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

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.