discussion
violation of zoning codes by well-to-do
traders and homeowners. It was the poor
jhuggi-dwellers who desperately dis-
played their documented claims to citi-
zenship voter IDs, ration cards and
tokens issued by the slum department.
The rich encroachers simply demanded
that their illegality be condoned and they
succeeded in getting their way.
Civil society is thus not a domain of he-
gemony as Chatterjee describes, but of
domination. Its attempts to make eco-
nomic liberalisation the common sense of
our times are accompanied by brutal state
repression and the anomalous exercise of
law. At the same time, the category of po-
litical society is inadequate for describing
the variety of social formations that stand
ranged against or in collusion with the
corporate and urban middle classes. For
example, the silence or tacit support given
to Bajrang Dal activists to burn Christian
homes in Orissa and Karnataka, or to self-
styled custodians of culture to attack exhi-
bitions, burn books, etc, suggests a grow-
ing intolerance precisely in that sphere of
civil society which Chatterjee claims lives
by the rules, as well as a growing state un-
willingness to curb this.
If one perceives peasants as political be-
ings, and the state is perforce bound to do
Classes, Capital and
Indian Democracy
Partha Chatterjee
Partha Chatterjee responds to the
three comments by Shah, John
and Deshpande, and Baviskar and
Sundar, on his essay Democracy
and Economic Transformation
in India.
Partha Chatterjee (partha@cssscal.org) is
with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences
Calcutta and also with the Columbia
University, New York
Economic & Political Weekly EPW november 15, 2008
so, a functionalist formula of preserva-
tion-dissolution falls apart. Instead, at-
tention must be focused on how the great
transformation of our times (Polanyi
1944) the attempt by the economy to
dominate society summons forth power-
ful counter-movements that resist the
commodification of land and labour, as
well as groups that are set up precisely to
divide society. The career of corporate
capital in rural India is more complicated
than Chatterjee allows; besides primitive
accumulation it includes forays into the
formal subsumption of labour to capital
(eg, contract farming) as well as the real
subsumption of labour to capital (eg, di-
rect takeover of land for agroforestry).
Most recently corporate capital has not
been content with ruling behind the
scenes, but its members have actually en-
tered Parliament or state legislatures
themselves. The counter-movements that
resist corporate moves are also diverse
and deploy a range of political resources
that far exceed Chatterjees description.
Categories such as civil society and politi-
cal society fail to capture the character of
domination in India today, thereby miss-
ing the brutality and desperation and, de-
spite these, the inherent dynamism and
hope that still persists.
I
t is immensely gratifying to be com-
mented upon and even criticised by
younger scholars whose work one has
greatly admired and whose views are a
pointer to the direction that Indian social
science will take in the years to come. I am
thankful to Mary John and Satish Desh-
pande, Mihir Shah, and Amita Baviskar
and Nandini Sundar for the care and
seriousness with which they have read
my article Democracy and Economic
Transformation in India (19 April 2008,
hereafter DET). My response below is in
the spirit of continuing the discussion.
Notes
1 For example, the Bharatiya Janata Party used
Modis electoral victory in 2002 to justify the
genocide in Gujarat; the existence of institutions
like the National Human Rights Commission
is used to deflect attention from Indias human
rights record; and even as the cash for votes deals
in the 2008 trust vote became an open secret,
they were subsumed within a framework of par-
liamentary procedure.
2 This is brought out clearly in ongoing research
byMalwa Muniswamy, a PhD student at the
Jawaharlal Nehru University, on the Velugu
programme, a World Bank funded microcredit
scheme in Andhra Pradesh.
3 See for instance, police firings at Maikanch village
in Rayagada district, Orissa, in which three people
were killed protesting against land acquisition for
bauxite mining in 2001; at Tapkara in Ranchi dis-
trict, Jharkhand in which nine were killed protest-
ing against the Koel Karo dam in 2001; at the Khu-
ga dam site in Churachandpur district, Manipur
in which three were killed in 2005; at Kalingana-
gar in Orissa, in which 12 were killed protesting
against a Tata steel plant in 2006; at Nandigram
in West Bengal where some 15 were killed in 2007
protesting against land acquisition for a special
economic zone. This is by no means an exhaus-
tive list of recent police violence related to land
acquisition. Increasingly too, as in the Posco steel
project in eastern Orissa, the Alcan bauxite project
in Kashipur and the SEZ in Nandigram, armed
gangs supported by the company and assisted by
the local administration and police have been used
to coerce villagers into parting with their land.
