Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how women-centric development policies become central to the Indian state's counterinsurgency strategy against Maoist rebels in eastern India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it delves into poor women's responses to state-directed development in a counterinsurgency context.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2011, the Indian state has planned and implemented special rural development programmes for regions where the Maoist insurgency has been active. These programmes especially target poor rural women through subsided micro-finance loans. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the everyday practices of one such programme in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

I found that poor women, even those who had earlier aligned with the Maoists, shifted allegiances, participated enthusiastically in the state-directed development programmes, and sought to build sustained relations with actors who represented the state. Despite having rebelled against the state earlier, they now actively sought it out. Participation in state-directed development programmes not only opened up the possibility of gaining access to public goods, but also provided women with an opportunity to step out of their households, carve a space for themselves in the local public sphere, and make claims on officials to support new livelihood options. For these women, among whom I conducted my fieldwork, the state mediated their socio-economic aspirations and enabled them to challenge existing gender norms in village society.

This paper thus argues that development policy in a counterinsurgency context, far from being a top-down imposition, becomes a space of mediation between ordinary women and the state.