected leader) was active in pressing for a flow of funds from government. In the panchayat where we worked (see figure 5.2), the Mukhiya was an especially strong representative of his community, and most of the (mainly tribal) villagers looked to him to access the state on their behalf. The Mukhiya had been responsible for getting EAS cards for a small number of villagers (admittedly only two from our sample population), and he worked closely with the Panchayat Sewak to draw up an annual list of possible schemes. One of his close associates told us that: ‘Panchayat Sewak comes and tells us that we should list out important schemes: check-dams, schools, roads, sitting platform, community buildings, drainage and so on. He also tells not to list more than 5–6 schemes, sometimes more when the panchayat is big. This is done after a few of us collect and deliberate [the Mukhiya and his inner circle], but usually we give 10–15 schemes. Ultimately, 2–4

Governance (a)

171

Resource Distribution by Panchayat

Rs. in thousands

4000 3000 2000 1000

(b)

Panchayats

Resource Distribution by Village 50

Percentage

Mahil Murhu Saaprum Sarvada Selda Sirka

Bamhani Bichna Burju Eetti Gaigai Ghaaghra Gullu Gurmi Gutuhatu Indipiri Ithe Jaante Jalaasaar Jaltanda Kitahatu Kotna Koyongsaar Kurapurti

0

% of amount

% of villages

40 30 20 10 0

Figure 5.2 EAS spending by panchayat and village, Murhu Block, Ranchi District, 1993–4 – 1998–9

schemes come to the panchayat’, and, he might have added, the Mukhiya largely takes responsibility for placing them and for carrying out the work. Interestingly, the only opposition to the Mukhiya came from a group of unemployed youths who wanted to control some of these schemes. In this case, though, and in several other cases which came to our attention, no argument was raised against pucca development projects. To the contrary, the youths wanted a check-dam to be built in their part of the village. Like the Mukhiya, they were happy to define the EAS in terms of the creation of visible and durable assets. If some work came from the scheme, that was well and good. But work was not always the main concern: that could sometimes be had in the brickfields of Gorakhpur, or at building sites in Calcutta. Even the poorest villagers understood development (vikas) in conventional terms, and welcomed tangible signs of it. A commitment to ‘development’ was still more apparent in Bidupur Block, Vaishali District, but in this case, unusually, the leading local

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The everyday state and society

politician was extremely knowledgeable about all government schemes, and had partly taken control of them in his constituency. Unlike his counterparts in Murhu and Sahar Blocks, the de facto MLA of this area (and de jure Member of the Legislative Council (MLC)), BB, was well aware of the demand-led provisions of the Employment Assurance Scheme, and he knew the details of those guidelines that specify the ‘proper balance’ of unskilled labour and materials in different schemes. Indeed, he provided us with a critique of those guidelines, arguing that it would be absurd to make afforestation a priority in Bidupur, given its location next to the Ganges: what was needed was all-weather roads, and if their construction required the importation of skilled labour, so be it.28 This attitude to employment generation is surely linked to the fact that BB, and RR (at the time the MLA for the Hajipur Assembly Constituency, into which six panchayats of Bidupur fall), are both members of the ruling Rashtriya Janata Dal, a political party that caters strongly to the interests of Yadav farmers. Those most in need of employment, including the Dusadhs and Paswans, are mainly supporters of the Dalit leader, Ram Vilas Paswan, and his acolytes.29 But if caste and class antagonisms help us to understand why BB and his supporters are in key respects insensitive to employment issues, they do not gainsay the fact that his preference for using EAS funds to build all-weather roads is widely supported in the Block, even though it reduces the (still considerable) scope for skimming by his favoured contractors. Indeed, in terms of the more general arguments of this book, what is truly significant is the extent to which BB, as a leading member of ‘vernacular society’ in Kaviraj’s terms, buys into the discourse of development as modernization, and works closely with his counterparts in ‘elite society’ to bring this about. We received information on these transactions from BB himself, and from an ex-District Magistrate of Vaishali. The ex-DM told us that during his long tenure in Vaishali he adopted a quota system wherein local MPs and MLAs were asked to recommend and decide upon the schemes that would operate in their constituencies. His formula was simple, if quite at odds with the instructions he received from Patna or New Delhi. All programme resources that came to his District were to be divided up on 28

29

‘The instructions direct that one should employ resources on various sectors. One of the sectors is forestry. If we implemented the scheme in [neighbouring] Raghopur Block, all the plantations in a year would get washed off next year due to erosion that Ganges causes in this area! How insensible to impose such restrictions from above without appreciating the ground conditions.’ Interview with BB. The Musahars are less inclined to be strong supporters of Ram Vilas Paswan. Given that most Yadavs will not work as unskilled labourers, it follows that members of the Scheduled Castes are gaining work from BB’s schemes, even if those schemes are not designed with employment provision as their main aim.

Governance

173

Resource Distribution by Panchayat

(a)

Gokhulpur

Waazidpur

Saidpur

Ganesh

Qutubpur

Pakauli

Rajaasan

Mathura

Mohanpur Khajbatta

Majhauli

Khilwat

Rahimapur

Kanchanpur

Mansoorpur

Bidupur

Daud Nagar

Panchayats

Resource Distribution by Village

(b) 80 Percentage

Chaksikandar

Rs. in thousands

3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0

60

% of villages % of amount

40 20 0

Figure 5.3 EAS spending by panchayat and village, Bidupur Block, Vaishali District, 1996–7 – 1998–9

a 70:30 basis between the MLAs and the MP. If a Block fell between two constituencies, the resources would be divided in proportion to the number of panchayats in each constituency. The representatives could then use the money as they saw fit. In the case of Bidupur Block, the records show that resources have been distributed almost exactly on a 19:6 basis, reflecting the fact that BB represents nineteen of the twentyfive panchayats. They also show that BB has been active in making sure that schemes are set up – or are about to be set up (see figure 5.3) – in all of the panchayats where he has supporters.30 From his perspective, the building of all-weather roads not only makes sense in developmental terms, but also ensures that resources will quite literally follow a road map 30

In the course of one conversation, BB produced a copy of the release letter of the second instalment of funds from the Government of India, as sent to the DM of Vaishali for 1998–9, and said: ‘Our people in Bidupur are patient. I tell them that when the next instalment would come, I would get the schemes in their area too [showing the letter]. Now the second instalment having been received, I would cover other areas as well. This is why you find only limited schemes in few areas until now.’

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through his constituency, in the process dampening down inter-village rivalries. Naturally, his key supporters become the executing agents of these schemes. The DM, meanwhile, having ceded power to the MLAs in recognition of their local dominance – a labour contractor exaggerated the power of the Mukhiyas when he told us that: ‘JRY is Mukhiya’s scheme and EAS is BB’s scheme’ – still made an effort to ensure that some funds went to those tolas or villages which were ignored by BB or RR. ‘For those areas, and also areas that are of interest to important political leaders from opposition, I used the interest money accrued to the development funds. If any MLA or ruling party leader questioned as to why I was sanctioning projects in areas of their political rivals, I would say that that was being done out of the discretionary DM’s funds and did not encroach upon their quotas, hence they could not have any grievance nor any locus standi to object to this.’ In Bidupur, then, as in Sahar and Murhu Blocks for quite different reasons, a combination of social forces came together to redefine the aims and objectives of what was intended by New Delhi to be an employment assurance scheme. The fact that black-topped roads were built in Bidupur also tells us something of importance about the good governance agenda. It is true that the EAS works poorly in Bidupur from the point of view of providing employment to local people holding EAS cards. It is also true, as we showed in the last chapter, that ordinary people have had very little say about the choice and running of EAS schemes. Levels of participation and employment provision were higher in Debra Block, Midnapore District. Most distressing of all was the fact that the roads built in Bidupur were mainly intended to benefit the Yadav communities and the inhabitants of what might be called the ‘main villages’ in the Block. By and large, the roads that were built did not make their way into the tolas of the Musahars or even the Paswans. And yet, importantly, tangible assets were built in Bidupur and a good deal of employment was provided to labouring households outside the formal structures of the EAS. Most of all, perhaps, this outcome was considered a reasonable one by most of the parties that were active in Bidupur’s political society (with the possible exception of the Paswans).31 Many poor non-SC households were pleased to see evidence of government spending in their villages. Philip Oldenburg has reported that in a village near Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, perhaps 25–30 per cent of JRY funds were ‘eaten’ and didn’t make it to the villages. A number of villagers expressed their concern about corruption, but for the most part 31

For elaboration, see chapter 6.

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‘what matters to villagers is perhaps how much reaches them, not how much is siphoned off, which sum they are unlikely to know or be able to find out’ (Oldenburg 2003: 18–19). Similar sentiments were expressed in Bidupur and Murhu. Where the state is seen mainly as a provider of funds rather than as a collector of taxes, as it is in much of rural India, it is perhaps understandable that villagers would come to such a conclusion, and that they would like to see evidence of government spending. Roads, schools and houses built count for rather more than meetings held or attended. Many of the public officials charged with running the EAS also knew this. They were mindful that their own desire to ‘eat the state’ had to be tempered by the need to provide physical evidence of government at work. Officials also worried about the consequences of being seen to be corrupt. Some proponents of good governance and participatory development might claim this sighting of the state for their own agendas, and not without reason.32 Nevertheless, it is clear that some accounts of the scale of rent-seeking behaviour in India, and in Bihar in particular, are absurdly high, and we say again that we see no reason to endorse Evan Osborne’s claim that more than 45 per cent of India’s national income takes the form of government-disposed rents.33 In addition, it needs to be said that the Mukhiya in our field site in Murhu, and BB in Bidupur, are providing at least one model of ‘good governance’ for their supporters and even for their localities. The outcomes of EAS spending were certainly more visible in Bidupur and Murhu than in Debra Block, Midnapore (where closer adherence to the guidelines had led to the proliferation of kuccha schemes of limited value), and both men worked closely with District and Block-level officials to diffuse fears about civil disorder. Just as importantly, both men had provided leadership in a context in which ‘the official state’ is more fragile than it is assumed to be in the mainstream literatures on good governance. They did so, moreover, not so much by 32

33

Up to a point. The good governance agenda at times comes close to the view that there was only bad governance previously, and that ‘unreformed’ governments were unconcerned with corruption. This is an exaggeration, to say the least. See also chapter 1. Osborne estimates that government-disbursed rents of the order of 35–45 per cent of India’s national income are channelled through the system of reserved jobs alone (Osborne 2001: 679). His figures draw on data provided in Mohammed and Whalley (1984). We do not share his underlying assumption that the reservation of government and public sector jobs is necessarily evidence of the distribution of government rents. Nor do we agree that this distribution system must promote or reproduce ‘the inevitable Balkanization of Indian politics’ (Osborne 2001: 679). For a more subtle understanding of the ways in which the sectoral and spatial distribution of government funds (and rents) can help to bind India together, see the outstanding essay by Dasgupta (2001).

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playing the part of elected local delegates, as by playing the role of the provider, or the traditional patron or dada (elder brother or bossman) figure who gets things done. Educating the state Many of the same strengths and weaknesses of the good governance agenda are apparent in the fields of education and the law, although in Bihar they come with fewer reinforcing pressures from political society. The main strengths are as we began to report them in chapter 4. The government of Bihar has since 1995 been committed in principle to the formation of Village Education Councils that would be presided over by a chairperson elected directly by a village open meeting. The chair is supported by an elected vice-chair, and one of them is meant to be drawn from an SC community. The committee would be supported for a while initially, and then periodically, by officials of the Bihar Education Project (BEP). This initiative replaced an earlier notification of 1988 ‘which suffered from the basic problem of the members [of the VEC] being nominated by the Block Education Officer (BEO) and of the mukhiya being the president’ (Kantha and Narain 2003: 134). The state also initiated a Total Literacy Campaign in Bhojpur District in 1992, and this later spread across the state. Kantha and Narain report that ‘When the literacy programme began . . . Madhubani and Madhepura produced such exciting results that these soon began to be cited as model examples in Bihar’ (Kantha and Narain 2003: 131). They go on to note, however, that ‘the enthusiasm generated soon declined and the second stage of the campaign could not take off in these Districts’ (Kantha and Narain 2003: 131). If there was an exception to the law of diminishing returns it was in Dumka, a District dominated by the Santhal and Mal Paharia (ST) communities that is now in Jharkhand. There is evidence to suggest that significant improvements in male and female literacy rates have been sustained in Dumka.34 At the same time, however, it is widely agreed that the main reason for this success story is that ‘the Collector himself ’ spearheaded the literacy campaign, and this poses problems for the good governance agenda. If the role of the Collector is acclaimed as a sign of committed officialdom this comes close to saying that good governance will be achieved where there are good governors, a proposition that is 34

Srivastava (1998).

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true but not very helpful.35 The same argument could be made of good teachers or good BDOs, with just as little gain. Many proponents of good governance will recognize this danger, and will want to pay close attention to ‘failing’ Blocks and Districts, and to those many BDOs, BEOs and BEP officials who do not show a proper commitment to their jobs and those they serve. But what they would find would not always be of great cheer. As we reported in chapter 4, very few officials of the BEP carry out their duties as they are meant to. It is common for mid-ranking officials and the village catalysts (the utpreraks) to spend less than a day in a village. VECs are often set up on an ad hoc basis, on the basis of quick conversations with those village leaders who can be met in an afternoon. Return visits are a rarity. But we should be careful about accounting for this behaviour in terms of the laziness of some utpreraks, or even with reference to the lack of a well-functioning system of performance-related pay. Again, there is a lurking danger of tautology, or the assumption that if the utpreraks are well motivated, well informed and well paid the formation of active VECs will be more easily achieved. In important respects this will be true, but it begs important questions about where the money will come from, and about the utpreraks’ own understanding of their ‘subject positions’ and their responsibilities. Our conversations with BEP officials showed they were put under considerable pressure by the target-driven nature of the new governance agenda. Measurable outputs had to be shown in short order. In Bhojpur District, about 200 utpreraks were given the responsibility for forming over 2,000 VECs in the years 1997–8 and 1998–9. This might not seem like a large number, but the VECs had to be formed in 1,794 villages in a District where many roads are impassable in the rainy season, and which can be dangerous and slow at the best of times. Getting petrol for scooters and motor-bikes can also be a problem in Blocks like Sahar, where the infrastructures of rule and development are often in retreat. And then there is the question of how the petrol is to be paid for, and whether the utprerak (or another quasi-governmental official) will be reimbursed. Some ‘rent-seeking public officials’ use their own resources to carry out the official business of the state. Officials must also have regard for public safety issues and for their standing in the community. In the case of lower-level officials this often translates into acts of obeisance, not least to members of village elites and the schoolteachers they are meant to be 35

We would also need to know more about how the Collector fired up his staff, and took steps to nurture women’s organizations, and what the opportunity costs were of this commitment to education.

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looking after (or over). Higher-level officials more often express a desire to return to an urban area before nightfall. Ever mindful of bandits and ‘extremists’, they also find it difficult to meet the expectations of their own families in the countryside. Better rates of pay, although welcome, would not address these broader issues of state capacity and the provision of rural infrastructure.36 Proponents of good governance are on stronger ground when they point to the power of vested interests in the education sector, and on the need to rethink the roles of some members of the teaching profession. We noted in chapter 4 that the teaching unions are especially strong in West Bengal, where teachers are part of the core support base of the CPI-M. (Most teachers we met were members of the All-Bengal Primary Teachers’ Association (ABPTA), which is affiliated to the CPI-M.) Even where school attendance committees function well, as they seem to in Debra Block, and where there is a well-established system of school inspection, it can be difficult for parents (and Sub-Inspectors [SIs]) to remove or even rebuke well-connected teachers. We also saw that VECs in Bihar failed to sustain interest once a teacher was able to exert his or her power over committee members, or where the government refused to transfer a teacher or pay for the addition of another. This had significant repercussions for how poorer people came to see the state, for ‘the teacher’ was often near the top of their list of ‘known state functionaries’. Nevertheless, the question of how to bring teachers to book is a thorny one. If VECs might in time be part of the answer it is clear that not much progress will be made until politicians are brought more squarely into the picture. But here too there are problems, and not simply those that derive from the mistrust of politicians that is a feature of the new public administration. Politicians in Bihar and Jharkhand are not much interested in education. They are occasionally interested in the funding of new schools, for they can then pose as providers of resources. For the most part, though, the politicians we spoke to were agreed that there was neither money nor votes in education. The flow of funds was not sufficient for them to consider it a significant source of patronage. Nor did it create many opportunities to provide contracts for dalaals who would turn out the vote in their favour. The idea that individual men and women would 36

We should emphasize that regular staff members of the BEP had few problems with payments, reimbursements and getting access to fuel. The BEP was well-funded by the World Bank and staff members could fill up their bikes or scooters with petrol at the District headquarters, Arrah. They could also access small amounts of petrol in jars in Sahar, if the necessity arose. The problems we have described here are more serious for staff such as Junior Engineers and panchayat sewaks, who can often be seen riding on the back of the motorbikes of important villagers or contractors out of necessity.

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Table 5.2. Schools with only one teacher, selected Districts of Bihar, 1996–1999 (percentage) District

1996–97

1997–98

1998–99

Vaishali Bhojpur Ranchi

18.8% 15.9 N.A.

11.3 17.2 25.4

18.2 19.8 30.2

Source: BEP State Office, Patna.

cast their votes on an issue like education also struck them as mistaken, and out of touch with local realities. Votes were not cast on this basis, and electors would not give up the security of a bloc – the protection of a social group in DaMatta’s terms – for a more abstract right to press the case for better schooling of their children. It is not surprising, then, that officials of the Bihar Education Project came under few pressures from politicians in a Block like Bidupur. The laziness that we observed in some BEP officials can largely be explained in terms of the lack of competition we observed in political society around the issue of education. The lack of proper funding of education in all three states also impacts on parental perceptions of the costs and benefits of schooling, and it is here perhaps that we see the most glaring weakness of the new public administration – its suggestion, implicit or explicit, that money is not the central issue, and that what matters is the quality of governance in a cultural or institutional sense. Our work suggests that a more commonsense view is in order. Parents that we spoke to were agreed that public education for their children would be more attractive to the extent that several teachers were provided in each school. The quality of the school building(s) should also be adequate, at the very least. BEP data for the research Districts suggest, however (see table 5.2), that between 18.2 per cent and 30.2 per cent of schools had only one teacher in 1998–9, and less than 5 per cent of schools provided a separate toilet for girls (table 5.3).37 The condition of many of the schools that we visited was rudimentary at best, and in some cases called to mind the semi-deserted Block development offices we had observed in Lapong Block, Ranchi District,

37

We say ‘suggest’ because the BEP’s data are not always consistent on a year-by-year basis: compare the figures for presence/absence of girls’ toilets in Bhojpur from 96/7 to 97/8 in table 5.3. There is no doubt that such facilities are underprovided. At the same time, however, the ability of the state properly to sight itself must be open to question. This too might relate to questions of state capacity, or to the monitoring of the officials charged with data collection and presentation.

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Table 5.3. Schools with a toilet for girls, selected Districts of Bihar, 1996–1999 (percentage) District

1996–97

1997–98

1998–99

Vaishali Bhojpur Ranchi

4.7% 13.0 N.A.

4.4 3.1 3.6

4.7 2.9 4.6

Source: BEP State Office, Patna.

Jharkhand (while searching for a Ranchi field site) and in Sahar. Good governance is all but impossible when the state is stretched this thin. Matters were much the same in Malda District and no better even in Midnapore. In Malda just over half of all school buildings could be described as pucca. The District is hit regularly by floods, and the administration finds it hard to keep up with the major repairs that are often required. The DPEP’s Perspective Plan for Malda, 1999, reported that 430 (of 1,877) schools needed major repairs and a further 941 needed minor repairs. Only 13 per cent of schools had toilets, and only 14 per cent had enough rooms to allow the teaching of four classes at the same time. (According to official data, 40 per cent of schools in Malda District have only one room or building, and 8 per cent have none at all). In addition (see table 5.4), the teacher–pupil ratios in Malda District and Old Malda Block were reported to be higher than the called-for figure of 1:30. The ratios were better in the two primary schools in our Old Malda field site, indeed considerably better than in Midnapore, but as table 5.5 shows there were still significant capacity problems in School No. 1 (five teachers but only two rooms), and very large numbers of children were being taught in one room. Money matters, and it is important to recognize the truth of this when we consider the ‘educational state’ from the point of view of some of its employees. Even allowing for the power of the teaching unions in West Bengal and erstwhile Bihar, and for the legitimate nature of many of the complaints that are levelled against teachers, it is important to get a sense of how they – the educators – see matters. Two points are worth making here. First, it is clear that most teachers are unsympathetic to the idea of ‘parent power’. Unionized teachers express resentment at the idea that they should be accountable to parents, and particularly to parents who are ‘barely educated’ or from ‘the lower classes’.38 Well-educated teachers 38

In reverse: ‘If we made a suggestion to the teachers, they would laugh at us’: interview with a group of poorer villagers, Old Malda, 1999.

∗

202 24 9.6 N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A.

7,627 700 9.2 174 208 18,072 2.4 1:88

Block

11.2 N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A.

22 2

Surveyed Gram Panchayat

Population per 1991 census. All ratio figures will have worsened by 1998–9. Sources: DPEP School Survey, Malda; Midnapore District Profile; Information from SIs.

No. of primary schools No. of child education centres (Shishu Shikha Kendras [SSKs]) Primary schools per 10,000 population∗ Average no. of households per school (incl. SSKs) Average no. of school-going children per school No. of primary schoolteachers Average no. of teachers per primary school Teacher–pupil ratio

District

Midnapore

Table 5.4. School infrastructure in Midnapore and Malda, 1998–99

7.1 244 187 6,019 3.2 1:58

1,877 105

District

6.8 N.A. 138 321 3.2 1:43

99 3

Block

Malda

15.8 N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A.

16 0

Surveyed Gram Panchayat

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Table 5.5. School infrastructure in field site primary schools, Malda and Midnapore Midnapore

Malda

Field site Field site District Field site Field site District School 1 School 2 average School 1 School 2 average Schoolchildren per school 109 No. of rooms 2 Schoolchildren per room 55 No. of teachers per school 2 Teacher–pupil ratio 1:55

296 3 99 4 1:74

208 N.A. N.A. 2.4 1:88

102 2 51 5 1:20

119 2 60 3 1:40

187 1.9 100 3.2 1:58

Sources: DPEP School Survey, Malda; Midnapore District Profile. Survey, Malda; Midnapore District Profile.

who hail from towns and cities find it hard to treat poorer people as equals, and in adivasi areas they are more likely to think of STs as ‘junglees’ than as citizens or clients. Educated or not, it would be a mistake to think of such teachers as rational or disinterested actors in the Weberian sense. Second, most teachers, and perhaps as many as 90 per cent in our Districts, look after their families with sources of income from outside the public school system. They have a business, perhaps, or land, or they teach on a ‘for money’ basis. This insulates them from political pressures. In West Bengal, too, teachers receive a reasonable wage from the state. Monthly salaries in 1999 were Rs. 3,350–6,325 for teachers with junior basic training.39 Set against this, it was an open secret in the late 1990s that recruitment into the teaching profession was expensive. This was true in both states, but in West Bengal, where the cost of a first job ran from Rs. 10,000–50,000 depending on the strength of a person’s political connections, it is also led to a flood of litigation. Disappointed applicants charged that the selection system operated by the District Primary School Council (DPSC) gave too much weight (40 per cent) to an interview, as compared to examination results (60 per cent). This allowed for a lot of ‘flexibility’ (corruption) on the part of DPSC officials and their counterparts among local employment exchange personnel. In Midnapore, no recruitment of teachers could be carried out between 1983 and 1996, partly as a consequence. (Some few appointments were made on ‘compassionate grounds’.) Recruitment began again in earnest in April 1999, 39

By comparison, a fully-employed labourer working at the government minimum wage would not earn more than Rs. 1,200 per month. It is worth noting that the salaries of teachers are generally paid on time. In Bihar, problems of non- or late-payment of wages are far more acute in state transportation concerns, or in services like refuse collection.

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when 2,600 teachers were taken on, but at the end of that year about 2,500 posts, or 10 per cent of the total number of all teaching positions, remained unfilled. In Malda, meanwhile, a senior official of the DPSC pointed to an almirah full of court cases, and declared that: ‘This is the District of court cases.’ He was not wrong, although he might have added that it was the same in many other Districts. By 2000, a legal system that was overloaded and open to corruption, and which was poorly regarded by many ‘citizens’ in consequence, was contributing significantly to the underperformance of the education system in both states. The fact that many teachers and potential teachers saw the state as a supplier of reasonably well-paid and secure jobs – jobs worth going to court for – had significant consequences for the ways that poorer people would see the state in the educational sector. Very often, they saw it is as remote, perhaps even as foreign, and simply not worth their while. The schooling of boys and girls suffered hugely in consequence. The politics of good and bad governance The dismal state of school buildings in Bihar and West Bengal can certainly be read as evidence of poor government, but whether this lack of spending is an indictment of the agendas of good government is much less clear. Those agendas are remarkably flexible, as we noted at the start of this chapter, and arguing against ‘good governance’ in general is about as helpful (and welcome) as arguing against parenting and chola chai. Proponents of good governance would look at our stories about education in eastern India and make at least three points in quick response. First, the rules governing the recruitment of teachers in West Bengal have changed in recent years. A government circular of 1991 announced a new method of recruitment that is weighted more to ‘assessed merit’ (65 per cent from marks in the final school exam, 20 per cent for teacher training and 5 per cent for co-curricula activities) than it is to the interview (10 per cent). It is true that no teacher had been recruited under the new rules in Malda at the time of our field studies (1999–2000), but the new rules were employed in Midnapore in 1999, and by mid-2000 no allegations of corruption had been lodged against the decisions that had been reached, and no court cases were pending. At the very least, this would seem to be a step in the direction of better government, or government that is more rule-based and transparent. Second, the established powers of the teaching establishment can be challenged by a process of circumvention. Both the Conservative and Labour Parties have tried this route in England and Wales, where they

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have pushed strongly for the recruitment of additional teachers who have not completed a full course of studies at a teacher training college. Teachers in the private sector are also hired directly from universities or from other professions. Accreditation is not necessary in this sector in either the UK or the USA. In Madhya Pradesh, too, steps have recently been taken in this general direction. Under the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGSMP) introduced by former Chief Minister Digvijay Singh, the state now has three classes of teacher. About 200,000 teachers are employed by the state’s Education Department in 80,000 formal primary schools. They are paid according to a pay scale that has been agreed with the teachers’ unions. A further 20,000 schools are staffed by shiksa karmis under the terms of the EGS-MP. The first batches of shiksa karmis received ‘rigorous training’ and were paid Rs. 1,000 per month while they were placed ‘on probation’ in the formal school system. ‘They are more likely than the formal school teacher to be a local person’ and ‘are recruited and posted by the janpad panchayat’ (Noronha 2003: 107). Finally, there are the EGS-MP Gurijis; they are nominated by the village community and the sarpanch to teach fellow villagers for a stipend of Rs. 1,000 per month, but with no tenure. These jobs have proved attractive to local youth leaders who might otherwise remain unemployed.40 Third, the importance of careful political management can be demonstrated at the national level. In her account of the ‘contentious politics of education reform’, Merilee Grindle argues that substantial progress has been made in Latin America ‘despite the odds’.41 She agrees that most politicians are lukewarm about reforming the educational system in their countries, and that powerful forces are ranged in support of the status quo. Grindle’s focus, however, is on the efforts of the ‘counter-forces’ which are pressing for educational reform. She seeks to establish both the means by which they have set national policy agendas, and the steps that were taken to defuse opposition to these initiatives. Her wider argument is that change is possible, and (or but) that it comes in small and unexpected ways. Progress is rarely continuous, but when it is achieved it is because skilled reformers have been able to exploit general sentiments about efficiency and transparency to effect specific policy changes. These policy changes in turn begin to change the terms under which succeeding debates about education (or health-care, or poverty alleviation schemes) are discussed. 40

41

In addition, while the Gurujis’ posts came without tenure, the hope and perhaps expectation was that they would in time be absorbed into the government cadre and made permanent. This is one reason, Srivastava reports (2003: 25), why many gurujis performed their jobs with more dedication that at first might have been expected. Grindle (2004).

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These specific rejoinders also point to a more important set of claims that must be weighed when we consider the agendas of good governance. These claims have to do with politics, but in a much broader sense than is intended by some critics of ‘good governance’. We stand beside these critics in important respects. We have tried in this chapter to show that money really does matter. It will be difficult to improve education or health-care in eastern India when financial issues are so easily discounted. We have already mentioned the lamentable state of many Block offices in our Districts, and we shall have more to say about the late or non-payment of public servants in chapter 7. We might add that Sub-Inspectors of Primary Schools in West Bengal currently have responsibilities for ‘circles’ of between 60 and 110 schools, and that their job description requires them to make at least ten inspections per month. (In other words, they are required to visit each school once or twice a year, on average.) The SIs we spoke to, however, said they could only manage five or six inspections per month because of serious capacity problems. There was a shortage of clerical staff and vehicles, and SIs could only borrow the DPSC jeep in Malda on an occasional basis. This is small beer, perhaps, but it is telling nonetheless. Critics are right to suggest that an agenda of administrative reform does not always sit easily with a strong bias away from the state and towards the market. There are doubtless efficiency gains to be made in government, and special interests to be confronted, but in eastern India the absence of a wellresourced public sector is what is most often noticeable. In some cases, the resources of the state have been looted by private interests, much as Harriss-White describes in her account of the formation of shadow states in Tamil Nadu. Government can then barely function, and ordinary men and women see the state mainly as an absence, or perhaps as a phantasm. And when they see government officials they often see men (or women) who are very far from being the disinterested public servants in which the new public administration invests so heavily. In the lower reaches of government, especially, the pressures that are brought to bear on officials come far more from family and community, and from brute economic circumstance, than they do from abstract models of the law or due process. Moreover, the fact that some schoolteachers in West Bengal, including some members of the CPI-M, are sub-contracting their jobs for Rs. 2,000 per month, suggests that money alone is not the issue, and that the sort of ‘calling’ that Tendler has described for health workers in Cerea State, Brazil, remains a long way off.42 42

We do not dispute that performance-related pay might help here, along with a more clearly defined career path. At present that path runs directly from teacher to headteacher.

