Revolutionary Maoism and the Production of State and Insurgent Space in Eastern and Central India

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Revolutionary Maoism and theProduction of State and Insurgent Spacein Eastern and Central IndiaMichael Spaceka

a Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa,Ontario, CanadaPublished online: 01 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Michael Spacek (2014): Revolutionary Maoism and the Production of State andInsurgent Space in Eastern and Central India, Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2014.896790

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Geopolitics, 00:1–23, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14650045.2014.896790

Revolutionary Maoism and the Productionof State and Insurgent Space in Eastern

and Central India

MICHAEL SPACEKDepartment of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

This article situates India’s Maoist insurgency within longer termprocesses of state expansion in the east and centre of the coun-try. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s work on space, its core claim isthat since the onset of colonialism the region has been producedas a peripheral area whose primary function has been as a zoneof settlement and a source of natural resources. Consequently thestate has been simultaneously thin and repressive, leading to thecreation of an oppositional insurgent space in which the Maoistguerrillas are only the most recent and visible actors. Currentlynew patterns of hyper-state and hybrid state/insurgent spaces areemerging: the former structured around the forced relocation ofentire populations into tightly controlled and regulated camps andthe latter around an emergent system of dual authority in whichthe demarcation between official and insurgent governance isblurred.

INTRODUCTION

India’s Maoist insurgency began in 1967 with an uprising of tea plantationworkers in West Bengal’s Naxalbari district. Since the late 1990s it has spreadto encompass approximately a third of the country. By all metrics, includ-ing conflict deaths, number of combatants, and affected police districts, thewar has intensified during the previous decade. The conflict zone encom-passes a large arc of territory running down the centre and the east of thecountry, stretching from the foothills of the Himalayas to the far south of

Address correspondence to Michael Spacek, Department of Political Science, CarletonUniversity, B640 Loeb Building, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada. E-mail:[email protected]

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the subcontinent. The war is concentrated in the isolated forests and hillsof the country, primarily populated by diverse groups of indigenous peoplegenerally known as the adivasi.1

This paper situates the contemporary conflict in long-term historicalprocesses of state formation, expansion and consolidation dating back tothe beginnings of the British colonial project. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’sideas on spatial production, I argue that the expansion of state space intoeastern and central India has occurred simultaneously with the produc-tion of spaces of insurgency and resistance. Particular attention is paid toroad networks and land-use regimes as colonising instruments. I argue thatstate expansion and formation in the region has historically been variegatedand thin, relying on a mixture of neglect and repression, thereby creatingpossibilities for the production of oppositional anti-state, insurgent spaces.During the previous two decades, the Maoist insurgents have entered intothis milieu and are altering spatial production in the region. Specifically,shifts in the region’s political economy and the state’s counter-insurgencyresponse have deepened processes of population displacement andrepression.

Simultaneously, the transformation of space in the region has alsoshaped resistance. The insurgents have been able to grow in size and capac-ity partly because of the expansion and transformation of production underneo-liberalism. The increased tenor of investment in the region has pro-vided the Maoists with ready access to funds in the form of levies while alsocreating a growing pool of potential recruits among the displaced.

I first discuss Lefebvre’s key ideas on the production of space and hisunderstanding of the state and resistance. Drawing on this framework, I thenexamine the historical processes of state formation in eastern and centralIndia, making the case that the region has been created as a peripheralarea whose primary purpose has been to serve as an outlet for internalsettlement and a site for resource extraction. Its marginality to the broaderpolity and its function as a zone of extraction has generated a twin logicof statecraft: minimal and weak state presence structured around violence.Applying this framework to the historical dynamics and logics of the statein India’s hinterlands, as revealed in changes in regimes of land regula-tion, economic activity and patterns of transport networks, I make the claimthat the simultaneous brutality and vulnerability of the state in the regionhas created an insurgent space. This space becomes particularly visible inthe numerous outbreaks of rebellion that have occurred in the region dur-ing the previous three centuries, of which the Maoist insurgency is onlythe most recent.2 Historicising the processes of state production challengesthe claim that the Maoist insurgency is primarily a consequence of discrete,contemporary changes in the political economy as a result of the emer-gence of neo-liberalism in India, while also recognising that changes in the

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Revolutionary Maoism in Eastern and Central India 3

modes of production in the region have helped shape the particular natureof contemporary conflict.3

To conclude, I examine the effect that the insurgency is having on thelogic and organisation of power in the region. In an ironic twist, the Maoistsare both a product of opposition to the deepening integration of the regioninto the state while also functioning as agents accelerating these processes.New patterns of hyper-state and hybrid state/insurgent spaces have emerged:the latter is an emergent system of dual authority in which the demarca-tion between official and insurgent governance is blurred, while the formerrepresents the rapid production of an ideal state space through the forcedrelocation of entire populations into tightly controlled and regulated camps.

The methodology of the paper is based on a review of the relevant the-oretical and secondary literature as well as author interviews in the region.The adivasi areas of eastern and central India are vast and diverse, con-taining myriad linguistic and cultural groups with unique histories. In spiteof this, however, Chotanagpur and Bastar, the two areas examined, provideinsights into broader patterns of state expansion in the region. They are bothsites of insurgency, sharing a historical experience as peripheral regions thathave been unevenly, and only partially, incorporated into the modern state.Situating an analysis of insurgency in these two regions allows an explorationof how the expansion of modernity and state space shapes, and is shapedby, what came before.

LEFEBVRE, THE STATE AND INSURGENCY

Eastern and central India, the site of one of the world’s largest civil con-flict, has long been a rebellious zone situated on the fringes of governability.The Maoists’ capacity to operate across large parts of this territory is oftenascribed to failures in development and governance – failures that are said tohave alienated the local inhabitants from the state, leaving them vulnerableto the revolutionary rhetoric of the rebels. While there is some truth to thisclaim, it remains insufficient. In addition to being unclear as to what suc-cessful governance and development would look like and how one couldrecognise its existence if it were to emerge, this perspective fails to situatecontemporary events into a longer term account of the patterns of statecraftthat have produced eastern and central adivasi India as a frontier zone withinthe modern, centralised and bureaucratic state. This argument provides noaccount of why other areas, with equally dismal socio-economic indicatorsand inefficient or rapacious systems of governance, have not experiencedthe near-constant rebellions that eastern and central India has.

A promising path for understanding insurgency in India, and otherhistorically rebellious zones, can be found by drawing on Henri Lefebvre

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and his dialectical understanding of the production of space. WhileLefebvre was primarily interested in providing an account of the pro-cesses driving urbanised modernity and capitalism in Europe, the historicaldevelopments that unfolded in Europe were part of broader secular transfor-mations – materially, socially and symbolically – across the globe. Becauseof colonialism and the expansion of capitalism across the world, the pro-cesses that Lefebvre grappled with should not be understood as discretephenomena geographically confined to the West. Furthermore, Lefebvre’sideas are theoretically expansive, profound and contain enough nuanceto be of relevance for understanding the planetary changes that haveunfolded during the previous few centuries. Urbanisation, the spread ofcapitalism and the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state, all coreconcerns of Lefebvre, have transformed India, south Asia and the entireworld.

Drawing on Lefebvre also provides novel insights into the historicalprocesses with which contemporary events in eastern and central India areintimately connected. While other approaches provide important accounts ofstate expansion and formation outside of Europe, certain key elements havebeen conceptually and theoretically neglected.4 First, at the macro level,India shares little in common with the so-called ‘thin’ or failed states ofsub-Saharan Africa and Asia from which much of the literature on state for-mation and insurgency draws. It is a state with ‘deep’ and functioning (if notalways effective) institutions and national identity. Large areas of the coun-try, however, exhibit, at least superficially, traits associated with failed states.Drawing on Lefebvre’s understanding of space enables one to situate thecountry’s peripheral hinterlands within a broader framework of an evolving,entrenched and ‘strong’ bureaucratic state.

