Insecure peace: understanding citizen and local government relations in a Maoist-affected region in India |
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Authors: | Subhasish Ray Mohan J. Dutta |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;2. Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore |
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Abstract: | This paper examines emerging citizen and local government relations in a village in the Junglemahal region of the state of West Bengal, once a major bastion of the Maoist insurgency in India. Since 2014, Junglemahal has not experienced a single Maoist-related incident. This has been widely attributed to the West Bengal government’s “model” handling of the insurgency, which rests on the rapid mobilization of public services through the non-elected arms of local governments, bypassing elected officials. How have Junglemahal’s residents experienced this particular form of post-conflict governance? Drawing on the culture-centered approach that ethnographically observes the processes of identifying development problems and developing community-grounded solutions to these problems, our findings indicate that the hyper-developmental state was paradoxically experienced by our respondents as a very distant entity. A recurrent theme in our interviews is the absence of a locally embedded party leadership that could be approached regarding issues of distributive justice. We argue that this desire for party mediation in public service delivery is an expression of a powerful social norm that has survived the conflict and ought to be integrated into post-conflict governance structures if the current peace is to endure. |
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Keywords: | Post-conflict reconstruction culture-centered approach local government bureaucracy Maoist insurgency |
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