Seeing Development as Security: Constructing Top-Down Authority and Inequitable Access in Jharkhand

Abstract

This article examines governmental development interventions and their local-level implications for access to and authority over resources, using a framework of assemblage practices (Li 2007) as an analytical strategy in a mixed-methods study in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum. This insurgency-affected district, populated by the Ho tribe, has India’s largest iron deposits. It hosts the Saranda Action Plan (SAP), a controversial intervention that exemplifies how India’s government elides development with security in resource-conflict regions. SAP aims to bring security and development to mineral-rich Saranda forest division, but has been widely critiqued for its failure to deliver community-oriented development, while the security agenda paves the way for mining concessions. Meanwhile, neighbouring Sadar Chaibasa division, with comparable development issues but less minerals, is treated indifferently. Based on secondary research in Saranda and empirical work in Sadar Chaibasa’s forest villages, this article untangles the practices through which governmental development interventions construct inequitable resource access locally in both extreme and ordinary cases. It argues that seeing development as security enables the mutual constitution of top-down authorisation and inequitable resource access, building an undemocratic local-level state.