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Mimetic sovereignties, precarious
citizenship: state effects in a looking-
glass world
Nandini Sundar
Published online: 03 Jul 2014.
To cite this article: Nandini Sundar (2014) Mimetic sovereignties, precarious citizenship:
state effects in a looking-glass world, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41:4, 469-490, DOI:
10.1080/03066150.2014.919264
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Mimetic sovereignties, precarious citizenship: state effects in a
looking-glass world
1
Nandini Sundar
This contribution explores the way in which the Indian state and the incipient Maoist state
in central India mimic while repudiating each other. As against theories of sovereignty
which see it either as authored from below (contract theory) or scripted from above
(domination), or irrelevant to the extent that subject and state are co-constituted by
regimes of power (cf. Foucault), I argue that in civil war, the display and practical
exercise of statehood and sovereignty is critical. However, this is primarily aimed not
at putative citizens but at the enemy. I look at the way in which the Indian state
impersonates guerilla tactics in order to ght the Maoists, and the way in which the
Maoists mimic state practices of governmentality. Each side identies its own citizens
through uniforms and lists of people killed, and inscribes its territory with memorials
to its martyrs. For the presumed citizens of these mimetic states, however, it is
precisely these markers of identity and legibility which make them more vulnerable.
Membership of parallel regimes holds out both promise and precarity.
Keywords: mimesis; sovereignty; state-effects; citizenship; Maoist guerillas;
counterinsurgency; India
The worst violators of nature and human rights never go to jail. They hold the keys. In the world
as it is, the looking-glass world, the countries that guard the peace also make and sell the most
weapons. The most prestigious banks launder the most drug money and harbor the most stolen
cash. The most successful industries are the most poisonous for the planet.
E. Galeano (2000, 7)
In the looking-glass world of South Bastar or Dantewada today,
2
a region in Chhattisgarh,
central India, populated largely by adivasis,
3
and the site of an ongoing civil war between
2014 Taylor & Francis
1
This paper was originally written in November 2008 for a workshop on Rethinking Citizenship at the
Max Planck Institute in Halle. I am grateful to the participants in that workshop, my co-fellows at the
Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, as well as audiences at the University of Cornell, Uni-
versity of Texas-Austin, Fondation Maison Des Science De LHomme - Paris, University of Pennsyl-
vania, University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Toronto, where I have presented versions
of this paper. I amgrateful to the three anonymous referees who so painstakingly reviewed this paper, as
well as the Editor of JPS, Jun Borras. I amalso grateful to Aparna Sundar, Chris Gregory, Amita Bavis-
kar and K. Sivaramakrishnan for their encouragement, and to Delhi University for funding this research.
2
Bastar district originally covered 39,000 km
2
. It has since been repeatedly divided into smaller dis-
tricts. Here Bastar refers to the original undivided district, and Dantewada to South Bastar, before it
was further carved up.
3
I prefer the self-designation adivasi, rather than the globalized indigenous peoples, to refer to the
8.6 percent of Indias population ofcially known as scheduled tribes. They are the poorest and most
exploited, by all indicators (see Kannan and Raveendran 2011).
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2014
Vol. 41, No. 4, 469490, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.919264
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armed guerillas of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Indian government, all roles
are reversed: Maoist guerillas (colloquially called Naxalites) behave like a state laying sover-
eign claim to territory while the police, who are deeply envious of Maoist organizational
structure and support among villagers, outsource their monopoly over force to vigilantes.
The people are desperately poor, while the land is enormously rich.
4
The police protect the
land against the people, seeing them as security threats to the unfettered exploitation of min-
erals by corporates.
5
Even as Maoist guerillas wage war against the government as Section
121 of the Indian Penal Code that is routinely applied to insurgents denes it (Government of
India 1860) the government in turn wages war against its own citizens.
In this looking-glass world, words mean whatever each side wants themto mean, nothing
is as it appears and the rules of the game change as one goes along. As Winifred Tate (2007)
says of Colombia, but which holds as true of Chhattisgarh, it is the security forces and ruling
politicians who are the most vociferous about human rights which they dene as the viola-
tion of their own rights by left-wing guerillas. As for the human rights of innocent civilians
who get killed as Maoists, this is mere collateral damage. The words Constitution or Rule
of Law in the mouths of human rights activists are read as propaganda for the Maoists.
