Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper, I use the example of West Bengal's Panchayati Raj (local government reform) to address a number of wider issues of concern for geographers commentating on India's politics and development. Taking the work of Kaviraj as a point of entry, I examine the impact that the decentralisation of government has had on people's access to the state and on the internal politics of three rural communities in West Bengal. The complexities of the processes involved suggest that, rather than there being the unidirectional penetration of society by an ‘alien’ developmental state, rural Bengalis are able to make knowing use of the language and structures of modern government for their own ends. I end the paper by suggesting the possible consequences of these findings for Kaviraj's thesis, for accounts of a ‘crisis' of India's developmental state, and for the discursive turn in development studies more broadly.

The study begins with a review of Green Revolution research in India. A move is charted from a concern with various types of differentiation to an interest in wage-rate trends and opportunities for off-farm diversification. This leads into a discussion of the crucial role of the investment patterns of richer farmers in governing the dynamics of rural industrialisation. Various characterisations of richer farmers are reviewed in this context. The focus then moves to Meerut District, western Uttar Pradesh. A review of the progress of the Green Revolution in this area is followed by a focus on the investment strategies of richer farmers in the district. The particular significance of notions of family is noted and related to social and political changes operating at a number of scales. It is argued, in conclusion, that the next generation of rural development or Green Revolution studies in India will require an attention to both ‘old-fashioned’ rural development issues centring on labour relations and distributive justice and a more novel set of social, cultural, and micropolitical questions relating to how successful farmers imagine their surplus and how its subsequent utilisation might be contested by less affluent groups.

The author focuses on the problems inherent in environmentalist critiques of the Indian state, and the inability of their authors to provide a useful analytical approach for reforming state institutions engaged in environmental regulation and natural-resource management. After a review of the arguments made by leading spokespersons of Indian environmentalism, the author provides an alternative framework for understanding the different forms of state intervention in natural-resource management in colonial and postcolonial India. Three factors that have shaped dominant policy phases and strategies of state institutions engaged in resource management are highlighted:

major shifts in the political and economic processes that create pressures for state intervention;

The government of India has embraced joint forest management as a key strategy for dealing with forest degradation and forest employment issues in the 1990s. This represents a significant movement away from the forest reservation policies that held sway from 1947 to 1988 and which criminalised many local forest users. In this paper we consider the role played by forest struggles and forest intellectuals (notably Guha and Gadgil) in the rewriting of India's forest policies. We also evaluate the utility of a moral economy framework in guiding joint forest management policies in India's Jharkhand. We draw on village-level fieldwork in Ranchi District, Bihar, to highlight the value of an approach to the management of Degraded Protected Forests that offers a key role to active and informed forest citizens (as per the moral economy framework). We also highlight five areas of present concern: the extent of local environmental knowledges, not least among women; questions of territoriality and excludeability in respect of forest protection activities; trust, imagined communities, and forest citizenship; the role of charismatic leaders; and the importance of complementary ‘nonforest’ policies.

Contemporary theories of social movements have failed adequately to address the spatiality of collective action. I argue that an analysis of collective action that pays due attention to the spatiality of movement practice can provide an important complement to social movement theories. This spatiality of social movement agency involves an analysis of how spatial processes and relations across a variety of scales, as well as the particularities of specific places, influence the character and emergence of social movements, and how social movements use space strategically. Using the notions of locale, location, and sense of place as an interpretive framework I argue that a spatialized analysis of conflict provides important insights into social movement experience. First, it informs us of the broader spatial context within which social movements are located; second, it informs us of the spatial and cultural specificity of movements; third, it informs us of the cultural expressions of social movement agency; and, fourth, it informs us of how the strategic use of space may constrain or enable collective action. I contextualize these arguments by analyzing the Maoist insurgency of the Naxalite movement, which first emerged in India during the late 1960s.

This paper covers several key issues relating to women and gender in post-1947 India. A detailed discussion on the construction of ‘women’ by colonial and anticolonial forces prior to Independence helps place the post-Independence period in context. Because the issues are complex and intertwined, it is argued that in the Indian context the definition of conventional feminism needs to be substantially enlarged to incorporate the vast canvass covered and the role played by women in realising the aspirations of the common people including women. Thus, the author provides some representative case-study materials on Indian women in struggle (Shahada, anti-arrack, and Chipko, etc) while taking care to point out the too common assumption that these, particularly the last one, are or were women's movements. This is followed by an account of how women have been defined as a problem by various Indian plans and how women's issues are so often written around (or under) the state's desire to control female bodies in the name of national population planning. The discussion here maintains a critical edge in bringing together a narrative of Indian planning around ‘women’ with several remarks on (and drawn from) Western and non-Western feminisms.

The authors have produced the Atlas of Women and Men in India, using material from the 1991 Census, mainly at district level. The Atlas may be unacceptable to Indian geographers because it seeks to question the authority of numerical data and of maps, and to Western geographers because this is “mapping before we understand the process”. The authors introduce maps of the sex ratio in India and explore through a map of changes in the sex ratio 1981–91 some numerical, analytical, and ethical problems of such mapping. The Indian feminist activists consulted want the Atlas for advocacy: does this justify its production?

Studies of regionalism in India have tended to concentrate on the secessionist struggles in Kashmir and Punjab, and on centre-State relations within the federal union. An issue which has received far less attention has been that of nonsecessionist regionalism—the various demands for the creation of new smaller States within India. The persistent tendency of the centre has been to view these movements as threatening and divisive and, therefore, with varying degrees of success, to resist and repress them. However, a number of commentators have suggested that smaller States are one way in which India's federal structure could become more equipoised, decentralised, and participatory. In this paper the author examines the recent mass movement for a separate State of Uttarakhand, an area which currently forms the Himalayan part of the State of Uttar Pradesh. Given the limitations of space, she concentrates on one aspect of the movement, namely how protestors have mobilised particular grammars and strategies of resistance in their struggle to persuade the central government (the final arbiter) that their demands for separation from Uttar Pradesh are justified and that the creation of Uttarakhand would benefit both the region and the country, economically, environmentally, and strategically.

Although self-determination is a right for all peoples, legally defining a people so that they can exercise that right is often difficult. So too is devising a means for establishing an optimal, politically viable governance system that will satisfy that right. In respect to the disputed erstwhile princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, whose independence neither India nor Pakistan will countenance, I suggest that those two powers agree instead to the establishment of a Kashmir Autonomous Region (KAR); that a People's Assembly be elected to enable population groups from all parts of Jammu and Kashmir to discuss various options for their future governance, within or outside the KAR; and that, following such discussions, a fair, internationally supervised plebiscite be held to determine which areas shall become part of the KAR and which shall be fully integrated into India and Pakistan. Thereby, those who consider themselves ‘Kashmiris' would become a self-defined people. The KAR, could straddle the line separating Indian-held and Pakistani-held areas. While it would have a single government, India and Pakistan would maintain nominal sovereignty over the portions of the KAR on their respective sides of the line.