Engaging the ‘Long 1980s’: On the Emergence of the Mission Mode of State-fabrication in India

This article argues that in India, the key period for locating morphings of the state on the ground is the period between 1977 and 1991, a period it calls ‘the long 1980s’. It then identifies a key aspect of such changes as the emergence of the mission mode of state-fabrication in which work of the government increasingly happens through the various missions as opposed to the traditional way of delivering governmental programmes through the line departments. This has involved a shift towards ‘quotidian logistics’ of state-fabrication as opposed to the ‘symbolic logistics’ operational in the immediate aftermath of decolonisation involving the growing importance of ‘social’ technologies of statecraft. Fabricating the state in the mission mode has seen the governmental apparatus reaching deep into hitherto marginal rural areas and population groups through missions. The arguments offered in the article provide an alternative to the accounts of the processes of change in the governmental system offered by the ‘passive revolution thesis’.