6
Peasant women who complain of rape by the police or paramilitaries are treated as liars
out to demoralize the brave security forces.
7
In a war where every villager is considered a
potential guerilla, a child grazing cattle in the forest or villagers celebrating agricultural fes-
tivals in their villages are all equally lethal weapons. If they protest their innocence, that
clearly proves their guilt. Why else would they be found in the forest in the path of
combing operations, or gathering in large numbers in their villages?
8
By its willful violation of laws governing land acquisition and human rights in adivasi
areas, the government has ceded the principles on which the Indian Constitution is
founded to the Maoists.
9
Equally, it has ceded territory through its linguistic practices, ampli-
ed by a compliant media. Even when something as ordinary as hand pumps or solar panels is
discussed, the setting for it is always Maoist-hit districts (see for example The Statesman
2012). The label Maoist functions metonymically for everything that is wrong in these
areas.
This contribution explores the performance of sovereignty in times of civil war, in par-
ticular, the mimetic nature of both ghting and statehood and that mixture of attraction and
4
The wider Dandakaranya region of which Bastar is a part has 18 percent of Indias iron ore deposits,
along with graphite, limestone, diamonds, uranium and other minerals.
5
Since 2006, the Indian Prime Minister has consistently referred to the Maoists as Indias gravest
security threat (Reuters 2006).
6
Union home minister P. Chidambaram said civil society activists who have argued against state
violence must answer for the slaughter of civilians (Times of India 2010).
7
For example, when asked why a police ofcer accused of rape was not dismissed, the Chief of Chhat-
tisgarh police replied, This is a well-conceived strategy of Naxals They are making frivolous alle-
gations (Bhardwaj 2012).
8
Following the killing of 17 villagers in June 2012 while they were celebrating a festival, the Police
Chief of Bijapur justied it saying: It is difcult to differentiate between Naxals and villagers . On
regular days, they take part in farming activities and at other times, they help the Naxals. In effect, they
are also Naxals (quoted in Pandey and Jain 2012).
9
The government justies its attacks on the Maoists on the grounds that they do not believe in the
Indian Constitution and, indeed, the Maoists have dismissed the Constitution as being as worthless
as a roll of toilet paper. On the other hand, the Maoists have done more to enforce the 5th Schedule
of the Constitution governing adivasi areas, which restricts transfer of adivasi land to non-adivasis,
than the Indian government has, and the Maoists repeatedly ask the Indian government to adhere
to the Constitution that it has sworn to uphold (Azad 2010, 567).
470 Nandini Sundar
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repulsion, fear, fantasy, fetish and contempt that drives each side (Taussig 1993, Aretxaga
2003). The Indian state impersonates guerilla tactics in order to ght the Maoists, while the
Maoists mimic state practices of governmentality. Each side identies its own people
through uniforms and lists of people killed, each side plots its territory through memorials
to its martyrs and each side complains similarly when the people are not sufciently
disciplined.
10
As Aretxaga notes, while states persecute people, they in turn are haunted by the ima-
gined power of those they construct as their enemies:
This mirroring paranoid dynamic often takes the form of powerful identications and obsessive
fascination as when the state engages in terrorist or criminal practices in order to appropriate the
power it attributes to its enemies, criminals, subversives, or terrorists These are not just
moments of repression against enemies that are already there; they are elds in which the
state and its enemies are created and recreated as powerful ctional realities through what
Derrida has called a phantomatic mode of production. (Aretxaga 2003, 402)
While incumbent states may be more or less successful in destroying their enemies, in the
process they, especially those which claim to be democratic, also self-destruct and frag-
ment. This happens by violating the principles on which they are ofcially founded such
as popular consent and the rule of law, as well as through the common practice of outsour-
cing violence to vigilantes. The same applies to social movements bound to secrecy. Even
as guerilla movements like the Maoists challenge the Indian state in the name of equality
and democracy, they create their own state-effects with all the constraints these impose
on citizens. For instance, the policy program of the Janathana Sarkar (JS), the Maoist
proto-state or peoples government, lists the following fundamental rights which shall be
guaranteed by the Peoples Democratic Government: right to express, right to meet,
right to form organization (CPI Maoist 2004). However, each of these freedoms, including
the freedom to vote for other parties in elections, is constrained by the partys need to dom-
inate their areas and protect their personnel.