Second, there are limitations to approaches that focus primarily on ter-ritorialisation of the state. Specifically, the idea of territorialisation relies ona binary action/reaction account of state expansion that under-theorises thedialectical role that both resistance and state expansion have in creating eachother, and underplays the importance of other elements of modernity suchas capitalism. A Lefebvrian analysis is able to capture the nuances and per-petual interplay between multiple social, economic and political forces in theregion. Conversely, such an analysis is able to go beyond the mono-causalassumptions in arguments that see social, economic and political relations ineastern and central India as primarily driven by transformations in the polit-ical economy of the region driven and structured by domestic and globalcapitalism. While these forces are important in any account of developmentsin the region, it is only part of the story. As John Agnew writes, “It is notpossible to maintain that the system of territorial state is a ‘function and con-tinuous product of capitalism’. This is because modern territorial states hadtheir origins in the political absolutism that predates the rise of capitalism inEurope”.5 While capitalism is a crucial element in the unfolding of space in

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Revolutionary Maoism in Eastern and Central India 5

eastern and central India, the role of the state and other social forces can-not be ignored. Rather than framing these processes as a binary interactionbetween capitalism and reaction, drawing on Lefebvre allows one to explorethe ways in which state forces, capitalism and local agents produce particularspaces through their actions and interactions and how those actions andinteractions in turn produce, and are produced by, space. The state andresistance continuously create and re-create each other in a process of per-petual becoming: resistance becomes more than simply a rear guard actionagainst the onslaught of modernity, it becomes, in itself, something whichcreates the state and space itself.

At its core, there are three dimensions to Lefebvre’s dialectics of space.First, there is spatial practice: “The material dimension of social activity andinteraction . . . networks of action and communication as they arise in every-day life”.6 Second, there is the representation of space: “Representations ofspace emerge at the level of discourse and therefore comprise verbalizedforms such as descriptions, definitions . . . maps and plans, information inpictures and signs”.7 Finally, there are spaces of representation: “a divinepower, the logos, the state. . . . The symbols of space could be taken fromnature . . . or they could be artifacts, buildings, monuments”.8 This dialecticbridges problematic distinctions between materialist and idealist approachesof understanding the development and exercise of political and economicpower and the practices of everyday life. For Lefebvre the first (material rela-tions) and the second (representation) create the third (signification), all ofwhich interact to produce space, which then re-creates the first and the sec-ond in a process of continuous (re)production. Space is not an empty vessel.It is not “prior to whatever ends up filling it”, and exists both territorially andtemporally – as a ‘thing’ that is continuously created and re-created through adialectical interplay between material production, everyday activity (rhythms)and spatial and temporal representation.9 Thus, Lefebvre provides a meansof seeing space (and that which creates space) as dynamic – a product of thepast that is not determined by the past. Space is perpetual ‘becoming’: noth-ing is complete or fixed as the everyday continuously interacts with placeand time. It is a rejection of both teleology and an ahistoricism that obliter-ates time, condemning the present to an impoverished existence as a seriesof discrete, continuously occurring, contextless events.

What we have in Lefebvre’s understanding of space is a powerfultool that avoids problematic teleological visions that continue to cast ashadow over discourses on governance, development and their relation-ship to insurgency and rebellion. Furthermore, in his work there also liesa nuanced and powerful conception of the state useful for understandingzones of rebellion such as eastern and central India. Drawing on Marx,Lefebvre sees modern (what he refers to as abstract) space as “determinedeconomically by capital, dominated socially by the bourgeoisie, and ruledpolitically by the state”.10 Importantly, however, the state, while a product

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of capitalism and an instrument of the bourgeoisie, is also something more:within it lies a totalitarian logic that seeks to dominate and assimilate all andhas, within itself, the potential to obliterate that which gave it birth and givesit sustenance. Space is “an apparent subject, an impersonal pseudo-subject,the abstract ‘one’ of modern social space, and – hidden within it, concealedby its illusory transparency – the real ‘subject’, namely state . . . power”.11

The principle of sovereignty, and its structuring logic, seeks to subsume andassimilate all of life within itself – to create an ‘absolute’ political space.12 Yetits desiderata can never reach fulfilment. The state is simultaneously a locusof social action and a product of these actions and, therefore, “never quiteemancipates itself from activity, from need, from ‘social being”.13

The contradictions of a space that seeks complete dominance andhomogeneity, yet can only exercise power through fragmentation, and hencedifference, are always laden with possibilities for resistance.14 As a ‘pseudo-subject’ with a totalitarian essence, it seeks to homogenise and flatten whilecreating centres of power that, by their very essence, undermine homogene-ity. Spaces of power create spaces of (relative) powerlessness – peripheralareas in which the state is as its weakest.15 These peripheral spaces consti-tute the margins of social, territorial and symbolic life: “the edges of the city,shanty towns, the spaces of forbidden games, of guerrilla war”.16 Becauseof the totalising logic of the state they become, sooner or later, the target ofviolence, destruction and absorption, a ‘fact’ that can only be halted, if it canbe halted at all, by active resistance.17

What Lefebvre provides is a powerful framework for situating India’sMaoist insurgency within processes of state expansion into its eastern andcentral hinterlands. Revolutionary Maoism is more than a historically dis-crete moment – a moment emergent solely because of the rise of neo-liberalcapitalism in India or failures in regimes of governance. The Maoists area consequence of, and contemporary agents in, spatial production in theregion. These processes are structured around logics of territorial colonisa-tion, drawing on spatially constitutive techniques such as cartography, thecreation of transportation networks and regimes of land regulation. In thisrespect, and others, the arguments presented in this paper find themselvesin agreement with Stuart Elden who writes, “Territory as a political questionis not simply political-economic or political-strategic, but relates to devel-opments in the law and the history of techniques such as land-surveyingand cartography”.18 As such, territory is only one component of what can beunderstood as space.

The violence and homogenising essence of the production of whatLefebvre called ‘abstract space’ in this peripheral area has created particu-lar forms of transgressive and rebellious action and consciousness.19 Theseperipheral spaces have become spaces of insurgency and rebellion not onlyagainst state practice, but also against the state itself. The Maoists are highlyvisible and relatively recent actors in this insurgent space.

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STATE SPACE IN EASTERN AND CENTRAL INDIA

The core claim in this section is that the production of state space in easternand central India has historically unfolded around sets of strategies thathave produced the region as a peripheral space functioning as a zone ofsettlement and site for natural resource extraction. Three primary charac-teristics of state production can be identified: 1) the state’s presence hashistorically been shallow or thin; 2) it has relied disproportionately on itsrepressive apparatus; and 3) state expansion has been, and continues to be,driven by opportunities for resource exploitation or responses to threats fromrebellion.

While strong bureaucratic states did not exist in the region during thecenturies preceding colonialism, there was an ebb and flow of territorialpolitical consolidation as local headmen regularly gained, and then lost,authority over large numbers of villages. Adopting the title of Maharaja, someof the stronger headmen aspired to high-caste Hindu status and importedoutsiders, or diku, from the plains to act as bureaucrats, priests and sol-diers.20 In spite of the existence of regional kingdoms, however, villagechiefs and petty kings retained a degree of autonomy and freedom of actionwithin their territories.21 This changed with the emergence of British ruleas the mostly autonomous polities of the interior were gradually replaced byBritish-supported semi-sovereign states that were economically, if not alwayspolitically, dominated by non-autochthonous populations.

