Paper short abstract:

Shining India fails to bridge the gap with the plantation coolies who now take the way of starvation, suicides, and join insurgent groups. The root lies in the quarantining of the workers and their subsequent disarticulation from the state, which in turn reinforced their marginalization.

Paper long abstract:

The "overdeveloped superstructure" of a post colonial state like India (Hamza Alavi) has failed to penetrate certain sectors of production, like the tea plantation; so much so that the latter almost never got the opportunity to be integrated into the post-Nehruvian national economy, built from the beginning of the 1960s. The post-colonial national state was hardly concerned with legitimizing itself vis-à-vis the tea sector - instead, its ideology of Development marginalized tea plantation workers as the "other" of the ideal national citizen. In this paper I argue that this marginalization in the state ideology of Development has created a quarantined pool of labor in the plantations whose low socio-economic status was reinforced over time. This becomes evident from the sustained failure of state development policies - both targeted and more general - when it comes to plantation zones. Crises in the tea plantations did not prompt state policies to rehabilitate tea plantation workers into other sectors through reskilling, nor trigger state efforts to try to revive the plantations. This suggests that even before the onslaught of the neoliberal era, the state in India has disentangled and disarticulated itself from the plantation sector.