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  • Negotiating power: Disputes over electrification in rural India

  • Indrajit Roy
  • Journal:
    Modern Asian Studies , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    25 September 2024, pp. 1-20
    • Article
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  • How are infrastructures socially appropriated? This article uses my fortuitous presence in a rural locality in eastern India as its residents discussed proposals for its complete electrification, allowing me to reflect on social negotiations around infrastructure prior to its installation. Drawing on a detailed ethnography of electrification in a West Bengal village, I illustrate the nuanced ways in which people inflect infrastructural projects with their collective ideas of what is right and good. As far as they can see, such projects are neither the unalloyed benefit that proponents celebrate nor the unmitigated evil that opponents lament. Rather, they are evaluated in relation to people’s imagination of the collective good, to which such infrastructures may or may not be central. Drawing on the insights offered by my interlocutors as well as recent advances in the literature on the politics of infrastructures, this article interrogates the perspective that infrastructures advance governmental rationalities. Building on well-established insights that technological infrastructures are not socially neutral and that infrastructures are socially appropriated, disputed, and negotiated, this article demonstrates that people’s engagement with infrastructures politicizes, rather than governmentalizes, them.

Politics of the Poor
  • Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India
  • Indrajit Roy
  • Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017
  • This book challenges the ongoing scholarly debates on poor people's negotiations with democracy. It demonstrates the varied ways in which the poor engage with their elected representatives, political mediators and dominant classes in order to advance their claims. Roy explains the variations by directing attention to the dynamic interaction between the opportunity structures available to the poor and the social relations of power in which they are embedded. He analyses these intersections as 'political spaces' which both enable and constrain popular practices. Through examination of the 'political spaces' available to the poor in four different localities, Roy outlines a new analytic framework to understanding poor people's politics. Based on these observations, the book makes a strong case for an approach to democracy that appreciates people's ambivalences towards democracy. Roy urges researchers of democracy to step beyond either enthusiastic narratives - the inevitability of democracy or apocalyptic accounts of democracy's impending death.

  • Annexure 2 - The Census Survey

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 434-440

  • Summary

    The survey was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, census data was collected from nearly 4,500 households in 18 wards of the two states. The survey response structure elicited nominal responses. However, the codes were treated ordinally. Based on the analysis of this data, in-depth interviews were conducted with 500 households in four purposively selected localities. Probability samples for West Bengal were generated at 7.3 per cent error level and 90 per cent confidence levels. Probability samples for Bihar were generated at 6 per cent error level and 90 per cent confidence levels. In the survey, the response structure elicited nominal as well as open-ended responses. The codes were treated nominally and categorically. The data was analysed using the STATA software package.

    The survey data

    The survey instrument included each of the 13 questions (12 in the case of West Bengal) mandated in the Planning Commission's survey schedule. It also included the MPI that were at that time being developed by the OPHDI for the UNDP Human Development Report (Alkire and Santos, 2010). In addition, it also drew on the questions framed for the BPL survey proposed by Mehrotra and Mander (2009) and the Destitution Questionnaire developed by the Right to Food campaign in India (RTF, 2002). The survey schedule specifically asked whether the respondent household possessed a BPL card or not. The survey instrument was administered in the local dialect.

    The survey response coding structure followed the cardinal response variables used by the Planning Commission's BPL survey. This harmonization facilitated the calculation and- subsequently- the assignment of a score to each surveyed household in accordance with the guidance issued by the Commission. The response variables for questions not corresponding with those on the official BPL survey, but drawing on the MPI were coded using the dichotomous variables (0/1) used by that index. Where the questions were such that they corresponded to both methodologies, the response format followed the cardinal treatment accorded to the data by the Planning Commission, since it was easier to dichotomize cardinal data.

    Recruitment and training of investigators

    The investigators were recruited from among a pool of NGO workers. In both States, my local NGO contacts recruited them on the basis of previous work experience, familiarity with local dialect, and ability and willingness to work in rural areas for extended periods of time.

  • 3 - Political Spaces: Social Relations of Power

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 117-186

  • Summary

    …the caste system is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers.

    Ambedkar, 1936

    Caste is congealed class.

