Neoliberal India Research Articles

Economic Growth, Development and Education of Scheduled Castes: Line Drawn from Neoliberal Era

The economy of India was reasonably well during the world economic crisis and is performing well in the economic growth of the nation. However, relatively high aggregate economic growth also co-exists with the persistence of less social development for more than a decade. The exclusiveness of this growth rate is associated with region, locality, education, employment, living standard and social position. In this situation, this study poses questions: what are the changing impacts of neoliberalism in India and does economic growth co-exist with social development? What are the neoliberal experiences of marginal sections connected to economic growth? How are the educational attainments, retention and achievements of Scheduled Caste students connected to the structural changes in higher education?

Revisiting Green Neoliberalism in India through the Lens of Market-Based Restoration and Reforestation Projects

This introduction to the special issue revisits the idea of ‘green neoliberalism’ through the lens of market-based restoration and reforestation projects in India. Addressing the strategic role of forests as ‘carbon sinks’ and ‘service providers’ in today’s neoliberal reform projects, it contributes to a renewed attention to the material production of such (un)desired natures and their variegated realities. It argues that empirical accounts of how the reorganisation of forests is imagined, how it is implemented through specific programmes, and how it gets entangled into the multi-layered histories of people and places, are critical to understand the tensions but also the openings that neoliberal restructuring at the forested frontier entails. First, the article builds on sustained critiques of ‘green neoliberalism’ to retrace changes in global environmental politics over the last 30 years, stamped by the extended reach of the market both outward —through a performative discursive shift and quantification drives— and inward, as it now aims at subjecting practices, habits and emotions to relentless rounds of improving and enhancing. Second, it considers these developments against the background of India’s forest governance since the 1990s, which saw the emergence of the judiciary as a key institution to enforce environmental laws and countertrends to democratizing forest governance. In light of empirical data collected in the special issue, it asks to what degree instruments such as compensatory afforestation or carbon forestry constitute a departure from older forestry projects, and, in fine, the heuristics of neoliberalism as a category, taking issue with the all-powerfulness of India’s State Forest Departments, the long-standing exclusion of local communities, the use of forests as capital for elite bureaucracies, but also the currency and power of the developmental state in India.

Book review: Manisha Rao, ed. 2021. Reframing the Environment: Resources, Risk and Resistance in Neoliberal India

Manisha Rao, ed. 2021. Reframing the Environment: Resources, Risk and Resistance in Neoliberal India. Oxford: Routledge. xx + 220 pp. References, index. ₹995 (hardback)

Slow Violence and theGas Peeditin Neoliberal India

AbstractThis article analyzes the ways in which slow violence and neoliberalism intertwine in the production of social and environmental destruction, evident in the lingering devastation from the 1984 Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal, India. Children are born with congenital abnormalities; women are plagued with reproductive health problems; and dangerous chemicals left in the abandoned factory continue to contaminate soil and groundwater. Yet Bhopal is remembered almost exclusively for the spectacle of its immediate aftermath. Drawing on 60 interviews with Bhopal victims and activists, field observations, archives, and official and independent reports, this paper examines how the neoliberal turn in Indian governance plays a role in the creation of slow violence. The paper advances our understanding of socioenvironmental destruction by tying slow violence to a temporal change in countries' governance in the Global South. The paper underscores the significance of considering political economic dynamics in the perpetration of slow violence. It also emphasizes how the neoliberal turn, now anchored in right-wing Hindutva politics in India, further constrains the possibilities for counter-measures that would address slow violence. The paper offers significant implications for analyzing the political economy of socioenvironmental and health disparities in the wake of corporate malfeasance.

Book Reviews: Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, Governing through Expertise: The Politics of Bioethics | Michael Levien, Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India | Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

JGSD is a peer-reviewed journal, which provides a forum for scholarly research and policy-oriented analyses on various dimensions of society, politics, economy, public administration, and security with a focus on South Asia.

