Description
TitlePersuasive citizens, unconvinced radicals
Date Created2011
Other Date2011-10 (degree)
Extentxi, 222 p. : ill., maps
DescriptionIn this dissertation, I do a comparative and historical ethnography of workers’ movements in two adjacent towns in central India. I invite attention to the shift in workers’ politics due to the retreat of the nationalist welfare state in the context of neo-liberal reforms. In the first town of Dalli-Rajhara, manually employed mine workers in state owned iron-ore mines persuaded the state employer to grant them labor rights. Their insurgent movement began in 1977, when the Indian state was aggressively pursuing economic nationalism. The workers could coerce the state to be accountable: All manual workers were eventually absorbed as regular mineworkers. In the second town of Bhilai, inspired by the first movement, casually employed workers in privately owned industries contended with their employers for labor rights. This movement began in 1990, which was the end of the era of economic nationalism and beginning of the neoliberal regime. The workers were losing to neoliberalizing state and capital, and their activism was fragmented. I argue that the basic shift due to neo-liberal reforms in India is not in the protective role of the state, but in citizen’s ability to hold the state accountable by challenging its legitimacy. This research is based on seventeen months of ethnographic and archival research in India conducted in 2003, 2004 and 2006. Most of the evidence is in the form of participant accounts of forty-five workers in the two movements. I also interviewed, and had numerous casual conversations with onlookers, regular workers, other union leaders, personnel managers, villagers, mine officials, contractors and many Delhi-based activists and academicians. I examined rare documents on contemporary Indian history from academic institutions, private collections, as well as state departments. My research intervenes in existing literature in two important ways. Much of the discussion on labor activism in the neoliberal period has focused on those working for capital centered in the United States. I show that neo-liberal capital is de-centered with receiving states as well as indigenous capital having very high stakes in the process. This complicates labor activism since labor and the new indigenous-global capital are still embedded in the old political culture of economic nationalism. In central India, this meant that workers were reluctant to let go of old protest tactics, while capitalists could mobilize public voice against the workers on the grounds of sabotaging national production. The focus of literature by Indian scholars in the neoliberal period has been on loss of employment of formal employees of the state. I draw attention to loss of work and resistance of informally employed rural migrants, the enormous mass of which are unlikely to be absorbed by the expanding sectors of the global economy. I suggest that given the fragmentation of conventional labor activism, this workforce could potentially mobilize as a huge social force demanding radical reforms.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
NoteIncludes vita
Noteby Manjusha Sasidharan Nair
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
Statistical Profile