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We agree, then, with Leftwich and Jenkins that the agendas of ‘good governance’ should be regarded critically, and at times even with suspicion. It is certainly possible for these agendas to deflect attention from what many on the Left would insist are the ‘real’ issues: the need to build a committed left-of-centre political party, for example, or to campaign for a redistribution of assets towards the poor (including land), or to ensure that land can be owned and controlled by women.43 We are also in agreement with Leftwich when he suggests that the good governance agenda is inclined to substitute wishful thinking for the hard task of building political forces capable of putting into place the institutional reforms that it favours.44 But we also detect a measure of wishful thinking on the part of the critics of good governance. This romanticism is to be found, in part, in the suggestion that the agendas of the new public administration are depoliticizing, when it would be more accurate to say that they have changed the terms of debate about government reform. In other words (and Leftwich would surely recognize this), the movement from politics to the economy and public administration is itself a political act. We should also recognize that a shift in the direction of governmentality, for all its evident flaws, is not simply an act of partisanship or class warfare, as some radical critics maintain. Corbridge and Harriss have described the process of economic reform in India as an ‘elite revolt’, and we agree with this assessment.45 The reforms in the 1990s were clearly meant to advance the private interests of some of India’s urban and industrial elites. But when it comes to questions of accountability, or decentralization, or even participation, the lines of intent are less easy to discern. An intelligent defence of ‘good governance’ is that it is meant to widen those spaces of empowerment that can be found in a world of the second-best. In other words, in a state like Bihar, where land reform is not on the cards, and where its advocates have not shown how (and with what consequences and at what cost) political forces might be built up to press for it, it illbehoves some critics of institutional reform to talk about political na¨ıvety. To put it more positively, one possible defence of some parts of the good governance agenda is that it refuses a Jacobin conception of politics which depends upon an idea of perfectibility, or an ‘ideal outside’. It recognizes 43

44

45

We fully support these normative claims, and we would underscore the importance of providing poorer men and women with land. Studies clearly show that the ownership of land translates into greater employment opportunities, an increased ability to borrow money, greater self-respect, and less vulnerability: see Herring (1983); Singh (1990). ‘[T]he [World] Bank’s analysis is na¨ıve . . . because it entirely ignores that good governance is not simply available on order, but requires a particular kind of politics both to institute and sustain it’ (Leftwich 1993: 607). Corbridge and Harriss (2000: chapter 7).

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that the world is imperfect, and yet still open to contestation, and advances a politics of the possible which is expected to broaden the canvas on which a more committed pro-poor politics can be played out. We shall come back to this general argument in chapter 8. Before we get embroiled in an assessment of ‘the morality of politics’, however, we need to return once again to Bihar and West Bengal, but this time with a view to saying something more concrete about the nature of political society in our research Districts, and especially in Midnapore, Malda and (again) Vaishali. If the new public administration is not wholly opposed to politics, it is largely silent on the matter of political parties and political fixers. As we shall see, though, in chapters 6 and 7, there is much to be said for the view that it is in political society, and not in civil society, that many of the most important questions relating to participation and government will be decided and fought out. For poorer men and women, especially, and indeed for many government employees (as we saw in Bidupur), the state is sighted in large part through the lens of political society. We need to pay close attention to those sightings. We also need to review some of the incentive regimes that structure ‘real democracies’, for these often cut against the grain of the good governance agenda. Competitive politics can be an expensive business and it is by no means clear that it must lead in the direction of a decline in corruption. Foucault reminds us to be humble in the face of the past, but we should also have regard for the messiness of the world around us.

6

Political society

Introduction Some of the most pressing debates in development studies have concerned the relative merits of states and markets, or the means by which markets might be regulated by a range of public institutions from the local to the global scale.1 These debates have taken shape, most famously, in the contrasting cases of sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, and they have an obvious and continuing relevance in countries as diverse as Brazil, Nigeria, India and China. Yet if debate on these issues continues to be fierce, there appears to be general agreement that ‘strong states’ or ‘free markets’ need to be kept in check by vibrant civil societies. Indeed, it is a common proposition in development studies that this hazy zone of ‘freedom’ between the family and the state is a source of unparalleled strength for ordinary men and women, and a source of development itself and even economic growth.2 Robert Putman has made this claim as strongly as anyone.3 His suggestion that economic growth is promoted by a prior build-up of social capital – of people’s engagements with a dense network of civic associations – has become a staple of World Bank thinking since the mid1990s.4 Even where the causal propositions of Putnam are refused, it is clear that the virtues of civil society are widely admired. Arturo Escobar looks to civil society as a breeding ground for oppositional movements and experiments. It functions for him, and perhaps also for Ashis Nandy in India, as a potential zone of resistance to the dehumanizing claims of developmentalism.5 Meanwhile, the claims of participatory development 1 2 3

4 5

For illustrative contributions, see Beenstock (1984), Wade (1990) and World Bank (1993). The best recent review is by Akyuz et al. (1998). Francis (2002) offers a sensible overview. Putnam’s name appears in the singular on the front cover of Making Democracy Work (1993), but authorship is listed inside the book as Putnam with Leonardo and Nanetti. See also Putnam (1995). For a critical review, see Tarrow (1996). See the World Bank’s Social Capital website; see also Woolcock (1998). According to Escobar, ‘Development is the last and failed attempt to create the Enlightenment in Asia, Africa and Latin America’ (1995: 221). What he calls the unmaking of

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and good governance are predicated very precisely on the apparent or assumed strengths of civil society. Governments are kept honest by the free and informed association of people in institutions that run all the way from self-help groups to social movements and decentralized forms of democracy. There is evidence to suggest that civil society is deepening in a number of poorer countries, including in India (as we have seen in the past two chapters).6 Nevertheless, it is a mistake to suppose that civil societies are fully formed in ‘developing’ countries, or that they can be made the bedrock of public policy. Partha Chatterjee has argued to the contrary, and we shall want to follow him in some degree in this chapter. In Chatterjee’s opinion, the concept of civil society, with its emphasis on equality, individual rights and freedoms, and autonomy from the state, is poorly placed to capture the realities of social exchange in postIndependence India (or, indeed, in other post-colonial countries).7 A modernizing and formally democratic state arose there, he says, not in response to impulses from within civil society, as was perhaps the case in some Western countries, but rather as the means by which civil society could be called into existence. In addition, if the Nehruvian project of modernization can be understood as a ‘project . . . to create a civil society’ (Chatterjee 1998: 10–11), it is important to recognize that this project was reshaped by elements in political society. No matter how hard New Delhi tried to build a ‘developmental state which [sought] to relate to different sections of the population through the governmental function of welfare’ (Chatterjee 1998: 15), and by means of well-crafted and carefully targeted development programmes, all of which were presented in the neutral language of ‘objective planning’, the fact remains that these programmes were reinvented at the District and Block levels by politicians and lower-level bureaucrats who did not always share the world-views of their English-educated metropolitan superiors. We have seen that this is indeed the case, although not quite in the directed manner that Chatterjee suggests. But what is perhaps more important about Chatterjee’s work is the suggestion that political society – that loose community of recognized political parties and their operatives, local political brokers and councillors, and perhaps even lower-level public servants who depend upon the grace and favour of politicians – bridges between the government and the public in a manner that often refuses the

6 7

the Third World will supposedly be achieved ‘out of hybrid or minority cultural situations [that will promote] other ways of building economies, of dealing with basic needs, of coming together in social groups’ (Escobar 1995: 225). See also Nandy (1989, 2003). For critical reviews, see Beteille (1999), Chandhoke (2003) and Mahajan (1999). The literature on ‘Africa’ is instructive here: see Mbembe (2001), Bayart et al. (1999), Chabol and Daloz (1999), and most especially Mamdani (1996).

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optimism of civil society models. This community has links upwards and outwards beyond the narrow concerns of the development projects that we have focused on so far. It is a community that draws its strength from the ability to exercise control over events in the locality and to link these to wider political discourses that emanate from Kolkata, Patna, Delhi and elsewhere. As we shall see, the concerns of an increasingly national political society – the status and role of leaders such as Atul Behari Vajpayee or Sonia Gandhi, the politics of economic liberalization, or questions of religion and national identity – do make themselves felt in the research villages.8 These concerns are addressed as subjects in their own right in the broader literatures on South Asia, but in this chapter they appear more as a set of resources on which local politics can draw. Our main interest is in the creation and maintenance of different patterns of rule: how politicians carve out spaces for themselves within the operations of the local state, what they do within these spaces, and how this impacts upon poor people’s experiences of government. By adopting this focus we want to distance ourselves from the assumption that the presence of political society is always a negative one. We recognize that elements in political society are fighting for a cut of the spoils, and that their circumvention of forms of bureaucratic rationality can be socially regressive. Ordinary people accept that politics is often ‘dirty’, and is based on ‘compromises, alliances (sometimes with old enemies), deals and power equations rather than [we would say in addition to: see chapter 8] principles’ (Ruud 2001: 134). That is why they judge politicians in terms of ‘their ability and capacity to get things done’ (Ruud 2001: 130). It also helps to explain why corruption and violence are often part of the political process, no matter how much they are sniffed at in the literatures on civil society. But if the darker side of political society is an important concern for the poor, it is not a problem that can be solved by wishing politics away. Sunil Khilnani maintains that, ‘In a fundamental sense, India does not merely “have” politics but is actually constituted by politics’ (1997: 9), and there is much to be said for this observation. Development studies makes a serious mistake, wittingly or otherwise, when it seeks to separate out already complex questions of development management from the even messier business of development politics.9 For our part, we prefer to see 8

9

Indira Gandhi’s role in forging this ‘national political society’ (see also chapter 2) was also brought home to us in Malda where she remained a forceful presence for many villagers, and where one woman thought she was still the Prime Minister. As Moore and Putzel (1999: 5) succinctly note: ‘There is a tradition in aid and development agencies of bringing in political analysis, if at all, in terms of problems and difficulties. “Politics” is why desirable things may not happen. Politics is messy. Political analysis is used only to explain and to try to fix things that have already gone wrong.’

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local political society as a set of institutions, actors and cultural norms that is often constructively engaged in providing links between ‘government’ and ‘the public’, as well as in brokering deals and forming patterns of authority that hold these deals in place. Where we depart from Chatterjee is in the emphasis we place upon the possibility of political society serving as a medium within which aspects of civil society can grow and gain support. One reason for linking the study of political culture to an analysis of political institutions is to rethink what democratic pro-poor governance might mean in the political societies of eastern India. It is now widely understood that democracy is always an incomplete project, much like modernity, and that it is unwise to think of a singular model of democracy being extended from the West to the non-West. The traffic is much more even, as Christopher Bayly has recently confirmed.10 By the same token, the hybrid understandings of democratic norms and practices that we shall report in eastern India can be read as attempts to resolve the tensions that exist between ‘politics’ and the ‘political’, where the former is understood to refer, following Chantal Mouffe, to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish a sense of social order and organization, and where the latter refers to the antagonistic dimension that is inherent in human societies and which is located in the struggles of diverse social groups for power and resources. As David Slater explains (and we have borrowed from him here), ‘In this context, politics can be seen as the attempted pacification of the political, or as the instillation and maintenance of order’ (Slater 2002: 257, summarizing also Mouffe 1995: 262–3), howsoever this is conducted. The decentring of political ‘science’ that we are proposing is not simply, then, about recognizing the empirical richness of eastern India, or other geographical contexts: it rather calls for a re-examination of the categories that we use to imagine politics and the political. We want to see how technologies of development are reworked by agents in local political society. These agents are not relicts waiting to be made redundant by waves of reform. Moore and Putzel highlight the skills and competences that actors in political society can bring to bear on development problems and the construction of a sense of citizenship.11 These include the ability to ‘spin’ or represent anti-poverty measures as being in the wider public interest. Political leaders can translate the underlying sentiments of externally designed schemes into terms that have local resonance. They also hold in place alliances of support that will extend beyond direct beneficiaries. Equally, politicians can exercise an ‘exit’ option from a development project. Intentional non-involvement will happen when they believe their 10

Bayly (2004).

11

Moore and Putzel (1999).

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energies are better spent enhancing their political capital elsewhere, or where they are happy to cede power to other agents, or where they perceive that key elements of a development project lie outside the normal scope of their power. Our field evidence suggests that many smaller development schemes in Vaishali and Malda Districts are sub-contracted by MLAs and District Council members to lower-level politicians or political brokers. In the next part of the chapter we look at the careers of some of the political leaders who operate in our field areas. We then consider how these careers are forged amid networks of power that operate over more extended spatial scales, and we review how these networks are embedded in long-standing patterns of governance. Throughout our discussion we highlight some of the clear and significant differences that structure experiences of rule and development in parts of Bihar and West Bengal, and most especially in Midnapore and Vaishali Districts. Poorer people experience a political society in Midnapore that is more structured and in some respects more civil than would commonly be experienced by their counterparts in north Bihar. At the same time, however, we draw attention to the ways in which the spectacles of electoral politics in both states can be linked to episodes of violence, or the production of an unrestrained ‘political’. The costs of more civil forms of engagement are greater than many models of good governance allow. We also show how poorer people resist the ‘disruptions’ they associate with electoral politics in Bihar, just as some poorer people in Midnapore contest the models of representation that are provided for them by members of the CPI-M, the political party that fills much of political society in that District. As ever, their sightings of the state are messier than the sightings that might be imposed upon them by experts, government workers and party activists. Their engagements with political society are partly informed by their understandings of civil society and the idea of what Thomas Blom Hansen has called the ‘sublime’ state.12 The constitution of political society: fixers and leaders The 1990s saw not only the rise of militant Hinduism in India but also a steady leaching of power to the ‘backward classes’. We shall have more to say on this in chapter 7 when we discuss the political careers of Laloo Yadav and Mayawati and their accounts of how the state should be made to work. But how is this leaching of power playing out at the grassroots? Who is being recruited into political society, and what are the implications 12

Hansen (2001: 35).

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of this ‘second democratic upsurge’ for structures of rule in the Indian countryside?13 We reported in chapter 3 that the lowest-level entrants to political society are the political ‘fixers’ or pyraveekars. The figure of the pyraveekar appears in the work of Ram Reddy and Haragopal almost entirely in negative terms: he acts as a middleman between the government and the people, and benefits enormously from the opportunities for largesse provided by the growth of the developmental state.14 He also exploits his ability to monopolize information that is not properly distributed by agents of the official state. ‘While the pyraveekar with one hand applies pressure, pushes the files, lubricates the process, and extracts the benefits from the system, with the other hand he passes on incorrect information, misleads the target groups, and makes a private fortune. It is the negative and exploitative dimension of the institution that speaks against it and calls for its elimination through appropriate measures’ (Ram Reddy and Haragopal, 1985: 1161). This reading of the pyraveekar will resonate with anyone who has experienced the effects of state scarcity, but it is also prone to exaggeration. Parry’s careful ethnography of corruption suggests that brokers play only a small role in controlling jobs and contracts in the Bhilai region of Chhattisgarh.15 In any case, it is misleading to expect that development interventions will run smoothly in the absence of the pyraveekar and his appetite for ‘extracted benefits’. Inconsistencies are bound to open up between the ‘vision’ and the ‘reality’ of state interventions and this creates a space for actors other than bureaucrats to provide a service to local people. The presence of explicitly political intermediaries within a village is not a new feature in Bihar or West Bengal. We saw in chapter 5 how BB stands atop the comparatively ‘thick’ political society of Bidupur Block, Vaishali District, and we shall have more to say about the Rashtriya Janata Dal in chapter 7. Needless to say, many of the pyraveekars who roam around Bidupur – social workers, as they like to describe themselves – are linked to BB or his leading rivals, and we shall come back to their activities later in the chapter. In Bhojpur District, meanwhile, political society has been deeply fragmented for several decades. It is only recently that some poorer communities have begun to re-engage the state in its income support 13 14 15

The phrase is Yogendra Yadav’s (1996). The gendered language is deliberate and reflects local realities. Parry (1999) also notes that the suggestion that corruption is universal and inevitable has important power effects in itself, not least in playing up the importance of brokers, and, as a result, increasing demand for their services. See also Oldenburg (1987) for a nuanced account of middlemen in ‘Third World corruption’.

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and empowerment functions. These engagements continue to be shallow and episodic, and in Sahar Block they are generally brokered by members of the CPI-ML. The production of political workers or dalaals who are acceptable to members of the Forward and Scheduled Castes is some way off, and progress in this direction is interrupted by periodic bouts of violence between cadres of the CPI-ML and landlord armies like the Ranvir Sena. Political society is also rather thin in Ranchi District, where many adivasis expect to be connected to the state by their Mukhiyas (as in our field locality) or by figures like Simon Minz, the Parha Raja of Bero Block, whose forest protection activities we reported in chapter 4. The Jharkhand Party and its offshoots were a presence here from the 1950s until the formation of the state of Jharkhand in November 2000, although that presence waned in the 1990s.16 Some villagers will also come into contact with Congress and BJP activists, and members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS was not strong in our research area in 1999–2000, but it has sought to engage adivasis around education and ‘cultural’ issues in other Blocks of Ranchi District. In West Bengal, the history of the CPI-M’s spread from the coffee houses and campuses of Kolkata to the interior villages of the state is also well documented, and forms an important part of the party’s presentation of itself.17 In this narrative, young leftists inspired by a combination of Marxism-Leninism, the Maoist revolution in China, and West Bengal’s own history of peasant insurgency, embedded themselves within village societies and provided leadership for the often violent land struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. After the momentum of the mass tenancy registration campaign, Operation Barga, had died away in the early 1980s, the party’s power-base remained firmly rooted in the countryside. The reinstatement of panchayat elections in 1978 also ensured that the state would help to lead a national trend towards the decentralization of development initiatives. A generation has now grown up with the activities of panchayat members and their political rivals being a part of everyday life. The panchayat reforms have had important impacts on the composition of political society in the state. The five-yearly ritual, begun in 1978, of electing over 60,000 gram panchayat members through intense partybased competition at the village and neighbourhood levels could not fail to draw more people into the domain of formal politics. Amendments were also passed ahead of the 1993 and 1997 elections to reserve panchayat seats and leadership positions for women and members of the Scheduled

16

For a review, see Corbridge (2002b).

17

See Nossiter (1988), Kohli (1987).

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Communities. These have ensured that an extended political society is now formally inclusive of all sections of the state’s population. Marvin Davis portrayed local politics in Midnapore in the 1970s as a contest between rival village elites, but these days have largely passed.18 The spread of panchayat institutions in West Bengal, the active politicization of rival caste groupings in Bihar, and the universal spread of state developmental work, have all played their parts. These processes of political inclusion are far from complete, of course, and their outcomes will vary greatly according to the norms and values that hold together the resulting networks of power. Furthermore, by no means all of the activities of these local political actors are expressly targeted at the state. We noted in chapter 3 that these individuals play varying roles in village life. The ability to give voice to the grievances of groups or individuals, and to intercede on their behalf in the Block Office or in a local dispute, is an important mark of a person’s leadership qualities and a means by which an actor’s power is displayed, augmented or contested. Most of these fixers are small-time operators who will not have a political career in any significant sense. They may enter the public life of a locality only briefly and then return to obscurity. This is often the fate of minor figures in West Bengal’s panchayats, and particularly of women or members of the Scheduled Communities holding reserved seats. They are sometimes thrust into the limelight at election time only to find they are dropped when their seats are returned to open competition. Within Bihar, too, many small-time brokers are unlikely to progress further than the panchayat, whatever ambitions they might hold to the contrary. Their contacts with key figures in the Block Offices, and their connections to higher-level politicians, might earn them a reasonable living and give them standing in their own community, but in most cases this is as far as it goes. They see the state episodically and through the narrow lens of the Block Office or the office/residence of an MLA. To progress further up the political hierarchy requires time and energy and a degree of cultural capital. Fixers at this level need to be literate. They need to have a reasonable knowledge of the local political landscape and its rules, and a sense of how government works and is meant to work. Success in political society also depends on a person’s ability to ‘perform’ his (or her) power appropriately, and to acquire a reputation for getting things done. In ‘normal’ times contractors in Vaishali District are required to function as political go-betweens who show their worth by the way they manage government contracts. Work needs to be organized for at least some labouring families, and the appropriate cuts and commissions 18

Davis (1983).

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must be passed on to officials and politicians with minimum fuss. These activities afford some contractors a reasonable living and a reputation for being ‘so-and-so’s man’ in the locality. They also involve them in a series of obligations. These favours are called in at election times when contractors are expected to deliver votes to the MLAs and MPs who helped embed them in political society. Elections engage contractors in a range of work, from the spreading of rumours about rival candidates to the organization of rallies for visiting dignitaries. Some will also engage in acts of ‘booth capture’, as we report later on. In appendix 2 we comment on the 1999 general election in Hajipur Constituency, Bihar: in the runup to voting, contractors in the area had to work night and day. They also had to lay out significant sums of money for the hire of vehicles and equipment, and to supply meals and hospitality for their political bosses. Performing these tasks in an effective manner can lead to progression up the political ladder, but it also comes with a price and this is something else we shall come back to. In Midnapore District, career progression for CPI-M workers is through long apprenticeship within the party. This is more hidden from public view than the careers of contractors in Vaishali, which are widely and candidly discussed. The various stages of involvement with the CPI-M, from joining one of its mass fronts through to the acquisition of full party membership, are meant to ensure the proper ideological education of initiates.19 In practice, however, they are also used to forge increasing levels of trust between leaders and aspiring lieutenants, and to act as filters between those potentially ‘less desirable elements’ drafted in to the party for electoral purposes and the holders of real power within the organization.20 Progression in this set-up is also bound up with the internalization of rules and values that are not simply derived from Marxism-Leninism. Ruud has argued that to rise within the CPI-M in Bardhaman District it is important for party workers to take on key cultural markers of ‘austerity, cleanliness and restraint’ (1999: 269), which themselves relate to the CPI-M’s own bhadralok roots and longstanding efforts at social reform. Similar ideals appeared to hold true in Midnapore, where workers were at pains to demonstrate their hard work, commitment to the poor, and 19 20

The West Bengal Krishak Sabha (Peasant Union) is by far the most important of these in the countryside, in terms of its numbers and political influence. For a detailed description of the CPI-M’s election machine, see Chatterjee (1997b). In rural areas, especially, there is often a need to engage ‘influential and effective people from outside the party’ (Chatterjee 1997b: 144) in the booth committees that are specially constituted in the run-up to a vote. People of ‘influence’ are often respected community figures: as a later section will make clear, they can also include men who are able to organize acts of violence.

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‘simplicity’.21 In Malda District, in contrast, these attributes were less important. Both the CPI-M and the opposition parties have a weak institutionalized presence in Malda, and political progression depends far more on an individual’s reputation for efficacy or even for violence, the two being linked in many cases. It is important to note that grassroots CPI-M workers in Midnapore are often viewed with a degree of warmth by their poorer supporters. They are people who can be turned to in a crisis, or simply people who will understand the problems of ordinary families. In Ranchi District, too, the Mukhiya of our Murhu panchayat was applauded for his ability to access a series of government schemes ‘for the betterment of the village’. Particularly among the poorest Lohra households, these achievements were seen as evidence of the Mukhiya’s power, and not as the independent outcomes of an impersonal, if developmental, state. The position of the local political worker is also viewed with a measure of ambivalence or even disdain. Ruud argues that this disdain stems from a series of cultural separations between politics as artha, or the pursuit of worldly interest, and the assumed moral order (dharma) that should dominate within the home or community. He claims that in contemporary eastern India ‘politics is perceived as a shamefaced but very real field of activities with its own rules and logic, which are normally, albeit not invariably, in conflict with moral ideals governing social conduct’ (Ruud 2001: 133).22 As a result, popular engagement with politics and local politicians is characterized by ‘cynicism coupled with participation’ (Ruud 2001: 116). It is possible that Ruud overplays the separation of artha and dharma when he suggests that a politician’s behaviour is constrained ‘not by moral considerations, but mainly by the right circumstances and by power, clout, influence and contacts’ (Ruud 2001: 134). Most villagers do not see politics as being part of the moral high ground, but this doesn’t mean they give carte blanche to their representatives. Local politicians draw tactically on a range of ideas about moral duty to justify their behaviour, and the mobilization of a discourse about corruption is, of course, as Gupta reminds us, one important means by which the idea of a sublime state is communicated to a wider public. 21 22

Bhadralok is often translated as ‘gentlemen’, and refers to an upper-middle-class urbane or educated elite. In doing so, Ruud echoes the work of Marvin Davis, who makes the distinction in these conflicts between gramer kaj (lit.: ‘village work’), or local politics aiming to uphold or reinstate the ‘traditional’ order of dharma, and sorkari kaj (lit.: ‘government work’), or local politics based around the language of the modern state, including ideas about the equality of citizens. Ruud would argue that it is the pursuit of artha, rather than highminded Nehruvian ideals, that most Bengalis would associate with sorkari kaj today.

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Nevertheless, Ruud’s account of dirty politics in Bengal is useful in uncovering the hidden transcripts of the dealings of lay villagers with politicians, and the languages within which these interactions are conducted.23 He notes that villagers can undermine the official performance of public meetings through misbehaviour or disinterest. They also try to portray themselves as wily and strategic players when they ask politicians for help. Villagers frequently use fictitious kinship terms to describe their patrons, and in doing so they try to tie their relationships into binding ideas of moral duty and order.24 The description of contractors/political agents as chhoto bhai neta encapsulates both this ambivalence towards politics, and the attempt to tame or capture it within local frames of reference. As ‘little brother leaders’, contractors are tolerated as mediators between the village and outside sources of help, but the term is also a public statement of the perceived limits to their abilities. Villagers are in no doubt that the ‘little brothers’ are dependent on their own ‘big brothers’ and that real power lies outside the locality. These political dadas are in turn seen as more distant and more dangerous figures, which is one reason why villagers use intermediaries to intercede on their behalf. To sum up: political fixers are important in a number of ways in our field localities. Caste matters in Bihar, but more in terms of a person’s ability to mobilize resources for a named group than in terms of abstract ideas about moral hierarchy. Political society has diversified and even democratized from its previously narrow base, and politics has effectively penetrated the villages of eastern India as a field of activity. The depth and breadth of what constitutes this field varies across our localities. In Midnapore it encompasses many aspects of social life. Elsewhere, local grandees are still respected and politics is more often confined to struggles for the control of state resources. Despite this variation, politics is well established as a field of activity in and through which contests over status and other activities can be fought out. Finally, it is important to note that political society has become domesticated in the minds of many villagers. The careers of political activists are linked from the outset to ideas of reciprocity, obligation and proper conduct which are constructed in part through vernacular idioms. This brings in to being understandings of politics that are most definitely not about ideology or policy preferences. Perhaps we can begin to understand the high degree of participation in local government affairs in these terms.25 Voting, or showing up to a 23 24

25

The idea of hidden transcripts is taken from Scott (1990). This contrasts with the rather self-conscious use of the English word ‘comrade’ when CPI-M workers address each other in public or as part of official business. Senior party workers use this term in a similarly fictitious display of equality within what remains a strictly hierarchical institution. Especially at election time, as was evident too in the 2001 panchayat elections in Bihar.

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public meeting, is in part a social obligation. It is an important public performance which, for all its hidden transcripts and ‘backstage’ denials, confirms the ongoing ties between lay villagers and the chhoto bhai neta or party worker, and between both of them and the world of politics beyond the village. Engaging the state: networks of power We can now consider the ways in which political careers are located within and are partly constitutive of local networks of power. Central to our concerns here are the ways in which political society engages with the institutions of the developmental state. The state and its development programmes are key resources for actors in political society. They are also important in fuelling the careers of members of political society. A recent movement towards larger and more decentralized budgets for anti-poverty programmes can be expected to shape local politics significantly. This will be especially the case in Bihar and Jharkhand, where the panchayat elections of 2001, the first in nearly twenty-five years, seem to have led to new or heightened levels of conflict between actors at different levels in political society. From the outset we should reiterate that the involvement of ‘politicians’ in the operation of these programmes is not wholly parasitic. It is to some degree a valid expression of their social power, and demonstrations of control over these resources might be as important to these actors as crude attempts to line their own pockets.26 Furthermore, the state is not a passive target. We saw in chapter 5 that some District-level officers in Bihar had tried to head off attempts to capture the EAS, and had insisted on projects that could be scrutinized in some degree. In the empirical analysis that follows we turn again to the role played by the EAS, but this time in West Bengal. We do so not because we believe that leakage from the EAS is particularly rampant, but rather because a scheme like the EAS is meant to check the nexus of power that often exists at the Blocklevel between bureaucrats, politicians, contractors and builders.27 The contrasts we observed in the scheme’s outcomes in Malda and Midnapore are particularly instructive in this regard as they emerged in conditions of 26 27

We offer some preliminary comments on the funding of political society later on. In our research sites, levels of everyday corruption in education, in terms, for example, of teachers not showing up for work, were more costly than the amounts diverted from more occasional EAS projects and other poverty-alleviation schemes. This observation tallies with a recent survey by Transparency International (TI) which suggests that Indians pay an annual total of Rs. 267 billion (about US$ 6 billion, or US$ 6 per person) in bribes, and that the health, education and power sectors account for most of this (Times of India, 17 December 2002). Because the TI study only assesses bribery in line departments, a comparison of programmes implemented by local governments cannot be made.

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identical local governance where there were no major differences in the official capacity of the state at the District and Block levels.28 The operation of the EAS in West Bengal was effectively decentralized to the Block-level by making the panchayat samiti (the elected Block council) the main implementing agency. On the recommendation of West Bengal’s Department of Panchayats and Rural Development, District and Block councils could if they wished devolve the implementation of EAS projects to the gram panchayats, again with the aim of strengthening local accountability. The bureaucracy would then facilitate implementation with the help of its organizational and technical expertise. The Block Development Officer (BDO) acts as the official executive agent and is supported by the Block Cashier and Sub-Assistant Engineers, and by the gram panchayat-level Secretary and Job Assistant. The accountability structures of the EAS are complex, and in West Bengal they are intended to engage a range of government employees, as well as the beneficiary community and elected political representatives (figure 6.1). The executing agent, or job worker, is meant to come from the community in which the scheme is placed, and the beneficiary committee and elected local councillors check the job worker’s activities. While the Sub-Assistant Engineer, and for smaller works the Job Assistant, take the measurements of completed works, their technical documentation has to be accompanied by a completion letter from the beneficiary committee. Only then can the BDO and Block Council prepare and submit the utilization certificate necessary to draw down further EAS funds from central government. This, at any rate, is how the EAS is meant to work. On the ground matters can be very different, as we have already seen in Vaishali District, Bihar. The checks are so complicated, and so demanding of the state’s limited capacity, that members of political society are inevitably drawn in to fill the gaps, and to deal with the internal inconsistencies of the scheme’s own rules.29 The particular settlements or resolutions of these gaps are in turn critically dependent upon the nature of the local political society. In Debra Block, there is a sizeable pool of grassroots political workers. These actors and their constituents are also located within a 28

29

We have no evidence to suggest that state capacity in Old Malda Block was significantly inferior to that in Debra Block, Midnapore. Both had their full complement of Block-level officers, whose training and levels of experience were comparable, and Old Malda’s periurban location should have reduced problems of staff absenteeism. Furthermore, Old Malda’s BDO was an able and committed civil servant, who wanted to tackle corruption in her Block (but was unable to). As an example of the former, the distribution of EAS cards to labouring households was a task that local CPI-M workers took upon themselves to complete in Midnapore, as the panchayat staff were too overworked to complete this.

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Employment

Material

Measurement

Completion

Utilization

records

supply forms

of completed

letter

certificate

(Muster Rolls)

work

Members of the public Job worker (‘foreman’)

P

P

Beneficiary committee

S

S

S

S

P+S

Elected politicians Elected Councillors

S

Block council Chairperson Civil servants Job Assistant / Sub-Assistant Engineer Block Development Officer

P

P+S P+S

Notes: P = Prepare; S = Sign Source: Field observations.