Indebted by dispossession: The long‐term impacts of a Special Economic Zone on caste inequality in rural Telangana

AbstractThis paper contributes to a growing scholarship examining the ways in which dispossession in neoliberal India is reinforcing and reconfiguring agrarian social hierarchies. Existing studies have focussed on the differential successes of villagers in Special Economic Zone (SEZ)‐generated real estate markets, incorporation of land losers into stratified labour markets and the caste‐based politics of dispossession. Few studies, however, have systematically explored the long‐term implications of state‐orchestrated dispossession on agrarian credit and debt relations. Based on long‐term fieldwork on a village partially expropriated for a SEZ in the South Indian state of Telangana, this study shows how dispossession has led to a sharp rise of over‐indebtedness within the land losing population. Dispossession deprived villagers of land and livestock; low compensation was inadequate to obtain replacement assets; and labour inside the SEZ was insufficient to ensure the reproduction of most households. The result was a cascading process of indebtedness for consumption smoothing that was generalized but the greatest among former untouchables (Scheduled Castes, SCs) and Lambadas (Scheduled Tribes, STs). Since dispossession precluded these historically marginalized groups from access to institutional credit, their reliance on largely upper caste moneylenders—whose land was spared expropriation—was deepened. Thus, I show how dispossession for neoliberal projects has reinforced this traditional caste‐based form of exploitation.

Book review: Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India

Book review: Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India

Power, privilege and paradox: Understanding Ranveer Singh’s sartorial fame and the (un)making of the new millennial masculinity in contemporary Indian society

Bollywood film star Ranveer Singh’s fashion choices are often defined as eccentric, outlandish and even androgynous, in particular, his much-talked-about public appearances in bright floral pantsuits, or kohl-lined eyes and man-skirts are discussed in popular media as subverting gender norms and challenging gender binaries. Commenting on the shift in representation of contemporary Bollywood’s male protagonist, film scholars have argued that Singh embodies ‘metrosexual masculinity’ in neoliberal India and that his on- and off-screen persona involves deliberate scripting of a ‘feminist’ and ‘less patriarchally structured masculinity’. Testing the extent of the assertions mentioned above, I examine Singh’s media persona as a site of cultural production and a form of social reproduction. I use a feminist theoretical framework, and gender studies debates to critique Singh’s negotiations with gender and sexuality in his media images across – film, advertisement and social media. I argue that the millennial star as a fashion icon is not only far from offering a progressive model of millennial masculinity, but is also working towards normalizing Hindu gender ideologies that have long sanctioned power to men and subjugated women in Indian society. Focusing on the role played by the corporatized androcentric media industry, I argue that ‘feminist’ posturing of the star appropriates and suppresses other forms of marginal identities. Singh’s media persona thus works to maintain the status quo as far as gender, class and caste identities are concerned, and becomes a vehicle of the nationalist ideology under the present right-wing leader, Narendra Modi.

Agrarian crisis and neoliberalism in India

The nature and manifestations of the rural and agrarian distress in India point to the disastrous, class-specific nature of neoliberal economic policies. A significant aspect of this process is its spatial dimensions – the various ways through which uneven development has been the cornerstone of the unfolding dynamics of economic growth in globalizing India. The prolonged agrarian crisis, fuelled by neoliberal economic policies, has created a crisis of survival in the rural areas. It has uprooted a class of cultivators and agricultural labourers, who have joined the informal economy as insecure, vulnerable workers.

Book review: K. Kalpana, South Asia Edition, Women Microfinance and the State in Neo Liberal India

K. Kalpana, South Asia Edition, Women Microfinance and the State in Neo Liberal India, New York: Routledge, 2019, 244 pp., ₹995 (Hardcover). ISBN 9781138219663.

Colonial World of Postcolonial Historians: Reification, Theoreticism, and the Neoliberal Reinvention of Tribal Identity in India

This article develops a critical analysis of the colonial world of the postcolonial historians whose works inadvertently contribute to the process of reconstituting the colonial construction of tribal identities in neoliberal India. The monolithic and colonial construction of tribal identities in postcolonial India reinforces and preserves tribal identities along the lines of the colonial methods of identity formation based on territorialization. The article highlights the problematic features of the territorialization and deterritorialization of tribal identities and their reconstitution. Territorial-based identity formation is now being used and sustained by the neoliberal political and economic ruling and non-ruling elites in order to exploit tribal communities. The existence of upper-caste and class-based Hindu social order is concomitant with a social hierarchy based on the exploitation of tribal communities in India. This article locates the colonial and neoliberal capitalist logic of identity formation that serves elites, and helps to advance the neoliberal political-economic project of the Hindu right. A postmodern logic of identity formation facilitates the expansion of the neoliberal capitalist economy with the process of Hinduization. It contributes to identity formations that divide the people on territorial grounds. The article is divided into four parts. The first outlines the philosophical basis of identity formation and its links with neoliberalism; the second deals with identity formation based on territory; part three documents the debates on tribal identity formation in postcolonial India; and the final part elucidates the capitalist logic inherent in territorial-based identity formations.