However, the Maoists and the Indian state are not mirror images of each other. For the
security forces, ghting is primarily a salaried job, though they may also be driven by
nationalism, honor or other emotions. Vigilantes are lured by money, power, the thrills
of criminality and, more occasionally, the guilt of betrayal when they have been former
insurgents themselves. Maoist recruitment, on the other hand, draws solely on non-monet-
ary motivations such as idealism, escape from the drudgery of everyday life or forced mar-
riages (for women), and a desire for justice or revenge against those who have oppressed
them. Contrary to what the government propagates, Maoist guerillas are not ghting for
personal benet and live in difcult conditions at great personal privation (for these
crucial distinctions between state forces and guerillas more generally, see also Richani
2007, Sanin 2008 on Colombia). Second, the Maoist Peoples Liberation Guerilla Army
(PLGA) has about 60 percent women (Majumdar 2013), compared to the all-male parami-
litary forces. This signicantly affects the way villagers experience their presence, without,
for instance, the threat of random sexual violence. Third, insurgent weaponry and resources,
however imaginatively deployed, are no match for the vast repower of the state
whose repertoire against the Maoists includes helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles
10
On government dissatisfaction with unruly citizens, see Scott (1998). Maoist language is equally
revealing: they note that of 16,200 saplings distributed only 30 percent survived because the
people did not take sufcient care (CPI Maoist 2000, 1949).
The Journal of Peasant Studies 471
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(Menon 2012). Finally, to the extent that sovereignty is propped up by external recognition
in a system of states, the government side is intrinsically stronger.
This essay is based on eight and a half years (since 2005) of investigation into the effects
and practices of insurgency and counterinsurgency in Dantewada, as well as some 24 years
of research in the adivasi tracts of India. Due to my sustained visits, I have been able to talk to
villagers without being embedded either with the government or with the Maoists, in con-
trast to almost all the current descriptive literature on Maoists (see for example Ramana
2008, Choudhary 2012, Navlakha 2012). Where not specically attributed, the observations
made here are based on a composite understanding developed over the years, born of mul-
tiple conversations. The names of all informants and villages have been changed.
The mobile Maoist state
The JS (Janathana Sarkar) shall be the newly formed Peoples Democratic State and the power
of a government. This power shall attain a complete character and a form with the formation of
countrywide Peoples Democratic Republic federation. Depending on the common minimum
program prepared by the Party the Janathana Sarkars forming in the process of development of
revolutionary struggle in DK shall make efforts to implement the peoples government power
as the new state power.
Policy program of Janathana Sarkar, CPI Maoist document, 2004
When there are two governments, whom should we follow?
A woman in Basaguda camp, 2008
The Maoist state inBastar has takenshape over three decades, andits boundaries have expanded
and contracted with the power of insurgency and counterinsurgency. At one level, the Maoist
state is a virtual phenomenon, an idea, an emotional identication. Rabindra Ray, a former Nax-
alite, once told me a joke that had circulated in the 1970s in the initial heyday of Naxalism. A
policeman taunted a youth he had arrested: You guys talk so much about Vietnam, he said;
show me where it is on the map. The youth, who was illiterate, put his hand on his chest
and replied, It is in my heart. At another level, the boundaries of the Maoist state can be
mapped by the absence of the Indian state, of visible markers like roads, schools or health ser-
vices, andthe presence of Maoist institutions likesanghams (village level governancestructures
discussed later) though these are not evident to the casual visitor.
The wider region which the Maoists call Dandakaranya straddles the boundaries of of-
cial states, and includes Bastar in Chhattisgarh, parts of the state of Andhra Pradesh to the
south, Maharashtra to the west and Orissa to the east. The Maoists claim this comprises
some 6 million people (CPI Maoist 2000, 4). Currently debilitated in Andhra due to counter-
insurgency successes, Bastar is widely considered the most important Maoist stronghold,
particularly its southern half and a vast stretch in the center called Abujhmarh (unknown
hills) which has never been mapped by either the colonial or post-colonial government.