    Ram Manohar Lohia, 1964

    India's poor are integral, not marginal, to its postcolonial democracy and emerging market economy. Their participation in the political and economic life of the country is mediated through the social relations of power in which they are enmeshed. Social relations of power shape the ways in which political parties seek legitimation from them during and after elections, employers recruit their labour for purposes of production and mercantile and commercial actors interact with them in market places. Such relations are constituted by the intersecting collaborations and conflicts between different social classes, of which the labouring poor are but one. This chapter introduces the four political places in which fieldwork was conducted. It does so through a discussion of the social relations of power – the web of collaborations and conflicts – within which the people of the localities are embedded. Because any discussion of social relations of power must necessarily be grounded in concrete realities, the material in this chapter underscores the detailed and the contingent unlike than the general and broad discussion of institutional opportunity structures of the previous chapter. Readers will meet the plethora of characters whose actions constitute the politics of the poor. I deploy a class-analytic framework to think through the social relations of power within which they are embedded. I first elaborate the key building blocks of class in the context of eastern India, highlighting the importance of labour relations and caste status in the constitution of class: three social classes are identified, based on a synthesis of the rich literature on the subject. I then introduce each of the four fieldwork localities by detailing the social relations of power that permeate their political economies. To understand the social relations of power, I direct specific attention to relations of production and the relations of distribution in the study localities. In the context of this chapter, the social relations of production refer to the ways in which members of the three identified social classes organize around their economic activities and deploy labour and material resources.

  • Introduction: Against False Binaries

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

    Francis Fukuyama, 1989

    People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world.

    Oscar Lewis, 1971

    The problem

    The world is richer today than it has been at any time in recorded history. 1 per cent of its richest people own over half its wealth, while 80 per cent of the global population shares less than 5 per cent of this wealth. Such inequalities and the poverty they underpin sit awkwardly with the fact that more people inhabit democracies than ever before, where they elect their governments and are a promised a share in political participation. Indeed, of the over 1.6 billion people estimated to be living in poverty, close to a billion inhabit democracies. Their very existence challenges a long-dominant assumption in academia and beyond that poor people are incapable of, and therefore unsuited for, democracy. The scepticism about democracy surviving in a socio-economic environment marked by poverty and inequality was particularly challenged at the turn of the century, when scholars gushed that democracy was on the ascendance. Since then, however, fears that democracy is ‘in recession’ have steadily gained ground. Geopolitical events from around the world, economic recession in capitalist democracies, and widening inequalities across the globe have sobered the enthusiasm for democracy on display at the turn of the century. The gnawing realization that processes labelled as democratization have been concomitant with widening inequalities of wealth and income has led observers to worry whether democracy is a luxury that people facing deprivations and disparities can afford.

  • 7 - From Tradition to Modernity?: The Politics of Imagination

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 346-395

  • Summary

    Love, dignity, respect: no one should be deprived of these things. We may not have these in our lifetime, but we hope that our children and grandchildren do in theirs.

    Jamuni Rishi, 9 April 2010, 35, Landless labourer

    The conjunctions between the opportunity structures inhered in India's unequal democracy and the social relations of power form political spaces. Such spaces shape poor people's negotiations with members of other classes. Their negotiations intimate the meanings they make of democracy. In the preceding chapter, I examined these negotiations in the context of a governmental intervention which is universal in its scope. The electrification program to which I directed attention is neither targeted to a specific section of Rahimpur's population nor is it conditional upon the performance of manual labour by potential beneficiaries. The chapter noted people's negotiations with the program in the context of an incorporative political place where the labouring classes collaborated uneasily with the entrenched classes against the precarious classes. In doing so, I offered a detailed account of the ways in which their disputations with the narratives of improvement reproduce extant social relations of power, but also strain these relationships. Whereas Rahimpur's people supplicate before their politicians in the context of a narrowly- targeted public policy and make demands in the context of broader-based public policy, they are able to push the limits of these relationships against the backdrop of universal public policy. Such negotiations illustrate the ways in which universalistic ideals entangle with particularistic practices in actually-existing democracies. In the present chapter, I continue my explorations of poor people's multifaceted negotiations with democracy in the context of another universally applicable policy. However, here I focus attention on a ‘populist’ political space. The discussions in this chapter draw on my fieldwork in Bihar's Sargana village, where the labouring poor collaborate with the precarious classes against the entrenched classes.

    The policy context is provided by the Bihar State Government's legislation declaring the public character of the State's Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples. The legislation draws on Wakf laws that administer Muslim places of worship and guarantee their public character. Since the promulgation of this law, the State's temples are mandated to not only have their accounts audited by government authorities but to also involve members of the public in their administrative and financial management.

  • 6 - From Backwardness to Improvement?: The Politics of Disputation

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 292-345

  • Summary

    I am poor today. Does that mean that my children should not lead a better life tomorrow?

    Interview notes, Shekhar Shil, 15 February 2010, c. 55, marginal landowner

    The preceding chapters illuminate the ways in which the intersections in between opportunity structures and social relations of power in contemporary India's unequal democracy constitute political spaces. Such spaces, in turn, shape labouring classes’ negotiations with other classes. These chapters note the importance of the policy design, which further specifies opportunity structures. Where the policy is narrowly targeted, people ‘supplicate’. Where the policy allows people to self-select themselves, they ‘demand’ access, although Roshanar's case alerts us to the continuing importance of the social relations of power. Although popular negotiations spawned by the different policies vary considerably, they signal for us the entangled meanings with which the poor imbue democracy. The negotiations underpinning these entangled meanings provide a window to analyse the entanglements between the universalistic ideas and particularistic practices that characterize any democracy.

