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

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.