Politically, the British displaced the minor chiefdoms using a set of ter-ritorially heterogeneous governing strategies. In the Presidencies of Madrasand Bengal, the heartland of the colonial state, imperial rule was direct,seeking to transform the region into a mirror image of Britain. Commercialagriculture and industry were encouraged, liberal systems of law promul-gated and a native administrative and a bourgeois middle class cultivated.22

In contrast the forests and hills of the adivasi-populated interior were onlyindirectly integrated into the Raj. Here rule was mediated through semi-sovereign, tributary princely states and notified agency areas where theBritish appointed an administrator to represent the Crown and “the self-governing structures were more or less to be left intact, but intrusion andexploitation of resources continued”.23

Transformations in the logic and practice of the colonial state are mate-rially visible in the changing patterns of transportation networks in theregion. Roads are highly visible manifestations of statecraft and networksof exchange, facilitating the movement of goods and people, enabling theestablishment and circulation of bureaucratic and administrative officials andproviding territorial access to military and police forces. They are mate-rial indicators of a region’s political economy, visible markers of the stateand also function as structures regulating settlement and everyday life.Simultaneously the particular configuration of transportation networks and

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the expansion of state space destabilises areas outside of their reach. Theycreate ‘peripheral’ zones which, according to Lefebvre, fight “for their auton-omy or for a certain degree of independence. They undertake actions thatchallenge their subordination to the state.”24

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the inte-rior hills and forests of eastern and central India were enmeshed in arelatively dense network of roads connecting the petty chiefdoms to thecoastal plains.25 These networks were, however, constantly in flux, reflect-ing the absence of strong, stable and centralised states in the region. Therewas a dialectical interplay between shifting migratory patterns rooted insemi-nomadic activities, such as swidden and the collection of minor for-est products, with political power. Both produced each other as disusedpaths disappeared and new ones emerged, reflecting changes in regionalsocial and economic circulation and politics.26 Petty chiefs retained mobilecentres of power that would shift as a response to changes in circula-tion. Inaccessibility was their ally, and a healthy distance was maintainedbetween themselves and the roads, which could be used by the armies ofregional kings for conquest or territorial consolidation.27 With the onset ofcolonialism, the ephemeral interior road networks began to fall into disuse asa response to an expanding and powerful state that had decisively capturedthe lucrative plains and coastal zones. Material and everyday spatial practicebegan to follow new patterns. Large forest tracts were cleared and the Britishbegan mapping territory and populations for purposes of revenue collection.Increasingly the representations of space began to create particular symbolsof abstract space: the revenue village, the district, the road.28

The expansion of the state was, however, a highly spatially differentiatedprocess. Initially the British had little interest in the interior. They sought toestablish a secure means of connecting Calcutta and Madras through theconstruction of an all-weather metalled road running parallel with the seathat effectively by-passed the interior. This changed in the mid-nineteenthcentury with the global increase in demand for coal in the wake of theUS Civil War.29 The large coal deposits in the region’s hills attracted Britain’sattention and would have profound consequences on the production of statespace. The British dismantled some of the princely states and undertookvigorous road and rail construction, connecting the resource-rich interior tothe coastal ports. Beyond expanding transportation networks, however, thetechniques of statecraft in the region were to remain structured around thesettlement of diku as commercial farmers and tenured landholders on theplains and fringes of the forests.30 During this period, the spatial expansionof colonial capitalism and extraction began to produce concentrated spacesof extraction and industrialisation in the region.31 Cities such as Jamshedpurand Deoghar (in modern day Jharkhand) developed as nodes connectingmines and industry.32 The creeping expansion of state space in the regionstimulated the need for railways and, subsequently, further fuelled demand

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for steel and coal. The region’s rich iron ore deposits were tapped, in part,to meet this demand.33

Outside of these interconnected clusters, particularly in the more inte-rior forest regions, few processing facilities were established and the state’spresence remained thin, reflecting the fact that “short-term colonial extrac-tion was the goal, not long-term development of resources”.34 It was notonly British disinterest, however, that constrained the region’s complete inte-gration into the state. Attempts by the colonial state to link populated, andpotentially rebellious, areas through networks of roads into the interior wereoften stymied by strategies of defensive migration deeper into the hills andforests and by active resistance.35 Colonial officials lamented the difficultiesof bringing ‘civilisation’ to the interior in the face of mass opposition toroad-building projects, attacks against construction crews and the destruc-tion of existing roads.36 In addition to actual attacks against building crewsby the local populace, “‘passive resistance’ took various forms, includingthe obstruction of labour recruitment, the overcharging of food stuffs andoutright refusal to supply any victuals”.37

Another primary concern of the British during the late nineteenth andearly twentieth century was to map and classify the region for the pur-pose of revenue collection. The process of mapping and classifying theregion produced particular spaces: uncultivated ‘wastelands’ targeted forsettlement, revenue villages for taxation and land set aside for state infras-tructure. This demarcation fundamentally transformed the everyday lives ofa population whose economic and social lives had previously been territori-ally fluid.38 The processes of state expansion through land survey, functionaldemarcation and the production of planned space was met by fierce resis-tance from those who faced displacement and alienation from vast tractsof the region. In the Chotanagpur region, for example, a series of rebel-lions in the late nineteenth century forced a modification of colonial policy.Beginning with the Chotanagpur Tenures Act in 1869, and culminating withthe Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (CNT) of 1908, the British pursued a series ofpolicies demarcating adivasi villages that sought to mollify the local popula-tion by codifying ‘traditional’ and communal rights.39 This marked a form ofspatial production undertaken by the British, and later Indian, governments.In effect, a legally defined and territorially bounded space was producedthat, ostensibly, existed outside of modernity but was in fact created bymodernity.

Thus the region’s isolation was both a consequence of state logic anda consequence of resistance. Few roads were built in part because peo-ple prevented them from being built. Furthermore, local population centresand networks of exchange were highly mobile and could re-locate withrelative ease to territory as yet untouched by the state. As such these pat-terns of spatial practice and representation dialectically interacted. Thesestrategies structured the material, symbolic and everyday patterns of life in

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the region, patterns based on an insurgent consciousness that rejected thesubcontinental-wide project of statecraft that began in the eighteenth century.

In addition to the abstract spaces of the state of the regional urban cen-tres and industrial and mining belts, and the zones which sought to preservecustomary life, the structuring logics which defined the relationship of thestate with the interior can be seen in regimes of forest regulation. Beginningin the nineteenth century, large tracts of terrain were legally notified as pro-tected, thereby placing them under the aegis of the bureaucracy and policeforces of the Imperial Forest Service.40 Notification of forests enabled thestate to regulate the economic and social activity of the adivasi, effectivelycriminalising mobility, swidden and the exploitation of non-timber forestproducts (NTFP).

Thus, under colonialism, the region was integrated into the state in aparticular way. Spaces of the state and capitalism were structured around theproduction of urban centres of economic and political power, connected byrail and road to industrial and extractive belts. These in turn were surroundedby protected areas whose creation reflected a dual-logic of conservation andextraction which appear, superficially, to be contradictory. Notification wasintended to manage territory and populations while also facilitating the man-aged extraction of resources. In effect, land policy mapped and administeredthe region’s fringes as spaces of demarcated wilderness: a space of represen-tation that sought to obliterate time, created to exist outside of modernity,but constituted by instruments of modernity. Regimes such as the CNT which‘preserved’ and froze spatial practice by legislating an ‘authentic’ and ‘tradi-tional’ adivasi geography sought to obliterate time by eliminating everydaypractices of mobility and change.

Conversely, an idiom of resistance emerged that challenged the expan-sion of the most visible manifestations of modern abstract space – the city,the railroad, the mine – by drawing on the symbolic and representationalpower of the land and forest.41 Historically, resistance to the state projecthelped produce particular ‘protected’ spaces, while the production of these‘protected’ spaces, in turn, helped shape resistance. The region was absorbedinto the state and the larger political economy through a dual integration, onein which both dualities were inextricably connected. On the one hand, theregion was imagined as a dangerous frontier rife with banditry and popu-lated by particularly uncivilised and recalcitrant populations.42 On the otherhand, the state and modernity were seen by local inhabitants as an ever-encroaching, totalising alien force that regulated, displaced and corralled,leading to uprisings which were expressed in apocalyptic, millenarian termsthat sought to (re)create a semi-mythical adivasi past.43

These logics of spatial production in the region helped shape the natureof revolt: resistance became structured around material demands framedaround idioms of anti-modernity, an opposition to encroachment by non-autochthonous populations and a rejection of the state. The unfolding of

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state production in the colonial and early period following independencecreated a particular form of insurgent space.