    I continue to explore these entanglements in this chapter and the next by shifting attention to a different kind of policy and focussing discussions on heterogenieties in poor people's negotiations within a single political place. The policy context is provided by an electrification programme which is universal in scope. This programme is neither narrowly targeted to specific localities or populations nor is access to it conditional upon performance of any manual labour. The discussions in this chapter are based on ethnographic observations in West Bengal's Rahimpur village, an incorporative political place where the labouring poor and the entrenched classes coalesced uneasily against the precarious classes. The discussion in the next chapter will proceed along somewhat similar lines, focussing on Bihar's Sargana village, a populist political place where the labouring poor gravitated towards the precarious classes against the entrenched classes.

    The material presented in this chapter enables me to analyse the ways in which Rahimpur's labouring classes dispute their elected politicians’ unilateral efforts to implement an electrification program that promises to improve everyone's lives. Through their disputations, they advance their own myriad views on what improvement means to them. Side by side, I underscore disputes among the ward's population, from which the elected politicians and his associates could not, try as they might, extricate themselves.

  • 4 - From Clientelism to Citizenship?: The Politics of Supplications

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 187-237

  • Summary

    We appealed to [Mukhya in Roshanar gram panchayat] to help us. We pleaded with him today so that our children do not have to plead before anyone tomorrow.

    Shamsul Alam, Roshanar Ward 5, 5 April 2010, c. 60, Kunjra Muslim, marginal landowner

    Institutional opportunity structures interface with social relations of power to shape political spaces. India's democracy, even as it allows inequalities to flourish, offers quite specific political spaces for the poor to negotiate their claims. Such opportunities are further shaped by the design of public policy. This chapter examines poor people's politics in the context of a narrowly targeted social policy. Where governments disburse social assistance within the framework of targeted public policy, the role of political mediators and the discretion of elected politicians, as well as bureaucrats, increases manifold. The labouring classes are compelled to supplicate before political mediators, elected representatives and myriad other politicians in order to even be enumerated for social assistance. Their supplications are further shaped by the particular relations of power in which they are embedded. The empirical material in this chapter pertains to the supplications poor people make to their politicians and political mediators in order to be classified as living ‘below-poverty-line’ (BPL). Enumeration as BPL enables households to claim access to BPL cards. The cards entitle their bearers to subsidies on housing, food and cooking fuel, pensions, and scholarships. Realizing the potentially exclusionary effect of targeting, the labouring classes refuse to submit quietly to their elected representative's decisions on the matter. At the same time, however, they do not reject such policy or collectively protest its implementation.

    How are we to understand people's supplications in the context of our overarching interest in the meanings of democracy for people who live in poverty? The material offered in this chapter combines fieldwork with a discussion of the recent history of the Indian government's shift to targeted interventions and an analysis of the policy narrative on which the targeting policy is hinged. Fieldwork included a combination of data from surveys, elite interviews and ethnographic material. I rely on a census survey (See Annexure 2) conducted by my team of investigators in each of the study localities to highlight the arbitrariness of the targeted interventions.

  • 1 - The Perspectives of the Study: Towards an Agonistics of Democracy

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 13-59

  • Summary

    Poverty generates an intense focus on the present to the detriment of the future.

    World Bank, 2015

    It is always good to remind ourselves that people are not fools.

    Michel de Certeau, 1983

    This chapter clarifies the conceptual frameworks used in the book. I first outline the relational understandings of ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’ to which my argument is indebted. I then pinpoint the relevance of a perspective that foregrounds politics as an ensemble of practices through which people conduct their lives. Thereafter, I introduce the agonistic approach to studying democracy which frames my argument. Following these conceptual clarifications, I offer an overview of early approaches to poor people's collective practices before engaging critically with the growing body of literature that locates poor people's negotiations within debates over universalism and particularism. Next, I propose the analytical framework of ‘political space’ as co-constituted by the dynamic intersection of institutional opportunity structures and social relations of power. Before concluding the chapter, I defend the ethnographic approach on which much of the data presented in this book draws.