The Indian state treats adivasis as backward and needing paternal protection, and sim-
ultaneously as oppressed and dangerous the Other of the mainstream nation. For the
Maoists, adivasis are now their primary constituency, though historically they have also
been strong among dalits or scheduled caste agricultural labor in states like Andhra
Pradesh and Bihar. While Indian states are identied with the dominant linguistic commu-
nity, the borders of Maoist state committees follow the spread of exploited communities and
languages, as well as topographies suited for guerilla ghting. As Chris Gregory put it (per-
sonal email, June 2013), the boundaries of the Indian versus the Maoist state can also be
identied along an axis of rice/millet, wet/dry, Halbi/Gondi and at/hilly oppositions,
472 Nandini Sundar
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though as the Maoists spread into the plains and rice replaces millets as the food item of
choice, this boundary too is increasingly blurred.
While Chhattisgarhs ofcial language is the north Indian Hindi, the majority of
Bastars people speak Gondi, or other adivasi languages like Dhurwa, Halbi, Bhatri, etc.
The Chhattisgarh government constantly describes Maoists as Telugu-speaking outsiders,
even though, by now, over 90 percent of Maoist cadre and even high-level commanders
in Bastar are local adivasis, and all meetings are conducted in Gondi. But Bastar has
always been a zone of north-south crossings, and the two movements that have changed
the course of Bastars history have both been from south to north. In the fourteenth
century, the Kakatiya king Annam Deo ed from Warrangal (now in Andhra Pradesh)
and established the kingdom of Bastar, which lasted till its accession to the Indian state
in 1947 (Sundar 2007). The second fateful journey north was of Naxalite squads in 1980.
The Naxalite movement ofcially began in the late 1960s as a peasant struggle in Nax-
albari, West Bengal, though its roots go back to the 1940s Telengana armed struggle led by
the undivided Communist Party of India. It represented the armed pro-Chinese stream of
Indian Marxism, which did not believe that parliamentary democracy would lead to the
requisite systemic change. The Indian state managed to crush the movement in the
1970s, but various splinter groups regrouped. In Andhra, the Communist Party of India
Marxist-Leninist Peoples War (CPI [ML] PW) was one of the more successful factions.
It later merged with another party, CPI (ML) Party Unity, and then in 2004 with the
Maoist Communist Center (MCC) of India, to form the Communist Party of India
(Maoist). The CPI (Maoist) is currently a signicant political force across several states.
The partys politics and policies are not uniform across states much depends on the
Figure 1. Map of Dantewada/South Bastar.
The Journal of Peasant Studies 473
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shape of local class hierarchies, the past history of the area, geographic factors, the nature of
the ruling regime and even the nature of local Maoist commanders.
11
In 1979, Peoples War (PW) drew up a plan titled Perspective for a Guerilla Zone. The
primary reason for going to Bastar was to develop it as a rear area for retreat when repres-
sion intensied on the Andhra side of the Godavari; organizing local adivasis was the sec-
ondary task (CPI Maoist n.d.). In the Sanskritic epic imagination in which these Telugu
Maoists were nurtured, it has always been a place of retreat Dandakaranya literally
means forest of punishment.
When the PW squads rst came to Bastar, they focused on making existing institutions
work, and not yet on establishing a parallel state. They held meetings in the villages at night
and identied local problems. They threatened foresters and contractors who paid less than
the minimum wage, teachers and health workers who neither taught nor cured but drew
their salaries anyway, land revenue ofcials and police who demanded bribes for routine
administrative work, and shopkeepers who cheated the villagers. After two or three
years, forest and revenue staff stopped staying overnight in the villages to feast on chickens
and liquor forcibly requisitioned from adivasis and moved to the smaller block centers
which had a police presence (see Shankar 1999, Sundar 2007).
