ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explain the lines of inquiry through a case study of a government scheme that sought, inter alia, to strengthen the sense of citizenship through logic of rights-based entitlement. It discusses three different issues: first, the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and what may be called a soft-yet-hard party-state. Second, the different discourses of rights and obligations to which the scheme has given rise; and third, how the new discourse of rights was interpreted in relation to existing perceptions of a politicized and self-serving state. In the political climate of West Bengal, it was largely in the second category that most measures could be found. The chapter argues that the benefits of the pro-poor schemes that the government seeks to implement, such as the NREGS, are logically accessed by villagers through supplication and an appeal to morality and moral justice.