    Perspectives of poverty: Residualist or relational

    Poverty is a fuzzy concept. Sometimes, people who are clearly not poor describe themselves as living in poverty. While it is not uncommon for pundits in the Anglo-Saxon West to label poor people as being wasteful and lazy, public opinion in much of the world generally steers away from holding alleged faults in their work ethic as responsible for poor people's poverty. Most commentators associate poverty with a lack of employment, educational opportunities and reliable social networks. Several economists, and following them, national governments and international donors refer to poor people's limited consumption of select bundles of commodities, usually stemming from low incomes. Sympathetic perceptions of the poor usually relate poverty to people being malnourished and ill. Of late, more multidimensional approaches to poverty10 are beginning to emphasize the ways in poverty is caused by deprivations of specific functioning, what Amartya Sen (1999) famously calls capabilities. In this vein, Table 1.1 presents a regional snapshot of the incidence of poverty, based on two enormously influential, but widely disparate measures. The presentation shows the ways in which the choice of measures influences inferences about the extent of poverty, complicating any attempt to develop a homogenous understanding of the term.

  • Conclusion: The Politics of the Poor: Agonistic Negotiations with Democracy

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 396-418

  • Summary

    For the poor the economic is the spiritual. You cannot make any other appeal to those starving millions. It will fall flat on them. But you take food to them and they will regard you as their God. They are incapable of any other thought.

    Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1927

    Men (sic) make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

    Karl Marx, 1852

    To say that ‘democracy’ is a hotly contested concept is to parrot a cliché. Democracy realists (Przeworski, 1991) warn us of overloading the term with too many meanings. The proliferation of definitions of democracy with adjectives and characteristics of all sorts has led scholars to articulate legitimate anxieties about stretching the concept of democracy to such an extent as to render it analytically meaningless. Against minimalist and maximalist views, and advocating somewhat of a middle-range perspective, Terry Lyn Karl (1990) suggests that democracy be conceived of an institutional arrangement in which competitive elections are complemented by mechanisms to hold elected representatives accountable to the rule of law. Reiterating this view, Marc Plattner (1998) makes a case for emphasizing the compact between liberalism and democracy.

    Chantal Mouffe disagrees. She directs attention to the fraught conceptual histories between liberalism and democracy to support her argument that there is in fact no necessary relation between the two (Mouffe, 2000). In similar vein, David Beetham suggests that democracy refers at once to ‘control by citizens over their collective affairs, and equality between citizens in the exercise of that control’ (Beetham, 1999, 3). Likewise, Huber et al., (1997) suggest equal participation in public affairs as one of the characteristics of substantive democracy. The collapse of the so-called ‘people's democracies’ and the concomitant ascendance of Liberal democracy during the 1990s not only provided a favourable intellectual climate for the flourishing of liberal rights, but also made Liberal democracy susceptible to egalitarian claims (Schmitter, 1994). Based on these somewhat contradictory insights, we have a fragmentary conceptualization of democracy that include rather disparate characteristics: competitive elections, the guarantee of civil liberties and individual rights, protection of private property and establishment of the rule of law on the one hand, and equal participation of people in the affairs that matter to them on the other.

  • Annexure 3 - The Multidimensional Poverty Index

  • Indrajit Roy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Politics of the Poor
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 October 2017, pp 441-442

  • Summary

    Following Alkire and Foster (2011), I use the concept of the MPI to encapsulate the diverse manifestations of poverty. The MPI uses ten indicators to measure three critical dimensions of poverty at the household level: education, health and living standard. The three dimensions are equally weighted, although the weightage assigned to the indicators varies. To elaborate:

    1. The dimension of ‘education’ comprises the following indicators, each weighted equally at 1/6

  • a. Years of schooling: The household was considered deprived if no household member completed five years of schooling.

  • b. School attendance: The household was considered deprived if any child aged 6–14 was not attending school.

    • 2. The dimension of ‘health’ comprises the following indicators, each weighted equally at one-sixth.

  • a. Child mortality: The household was considered deprived if any child aged five years or less had died in the family within the last five years.

  • b. Nutrition: The household was considered deprived if anyone in the household reported that there were times when they ate fewer meals than usual or when they reported not knowing in the morning whether they would be able to afford a meal in the evening.

    • 3. The dimension of ‘standard of living’ comprises the following indicators, each weighted equally at one-eighteenth.

  • a. Electricity: The household was considered deprived if it had no legal access to electricity.

  • b. Drinking water: The household was considered deprived if it did not have access to safe drinking water.

  • c. Sanitation: The household was considered deprived if it did not have their own improved sanitation.

  • d. Flooring: The household was considered deprived if the house it inhabited had a dirt, sand or dung floor.

  • e. Fuel: The household was considered deprived if it used wood, charcoal or dung for cooking.

  • f. Assets: The household was considered deprived if it did not own more than one of: radio, TV, telephone, motorized vehicle, or refrigerator.

    • A household was identified as ‘multi-dimensionally poor’, or MPI Poor, if it was deprived in at least one dimension, or in a combination of indicators that added up to at least one dimension.

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