6 - ‘We Are the Ones Who Make the Sarkar’: Law, Civil Society and Citizenship in Subaltern Politics

Summary

‘We are the ones who make the sarkar’—KMCS and AMS activists would commonly resort to this turn of phrase, or a variation of it, to convey their understanding of the state. The phrase expresses a political imaginary that had been fostered through many years of collective mobilisation. Centred on notions of democratic representation and public accountability, this imaginary goes against the grain of the meanings that Bhils tended to attribute to their relationship to the state under everyday tyranny. As I showed in Chapter 2, Bhil subordination to everyday tyranny had been inscribed in idioms that effectively constituted the state as a despotic and all-powerful authority—the sarkar was referred to as bhagwan, mai-baap, or simply as ‘big’—and Adivasis as rightless subjects duty-bound to obey its biddings. The fact that this reversal of meaning took place testifies to the fact that the KMCS and the AMS brought about a significant democratisation of local state–society relations in western Madhya Pradesh. Indeed, when Bhil activists reflected on the mobilisations against everyday tyranny that they had participated in, they were clear that they had been very effective in curbing the corruption and the violence that were the hallmarks of everyday tyranny: ‘Lots of changes have happened. We are not afraid of the forest-wallahs and the police anymore. We now plough our fields and we don't give liquor, chickens, or money to anyone.’ Their ability to withstand and curb the predation of local state personnel tended to be attributed to the emergence of an awareness of rights and entitlements: ‘We can't be cheated by anyone now—we know about our rights’ (interview, Bhuvan, April 2010).

It is the character of this democratisation of local state–society relations that is the focus of this chapter. My investigation concentrates on new practices and imaginaries, which were generated through the activism of the KMCS and the AMS and which went a considerable way towards changing the terms upon which Bhil Adivasis engaged with the local state. In the analysis that follows, I am fundamentally concerned with developing a nuanced understanding of how subaltern groups appropriate the legal and political idioms of India's postcolonial democracy—particularly in terms of how such appropriations shape and reshape both the political subjectivities of subalterns and the workings of India's democracy on the ground.