Figure 6.1 Local monitoring of the EAS in West Bengal: main actors and responsibilities

system of functioning and active panchayat bodies behind which lies a well-integrated structure of party committees, stretching all the way from the local branch office to the District and State committees.30 These well-established political networks are used to control the EAS in three important ways. First, people’s expectations of the scheme are limited by the coordinated actions of party members, with the passive support of local civil servants (see chapter 4). Neither local government employees nor party members had any expectation that national government would provide ‘unlimited funds’ for the EAS. As a result, the CPI-M did not promote the idea that work provided under the EAS was in any sense a 30

The areas covered by the different tiers of CPI-M committees vary considerably across the state, and are a rough indicator of the party’s local strength and depth of organization.

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right around which labourers could agitate. The EAS was not going to be another ‘Operation Barga’ for the Party.31 The CPI-M’s control over the EAS also extended to managing participation in the scheme, as we have already reported. The selection of job workers and beneficiary committee members was effectively controlled by the party in areas where they held power, albeit on the basis of discussions with party supporters. The local party was also effective in managing (but not erasing) corruption. The execution of EAS schemes was divided into road schemes (undertaken by the Block office, and usually using contractors) and smaller schemes (undertaken by the gram panchayat, and using the local job worker). Information about all schemes was given to the general public through the gram sansads, but it was at the level of small schemes that the beneficiary committees and the public at large were best able to make use of this information. We have evidence of a small scheme that ended up a few hundred rupees under budget: another project was found to take up the shortfall, and provided extra work. The increasing strength of the CPI-M’s main rival in Debra, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), has meant that some TMC supporters have managed to gain places in the beneficiary committees, and these have become more effective bodies as a result.32 Contractors gaining commissions are also expected to make ‘party donations’, a proportion of which is recycled to the local community in different ways.33 What emerges from this system of political control? We have already compared the material outcomes of the EAS in our research Districts, but here we wish to draw out the political importance of the scheme. Certainly, implementation of the EAS in Midnapore was not entirely 31

32

33

‘Operation Barga’, the tenancy registration campaign of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was a key moment not only in solidifying the CPI-M’s political support in the state, but also in demonstrating the effectiveness of a different expression of its power from the openly violent politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Specifically, the strategy used in Operation Barga was to mobilize party workers and supporters around the full implementation of existing legal rights to secure tenancy, rather than challenging property relations through the illegal ‘land grabs’ that had characterized the earlier period (and which led to the imposition of president’s rule). The party’s decision not to use the EAS in a similar way certainly cannot be explained by a lack of ability to mobilize, as this still exists in most parts of the state. This is also the conclusion reached by Bardhan and Mookherji (2004) in their study of the poverty alleviation efforts of panchayats in West Bengal. We do not want to maintain, however, that political competition is necessarily good for governance; much will depend on the type and cost of the competition (see also the next section). Paying stipends and honoraria to grassroots political workers would be one case in point, and in Midnapore these individuals did take their responsibilities seriously. More directly, in one of the adivasi neighbourhoods of our locality, a local contractor was asked to sponsor the CPI-M’s contributions to the Hul festival.

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‘clean’, but it did involve rituals of accountability and popular participation that were performed on a regular basis. People’s participation in the gram sabhas had little direct impact on major spending decisions in the Block, but some information was allowed to trickle down. It was often educated middle-class individuals, or rivals of the local CPI-M, who would use this information to challenge minor infringements or acts of embezzlement, and the party took care to respond to at least some of these challenges.34 ‘Purges’ of corrupt party members amounted to occasional but important performances of the party’s commitment to probity. The chairperson of the Debra Block Council was kicked out of the party for embezzling funds in 1993. His fall from grace was still talked about six years later, and served as a warning to other party bosses. Partha Chatterjee has suggested that commitments to (self-)discipline and development are key watchwords for the CPI-M, and they are regularly restated in Midnapore. Effective control of EAS and other local government resources is key to these public performances, and allows the party to be seen to govern effectively and even graciously.35 Even when admitting the misconduct of some of its members, the CPI-M’s control of the ‘public transcript’ of their correction is used to enhance its political standing in a wider sense. The EAS worked much less well for poorer people in Malda than in Midnapore. We believe this difference has more to do with the composition of political society in Malda than with the ‘backwardness’ or ‘illiteracy’ of the population, which is how some local politicians prefer to account for things. Malda’s more restricted political networks are bound up with a form of political clientelism that fails to manage the spaces of participation opened up by panchayati raj institutions, and which supposedly are widened by government programmes like the EAS. District party leaders enjoy the support of powerful outsiders (the national Congress Party, and the more critical support of the state-level CPI-M), but they do not have sufficient reach to incorporate the generation of chhota bhai netas that has sprung up to fill these spaces. In part, this has to do with institutional density: CPI-M local committees in Malda cover six times the area of their counterparts in Midnapore, and there are no equivalent committees in the Congress Party. Rather more important, however, has 34 35

Where complaints were substantiated, the CPI-M responded by getting the individuals involved to return money, or put works right out of their own pockets. Gram panchayat chairs who were in complete control of their councils were often at pains to show proper ‘respect’ to the political opposition, a state of affairs widely described as ‘political maturity’ among party members and civil servants in Birbhum (Williams 1996).

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been the failure of grassroots party workers and the public more generally to connect to vertical structures of political accountability. This failure was made explicit in the operation of the panchayats and the development schemes run through them. While formal party organization extended as far down as the Block level in Malda District, it did so without a commitment to either broadly developmental priorities or a sense of party discipline.36 Tight-knit relationships had emerged between key members of the Block council and government employees charged with a role in overseeing development work, and these relationships allowed individuals of all parties to loot significant chunks of Block-level EAS funds.37 The politicians benefiting from these corrupt networks use these opportunities to build up their personal wealth and prestige rather than the institutional position and standing of their parties. Block-level political bosses also seemed to have little control over, or interest in, the activities of the gram panchayat members who were below them. State-level politicians and civil servants were well aware of some of these failings, and in 1999 they ordered Block Councils to devolve 50 per cent of the EAS scheme budget to the gram panchayat. They also gave fresh orders for gram sansads be held on a proper basis. In the absence of sustained political supervision of gram panchayat members, however, most of the leaders of political society that we observed at this lower level behaved in precisely the same ways as their counterparts at the Block level. Corruption was not so much reduced as decentralized, and possibly expanded. Political parties in Malda do not have the power to keep control over ward representatives and development schemes in the way they do in Midnapore. Commitment to the cause of the poor has become a secondary concern in a context where political workers expect public offices to be exploited for private gain. Rent-seeking strategies of this sort in turn lead to efforts to close down the democratic and participatory spaces that are present within panchayats and in schemes like the EAS. Politicians of all parties in Malda are keen to leave ordinary villagers in the dark about 36

37

CPI-M leaders with a background in land struggles were few on the ground, and came mostly from Gazole Block in the northeast of the District. Rather more recruits and leaders had come from the student movement in Malda. In the course of our research we came across examples of muster rolls for labourers where the numbers of workers had been grossly exaggerated. Various other means to divert money were widespread, such as the underpaying of labourers who were reported as receiving the minimum wage. It was in Malda, however, that some of the most blatant forms of corruption existed. Elsewhere in the Block a scandal had arisen because government money had been spent on a phantom road-building scheme. In Vaishali, in contrast, where the cuts diverted to politicians and civil servants are institutionalized, no one would have considered taking them without there being at least some physical evidence of a scheme.

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development schemes, the duties of panchayat officials, and the rights of the poor. Panchayat members are then free to take up projects that are hard to audit and which can support a massive diversion of government funds. Of course, there are always a few people who are aware of the misconduct of those above them. When these people begin to speak up, they are generally paid off – which is what they are hoping for, by and large. All told, then, transferring a well-defined portion of schemes to the gram panchayats has not disrupted wider patterns of rule in Malda: the gram panchayat members use their autonomy to make profits for themselves, and are careful not to interfere in the affairs of their ‘seniors’. Ward representatives in turn pay off (or threaten: see below) well-informed villagers who begin to speak publicly about corruption. Poor people with weak social networks find it hard to make complaints about the corruption that affects them so badly. In Malda, they expect lower-level government officers to be involved in the corruption, while higher-level officers are not easily accessible and may not know precisely what is going on. They also know that local politicians from all the leading parties depend on their share of the ‘loot’ to help finance their election campaigns.38 In sum, looser party control in Malda does not lead to more ‘democratic’ panchayat institutions than in Midnapore. The Government of India’s plans for an Employment Assurance Scheme that would be based on full disclosure of information, and the full participation of citizens as workers–beneficiaries–ombudsmen, were never very realistic. In Midnapore, however, the CPI-M was able to distribute some work and material benefits to families most in need, and in the process it reproduced a sense of its vanguard role in political society. If complaints were muted about corruption, or about a lack of popular control over scheme resources, it was because this resolution of ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ worked in an orderly and relatively inclusive manner. The contrasting situation in Malda shows that it was the relative thinness of political society that contributed to the failings of the developmental state. Corruption was particularly venal because leading members in political society (officials and politicians) were largely unchecked by functioning structures of vertical 38

Regrettably, we do not have detailed data on the funding of political parties or politicians in our localities. Subventions from bureaucrats (payments to secure transfers or stave off transfers) are clearly important, along with rake-offs from development spending. The CPI-M in West Bengal, while not above this pattern of political funding, is probably unique in eastern India in its ability to collect a small annual fee from members of its associated mass fronts (for peasants, workers, students, etc.). In the mid-1990s, membership of these fronts in Birbhum alone was reported to exceed 600,000 persons. The collection of what at that time was a one-rupee fee can thus generate a modest but significant income.

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accountability. In this atomized political world the self-interest of public representatives was paramount, and this extended to keeping one’s nose out of other people’s corrupt practices. External attempts to clean up the District through decentralization were able to reshape the political terrain, but their ultimate effect was to displace corruption from the Block offices to the anchal and ward levels. To put it another way, poorer people were provided with sightings of new state officials and new sites of corruption, but not with sightings of the new model state that has been mandated by New Delhi. The price of rule Finally, we turn to the wider question of the embedding of these networks of power within more longstanding patterns of rule. There can be no question that both Bihar and West Bengal have been at the centre of the second democratic upsurge that Yogendra Yadav has described for India more generally. By the same token, there can be no doubt that the political cultures of Vaishali District and Midnapore District are distinct from one another in key respects and map out very different models of government. In both Districts, the party in command locally at the time of our fieldwork was the party in power in the state, which is one reason for focusing on them here. The ambitions and tactics of those parties, however, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the CPI-M, were often very different. Pranab Bardhan suggests that, ‘In the infinitely layered social structure of India a group, say the Jats in Uttar Pradesh or the Yadavs in Bihar, can go on clamoring for equity in the sense of parity with the upper castes, while not doing much about their customary oppression of the Chamars [or Musahars], who are placed below them in the village society (often taunting them for special government favors bestowed on them and calling them sarkar ki jamai or the government’s sons-in-law)’ (Bardhan 2001: 227). This rings true for Vaishali District in several respects, not least in terms of the assumptions this discourse makes about the capture of state institutions by and for defined communities. In Midnapore District, in contrast, as we have already begun to suggest, democratic politics is more often phrased in terms of an appeal to class, and to the claims of reason, social justice and rural development. This appeal to the classical categories of ‘western’ politics is doubtless one reason why ‘West Bengal’ is so often contrasted to ‘Bihar’ in wider accounts of Indian politics: it is almost as if the two states personify good and bad, reason and unreason. But if there is some basis for this claim, albeit one that is overstated, it should not be allowed to obscure some

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very real similarities of political style between the RJD and the CPI-M. Both parties operate in a political landscape that is increasingly expensive, something that is neglected by some advocates of decentralization and democratization, and both parties routinely use forms of physical and verbal violence to make the costs and benefits of democratic politics more to their liking. Midnapore: politics as development We have already noted the density of political society in Midnapore, and its dominance by party members. The CPI-M’s version of political society fills many of the spaces where independent civil society groups might expect to be active. It is here that the activities of the developmental state can effectively be brought under the management of the party. This helps to establish networks of power within which self-discipline and attention to the needs of poorer villagers are important to the advancement of political careers. This linking of discipline and development – a highly developed hierarchical set of party institutions with a pro-poor reformist agenda – has underpinned many accounts of West Bengal’s political exceptionalism in the period since the Emergency.39 It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the most lasting success of the party has been achieved in the field of service or benefit provision to the rural poor. Partha Chatterjee reminds us that: The point is not, as is sometimes supposed, whether the Left Front government has done a great deal to meet the demands of the people in the countryside . . . [it] is rather that a field of political transactions has been opened which is within the reach of most villagers and where matters of local interest can be negotiated and sorted out on a day-to-day basis. It is in that field that the CPI-M, with its permanently mobilized corps of workers, enjoys an advantage in the matter of the daily renewal of the legitimacy of power. Party politics in the West Bengal countryside today is not something which arrives along the campaign trail once every five years; it is everyday business and goes hand in hand with government work. (Chatterjee 1997b: 160–1)

If we are to take seriously claims of Bengal’s success we need to ask what values underpin this field of transactions, and what holds it in place. The linking of the CPI-M’s political institutions, and especially its electoral practices, to the apparatuses of the developmental state has provided a 39

Among others, see Kohli (1987), Lieten (1992, 1996), Crook and Sverrisson (2001). More critical is Mallick (1993).

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degree of macro-political stability almost unique in independent India. But the values that are expressed in and through the CPI-M’s rule are equally important in the shaping of West Bengal’s political society, and the role its poorer citizens play within this. Chatterjee’s work suggests that the linking of discipline and development is important not only in the practice of the CPI-M, but also in its representation of what constitutes proper political behaviour. We have already seen that it was in Midnapore, of all our field sites, that public meetings concerning the conduct of the EAS and other schemes were most regularly held, and most widely attended. In these meetings, clear norms of good political conduct are regularly performed: CPI-M chairs of local government bodies publicly insist on their need to behave impartially, and due process is observed. Villagers also, to some degree, accept a duty of attendance. This theme of political pedagogy is repeated in the vision of West Bengal’s history that is continually presented in a range of public meetings from election hustings to cultural events. The accepted story of the last thirty-five years in West Bengal contains a number of key elements. First, it portrays the land campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s as a time of popular awakening and struggle against an unjust feudal order. Second, it portrays the period since the CPI-M gained power as one of rural development, in the process linking the activities of CPI-Mled governments to a discourse of progress. The material benefits of Left Front rule – electrification of villages, irrigation improvements, or simply rural roads – are contrasted with an earlier ‘dark age’ under Congress rule. Third, the constraints on the CPI-M’s abilities to act are stressed: people are encouraged to expect the rational and ordered use of limited resources, nothing more. The skill of the party and its local workers lies in linking this general narrative both upwards to events of high politics, and downwards to people’s direct experiences. The closeness of the party to the poor allows it to speak with authority about the injustices of previous generations: landlords’ public beatings of labourers, and sexual abuse of lower-caste women, are still important issues in the consciousness of many labouring households, and the party’s role in preventing them is stressed with regularity. Chatterjee notes that it is important as well for the party to explain the game of national politics at election time; through its campaigns, ‘the position of West Bengal in the overall pattern of Indian politics is, as it were, rediscovered and reaffirmed’ (1997b: 161). The theme of constraints is also important here: limited resources for local development are linked to an idea of central government conspiring against West Bengal, and the picture of an embattled, but principled party is thereby reproduced.

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Like all political discourses this is a partial and partisan narrative, but rather than comment on its veracity, or its relationship to what a communist party ‘should’ be doing, we are interested in the patterns of rule it helps to reproduce.40 The heavy element of pedagogy is indicative of wider patterns of vanguardism within the party: despite the close links of grassroots workers to the rural poor, there remains a degree of unease about the behaviour of the electorate in general. The strong retention of party control over key panchayat decisions was justified by one of our respondents with reference to a fear (or suggestion) that the public could be led astray by richer members of the village. The heavy stamp of party control was thus seen as necessary, even if it sometimes had the effect of undermining the public standing of the very council chairpersons who are the party’s official public representatives. The representation of the party as the sole custodian not only of values that are rational and modern, but of Bengali interests more generally, is meant to justify this highhandedness: far better to have frustrated pradhans, or cynical voters, than lose sight of these ideals.41 The CPI-M is also willing to use force to secure its version of a better and more legible society. In the run-up to the 2001 state Assembly elections, a contiguous Block to Debra saw some of the worst political violence in West Bengal in recent years. The violence was most likely started by supporters of the opposition TMC, but it was quickly met with deadly force by the CPI-M. The killings in Keshpur were followed by seventy-six political murders across the state during the 2003 panchayat elections.42 Force has always been important in the politics of West Bengal, just as it is (and is more widely recognized to be) in Bihar. Arild Ruud notes that groups of Bagdi (SC) males have been used as lathityals (cudgel bearers or toughs) for and against the CPI-M in Bardhamman (Ruud 1999: 259), and Ben Rogaly’s work on the management of labour relations has shown how local CPI-M bosses use the threat of violence on a consistent basis to demonstrate their power (Rogaly 1998). In some of their more candid moments, members of the CPI-M old guard will describe the organized use of force as a valid expression of 40 41

42

For a description of the party’s rhetorical and ideological gymnastics over the question of agrarian class relations, see Bhattacharyya (1999a). The representation of its political opponents as outsiders is an important strategy of the CPI-M that deserves greater attention than we can give it here. It can be seen both in the party’s attempts to portray the BJP as a party that belongs in the cow-belt (Chatterjee, 1997b: 179), and in its marked difficulty in dealing with the political career of Mamata Banerjee, whose populism has always pandered to specifically Bengali concerns. Mathew (2003) notes that almost half – thirty – of the dead were members of the CPI-M. The point here is not to position any one political party as perpetrator or victim, but to indicate that violence continues to be an important part of the way in which politics is conducted in West Bengal.

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lower-class ‘revolutionary’ consciousness. But if there is a ‘class war’ in the countryside, the large landlords, the enemy named most often in the CPI-M’s own pronouncements, are conspicuous by their absence. What is more evident is continual sniping over wages, tenancy arrangements and the control of land, in which the management of conflict becomes a key watchword for the CPI-M. The party’s efficacy in resolving these minor disputes remains important, both to keep the memory of its past struggles alive and to demonstrate its continuing power in the countryside. But it is hardly credible to interpret these struggles as being aimed at a further radical shift of power in the countryside. The disputes described by Rogaly and others are primarily those between richer peasants, and conflicts are always fought out with an eye to their electoral significance. What these ‘interruptions to the norm’ suggest is that the political project of the CPI-M in West Bengal is far from complete, and far from unchallenged. We would argue that such outbreaks of violence are not merely isolated events, or flaws to be ‘corrected’ by the reinstatement of party discipline.43 Rather, they are constitutive of a particular form of decentralized democracy, where the possibility of political violence and the correct following of committee procedures are equally part of village life. We return to the consequences of this ordering of political conflict in our conclusion, and again in chapter 8. Vaishali: caste politics and political competition Violence is also constitutive of politics in many Districts of Bihar, including Vaishali. The general view of politics in Bihar, which in important respects is not wrong, is that the Forward Castes (Brahmans, Bhumihars and Rajputs, especially) who once dominated there have been replaced over the past thirty years by political parties that have claimed the state for the rural OBCs.44 These acts of replacement, moreover, which have erupted in a series of bloody confrontations, have had the effect of reinforcing a pattern of rule which refuses to deal with the collective action problems that are supposed to define ‘everyday politics’. To the extent that ideology has entered politics it has been through an effort to empower the (mainly Other) Backward Castes against their erstwhile tormentors. In some areas this has promoted a Naxalite politics focused on land and 43

44

Any suggestion that political violence is centrally organized or sanctioned is strongly resisted by the party. Its representation as local action by unruly members allows the higher echelons of the party to distance themselves from these incidents, however useful they might be for short-term electoral gain. At first under Karpoori Thakur, and later, in a more sustained fashion, under Laloo Yadav. Useful guides to the agrarian and political struggles of the 1970s and 1980s can be found in Blair (1980, 1984), Frankel (1989), Hauser (1993), and Januzzi (1973).

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labour issues, but empowerment has more generally been conceived in terms of honour (izzat). Part of the appeal of Laloo Yadav is that he personifies a muscular form of subaltern politics which trades an eye for an eye. The idea that the state should be run for the ‘common weal’ is refused in this model. Politics is conceived as a Darwinian struggle for survival, in which the strongest politicians take strength from the often tightly defined groups which they represent (the Yadavs, say), or with whom they seek to ally (the Muslims for the RJD). What is missing from this account, however, or from overdrawn contrasts between ‘Bihar’ and ‘West Bengal’, is that competitive politics is deepening in many parts of Bihar, and with many of the same effects as can be observed in its eastern neighbour. Consider, for one last time, the nature of political society in Bidupur Block, Vaishali District. We were concerned in chapter 5 to show how an externally imposed agenda for ‘good governance’ was reshaped by the activities of key players in this locality, including, most notably, the de facto MLA of the area, BB. Government officials in Bidupur and Vaishali come under enormous pressures from local politicians and their main supporters. Laloo Yadav was the MLA for the surrounding Raghopur assembly constituency from 1995 to 1998, and BB is one of his leading supporters. We also showed how the network of contractors and supporters that surrounded BB was penetrated only to a small degree by members of the poorest communities in the Block, including the Paswans, Dusadhs and Musahars. These communities were cut off from the metal-topped roads that were built under the EAS, largely at BB’s direction (see figure 5.3). We discovered exactly the same situation in nearby Patepur Block, where two of us drove to a possible ‘research village’ in January 1999 with the local Circle Officer. As we approached the main tolas of the village, the CO pointed out the neatly built brick roads that led to the settlements of various Yadav families: roads built with EAS funds. When the brick road ended, and we spilled on to a deeply pot-holed earthen road that ran for half a mile to the furthest tola, the CO told us, ‘as the Yadav tolas end, so does the kharanja [brick road] too. Now you will see the settlements of Musahar tola ahead.’ The wretched poverty of the Musahars of this tola offers clear evidence of the failure of political society in Vaishali to deepen sufficiently to empower the poorest. Government was not working for the Musahars and their preferred means of advancement, or simply of survival, was long-distance migration to Punjab and Haryana.45 Nevertheless, even in 45

We were told that 30–40 per cent of households sent at least one member to Punjab or Haryana. People were well-informed about wages in other states (that is, they accessed information that was valuable to them), and one villager told us that, ‘as members migrate this brings down the employment-seeking population here’.

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this community, it was apparent that the very ‘absence’ of sarkar was a subject of reflection, and even action. Villagers said they were reluctant to approach Block officials directly, because ‘we are illiterate’. But it also transpired they had ‘a tola mate who goes to the Block and speaks on our behalf, as he is the only matriculate in the entire tola’. In this particular case, the villagers maintained that the ‘tola mate’ had swindled them of funds on another project, but this is perhaps less important than the fact that a sense of entitlement to government funds, and thus a sense of citizenship rights, was widely felt in this disregarded community. In the ranks of the Other Backward Classes this sense of entitlement is equally well formed, but it is underpinned by a sense of achievement. The ‘state’ has clearly failed these and other people in all sorts of ways. We have already commented on the poor state of educational provision in the public sector, and the failings of the power sector and hospitals in Bihar have been widely remarked, alongside the criminalization of politics (see chapter 7). In the specific case of ‘developmental funds’, however, including those distributed under the EAS, it is important to underscore a point that we began to sketch out in chapter 5: namely, that if BB sits at the apex of political society in Bidupur, he is required to be responsive to a broad range of actors in civil and political society. In some respects, indeed, the high level of political competition that can be observed in Bidupur poses greater problems of ‘democratic management’ for BB than would commonly be faced by his counterparts among the CPI-M in Midnapore. His enthusiasm for the conversion of the EAS into a road-building scheme must be seen in this context. Instead of dictating to middle-ranking groups in Bidupur’s political society, BB was required to acknowledge the remarkable fragmentation of traditional authority structures that have occurred there over a thirty-year period. Along with the local MP and DM, he had to decide on who, in what ways, in what order, and to what degree (including financial), a wide range of contractors, households, fixers and communities could be made to share in the bounties of developmental spending. He had to do so, moreover, in the knowledge that most of these individuals or groups have a very good grasp of how ‘the state’ works at the level of the Block office, and of who precisely must be bribed to get a particular job done or contract awarded.46 If BB failed to perform his tasks satisfactorily he could be punished at the ballot box, or possibly be shunned by his own patrons within the 46

For many poorer people, small payments to the VLW are the first step into a government system marked both by the professionalization of corruption and by a greater degree of social levelling in its incidence.

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Rashtriya Janata Dal. Lower-level fixers and politicians also run the threat of physical violence being used against them. Again, this is not so very different from some other states in north India. The deepening of democracy in Bihar is bound up with the power of numbers and with the threat of physical force. This is also where a sense of citizenship is slowly being forged. BB is seen as a boss and a patron, but he is also seen as someone who is responsible to the ‘middle orders’, and who might yet be brought under some measure of control – or simply be opposed – by the Scheduled Castes. Demands are brought to bear upon BB by fixers in political society, and these fixers must have regard for the wishes, and even demands, of ordinary people who are becoming more aware of their rights. At the same time, however, the deepening of democracy in Bihar is occurring alongside forms of political mobilization that call to mind New York City under Boss Tweed. That is to say, people are learning about democratic values in the ways that many people did in ‘the West’, as opposed to in the textbooks of the West or the international development agencies. They understand that rules emerge from conflicts, and that politics can be costly for those who are keen to control the power and resources that flow from them. Conclusion The political settlements that we have described for Midnapore and Vaishali would doubtless be found to some degree in other parts of India. Political societies are structured by an uneasy and slowly shifting set of relationships that are governed by patron–client relations and the threat of violence, on the one hand, but which are also responsive to the demands of ordinary people who put pressures on lower-level fixers and political operatives. These demands, moreover, are sometimes articulated with reference to a discourse of ‘rights’, or a sense of people’s legitimate claims upon ‘the state’ (whether as an individual or as a member of a population). In West Bengal, the panchayats are operating in many Districts to ensure that the poor are incorporated within state-sponsored mechanisms for the redistribution of some assets and even some voice. Poorer people are familiar with the practices of panchayati raj but in some areas there has been little in the way of learning about rights or even struggle. As a consequence, the rural poor are still largely dependent on party elites rather than being agents in their own right. It is mainly through participation in gram baithaks that a broader sense of citizenship is being learned. In Bihar, meanwhile, caste tensions keep social conflict out in the open, but militate against development and the empowerment of the most marginalized social groups. Set against this, a high level of political competition

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in some Districts, as for example in Vaishali, is creating new spaces of participation for the Other Backward Castes, including the Yadavs and the Kurmis. Whether these acts of participation describe the making of modern citizens is a moot point. Partha Chatterjee might argue that caste or ethnic politics stand in opposition to the civility of a politics that is focused on individuals and the prosecution of their statutory rights. We agree, up to a point, but we would also want to insist that pork-barrel politics is hardly unknown in ‘the West’. The distinction that Chatterjee maintains between political society, on the one hand, and civil society on the other, can more reasonably be thought of as a set of interlocking political practices that are arranged along a continuum. Elections in Midnapore and Vaishali illustrate this very well. They are certainly occasions for ‘the great anonymous performance of citizenship’ (Chatterjee 2004: 18). High levels of voter turnout among the poor indicate a growing sense of recognition that politicians and governmental agencies must take the preferences of ordinary people into account. The act of voting, moreover, feeds into a broader range of transactions between ordinary people and their points of contact in political society. It is through such transactions that a sense of citizenship begins to develop. We saw this in Vaishali. At the same time, however, as Appendix 2 graphically illustrates in the case of the 1999 general election in Hajipur Constituency, Vaishali, members of the most excluded castes (Bihar) can be effectively barred from voting by the use (or threat) of violence. Appendix 2 also makes clear that the (supposedly) anonymous act of voting is bound up with intensely visual and highly personalized performances of political power that appeal to ‘ordinary people’ as men or women, as members of caste groups, and as the clients or supporters of named authority figures.47 Again, this is not so very different from what happens in ‘the West’, or at least in parts of the United States. Voter fraud was widely reported in Florida in the presidential election of 2000, and the use of ‘ex-felon lists’ to disenfranchise black voters in the same state in 2004 was also discussed by news organizations. Problems of ‘good governance’ are much greater in Vaishali than in Florida, of course, not least because people have better means of redress in the US, but the civil/political society opposition is less clear-cut than we sometimes imagine. Chantal Mouffe’s description of politics as ‘the attempted pacification of the political’ is perhaps more 47

In West Bengal, acts of ‘booth capture’ and other forms of directly forceful exclusion from politics may be more rare, and generally are not played out in caste terms. Nevertheless, as we have noted above, violence remains an important constitutive part of these personalized performances of power for the CPI-M and its political opponents alike, however ‘free and fair’ the voting is on polling day.

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instructive in this regard. In eastern India pacification does not imply the absence of conflict, but its attempted regularization within particular forms. Aggressive competition is present as a threat and as a practice across all our field sites. In Vaishali, however, this takes the form of competitive caste mobilizations for the capture of governmental resource streams. In Midnapore it involves a political settlement that links a space for the empowerment (and voice) of the rural poor to a continuing high level of party control. Each pattern of rule opens up and closes down certain options for the rural poor to engage with the political process.48 These political settlements in turn expose the shallowness of measuring government performance in eastern India against an idealized model of ‘good governance’ or ‘democratic politics’. Judgements of this sort will continue to be made, of course, and it is part of our wider argument that they can have constitutive force when they are backed by the policing or funding powers of central government or the leading development institutions. When we say that such measurements are not ‘useful’ we do not mean that democratic practices cannot be improved in each of our field sites, or that the agendas of participatory development and good governance are irrelevant in eastern India. Of course not: we mean to suggest that the incentive systems that structure political cultures can be difficult to change. A focus on political institutions can be misleading if it encourages the view that decentralization, say, or even democratization, will promote development (or even ‘freedom’) in a straightforward fashion. Political institutions take shape in political cultures. Just as importantly, and this applies to the Left as well, it is a mistake to suppose that political cultures that might be admired in one locality can be transferred with ease to another. This was an implicit suggestion of Atul Kohli’s important and generally positive analysis of the state and poverty in West Bengal. We will argue in chapter 7 that we need to have close regard for the very different trajectories by which poorer people can (and cannot) hope to make the state work better for their families. This chapter also finds us moving back to some of the broader issues that we 48

Importantly, these patterns of rule, and the spaces of empowerment they open up for the poor, are dynamic. The reinstatement of panchayat elections in Bihar soon after the main period of our fieldwork could begin to restructure the patterns discussed above. It is possible that the panchayats will bring a new range of personnel, including social and charity workers committed to more positive and inclusionary forms of politics, into political society at the grassroots level. In West Bengal, the 2003 panchayat elections saw some potentially important reversals for the CPI-M-led Left Front, including the loss of Malda District Council, one of the first Districts the party has lost control of in twenty-five years and six rounds of elections. Whether this prompts a more significant shift in the party’s style of ‘managed participation’ remains to be seen. In both cases, the political trajectories remain uncertain, and any gains experienced by poorer and excluded individuals are clearly reversible.