References
Marx, Karl (1990) (1867): Capital, Vol 1 (London:
Penguin Classics).
Polanyi, Karl (1944): The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Beacon Press).
Washbrook, David (1981): Law, State and Agrarian Soci-
ety in Colonial India, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (3).
John and Deshpande are right in
suggesting that in DET, I have tried to in-
quire whether the apparently hegemonic
position recently acquired by corporate
capital in urban society in India also extends
to the countryside. I have also tried to flesh
out the dynamics of what I call political
society, earlier worked out for urban popu
lations, in the contemporary rural context.
The route I have chosen in DET is to connect
with an older Marxist discussion of transi-
tion to capitalism, passive revolution of
capital and the politics of the subaltern
classes, and to ask if an adequate under-
standing of our contemporary situation
requires a reconceptualisation of those old-
er categories. This, of course, is only one
possible trajectory to an understanding of
the present and, needless to say, other ave-
nues could be profitably explored.
Hence, if Mihir Shah is convinced that
class analysis of the Marxist variety is
89
discussion
long discredited and that power in India
cannot be understood without reference
to the caste system, he is of course at
liberty to ignore DET altogether. However,
I would like to point out a methodological
problem concerning the level of generality
to which a conceptual study aspires. While
it goes without saying that the practices
of caste discrimination are deeply inter
twined with virtually all relations of
power in India, I am sceptical of theore
tical claims that the social scientific ana
lysis of Indian society requires, as a
consequence, its own theoretical con-
cepts. The assertion of some sort of
uniqueness of India, it seems to me, de-
nies to us the wealth of comparative re-
sources that more general theoretical
frameworks allow and needlessly impris-
on us within the scholarly fortifications
built by Indologists. I am also unconvinced
that there is anything like a caste system
that can be referred to in speaking of
power formations in India as a whole,
espec ially since it is clear that the ritual
significance of caste, sanctioned by reli-
gious texts and practices, has virtually
disappeared from caste-based contesta-
tions in recent times. If caste has been
secularised, then its only system-like
features are given by the provisions of the
Indian Constitution relating to caste, by
administrative orders and by court judg-
ments, all of which are the aggregative
results, perennially under contestation, of
national politics and many of which are
subject to numerous modifications at the
state and local levels.
As far as power relations in the concrete
are concerned, class is, without doubt,
intimately tied to caste as practised at
local levels, but other than obvious gener-
alisations such as the predominantly up-
per-caste character of the urban middle
classes or the predominance of Dalits
among the landless poor, there are few
general statements I know tying class to
caste that would be valid for India as a
whole. By comparison, statements about
class, by virtue of their conceptual ground-
ing in general theories of economic and
political change, have, in principle, much
more general applicability in an all-India
domain and are open to debate based on
empirical findings. It is true, of course,
that the electoral mobilisation of caste and
90
the emergence of a new middle class have
sometimes led to the regional consoli
dation of a caste at the social level, as is
apparently the case with Yadavs in large
parts of northern India, but it has also led,
as in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, for
example, to social antagonism between
contiguous Dalit castes. The subject of
caste and economic transformation in
India is crying out for rigorous study but
it is not one I am competent to attempt at
the level of generality chosen in DET
Something similar needs to be said
about Shahs comments about the adivasi.
First of all, he misquotes me when he says
that I claim tribal peoples depend more
on forest products or pastoral occupations
than on agriculture. What I had said
was this:
In every region of India, there exist marginal
groups of people who are unable to gain ac-
cess to the mechanisms of political society.
They are often marked by their exclusion
from peasant society, such as low-caste
groups who do not participate in agriculture
or tribal peoples who depend more on for-
est products or pastoral occupations than on
agriculture. Political society and electoral
democracy have not given these groups the
means to make effective claims on govern-
mentality. In this sense, these marginalised
groups represent an outside beyond the
boundaries of political society.
Centrality of Peasant Agriculture
Clearly, I did not mean to suggest that all
tribal peoples in India were pastoralists or
gatherers of forest products. Rather, I was
talking about the centrality of peasant ag-
riculture to the issues of development and
electoral democracy in much of rural In-
dia and the systematic marginalisation of
those rural communities that did not have
a significant role in agriculture. These
would include those Dalit and adivasi
groups that live alongside peasant villages
but do not participate in agriculture, face
deep-seated cultural prejudices and, given
the inherent majoritarian bias of electoral
democracy, are not easily mobilised into
political society.
