Paper short abstract:

Citizenship in India is often mediated by governance processes, structuring resource contests, along caste and tribal lines; and, sited at panchayats. ‘Governmentality of panchayati raj’ disciplines all actors, including Naxals, which will be analysed using field data from Bihar and Jharkhand.

Paper long abstract:

The practice of citizenship in marginalised parts of India has been subject to a 'judicious veto' of the administrative apparatus ever since the colonial times, the formal legal rights notwithstanding. The governance processes thereby attain salience in understanding the complex and multifarious conflicts generated in these parts, which include a variety of contestations around caste and tribe; resource control (both public and societal); and, rationalities of governance. Some of these processes also correlate with the violent contestations labelled Naxalism, sparking off a new kind of political economy wherein the challenge to the liberal state from violent non-state actors (clubbed together under the label of Naxals) seem to be subject to the disciplining power of the same governmental process that lie at the roots of these issues.

Public policy geared towards addressing these conflicts is premised on mutually competing rationalities of raison d'état on the one hand and socio-economic transformation on the other. Additionally, the engagement between governance processes and conflict is mediated by the new governmentality of panchayati raj, which in turn become the institutional location of contests between all these processes and are in turn both, open to capture as well as emancipatory politics of citizenship. This complex melange of factors promise to generate a politics of transformation in Bihar and Jharkhand, which is the analytical focus of this paper.

Drawing from a recent intensive field study in Bihar and Jharkhand, the paper will analyse the implication of the above-mentioned processes for politics, governance processes and citizens' rights.