ABSTRACT
Junglemahal – the forested southwestern districts of West Bengal has experienced a series of violent clashes between Maoist and counter-Maoist forces. While the popular news and documentation focus on the major conflicts, there is a virtual absence of studies on the effects of such violence on people’s everyday lives. It not only includes disruptions but also the development of a distinct form of protest politics in the region. Through my second series of ethnographies, Chapter IV unearths what happened in two of the forested and Maoist-affected districts of the state before, during and after the political change. This chapter consists of two cases. Based on about a decade-long ethnography, the first case represents a thick description of the politics of violence between Maoists and informal LF-installed counter-Maoist forces – then popularly known as the Harmads. The second case shows how traditional cultural expressions are used as invented traditions to legitimise political decisions by TMC. This chapter relooks at one of the broad analytical tools of “party society” to explain the political stability of the state and, based on ethnography, it reformulates the concept as a distinct form of “systemic misrecognition” to be replaced by “cultural misrecognition” during the TMC era.