Contemporary changes in the political economy of India and state pro-duction are, however, simultaneously transforming resistance and insurgentspace. Specifically, the relaxation of investment and ownership regulationsand the growing demand for natural resources as a result of the country’seconomic boom has led to a significant increase in private domestic and for-eign investment in the region. In 2000 the Indian government amended theMines and Minerals Regulation and Development Act governing the industry.The changes delegated mine licensing powers to individual state govern-ments, lifted foreign equity limits and removed thirteen minerals that hadbeen exclusively reserved for the public sector.44

In the same year the states of Chhattisgarh, formerly part of MadhyaPradesh, and Jharkhand, formerly part of Bihar, were created. Both werecreated under the aegis of the then-BJP-led central government. While theJharkhandi movement, a popular identity-based movement, had long calledfor the creation of a separate state of Jharkhand, the view among those in themovement is that the state was created by local elites who were interested ingaining control over resources without the interference of the Patna-basedgovernment of Bihar. Similarly, Chhattisgarh which, unlike Jharkhand did nothave a history of agitation for separate statehood, was created by the samelogic. It is telling that there has been little appreciable improvement in thesocio-economic indicators of the adivasi since bifurcation. The result is thatover the past ten years the number of mining licences issued has drasticallyincreased as private capital has flowed into the region.45 The subsequenttransformations in space were materially marked by the massive expansionof roads in the region as well as increases in the density of industrial beltsand the spread of new industrial spaces in areas which were once imag-ined and created as ‘authentic’, temporally frozen spaces existing outside ofmodernity.46

These changes have placed enhanced stress on the contradictions inher-ent in the region’s land regimes. Much of eastern and central India’s mineralresources are in areas that are heavily regulated and usage is circumscribed.There has been a move towards increased privatisation and the transfer ofboth usufruct rights and ownership of previously protected lands to pri-vate interests.47 While protected land in adivasi communities cannot be soldor transferred, legislation grants the state eminent domain. It has becomecommon for the government to expropriate land and subsequently trans-fer ownership to private interests.48 This has transformed the relationshipbetween the local populace and the state from one of regulation and controltowards one of land alienation and displacement.

In eastern and central India, the state-building process has been onethat has, whenever possible, sought to circumvent the interior, a patternthat follows Lefebvre’s idea of the state as seeking to exclude, as much as

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possible, peripheral areas.49 However, the very processes of exclusion havehistorically created demarcated zones which sought to freeze time. The codi-fication of adivasi land ownership and village life at a particular moment andthe demarcation of protected forests created a space that, while imaginedto be separate from the onset of modernity, was fundamentally a prod-uct of it. This created certain patterns of exclusion/inclusion. Patterns ofexpansion have been shaped by the state’s overriding view of the area as adangerous frontier rich in natural wealth, a view which both shaped and wasshaped by the production of spatial islands: clusters of industrial belts andregional urban centres linked to coastal ports and the heartlands of power.Around these belts the British sought to create a particular kind of space,one which both set the adivasi interior apart from processes of modernitywhile also seeking to regulate the everyday life of the population through arigid demarcation of the ‘appropriate’ uses of space enforced by the repres-sive apparatus of the state. Thus, colonial expansion into adivasi areas wasmarked by two defining characteristics: the state was shallow and manifesteditself through diffuse and relatively thin systems of authority, and expansionwas structured around segmentation, displacement and repression. Thesedual characteristics – weakness and violence – have generated the impetusfor, and possibility of, the production of an insurgent space, with profoundconsequences for the contemporary period.

DIALECTICS OF STATE-INSURGENCY AND THE(RE)CONFIGURATION OF SPACE

Conflict between expanding state geographies and an oppositional insurgentspace is neither binary nor static. There is a dialectical interplay betweenboth state and insurgent space, creating, recreating and structuring the logicsof both in an endless process of becoming. It is a long historical processin which local economies, societies and political systems interact with anemerging, expansionist state. It is also a consequence of the impoverish-ment of local populations through regimes of land regulation that emergedin the nineteenth century and that are now being transformed into regimes ofdisplacement. Both processes shape and create each other. While insurgentspace, by definition, can only exist in opposition to something, this some-thing (the state) is also produced by opposition. Its initial impetus lies innegation – a rejection of state authority in the social, material and sym-bolic realms – but it is also productive. Social, material and symbolic lifeacross time and space are created in opposition to the state and become aspace of refusal, creating the social and material possibility of opposing stateproduction through everyday resistance and violent revolt. Because of theirspecific ideological orientation and organisational history, the Maoists haveentered into this milieu and are contributing to its reconfiguration. While the

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Maoists, at the local level, have drawn on cultural idioms of resistance rootedin particular local practices and deployed this in a critique of an encroachingstate, their vision is, fundamentally, rooted in an alternative modernism.50

The Maoists wish to see the state transformed along more ‘rational’ and ‘sci-entific’ bases and are thus engaged in a process that seeks to integrate andsubsume local histories and cultures into a territorially broad movement thatunderstands itself as part of a national (and world-historical) revolutionaryforce.51 They are both agents in, and a consequence of, the production ofspace.

Across much of the once demarcated and temporally ‘frozen’ areas, suchas the ‘protected’ forests or areas regulated by acts such as the CNT, the post-liberalisation period has seen a simultaneous process of militarisation as wellas industrial and bureaucratic expansion. There has been a marked increasein both the scope and scale of extraction and processing facilities coupledwith militarised road construction, the establishment of large cantonments tohouse the increasing number of paramilitary police forces semi-permanentlydeployed in the region, as well as an expansion of the welfarist aspects ofstate infrastructure such as schools and health clinics.52 At its most visible, theperceived threat of the insurgency has become an impetus for the deepeningof state space in the region facilitated by the expansion of transportationnetworks for military and police purposes. The Chhattisgarh government, forexample, has contracted the Border Roads Authority (BRO), a wing of thearmed forces responsible for building and maintaining infrastructure alongIndia’s volatile borders with Pakistan and China, to construct a network ofall-weather, paved roads in the south-western part of the state where theMaoists have established a significant presence.

In spite of the common patterns that can be identified across the region,the production of space in different parts of the region displays diverse char-acteristics reflecting a continuous interplay between local social forces. Twoexamples will be used to illustrate both the similarities and differences inthe production of state and insurgent space in the region: Bastar in southernChhattisgarh and the Chotanagpur region of Jharkhand.

In a short period the war has rapidly and fundamentally altered thenature of space in Bastar.53 Here the conflict is structured around acute,indiscriminate violence intimately connected with ‘ground-clearing’ opera-tions that have depopulated vast tracts of territory. The state government’scounter-insurgency operation began in earnest in 2005, led by the SalwaJudum, a now officially disbanded, semi-private militia group.54 While theleadership of Salwa Judum maintained that it was a spontaneous uprisingby local adivasi against Maoist terror, the reality is that the ‘movement’ wasfounded, organised and funded by elements of the Chhattisgarh govern-ment, specifically by factions and individuals surrounding Mahendra Karma,Dantewara’s long-standing Congress Party MLA, who was killed by theMaoists in a roadside ambush in May 2013.55

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Salwa Judum’s strategy had been to displace villages through terrorand violence, forcing the surviving population to re-locate to one of thetwenty-one fortified Judum-controlled camps located along the district’s solenational highway. At the height of the Salwa Judum campaign approximately40,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), a significant percentage of thesparsely populated rural areas of the district, had been transferred.56