Rights-Politics and the Politics of Rights in Neoliberal India

In 1991, the Indian economy, was finally proclaimed liberalised from the control of the state; the market was now to be the sole engine of growth, development and poverty alleviation. But just over a decade later, a series of rights-based legislations––rights to food, work, information, education, and forests were seen as challenging the market’s dominance over an anti-poverty agenda and heralding the birth of India’s welfare state. These rights-based legislations have animated a growing field of social scientific inquiry which assesses the genesis and career of the different pro-poor laws that have passed since 2005. This paper reviews two recent contributions to that scholarship: Rob Jenkins and James Manor’s Politics and the Right to Work and Indrajit Roy’s Politics of the Poor, both of which are concerned with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). After contextualising the two books within an emerging legal activism and providing an in-depth discussion of their key concepts, arguments and methods, attention is paid to each author's explanation of the contradictions between India’s neoliberal economy and welfare state. In conclusion, the strengths and limitations of prevailing approaches studying India’s poverty alleviation programmes are discussed and it is suggested that a theoretical cross-fertilisation with neoliberalism studies could further reinvigorate and give shape to this promising literature.

Betting on Potatoes: Accumulation in Times of Agrarian Crisis in Punjab, India

ABSTRACTDespite the widespread consensus that neoliberal India is reeling under an overarching agrarian crisis, this article argues that at least some capitalist farmers are continuing to accumulate and are thereby contributing to the process of class differentiation. Through a study of potato‐growing capitalist farmers in Punjab, the archetypal Green Revolution state of India, the author shows that such farmers can navigate complex production and market processes to make profits. However, risks of volatile prices and land and credit markets have made capital accumulation more uncertain. While potato is a minor crop in Punjab and the case cannot be generalized, it brings into focus both under‐explored non‐state actors and processes in the state, and important tendencies of change since the plateauing of Green Revolution technologies. The analysis also highlights the agency of such farmers in negotiating a transformed political economy context, including the presence of corporate agribusinesses.

Masculine anxiety and ‘new Indian woman’ in the films of Anurag Kashyap

ABSTRACT This essay examines the portrayal of masculine anxiety and the representation of ‘new Indian women’ in Anurag Kashyap’s films Dev D (2009), Ugly (2013) and Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016). Kashyap in his films, particularly in the films mentioned here, focuses on transforming social relations in post-liberalization urban India. His films often portray the anxiety of contemporary Indian men over the issue of female emancipation and their aggression towards those women who defy the patriarchal code of conduct by attempting to assert their own agency. By situating the neurotic, hyper-masculine heroes at the centre of the narratives, they point at the skewed gender relation which despite the pervasive rhetoric of women’s empowerment echoed throughout neoliberal India is increasingly becoming more and more fractured. Kashyap’s films thus act as representatives of a new social order currently in progress in India and compel us to understand the complex process through which the notion of masculinity is being continually configured. The essay traces the connection between the masculine anxiety and the neoliberal social world by exploring the psychic and social lives of the fictional male characters created in Kashyap’s films.

Law and Corporate Malfeasance in Neoliberal India

Critical sociolegal scholars highlight how the law favors powerful actors in handling the socioenvironmental devastation affecting marginalized populations. What receives scant attention is how the neoliberalization of the world economy has further enabled powerful capitalist firms to shape the legal path in their own favor and to the detriment of the marginalized. Union Carbide’s 1984 Bhopal catastrophe killed 25,000, injured 600,000, and left prolonged consequences. This paper advances our understanding of the political economy of law by analyzing the handling of death and devastation in Bhopal. Drawing data from 60 interviews with Bhopal victim activists and archives, it advances the argument that the law mirrors the interests of the neoliberal actors of capital. Findings suggest that the law has not only proved unable to safeguard the weakest elements of Bhopal society, but also the pursuit of legal solutions under neoliberalism is incapable of addressing the long-term harms affecting marginalized Bhopalis.

Deus ex mitigata: Denaturalizing the discursive power of Solar India

Post-Paris Agreement, India is swiftly transitioning to low-carbon electricity generation through solar park development. Despite exceeding emissions reduction targets, many social development claims remain unrealized. This paper addresses the following questions: (1) What discourses do state institutions utilize to justify solar park development in rural spaces? (2) What sociopolitical effects do these discourses have at the local scale? I conducted a critical discourse analysis of technical and policy documents focusing on knowledge production to influence social power and the political economy. I also draw on eight months of fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews of residents, bureaucrats, and solar employees in Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and New Delhi. This paper argues that solar parks are rationalized via discursive formations of the climate crisis, economic development, and ecological modernization. These discursive formations are stitched together into story-lines and circulated by public and private institutions (Solar India), comprising a “deus ex mitigata,” a deus ex machina set of discursive formations that rationalize greener capital accumulation in neoliberal India that does not address asymmetric power relations. The modalities by which this is accomplished dispossess peasants of land and livelihoods. As such, low-carbon electricity generation does not positively “transform the lives” of residents, a raison d’être for solar park development.

