ABSTRACT
The practice of citizenship in marginalised parts of India has been subject to a ‘judicious veto’ of the administrative apparatus ever since colonial times, 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 violent contestations, sparking off a new kind of political economy in which the challenge to the liberal state from violent non-state actors (clubbed together under the label of Naxals) seems to be subject to the disciplining power of the same governmental process that lies at the roots of these issues. 1
Public policy geared towards addressing these conflicts is premised on mutually competing rationalities of raison d’état and socio-economic transformation. In addition, the engagement between the governance processes and conflict is mediated by the new governmentality of Panchayati Raj, which in turn becomes the institutional location of contests and is, therefore, open to capture as well as emancipatory politics of citizenship. Drawing from an intensive field study in Bihar and Jharkhand, this complex melange of factors promises to generate a politics of transformation in Bihar and Jharkhand, which is the focus of this chapter.