There were three primary logics behind the Salwa Judum’s ground clear-ing and camp re-location strategy. First, the re-locations functioned as ameans of depriving insurgent access to villagers, eliminating a potential con-stituency and source of material support. Second, the camps were SalwaJudum controlled, but government funded, providing the ‘movement’s’ lead-ership with access to lucrative human and material resources.57 To this daythe state grants per head funding, creating incentives for forced displacementand the manipulation of camp figures. In 2006, for example, officially therewere 60,000 IDPs. An independent fact-finding mission established by thecentral government in Delhi found, however, that the actual numbers werecloser to 40,000.58 Finally, the presence of IDPs provided the Salwa Judumwith a compliant source of manpower for lucrative road-building and otherinfrastructural contracts. Salwa Judum used the IDPs as corvée labour forgovernment-sponsored building projects, paying their workers with the foodallocated to each IDP by the state.59

The policies of strategic hamleting and mass displacement provided theSalwa Judum leadership with access to lucrative sources of funding. Thesemi-privatised violence of the region is less a counter-insurgency strategythan a massive protection racket and resource capture scheme run for thebenefit of locally influential and well-connected strongmen. While SalwaJudum began as a relatively unified organisation led by Mahendra Karmaand other well-connected political strongmen, it has now developed intoa loose co-ordinating body that demarcates territory and resolves disputesamong the individual warlords who control specific camps.60

Many of those who have studied the Maoist conflict in Dantewara haveseen it as a convergence of counter-insurgency with a political economyof conflict.61 Undoubtedly this is a vital element that has both driven andstructured the dynamics of the war in this area.

Salwa Judum and the mass relocation campaign, however, should alsobe seen as an exercise in a particularly brutal and accelerated project thatseeks to produce an ideal state space. The camps are contained, clearlydemarcated places where the political, social and economic lives of theinhabitants are fully controlled by the warlords and police officials whorun them. The production of space in this region reflects earlier processeswhich unfolded during the colonial period. What is currently unfolding inChhattisgarh are processes which seek to demarcate an absolute, controlled,space from the insurgent spaces of the partially mapped and uncontrolleddepths of the state’s southern forests. Evacuated from their villages, often

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by force, the camp inhabitants’ everyday life becomes a regimented routinein which activities outside of the walls are controlled, requiring permissionfrom the camp controllers. The camps are represented and ‘understood’ bythe state and its officials, along with the roads connecting them to militarycantonments and regional urban centres, as ‘safe’, familiar and controlledspaces.62 Unlike the many villages and settlements that dot the interior ofthe region, these state spaces have names, they are mapped, and their pop-ulations are ‘known’. In a perverse version of state-provided welfare, thedistribution of food is entirely controlled and channelled to inhabitants bycamp authorities. In many cases the food is distributed in exchange for forcedlabour that the inhabitants provide for road-building projects commissionedby the state to the very same people who run the camps.63 The camps, aswell as the heavily militarised roads which connect them, are an abstractspace that reproduces, and caricatures the state at its most potent.

While Bastar shares some general characteristics with the broaderregion, here state space has historically been particularly thin. The processesof forcible displacement and relocation to highly controlled spaces reflectsthe interplay of forces in the area. The camps, while funded and partly pro-tected by the state, were initially established and run by non-state actors.As such, they are rooted in the fundamental contradictions in Bastar, reflect-ing its particular historical trajectory. Unlike Chotanagpur, this area existednearly entirely outside of the colonial political economy. While during theperiod preceding liberalisation, there was limited state-led industrialisationaround the city of Jagdalpur, primarily around the Bailadila iron ore minesand railway, the scale and scope was nowhere near that of Jharkhand.64

Furthermore, the history of contemporary insurgent space in the region ismarkedly different. Bastar is a relatively large area whose forests extendinto a number of neighbouring states. The Maoists, when they entered thearea from Andhra Pradesh in the early 1980s, were able to function andwork in relative isolation, allowing them to expand their reach gradually.65

Faced with a powerful, entrenched insurgent force and a large area virtuallyuntouched by capitalism and the state, the response by local elite groups hasbeen to produce an entirely new form of state space: an ideal state space inwhich entire populations have been forcibly re-located to heavily controlledand policed territories in which the entirety of social, political and economiclife is controlled.66 It is a hyper-state space that has effectively ceded controlof the region to the insurgents, while seeking to maintain control over thepopulace by re-locating them to secure, strategically located state spaces.

In contrast to Bastar, Chotanagpur has historically been more econom-ically and politically integrated into the state. Since the colonial period, thearea has had a mining industry and dense road and rail connections tothe coastal ports. Extraction, as discussed above, was historically limited torelatively concentrated pockets while much of the rest of the region wasdemarcated as ‘protected’ adivasi areas.67 During the previous decade there

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has been a large influx of domestic and foreign investment.68 By 2008 min-ing and quarrying composed over a third of Jharkhand’s GDP, with muchof the industry concentrated in and around Ranchi. Across much of thestate the spatial demarcations which once existed are breaking down as thescale of extraction is expanding rapidly into ‘protected’ forests and speciallynotified adivasi areas.69 The majority of the mines in the area are privatelyowned and operated facilities whose creation has been facilitated by massivegovernment-financed infrastructure projects such as dam, road, rail and deepwater port construction.70 Like Bastar, the region is seeing a transformationof state space, yet the dynamics of this transformation are markedly different.Here the spatial demarcation that exists between the insurgent interiors of theBastar forests and the islands of state spaces connecting the regional urbancentres with the camps and cantonments is absent. Displacement and thetransformation of spatial practice in the region is not linked to the expansionof ‘ideal’ state spaces into peripheral areas, but is rather the consequence ofthe massive expansion of industrial sites and townships in the state.71 Thereexists a more opaque demarcation between state and insurgent space. Theexpansion of the mining industry, and the massive entry of private capi-tal, has created lucrative sources of funding for non-state actors such as theMaoists’ local elite fixers.72

Rather than displace the state, the Maoists have organised and re-structured it in ways that have enabled them to reap the benefits of existingmarkets of protection and informal taxation. They have imposed a levy of 5%on all of the mines in exchange for allowing them to continue operations.73

Furthermore, the Maoists have now become brokers of state largesse, ensur-ing that their local allies receive infrastructure and development contractsin exchange for a 10% commission. The revenue from the informal taxationof mineral industries alone (not including the percentages syphoned off intheir role as brokers of development funding) was estimated to be around$500 million in 2008.74 From the perspective of the Maoists, this has createda virtuous cycle: the greater the reach and depth of control of the Maoists,the greater the opportunities for revenue, the greater the revenue extracted,the greater the capabilities for expansion of the insurgency.

In Jharkhand the insurgency has not displaced the state. The state existsas part of a network intimately connected with local elite brokers and, unlikethe case in Chhattisgarh, is only one segment of a powerful and entrenchedset of social forces. This set of social forces also includes networks of popularorganisations who trace their history to the struggle that sought the creationof Jharkhand state as an adivasi state and draws on idioms of autonomyand cultural authenticity, modifying it to a modern vernacular that demandsa political, bureaucratic ‘homeland’ for the adivasi within the Indian state.75

Such contemporary identity movements are absent in Chhattisgarh. Whathas happened in Jharkhand as a consequence of Maoist power has beena reconfiguration of control over space. The insurgency has captured one

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element of the local governance structure and integrated itself into a systemof authority marked by a division of labour between state and non-stateactors. It is a system that Burt Suykens refers to as ‘twilight authority’: “aphenomenon in which one source of authority does not represent the denialof other sources of authority, but in which multiple authorities engage andinterlock with each other, while retaining their own distinct character as asource of authority”.76

The particular dynamics of conflict in Jharkhand have been influ-enced by a number of significant factors. First, since colonialism, space inJharkhand, unlike in Bastar, has been structured around areas heavily inte-grated into the capitalist economy. Space was constituted around belts ofindustry and extraction linked to urban centres by networks of road and railexisting alongside demarcated territory that sought to preserve pre-capitalistsocial and economic regulations, ironically through legal and bureaucraticregimes such as the CNT. Bastar’s integration into the state, on the otherhand, was nearly exclusively structured around forest regulation: a regimethat sought to produce a space constituted through restrictions on the every-day practices of the local populace. Jharkhand’s integration was structuredaround hybrid space that created spaces of modernity alongside spaces thatsought to provide protection to the everyday practices of the local popu-lace. This particular form of hybrid space shaped, and was in turn shapedby, the emergence of forms of political mobilisation that drew on a particu-lar modernist re-imagining of rebellion and political action which sought todeepen the production of temporally frozen adivasi space while modifyingit to more closely reflect a bureaucratic imagining. Hybridity of space is thusan ongoing feature of the production of space in the region, one which hasinfluenced, and is being influenced by, the Maoists.