To continue my earlier point, let me also
say that I find it analytically unhelpful to
speak simultaneously of all tribal peoples
in India. While the term adivasi may
have some political purchase in certain
contexts, establishing equivalences bet
ween tribal populations in central India
and those in the north-east, any serious
analysis must acknowledge the huge diffe
rences. There may be, arguably, some-
thing like a national and colonial question
in the north-east, and the system of reser-
vations, restrictions on property owner-
ship and the spread of the new consumer
economy have created a tribal middle class
there that poses very different implications
for changing power relations than in
the regions of central India, including
Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where tribal
peoples are far more densely integrated
within, and generally subjugated by, the
power structures built around agriculture,
mining, commercial forestry and industry.
I would hesitate to bring them under the
same conceptual umbrella.
I was also somewhat puzzled by Shahs
charge that in speaking about the recent
changes in the conditions of peasant
agriculture, I was invoking the idea of a
self-sufficient village community. Surely
there is an immense range of situations,
and historical time, lying between a self-
sufficient peasantry at one end and peas-
ant production where nothing is produced
for self-consumption or non-monetised
exchange at the other. Indian historians,
working on the period from the 16th to the
20th centuries, have explored that range
of situations, pointing out the varying de-
grees to which peasant agriculture has
been entangled in monetary and market
relations and the tendencies, especially in
the late colonial period, toward a differen-
tiation of the peasantry. Alongside, there
has grown a large literature on the com-
parative study of peasant societies in Asia,
Africa and Latin America that begins from
the premise that peasant communities are
linked to larger power structures through
taxation, credit and commodity relations.
Virtually all of the Indian discussion about
the transition from the late colonial to the
recent period has talked about movements
from one point to another within that
range between complete self-sufficiency
(which did exist in some places at certain
times) and complete absence of production
for self-consumption (which, by all ac-
counts, was never quite prevalent until
very recently). The reason why my obser-
vation about the end of peasant production
for self-consumption is significant should
be clear: if true, it should signify the
november 15, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

dissolution of the peasantry itself, in the
same way that it has disappeared in
western Europe and North America. That is
what we would expect with primitive accu-
mulation, commercial agriculture and the
rapid differentiation of the peasantry. The
complete absence of production for self-
consumption or non-market exchange
would remove the foundations of peasant
social life.
The question posed in DET was: are we
seeing the dissolution of the Indian peas-
antry? The answer was: because of the
politically regulated process of the revers-
al of the effects of primitive accumulation,
the peasantry is not likely to be dissolved.
What Is New?
There is one question that appears in all
three sets of comments: why do I insist
that something dramatically new has hap-
pened in India since the 1990s? Shah
thinks the process I describe began in 1971
with Indira Gandhis garibi hatao pro-
gramme. John and Deshpande say that
welfarism, if that is what I am talking
about, came into fashion even earlier.
Baviskar and Sundar suggest that amelio-
rative measures to soften the destabilising
impact of capitalist growth go all the way
back to the industrial revolution in
England and, in India, to colonial efforts
in the 19th century to protect small
peasants. I need to clarify the claim I am
making in relation to the history of capi-
talism as well as to the history of the
modern (colonial and post-colonial) state
in India.
My claim about a process of reversal of
the effects of primitive accumulation is,
contrary to Baviskar and Sundars sugges-
tion, definitely not one based on a need
of capital argument. This argument was
made some 30 years ago by structuralists
such as Claude Meillassoux, Pierre-
Philippe Rey and Harold Wolpe to explain
the survival of precapitalist modes of pro-
duction even after they had been articu-
lated with the global capitalist economy.
Their argument was that by bearing part
of the costs of reproduction of labour and
supplying cheap raw materials, the pre-
capitalist sector was meeting the need of
capital to keep its production costs low.
The problem with this explanation, as even
the Althusserians who made it admitted,
Economic & Political Weekly EPW november 15, 2008
was that the articulation of pre- capital
with capital could only be seen as a de-
layed transition to a fully developed capi-
talist mode of production. Kalyan Sanyal
has dealt with this particular form of the
transition argument in his book (Sanyal
2007:20-28). My claim about the reversal
of the effects of primitive accumulation, as
I have explained in DET, is not a transi-
tion argument at all. It is a process that I
argue is integral to the global reproduc-
tion of capital in its most advanced phase.
