Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Development in postcolonial India remains a contested terrain where competing approachesarenegotiatedandoperationalized. Fromtheearlydaysofindependence, development discourse in India carried elements of Nehruvian impulse of state-led technocratic development as well as people-centric community development primarily influenced by the Gandhian notion of the village economy. The present paper aims at engaging withthis Indian development complex, where conventional binaries such as state-led/community-led, national/local, top-down/bottom-up, and so forth are transcended, leading to a framework where the binaries become complementary. It traces the evolution of community development and engages with its mainstreaming in the early decades of independence as well as in the neoliberal phase of developmental governance. Although this renewed trend of involving the community in the development process presents itself to be more people-centric, it is argued that such a tendency could be as homogenizing as the narratives ofnationaland globalinstitutions. The paper recognizes the ambivalence of community development and proposes that the state and community, far from being autonomous spaces, mediate and produce each other.

Democracy is characterized by an axiomatic civilized form of government that people can have only when they arrive at the ultimate level of civilizational advancement. Like capitalism, democracy comes with the final stage of evolution. In this scheme of things, lesser forms of government and political organizations can be termed as the infancy of evolution and civilization. Democracy promotion is invested with a moral dimension for other states to follow. It is not that different states do not see America's geopolitical ambition in this plan, nor does it mean that America really believes in coaxing others. The democracy zealots ignore the fact that democracy, the way we understand it today, has a very recent origin and that it was the product of a particular historical moment. Democracy promotion is ultimately the promotion of Western liberal democracy which is more pronounced in the economic rather than the political sphere.

Both India and Europe have been undergoing a difficult process of negotiating cultural, religious and ethnic diversity within their democratic frameworks. In fact, recent incidents of xenophobic backlash against multiculturalism and minority communities in Europe, as well as myriad movements for constitutional recognition of castes, tribes and languages and the emergence of Islamophobic terror in India, question the conventional idea of democracy as the idyllic preserver of diversity.

The paper explores the production of ideal political life within modernity and offers a critique of the modern security state which transforms antinational individuals to the condition of bare life. Since the nation-state is believed to be a modern formation, the unification of political rationality and the national subject is seen as a necessary project of the nation-state to create patriotic citizens out of individuals. It is for this reason that the dissociation of rationality from the political subject becomes an imperative for the individual to be hailed as terrorist. If body can be constituted meaningful in the political space of modernity through reason, it has to be subjected to an exercise of un-moderning once it becomes useless for the state. This process of corporealization is made possible through torture which contributes to the state of exception. However, the paper questions the idea of national rationality and makes a case for de-linking statist reason from human life. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Gender studies in general, and Gender and Development (GAD) in particular, through their belief in a cultural conditioning of gender behaviour, use the idea of 'culture' in a restrictive sense which perpetuates a conceptual difference between men and women, and also between First World and Third World women. There is a tendency among gender experts to magnify the difference between men and women, and categorise them into two radically different realms. This article argues for a gender project based on the idea of culture as lived experience. It approaches gender not as a category of exclusion but as a problematic construct that is constantly restructuring itself. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

The paper highlights the complex relationship between development and language and argues that poverty as a condition of underdevelopment is materialized in representation. Instead of limiting the scope of the topic to the rhetorical aspects of development thought, it is proposed that development language produces a specific reality of poverty while writing about it. Using a post-structuralist framework and drawing from various Planning Commission reports on poverty lines, the paper goes on to implicate these reports in the production of authoritative knowledge and the elision of the poor. Through the identification of the cut-off line, which distinguishes the poor from the non-poor, these reports control our ways of knowing and suspend our ability to imagine poverty in any non-institutional manner. Such representation not only omits poor’s everyday experience and converts poverty as experience to poverty as knowledge, but also predicates its objectivity on such elision. The paper also highlights the slippages and contradictions in these reports, and shows how in the seeming inevitability of poverty knowledge, people find innovative ways to appropriate and disrupt it.

Taking issue with the commonsensical understanding of terrorism as an anti-modern formation, the present article proposes to locate terrorism in the broad framework of statism, its collusion with power and the creation of knowledge on which popular consciousness is grounded. This approach helps in demystifying the problem of terrorism and implicates the state in the creation of terrorism discourse. Seen thus, terrorism is less a tangible object or a value-free idea, and more a product of a particular type of analysis - taking place in language, in laws and in state apparatuses. Placing terrorism in the historical context records the shifting definitions of terrorism and unravels its meaning in the domain of power which establishes terrorism not as an actually existing reality, but as a discursive product. This reading leads us to see not only the power of language in making such a discourse, but also the chronic incapacity of modernist vocabulary to address problems peculiar to 'different' cultures. © The Author(s), 2010.

Drawing from the insights of post-structuralism, the essay questions the ontology of underdevelopment existing prior to its representation and locates the idea of development within discourse. Since language constructs reality within a signifying system, the problem of underdevelopment is a product of particular cultural experiences and is not innocent of power. By weaving objective narratives of evolution and progress, development discourse successfully masquerades its relativism and creates a universal system of scientific knowledge. The essay also engages with postcolonial theory and argues that like the Orient and its savagery, the Third World and its poverty were invented to exercise discipline and control in non-Western territories. Understood thus, development can be a synonym for a civilizing mission. The development expert here appears not as a disinterested change agent but an ideologically driven disciplinarian, and it is for this reason that the emancipatory promise of development is highly suspect. © 2011 SAGE Publications.

Development is concerned with the biological security and well-being of people, and so all development theory and practice are biopolitical in a fundamental sense. The paper argues that for development to be made meaningful, it needs to legitimate itself through the production of healthy bodies, which can be realized through food security, immunization drives, and housing schemes among others. A postcolonial democratic state like India makes an effort to protect its people from hunger and draws its legitimacy from the same. Yet at the same time, the supposed development of the nation implies a concurrent elision of the weak and the vulnerable. Drawing upon India’s experiment with food security, public distribution systems, and other similar schemes, the paper advances an idea of development that is not only inherently biopolitical, but also a compromise between the commitment to protect people from hunger and the need for working around international agencies. While doing so, the paper borrows from the theoretical vocabulary of Foucault, Agamben, and others to historicize the modernist idea of protecting citizens as well as the reality of deaths from hunger and development-induced displacement.