The size and high degree of concentration of mineral reserves in thearea is conducive to large-scale, capital-intensive extraction. This requiresboth infrastructure investment and a certain degree of stability. As the minesprovide a significant source of revenue, it is in the interest of both the stateand the Maoists to manage the intensity of violence and facilitate invest-ment in infrastructure. These logics have led to the emergence of hybridinsurgent/state space that is structured around joint regimes of accumula-tion and the distribution of state funds through ‘twilight institutions’ partiallycontrolled by the rebels. This does not mean that there is no violence inChotanagpur. It remains a site of insurgency with regular clashes betweenstate forces and the rebels. The contradictions in this emergent space inwhich an uneasy balance is struck between competing forces may prove tobe a temporary aberration whose disequilibrium condemns it to inevitablecollapse and destruction. Or we may be seeing simply the newest avatarin the long history of indirect, outsourced state authority in the region:the production of a state space that is simply absorbing a threat, and byabsorbing it also neutralising it, but in turn is being absorbed by it. The

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continued fragmentation of the Maoists in the region and the blurring of theline between police and insurgents is evidence of this dialectical process.What is clear is that the nature of insurgent space in the region is being fun-damentally transformed by the conflict between the Maoists and the state.Whether this challenge from the periphery will remain more than a brieffootnote in the long history of India’s internal frontier remains to be seen.

CONCLUSION

Much of the work examining Maoist insurgency in India and insurgency ingeneral has failed to grapple with the historical processes of modern stateexpansion into peripheral areas. The result is too often a static and superfi-cial reading that understands specific internal conflicts as analytically discreteevents frozen in a particular moment. The two actors, the state and insur-gents, become reified ‘things’: causality becomes a question of isolating keyvariables on a spectrum of greed, grievance and opportunity. In the specificcase of eastern and central India, those sympathetic to the Maoists pointto the emergence of rapacious neo-liberalism and population displacement,often drawing on teleologies of ‘failed’ development. Those less inclined tosympathise with the rebels point to their brutality and capacity to mobiliseignorant and backward people through strategies of deception and violence.Both perspectives result in a static and wholly unsatisfactory view of conflictthat is both ahistorical and dismissive of the experiences and actions of thoseoutside of either government or insurgent ranks.

There has, however, also been a great deal of interesting work examin-ing the political economy of the Maoist insurgency that focuses on resourcecapture and commodity chains in conflict zones. Drawing on David Harvey,these authors situate the current conflict within the broader framework ofa form of highly predatory neo-liberal capitalism marked by a mode ofprimitive accumulation. I share many sympathies with these arguments andwould argue that the approach presented in this paper complements them.Drawing on Lefebvre provides new insights, however, through a theoret-ical perspective that centres the analysis onto the geographies and logicsof power generated by the state. Applying his ideas to the production ofstate space in the region allows for a complex and more nuanced readingof the conflict. His understanding of space as something that, through con-stant interactions between the social, material and symbolic, is perpetually inthe process of becoming, allows for a dynamic, historically rooted analysis.It places emphasis on the particular forms in which the state manifests itself,the response this generates and how this response then alters processes ofstate production.

Specifically, I have argued that state production in eastern and centralIndia has been relatively thin while also acutely violent. The state is simul-taneously weak and brutal. This has generated fierce, and often violent,

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opposition not only to its specific techniques of rule, but also to its very rightto govern and exist. The particular production of both state and insurgentspace in eastern and central India has provided a suitable and hospitableterrain for the emergence of the Maoist insurgency. Crucially, however, theMaoists are transforming these spaces in novel ways. Their strength, territo-rial reach and ideology, which does not reject the modern state but rejectswhat they see as India’s particular ‘semi-feudal’ class nature, are factors thatare contributing to the creation of new forms of space in the region. In thecase of Jharkhand, there is the emergence of dual forms of authority in whichthe lines between the state and the insurgents have become blurred, whileChhattisgarh has seen the emergence of spaces of particularly virulent ‘ideal’micro-territorial states. Something new is in the process of becoming.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Jean Michel Montsion, Gopika Solanki, Ajay Parasaram,Lukas Makovicky and Elizabeth Berman for their assistance in helping me todevelop this article. Their criticisms, suggestions and guidance were trulyinvaluable. I would also like to thank the organisers and attendees at theDalhousie History Society conference Revolution and Recovery for providingme with a forum for my ideas.

NOTES

1. The term adivasi is Sanskrit for ‘original people’ and refers to groups dwelling on the marginsof sedentary societies who practise non-agricultural modes of production and exist outside of the Hinducaste system. The term is not without its problems. Historically, South Asia did not experience the clearpatterns of migration and conquest seen in the Americas. It is difficult to make a firm distinction in theregion between indigenous and migrant populations. Conceptually, it subsumes a vast array of linguistic,social and cultural groups into one category. With these caveats in mind, I will use the term throughout.While it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine this in depth, I feel that the term adivasi is ofhistorical, social and political value. It is also a term that has been widely embraced as a category of self-identification. For an examination of the term and a defence of its use see Shashank Kela, ‘Adivasi andPeasant: Reflections on Indian Social History’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 33/3 (2006) pp. 502–525.For a contrary perspective see Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200-1991 (Cambridge:Cambridge UP 1999).

2. A common claim is that the Maoist insurgency has grown in strength during the previous twodecades as a consequence of the increase in resource extractive industries in the region and subsequentmass displacement and impoverishment. Rebellion in the adivasi regions of eastern and central India is,however, not unique to the current period. There were at least sixty-seven adivasi rebellions betweenthe Battle of Plassey, which ushered in British East India Company Rule, and independence in 1947. SeeC. R. Bijoy, ‘Forest Rights Struggle: The Adivasi Now Await a Settlement’, American Behavioral Scientist51/12 (2008) pp. 1757–1758.

Two broad observations can be made linking most, if not all, of these rebellions. The first is thatIndia’s eastern and central hinterlands have a history of violent opposition to authority and particularmodes of governance. The second is that most of these rebellions sought to resist the expansion andeffects of colonial state power. While some rebellions directly targeted the symbols and institutions ofBritish rule, other revolts were fought in direct opposition to colonial expansion and consolidation.

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Just as the production and expansion of the colonial state led to frequent rebellions, the indepen-dent state has also faced numerous revolts in its eastern and central hinterlands. Immediately followingindependence the Telangana region, in contemporary Andhra Pradesh, erupted in violence. In 1946 anuprising against the rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad, a large semi-sovereign Princely State, eruptedagainst his refusal to accede to the Indian Union. This was followed by the intervention of IndianArmy troops in 1948 and forced integration into the Republic. India’s military victory did not end therebellion. See Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press1966) pp. 381–382. India’s Maoist insurgency is neither unique nor a wholly discrete event connected tocontemporary transformations in the region.