If one is to see it in the terms of Althusse-
rian structuralism, one would have to say
that those conditions of reproduction can-
not be obtained by looking at the econom-
ic instance alone; the full set of conditions
is specified by the political instance.
As far as India is concerned, it is cer-
tainly possible to trace back the genealogy
of specific governmental technologies of
looking after populations to the days of
Nehru and Indira Gandhi and even fur-
ther back to colonial times. But the key
difference marked by the period since the
1990s is the following. The developmental
state of the passive revolution in the de
cades after independence was the domi-
nant formation claiming the moral high
ground of modernity, national interest,
equity, justice and even efficiency. The big
bourgeoisie, seen to be mired in the paro-
chial ethos of traditional merchant com-
munities and unwillingly to break out of
its protected monopolistic shell, was
socially weak. Primitive accumulation was
then carried out with the full legal, fiscal
and coercive powers of the state
unapologetically, since the rational
neutrality of decision-making organs such
as the Planning Commission was supposed
to ensure that such decisions of the state
were always equitable and in the overall
national interest.
When the state entered the arena of in-
dustry, commerce and services, it project-
ed itself as a better employer than the pri-
vate sector and claimed to set the stand-
ards of labour law implementation, em-
ployee benefits and social responsibility.
When it took up populist welfare projects
such as those under garibi hatao, it did so
by loudly proclaiming the leading role of
the state in independent and equitable
national development and, in the voices
of some of the more enthusiastic official
discussion
spokespersons, as steps in the transition
to some sort of socialism. The situation
could not be more radically different
today. Every single term of justification
for expenditures in the so-called social
sector has been transformed. That is
what is new.
Civil-Corporate and
Political-Non-corporate
Baviskar and Sundar have sternly ques-
tioned my key distinctions between civil
and political society, on the one hand, and
corporate and non-corporate capital, on
the other. They have argued against the
usefulness of these binary distinctions (or
do they, in fact, object to all binary distinc-
tions?) and have suggested that if they are
to be used, the characteristics I have at-
tributed to each of the terms should be
inverted. To reiterate my distinctions:
Civil society is the domain of associative
life of citizens enjoying legally protected
rights of freedom, equality and property,
while political society is the space where
populations are governed and looked
after, often by ignoring or violating civic
norms. Corporate capital refers to busi-
ness organisations that are typically in-
corporated as joint stock companies, fully
regulated by the law and engaged in busi-
ness transactions on the basis of legally
enforceable contracts, while non-corpo-
rate capital refers to the (admittedly di-
verse) array of enterprises that are insuf-
ficiently regulated by the law, that fre-
quently operate on trust based on kinship
or political loyalty and that could, if nec-
essary, subordinate the maximisation of
profit to the need to secure a livelihood.
There is no doubt that the category of non-
corporate capital has been named nega-
tively, and it is possible that the positive
features attributed to it will, after more
extensive empirical study, yield a class of
enterprises that is smaller than everything
that lies outside the domain of corporate
capital. But those are my provisional
distinctions.
Baviskar and Sundar point out that
there is no dearth of illegality in the civic
world of the middle class in India. True
enough. But unlike the claims of survival
needs in political society, they do not have
the moral stamp of legitimacy. Middle
class property owners, entrepreneurs and
91
discussion
even corporate firms may engage in a host
of illegal activities and get away with them
by resorting to evasion or subterfuge, or
by greasing the palms of those responsible
for catching them. If they talk about it in
public, they do so shamefacedly, even
though some may privately flaunt their
impunity. But unlike squatters in Mumbai
or Kolkata, or vegetable traders in various
north Indian towns who recently vanda
lised the glitzy new stores of Reliance
Fresh, they cannot proclaim the righteous
demands of livelihood and survival. Moral
legitimacy counts for a great deal in demo
cratic politics. If one could invoke a
Nietzschean insight, it is mistaken to claim
that the dominant and propertied classes
any longer set the standards of morality
for society; rather, in a democratic age, the
moral passion of entitlement and outrage
is on the side of those who have little.