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raised in part I. Our work in eastern India has provided us with a platform from which to research in some detail questions relating to governance and governmentality. We have done this mainly through a study of the Employment Assurance Scheme and primary education provision and uptake. We have tried to show how these sites of state–poor encounters give rise to, and are structured by, the sightings of the state made by poorer men and women, urged on by ideas about participatory development. We have also looked at those sightings made by government officials and members of political society, which are informed to some degree by ideas about good governance and democratization. We now want to widen our lens and consider some of the very diverse ways in which poor people speak back to ‘the state’. Very often, as we shall see, this is done in ways which refuse (or which seem to refuse) the blandishments of the new public administration.

Part III

The poor and the state

7

Protesting the state

Introduction In the past four chapters we have tried to say something about the spaces of empowerment that open up for poorer people in their dealings with government officials and other authority figures around the EAS and primary education provision. In some cases these spaces can be enduring and quite extensive, as we saw in Debra Block, Midnapore. For all that the CPI-M attempts to fill the political society of this Block, poorer men (and some women) are given opportunities to work on government schemes, and they have some say, too, about the running of those schemes and their local public schools. Political society is also quite thick and competitive in Bidupur Block, Vaishali, although as yet the Scheduled Communities have not managed to make much headway against the Yadavs and other OBCs. In Old Malda Block, political society is less open to the voices and interests of the poorest, and spaces of empowerment are harder to detect. Poor levels of literacy and information circulation conspire against the agendas of participatory development and good governance, and such successes as we could report tend to be episodic and sometimes short-lived. Poorer households tend to fare worse here than in Bhojpur or Ranchi, where patrons are often more responsive to their clients. In the final part of the book we want to extend our terms of reference to include a broader range of political encounters across India. We also want to review the agendas of the new public administration in the context of political societies, such as can be found in Kerala, that might be thought to be more receptive to their concerns than a state like Bihar or even Jharkhand. Once again, this returns us to James Scott, but not to Seeing Like a State, which has surprisingly little to say about the ways in which people talk back to their overseer. This time we are directed to Weapons of the Weak, where Scott looks at the diverse strategies employed by members of peasant households who fight back against

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the depredations imposed upon them by landlords, traders, merchants and government officials. Weapons of the Weak has been criticized for playing down the gendered nature of peasant politics, and for ignoring such large-scale peasant rebellions as can be observed.1 But Scott’s work forces us to think through both the conditions of anti-state and anti-landlord protests, and the highly variegated forms in which these politics are made flesh. Faced with the greater power of the landlords and/or the state, the rational peasant falls back on more Brechtian or Schweikian forms of everyday resistance, among which Scott numbers foot-dragging, deception, desertion, joke-telling and non-compliance (Scott 1985: xvi). In this chapter we want to present a similar take on the politics of the poor in contemporary India. We should straightaway say that we cannot hope to do more than scratch the surface here, at least in terms of identifying and commenting upon specific political acts or movements. There are several excellent books that take up these issues in detail.2 Our purpose, rather, is to direct attention to some of the generic forms of resistance by means of which poorer people talk back to the state or advance their agendas for good governance. More exactly, we want to suggest that these forms of resistance/promotion very often take shape with reference to the different sightings of the state that are made by poorer men and women, and indeed by some government officers and members of the international development community. Chapter 6 began this task, but here we return to the broader canvas that occupied us in chapters 1 and 2. We begin with questions of accountability and some of the different ways in which poorer people have demanded a right of inspection of government information. We then turn to the politics of decentralization, and in particular to recent experiments with panchayati raj institutions in Madhya Pradesh and Kerala. These experiments are bound up with the construction of citizenship and involve more direct sightings of the state. Next, we turn to questions of izzat, or the politics of honour and empowerment. Our focus here is on Bihar, and to a lesser extent Uttar Pradesh, two key states in the Hindi heartland where a dominant politician from the Backward Classes presents him- or herself as the embodiment of a new type of rule. Finally, we consider how the power of the state might be sighted along class and sectoral lines, and from the perspectives of reformers who are active within the Government of India or the international development community. 1 2

Hart (1991), Brass (1991). See, inter alia, Baviskar (1995), Hasan (1998), Omvedt (1993), Pai (2002), Skaria (1998), Webster and Engberg-Pedersen (2002).

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Information circulation and the question of accountability When we invited villagers in Sahar Block, Bhojpur, to think aloud about pathways to enhanced pro-poor governance, they quickly pointed to issues of information circulation and usage.3 Our respondents complained about the lack of information they had on government ‘schemes’. They also made the point very firmly that they needed information in a form they could make sense of and which provides the basis for specific actions. Although no one in Sahar Block cited the example of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (see also chapter 1), these are similar to demands that have been made by the MKSS in Rajasthan. The MKSS has been at the forefront of a right to information movement that has been gaining ground in India more widely. The organization was formed in 1990 and its initial concerns had to do with the enforcement of minimum wages legislation. As Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey explain, ‘in fighting for minimum wages [for example, on government drought-relief programmes], the MKSS first understood the significance of transparency and the right to information. It was necessary to access records, to prevent corruption, to try and obtain the minimum wage, and to ensure that infrastructure actually got built. Every time the workers made a demand for minimum wages they were told that they had not done the work, as proved in the records. [But] when the MKSS made a demand to see the records, they were told that these records are government accounts and therefore secret’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 3). The MKSS came face to face, in other words, with a frankly colonial bureaucracy which hid behind some of the provisions written into the Official Secrets Act of 1923. Interestingly, the tactics that the MKSS evolved to press for a right to information, a demand that we might consider to be ‘modern’ or rightsbased, as in key respects it must be, made use of a repertoire of vernacular understandings of the ethics of public life that reached back to pre-British days. Christopher Bayly has argued recently, and more generally, that ‘the particularities of Indian nationalism have to be understood in the context of Indian forms of social organization and ideologies of good governance that pre-date the full western impact even if they, in turn, had been modified by colonial rule’ (Bayly 1998: vii). He suggests that we should tread with care when dismissing nationalist or caste-based discourses in India as

3

As part of a DFID-sponsored exercise that we report in chapter 9.

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merely derivative, or as the bastard children of imperial categories.4 This is to deny ‘Indians agency in their own history’ (Bayly 1998: 3). It also forgets that Punjabis and Bengalis, for example, had a sense of territory and territorial identity before the British imposed modern boundaries. Extending this argument somewhat, it is important to note, as well, that what Scott has previously called ‘the moral economy of the peasantry’ (Scott 1977), has many times been invoked in different parts of India to check ‘uncalled-for’ behaviour on the part of kings and their retainers or officials. Ramachandra Guha reminds us that what became known as the Chipko andolan in the 1970s was anticipated in Uttaranchal in important respects by the institution of the dhandak: a form of ‘rebellion as custom’ which combined ‘individual and collective resistance to tyranny by officials with a simultaneous call to the monarch to restore justice’ (Guha 1989: 67). What was challenged here was not the idea of the state, but its corruption by individuals who had ‘gone wrong’, or who failed to obey the tenets of natural justice. The MKSS sights the state in a not dissimilar fashion, but with due regard for the conventions of law and ‘right’ at the national scale. In its first incarnation, the MKSS made use of village-based public hearings, or Jan Sunwais, to place the local state firmly in the glare of public scrutiny. The first Jan Sunwai was held in Kotkirana panchayat in Pali District, Rajasthan, in December 1994. Members of the MKSS had been approached by ‘a poor, middle-aged man about underpayment of wages’. They had used their links to a ‘cooperative bureaucrat in temporary charge of the Block Development Office’ to access relevant documents, the contents of which ‘were copied out by hand under the disgruntled gaze of the office staff’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 4). Facing down opposition from local goons and politicians, the MKSS pressed ahead with a Jan Sunwai which was attended by ‘over a thousand people’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 4). Using an ‘informal idiom of conversation and exchange’, but with ‘all the seriousness of court proceedings’, the people of Kotkirana were turned into a large jury which heard evidence from fellow villagers about what they had discovered in the copied records. According to Roy and Dey, again, ‘Person after person came to the mike, to say their name was fictitiously recorded on the muster roll; that they were away on migration; that they did not do manual labour; that the names of their dead fathers and relatives had been entered [and so on]’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 5). Much as we found in eastern India, the MKSS discovered through 4

Bayly is taking aim at Chatterjee (1986, 1993) and Dirks (1992), among others. Dirks replies in the final chapter of his book, Castes of Mind (2001). See also O’Hanlon and Washbrook (1992).

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a string of Jan Sunwais that more than 30 per cent of government funds marked for poorer people were, on average, being diverted to government officials and local politicians. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the biggest rakeoffs were in the poorest Districts and panchayats, where ‘poverty (and its alleviation) were big business’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 8). In the second half of the 1990s the MKSS was able to use the system of Jan Sunwais to expose the links between corruption and the electoral system in rural Rajasthan. The sarpanch of Kukarkheda, Basanta Devi, was pressured in a public forum to return ‘100,000 rupees which had been proven through the documents and the public depositions as having been defrauded from the panchayat . . . The whole area was buzzing with the news. “Laloo or Jayalalitha did not return stolen money, but Basanta Devi has”’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 15). Like many sarpanches across India, Basanta Devi had assumed that she had the right to dip into, or simply loot, the contracts she had received from local politicians in return for helping to get the vote out for them at election time. Now that ‘right’ had been challenged, and the MKSS felt emboldened to scale up its demands for information circulation and accountability to the state level. Partly in response to pressures from the MKSS, the Rajasthan State Legislature passed a Right to Information Law on 1 May 2000. Perhaps more significantly, the state Assembly moved in the same month to pass an Amendment to the Panchayati Raj Act which created the legal entity of the ward Sabha and vested it with powers of social audit. It is still too early to judge how these social audits will fare. Ward Sabhas will be as time-consuming as Jan Sunwais, which typically last a day or more, and there is no reason to suppose that government officials will make information available freely or on time unless they are placed under pressure. Some bureaucrats are already fighting back against the MKSS. They argue that its actions are likely to choke the arteries of government, and will provoke a rash of false charges against government officers who lack the means to defend themselves. There is doubtless some truth in these complaints, just as there is a pressing need for independent assessments of the activities of the MKSS and the effectiveness of its Jan Sunwais.5 It is hard to escape the conclusion, even so, that the MKSS has enjoyed considerable success in Rajasthan, and has done so for a variety of reasons that speak directly to the concerns of this book. To begin with, and perhaps most importantly, the MKSS has encouraged ‘the people . . . to concretely perceive the links between their personal lives and the political processes of democratic functioning. They saw the links between the check dam and the 5

See Jenkins and Goetz (1999).

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debate over State allocations, the planning process, and the implementation machinery’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 5; emphases added). The MKSS facilitated these sightings, moreover, not simply by its efforts at procuring and/or copying government records, especially at the panchayat level; it also dramatized its quest for accountability by means of rural juries armed with little more than microphones and perhaps a video recorder, as well as by hunger strikes, dharnas (sit-ins), and such innovations as the Ghotala [scam] Rath Yatra (a play performed in a dharna tent), and the declaration of pakhand divas (hypocrisy day) and kala divas (black day), both of which led up to ‘victory day’ when the Panchayat Raj rules were finally amended. The state was sighted by low-level technologies that produced a version of that same state in highly visual local spaces – theatres, in effect, that involved an audience in a partly scripted deconstruction of the state’s descriptions of itself. In addition, and also very significantly, the MKSS took steps to scaleup its campaigns by joining forces with the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) in New Delhi, and by working actively alongside committed politicians and journalists, including Kuldip Nayyar and Nikhil Chakravarty. By this means, especially, the grassroots campaigns of the MKSS were made to rub shoulders with demands for open government that were being raised in metropolitan areas, and which have come to focus on the fourth estate (the press and media) and the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts. As Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph have recently shown, the ‘supreme court’s judicial activism helped to repair and correct the Indian state [during] the era of unstable, short-lived coalition governments in the 1990s’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 132). Helped by a more engaged presidency, and by an Election Commission brought to life by T. N. Sheshan, the Chief Election Commissioner from 1991 to 1996, the courts laid claim to the primacy of ‘the chief justice’s views against those of the political executives . . . in the appointment and transfer of high court and apex court judges’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 139). They also ‘played a critical role in approximating a framework of lawfulness and predictability that has had some success in protecting citizens’ rights, limiting malfeasance and safeguarding environmental and other public goods’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 132).6 6

It should be noted that Rudolph and Rudolph are fully aware of the enormous backlog of cases facing the court system in India at the highest levels (765,426 cases in the Allahabad High Court alone in 1995: Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 137), and of the fact that judicial activism has often been in response to pressures that first emerged in civil society, and with environmental and human rights activists in particular (as in the cases of opposition to ‘environmental degradation and big dams (Narmada, Tehri), [and] child and bonded labor’ and demands for ‘Dalit (ex-untouchable) empowerment, and historical and cultural preservation’: Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 137).

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Decentralization: getting closer to the state? A more activist judiciary in India might in time prove to be a major source of empowerment for differently placed individuals within the rural and urban poor. Niraja Gopal Jayal is right to warn that, ‘the state manifests an uneven relationship with society: combative towards some forces and collusive with others’ (1999: 99). Even in Orissa, however, where at ‘the local level, the relationship between state and society becomes less paternalistic and more directly exploitative as state functionaries browbeat the illiterate poor into submission’ (Jayal 1999: 99), there is evidence that the food crisis in Kalahandi District was addressed, and partly mitigated, by ‘the use of institutions of parliamentary democracy, such as adversarial politics in the legislature, a vigilant press, and a judiciary receptive to public interest legislation’ (Jayal 1999: 238; emphasis in the original).7 In neighbouring Jharkhand, meanwhile, the women’s movement has been active in pressing the issue of female land rights in the High Court, and indeed in the Supreme Court in New Delhi, where a judgement is still awaited. Such legal challenges tend, however, to be brought on behalf of poorer people, and there can be no guarantee that a judgement in their favour will be properly enforced. Partly in recognition of this, the Government of India has argued that poorer people must be brought into a more direct relationship with ‘the state’, and indeed with the political process. To this end it passed in 1993 the two constitutional amendments that we have discussed previously (see chapter 4), which devolved greater powers and responsibilities to local government. In addition to arguments about the merits of decentralization (that people will take a more active interest in government if they have some say in how decisions are reached and monies are spent), the thinking behind the constitutional amendment Acts had regard for the principal-agent problem. That is to say, there was a stated recognition of the fact that many lower-level government officials, most of whom would be recruited from the state cadres, could not be supervised properly by their principals. Even assuming that District and state-level IAS officers were well-intentioned and honest, they were simply unable, for the most part, to keep their subordinates in check. Muster rolls could be falsified and false accounting could be practised on a widespread basis. One way to address this question, central government now reasoned, with support from many external actors, was to institute both surveys of the attitudes and practices of public officials, and also public service reforms.8 New managerial systems could be put in place 7 8

Amartya Sen would see this as supporting evidence for his thesis that famines do not occur in open or democratic societies (Sen 2000 and cf. our discussion in chapter 2). Including the survey of public officials in Uttar Pradesh that was commissioned by the World Bank in 2000. See also World Bank (2003).

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that would reward honest and innovative behaviour, and which would deal harshly with corruption or ineptitude. But another way to deal with the same question was to reduce the powers of the ‘agents’. This could be done by turning over some of their responsibilities to ‘the people’ through an invigorated system of panchayati raj institutions. We have no desire to go over old ground here. We have seen that decentralization is no guarantor of empowerment. The costs of participation often remain high for poorer people, and for women especially, many of whom continue to face enduring structures of social exclusion.9 In most states, too, the decision-making powers that come into view remain limited, at best, and are sometimes unsupported by devolution of funds.10 Nevertheless, it will be useful to consider in more detail how decentralization has played out – or has seemed to play out: collecting detailed evidence is always difficult – in Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, two states that are pointed to with some regularity in discussions of decentralization. What lessons, if any, can we learn from the experiences of people in these states about the political possibilities that might inhere in closer inspections of the state? Madhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh is one of the poorest states in India and forms part of the Bimaru group of ‘backward states’, along with Bihar and presumably now Jharkhand from those among our research area. It was formed in 1956 from parts of modern-day Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, and goes by the cutting nickname of the ‘leftover state’ (Shesh Pradesh). This changed when Digvijay Singh came to power as Chief Minister of a Congress (I) government in 1993. The state now began to make headlines for its experiments with ‘pro-poor governance’. Among the reforms that Singh supported were the following: the decentralization of funds and powers to PRI institutions for the purposes of rural development, social welfare and some revenue matters; the promotion of an Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS-MP) to help promote universal literacy; a Participatory Watershed Development Programme that would link anti-poverty agendas to environmental regeneration; a District Poverty Initiative Programme that provides grants instead of loans to poorer people identified by means of participatory wealth rankings; a Citizen’s Charter and Right to Information Act; the country’s first sub-national policy for women’s development; and improved IT facilities in rural areas. 9 10

Brett (2000). For extended commentary, see Crook and Manor (1998); Manor (1999).

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There is some evidence to suggest, as well, that Singh’s push to involve greater numbers of women and members of the Backward Classes in ‘participatory government’ did meet with a measure of success. The reservation of posts in government from the level of panch through sarpanch on up to the post of Zilla Adhyaksh (Chair of the District-level council) helped to ensure that slightly more than a third of all panches are women and that members of the Scheduled Communities make up about 40 per cent of elected representatives at the Block and District levels.11 As Srivastava reports, too, on the basis of extensive fieldwork in two Districts in different regions of MP, Vindhya and Mahakaushal, ‘the act of bringing thousands of actors from the poor castes into the institutions of panchayati raj has not been without impact. . . . [The process has helped] in the demystification of the state, bringing into the open how the powerful in society and the erstwhile middlemen build up connections with and influence on Sarkar (government). . . . [they also learn] of networking strategies, the machinations of cuts and commissions, routes to higher mobility, and so forth, all leading to what Hirschman would call improved exit and voice options in the longer run’ (Srivastava 2003: 23). Nevertheless, as Srivastava also reports, and as we should perhaps expect in a state where decentralization is being gifted from above, largely in the absence of a sustained mobilization of the poor, the workings of the new PRIs are far removed from the rhetorics in which Digvijay Singh once sought to surround them. Srivastava found that what he called the ‘constitutional sarkar’ was being widely nudged aside by the ‘permanent sarkar’, or that loose assembly of the landed, the higher castes, males, contractors, MLAs and MPs, and District-level bureaucrats. In some cases, the control of the permanent sarkar over the constitutional sarkar was direct and very open, as where the Brahman husband of the female sarpanch continued to manage the business of the panchayat – including signing checks, running meetings and so on – while his wife looked after the education of their children in a small town 35 kilometres away. In other cases, control was exercised more indirectly, as when a 70-year-old sarpanch from a Backward Caste turned up for work, but was little more than a frontman for a local Rajput landowner who had ‘fought’ the election against a rival Rajput with his own frontman. And in still another case, power was exercised over an elected, Backward Class sarpanch by means of a more educated panchayat secretary who was put in place by 11

We are grateful to James Putzel and John Harriss for allowing us to quote from work that Manoj Srivastava has carried out for them as part of a DFID-funded programme on ‘Crisis States’.

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members of the permanent sarkar. In this case, principal-agent thinking was turned upside-down. Instead of the principal (the elected panch or sarpanch) exercising control over his or her agent (the panchayat secretary), the latter person was using an educational advantage to reproduce the power of the (minor) bureaucracy. The results of these forms of ‘elite capture’ were at once predictable and depressing. Srivastava found that panches and sarpanches were taking advantage of a new rule that allowed for no government audit of schemes budgeted at Rs. 50,000 or less. They used this rule to siphon off funds from the JRY allocation, either to line their own pockets or to fund their political ambitions. The government of Madhya Pradesh had intended that spending of this order should be scrutinized by members of the panchayat directly, through a social audit. But this provision was unknown to most villagers, and was not acted upon in the form even of statutory gram sabhas. In the Vindhya region, Srivastava reports, a simple rhyme has been composed to express popular feelings about the enormous rakeoff of funds (up to 90 per cent on some estimates) from the JRY budget: J-R-Y, matlab jeb kharch aayee (roughly, when JRY funds arrive, then the pocket expenses thrive). Srivastava came across one case where an up-sarpanch carried out minor roadwork to the value of Rs. 800, but was asked to sign for a much inflated figure. The up-sarpanch later found out that a sum of Rs. 53,000 had been entered in the register. He was also able to report in some detail on the pressures under which many sarpanches laboured: it generally cost Rs. 10,000–25,000 to fight an election; there were various small costs associated with ‘moral patronage’ (helping people in distress) and status enhancement (refreshments for visitors); and the sarpanch needed significant funds to bribe such inspecting officers as there still were, and to make contacts with MLAs, MPs and ministers if she or he wanted to climb the political ladder. (Interestingly, and again predictably, the transfer of some budgets to the sarpanch from those of an MLA had not only caused many MLAs (and MPs) to exert pressure on Digvijay Singh to tone down his decentralization agenda, but had improved the bargaining position of the sarpanch). Sadly, in the eyes of many villagers in MP, decentralization has become little more than a recipe for the greater looting of the state. To the old thieves were now added some new thieves, some few of whom, of course, would have come from poorer families. Kerala An optimist might say that things will change in time in Madhya Pradesh, and that at least people from the weakest sections are now standing for

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election. Assuming that not all of these people are fronting for more powerful individuals, we must suppose they find it rational to engage with a more participatory form of democracy. But we might equally make use of O’Donnell’s term, ‘low intensity citizenship’, to describe state–poor relationships in MP, and we should certainly have regard for Chibber’s charge that India suffers from an excess of ‘democracy without association’.12 Poorer people in the Bimaru states still learn to see the state through vertical and highly mediated exchanges with members of the permanent sarkar. Even when some of their numbers gain command of some state agencies or funds, there is no reason to suppose, a priori, that they will take the part of the poorest or abide by the rule of law. Of course, matters might be very different in Kerala. The so-called ‘Keralan model’ has been widely applauded on the Left, and it is undoubtedly true that levels of literacy and basic health-care provision in Kerala are excellent, and put richer states to shame. Doubts continue to be voiced about the long-run capacity of the private sector to generate jobs in the face of high levels of unionization and government regulation of labour markets, but even these concerns have been displaced amid renewed excitement in Kerala’s experiments with participatory democracy.13 In 1996 the government of Kerala introduced ‘The People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning’. Important planning and budgetary functions that previously were left to state-level agencies were now devolved to urban municipalities and rural gram panchayats. The government also took steps to ensure that village assemblies (gram sabhas) would be held twice-yearly in all gram panchayats, so that ordinary men and women could engage with the planning process. Thus described, there is little perhaps that sets Kerala apart from many other states which have sought to enliven local (self-)government. In Kerala, however, the Left Democratic Front which was returned to power in 1996 has sought to build upon a long tradition of popular mobilization that had brought poorer people into political society through land reforms, highly organized political parties, and mass-based organizations of workers.14 To this end, the government committed a large number of ‘key resource persons’ (KRPs) to work with each gram panchayat at the time of the first gram sabha, when the planning cycle was initiated. The KRPs were trained by the State Planning Board, and were given the job of distributing publicity in advance of the gram sabha. They also had to work with the local government official who would preside 12 13

O’Donnell (1993), Chibber (1999); this sentence after Chaudhuri and Heller, 2003. 14 Kannan (1988). Dr`eze and Sen (1995), V´eron (1999). See also Parayil (2000).

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at the village meetings. According to one observer, the training exercise in Kerala amounted to ‘the largest non-formal education program ever undertaken in India’ (unnamed person, quoted in Chaudhuri and Heller 2002: 6). In the first year alone, ‘in seven rounds of training at state, district and local levels, some 15,000 elected representatives, 25,000 officials and 75,000 volunteers were given training. About 600 . . . Key Resource Persons received nearly 20 days of training. Some 12,000 . . . District Resource Persons received 10 days of training, and at the local level more than 100,000 persons received at least five days of training’ (Chaudhuri and Heller 2002: 6). In subsequent years, training was targeted to members of the Scheduled Communities and women, and the government’s efforts were supplemented throughout by the activities of civil society organizations, including, most notably, the Kerala Sashtra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP: the People’s Science Movement). In many ways, the KSSP was the progenitor of the training effort. Observers are agreed that the State Planning Board has depended heavily on local-level experiments that have been initiated over the course of twenty years by the KSSP’s mainly white-collar volunteers. Whether these efforts have truly empowered the poorest is hard to say. We lack studies that describe in detail how the gram sabhas have functioned: whether and how those people in attendance take part in substantive discussions; and whether and how the budget is spent in a manner that improves the capabilities of poorer people (or the designated recipients). Nevertheless, we do now have the first reports of a programme of research that has sought to interpret a remarkably complete set of attendance registers from gram sabhas in all 990 of Kerala’s gram panchayats. Data sets are available for each of the first two years of the campaign, and they provide information on the attendance rates of the Scheduled Communities and women. According to Chaudhuri and Heller, the data sets suggest a very high level of participation – ‘it is possible that close to a third of the households had an adult member who attended [a] gram sabha’ (Chaudhuri and Heller 2002: 8). They also point to ‘a dramatic increase, from the first to the second year, in the social depth of participation. Not only did the participation rates of two traditionally subordinate groups, women and members of SC/STs, increase substantially, in the case of SC/STs participation rates in the second year were higher than those of the general population in 80 per cent of the panchayats’ (Chaudhuri and Heller 2002: 8). Chaudhuri and Heller interpret these base findings to mean two things: firstly, that members of the subaltern communities are finding it privately

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rational to engage the local planning process; and, secondly, that the increased participation of these two groups in 1997 needs to be understood both in terms of the increased budgetary allocations that were on offer to them, and with regard for the concerted efforts at mobilization in these communities that were made by the State Planning Board and the KSSP in 1997. They also point out that those panchayats that recorded levels of attendance that were significantly below the average were generally those: (a) where a larger geographical area discouraged some women from making the journey to the meeting-place; and (b) where previous levels of popular or labour-based mobilization were low. Taken together, these findings would seem to confirm that regularized sightings of the local state can lead some members of the ‘weakest sections’ to find it worth their while to engage the planning process. These sightings, however, have to be tied to a visible set of rewards or payoffs (direct or indirect), and they are most likely to persist when they are situated within a sustained programme of political activism at the grassroots level. This was missed in the first writings on the new public administration, and to a large extent the politics of good governance is still neglected.15 The data also suggest that high levels of literacy have helped people to ‘see the state’ in less restricted terms than would be common in Madhya Pradesh. In Kerala, there is a greater understanding of, and possibly sympathy for, the idea of the state that is put forward on a regular basis by left-leaning, secular political parties. Whether this translates into a real and lasting redistribution of power and resources is unclear. The first stage of Chaudhuri and Heller’s study does not address this question, although they seem cautiously optimistic that such is the case. What is clear, however, from elsewhere in India, is that when the voices of the poor are treated with contempt, they are increasingly likely to seek redress by capturing the state and turning it into an instrument of sectional power. ‘I am the state’ The title of this section is taken from Sankarshan Thakur’s (2000) engaging biography of the erstwhile Chief Minister of Bihar (The Making of Laloo Yadav: The Unmaking of Bihar). Laloo Yadav has become a figure 15

Tendler’s (1997) work is more attuned to political questions (see chapter 5), if not perhaps to political struggles, and it would be misleading to suggest that some of the leading development agencies are not beginning to engage critiques of their work which have made the charge of ‘depoliticization’. We shall have more to say on this in chapters 8 and 9.

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of fun for the chattering classes in Delhi, and a hate figure for many in the Forward Castes. In late-January 1999, when two of us were trying to gain an entry to a suitable research village in Bidupur Block, Vaishali District, a Laloo heartland, we chanced upon an elderly Rajput farmer who led us to the banks of the Ganges in a village not far from the one we settled on. When the topic of Laloo came up in conversation, he exclaimed with real vehemence, and in a mixture of English and Hindi, that ‘the man was worse than Hitler, worse even than Sikander’. Farmers like this gentleman, of course, along with many Brahmans and Bhumihars, have long been used to exercising economic and political (including cultural) power in their villages.16 Particularly in central Bihar, which we discuss shortly, the upper castes had been able to convert their control over land, labour and credit markets into control over the political system and the use of public space. From an upper-caste point of view, life was orderly and the political had been pacified. Members of the Backward Classes were expected to defer to their employers or ‘masters’, just as wives were compelled to obey their husbands. (An extraordinarily high level of ‘dowry deaths’ continues to speak to this pattern of oppression in the Rajput and Bhumihar areas of our field locality in Sahar.)17 The police and other local-level state employees were expected to do the bidding of the Forward Castes, and these communities supplied key members of the political class in Bihar. The higher reaches of the civil service, moreover, were staffed overwhelmingly by members of the Forward Castes, including Kayasthas, and they had a reputation for running the state in a technically competent manner that lasted until the late 1960s. It is sometimes forgotten that Bihar is the state which provided India with its first president, Sri Rajendra Prasad, and that the state was ruled for the first fourteen years after Independence by just one Chief Minister, Dr Srikrishna Sinha. Seen from this comfortable perspective, the arrival on the political scene of Karpoori Thakur and Laloo Yadav could only be seen as a descent into chaos, or the dark ages (Kali Yuga), almost literally so given the failings of the power sector in Laloo’s Bihar. In some respects Laloo Yadav was Karpoori Thakur’s prot´eg´e, although he lacks the latter’s roots in Lohiaite socialism.18 Thakur was one of the first politicians in Bihar seriously to challenge the power of the Forward Castes and the 16 17 18

Das (1983), Sinha (1991). It was suggested to us that there might have been as many as thirteen deaths over a period of ten to fifteen years. A follower of Ram Manohar Lohia, the main leader of the socialist opposition to Congress in the 1960s.