3. For more on this argument see: Megha Bahree, ‘The Forever War: Inside India’s Maoist Conflict’,World Policy Journal 27/2 (2010); Dia Da Costa, ‘Tensions of Neo-Liberal Development: State Discourseand Dramatic Oppositions in West Bengal’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 41/3 (2007); RajkishorMeher, ‘Globalization, Displacement and the Livelihood Issues of Tribal and Agricultural Dependent PoorPeople: The Case of Mineral-Based Industries in India’, Journal of Developing Societies 25/4 (2009);Jason Miklian and Scott Carney, ‘Fire in the Hole: How India’s Economic Rise Turned an ObscureCommunist Revolt into a Raging Resource War’, Foreign Policy (Sep./Oct. 2010); Kathy Le Mons Walker,‘Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory Growth, Agrarian Crisis, Internal Colonization, andthe Intensification of Class Struggle’, Journal of Peasant Studies 35/4 (2008); Robert Weil, ‘Is the TorchPassing? The Maoist Revolution in India’, Socialism and Democracy 25/3 (2011).

4. See Jeffrey Ira Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control(Princeton: Princeton UP 2000); Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Lee Peluso, ‘Territorialization and StatePower in Thailand’, Theory and Society 24 (1995).

5. John Agnew, ‘Capitalism, Territory, and Marxist Geopolitics’, Geopolitics 16 (2011) p. 232.6. Christian Schmid, ‘Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-

Dimensional Dialectic’, in Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid(eds.), Space, difference, everyday life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Routledge 2008) p. 36.

7. Ibid., pp. 36–37.8. Ibid., p. 37.9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell 1991) p. 15.

10. Ibid., p. 227.11. Ibid., p. 51.12. For Lefebvre, the state’s tendency to seek to absorb and annihilate all else and create its own

fully realised space was only one dialectical possibility among many: “We may wonder whether the statewill eventually produce its own space, an absolute political space. Or whether, alternatively, the nationstates will one day see their absolute political space disappearing into (and thanks to) the world market.Will this last eventuality occur through self-destruction? Will the state be transcended or will it witheraway? And must it be one or the other, an not, perhaps, both?”, ibid., p. 220.

13. Ibid., p. 83.14. Ibid., p. 52.15. Ibid., pp. 84, 321–322.16. Ibid., p. 373.17. Abstract space eventually “absorb[s] all such differences, and they will succeed if these retain

a defensive posture and no counterattack is mounted . . . it only survives inasmuch as it fights in self-defence and on the attack in the course of class struggle in its modern forms”, ibid., p. 373.

18. Stuart Elden, ‘Thinking Territory Historically’, Geopolitics 15 (2010) pp. 759–760.19. For Lefebvre, abstract space, is the modern socio-political space of capitalism, property and the

state. It is a space that is present but not truly visible as it is composed of concrete abstractions “whichincludes the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of moneyand that of the political state”, ibid., p. 53.

20. John MacDougall, ‘Agrarian Reform vs. Religious Revitalization: Collective Resistance toPeasantization among the Mundas, Oraons and Santals, 1858-95’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 11/2(1977) p. 300.

21. K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Transition Zones: Changing Landscapes and Local Authority in South-WestBengal, 1880s-1920s’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 36/1 (1999) p. 24.

22. See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement(Durham: Duke UP 1996).

23. Bijoy (note 2) p. 1758.

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24. Henri Lefebvre, ‘Space: Social Product and Use Value’, in Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (eds.),State, Space, World: Selected Essays (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP 2009) p. 190.

25. Ravi Ahuja, ‘Opening up the Country? Patterns of Circulation and Politics of Communication inEarly Colonial Orissa’, Studies in History 20/1 (2004) pp. 112–113.

26. Ibid., pp. 93–95.27. Ibid., p. 103.28. See Alex Ekka, Status of Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples and Land: Jharkhand (Delhi: Aaakar

Books 2011).29. Ibid., p. 120.30. Alpa Shah, ‘Morality, Corruption, and the State: Insights from Jharkhand, Eastern India’, Journal

of Development Studies 45/3 (2009) pp. 305–306.31. See Stuart Corbridge, ‘Industrialisation, Internal Colonialism and Ethnoregionalism: The

Jharkhand, India, 1880-1980’, Journal of Historical Geography 13/3 (1987).32. In 1909 the Tata Iron and Steel Company (Tisco) founded Jamshedpur, the central node of

its extraction and processing facilities in the region. To this day Jamshedpur is an urban space createdand controlled by capital, the largest ‘company town’ in the world, with Tisco holding responsibility formunicipal government, urban planning, infrastructure and the provision of social services and security.See Blair B. Kling, ‘Paternailism in Indian labour: The Tata Iron and Steel Company of Jamshedpur’,International Labour and Working-Class History 53 (1998).

33. C. P. Simmons, ‘Indigenous Enterprise in the Indian Coal Mining Industry c. 1835-1939’, IndianEconomic and Social History Review 13 (1976) p. 192.

34. Ahuja (note 25) p. 125.35. Ibid., p. 103.36. Ibid., pp. 103–105.37. Ibid., p. 105.38. Ekka, pp. 61–62 (note 28).39. Ibid., pp. 48–49.40. René Véron and Garry Fehr, ‘State Power and Protected Areas: Dynamics and Contradictions of

Forest Protection in Madhya Pradesh, India’, Political Geography 30 (2011).41. The songs and stories of resistance often juxtaposed the destruction of ‘natural’ space with an

inevitable response. Birsa Munda, a millenarian adivasi leader who led a series of revolts against theBritish in the 1890s, for example, was associated with a song whose words include: “The big river inflood, the dust storm is brewing; O Maina, run, run away; The forest is filled with smoke; O Maina . . .

; Your mother is burning, O Maina . . . ; Your father is floating away, O Maina”, Mathew Areeparampil,Struggle for Swaraj (Chaibasa, Jharkhand: Tribal Research and Training Centre: 2002) p. 205.

42. Nandini Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-2006)(Delhi: Oxford UP: 2007) pp. 78–103.

43. This space of representation still has echoes in the present day among activists who see the stateand the expansion of extractive industry as a contemporary manifestation of a long historical process. “Ifyou see the history, history suggests that conflict in adivasi society started with the formation of Indianstate. The whole state. Because before there was the Indian state, adivasi were . . . they had ownershiprights, resources, land, everything. They had their own area. Their saying, I think you musts have heardof it, Santhal country. Or Munda country. They presumed that the area they were living, that is therecountry. But when the British invaded- first that Aryan invasion, but largely the problem of resourcesarises during the British invasion. In 1765, British invaded Bengal. And that time adivasi they protested.There were huge fighting between British and adivasi. They said no, we cannot accept your rule. We haveour own rule. Why should we pay you the tax because land and resources, everything, is given to usby our <inaudible>. That was the whole idea. Then, but with the power of gun and this British theyestablished their rule and then after independence things went from bad to worse. Now everything . . .

every area is captured by the Indian government”, Interview with Gladson Dungdung, Ranchi, Jharkhand,1 May 2013.

44. See Government of Chhattisgarh, Mineral Policy: Government of Chhatisgarh 2001, availableonline at <http://www.chips.gov.in/sites/default/files/Minera%20Policy_English.pdf>.

45. Bijoy (note 2) p. 1772.46. Ekka (note 28) pp. 51–97.47. Bijoy (note 2) p. 1772.48. Bahree (note 3) p. 84.

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22 Michael Spacek

49. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (note 9) p. 373.50. Interestingly, the Maoists claim that local adivasi languages in Bastar, specifically Gondi and

Maria, were first standardised and written by the Maoists in the 1980s. According to Varvara Rao, head ofthe Revolutionary Writers Association, a CPI (Maoist)–affiliated literary group, ‘They <the Maoists> startedworking among the adivasis. They have learned their language, they have learned their way of living. Firstthey have translated the songs from Telugu in their language or Hindi. People in Dandakaranya mostlyare the Gonds and the Koyas, their language is Gondi, Maria, and other adivasi dialects. These people<the Maoists> have learned their language, translated very rich . . . Telugu has got very rich revolutionaryliterature. Firstly they <the Maoists> have translated them. There’s also many oral tradition forms, theywere translated. Slowly they <local inhabitants> themselves have started writing in their language. Gondi,Maria language. Today you see in Dandakaranya, they, <the Maoists> bring out 24 magazines. Hindi,Telugu, Maria, Gondi, language, they print 24 magazines’, Interview with Varvara Rao, Hyderabad, AndhraPradesh, 5 Feb. 2013.