Results and Intentions
All three sets of commentators raise the
question of actual results as distinct from
the intentions of reversal of the effects of
primitive accumulation. This is an impor-
tant question and, although I did address
it in DET, it deserves more attention. The
intention here is driven by neither the
benevolence nor the economic needs of
capital. Rather, it is formed within the
institutions of government as a set of poli-
cies designed to tackle the political prob-
lem of governing populations that make
demands for livelihood, security and well-
being. Since the intentions emerge from
the arena of politics, it goes without say-
ing that they are shaped by the struggles
between rival groups and classes in that
arena. Baviskar and Sundar note very
rightly that the rural employment guaran-
tee, forest rights and right to information
are the three major sets of governmental
policies designed to help the marginal and
underprivileged sections of the people
that have been won through protracted
struggle. Shah, similarly, argues that the
implementation of National Rural Employ-
ment Guarantee Act on the ground is a
battle that continues to rage. I could not
agree with them more. The interesting
question is not why such governmental
policies come after a spate of agitations
and vigorous movements, but rather why
these are the policies that are chosen, as
92
against others, and why these are the spe-
cific institutional forms that those policies
take, as distinct from others that might
also have been available. Even more inter-
esting, it seems to me, is the question: why
were these the most effective forms in
which the demands could be framed by
the movements so that they might elicit a
policy response from government? These
are the nitty-gritty of the politics of govern-
mentality that the rational-technocratic
language used by administrators and eco
nomists is designed to hide. But the stu-
dent of politics should easily see through
it. As I have argued, in DET and elsewhere,
policy and politics mutually constitute
each other on the field of mass democracy.
Come to think of it, politicians, whether
in government or in the opposition, sel-
dom shy away from talking about the poli-
tics of governmentality. Indeed, one might
truthfully say that the overwhelming bulk
of the political rhetoric expended in elec-
toral campaigns today concerns what gov-
ernments have or have not done for which
sections of the population. The function of
rhetoric here is to turn the heterogeneous
demands of populations into the morally
coherent and emotionally persuasive
form of popular demands. In this sense, as
Ernesto Laclau (2005) has argued, pop-
ulism is the only morally legitimate form
of democratic politics today. I have sug-
gested, in DET and elsewhere, that present-
day critics of populism must, to make their
case, necessarily demand the restriction
or modification of democracy. This also
clarifies, I think, why we see the proli
feration of the tactical use of violence, not
so much to intimidate or punish (although
there is that too, but that is familiar politi-
cal violence of an old kind) but to display
in the public space, in spectacular fashion,
the anger and moral outrage of the people.
Violence here serves the rhetorical function
of converting populations into a people.
I agree with John and Deshpande that my
account of political society in the rural areas
is underspecified. The problems are both
conceptual and empirical. I tried to approach
them by working on two sets of contrasts.
One is the contrast with an older under-
standing of peasant politics, where the state
was an external entity to peasant conscious-
ness, mediated, often quite ambiguously,
through landlords, moneylenders, traders or
power brokers. This was the basis of the old
patron-client model of Indian politics. There
is mounting empirical evidence that this sit-
uation has decisively changed. But have
peasants now become citizens? The evi-
dence on electoral participation and expec-
tations from government produced by recent
large-sample surveys (such as those carried
out by Yogendra Yadav and his Lokniti
colleagues) are immensely suggestive. But I
am still unable to give to them a specific con-
ceptual description.
The other contrast is with political soci-
ety in urban formations, where there is
evidence of new forms of political associa-
tion coupled with the organisation of
labour and enterprise in the so-called in-
formal economy which is giving shape to
quite sophisticated forms of strategic poli-
tics in the field created by governmenta
lity. Based on this urban standard, my
provisional conclusion is that although
non-agricultural occupations are rapidly
on the rise in rural areas, political society
there has still not acquired a distinct
shape. Hence, the lack of descriptive
clarity. The most I can do at this stage is
point to the need to move away from the
traditional politics of the demands of the
kisan and formulate, in strategic terms, a
politics of organisation of non-corporate
capital in rural society.1
Shah makes an interesting point that I
had not thought of when describing recent
changes in the conditions of peasant agri-
culture. He mentions the general privati-
sation-centred policies since the 1990s
which led to a decline in bank loans in the
agricultural sector and to the rising im-
portance of the professional moneylender.