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Congress.19 He also gave Laloo Yadav his start in parliamentary politics. He first gave the erstwhile JP activist and student leader a ‘Lok Sabha ticket in 1977 and then . . . a Lok Dal seat in the Bihar Assembly’ (Thakur 2000: 53). But the two men were also very different, and could be considered to pose very different threats to the established order. As Sankarshan Thakur makes clear, Karpoori Thakur had a reputation for simple living and a basic level of honesty. ‘It was said of Karpoori Thakur that once he was chief minister of Bihar his brother-in-law approached for some financial help, perhaps a job in the government. . . . Having heard [his case], Karpoori Thakur produced a fifty-rupee note from his pocket and handed it to him saying, “Of course I will help you. We are barbers by caste, go and buy yourself a barber’s tool set with this and begin earning money”’ (Thakur 2000: 183). Laloo Yadav, in contrast, has been charged with corruption on a grand scale, with his antagonists pointing in turn to the ‘fodder scam’, to his supposed acquisition of properties overseas, and to his wife’s (Rabri Devi’s) declaration that it was the profits from her herd of cows that paid for the family’s shopping complex in Salar Kalan and ‘four rather large houses in and around Patna’ (Thakur 2000: 184).20 There is a more important difference between the two men, however, which has been pointed up by Shaibal Gupta. Whereas Karpoori Thakur ‘represented a more Sanskritised section of the backwards, those with a certain level of education and economic power . . . Laloo Yadav [brought] the cockney backwards to the forefront, a non-Sanskritised, earthy, rusty section that spoke the local dialect and existed on the fringe of the market’ (Gupta, quoted in Thakur 2000: 97). As is well known, Laloo Yadav first put together a coalition of Yadavs, Kurmis and Muslims, and Bihar has been a notably safe state for Muslims under his leadership.21 By the time of the 2001 panchayati raj elections in the state, however, the first in almost 19

20 21

This is not to discount the contributions of Jaipal Singh in Jharkhand (the Jharkhand Party provided the main opposition to Congress in Bihar in the 1950s), or of Jayaprakash Narayan (whose JP movement is still celebrated in Bihar, including at the museum/shrine to JP in Patna). Nor is it meant to marginalize the opposition provided by extraparliamentarians, including peasant leaders like Swami Sahajanand in previous decades (Hauser 1994). It is simply to record that Karpoori Thakur brought the Backward Classes firmly and forcefully into electoral politics in Bihar in the 1970s and 1980s. For more on the fodder scam, see Nambisan (2000). Laloo Yadav gave orders for the arrest of L. K. Advani, later Home Minister in the BJPled National Democratic Alliance government, when he entered Bihar in October 1990 on the penultimate leg of his Ram Rath Yatra from Somnath (Gujarat) to Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh). He also deployed the police and other forces to protect Muslims in the wake of the disturbances that followed the Mumbai bombings in February 1993. Ashutosh Varshney (2001) has written an important account of the geography of communal violence in urban India, arguing that it is most likely to occur where civic associations do not

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twenty-five years, Laloo Yadav was seeking to link the Muslim and Yadav vote blocs to communities and leaders from within the ‘lower Backward Classes’. Although the elections were not fought on party lines, it is clear that his Rashtriya Janata Dal was under pressure from his erstwhile allies Nitish Kumar and Ram Vilas Paswan,22 and that, much as Kanchan Chandra’s work would predict (see chapter 1), Laloo Yadav was having to offer a small share of the spoils to allies from within the Scheduled Communities. But there were problems here, too, as we suggested earlier. The very scale of Bihar’s ‘patronage democracy’ was turning the state into an empty shell, barely able to function in key respects. Some of the funds that could be drawn down from New Delhi were being spent on tangible projects like road-building, as we reported in part II, and were the subject of extensive negotiations in local political societies. Yet no determined efforts were made to come to terms with the state’s pressing financial problems. Thakur writes movingly of the awful state of the Dharbanga Medical College and Hospital, where a lack of money and security allowed ‘Cats and dogs [to] reign in the labour room, [and where] open-stomach surgery is performed next to open drains with Erasmic shaving blades’ (Thakur 2000: xviii). He also goes on to quote a doctor, who notes, very much in line with Chandra’s thesis, that ‘Only two kinds of patients come: those who are well-connected and hope to get free and special care, and those who have nowhere else to go’ (Thakur 2000: xviii). This is a state, too, whose Chief Secretary in 1998 received an open letter from N. C. Saxena, then Secretary, Rural Development, Government of India, lambasting corruption at all levels, and declaring that, ‘The State of Bihar is being treated like a private property by those at the top . . . [and run by] a lower-level bureaucracy [that] has no work ethic, no feeling for the public cause, no involvement in the future of the nation . . . they have only a grasping, mercenary outlook, devoid of competence, integrity and commitment’ (quoted in Thakur 2000: 146). He went on to note that while his ministry had set aside more than 1,000 crore rupees for rural development schemes in Bihar in 1997–8, ‘Not a single rupee has been sanctioned by our department for drinking water schemes this year because the Bihar

22

transcend the Hindu–Muslim divide. It is not clear, however, that this general thesis can account for the specificities of the Bihar situation, a state which moved from gruesome killings of Muslims at Bhagalpur to relative peace in the mid to late 1990s. Political will, rather than civic association, would seem to be the decisive variable here. See also Brass (2003), Breman (2002). Nitish Kumar jumped ship to the Samata Party, a close ally of the BJP in Bihar. Ram Vilas Paswan founded the Lok Dal Shakti Party to mobilize mainly among Dalit groups. The two men formed an alliance at the time of the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, but could not sustain this unity against Laloo Yadav in the state Assembly elections in 2000.

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government has not been able to finalise procedures for buying pipes for the last one year’ (Thakur 2000: 146–7). It is difficult not to share Saxena’s outrage, or that of Sankarshan Thakur. But we also need to understand the conflicting rationalities that have produced this state of affairs. One of the reasons why Laloo Yadav and his lieutenants enjoy popular support among the Yadav community, and among the Backward Classes more broadly, is precisely because their sighting of the state is so sectional. If there is no sense of ‘the public cause’ or ‘the future of the nation’ this is largely because these terms have meant little to the historically subaltern classes in Bihar. The ‘state’ in Bihar has too often presented itself to the poor or the socially excluded as an oppressor, or as the preserve of the forward castes. Part of Laloo’s appeal, or the appeal of Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, is bound up with the declaration that ‘now it is our turn’. No apologies are made for recruitment policies that staff the state with Yadavs, Kurmis and even Muslims. Nor are apologies made for making hospital beds available to supporters of the extensive corps of political ‘fixers’ on whom senior members of the RJD must rely. For many of the low-caste men and women who now get beds in Darbhanga Medical College and other hospitals, it might be the first time they have gained admission to an important state institution. So long as some doctors and bandages remain, their sighting of the state might be positive, at least compared to what they knew before. In a situation where state resources are scarce, and when there is a recurrent expectation that the Forward Castes might be returned to power, it can be privately rational to pursue a form of politics, in the widest sense of that word, which targets the state not as an abstraction but as a favour, a bed, or a job. In the longer run these modes of economic and political management will not be sustainable, and it is possible that the government of Bihar will have to pay closer attention to funding sources in New Delhi, within the state, and even abroad.23 But this is not yet of great concern to Laloo Yadav, or even some of his supporters. When two of us interviewed the Chief Minister’s husband in Patna in May 1999 he embarked on a lengthy diatribe against ‘development’, which at one point he declared was leading to holes in the ozone layer. The more serious import of his remarks, however, was that development had more to do with patterns of social exclusion than with economic growth. Laloo Yadav took pleasure in asking ‘Professor-ji’ to take a look at the ten or so framed photographs that were hanging on the walls of his study. What was the common theme? 23

Laloo Yadav made a visit to Singapore in the late 1990s, ostensibly to drum up support for foreign direct investment in Bihar.

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The answer, which sadly eluded the academic, was that in each case he was being taken off to prison. Laloo Yadav makes a good deal of this. He is the anti-establishment figure, the lowly cowherd who embodies the ‘authenticity’ (rusticity, perhaps) of rural India, and who speaks back to those who look down on ‘the common people’. Nandini Gooptu reminds us that: ‘The extension of the scale of celebration of Holi [in UP in the 1920s and 1930s] reflected the concern of the shudra poor, first, to resurrect a supposedly lost kshatriya power and glory, secondly, to uphold Lord Krishna both as an icon of martial prowess and as a patron deity of the poor and powerless, thirdly, to celebrate the triumph of the good, and, finally, to enact the symbolic inversion of the established order of power and hierarchy’ (Gooptu 2001: 213). The political appeal of Laloo Yadav needs to be understood in this context. It is too easy to write him off as a rogue or buffoon, as some are inclined to do. Laloo Yadav rather needs to be understood as a Yadav leader who dismisses the idea that the shudra poor in any sense deserve their present fate. In his rough prose and flamboyant political performances, he calls to mind both the idea of the beer, the brave but ascetic hero figure, and the Dada, the muscular protector or boss of a neighbourhood. When Laloo Yadav declared that he was the state, he was reminding his supporters – and his enemies – of what Gooptu calls ‘the courtly culture of shudra, especially yadav, kings’ (Gooptu 2001: 217), and their associated displays of strength. His tacit support for the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in central Bihar (see next section), and his hurried visits to the sites of upper-caste massacres of the Backward Classes, help to consolidate an image of a political leader who refuses to bow to Kshatriyas or Brahmans. Many Backward Caste men and women support Laloo Yadav precisely because he articulates – and personifies – their aspirations to speak back, to be virile. He is a charismatic leader in the secular and popular sense: not a man who has divinely given talents or powers, but a man who projects and writes into public culture the fantasies of an oppressed majority. Sublimation becomes part of the sighting of the state that ordinary people make, and with that projection comes a barely concealed threat of violence. The registers of this violence, moreover, which run from allbut-sanctioned ‘revenge killings’ to the visual and aural symbolism of the lathi yatra and rough speech, are registers which speak back to the violence done to the poor and excluded by the forward castes.24 Laloo Yadav may have been less effective than Mayawati in writing public space with 24

Laloo’s use of language is neatly dissected in Thakur (2000); see Frontline for an account of the Lathi Yatra of June 2003. A lathi is a bamboo stick or staff, a yatra is a march or procession.

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statues (of Ambedkar in her case), but like Mayawati he has positioned himself as an avenging leader. When his supporters in Bihar see the state, they very often see him as well, and in him they might aspire to see a stronger version of themselves. Less opaquely, perhaps, they have also been empowered to draw the line when it comes to their engagements with government officials and some employers. Laloo Yadav has built successfully upon Karpoori Thakur’s attempts to change the terms of the ‘poverty debate’ in Bihar. Instead of an emphasis upon jobs and services, he has emphasized the issue of social exclusion and a person’s sense of self-worth or honour (izzat). And in this specific respect his politics can be judged a success. Poorer men and women in Bihar might not expect to gain much from the state, but some of them at least (perhaps the members of the ‘creamy layers’) no longer expect to be treated with disdain, or abusively. In any case, for the Yadavs and Kurmis, especially, many of the people they now see in the state are members of their own communities. If Laloo Yadav is Sikander, they are his lieutenants and foot soldiers. ‘We are the state’ might be the new slogan for these communities. Combating the state The successes of some members of the Backward Castes in taking possession of the state in Bihar have not yet been matched by the Scheduled Communities (although matters are different in Uttar Pradesh). Some members of these communities prefer to keep the state at a distance, and some have joined political movements – the so-called Naxalite movements – that see the state as an enemy. These movements, which began in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal in 1969, and which are active also in south India, particularly in Andhra Pradesh, position poorer people and government officials as necessary antagonists in an ongoing struggle over land and forms of rule. Government officials who are targeted in this way are often defined in very broad terms. As we write, The Hindu is reporting that four members of the People’s War group have thrashed a transport official in Gunter District, Andhra Pradesh, for amassing wealth through corruption and getting his transfer orders cancelled. They also torched his vehicle.25 Meanwhile, in central Bihar, Bela Bhatia has reported several attacks on schoolteachers in MCC-dominated areas.26 The MCC has also been active in leading attacks against the armies (senas) of leading Bhumihar and Rajput landlords, including the Ranvir 25 26

The Hindu, 27 May 2003, downloaded from the Internet on 30 September 2003. Albeit in the course of an analysis of ‘Naxalism’ in Bihar that is far from unsympathetic to its subjects: Bhatia (2004).

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Sena in Patna, Jehanabaj and Gaya Districts. Some of its cadres have also helped to enforce extensive areas of ‘no cultivation’, where organized landless labourers are under strict orders not to work the land of a named employer, although in Bhojpur the lead in this respect was taken by the CPI-ML. Violent attacks on landlords or state officials are hardly new phenomena in rural India. Certain fantasies persist about pacific Hindustan, encouraged perhaps by some Gandhian writings on the soul of India residing in the country’s villages, but Paul Brass is right to remind us that many villagers perceive the police, for example, ‘as marauders, equivalent to dacoits, not their protectors, but rather an additional, more powerful, and more dangerous band of robbers than those for whom robbery is a vocation’ (Brass 1997: 374). In his view, most villagers in north India experience the external world as a Hobbesian state of nature in which resort to force is at once natural and expected. Murders of state officials are not uncommon in this world, and have long defined state–society relations. The dhandak (see above) is one example of this, albeit on an individuated scale, while the so-called forest wars in Singhbhum District, Bihar (now Jharkhand) in the late 1970s and 1980s generalized such killings over an extended spatial scale.27 What is perhaps specific to the Naxalite movements, however, is the matter of their organization and ideology.28 Notwithstanding important differences between them, the movements led by cadres of the CPI-ML, or the MCC, or People’s War, are infused with at least some degree of ideological training which positions men and women from the Scheduled Communities, mainly, as foot soldiers in the class struggle against feudal landlords and mahajans (money-lenders), and their protectors in the government. In central Bihar, the activities of these various groups have had three major effects, as the outstanding recent work of Kalpana Wilson and Bela Bhatia helps to make clear.29 To begin with, the ‘revenge killings’ that the MCC and some other groups have organized have undoubtedly helped to dent the power of local landlords. The ‘flaming fields’ of central Bihar are dotted with gruesome reminders of upper-caste attacks upon dalits and other poor 27

28

29

Areeparampil (1992); Corbridge, Jewitt and Kumar (2004: chapter 4). We should say again that we do not agree with Brass in all respects. Political life in rural north India is less anarchic than Brass suggests. The institution of the dhandak, indeed, which is not one of Brass’s concerns, is an attempt to re-establish a moral order of sorts, or to reclaim politics from the political. It is necessary to insist on the plural here, and to distinguish the tactics and changing policies of the CPI-ML, say, in Bhojpur, from those of the MCC or a group like People’s War in Andhra Pradesh. Bhatia (1998, 2004); Wilson (1999).

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people, as at Pipra, Arwal, Nagri and Shankarbigha, but recent attacks on the Bhumihar-dominated villages of Chauram and Rampur-Aiyara have demonstrated the willingness of labouring groups and the organized Left to fight back.30 These killings, moreover, have been complemented by insistent and often well-targeted attacks upon government officials, including District Magistrates (DMs) and high-ranking police officers. The DMs of Gaya and Jehanabaj Districts now travel in armed convoys, hoping thereby to avoid the landmines that might be placed across their paths. Fear of the MCC is now so great that various ‘units’ further south in Jharkhand, in Hazaribagh and Palamau Districts, have attempted to demand money from aid agencies working in the area, including the Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project.31 The second objective of the ‘ultras’, or the ‘extremists’, as the government likes to refer to them, is to drive the state out of areas they seek to control.32 The People’s War Group (PWG) has been effective in this regard in some of the forested areas on the borders between Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. But in central Bihar, too, there are zones that resemble a battleground. In the area of Sahar Block, Bhojpur, where we worked in 1999–2001, the state was sometimes present in the form of an occupying army of soldiers and policemen.33 The developmental state, in contrast, has faded from view, and the few petrol stations left along the heavily pot-holed road to Arras have been turned into virtual fortresses, such is the lack of state control over some parts of the Block. At the same time, however, this very part of Bhojpur District has been the site of long and difficult, and in key respects successful, struggles by the CPI-ML to raise the wage rates of agricultural labourers. Working in the face of appalling violence and intimidation, cadres of the CPI-ML sought periodically over the course of thirty years to organize labouring households in strikes that removed a significant amount of cultivable land from the effective control of its owners. Some Naxal groups have also been able to declare the formation of ‘Liberated Zones’ where order is generated (or imposed) by the groups themselves. It would be wrong, 30 31

32 33

For more information, see: www.satp.org/satportp/countries/india/terroristoutfits/ massacres.htm Project officials in 1999 found it hard to tell whether it was the MCC making demands, or whether gangs of disaffected youths were acting in its name. Nevertheless, the threat posed by the MCC was real enough, and was one reason why the EIRFP pulled out of Palamau District before the second stage of the project began in 2000. Significantly, the government of Bihar refers to ‘infestations’ of extremists. It should not be assumed that these ‘armies’ were always made unwelcome by poorer people, or that they straightforwardly took the part of landowners. The connections between Laloo Yadav and the MCC, in particular, remain deliberately open to interpretation, but there is no doubt that the ruling RJD regime has deployed paramilitary forces to keep the landlords’ armies in check.

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however, to refer to these zones in uncritical terms. The fact remains that most villagers are required to fund the rebel groups who live amidst them, and some will see the rebel occupiers as little more than a ‘quasistate’, with all the latter’s powers to dispense summary ‘justice’. It is also true that many villagers in the Liberated Zones remain as targets for the landlords when the rebel units move on, as they very often do. Thakur reminds us that ‘the upper caste feudals have always been better off for the simple reason that they are better entrenched. They have better resources, better networking and their targets are always within their sight: their own landless poor. . . . On a rough count, the Ranveer Sena, or its variables, killed ten Harijans for every single Bhumihar life lost in the so-called caste wars of central Bihar in the last decade’ (Thakur 2000: 166). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for those families that can move to Delhi or Punjab, to labour elsewhere, migration remains a more favoured route for escaping the state in central Bihar. Damaging the (urban) state Migration, of course, is no guarantee of better treatment. Wage differentials between Punjab and Bihar are sufficiently high to induce a westward flow of labour, but low-income migrants the world over tend to get a raw deal from the state.34 This was and remains the case in many parts of southern Africa, where the flow of black labour to white-owned mines and plantations has helped reproduce outposts of urban-industrial capitalism amid predominantly non-capitalist modes of production.35 It is also the case in California and Florida, where the gracious living styles of the white middle and upper classes, including many Latinos in southern Florida, are made possible in part by the legal and illegal flows of Mexicans, Cubans and Haitians into household and gardening labour pools, as well as to the sugar fields and orange groves.36 And Jan Breman has provided marvellous documentation over many years of the ways in which agrarian and industrial capitalism in the Surat region of Gujarat has been supported by the importation of cheap and unprotected adivasi labour streams from the dryland interiors of the state, or from neighbouring Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Some of these labourers don’t get to see the state at all, at least not in person. They are generally housed in compounds attached to the houses of their employers, or in ‘hutment 34

35 36

The state very often being in tow to ideologies of ‘territory’ and the ‘nation’ even as its ruling classes demand the entry of migrant labour forces. For a speculative account of the politics of ‘the migrant hordes’, see Hardt and Negri (2000). See the essays in Wolpe (1980). Davis (2001) and Gonzales (2001) provide useful introductions.

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colonies [where they] remain deprived of mutual contact’ with other members of the labouring poor (Breman 1985a: 377). In any case, there were only three labour officers employed by the Assistant Commissioner of Labour to work in rural areas of Surat District in 1977, and these individuals liked to ‘accept payments from [farmers] in return for neglecting to register complaints and track down infringements of the regulations’ (Breman 1985a: 303). As Breman points out, ‘These state servants would not be averse to helping the agricultural labourers but these, of course, cannot afford the price of protection’ (Breman 1985a: 303). It is unclear whether any (or many) of these labouring men and women will have joined in some of the marches or demonstrations that have taken shape under the banner of the ‘new agrarian politics’ – a politics which claims to pit an authentic rural India (Bharat) against the neocolonial powers of urban India. On the face of it, their participation would seem unlikely, and quite possibly against their best (economic) interests. Most of them will have an interest in lower foodgrain prices, not the higher prices being called for by farmers’ leaders like Mahendra Singh Tikait of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU). This will also be the case for local pools of agricultural labour – and yet there is certainly evidence of men and women from these communities joining in the new politics. The very scale of some of the marches on Delhi that were organized by Tikait in the 1980s and 1990s, or by Sharad Joshi of the Maharashtra-based Shetkari Sanghatana, suggests that labouring men and women must have jumped on trains and buses to swell the crowds to several hundred thousand or more. Ashutosh Varshney has sought to explain this seeming contradiction within the framework of a rational choice model of politics.37 He suggests that members of the labouring poor will support the new agrarianism when they expect it to lead not just to higher food prices but also to higher real wage rates. In these circumstances, it is possible that poorer rural families will set aside differences with their local employers and come to see an urban-biased state as the source of their poverty. Rational political actions would then include demands for cheap water and electricity, higher farm output prices, and lower farm input prices, much as Tikait has demanded. To the extent that poorer people in the countryside can be provided with more heavily subsidized grains through the Food Corporation of India/Fair Price Shops system, so much the better. On the other hand, and this seems more likely to us, it is also possible that poorer people have joined the new agrarian politics because they have been coerced to do so by their employers, or because they have responded 37

Varshney (1995).

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to the symbolism and sense of social obligation of these social movements. Jim Bentall’s patient fieldwork in western Uttar Pradesh established very clearly that Tikait was drawing support from Jat landless families far more than he was doing from the numerically preponderant Scheduled Castes (Bentall 1995). The BKU mobilized support within Jat khaps (lineages), and by reinventing Jat concerns for the authenticity of ‘soil culture’. But Tikait was also successful in making an appeal to ‘political symbols and forms which generate and reinforce undifferentiated notions of a community of commodity producers’ (Hasan 1998: 109). The fact that this appeal edged at times into support for the Hindutva project might not have discouraged poorer men and women, including some Scheduled Castes, from taking part in a politics which so raucously denounced the ‘vampires’ who drained the ‘blood of rural India’: the merchants and petty traders, to be sure, but also the operators of electricity sub-stations, and the urban-based officials who declared farm support prices and who handed out permits to sell sugar cane to state-owned refineries.38 Here, perhaps, is where the real strength of Mahendra Singh Tikait resides. Further south, in Maharashtra, Sharad Joshi, an ex-UN official and late arrival in the ranks of India’s farmers, has struggled to present a more intellectualized account of the problems of Indian agriculture. To be fair, Joshi has led effective and imaginative campaigns around particular crops: onions, for example, or tomatoes. And he is certainly able to use evocative language. He told Bentall that urban India was run by the ‘black British’, and that the countryside now laboured under the yoke of a second colonialism.39 For the most part, however, Joshi has kept his distance from campaigns for lower farm input prices, preferring to note the damaging ecological consequences of cheap water and pesticides. He has also kept his eye on the workings of the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) in New Delhi. Tikait, meanwhile, has sought to fill the shoes of Charan Singh, the powerful Jat farming leader who dominated UP politics in the 1960s, before he moved to the national stage. More so than Singh or Joshi, however, Tikait has been prepared to speak and act roughly. Much like Laloo Yadav, Tikait has been keen to promote an ideology of ‘avenging masculine power’ among his Kisan Union activists. According to a Times of India article from 9 August 1989, ‘Despite his innocuous exhortations, the Chaudary’s [Tikait’s] followers have repeatedly gone on the rampage; burnt down generators; refused 38 39

See Corbridge and Harriss (2000: chapter 5), Corbridge (1997). On the sugar permits, see Attwood (1991) and Jeffrey (2001). Interview on 26 March 1992, cited in Bentall and Corbridge (1996: 30).

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to pay official levies and dues; and attacked the police, often hindering investigation into criminal offences’ (quoted in Gupta 1998: 355).40 The reporter goes on to suggest that, ‘What matters [here] is the perception that all these actions are part of the “helpless” resistance to the organized might of the state’, something that he finds ‘dangerous [when] Mr Tikait succeed[s] in channelising this perception into organized protest’ (Gupta 1998: 355). But what he does not pick up on is the pleasure of violence itself, or of vandalism, which is something we should not underestimate. Thomas Blom Hansen writes of ‘the importance of social imaginaries, of desires of recognition, and the attraction of the public spectacles of violence and assertion that Shiv Sena has employed so successfully over the years’ (Hansen 2001: 7), and this insight can usefully be generalized. Mahendra Singh Tikait and Laloo Yadav have also understood the constitutive role of violence, and the sense of selfworth that many poorer people, and men especially, can gain from acts of destruction or even self-destruction. Making demands of the CACP will not mean a great deal to such people, but marching on Delhi has its own attractions. Riding free on a train, bearding the conductors, claiming the streets of the capital near the Boat Club Lawns, chipping away at a statue of one of India’s great and good, all of these things can be liberating. They speak to an account of politics as transgression and also of playfulness, even as they highlight what Scott has called the ‘weapons of the weak’. They also speak to very direct sightings of the state, one of the most concrete of abstractions as Marxists have sought to remind us.41 Reforming the state The state is also seen by its employees and by those charged with reviewing their modes of conduct, including consultants for external agencies or higher levels of government. We have made this point already, and yet it bears saying here that there are important movements within ‘the state’ to push in the direction of pro-poor governance, or what might be considered supportive of that goal. We have already reported the contributions made by a more activist judiciary, and it is worth noting that one of the leaders of the MKSS, Aruna Roy, has a background within the Indian Administrative Service. In her recent paper with Nikhil Dey, she reports that attempts to link the MKSS to the Press Council 40

41

Not all farmers approved of such actions. One farmer with nineteen acres told Bentall that, ‘Tikait has upset the discipline of the farmers. Anyone can cut an irrigation channel, anyone can burn a transformer. But I don’t like that’ (cited in Bentall and Corbridge 1996: 39). Marx referred to money as a concrete abstraction. For a discussion, see Harvey (1982).

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of India and the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information had been pushed forward in part ‘because of some committed bureaucrats and [because] the National Academy of Administration at Mussourie . . . played a supportive and facilitating role in the process’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 13). We await further work on the way in which administrators at Mussourie are instructed on the human technologies of rule which they are supposed to enforce in their future careers.42 It would be surprising, though, if the rather traditional, and decidedly masculine, forms of socialization that have made a virtue of academic excellence and self-reliance were not being leavened now by courses that promote a measure of reflection on the ‘proper role’ of the state vis-`a-vis different social groups. Better training, of course, is unlikely to be turned into sustained action when administrators are brought face to face with established elites in rural political society, or where a training regime is unsupported by incentive systems that reward pro-poor initiatives by individual officers or teams. This might especially be the case in the state-level cadres of the police and administrative services, where reform is perhaps most needed. Government officials have to make a living, and even the best of them will want to secure postings that allow them to educate their children properly. That can be difficult in remote areas, or in the face of consistent pressures from local elites to transfer officers who cause them trouble. But, again, smaller or larger spaces for empowerment can open up. Arnold Harberger has argued that ‘a handful of heroes’ can turn around whole economies or societies, and it would be unwise to discount the difference that someone as respected as N. C. Saxena can make in his or her department (see above).43 And even if one leans more to a structural account of the spaces of social action, as we do, the story that we related earlier about Polus B–, the adivasi schoolteacher in Bihar (now Jharkhand) who wanted to cut down and sell ten jackfruit trees, packs a punchline that is worth recounting (see chapter 1). Polus B– sold his trees to a dalaal for just Rs. 20,000 even through the trees were ‘worth’ Rs. 80,000 net of logging and transportation costs. He did so because he simply couldn’t face the money, time and social (humiliation) costs of dealing with various officials in the Forest, Revenue and Police Departments who had power over him. In 1993, however, a group of Forest 42 43

Potter (1996) remains the best account. See also Srivastava’s (1998) interesting account of the Doon School in forging the world-views of some among India’s elites. Harberger (1993).

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Department officers in Bihar began a campaign to deregulate the trade in those tree species that were commonly grown on private lands, and which were not found in abundance in Protected Forests. The jack tree was one of these species, and the officers made their case on the ground that their time could be better spent regulating competitive timber markets. They also argued that the current system was stacked against the interests of poorer people in Jharkhand, and on this basis, at least, they managed to gain some support from sympathetic MLAs and from a new Forest Minister who was keen to make his mark. The Transit Permit system was relaxed on a trial basis in 1994, and after a short burst of tree-felling the price of jack timber first stabilized and then increased in real terms. Significantly, too, the rate of jack tree plantings also began to increase at this time in response to new price signals. For the first time in thirty years, a healthy number of new saplings were being put in place alongside old trees that had begun to rot where they stood. Much as these officers had supposed, a new regime of deregulation could have positive social benefits for the poor while also leading to an overall increase in homestead tree cover.44 We should not get too carried away with this success story, for the old regime of nationalization was reimposed in 1996. A majority of officers in the Forest Department had opposed the new rules, and they joined together with a large number of dalaals and politicians to put pressure on the government in Patna to rescind its orders of 1994. Powerful interests are not easily dislodged, as we have repeatedly made clear in this book. Nevertheless, there are fissures in large organizations like government line departments, or between different branches of government, and these can provide signposts to a form of politics that some within the state are keen to exploit. The same argument holds true for the World Bank or the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID). It would be misleading to suggest that these organizations are not mainly responsible to their shareholders or subscribers, and the geopolitical interests which they are bound to uphold. The World Bank is not about to support Cuba or Libya. That said, these are complex organizations, and it is possible for agendas to be argued within them that might seek to empower the poor in direct and possibly quite ‘radical’ ways. The debate around the production of the World Bank’s 2000/2001 report on ‘attacking world poverty’ brought some of these issues to the fore, and if the debate was not finally settled to the satisfaction of the ‘radicals’ it was successful in 44

Corbridge and Kumar (2002).

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bringing several matters into the open. Clare Short’s leadership of DFID from its founding as a full ministry in 1997 to her resignation in 2003, following the US–UK invasion of Iraq, also opened the way to new debates on the direction and purpose of British lending policies. Her emphasis upon the ‘poor and the poorest’, as well as on issues relating to gender equality and sustainability, needs to be seen for what it was: an imperfect but reasonably honest attempt to bring new voices to the table of development thinking and practice. These initiatives are now being followed up by DFID’s Drivers of Change agenda, which promises to mainstream considerations of politics and political economy into the department’s attempts to ‘understand and effect pro-poor changes’.45 In some small way these voices are contributing to new sightings of ‘the state’ in what Escobar has called the ‘economically less accomplished’ countries of the world. Conclusion Our major concern in this book has been to consider how poorer men and women in India make sense of ‘the state’. By the state, of course, we have generally meant the ‘everyday state’ described by Fuller and Benei, or that ‘dull, routine, business-as-usual . . . state [that manages] literally millions of transactions at the grassroots level’ (Oldenburg 2003: 28), and which extends from the District Magistrate to ‘the office boy of the . . . state public sector Textile Corporation’ (Oldenburg 2003: 3) and on to the shadow state described by Barbara Harriss-White. None of these sightings will be unmediated, for they always have regard for past experiences, conversations with friends or relatives, newspapers read and so on, and with some broader sense of the ‘state idea’. But the range of possible transactions is immense, and it would be unwise to write off the possibilities for contesting actions around various state–poor encounters. We 45

In a background paper authored by Sue Unsworth on ‘Understanding Pro-Poor Change’ it is suggested that ‘DFID and other donors find it easier to say “what” needs to be done to reduce poverty than “how” to make it happen’. In a draft paper for the Drivers of Change initiative, the DFID team goes on to declare that Unsworth’s paper has enjoyed ‘remarkable resonance’ within DFID, and that there is now ‘widespread recognition that DFID and other donors need to make greater efforts to ground their programmes in understanding of country contexts, including a good grasp of the likely relationships between basic political, economic and social change over the long and medium term’ (Government of United Kingdom, 2004, quoting Unsworth/DFID 2001). It might fairly be argued that this recognition has come late in the day, and that DFID is still hedging its bets on how to support pro-poor political organizations and agendas, but even a cursory reading of this document will confirm that serious debates are being worked through within the organization.