As the Maoists tell it,
12
since the exploitative state had receded, if not completely disap-
peared, they were at a loss. Their struggles became seasonal, concentrating on raising the
rates of tendu patta (used for making local cigarettes and the biggest source of cash
income for adivasis). Between 1983 and 1987, there was an intense debate within the
party on the local agrarian structure as to whether internal class differences mattered
within adivasi society which is traditionally more homogeneous than caste society or
whether the major contradiction was with the state. The real breakthrough in South Bastar
came in 1987. One Kalmu Deva, who originally came from further north, had colonized
some 100 acres of forest land near Konta, in the deep south of Bastar. The local Dorla adivasis
asked the Maoists to distribute some of this land to them, for which the Maoists held two or
three meetings in the village, trying to persuade Deva to part with his land. During this period,
the squad was attending a wedding in the village, when Deva called the police. While the rest
of the squad escaped, their leader fell into a ditch and was caught. The next week, his deputy
killed Deva for betraying them, but the villagers sawthis as a signal that the party was ready to
take land redistribution seriously and began coming to them in large numbers.
Much of the land that adivasis cultivate has no legal title, dating from the colonial
appropriation of forests in which they practiced shifting cultivation (see Sundar 2007). Of-
cial landholdings are about one hectare per household, making access to land a big political
issue. The Maoists helped people settle new villages in the forest ranges of the deep south
and redistributed land in the more settled villages.
13
Over time, they set up their own par-
allel structures in the villages called sanghams (collectives), displacing both the traditional
headmen and the sarpanchs or elected village representatives, some of whom left the vil-
lages. The Maoists claim the latter act as agents of the Indian state in the villages, rather
than representing the people to the state.
11
For the rst phase of the Naxalite movement, see Mohanty (1977), Banerjee (1984), Sinha (1989);
for the recent phase, see Jeffrey et al. (2012); Shah and Pettigrew (2011), Venugopal (2013). See also
the CPI (Maoist)s own party history (n.d.) for both phases.
12
Interview with Lanka Papi Reddy, former Central Committee Member of the CPI (Maoist) and other
former Maoists, March and May 2010; see also Shankar (1999).
13
The parliamentary Communist Party of India (CPI) also gathered support by settling adivasi pea-
sants onto forest land, but has been gradually displaced in its strongholds by the Maoists.
474 Nandini Sundar
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Kalyvas (2006, 2189) argues that insurgency can best be understood as a process of
competitive state building rather than simply an instance of collective action or social con-
tention with terms like shadow government, parallel hierarchy, rebel infrastructure, or
alternative government used to describe these alternative sovereignties. He goes on to
specify some of these statelike activities: they collect taxes, organize policing, administer
justice and conscript ghters (Kalyvas 2006, 219). Similarly, in describing guerilla gov-
ernance, Nelson Kasr notes that an insurgent organization must meet several dening
conditions. First, it must gain territorial control within the state against which it is rebelling,
although its territory and its control may vary. Second, civilians must reside in that area.
Third, there must be at least initial violence and, if not continuing violence, then its credible
threat. Fourth, the guerrilla organization must be sufciently free from external control that
its leaders can make their own decisions about whether and how to govern . Three clus-
ters of variables dene governance: encouragement of civilian participation, formation of
civilian administration and organization, regulation or taxation of commercial production
of high value goods or services (Kasr 2008).
The Maoist state in Dantewada meets all these conditions it has control over a par-
ticular territory, albeit one that is fragile and subject to police and paramilitary incursions, it
has organized civilians under the Janathana Sarkar and it taxes contractors and industries
working within its ambit. While there is evidently a great deal of voluntary support over and
above the coercion exercised by the Maoists, coercion, as Kasr notes, is a given because of
the threats the movement faces from the state. This is also borne out by Maoist leader
Azads response to civil society criticism on the killing of informers:
to be more humane cannot be associated with the question of civil behavior vis--vis the
enemy and their agents in our tactics. Having said this, quite rightly, there should not be
any attack on soft targets, but targets have to be assessed within the framework of the poli-
tico-military aims of the movement both immediate and long term. (Azad 2010, 9)
Kalyvas (2006) argues that the degree of violence exercised by states and insurgents varies
inversely in proportion to their control over a given territory the greater the control, the
less the need for violence.