51. “The Communist Party of India (Maoist) is the consolidated political vanguard of the Indianproletariat. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the ideological basis guiding its thinking in all the spheresof its activities. Immediate aim or programme of the Communist Party is to carry on and completethe new democratic revolution in India as a part of the world proletarian revolution by overthrow-ing the semi-colonial, semi-feudal system under neo-colonial form of indirect rule.” Chapter 1: GeneralProgramme, Party Constitution, Communist Party of India (Maoist), available online at <http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/maoist/documents/papers/partyconstitution.htm>.

52. For example, in 2010 the Government of India announced the “Integrated Action Plan toDevelop Tribal and Backward Districts in Left-Wing Extremist Areas”. The programme provides centralgovernment infrastructural funding, with a particular focus on social infrastructure such as schools andmedical facilities, to districts in which the Maoists are active with an explicit aim of deepening statepresence and garnering popular support. Press Information Bureau, Government of India, available onlineat <http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=79472>.

53. Chhattisgarh is also the epicentre of the conflict. While the population of the state com-poses only 4% of the total population of the country, it accounts for 37.4% of conflict deaths since2001. See Johnathan J. Kennedy and Lawrence P. King, ‘Understanding the Conviction of Binayak Sen:Neocolonialism, Political Violence and the Political Economy of Health in the Central Indian Tribal Belt’,Social Science & Medicine (2011) p. 3.

54. ‘Purification hunt’ in the local Gond language.55. Jason Miklian, ‘The Purification Hunt: The Salwa Judum Counterinsurgency in Chhattisgarh,

India’, Dialectical Anthropology 33/3&4 (2009) p. 442.56. The number of displaced as a percentage of Dantewara’s rural population during the height of

the Salwa Judum campaign is difficult to estimate. In 2007 and again in 2012, parts of Dantewara wereadministratively separated from the district. Furthermore, the Indian Census 2011 data for the area wasnot publicly available at the time of writing. Based on data from the 2001 Census and using 40,000 as thenumber of IDPs, the percentage of the rural population displaced would be around 6%. See Governmentof India, Ministry of Home Affairs: Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, 2001 Census,available online at <http://www.censusindia.gov.in/PopulationFinder/Population_Finder.aspx>.On theother hand, Nandini Sundar has written of 100,000 displaced. Presumably the additional 60,000 constitutethose who had fled their homes but had not re-located to the camps. This would mean that closer to 15%of the district population has been displaced. See Nandini Sundar, ‘The Immoral Economy of Counter-Insurgency in India’, paper presented at Yale University Program in Agrarian Studies Colloquium Series,New Haven, 2006, available at <http://www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/colloqpapers/05sundarpub.pdf>.

57. According to Sudha Bharawaj, head of the Chhattisgarh unit of the People’s Union for CivilLiberties, there were approximately 10,000 people left in the camps as of early 2012. Some of thosehave been relocated to purpose-built housing colonies in urban areas, some have moved to neigh-bouring Andhra Pradesh while others have fled deeper into the forests. Author interview with Bilaspur,Chhattisgarh, 26 Feb. 2013.

58. Miklian (note 55) p. 451.59. Ibid., p. 450.60. Ibid., p. 459.61. See Bahree (note 3); Ipshita Basu, ‘Security and Development – Are They Two Sides of the Same

Coin? Investigating India’s Two-Pronged Policy Towards Left Wing Extremism’, Contemporary South Asia19/4 (2011); see Johnathan J. Kennedy and Lawrence P. King, ‘Understanding the Conviction of Binayak

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Revolutionary Maoism in Eastern and Central India 23

Sen: Neocolonialism, Political Violence and the Political Economy of Health in the Central Indian TribalBelt’, Social Science & Medicine (2011); Miklian (note 55); Walker (note 3); Weil (note 3).

62. In author interviews with a number of senior police officers in Chhattisgarh the camps werecontrasted with the open space of the forest where undertaking military and ‘development’ activi-ties was difficult. The camps were seen as a means to control both territory and the populace. Forexample, Girdhari Nayak, Director-General Police (Prisons) Chhattisgarh, states, “Bastar is a huge area,40,000 square km. This [construction of the camps] took place in around 15,000 square km area and644 out of 644 villages these people came. Forest village. Not revenue village. Forest village is a differentconcept and revenue village is a different concept. Forest village you’ll find two houses here, another fewhouses after two kilometres. Those are forest villages. Very spread out in the jungle. So basically peoplehave come out from forest village in those areas. And then stayed in clustered areas. These people, theystay in the relief camps, their houses have been built, their livelihood programmes have started in thoseareas, all these things.” Author interview with Raipur, Chhattisgarh, 25 Feb. 2013.

63. Miklian (note 55) p. 451.64. Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns (note 42) pp. 196–197.65. Author interview with Vishva Ranjan, Director-General Police, Chhattisgarh (Rtd.), Raipur,

Chhattisgarh, 1 March 2013.66. Under colonialism Dantewara district was part of the Princely State of Bastar. For more

on the Bastar rebellions of 1876, 1910 and 1961–1966. See Nandini Sundar, ‘Debating Dusshera andReinterpreting Rebellion in Bastar District, Central India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(2001).

67. Miklian and Carney (note 3) p. 108.68. For a detailed examination of newly opened mining facilities and projects that are currently

in development see Rajkishor Meher, How Mineral-Based Industrial Development Marginalizes andDisplaces People in India (New York: Edwin Mellen Press 2010).

69. Ibid., p. 158.70. Meher, ‘Globalization’ (note 3) pp. 469–471.71. See Government of Jharkhand, Department of Industry, Jharkhand Industrial Policy 2102,

available at <http://www.jharkhandonline.gov.in/DEPTDOCUPLOAD/uploads/13/D201213168.pdf>.72. There has been significant growth in the number of Maoist splinter groups in Jharkhand.

According to SN Pradhan, Assistant Director-General Police (Modernisation), Jharkhand, the splintergroups primarily function as local gangs who use the Maoist name for convenience:

I would compare them with the Italian mafiosi. Anybody who is not my friend is my enemy.Anybody who is not endorsing what I’m saying is my enemy. Anybody who doesn’t sayyes, if I want to do any work . . . yesterday a journalist was killed. He was not killedfor his journalism. He was killed because he was also a contractor. So he took up somegovernment contract works in some deep interior parts of Khunti. And he was asked topay up for something, this is what we have found out so far, still to be confirmed. He wastold that anything you do, you first expressly ask for permission that this is what I wantto do. And only then do you go ahead with your work. So I don’t see anything but themotive is to spread a fear psychosis. To have a blanket of fear which just says that anythingyou want too do has to be with clear permission from us, otherwise you can’t do anything.You shouldn’t attempt anything. So I think it’s just an attempt to perpetuate that fear inthese areas. Deep down it is just an alternative economics of earning for lots of peopleinvolved in this who realise that government projects, contracts, even private contracts,mining, forest-related contracts, all are money spinners. So unless you have a blanket offear, people will not automatically turn to your before even attempting enterprise. (Authorinterview with Ranchi, Jharkhand, 29 April 2012)

73. Alpa Shah, ‘Markets of Protection: The ‘Terrorist’ Maoist Movement and the State in Jharkhand,India’, Critique of Anthropology 26/3 (2007) p. 276.

74. Miklian and Carney (note 3) p. 110.75. For more on the Jharkhandi movement see, Amit Prakash, Jharkhand: Politics of Development

and Identity (Delhi: Orient Longman 2001).76. Bert Suykens, ‘Diffuse Authority in the Beedi Commodity Chain: Naxalite and State Governance

in Tribal Telangana, India’, Development and Change 41/1 (2010) pp. 159–160.

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