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have made this point, in part, by reference to Laloo Yadav and the politics of izzat, but we should also make it clear that the state is challenged every day in the small acts of resistance that people deploy against government officials or systems of rule. James Scott is right in this regard. The meeting not kept, the fine not paid, the form of address that is refused – all of these can help poorer people to maintain a sense of dignity and self-worth in the face of aggressive and overbearing officialdom. This does not mean, however, that we are inattentive to the vast and enduring asymmetries of power that structure many or even most exchanges between ‘the state’ and poorer men and women. Richer people and higher-ranking state officials also come to meetings with an agenda, assuming they turn up at all. They also use words and gestures to establish the field of their social power, and they sometimes join with others to support political projects, including a lopsided version of liberalization and Hindutva, that Corbridge and Harriss have described as ‘elite revolts’. In the face of these actions, it would be a disservice to the poor to suggest that sustained progress in the direction of empowerment will come without a fight, or by individual actions alone. The major lesson we have been taught by the MKSS in Rajasthan, or by the CPI-M in Kerala and West Bengal, or even by Laloo Yadav and the RJD in Bihar, is that change comes through concerted struggle and from highly organized attempts to pare back the power of established social and economic elites. To the extent that members of the development community play down the need for conflict and contestation they will be led to misleading and possibly false conclusions about the relevance of a good governance agenda. In Bihar, a reasonably effective campaign to free the state from the power of the Forward Castes has not been accompanied by a sustained attempt to improve the state’s infrastructure. Nor has it improved the material conditions of existence of Bihar’s poorest communities. The state’s coffers continue to be looted, and the Scheduled Castes continue to find themselves in weak positions when they compete for jobs or make claims on sarkar. The fact that they now encounter Yadavs in the Block Development Office and Rajputs in the fields is arguably of little consolation. For many labouring families the options are simply to survive, to engage in struggles over pay and conditions at work, and/or to seek the exit option by migrating to Delhi, Haryana or Punjab. In this context, a form of government that eschews corruption, or which shares information freely with its clients, or which is effectively decentralized to the Blocks and panchayats, would undoubtedly be welcome. As Adrian Leftwich has pointed out, however, to suppose that good governance of this

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type will come easily to a state like Bihar is misleading. The incentive systems that are generally in play in political society militate against changes in this direction, and there are few signs of a challenge emerging to the conditions under which governmental business in Bihar is presently conducted.46 And yet, having made this point, it is not inconsistent to say that the ‘good governance’ agenda can make a difference in a state like Bihar (or, indeed, in Malda District, West Bengal), so long as we extend our field of assessment to include developments that happen slowly, episodically, and perhaps in only a few localities at first. The ‘depoliticization’ thesis tends to think about politics in terms of large structures and big events. Quite rightly, it points out that the empowerment of poor people is difficult to effect when large numbers of them, and poor women especially, are unable to read or write, and when most labouring families lack assets that they can use to acquire loans and social status. It also drives home the point that richer and more powerful individuals can be expected to defend their sources of privilege. What this thesis tends not to pick upon, however, are two propositions that point in the direction of Scott’s weapons of the weak, and the possibility that progress can be achieved by political actions that are small-scale, that sometimes are unintended, and which often happen at a lag. These propositions derive, first, from the more Foucauldian account of politics to which Scott comes close on occasions. This is an account which thinks of politics as a vast palimpsest of competing actions and counter-actions that take shape around the multiple capillaries of power that bring poorer people, in this case, into contact with ‘the state’ and its technologies of rule. In addition, they derive from the more pragmatic traditions of political (or policy) analysis that can be found in the community of development ‘experts’. As we shall show in chapter 8, there are good reasons for thinking that members of this community, including some employees of the World Bank, know full well that the good governance agenda will work best where political systems are also ‘pro-poor’. They also understand that opponents of good governance will have to be marginalized, co-opted or even bought off, as Judith Tendler showed in the case of health-care reform in Cerea, Brazil (see chapter 5). ‘Politics’, 46

It is possible, as we indicated in chapter 6, that the Scheduled Castes will benefit from the increased competition which is apparent within the OBC community in Bihar. Their leaders might yet strike deals with representatives of communities (such as the Yadavs or Kurmis) that have mainly thought about voter mobilization in ‘horizontal’ terms. It needs to be said again, however, that capturing some part of the state, or a patronage democracy, is no guarantee that the state will be made to run more efficiently in the medium or long term. This is the point of entry for the ‘new public administration’, for all its faults and occasional unworldliness.

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that is to say, is not absent from this form of analysis, but is conceived more in regard to tactics than strategy. It is perhaps also recognized that not shouting about politics can be part of an effective political agenda, particularly when attention turns (as it is beginning to turn in the development agencies) to the possibility of empowering poorer people against the state. This is something we shall consider further in the concluding chapters.

8

Post-colonialism, development studies and spaces of empowerment

Post-colonialism and political society The discipline of development studies does not have a good reputation among students of post-colonialism. Indeed, it is hard to think of two intellectual and political traditions that are further removed.1 Postcolonial scholars are deeply suspicious of the Eurocentric and depoliticizing instincts of development studies. This is a common thread in the work of Partha Chatterjee, Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson, however much they are divided on the possibility of development ‘itself’. Chatterjee and Ferguson do not fully share Escobar’s pessimism about the past fifty years: the age of misdevelopment that supposedly brought about only famine, debts and immiseration. But they do insist that the ambitious plans of the development industry are repeatedly frustrated by structures of power and politics that are opposed to easy talk of citizenship, good governance and benign economic growth. In the everyday worlds of ‘popular politics’, Chatterjee maintains, deals are struck by poorer people with those who mediate for them in exchanges with the state and governmental agencies. This is the dirty and sometimes dangerous world of political society. For Ferguson, meanwhile, the necessary and repeated failure of development projects to secure their stated aims is linked to the extension of state power over potentially rebellious populations. The development business, and the counterpart discipline of development studies, is neither ineffective nor especially insincere, but its power effects are often profoundly disempowering for poorer people. Worse still, perhaps, the rhetoric of participatory development and good governance is pushed down the throats of people who experience 1

Sylvester suggests that ‘development studies does not tend to listen to subalterns and postcolonial studies does not tend to concern itself with whether the subaltern is eating’ (1999: 703). This is an exaggeration, of course, indeed a caricature (consider the work of Chambers 1983, Narayan and Petesch 2001, and Parpart, 1993), and we shall need to deconstruct it later in the chapter. Nevertheless, it does capture a prevailing sense of stand-off: see also Briggs and Sharp (2004), Corbridge (1993a), Goss (1996), Mohan and Stokke (2000).

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authority in entirely other and more troublesome ways. In place of the hard work of politics and confrontation they are offered the candy-floss of good intentions and the traumas of structural adjustment. Our work in eastern India suggests there is a lot of truth in these observations. The Government of India has made play over the past fifteen years of its agendas for a new form of public administration. These agendas have embraced the schemes we have discussed here (the Employment Assurance Scheme, Village Education Committees and Joint Forest Management) as well as plans for the privatization of service provision in areas like urban water, sanitation and electricity supply. Taken in the round, they are meant to engineer a new set of relationships between government(al) agencies and members of ‘the public’. The aim, increasingly, has been to create an informed citizenry that is at once able to make demands of the state (including for employment and oversight of public officials), and which is also required to stand on its own feet (in the sense of taking responsibility for making payments to service providers). Similar proposals for good governance have been in play in countries across the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds, and have given rise to a huge and often critical literature. Chatterjee might be right to suggest that civil society is a western concept, but the construction of fully civil societies is hardly complete in countries like the UK and the US. Poorer people in London and Los Angeles make use of political society to access some of the services they consider to be theirs as of right, if not always by law.2 It is clear, nonetheless, that the good governance agenda faces particular problems in Districts like Vaishali and Malda in eastern India. As we showed in part II, rates of participation in the EAS in these Districts are dismally low, both in terms of labour days gained by poorer men and women and in terms of the workings of village open meetings. Such meetings as are held are very often captured, as most students of eastern India would expect, by members of socially or economically dominant groups, as well as by political fixers. They are also run by and for men rather than women. The intended beneficiaries of the EAS, for their part, are not always unhappy that decisions are taken for them, or that resources are diverted to the construction of pucca buildings or roads, as they were in Bidupur.3 Much depends on where and how the monies are spent, and on how people think about the opportunity costs of more direct forms 2 3

See the interesting discussion in Amitava Kumar (2002); also Davis (1991). By the same token, the fact that people are sometimes unhappy with these arrangements, and do complain, suggests that they are not always content with the forms of ‘mediated politics’ that dominate in political society. They also have a sense of their rights as citizens or as members of a population.

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of participation. Precisely because poorer men and women in forestdependent villages expect the benefits of JFM to accrue mainly to richer households, they refuse to participate fully in JFM executive committees or forest guarding activities. As we explained in chapter 3, poorer people also have close regard for the need to maintain their non-state social networks. They have well-informed expectations about the enduring nature of power asymmetries, and will think twice about making demands that would offend an important employer or patron. Injunctions in favour of ‘participation’ will often fall on deaf ears in these contexts, as will suggestions that government officers are being retrained to serve poorer people as clients or citizens. As we have stressed throughout this book, ordinary people form their sightings of the state at least in part through their everyday encounters with lower-level government officers. Villagers know that if they want to get a handpump built, or a house constructed under the Indira Awas scheme, they might have to bribe the VLW.4 And when it comes to dealing with more senior government officers, they will expect meetings to be brokered by an intermediary. Many of them will also expect to be treated as subjects rather than as citizens or clients, even if they want more even exchanges. In Malda District, indeed, the attitude of schoolteachers to parents (see chapter 5) is most often one of grudging compliance; a sense, perhaps, that members of a frankly uncivilized ‘crowd’ have on occasion to be humoured or listened to, even where their complaints and suggestions are later ignored. It is said that power corrupts, and it is certainly the case that the ‘good governance’ agenda is corrupted by existing power-holders in eastern India, as well as by a lack of investment in state capacity. Ferguson is right to ask questions about why such pallid and contradictory discourses are produced time after time in a world riven by enormous power inequalities. Chatterjee is also right to maintain that it is the identity and qualities of the agency that mediates power in political society that is often key to the livelihoods and sense of dignity of poorer people. ‘Who claims to speak for who, and on what terms?’, he asks. In Midnapore, as we have seen, it is the CPI-M which largely plays this role and which dominates political society, sometimes to good effect. Evidence from our Debra field sites suggests that Atul Kohli’s arguments from the 1980s are right in important respects: poorer people can be empowered by a well-organized, left-of-centre political party that puts pressure on (or directs) the local state to commit resources and power to 4

This knowledge also speaks to a well-informed and in some respects sophisticated account of how different government agencies work in practice.

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the ‘weaker sections’ of society.5 Kohli made this argument with reference to the land reform campaigns of the 1970s and early 1980s, and to the Left Front’s commitment to the registration of sharecroppers (Operation Barga) and the politicization of local government (the red panchayats). Our work has complemented this and other previous studies by highlighting the ways in which the CPI-M in Debra Block, Midnapore, was able to position itself as a major supplier of information, advice and work (through the Employment Assurance Scheme) to members of poorer households. Men and women in Debra Block were more than three times as likely as villagers in the four remaining study sites to gain work from the EAS (although a majority of them remained uninformed about the scheme’s main provisions). The children of poorer households in Debra Block were also more likely to attend functioning public schools than their counterparts in Old Malda or in Bihar, and parents were more able to exercise control over schoolteachers than was the case elsewhere. This was true notwithstanding the close links between the CPI-M and the teaching unions. In some respects, therefore, poorer people in Debra Block came to see the state in more positive terms than did poorer people in the remaining field areas. Notwithstanding the cynicism about politics that Arild Ruud reports for Burdwan District, West Bengal, and which we found often enough in Midnapore, it remains the case that many poorer people in these ‘red fortresses’ (Ruud 2001: 122) come to see the state in terms of the abstractions provided by the CPI-M’s actions and rhetorics, as well as with reference to the ‘Indianized accounts’ of politics that Ruud describes (Ruud 2001: 131–4). We would maintain, indeed, that the CPI-M’s insistence on making the state work for the poor amounts to something more than ‘politics as usual’, or the polluting activities of politicians who trade in deals rather than principles. Politics might be dirty in several respects, and effective politicians are certainly those men and women who get things done, but in Debra Block we detected something else besides. The effectiveness of the CPI-M’s party workers was also judged by their superiors, and with regard for a model of politics that was ideological, disciplined and rule-oriented (see chapter 6). This much was apparent in terms of the party’s control over the Employment Assurance Scheme in Debra Block. Efforts were made to direct resources to people who could be defined as poor in income and class terms, even as efforts were made, as well, to manage information 5

There are also problems with Kohli’s analysis. Drawn primarily from interviews with the upper echelons of the CPI-M, it portrays a party that is more coherent and more ideologically committed than that which exists on the ground today. For an evaluation of Kohli’s work on West Bengal, see Williams (1999).

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flows in such a way that poorer households would not form ‘unrealistic’ expectations of the state. The CPI-M encouraged disadvantaged people to see the state (and thus the party) as an institution that could be trusted to take the part of the poor, and to make goods and services available to them in a reasonably efficient and impartial manner.6 In important respects it was old-fashioned, which is to say that it refused some of the claims that are now advanced in favour of participatory development or empowerment. The party insisted that class was more important than gender, and that the delivery of development benefits counted for more than primary education provision.7 It also refused Amartya Sen’s rather easy suggestion that the maximization of freedoms along any one dimension will lead to an enhancement of freedom along all other dimensions. The CPI-M proposed a step-wise model of politics which insisted on tight party discipline and information control as a means to effecting even minimally pro-poor governance. It proposed, in effect, and perhaps quite reasonably, that poorer people had to be protected (or empowered) not just against other classes, but against some of their own dispositions and desires. In Bihar, in contrast, desire would seem to be openly at the heart of the politics prosecuted by Laloo Yadav and the Rashtriya Janata Dal. To the extent that Laloo’s supporters form a favourable view of the state it is often in terms that are personalized (l’´etat c’est moi) and by means of a performative politics of aspiration. Vocabularies of acclamation are phrased in terms of taking (back) control over the state, or of making the state work for the private financial and emotional interests of groups like the Yadavs or Kurmis. This renders them no less authentic, of course, but, equally, there is no need to mistake these important signs of sectional empowerment for a politics that is pro-poor in a wider sense, or in the sense of being oriented to the Scheduled Castes. At the same time, however, as we have also explained, the contrasts between ‘Bihar’ and ‘West Bengal’ can be drawn too starkly or onesidedly. Poorer villagers in our Ranchi field site have benefited from the 6

7

This is not to say that poorer people always internalized this sighting of the party or the state. Our work suggests that party workers are trusted to a degree, but poorer people also understand that key decisions often remain beyond their reach. During fieldwork in West Bengal in 1997, Williams was repeatedly told by CPI-M representatives that the party had ‘solved’ the gender issue simply by the reservation of panchayat seats for women. Of course, such ‘empowerment from above’ often changes precious little on the ground, and most grassroots activists saw the party’s mohila samiti (women’s front) as an organization of limited importance; it was concerned with activities that were limited to the domestic sphere. More generally, as we have stressed in chapter 6, the role that ‘class struggle’ plays within the CPI-M is now more about preserving a political order than it is with radically transforming it.

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efforts of the Mukhiya to put pressure on the local state to direct resources to his panchayat, even if this was at the expense of other localities in the Block (see chapter 5). In Bidupur Block, Vaishali District, meanwhile, we have seen that a politics of ‘desire and acclamation’ takes shape within a political society that is more competitive than in Debra Block. For the middling castes, especially, the state is brought into view, and made to do considerable governmental work, on a basis that secures a relatively even allocation of resources to panchayats and between non-SC villages. Neither here nor in Bhojpur is the state dominated by a small number of actors. State failure is apparent in both Districts, along with a measure of looting, but it is no more apparent than it is in Old Malda Block, West Bengal, where government agencies have been captured by members of the locally dominant elites. Public schools function badly in Malda, and health-care facilities are miserable. The physical landscape of Old Malda Block tells a tale of neglect and exploitation that is worse even than in Bidupur, where the local MLC did at least make sure that roads were built. The shadow states that Barbara Harriss-White describes in Tamil Nadu are out in the open here, and speak to a pervasive criminalization of politics that does few favours for the rural poor. Development studies and civil society Post-colonial (and Marxist) critics would be right to point to the limitations of a ‘good governance’ agenda in many Districts across eastern India. Poorer people often have to protect themselves as best they can by sidling up to mediators or protectors in political society. This is no easy matter when that society is dominated by the very individuals or groups who are opposed to their empowerment in a more structural sense. Most of the ‘participation’ that we observe in a Block like Bidupur (including meetings to hand over small payments to VLWs, or meetings between village leaders, contractors and BB) takes place in political society. We should not conclude from this, however, that political society eclipses civil society in eastern India, which seems to be Chatterjee’s assumption, or that the development industry, and development studies, is committed to a project of depoliticization, which is the thesis maintained in different ways by James Scott and James Ferguson. We want to close the book (here and in chapter 9) by saying why we find these arguments problematic. We do so first with regard to theoretical and empirical arguments. We then turn to questions of politics and public policy. We can start with the distinction that Chatterjee maintains between political society and civil society. This is an instructive distinction, and Chatterjee’s focus on the governmental rights of illegal and paralegal

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populations is a necessary corrective to glowing homilies about the unending construction of modern citizens. As he puts it at the end of his first Schoff lecture: ‘it is morally illegitimate to uphold the universalist ideals of nationalism [and citizenship] without simultaneously demanding that the [group-based] politics of governmentality be recognized as an equally legitimate part of the real time-space of the modern political life of the nation’ (2004: 25).8 But like all binary distinctions, this one is also overdrawn. Our discussion of rent-seeking behaviour in north and central Bihar (chapter 5) shows that government officers cannot always be classified as if they were members of either elite or vernacular society. They face competing pressures from different groups in civil and political society, as well as from within the departments or agencies they work for. These pressures caution them against excessively predatory and sectional forms of behaviour. We also showed how the CPI-M in West Bengal has been expanding a sense of citizenship for villagers in Midnapore, even as it directs many of the demands they can make on the state as members of a population. We would maintain, indeed, that the gram baithaks that we reported in chapter 4 are one means by which a purposeful and well-organized mediator in political society can use its power to open up parallel spaces for individuals or households in civil society. Perhaps most of all, however, we would argue that at least some of the transactions that we observed in Vaishali, including meetings between BB and the District Magistrate to agree a new list of EAS schemes, are conducted in that uncertain space where the workings of political society are informed by the precepts of civil society. It is not just a question, then, of ‘who can mediate?’ (Chatterjee 2004: 64). What matters just as much is how mediation occurs, and to what extent and how it promotes (and draws upon) ideas of citizenship. Politicians like Mayawati and Laloo Yadav enjoy well-deserved reputations for linking governmental politics to sectional agendas. Farmers’ groups have also been beckoned into existence by the exercise of governmental power 8

It will be helpful to know that Chatterjee’s target (or foil) in his first lecture is Benedict Anderson. Anderson, Chatterjee suggests, is committed to the view that liberatory politics will only be found in the ‘unbound seriality of the everyday universals of modern social thought: nations, citizens, revolutionaries, bureaucrats, workers, intellectuals, and so on’ (Chatterjee 2004: 5 summarizing Anderson 1998). By contrast, ‘the unrelieved nastiness of ethnic politics’ (Chatterjee 2004: 6) is a product of the bound serialities that produce governmental populations. Chatterjee’s point, in contradistinction, is that real people do not live in the empty and homogenous space–time of capitalism/modernity/the nation that Anderson celebrates. Instead, ‘The real space of modern life consists of heterotopia’ (Chatterjee 2004: 7), and this is where we find the real and dirty worlds of everyday politics, or the politics of the governed.

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over farm input and output prices, meant in part to serve the ‘needs’ of the urban poor and the BPL population. Mediators such as these have worked to empower the Backward Castes with a sense of pride and honour, or to protect the interests of different populations of farmers and labourers. It can still be argued, however, that the forms of mediation proposed by the RJD and BKU are substantially different to those offered by the MKSS in Rajasthan, or which are advanced by the KSSP and CPI-M in Kerala. What we see in these cases, supported by a national right to information movement and by rigorously decentralized structures of governance, is more akin to the construction of citizenship and the direct empowerment of individuals, households and communities. These acts of construction, moreover, which are always tenuous, and which are open to reversal, are supported in rural India, as they have been in many other countries, by more general processes of education (the acquisition of literacy, the ability to make better use of information) and participation in labour markets (particularly where contracts are more formal or impersonal). They are also supported by the right to vote periodically in elections, and by often fitful understandings that individual men and women have ‘rights’ as individual men and women. There is a wider argument to make here, as well. Our work in eastern India does not incline us to the view that civil society is more important in the politics of the governed than is political society. Although we found significant examples of ‘engaged participation’ in Districts other than Midnapore – including autonomous village forest protection committees in Bero Block, Ranchi District, and a Village Education Committee made up mainly of Yadav parents in Bidupur Block, Vaishali District – we found many more examples of ‘participatory failure’, at least in the terms demanded by some development agencies. The embeddedness of many government officers in local society also militates against quick and easy mobilizations of a good governance agenda. At the same time, however, we are troubled by the elements of closure that are built into a model of ‘political versus civil’ society. By declaring so firmly that civil society is a western concept, and that the politics of civility are enjoyed in India only by the closed circles of various elites, there is a danger that ‘the governed’ are denied any means of access to what Chatterjee tellingly describes as the ‘walled up . . . enclaves of civic freedom and rational law’ (2004: 4). Where else is civil society made if not in political society? What we detect in Chatterjee’s work is a premature form of closure that is at odds with the multiple and hybrid sightings of the state that are made by ordinary people ‘in most of the world’. When Chatterjee asks ‘who claims to speak for who, and on what terms?’ he takes care to distance

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himself from the suggestion that a poorer person, household or community stands to benefit in equal measure from the forms of mediation that might be effected by an employer/moneylender, by the apparatchiks of the Shiv Sena, or by cadres of the CPI-M. Each of these agencies can secure governmental benefits for a named household or social group, but they will do so in ways that demand different forms of reciprocity from the ‘beneficiaries’. The normative, in other words, is not refused by Chatterjee, even when ‘political society’ comes close to being celebrated en masse. What Chatterjee tends to underestimate, however, is the possibility that the slow-burning processes of democratization and secularization, along with some of the initiatives that are being put into play by proponents of ‘good governance’ (or the new public administration), are creating new spaces for empowerment and citizenship within what he calls political society. And there are parallels here, we will maintain, with the discursive strategies employed by James Ferguson in his arresting account of the substitution of bureaucratic policy for popular politics in the ‘development’ of Lesotho. Ferguson, we suggested in part 1, has written an important work of social science, one that has concerned us throughout this book. He shows with great clarity how development agencies in Lesotho combined with the government of that country to depoliticize its public life. ‘Development’ was apparently reduced to a series of technical interventions, many of which failed in their own terms, but which worked collectively to extend bureaucratic state power over previously marginal social groups and areas. Ferguson also gives some thought to the question of ‘what is to be done?’ in the face of these developments, and he refuses to endorse the simplistic nostrums of the ‘anti-development’ school. Power has to be engaged, it cannot simply be wished away. At the same time, however, Ferguson imposes on his work a form of closure that puts us in mind not only of Chatterjee, but also of James Scott, yet which in important respects is more severe. Scott, after all, maintains in Seeing Like a State that the skills and social practices of poorer people will be disregarded only when a high modernist regime is able to trample over civil society. Where this is not the case, we must presume that the intentions or plans of the state will be disrupted by lower-level public officials and by the weapons of the weak, much as we have seen in eastern India. In Ferguson’s account, the closure is effected with regard to what he calls the ‘the development apparatus’ more generally. Readers of The Anti-Politics Machine will recall that the empirical part of the book opens with a one-paragraph citation from a World Bank country study of Lesotho that was published in 1975 and which purported to describe Lesotho when it gained independence in October 1966 (Ferguson 1990: 25).

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Ferguson has no trouble in showing how the major assumptions of that report, at least as indicated by its opening paragraph, constitute Lesotho as a blank page upon which people living in a ‘subsistence economy’ can be ‘developed’ with the help of foreign aid and technical assistance. The report does this by blithely disregarding questions of landownership, the scale of the cash economy, and the past histories of forced labour flows within the colonial economies of southern Africa – hence the charge that it depoliticizes public life. Now, this might well be a ‘correct’ reading of how the World Bank saw Lesotho in 1966/75, but we need to recognize how this one paragraph is made to do much more work in Ferguson’s book, and how this work supports a particular, and in our view controversial, reading of the relationships that prevail between ‘the development industry’ and directed social change. Ferguson asks his readers to follow him in making three assumptions, each of which needs to be rendered problematic. First, we are asked to assume that the World Bank’s view of Lesotho, even in 1966, is accurately and completely represented by the one paragraph that Ferguson cites and reproduces. Second, we are asked to assume that what might have been an uncontested World Bank account of development in Lesotho in 1966/75 continues to structure, indeed dominate, the Bank’s lending policies and decision-making into the early 1980s, when Ferguson was conducting fieldwork in Lesotho, and the late 1980s when he was writing his book. The assumption constitutes the Bank as a unitary institution which displays a singular incapacity to learn. Third, Ferguson invites us to believe that aid workers in Lesotho throughout this period, including those men and women who worked for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) on livestock and range management projects in Thaba-Tseka, either fully internalized the assumptions made in a World Bank country report of 1975, and/or were unable to reshape or contest these assumptions in their working lives. To put it another way, while Ferguson encourages us to believe that the intended beneficiaries of CIDA’s livestock interventions are able to see through and undermine the so-called ‘bovine mystique’ (he does this quite brilliantly and with lacerating wit: Ferguson 1994: chapter 7), he fails to extend the same courtesy to the aid workers he spent time with. Oddly, for an anthropologist, these men and women are not allowed to speak for themselves. As a result, they come across as guileless at best and possibly as dupes or even knaves. The approach to development agencies and discourses that we have taken in this book is rather different. We accept that most of them have blind spots, and are not about to support left-wing politics in the periphery. Many institutions will draw the line at supporting left-of-centre

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political parties that work within a democratic framework, as in Kerala or West Bengal, albeit in part for legal reasons. We also accept the force of John Harriss’s suggestion that an agency like the World Bank will periodically embrace ideas that serve to depoliticize development, and not just ideas about ‘the economy’ (Harriss 2001). This much was evident in the Bank’s attempts to turn Robert Putnam’s ideas about social capital into the ‘missing link’ of development, notwithstanding the logical and political flaws in an analysis which fails to see the mutual dependence of social capital and other forces of social change. It was also apparent in the literatures that surrounded the Bank’s first attempts to promote a strong agenda of participatory development. As we saw in chapter 4, some of the very real arguments that need to be made in favour of specific forms of political and economic participation get lost amid a more general rhetoric about the virtues of participation tout court. Much like the agenda of good governance (chapter 5), the mainstream perspective on participatory development presumes what it must demonstrate: that strong individuals flourish in strong civil societies, and that distinct centres of bureaucratic power (or governance) can be brought under their control. Politics gets lost in this mix, along with accounts of the structuring of local political societies. At its worst, politics is simply factored out as a disturbance, and the skills of key actors in political society are bluntly disregarded. At the same time, however, we want to insist that the broader development community is less homogeneous than it is made out to be by post-colonial critics. It is not only implicated in the politics of the governed, but is by turns a prominent source of critique of particular forms of governmentality. It is important to note that governmentality is not something that any of us can escape from, not, at any rate, if we want to enjoy the benefits of welfare, citizenship or extended divisions of labour. What matters are the forms in which the politics of governmentality is played out. How, if at all, is power shared in political society? How are individuals and agencies made accountable, and to whom? How is ‘the economy’ managed, and with what effects on incomes and livelihoods? Questions such as these are the very stuff of development studies and related policy-oriented disciplines, and necessarily so. But they are also fiercely contested within these broad communities. The major development institutions are committed to fiscal rectitude and the promotion of ‘market-access’ economies (for both of which strategies strong arguments can be made).9 But they are also pushed by activist groups, staff 9

Albeit these arguments are sometimes negative in form and focused on the medium to long run (‘fiscal ill-discipline hurts the poor in the longer term’).

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members and contracted academics to reflect more seriously on development discourses that are ‘political’ and which do challenge the status quo, including support for accountability campaigns.10 The World Bank’s World Development Report, 2004, devotes a Box (10.7) to the question of ‘Managing the thorny politics of pro-poor service delivery reforms’, and includes in its discussion the possibility of ‘Marginalizing opponents before, during and after implementation, particularly those with veto power’ (World Bank 2003: 198). It also deals explicitly with the question of corruption, which is described as ‘a regressive tax, penalizing poor people more than others’ (World Bank 2003: 196). Partly in response to this, the Bank commends the use of public expenditure tracking surveys, shorter routes to accountability that link service providers to clients directly, greater spending on health-care and education (so long as monies are directed to efficiency gains and the removal of bottlenecks), and the use of public-sector solutions (including the contracting in or out of services) where market failures are likely.11 Our point, of course, is not that the World Bank doesn’t also speak loudly in favour of macro-economic policies that are broadly neoliberal, or that we think it has brought sufficient pressures to bear to fund interventions that could reasonably be described as ‘pro-poor’. The Social Development Unit of the Bank hardly competes on a level playing field with divisions staffed by neoclassical economists and political scientists, or which take their lead from their paymasters in Washington DC. Nor do we think that ‘shorter routes to accountability’ will be easy to construct in political societies of the sort we have encountered in Bihar and West Bengal. The point we are trying to make has to do with politics in a broader sense, and with what might be called the methodological implications of false closure. Ferguson’s work is instructive in this regard, because for all its undoubted brilliance it buys into a conventional left-cum-post-developmental view that both homogenizes development theory, and, curiously, fails to recognize the full effectivities of what we would prefer to see as an evolving and contested body of work. Governmental practices built around participation, accountability, human rights and other technologies of rule will often fail to meet the needs of poorer people who have to secure most of their needs in political society. But this doesn’t mean that the unintended consequences of such practices work 10

11

Amartya Sen, Mick Moore, Robert Chambers, Barbara Harriss-White and Robert Wade, for example, have all carried out work in recent years for the World Bank, UNDP, and/or DFID; it makes no sense to press them into service alongside the late Walt Rostow, say, or even Anne Krueger, as exponents of some hopelessly teleological and managerial account of the political economy of uneven development. See also Devarajan and Shah (2004).

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exclusively to secure the greater power of ‘the state’. (In any event, the extension of state powers should not always be linked negatively to the senses of well-being of ordinary people. Much will depend on how that power is used and contested.) Our work suggests there are reasons for believing, as well, that governmental practices such as these can, slowly and unevenly, be instrumental in providing poorer people with a greater sense of self-worth, dignity and, more rarely, a degree of power over those who would govern them. They can be made to work, that is, to change the contours and effects of political society. Spaces of empowerment All of this matters, finally, because it impacts on the way that we might think about the politics of what the development community likes to call ‘pro-poor governance’. James Scott is careful in Seeing Like a State not to dismiss development as such, as opposed to its high modernist variants. And James Ferguson likewise takes care to conclude his book with some reflections on where and how western academics, and others, might seek to engage the asymmetries of power and knowledge that construct certain peoples as objects for ‘development’ (see chapter 9). In a very real sense, however, the political trajectories that are pointed to by Ferguson are only thinly fleshed out. The same might be said of Partha Chatterjee’s work, for all that we admire it. It is important that development doctrines are understood as forms of governmentality and are subjected to rigorous critique. It is equally important to insist on the vitality, and indeed validity, of the ‘unbound serialities’ that Chatterjee is moved to celebrate in political society. But none of this means that we shouldn’t also attend closely to the careful accounting of political and developmental possibilities that is served up in a report like the World Development Report, 2004. The authors of that report sharply oppose the sort of ‘one size fits all’ approach to policymaking that some critics, rightly on occasions, have associated with the World Bank. They rather contend that public bureaucracies are likely to play a positive role in the organization of modern life only where political systems are pro-poor; where politics are clientelistic the task of policymakers should be to strengthen the voices of the poor and to provide nonstate options for livelihood enhancement. More generally still, the Bank recognizes that, ‘Despite the urgent needs of the world’s poor people, and the many ways services have failed them, quick results will be hard to come by. Many of the changes involve fundamental shifts in power – something that cannot happen overnight’ (World Bank 2003: 18).

