Contribution short abstract

Despite focused welfare schemes and constitutional safeguards, development interventions directed at Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) in India continue to face challenges that obscure historical injustice, reproduce epistemic hierarchies and marginalise indigenous agency.

Contribution long abstract

Conceptually, drawing from Arturo Escobar’s (1995) formulation of development as a colonial knowledge regime that produces “underdeveloped” subjects through universalised categories of progress and deficiency. The persistent framing of the Asurs as backward reflects the construction of 'other,' where power operates through hierarchical knowledge production about the 'other.' These discursive constructions legitimise welfare-led and humanitarian responses that depoliticise structural inequalities, indicate that development functions as an “anti-politics machine” by displacing questions of power, land and autonomy.

This process results in chronic exclusion, constituting a form of symbolic violence. These mechanisms are further reinforced through state practices of enumeration, targeting, and policy categorisation, which align with insights on colonial domination illuminate how such structures generate internalised inferiority and cultural alienation among marginalised indigenous communities.

In the Indian political context, the paper foreground tribes as political actors embedded within extractive development and governance regimes, rather than passive recipients of welfare. Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) concept of political society further explains how the Asurs are governed as administratively managed populations rather than rights-bearing citizens. Additionally, drawing on subaltern representation, the paper interrogates the limits of participatory development and questions whose voices are authorised within development planning.

By foregrounding the Asur case, the paper argues for rejecting siloed and universalised development models in favour of locally driven, culturally grounded approaches that recognise indigenous epistemologies and political agency. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s (2014) notion of epistemologies of the South, it calls for redistributing power within development practice by centring indigenous knowledge, dignity, and participation.