I have no doubt that Shah is correct in his
observation. However, I would be more
careful before concluding that there is
therefore a return to the old forms of ex-
ploitation. What has clearly changed is the
earlier role of nationalised banks as an ac-
tive agency of distribution of governmen-
tal welfare. State-owned banks, we know,
are now instructed to give priority to the
commercial viability of their operations.
But, at the same time, there has been an
enormous expansion and deepening since
the 1990s of the panchayat institutions
which are now the principal agencies
of social sector expenditure in infra
structure, health, education, housing,
november 15, 2008 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

sanitation, employment guarantee and
emergency relief in rural areas.
What is also new, compared to the ear-
lier regime of welfare distribution, is the
carefully targeted form of these pro-
grammes, specifying in each case the
particular population group, whether
scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, below
the poverty line, women, children, etc, for
which a scheme is intended. Even when
their scope is territorial, such as the
schemes meant for backward districts or,
most recently, minority concentration dis-
tricts, the specific programmes are target-
ed to meet the needs of specific population
groups. Besides, it is debatable how far
bank loans contributed, even in the 1970s
and 1980s, to the subsistence needs of
poorer peasants; if anything, traditional
forms of borrowing from relatives, neigh-
bours or moneylenders were persistent
features even then. I am sure what has
changed in most regions of India since
the 1990s is the increasing need to bor-
row ever larger amounts to meet the costs
of production of commercial crops, and
here the banks are no longer forth
coming. Hence the emergence of other
creditors who, unlike the older landlord-
moneylender-trader, usually have little
interest in the land or labour of indebted
peasants. If I may put the contrast some-
what simplistically, why does the response
to indebtedness now take the form of sui-
cides rather than attacks on money
lenders? The answer must come from the
domain of politics.
Is Power More Repressive?
No one with a sense of realism will claim
that the coercive, violent or repressive
application of state power has disappeared
from India. The evidence is abundant and
all too obvious. If, nevertheless, I am
pointing to forms of power that are non-
repressive, I am asking the question
whether there is more of the latter today
than was the case before. In other words, I
am asking a question about tendencies, of
preferred methods, of a growing sophisti-
cation in the deployment and use of
power. It is, if I may return to the theore
tical lineage of DET, a Gramscian question
about stages of maturity of the passive
revolution of capital. Our answer to the
question will have major implications for
Economic & Political Weekly EPW november 15, 2008
discussion
the way in which we think about the poli be self-conscious of ones location in the
tical options that lie before us. emergent dynamics of power. Just as the
All three sets of comments show, I indiscriminate worship of state power
believe, a strong urge to find evidence of once led to many disasters, so can the in-
the continued repressive power of the stinctive horror of state power prevent us
state and to build around it a political re- from recognising political traps as well as
sponse of condemnation. Needless to say, I political opportunities.
lend my voice, for what it is worth, to the My claim that there is no credible tran-
condemnation of state violence. But I fear sition narrative available to us is partly the
we may be missing a far more subtle recognition of this new reality where po-
process of the induction of ever increasing litical change is necessarily molecular,
sections of the people, individually as local and perhaps impermanent and even
well as in the mass, into a web of power reversible. But partly it is also a provoca-
relations in which they are being trans- tion to think of democratic politics outside
formed into the subjects of power. As I the familiar mode of undivided concentra-
keep saying, they are not necessarily turn- tion on resistance to coercive power.
ing into republican citizens, but they are
nonetheless acquiring a stake, strategical- Note
ly and morally, in the processes of govern- 1 I should cite here the recent study by Barbara
Harriss-White (2008) which describes, for West
mental power. And governmental power, Bengal which has a distinguished history of thought
we know, is no longer restricted to the and political action on land reform and improving
the conditions of small and landless peasants, the
branches of the state but extend to a host astonishingly unregulated nature of the markets
of non-state and even non-governmental for agricultural commodities and the shockingly
exploitative modes of agricultural trade.
agencies.
The implication is that even the most
fervent activist of the rights of the under- References
privileged, or the most resolute and Harriss-White, Barbara (2008): Rural Commercial
Capital: Agricultural Markets in West Bengal
incorruptible non-governmental organisa- (Delhi: Oxford University Press).
tion, is being deployed, even in its opposi- Laclau, Ernesto (2005): On Popular Reason (London:
Verso).
tion to the state, into a constituent element Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Develop-
of the strategic war of position of the pas- ment: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality
and Post-colonial Capitalism (London: Routledge),
sive revolution of capital. It is important to pp 20-28.
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