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Sadly, this is the conclusion we are driven to as well. In Midnapore, a committed left-of-centre political party has helped to shift power and resources to the poor in some measure, but this does not mean it will happen in a state like Bihar, or that it could be effected in short order. Building political capacity is time-consuming at the best of times, and the incentive systems which currently prevail in Bihar are hardly conducive to the investments that would be required. Poorer people are not generally empowered by an optimism of the will that lapses into wishful thinking or simple romanticism. Not should the costs of radical (Naxalite) actions be ignored in any accounting of the merits of political society in a District like Bhojpur. At the same time, however, an extreme pessimism of the will can be politically corrosive, and is not called for. In this book we have begun to indicate how the Left Front government in West Bengal is beginning to extend its economic (mainly land and labour-related) initiatives into the fields of education provision and democratic accountability. In the postscript we will report further on how our work with the state’s Institute for Panchayats and Rural Development took up some questions relating to the training of local government workers. And in Bihar, too, there are real possibilities for the empowerment of poorer people, both by the government and in the face of government. Once we accept that poorer men and women make multiple sightings of the state, and that they weave together diverse and sometimes contradictory accounts of the state’s obligations to them, we can begin to imagine a terrain for politics which is correspondingly decentred and plastic. This terrain might involve the manufacturing of better exit options as well as localized struggles for accountability around public spending. It might also involve the production of education and health services outside the direct control of the state. But whatever it involves, it will be bound up with forms of engagement with the world of the second-best (at best). James Scott is right to suggest that poorer people are rarely empowered in the long run by governments which claim to see all on their behalf. We can add to this that poorer people are rarely empowered by political movements that claim to see the future in utopian terms. Poorer people instead need to be supported in their diverse and discontinuous efforts to bring agencies of the state more firmly under their gaze and control. These efforts will often taken shape in political society, with the help of local mediators. But if some initiatives are commended by members of the development community this is no reason for discounting them. The poor stand to benefit most from a politics that is honest rather than glamorous, and from public policy interventions that recognize existing realities or

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incentive systems. The shape of those public policy interventions, moreover, is not set in aspic. The development community, for all its faults, and for all that it must respect ‘its’ paymasters, is a learning community. As we have argued repeatedly in this book, it is one of the communities that helps to produce ‘the poor’ as an object for social policy, and it is a community that helps some members of the poor to see themselves and the state in different ways. No matter how much Ferguson (or Escobar) suggests otherwise, it is a community that helps to weave together the complex and contested tapestry of state–poor encounters that we have described in this book, and which we attend to further, and with a closer eye on the politics of the research community, in the postscript which follows.

9

Postscript: development ethics and the ethics of critique

James Ferguson ends his account of The Anti-Politics Machine with a useful and very honest Epilogue which addresses the question ‘What is to be done?’ In the course of his discussion he makes a number of points that we find helpful. In particular, he warns against a form of romanticism that would turn the fieldworker into a hero or social activist. The truth is that most of us should not expect to make a difference. Social change is most often made slowly and in a non-linear fashion by the men and women who become the subjects of social science. Ferguson quotes Foucault to bolster this argument. ‘As Foucault remarked of the prisons, when the system is transformed, “it won’t be because a plan of reform has found its way into the heads of the social workers; it will be when those who have to do with that . . . reality, all those people, have come into collision with each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and confrontations; when critique has been played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas”’ (Foucault 1981: 13, quoted in Ferguson 1990: 281). This view is largely consistent with the arguments we have developed here, although we would want to signal more clearly than Foucault the role that directed change can make, particularly when it is being pressed by the wealthy and the powerful. We would also insist that the critiques that ‘are played out in the real’ are informed by the views of social workers (in this case) or other experts; their ‘plan of reform’, that is to say, is already part of the sightings of the prison system that are made by inmates and warders. Ferguson also makes the argument that western academics who want to take the part of the ‘global poor’ should expect to be active politically within their own countries, and here too we find ourselves in strong agreement. Given the power of the major development institutions, and given our view that these are contested institutions, it would be inconsistent not to advocate getting engaged with these centres of power. This isn’t easy, of course, for most academics will not get a chance to work with the World Bank, say, or UNDP or DFID, and far less to make policies in these institutions. As ever, a measure of realism and modesty is 265

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required, and perhaps also a measure of determination if one is committed to working there, or, indeed, in activist groups or campaigning organizations.1 Robert Chambers and Norman Uphoff are two academics who have sought to make a difference in this way, and we have signalled our admiration for their efforts. They have taken steps to ‘make social science matter’, to take the title from a recent and much-quoted book by Bent Flyvbjerg.2 But still the question remains of the relationship between the ‘fieldworker’ and the ‘field’. This has been the subject of a great deal of writing of late, much of it concerned with questions of positionality and the dangers of ‘extractive research’.3 We have learned a great deal from this work, and we recognize that our initial ‘academic’ research project was at times very demanding of our respondents. If we were doing the project again we wouldn’t use a questionnaire survey than runs to seventy-two main questions and many sub-questions. We simply haven’t been able to analyse this data as effectively as we had hoped, and it could be said that the excess of data we collected amounts to a tax on the people we worked with. We also recognize that our presence in the villages gave rise to expectations of what we might ‘do’ for certain households or the community at large that we could not hope to fulfil. Like most fieldworkers, we did our best to dampen down these expectations, and if we could help villagers with a small task we did so. Much like Ferguson, however, we found ourselves asking the question, ‘is there something (else) that we could or should be doing in a more positive sense?’ In our view, this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and we suspect that most fieldworkers ask it at one time or another. By the time that fieldwork for the ESRC-funded research project was drawing to a close, early in 2000, we had forged strong links with activist groups and NGOs in Bihar, as well as with the State Institute for Panchayats and Rural Development (SIPRD) in West Bengal and DFID’s West Bengal 1

2

3

Working for the UNDP needn’t prevent activism in a campaign like Jubilee 2000 (now Jubilee Research), for example. We also know of colleagues who have worked for the Save the Children Fund before moving on to a spell at the World Bank. But let us also be clear that we do not believe that this is the only way that academics can engage what non-academics so often like to call ‘the real world’. Academics engage the worlds of which they are necessarily a part in all sorts of ways, and most often with a clear purpose and self-critically. Teaching, writing and training fellow researchers will remain the major engagements of most academics, and very properly so. These engagements are not without effect, nor are they undertaken lightly or without regard for the ethical issues that frame this postscript. Flyvbjerg (2001). It should be obvious, but we’ll say it anyway: activists of the New Right also want to make social science matter, and they too will be pushing for jobs and power within organizations like the IMF and World Bank. Good starting points are Caplan (2003) and Scheyvens and Storey (2003).

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project team in New Delhi. We began to exchange ideas and results with some of these agencies in the way that researchers generally do. In spring 2000 we decided to approach DFID (India) to see if it would fund an action research project that would return some of our research findings to villagers and other ‘stakeholders’ in Malda and Bhojpur Districts. We chose Malda because the ‘good governance’ agenda was less established there than in Midnapore. We chose Bhojpur because of its long history of pro-poor struggles: we thought this would make it a good site for the consciousness-raising work we had in mind. It would be dishonest to say that academics who work for universities in the UK or Canada aren’t under pressure to get research grants, but this was not our main objective. We wanted to take a year off the ‘main’ project – the one that would give rise to refereed books and papers – in order to get more involved on the fuzzy border between development studies and development practice. Happily, DFID agreed to fund the research, although at first it only wanted to finance the work in West Bengal. (We shall come back to this shortly.) The project went by the name of Enhancing Pro-Poor Governance in West Bengal and Bihar (EPPG), and work began in West Bengal in September 2000. The research team worked in tandem with members of SIPRD, and began by convening village meetings in both Old Malda and Debra Blocks. These were attended by about 200 and 150 villagers respectively, including a large number of people from marginalized households or communities. We provided information on people’s rights, the system of local self-government, and development programmes, and we tried to give villagers a sense of how these varied between Districts. Follow-up activities in the Malda panchayat included participatory learning exercises, the distribution of handbills, and the creation of a ‘village library’. We also tried to get a sense of whether villagers found the meetings useful. We discovered that rates of information retention varied from 42 per cent to 88 per cent over the course of a month, and retention rates were highest when the information was practically relevant to a person’s livelihood strategy. (The mode of dissemination mattered much less: see also table 4.6.) Three intermediary stakeholder meetings were then held in Malda with 137 local councillors, government officers, and members of NGOs and political parties with whom we had worked at the village, Block and District levels. We asked participants to reflect on some of the problems of local governance that we had identified. For the most part, though, we invited them to push the agenda in a direction they felt comfortable with, and which might point to concrete suggestions for public policy reform. These recommendations were developed further in an inter-stakeholder (general) meeting that was held in Malda, in December 2000, and in a

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state-level workshop that was held in Calcutta in January 2001. Thirtyseven recommendations for changing local government policy and practice were discussed at the workshop, and some of these were reshaped for further analysis by DFID (India) and the government of West Bengal. Many of the recommendations that came from stakeholders in Malda referred to the non-implementation of existing government acts or directives, and the need for enforcement actions. The later meetings also allowed participants to reflect more generally on the governance roles of local councils. Discussion extended to the possibility of bringing health and education under effective pro-poor controls, and the means by which local councils might mobilize their own resources more effectively and/or ‘untie’ some of the funds made over to them. Do we think these workshops made a significant difference to the political landscapes of Malda District or West Bengal more generally? Of course not. But we do believe the project met the test of ‘not doing harm’ and that at least some villagers became more aware of their rights vis-`a-vis the state (or party), whether or not they could act on them. SIPRD also seemed to think the project was worthwhile. It drew on the EPPG project when it redesigned elements of its training programmes for ‘participatory rural development’. DFID was right to push us to work with a government agency in a state that showed strong signs of pro-poor governance. The research team then turned to Bihar, where DFID was reluctant to fund work of any kind. In 2000, indeed, it was committed to not funding work there, apparently on the basis: (a) that monies very often were captured (this is in regard to development projects, of course); and (b) that the political culture of the state was not pro-poor (the prevailing incentive system allowed politicians to make their careers without attending to the needs of poorer men and women).4 Realizing that DFID was unlikely to be shaken in its negative view of ‘Bihar’, we argued nonetheless: (a) that there were spaces of empowerment for the poor in Districts like Bhojpur and Vaishali; (b) that some of these had been forged by officers working to close down the space for rent-seeking, and others who promoted Janata Durbars; (c) that other spaces had been forged through continual engagements with and against the state by campaigning groups and NGOs, and most notably by the struggles led by the JP movement and 4

We need to be careful here. This is what we were given to understand from conversations with DFID officials, although this might not have been ‘official’ DFID policy. By the same token, we were not provided with coherent arguments for this apparent discrimination against Bihar. Did DFID suppose that the political cultures of Andhra Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh, or even parts of West Bengal, were so much better than those in Bihar, and if so, why? As we said in the main body of the text, there is a danger that the word ‘Bihar’ functions as a stereotype of corruption and unreason when the ground realities are both more complicated and less depressing.

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the CPI-ML, as well as those waged in support of the dignity and honour of the Backward Classes by the Janata Dal; and (d) that if DFID was serious about working on behalf of the world’s poorest it could hardly avoid Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It is likely that persistence as much as strong arguments persuaded DFID to let us go ahead with the workshops we planned for Bhojpur. In any case, preparation for the workshops began in February 2001, and a lot of effort went into the task of engaging villagers ahead of the workshop planned for our Sahar Block field site in June. A discussion paper was prepared and circulated in Bhojpuri, and villagers were asked to let us have their thoughts on a possible agenda for ‘discussion/action’. We drew on these responses to help write a folk drama that was performed as part of the village workshop. Dugdugi drew more than 600 people to watch it, and used the figure of an idiot savant (the bhaku) to draw attention to the functioning of local government institutions in a more ‘active’ panchayat than villagers were used to – one where ward commissioners and alert voters put pressure on government officers to run their programmes ‘properly’ and with an eye to meeting collective needs. Workshops were then held in June and July with Block-level NGOs and activists from across Bihar, including literacy activists and BEP motivators; with Block- and lower-level civil servants from Bhojpur District; with Block-level political party functionaries from Bhojpur District; and with newly elected panchayat representatives and members of VECs and Mahila Samoohs (groups to promote women’s empowerment and female school-going) from Bhojpur, Rohtas and Buxar Districts. Participants in the Block-level workshops were invited to consider a range of questions relating to people’s empowerment, government reform, political culture and social change, and a refined version of this agenda was later used to structure the discussions of a District-level workshop that combined members from the separate Block discussions. The project was concluded by a state-level workshop that was at first confined to civil servants, activists, NGOs, academics and people from the media or concerned foundations, and which on its third day was given over to state-level politicians. Again, did we expect these workshops to galvanize political society in Bhojpur or in Bihar more generally? Not exactly, although we had hopes that they would provoke further reflection and some action. Several politicians spoke openly at the state-level workshop about the incentive systems that were in play in Bihar’s political cultures, and about the difficulties they faced in making electoral capital out of health and education issues (something that was true also in West Bengal). Others confirmed that political parties were organizing exclusively on caste lines, and that

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training camps for party workers had more or less stopped in the 1980s. Many MLAs and party workers were unaware of the government’s development programmes. Nevertheless, a number of issues were raised in a spirit of open and constructive dialogue, and members of every political party were encouraged to discuss their concerns in public with other participants in Bihar’s political cultures.5 The workshops also gave rise to a large number of practical recommendations and suggestions for taking them forwards. Several of these were in support of the idea that NGOs should play a bigger role in structuring political society in Bihar, and for linking between the state and poorer households. Members of the project team worked with existing NGOs to provide more secure documentation of the range and scope of NGO activities in Bihar (and Jharkhand). Copies of the resulting documentation have been widely circulated. The research team was also encouraged by the decision of the Secretary, Department of Panchayats, to work closely with the project. He attended the village meeting in Sahar and expressed interest in developing the folk drama into a television programme that could be used in the training of panchayat representatives. The time was right for such an enterprise. The Secretary found himself in charge of a department that was required to form a more robust set of rules and regulations for the panchayati raj institutions that were being revived across Bihar. We might add that we are still in the process of trying to set up a small organization that would work with poorer villagers in two or three panchayats around their rights to information and benefits from local government agencies. We find inspiration here in the work of the MKSS in Rajasthan (see chapter 7). But let us now come to our punchlines. We have set out these activities at some length not simply as a matter of report, or because we have 5

One minister said that politics was only about power, and that politicians were interested in the ‘glamorization of poverty’, but not in its alleviation. It should be noted, however, that the education minister (Ram Chander Purbe) disputed the view that education was not a big issue for politicians. He argued that ‘the trickle down of democracy’ was creating ‘a hunger among people’ for education, and that MLAs were having (or would have) to respond to this. He further suggested that a combination of VECs with functioning panchayati raj institutions would give parents and VEC committee members greater statutory powers over teachers, including the power to withhold wages in some circumstances. It is possible this will happen. We hope to test this and other suppositions/predictions by means of resurvey work in 2009. Another minister said that government schools would improve only if someone in the country ‘had the courage to ban private schools’. Finally, still another minister took the research team to task for supposing that it was middlemen and political fixers who pushed for pucca construction works, when this is what the ‘people at the grassroots were demanding’. As we said, a range of views were clearly and forcefully expressed, and if there was general support for our research findings this was by no means complete or across the board. A representative of the CPI(M-L) complained that our work, and the workshop, were not focused enough on the disempowering effects of the government–goonda (muscleman)–contractor–broker nexus.

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drawn on the EPPG project in chapters 3–6. Nor are we trying to suggest that we have done something unusual, or that ethical objections can’t be raised against us getting involved in the first place. Ferguson maintains that outsiders should get involved only ‘where it is possible to identify interests, organizations, and groupings that clearly represent movements of empowerment, and when a demand exists on the side of those working for their own empowerment for the specific skills and expertise that the specialist possesses’ (Ferguson 1990: 286). We largely share these sentiments – while noting that there are important issues to be decided about the insider/outsider distinction in fieldwork, and that Manoj Srivastava is positioned very differently than Corbridge, V´eron and Williams – and we acknowledge that if we have met the first of these tests it is less certain that we have met the second one (although we would argue that we have done). In any case, the point that we want to develop here is rather different, for it concerns the ethics of critique more generally, and what Max Weber described as the duties of a public intellectual in the service of moral forces (see Introduction). The EPPG project gave us fresh insight into the sorts of questions that development professionals are bound to ask, and which are not going to go away any time soon. These questions made us wonder if too many academics claim a monopoly on virtue and fail to render problematic the ethics of the forms of critique to which they themselves subscribe.6 In our view, there are at least four legitimate forms of critique that academics might engage in, all of which deserve to be treated with a mixture of caution and respect, and each of which speaks to different aspects of the politics of empowerment and state–poor relations. First, there is the tradition of refusing judgement. This tends to be associated with ‘positive economics’, and with a defence of the ‘status quo’, but it is also common among anthropologists. Refusing to make overt judgements is often very difficult and can be commendable. Imagine a ‘liberal’ anthropologist from the UK trying to make sense of active supporters of the National Rifle Association in the United States, or groups trying to promote the teaching of Creationism in schools. Straightforward descriptions of these groups (insofar as descriptions are ever straightforward) can be an effective way of representing difference and of allowing moral judgements to be made by the respondents themselves. 6

Let us be clear that this goes both ways (see also note 1). Development professionals sometimes underestimate the contributions that academics make. In addition, the report format that is often imposed by development agencies, with its emphasis on discrete (numbered) points, an executive summary, and even bullet points, imposes a cost in the same way that any form of writing imposes a cost (it stops the writing of other stories). The urge to simplify, or to ‘get to the point’, is understandable but not always attractive or even helpful.

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At the other end of the spectrum there is the post-structuralist strategy of subjecting everything to critique. Foucault seemed at times to subscribe to this viewpoint; indeed, one might argue that it is consistent with his expansive conception of power and its effects. The aim is not necessarily, or even, to suggest ways forward in the sense of concrete policy alternatives. It is rather to add to the foment of debate and to put into play new ways of thinking which might provide resources for some individuals or groups in the constant jockeying for power and position that promotes the (re)structuring of everyday life. Critique thus becomes an act of permanent revolution, or perhaps even a playful decentring of ideas and practices that are taken for granted. Some criticisms of the very idea (or discourse) of development fall into this category, if category it is. In between these strategies are the more conventional strategies of the political Left and Right. These forms of critique imagine a situation where the poor are empowered – a world where land and power are better distributed, for example, or where men and women have equal opportunities to access the market – and dismiss strategies that fall short of a proposal for reaching this world as ‘reformist’, or missing the ‘real’ issues. Critiques of this sort are important because they push ‘policy-makers’ to think more critically about the nature of the ‘constraints’ they face. They also direct attention to popular struggles that might push back the envelope, and to the dangers of promoting policy agendas without specifiying the political forces that would bring them into being. Lastly, however, there is the form of critique to which so many postdevelopmentalists and some leftists (not to mention neoliberals) object – what we might call the reformist or pragmatist tradition which begins with a specific question and works outwards from it. This tradition also has much to commend it, and we feel this more strongly now that we have worked inside the belly of the beast. One complaint that reformists might direct to members of the post-developmental community, and indeed to James Ferguson in this specific respect, is that they falsely homogenize a range of development initiatives under the heading of ‘the development discourse’. Another complaint that would apply to individuals like Esteva and Prakash, and perhaps also to Escobar, is that they refuse to specify the costs of their proposals.7 There is an important ethical issue here. How legitimate is it to commend strategies of delinking or spatial closure, say, or of returning to a ‘culture of the soil’, if the opportunity costs of these actions are not made clear to those who are expected to heed the call? By the same token, it can fairly be argued that the utopias of the Left or the Right – communism or free-market capitalism – carry less moral weight 7

Esteva and Prakash (1997); Escobar (1995).

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to the extent that their proponents refuse to consider the likely costs of these regimes, and of the social upheavals that would be required to get there (assuming the horizon is not ever receding).8 We can also consider a more practical argument that can be made in favour of this form of critique (as one of many). If we assume: (a) that the world is not perfect or perfectible, (b) that what is called ‘development’ comes in many versions, and (c) that pro-poor political coalitions are not easily built; and if we further assume that an actor wants to take the part of the poor in some way (that is, he or she refuses the first form of critique), then it is not clear that this form of engagement (or critique) is uncalled for. More positively, while we agree with Harriss-White that ‘Development policy needs rethinking as that set of political and institutional forces required to prevail against the obstacles to a democratically determined accountability’ (2003: 247), it is not obvious: (a) that this takes us very far in generating specific policy initiatives that would address the problem of corruption in West Bengal or Bihar, or of forcing governments to share information with poor people in such a way that their citizenship rights are genuinely deepened; or (b) that the formulation of policies that would address these issues would look radically different to some parts of the good governance agenda that has been put into play, and periodically reviewed and developed, by the Government of India or leading agencies from within the NGO and international development communities. (This is why we wrote favourably of one part of the World Bank’s World Development Report, 2004 in chapter 8.) What we are calling for is a greater recognition that all these forms of critique must be in play at different times, and that they all raise ethical questions. Working on the EPPG project has made us more aware of the need to ask specific, policy-related questions, and of the need to refuse the romanticism that many left-leaning academics bring to development issues. People who work for the development community, including the NGO community, like to ask academics, ‘well, what would you do then?’ Academics, for their part, like to brush the question away. ‘That’s not our job’, is a common reply, and it is one that Ferguson uses in his Epilogue.9 We respect this answer, and we recognize that Ferguson develops two other forms of critique to quite superb effect. We would simply say, in 8

9

It is a logical error to suppose that a form of critique that shows that ‘capitalism’ is associated with negative outcomes a, b and c (say unemployment, pollution and inequality) is in itself an argument for socialism or something that is ‘not capitalism’. That argument would need to show that the alternative is not also associated with a, b or c, and/or is not damaged by negative outcomes d, e, f and g. ‘The first response to this sort of objection must be that the book never intended or presumed to prescribe, and that this is not what the book is all about’ (Ferguson 1990: 279).

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addition, that what the EPPG brought home to us is that ‘destructive’ forms of critique are ultimately weakened (made less relevant and perhaps more dangerous (by refusing to specify costs)) to the extent that they are not also informed by the constructive forms of critique that public policymaking demands. We think this is what Max Weber had in mind when he spoke about the duties of a person who stands in the service of moral forces. As Mitchell Dean explains, Weber wanted to prosecute ‘an analytics of government [that encourages] us to accept a sense of responsibility for the consequences and effects of thinking and acting in certain ways’ (Dean 1999: 36). That sense of responsibility would extend to raising ‘inconvenient facts’ (Dean 1999: 36, citing Weber 1972: 147), and thus to critiquing the conventional ‘techniques, practices and rationalities of government and self-government’ (Dean 1999: 37), but it would also extend to commending specific forms of government or self-government that would seek the empowerment of individuals and groups against ‘specific states of domination’ (Dean 1999: 37). It is this specificity, perhaps, that public policy-making ultimately teaches, and which calls for a less dramatic conception of politics than some academics feel comfortable with. It also confirms that development studies, in this case, is not exterior to the world it describes, but is constitutive of that world.

Appendix 1 Major national programmes and policies related to poverty alleviation, 1999

I

Special employment and poverty alleviation programmes

(a)

Rural self-employment programmes

IRDP

TRYSEM

DWCRA

Integrated Rural Development Programme 50% centrally sponsored scheme with national coverage since 1980 (1976–80 pilot scheme in selected Blocks). Aims at providing self-employment through acquisition of productive assets and skills through provision of subsidy and bank credit. Targeted at rural BPL population, largely small and marginal farmers, agricultural labourers and rural artisans. Special safeguards for SC/STs, women, physically handicapped; priority to assignees of ceiling surplus land, Green Card holders under Family Welfare Programme and freed bonded labourers. Performance during Eighth Plan: total allocation (Centre and State) = Rs. 5,048 crores; 108 lakh families covered. Training of Rural Youth for Self-Employment 50% centrally sponsored facilitating component of IRDP since 1979. Aims at providing basic technical and managerial skills through training. Targeted at rural BPL population between 18 and 35 years. Special safeguards for SC/STs and others, like IRDP. Performance during Eighth Plan: total allocation (Centre and State) = Rs. 370 crores; 15 lakh youth trained. Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas Sub-scheme of IRDP started in 1982–3 on pilot basis, later extended to all Districts. Aims at improving living conditions of women and, thereby, of children by promoting women’s income-generation activities through self-help groups and providing access to basic social services. Targeted at groups of 10 to 15 women among BPL families. 50% to SC/STs. 275

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SITRA

GKY

(b) JRY

Appendix 1

Performance during Eighth Plan: total allocation (Centre and State) = Rs. 190 crores; 1.9 lakh groups formed; 30 lakh beneficiaries. Supply of Improved Toolkits to Rural Artisans Sub-scheme of IRDP introduced in 1992, national coverage from 1995–6. Aims at enhancing incomes and product quality through 90%-subsidized provision of toolkits of Rs. 2,000. Targeted at rural artisans (BPL), except weavers, tailors, needleworkers and bidi (country cigarette) workers. Special safeguard for SC/STs, again like IRDP. Performance during Eighth Plan: total allocation (Centre) = Rs. 116 crores; 6.1 lakh toolkits distributed. Ganga Kalyan Yojana 80% centrally sponsored scheme started in 1997, covers all Districts. Aims at improving agricultural productivity through exploitation of groundwater (borewells and tubewells, which are not provided under MWS). Targeted at small and marginal farmers (BPL) (individuals and groups of 5–15) who have not been assisted by another government minor irrigation programme. Rural wage employment programmes Jawahar Rozgar Yojana 80% centrally sponsored scheme since 1989, after merger of NREP and RLEPG. Aims at generating additional gainful wage employment for unemployed and underemployed men and women in rural areas. Secondary objectives include creation of assets for the community and for SC/STs, and positive influence on wage levels. Provides employment opportunities at minimum wages. Targeted at rural BPL population with preference for SC/STs and freed bonded labour and with 30% reservation for women. Second stream added in 1993–4 targeted at 120 identified backward Districts in 12 states; aims to provide 90–100 days of employment per person (merged into EAS). Third stream introduced in 1993–4 (later called JRY Special and Innovative Projects) for projects aiming at preventing migration, enhancing women’s employment, etc. Performance during Eighth Plan: total allocation (Centre and State) = Rs. 17,473 crores; 40,362 lakh person-days of employment created. The Draft Ninth Plan made the EAS the major

Programmes and policies for poverty alleviation

EAS

MWS

IAY

NSAP

277

employment programme; JRY to be confined to the creation of rural infrastructure at the village panchayat level, in consonance with the felt needs of the community. Employment Assurance Scheme 80% centrally sponsored scheme introduced in 1993 as pilot scheme in 1,775 backward Blocks, extended in 1997–8 to cover all rural Blocks in country. Aims at providing 100 days of assured casual manual employment at statutory minimum wage during lean agricultural season. Secondary objective is the creation of economic infrastructure and community assets for sustained employment and development. Linked to environmental programmes (watershed development, agro-horticulture, water and soil conservation, etc.) as per the felt needs of the District. Demand driven, targeted at all persons in the age group 18–60 who are in need of work. Performance during Eighth Plan: total expenditure (Centre and State) = Rs. 5,278 crores; 10,686 lakh person-days of employment created; 259 lakh persons registered. Million Wells Scheme 80% centrally sponsored scheme since 1996, started as subscheme of JRY/NREP in 1988–9. Aims to improve agricultural productivity through fully subsidized provision of open irrigation wells on private land. Targeted at small and marginal farmers below BPL, two-thirds of which are SC/STs and free bonded labourers (before 1993–4 exclusively to SC/ST). Performance during Eighth Plan: total expenditure (Centre and State) = Rs. 3,727 crores; 7.4 lakh wells constructed. Indira Awas Yojana 80% centrally sponsored scheme since 1996 (before subcomponent of JRY). Provides funds for house construction. Targeted at SC/STs. National Social Assistance Programme Programme launched in 1995 with three components: National Old Age Pension Scheme, National Family Benefit Scheme, National Maternity Benefit Scheme. Supplements efforts of states in order to ensure minimum national standards of well-being. Provides social assistance benefits in the case of old age (pension of Rs. 75 per month); death of the primary breadwinner (lump-sum of Rs. 5,000–10,000); and maternity (Rs. 300 per pregnancy up to the first two

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live births). Performance during 1996–7: total expenditure (Centre) = Rs. 384 crores; 58 lakh beneficiaries.

(c) SJSRY

USEP

UWEP

II DPAP

Urban poverty programmes Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana 75% centrally sponsored scheme launched in December 1997, replacing NRY (Nehru Rozgar Yojana) and other schemes. Seeks to provide gainful employment through support of self-employment ventures and provision of wage employment. Rests on foundations of community empowerment. Targeted at urban BPL population in all towns, particularly in identified pockets of urban poverty. Performance (of NRY) during Eighth Plan: total expenditure (Centre and State) = Rs. 498 crores. In 1993–4, 124 lakh person-days’ employment created; 1.5 lakh beneficiaries for setting up micro-enterprises. Urban Self-Employment Programme Main component of SJSRY. Seeks to upgrade informalsector activities by encouraging the setting up of microenterprises with subsidized loans, skills training, and infrastructural and marketing support. Targeted at individual urban poor and, particularly, at neighbourhood groups of urban BPL women. Urban Wage Employment Programme Component of SJSRY. Aims at providing wage employment to unemployed and underemployed persons. Secondary objective is creation of socially and economically useful public assets (coordination with NSDP). Targeted at urban BPL population.

Special Area programmes Drought Prone Areas Programme (Watershed Development) Started in 1973–4 as integrated area development programme; 50% centrally sponsored: revamped in 1995–6 into approach based on Watershed Development. Aims to promote economic development of village communities through optimum utilization of natural resources that will mitigate effects of droughts and encourage ecological

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balance. Seeks to improve economic condition of resource poor and disadvantaged sections through creation and equitable distribution of stable resource base and increased employment opportunities. Covers 947 Blocks in 155 Districts in 13 states. Expenditure between 1995–6 and 1996– 7: Rs. 2,035 crores; almost 5,500 Watershed Projects to be implemented in this four-year period. III

Social services

(a)

Basic services programmes

MNP

BMS

(b)

TLC

Minimum Needs Programme Launched in 1974–5. Seeks to establish network of facilities and social services in all areas up to national norms in order to raise living standards and reduce regional disparities. Provides investment in elementary and adult education; supplementary nutrition; rural health, water supply, roads, electrification, housing; and environmental urban slum improvement. Most important programme for delivery of basic services. Basic Minimum Services Started in 1996. Seeks universal coverage by 2000 in regard to primary health-care, primary education and safe drinking water. Education National Policy on Education Universalization of elementary education has been policy goal since Independence. Focus on physical infrastructure and teacher training. Revised Policy since 1986. Includes 18 centrally sponsored schemes, including: Mid-Day Meal Scheme, Operation Blackboard; Non-Formal Education Programme; and Post Literacy and Continuing Education. In 1997–8, central plan allocation to elementary education was Rs. 2,265 crores. Total Literacy Programme Principal instrument of National Literacy Mission launched in 1988. Aims to eradicate (child and adult) illiteracy by 2005 through campaigns in specific areas. Performance 1988–97: covered 215 Districts; 666 lakh new literates.