My concern in this contribution, however, is not with the degree of violence or control
over territory and services. Nor does it aim to merely establish the fact of a dual sovereignty,
although, in contrast to the post-Foucault literature which sees traditional concepts of sover-
eignty based on consent or domination as pass in an age of biopower and bioregulation,
14
I
wish to emphasize the importance of assertions of sovereignty as part of civil war. My focus
is on showing how the performance of sovereignty involves mimicking the other and how
the state effects this creates addresses individuals, creating precarious citizenship.
So how does the incipient Maoist state practice sovereignty and what sort of state effects
does this create? For one, its enactment is often a silent affair with thousands attending
meetings, but as secretly melting away into the forests.
15
Civil wars have a culture of
14
Foucault (2003, 356) himself provides a far more sophisticated historical analysis of sovereignty,
which relates it to different modes of surplus extraction.
15
Describing a rally he attended in 2005, at which some 10,000 people gathered, Shubhranshu Choudh-
ary writes of how secrecy is maintained even from the participants themselves: We met many groups
walking like us to the rally. No one knew where the rally actually was. Groups landed at one village,
found a local contact who told them to go to another village where the next destination was revealed.
Sometimes there are other groups waiting and they joined up (Choudhary 2005).
The Journal of Peasant Studies 475
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self-censorship (see also Green 1994). Villagers will not talk to outsiders about Maoist
movements in their areas.
However, in their strongholds, Maoist memorials to their leaders which take days and
weeks to build with the combined labor of several villages tower over the landscape (see
Figure 2). Along with memorials, ags and commemoration days are essential rituals of
rule. The policy program of the JS lays these out: Name: Janathana Sarkar; Flag:
Hammer and Sickle with red ag with the length and breadth of the ratio 2:3. Song:
Must sing communist international in front of the ag (CPI Maoist 2004). The Indian
states celebration of Independence Day and Republic Day accompanied by the unfurling
of the Indian tricolor is countered by black ags in Maoist areas. Instead, the Maoists mark
International Womens Day and Martyrs Week. The Maoist stamp on the annual calendar
goes deeper. JuneDecember remains the period for cultivation, but JanuaryMay, which
was earlier devoted to the collection of minor forest produce and wage labor, now includes
ghting. Visiting squads are well integrated into village life, openly attending village
meetings, playing volleyball with villagers and sleeping on cots in the open spaces
between houses.
The Maoist state, like any other, has both coercive and welfare functions, though
often exercised by the same institutions. The Politburo and Central Committee
oversee various state committees who work through dalams (armed squads) which in
Figure 2. Memorial to Maoist leader Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar)
476 Nandini Sundar
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turn oversee their mass organizations like the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan
(Revolutionary Adivasi Womens Union), and the village committees. Like any army,
the PLGA has companies, platoons and brigades, though as a peoples guerilla army
commanders and cadre share the same work, food and living conditions. In addition,
there are village militias or base forces which form an essential part of the JS.
In practice, the village JS appear quite varied. On average, a village JS comprises some
45 villages with a population of 5003000, and is run by a committee of 1520 members
drawn from all the constituent units. It has eight departments: nancial, defense, agriculture,
judicial, education-culture, health, forest protection and public relations. Each department
has its own workers. The forest department, for example, has two people in every village
who check out the forests once a month to see whats been cut and whether it was author-
ized. The agriculture department encourages the formation of co-operatives to cultivate and
share plough bullocks, and the construction of ponds for irrigation and sh rearing. The vis-
iting squads urge people to grow vegetables to ensure a balanced diet. Every month or so, a
general body meeting is held by rotation in the different constituent villages, where all
issues are discussed. Everyone attends including women and children, unlike traditional
meetings attended only by men.
The Maoists also regulate drinking and gambling during cockghting, intervene to
prevent domestic violence and settle petty disputes. The Maoists catalogue their states
achievements just as the Indian government does, in terms of the numbers of sh seedlings
distributed, cattle pounds created and so on (see CPI Maoist 2000). Their record-keeping
propensities date back to the 1970s. Amrita Rangaswamy, describing the Naxalite conict
in Srikakulam, noted, The routine and the organisation of the guerillas seem to be modeled
on the Indian police. The habit of maintaining diaries and the style of entries is perhaps an
outstanding example (Rangaswamy 1974).