The poetics and politics of ‘progress’ in neoliberal India: The state and its margins in Shanghai (2012)

The contemporary Indian state is exemplified by contradictions. Its workings are marked by a simultaneous retreat and deepening of state power under neoliberalism as well as burgeoning governmentalities that both produce and police political dissent. Such framings of the state problematize received political wisdom on the relations between centre and margin, state and government, citizen and subject. Anthropological approaches to the state map out its complex organizational logics, which are further embedded in the exercise of power and violence. Drawing on such approaches, this article examines the 2012 Indian film Shanghai, directed by Dibakar Banerjee. Based on Greek author Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1966 novel Z, Shanghai represents the contemporary neoliberal Indian state’s workings in the fictitious periurban town of Bharatnagar, slated to become a world-class Special Economic Zone. However, when a left-wing activist opposing land acquisition is fatally injured in an ‘accident’, a state bureaucrat’s investigation unravels how the onward march of pragati (‘progress’) is undergirded by violence. Taking Shanghai as an example of ‘realist fiction’, I examine both representations and realities of the neoliberal Indian state using a thick and nuanced reading of the film’s narrative, cinematic details, context and characters, situating them in anthropological discussions on the state and its margins in contemporary India.

Between unemployment and enterprise in neoliberal India: Educated youth creating work in the private education sector

This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they have gained to create work in those same institutions. They do so by running errands and creating services for institutions, as well as undertaking administrative duties and teaching classes. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests. But we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. At the same time, however, their practises work to reproduce gender norms and class inequalities.

Politics of a Transformative Rural: Development, Dispossession and Changing Caste-Relations in West Bengal, India

This paper explores the political churnings around an almost twenty-year-old process of land acquisition and development in Rajarhat, an erstwhile rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal. The narrative takes shape against the backdrop of a neo-liberal state in the global South acting as a corporate facilitator, the concomitant dispossession, and particularly the transformation of the villages and rural livelihoods. The paper tries to trace the nature of this transformation by mapping the socio-economic changes on the one hand, and the reinvention of traditional caste-based social hierarchies brought about by such changes on the other, and highlights the formation of “syndicates” (low-level cartels) in the area as a unique manifestation of the latter. Such developments, the paper argues, symbolize a qualitative shift in rural social relations, brought about by rapid urbanization in neoliberal India.

Debunking the Myth of the Entrepreneur through Narrative in the Contemporary South Asian Novel

The post-Cold War wave of neoliberalism that has swept South Asia has had to be propped up not just by the repressive apparatuses of the region’s states, but through an array of ideological reinforcements as well. The cultural myth of the entrepreneur has served this function as one of the main ideological legitimizations of neoliberal capitalism, attributing meritocracy to cases of individual wealth accumulation and conveying a sense of a society in which government has gotten out of the way and let the most creative and innovative thrive and thereby preempting alternative narratives of capitalist success, such as those emphasizing nepotism, illegal and/or socially harmful business practices, and/or crony-capitalist practices. The rise of the entrepreneur myth has provoked a cultural response in the form of a number of recent novels that employ alternative narratives of business success to debunk the myth of the entrepreneur and thereby challenge the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism. This essay argues that The White Tiger highlights the criminalistic side of entrepreneurialness and, while showing how free-market capitalism in India may allow the select few to escape from residual feudal social structures, unmasks the continuing brutalities and deepening inequalities of neoliberal India wallpapered over by triumphalist popular celebrations of the entrepreneur and India’s emergence as a global capitalist powerhouse. Similarly, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia gives lie to certain core entrepreneurial capitalist shibboleths like market inefficiencies, externalization of costs, and the pretense of a stateless capitalist future, while substituting a narrative resolution of deep human onnection for the entrepreneur’s lonely, atomized economic triumph. Finally, The Golden House gives narrative form to the quixotic ill-fatedness of the dream of escaping one’s roots and joining the ranks of a transnational capitalist plutocratic elite through entrepreneurial success while exploring the recent nativist backlash against neoliberal globalization.