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Appendix 1

DPEP

(c)

District Primary Education Programme World Bank-assisted project launched in 1994. Aims to achieve universal elementary education through specific planning and target setting at district level. Operates in 149 Districts of 14 states. In 1997–8, central Plan outlay for elementary education was Rs. 561 crores (bulk of expenditure borne by states). Health and family welfare ‘Health for All’ Policy Policy announced in 1983. Continued expansion of health infrastructure, including primary health centres, but with more attention to underprivileged and vulnerable sections. Includes National Illness Assistance Fund that seeks to ensure financial assistance for specialized medical treatment from life-threatening diseases. Targeted at BPL patients. Includes various disease-eradication programmes. In 1997– 8, central Plan allocation to primary health care was Rs. 918 crores. Family Welfare Programme 100% centrally sponsored scheme started in 1952. Seeks to promote small family norm and reproductive and child health through free and voluntary choice. Includes Reproduction and Child Health scheme, Pulse Polio Immunization scheme, etc. In 1996–7, central Plan outlay to family welfare amounted to Rs. 1,535 crores.

FWP

(d)

Housing and sanitation

ARWSP RSS

National Housing Policy Revised in 1994. Recognizes importance of housing for overall development of rural people and urban poor. Includes central assistance to national network of building centres; housing schemes for Economically Weaker Sections and Lower Income Groups; and IAY (see above). Rural Water Supply Programme Central assistance matching provision by state under MNP. Rural Sanitation Scheme Supplements MNP and other programmes. Targeted at SC/ STs. During 1996–7, central expenditure was Rs. 60 crores; 2.3 lakh latrines built.

Programmes and policies for poverty alleviation

(e) SCP

TSP

(f)

ICDS

IV

281

Welfare of weaker sections Special Component Plan Started in 1979. Central assistance to states to make special provisions to SCs under various schemes. Tribal Sub Plan Started in 1974. Central assistance to states to make special provisions to STs under various schemes. Development of women and children ‘Empowerment of Women’ Policy National policy announced in Ninth Plan. Main scheme: ICDS (see below). Various smaller schemes: STEP (Support to Training and Employment Programme); Employment and Income Generating Training Programme that trains women belonging to weaker sections in nontraditional occupations (co-funded by Norway); Rashtriya Mahila Kosh that extends credit to poor women of informal sector; Mahila Samridhi Yojana that promotes thrift among poor women, etc. Continuation of women’s component in poverty-alleviation programmes. Total central outlay for various schemes for women and children 1997–8: Rs. 1,026 crores. Integrated Child Development Services Scheme Started in 1975–6. Seeks to provide integrated package of services, including supplementary nutrition, immunization, health check-up and referral services, pre-school non-formal education and health to children below six years. Covers 201 lakh children and 38 lakh mothers. Agriculture

Various crop, livestock, fisheries schemes; schemes for irrigation, agricultural credit, supplies, technology, processing, marketing, etc. Some schemes targeted at marginal and small farmers. In 1997–8, central plan allocation to agriculture and allied sectors was Rs. 2,969 crores. V PDS

Subsidies Public Distribution System National food security and general subsidy scheme until 1997. Aimed at providing national and individual food

282

TPDS

Appendix 1

security through distribution of subsidized food and maintenance of buffer stocks (since 1966); promoting foodgrain production through ensured procurement and minimum support prices for farmers; checking inflationary pressure through subsidized food prices. Untargeted, but originally biased to urban areas. Targeted Public Distribution System Replaced untargeted PDS in June 1997. Aims at ensuring availability of essential commodities at affordable prices especially for the poor through provision of subsidized rice and wheat (10 kg per month), sugar, kerosene, etc. Other objectives like older PDS. Targeted at rural and urban BPL families; reduced food subsidy for the non-poor. In 1997–8, total subsidy will be Rs. 6,167 crores (Rs. 3,718 crores for BPL families); 1,645 lakh families covered (587 lakh BPL families).

Appendix 2 in Hajipur

The 1999 general election

What follows is a report on the 1999 parliamentary election in Hajipur, Vaishali, that was written for the research team by our co-worker, Vishwaranjan Raju. Many of the themes that Vishwaranjan teases out here (gender issues, the relationship of local and national political figures, the temporary ‘stopping’ of the development state) are not specific to Hajipur. Several of them can be observed in elections in West Bengal, for example. Nor should we assume that the everyday qualities of political life in a District are captured in extremis by the events that occur at election time. This report should rather be read as a complementary piece to the accounts of political society in Vaishali that we built up in part II of the book. For the record, the parliamentary seat of Hajipur was won in 1999 by Ram Vilas Paswan for the Janata Dal (United). The Janata Dal (United) was part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance which swept to power in New Delhi. Ram Vilas Paswan had won the seat in 1998 for the Janata Dal. At this point he was an ally of Laloo Yadav. The runner-up in the 1999 elections was Ramai Ram for the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Ramai Ram would have been required to resign his position as an MLA and State Minister in the government of Bihar had he won the parliamentary seat of Hajipur. Ram Sunder Das was placed third (in 1998 he took second place for the Samajwadi Janata Party (Rashtriya)). Ram Sunder Das had twice previously represented the Hajipur constituency, and was an ally of Laloo Yadav in the early-1990s. He had also been the Chief Minister of Bihar. BB is UNR, the local MLC. BB had for some years been the Janata Dal MLA for Raghopur. A long-time ally of Laloo Yadav, BB had resigned his seat in favour of Laloo Yadav before the latter became an MP. In return for this favour, Laloo Yadav rewarded BB with a seat in the Legislative Council. The present MLA for Raghopur, Rajgir Chaudhury, is something of a dummy candidate for BB, and is rarely mentioned by villagers. In D— village, in 1999, BB was able to mobilize the votes of those (few) Rajput families in the village who had taken advantage of 283

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his considerable links to the Block and District office, but not of those younger Rajputs who turned to Ram Vilas Paswan. Although most of Bidupur Block falls into the Yadav-dominated Raghopur Assembly Constituency, the Hajipur parliamentary constituency is less obviously dominated by Yadavs. The 1999 election in North Bihar was determined by the ‘Laloo’ question: whether to be for or against the husband of the Chief Minister of Bihar. Mindful that his party was losing support to the Samata-JD (United)-BJP combine, Laloo Yadav gave word that wherever an RJD candidate for Parliament ‘lost out’ in an RJD-Assembly seat, the sitting MLA would not have his or her ticket renewed for the next Assembly elections. BB, then, although not the MLA for Raghopur, was under pressure to ensure a lead for Ramai Ram in his area (which he did, by about 17,000 votes). The MLA for the Hajipur Assembly constituency, Rajendra Rai, faced similar pressures, but in a constituency less dominated by Yadavs he was unable to prevent Ramai Ram from trailing there by rather more votes. The election looms ‘Poor rural Indians are intelligent enough to know that seeing colourful helicopters in the sky means that election season has come again. They can easily make the assumption that white khadi-dhari politicians with huge crowds will again become the talk of villagers.1 A long procession of motor cars, new models of cars, will again move around these villagers. At the same time they become afraid, remembering what happened in the last election. There were no commercial vehicles for the last three days of the election. If anyone had an emergency the only option was to go to Hajipur by bicycle. There was no doctor in hospital as somebody told them that he was on election duty. School-going children were free to move in fields. Education is the first and foremost part of government which has to give greater sacrifice in name of election: teachers being polling officers, schools being polling booths, and colleges being “counting centres”. The whole system of education is stopped until a new government is formed.’ ‘This election is not different from others. When Vajpayee had come to Patna, a rickshaw puller told me that the traffic police had changed the route and just for one kilometre distance he had to move through three kilometres. But the passenger paid him only at the past rate. A hawker selling samosas and chaats [snacks] told me that at a rally for Laloo many people came and ate up all his items and paid nothing in return. While approaching D village [the research site] I was at Ganga bridge. I saw many passengers having no other option but to reach 1

Wearing ‘traditional’ or neo-Gandhian dress.

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Hajipur by walking the whole distance of ten kilometres, putting their luggage on their heads. At Paswan Chawk many flood-affected people were seen waiting for governmental assistance but nobody was available from the government side to console them as all were on election duty.’ Big men (and women) and local politics ‘H – Singh told me that in this parliamentary constituency 25,000 votes are bogus and about thirty booths are “be chiragee” as nobody resides here. According to him, thirty years back many villages were swept away by a current of the Ganga. The residents of those villages were at the bank of the river and a few of them migrated to Goraul or even Monghyr District. However their name on the voter list still remains. This is why Laloo Prasad preferred to contest the Vidhan Sabha [Legislative Assembly] election from here, considering 25,000 votes as solid votes, for which the ruling party easily manages in its own favour. When I asked why the parties in opposition do not raise this issue I was told that when we will be in power we will encash this whole 25,000’. ‘Recalling the earlier system when the post of minister was given to a political leader, C– Singh [a prominent villager] said that people had to take time to meet with them as they would always be busy in meetings. For the approval of any official’s letter there used to be a meeting, and with the consent of all the participants letters were either approved or rejected. But nowadays a criminal also says that tomorrow morning I will meet Mantri-ji [minister] and take approval for a particular contract work. Now the residence of a political leader has become a shop where for each piece of work – for example, a signature – there is a fixed rate. The authority to examine these matters is generally delegated to a PA or a very close relative.’ ‘One villager, V– Singh, said that BB’s visit to this village was directly related to the need to assemble a big crowd at the time of nomination. Earlier there used to be a victory rally, but now a leader has to show the media that a wave is in his favour. For this reason BB asked all vehicle owners [preferably four-wheelers] to participate in his nomination. K– Rai, a contractor whom I met at a tea stall, told me that when BB had visited the Yadav tola he specifically asked M– Singh to come at the time of his nomination at Hajipur. M– agreed to go on condition that a new vehicle would take him there. K– Rai, sitting in front of BB, accepted the responsibility for arranging a new vehicle. For fare and petrol the total cost was about 4,000 rupees. After the nomination was filed all respected people were invited to the residence of BB, where KD Rai and others had to contribute to the provision of beaten rice and curd. There he

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contributed two big drums of curd. This is one of the means by which politicians who give out [government] contracts for work take a return from their [the contractors’] earnings.’ ‘It was rumoured within the Rajput tola that Ram Sunder Das had taken Rs.10 lakhs to stand and contest from Hajipur constituency. However, elderly people were not happy as Ram Sunder Das had shifted from the RJD to the Samajwadi Janata Party as Laloo did not gave him a ticket’. ‘One evening when I was at Deba Chowk I saw that Rajendra Rai, a minister of Laloo’s government, visited and stayed for a long time. He was at the time discussing with local volunteers and villagers how he can get a victory over Ram Vilas. Actually he was in trouble as his local support was almost nil. All of his contract work on the Employment Assurance Scheme was actually done as per rule; that is, with the appointment of an Abhikarta [Agent] (the Block Development Officer also told me that in one of the meetings for the selection of an Abhikarta he was physically present). The work was done by the Junior Engineer, who did not appoint or involve local weighty personalities in his work. No benefits from the work were diverted to these people. The people agreed that the work done by Rajendra Rai is of comparatively better quality, but the setback he faced in a “democracy” was that the votes of the masses were still decided by a few weighty personalities in the village.’ ‘On my way to Patna I stopped at Onari Chowk to review the motivational level of people. This is a place where Dusadhs and Yadavs are in equal number. A person selling fish at Onari chowk was telling his people not to worry and that our leader [indicating Ram Vilas] has made arrangements for the election. He was telling the other Dusadh people that this time nobody will stop you voting. I joined the group and tried to win his confidence. He said finally that R– Singh, who is the stronghand of Ram Vilas-ji, has arranged for an AK 47 [rifle] for the period of the election. This has come from Nepal. My observation was that at this Chowk, if some special effort is not made by the administration, there is a fair chance of some casualities.’ ‘The next day, in the village, P— Singh, who last year was the Vidhan Sabha [Assembly] candidate of the Janata Dal, and who was defeated and had only 48,000 votes, again moved to the villages to collect his caste’s [Rajputs] votes for Ram Vilas and Vajpayee. In D— village he came and stayed at C– Singh’s dalan. This place is a milestone for all leaders, as he is the most reputed and respected person of his caste and of other castes also. Every leader wants to ‘please’ him, and if he is pleased politicians assume that other villagers respecting the view of C– Singh will not go against him. I found here for the first time that a political leader was facing questions from the public. One question was why Paswan himself

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had not come here? If he has no time during the election then what is the guarantee that in future he will come when he will become minister? How will he recognize us when he is MP since 1977 and has never visited this village or others nearby?’ Campaigns, rhetoric, transport ‘Next afternoon Ram Vilas made his speech at Deba Chowk. An announcement was made at a regular interval that due to some technical fault in the “helicopter” he is coming by car. When Ram Vilas spoke he used the word “helicopter” five times. Then I got into the issue of helicopters and talked with several people standing there and reached the conclusion that the word “helicopter” added much to the reputation of that leader. For rural illiterate people the helicopter is a symbol of the gradation of the leader. For people for whom the concept of the country is not clear – where somebody tells that the country means adding up Hajipur, Patna and Delhi – it is not easy to convince that so-and-so is a Cabinet minister or has held a higher designation. The only easy means to convince them is that they have come by helicopter. The poorer people can easily assume that his influence is much higher than that of leaders who are moving in cars. Even then, moving by Tata Sumo [as opposed to] moving by other [smaller] cars marks a difference in status.’ ‘Apart from four-wheelers, Rajdoot motor cycle rallies have also made the election more colourful. At least fifty youths making a group, with their party flags on their bikes, were common and were instructed to move inside the village. The question arises from where they were getting funds for petrol. For Ramai Ram they were mostly contractors who were always seen at party offices at every Chowk. Common people used to speak of them as “mobile cash counters”. When an RJD minister in a particular zone requires some money he will make contact with a nearby contractor who has been given work in the Laloo ministry. The story about Ram Vilas is not very different. I hear also there are “cash counters”, and even that you may not have to pay money: just by listing a few names you may get a full tank of petrol, or some time you may have to show a coupon issued by the party office. The question then is what this petrol pump owner will get in return for free petrol distribution for the last seven days. D.K.C – is the owner of two petrol pumps at Hajipur. He simply wants a ticket in the Vidhan Sabha election. Somebody says that his petrol pumps had been allotted by MP quota by Ram Vilas and that he has already been obliged. However, when I asked about distribution of petrol free or by coupon a volunteer said that petrol is given only to those candidates who may climb on stages and give speeches.’

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‘The next morning supporters of Ramai Ram came to the village asking for votes. They firstly approached the Dusadhs and Chamars. But the villagers were in a mood to face them down. Only when the vote comes do you come to us; where is your leader? If the leader has no spare time for us at this time of the election, will he count money when he becomes minister or will he come to us?’ ‘One of [Das’s] supporters pulled out a diary stating that: “I will note down your problem and when Neta-ji will come to power he will implement it.” Then one of the Dusadhs standing nearby reacted and said: “Sir, please don’t make a fool of me. I am a ragpicker and I have found many such diaries thrown at the garbage; this diary will also be thrown at the same place.”’ ‘In Yadav tola, I found that many people were fans of Mulayam Singh, and said that it was only due to him that Sonia could not become Prime Minister. Most of them, being Yadavs, were supporters of Laloo, but in their opinion the alliance of Laloo with Congress was not correct. We know the Laloo who was a follower of Jai Prakash Narayan, Lohia-ji and who now claims that I am the only leader who is protecting for social justice.2 But he does just the reverse of it. It is not others but our own people who are teasing us.’ ‘There were comments also on the speech of Rabri Devi at Raja Pakar Block [dominated by the Yadav caste]. She had said that whenever Ram Vilas will come to you: “You have to throw stones at him” and this was matter of a criticism. The message to her was that you may do unfair measures while in party office but in public meetings you must follow some accepted norms.’ ‘R– T– Paswan [of Gurmiswa] was saying at Deba Chowk that: “I have studied somewhere in the newspaper that our President is also a Dalit. But he never takes steps to protect our rights. Then what is the use of making a Dalit President? The President should instruct the election commission either to make separate arrangements for Scheduled Castes or resign from the post of Presidentship.” Another person sitting behind him said that is not a good sign for the Dalits as every leader had talked about Dalits for many years and nobody in reality did anything for them. Many leaders divided the Dalits and now the Dalits’ bargaining power has been reduced.’ 2

Laloo Yadav began his political career as a student leader (he was elected GeneralSecretary of the Patna University Students Union in 1967), and became an activist in the campaigns against Mrs Gandhi’s government, and later the Emergency (1975–7), that were led by the Gandhian socialist, Jayaprakash Narayan. His regard for the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia was less ideological than visceral – in his view, ‘the Socialist Party was the natural home for the backwards of Bihar’ (Thakur 2000: 32).

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‘At the dalan of N– Singh people were talking about Ramai Ram. M– Singh said that Ramai from no angle looks a leader. He is so dwarfish that in between a mob he seems to be sitting on a chair; he has no style of speaking. His pronunciation is very bad and he talks with people in the rural language. On the other hand Ram Vilas looks civilized and his style of speech is also urban; his personality attracts people. Later on I learned that the whole discussion started when R– said that he had seen Ram Vilas wearing a “suit” during the election campaign in Hajipur.’ ‘[Both] print media and electronic media have entered the village, breaking down the boundaries of the township. The time is changing so fast and “consumerism” has became dominant not only in metros or in towns but also in villages. Playing cards for hours with Titan watches on the wrist is not uncommon. In the same way a live telecast on Doordarshan of parliamentary debates, comparing the speeches of different leaders, their manner of action and reaction, their style of delivering speeches, everything has reached to the village. When they see any leader in front of them by naked eye they compare them to what they have earlier seen on the television screen. Very interestingly, during the whole discussion I found that nobody talked about the “performance capability” of leaders. Most of the discussion was about BJP leaders in Delhi, and their extraordinary capacity of delivering speeches. N– Singh, who is educated enough, said that Vajpayee-ji is a leader and Sonia Gandhi is a reader [she reads a speech written by another].’

Issues for the villagers ‘Leaving [another] discussion before its conclusion I reached the Kahar toli. Sanjay’s mother has little interest in politics. But she is very keen on what Rabri Devi says, including her suggestion that because, “Bahu [daughter-in-law] is always brought from outside . . . then what is wrong if Sonia has come from outside.” According to her what Rabri says is correct. Meanwhile, some nurses from the health centre, while returning after dressing a patient in Chamar toli, saw us and accompanied the meeting. One of the nurses had great objection to the slogan of the BJP that Sonia is bahu [daughter-in-law] and she is an outsider. She said that all daughters-in-law of this country are outsiders. How many problems we face in making an understanding in our new family as daughter-in-law only we can say it. After giving so many sacrifices we are called outsiders. Now we have to serve the family and we are outsiders. The BJP has taken the wrong stand. It has broken the families in India just by categorizing daughter and daughter-in-laws as separate.’

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‘Me– Singh, sitting at his flour mill, told me that I will vote for Ram Vilas as he is symbol of development. While he was Railway Minister he did many things for Hajipur; now he is promising that he will open a railway coach factory at Chak Sikandar, which is hardly one kilometre from here. In our village every unemployed [person] will get employment there. He charged that Laloo is not wanting these things to happen as his popularity will fall down and the credit will be grabbed by Ram Vilas.’ Election day ‘Today is the date of the election. The election is scheduled to start at 7 o’clock in the morning. At 6.30 D– Paswan was at my residence requesting me to do some arrangement for their voting as yesterday a few Yadavs had declared at Deba Chowk that no outsider [residing at Yadav tola] will be allowed to vote there. Actually this arrangement for voting was made during the 1996 election when both Laloo Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan were fighting together. That time they had no objection. But now both leaders are fighting against each other. This has created problems for the Dusadhs as their polling booths are situated within the Yadav tola.’ ‘There was no enthusiasm among villagers for voting. However, politically motivated persons [those houses which politicians use to sit while campaigning] were moving around the polling booths. A few of these people were engaged in welcoming and honouring polling officers and the armed forces.’ ‘At the police station I met R– K– Jha, a police constable deputed there. He was not in a mood to resist any type of malpractice; even the presiding officer was in the same mood. The police had a grievance that Shahid’s Kargil force is highly glorified and that government machinery gives more regard to them; but if one of us will die nothing will happen except a few sentences in the newspaper and a few rupees for shradh karm [funeral rites]. In the case of the soldiers, then lakhs plus service to dependants and the Chief Minister’s salute.’ ‘In the same way schoolteachers who were presiding officers were very disappointed with the system of election. They told me that in name of forces we have four constables; they have to move and control four booths covering distance of two kilometres. Can you expect them to control malpractice relating to polling for all four booths at same time? We also had no arrangement to stay here – nothing for food and lodging. These things we have to avail from these very villagers. For tea, breakfast and lunch we are dependent on villagers.’ ‘I again moved to Dusadh tola and met R– R– Paswan, R– Paswan and B– Paswan. Their flat faces told me they had been looted. They were

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silent and even refused to talk with me at that moment. Just to normalize the situation I tried to smile but could not succeed.’ ‘I had information about another booth at Yadav tola. This booth was managed by K– Rai and some other contractors including a few young youths whom BB has assured to give contractorships to in the coming future. The total votes to be cast at this booth was 1,236, out of which about 1,000 votes were cast up to 12 o’clock. Malpractice was so open that anybody who was coming from that tola had accurate information about how many votes had been cast until he left the tola.’ ‘I was sitting at the dalan of R– Singh. Me– Singh told me that from today the party office will be closed and a wine shop will be opened there. C– Thakur told me that now the days of flying helicopters, colourful banners and big meetings at different chowks are over.’

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Index

Accountability of civil servants 221 adivasis (see Scheduled Tribes) Ambedkar, Dr Bhimaro Ranji 35, 123 Bailey, F. G. 34–5, 37 Bardhan, Pranab 34 Bayly, Christopher 191, 221 Bentall, Jim 242 Bhatia, Bela 237, 238 Bhojpur District 92 action research in 269–70 and education 143, 144–5 and the EAS 162, 165, 169 social networks 105 poor people’s encounters with the state 116–17 Bihar (see also Jharkhand, Bhojpur District, Ranchi District, Vaishali District) privatisation of the state 34 biopolitics 15–16, 27, 90, 151 Brass, Paul 18, 238 Breman, Jan 240–1 caste (see also: jati, varna) and bureaucracy 35 and political power 71–3, 144, 198, 206, 232 and poverty 95 and state capture 37–8 and social dominance 95–6 Census 27 Chambers, Robert 78, 124–6, 134, 266 Chandra, Kanchan 37–8, 41, 234 Chatterjee, Partha 1–2, 5, 8, 36, 189–90, 191, 207–8, 214, 250–1, 252, 255–6, 257–8, 262 Chaudhuri, S. 3–4, 230–1 Constituent Assembly Debates 54, 55

314

Cooke, Bill 121 citizenship, construction of 255–8 civil society 189, 255, 257–8 Corbridge, Stuart 25 corruption 157, 161, 166–7, 175, 182, 204, 222–3, 228, 234 Dadaism 236 DaMatta, Roberto 152 Dandekar, V. 64 Davis, Marvin 195 Dean, Mitchell 274 decentralisation 155, 225, 226 democracy 191, 215 participatory 229 Department for International Development 246, 268–9 and New Public Administration 3 development, theories of community 123–4 depoliticisation of 248, 258 participatory 43, 140, 260 post-development 48 Development studies 9, 44–5, 188, 250, 255 developmentalism 47–9 Dey, Nikhil 221, 243–4 Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project (EIRFP) 43–4, 45, 134, 145–6 economic reform 41–2, 74, 158, 186 education (see also Village Education Committees) 80, 96–102, 176–83 literacy 96–8, 176 perceptions of 99–102 School Attendance Committtees (SACs) 129–31, 143, 178, 180 schooling 99 elections 196, 283–91 electoral system 2 employment and social networks 102

Index Employment Assurance Scheme 80–2, 109, 127–8, 161–8, 199 accountability structures 200 information flow 131–2 and participation 43, 134–8 Escobar, Arturo 47–9, 188, 250, 264, 272 Esteva, G. 272 Ferguson, James 6–7, 70, 250–1, 252, 255, 258, 261, 262, 264, 265, 271, 273–4 Flyvberg, Bent 266 forests (see also Joint Forest Management) deregulation of timber products 245 Foucault, Michel 15, 265, 272 Fuller, C. 7, 108 Gandhi, Indira 64–6 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 123 gender 254 and poverty 96 and rural development 67 good governance 1–2, 151, 152, 161, 177, 183, 215, 251 academic debates 153–5, 157 Gooptu, Nandini 17, 23–5, 236 government, structures of (IAS) 5, 243 governmentality 154, 260, 262 theories of 5–6, 16 Grindle, Merilee 156, 184 Guha, Ramachandra 222 Gupta, Akhil 108–9, 119–20 Gupta, Shaibal 233 Hansen, Thomas Blom 222, 243 Haragopal, G. 193 Harbinger, Arnold 244 Harriss, John 7, 108, 186, 260 Harriss-White, Barbara 4, 7–9, 39, 160–1, 273 Heller, Patrick 3–4, 230–1 Herbst, Jeffrey 33 Hirschman, Albert 9, 40 Hunter, Iain 50 Inden, Ronald 158, 161 Jaffrelot, Christophe 71, 123 jati (see caste) Jayal, Ayesha 18 Jayal, Niraja Gopal 225 Jenkins, Rob 151, 153, 158, 161, 186

315 Joint Forest Management 79–80 awareness of 133–4 Joshi, Sharad 242 Kantha, V. 176 Kaviraj, Sudipta 5, 36 Kerala 228 KSSP (Kerala Sashtra Sahitya Parishad) 230 Khilnani, Sunil 190 Kohli, Atul 158, 215, 252–3 Kothari, Uma 121 Krueger, Anne 154 Kumar, Sanjay 25, 139–40, 145, 146 leadership, political 208–9 Leftwich, Adrian 151, 186 Lehmann, David 49 livelihoods, poor people’s 93–6, 102–3, 107–8 local government 109 MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan) 28–9, 221, 222–4 Madhya Pradesh 226–8 Malda District 90 ‘action research’ in 267–8 and the EAS 141–2, 203–6 and education 178, 180, 183 and political society 255 social networks 107 Manor, James 155–6 masculinity 244 methodology 87–9, 266 field economics 4 Midnapore District 91–2, 109 and the EAS 135–7, 142–3, 147–8, 200–3 and Education 182 and political society 196–7, 207–10, 252–4 poor people’s encounters with the state 117–19 social networks 106–7 micro-credit 103 Migdal, Joel 37 Moiji, Jan 24 Moore, Mick 191 Mosse, David 138, 140 Mouffe, Chantal 191 Myrdal, Gunnar 157 Nandy, Ashis 42–3, 188 Narain, D. 176 National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 1

316

Index

Naxalism 237–40 Nehru, Jawaharlal 53–4, 55, 123 neo-liberalism 40, 78 New Public Administration 1, 3, 8, 153, 158, 159–60, 168, 186, 251, 258 Oldenburg, Philip 174–5, 246 Osborne, Evan 41 O’Tuathail, Gerard 25–7 Palme Dutt 60 participation 137, 140, 142, 144 assessment of 126 as a form of ‘tyranny’ 146–50 history of 123–5 and information flow 131–4 theories of 121, 125–6, 138, 146 Parry, Johnny 22–3, 193 passive revolution 36 Peck, Jamie 30 performativity 30–2 Planning Commission 55, 57–8, 59, 69–70 Polanyi, Karl 41 politics 65 and criminalisation 77 and identity 37 and moral order 197–8 political culture 3–4, 206–13 political society 168, 178–9, 187, 189, 191, 250, 255–6, 257–8 political workers/agents 193–9 population control 62–3 populism (see development) post-colonialism 250, 255 poverty academic debates around 51–2, 59–60, 64, 77 definition of in fieldwork 93 and economy 59 and empowerment 77–8, 82–3 and inequality 67 and Scheduled Castes 57 and seasonal variations 93 and population growth 60–2 anti-poverty programmes 21, 68, 70, 159–60 as social exclusion 149, 237 government definitions 55, 59, 68, 69–70, 75–7 government spending on 71, 275–82 Indira Gandhi and 64–6 poverty lines and minimum needs 63–4, 75–7 Prakash, M. S. 272

Putnam, Robert 188–9 Putzel, James 191 Queueing 31–2, 38 Ram Reddy, G. 193 Ranchi District (see also Jharkhand) 92 and the EAS 162, 165, 170–1 and Education 144 and forest offences 27–8 and political society 20, 254 poor people’s encounters with the state 112, 114–16 social networks 105–6 Rath, N. 64 Reid, John 27 Rogaly, Ben 207, 209–13 Rose, Nikolas 16, 49–50 Roy, Aruna 243–4 Rudolph, Lloyd 34, 224 Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber 34, 224 Ruud, Arild 190, 196, 197–8, 253 Saberwal, Satish 36 Scheduled Castes (SCs) 47, 73, 237, 247 and poverty 56–7 Scheduled Tribes (see also adivasis) 57, 73, 237 and poverty 56 Scott, James 7, 16–17, 43–4, 45, 219–20, 247, 255, 258, 262, 263 Sen, Amartya 3, 17 Short, Clare 246 Singh, Digvijay 4, 226 social capital 126, 188 Srivastava, M. 227–8 state and typologies 22 economic exchanges with 23–5 everyday state 19, 108–19 information exchanges with 25–9 poor people’s interaction with 20–33, 108–19 shadow state 4, 22, 185 sightings of 7 state scarcity 33–8, 165, 185 structural adjustment 154 Tambiah, Stanley 17 technologies of rule 5–7 Tendler, Judith 156 Thakur, Kapoori 232–3, 237 Thakur, Sankarshan 231, 233, 234–5, 240

Index Tikait, Mahendra Singh 242–3 Tiwary, M 147 Turner, John 124 UNDP Human Development Index 2 and New Public Administration 3 Uphoff, Norman 266 Vaishali District 92 and the EAS 138, 162, 165, 171–4 and Education 144 and electoral competition 283–91 and political society 195–6, 207, 209–13, 255 social networks 104–5 Varshney, Ashutosh 241 Vasan, S. 35 Village Education Committees (VECs) 80, 128–9, 143–5, 176 awareness of 132–3 formation of 177–8

317 violence 209, 210, 238, 243 and electoral competition 105, 209–10, 213 and State 17–18 Washington Consensus 42, 154 Weber, Max 274 Weiner, Myron 37 West Bengal (see Malda District and Midnapore District) Williamson, Jeffrey 155 Wilson, Kalpana 238 Women (see also gender) in government 226–7 World Bank 41–2, 154, 245–6, 258–9, 260, 261, 262 and New Public Administration 3 World Wide Web and information flows 28, 29 Yadav, Laloo Prasad 211, 231–4, 254 zamindars (revenue collectors) 56