Citizenship of the Maoist state comes at the cost, both good and bad, of citizenship of the
Indian state. In one village, Pulam, I was told by residents that they had burnt their govern-
ment-issued land titles (the main source of identity and surety across the country, and
unthinkable in normal times), because they were told they had no more use. The Maoists
had issued their own land deeds instead. In many places, villagers have been advised to
reject local government money for road-building, construction etc., which is a source of
local wage labor, on the grounds that this enables corruption by the village leaders and
leads to class differentiation in society. Elsewhere, while roads remain taboo because they
allow the security forces to travel freely, the villagers are allowed to use government
funds after the Maoists approve of the scheme. In some places, sarpanchs or village
leaders who were elected in panchayat (local government) elections were made to resign.
The Maoists have consistently called for poll boycotts. Before Salwa Judum (see next
section) started, teachers, health workers and fair price shops (where government supplies
basic foodstuff at less than market rates) were welcomed by villagers and Maoists. From
20112012 onwards, because all development funds are routed through an integrated
action plan which serves as a form of low-intensity counterinsurgency, Maoist attitudes
have hardened though essentials remain exempt from a boycott. Ideally, villagers would
like the best of both states to have schools and hospitals but not police camps; wages
for forest work, but no restrictions by the forest bureaucracy. Forced to choose, the poorer
people across villages say they prefer the Maoist state but with a real sense of regret at
the government funds they are forced to forgo. Just as in the Indian state, in the Maoist
regime too people are forced to migrate for work, in this case as seasonal agricultural
labor for farmers in Andhra. Above all, the Maoists offer no protection when the
police arrest villagers. Instead, villagers turn for help to parliamentary parties like the
The Journal of Peasant Studies 477
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Communist Party of India, the same parties whom they boycott during elections on Maoist
orders.
The Maoists nance their state through levies. Other than some 20 multinational com-
panies whom they refer to as the comprador big bourgeoisie (CBB), who they will not
allow to operate on ideological grounds, everyone working in Maoist areas has to pay
them taxes. For example, traders running transport services in the interiors pay them Rs
(rupees) 5000 per year to run a tractor, and Rs 3000 for a jeep. Tendu leaf contractors can
only purchase leaves at rates cleared with the Maoists, and after paying them a share.
16
While the Maoists have used this to leverage higher prices for the villagers, neither this
nor the achievement of social equality within the villages entirely transforms the wider
inequalities between adivasis and outsiders. The latter continue to look down upon the
former. While an armed adivasi has more purchase on national attention than an unarmed
one, and the Maoists are posing a major challenge to primitive accumulation in the forest
belts, they do not pose an alternative to advanced capitalism as a whole.
Just as the Maoist state slowly elbowed out the Indian state, replacing it with structures
that look similar as well as different, the Indian state is trying to force its way back in,
mimicking what they see as the practices of the Maoist state.
Salwa Judum as outlaw envy: a government-run peoples movement
This mimicry by the colonizer of the savagery imputed to the savage is what I call the colonial
mirror of production and it is identical to the mimetic structure of attribution and counter
attribution that Horkheimer and Adorno single out .where they write: They cannot stand
the Jews, but imitate them.
Michael Taussig (1993, 66)
The police and the government cannot stand the Maoists but they want to be like them or, at
least, like their idea of what Maoists are like. The Indian police routinely complain that they
are hampered by laws in carrying out extra-judicial executions, as compared to the
freedom that insurgents and criminals are thought to enjoy. This position has wider
support, occasionally taking the form of public vigilantism (see also Caldeira 2006,
Pratten and Sen 2008).
In 2003, the Indian Home Ministry announced a policy of promoting local resistance
groups, drawing on counterinsurgency practices in Kashmir and Indias Northeast (Minis-
try of Home Affairs 20034, 44). Accordingly, in 2005, the Dantewada District Adminis-
trator laid out a proposal that outlined clearly how a peoples movement should work in
countering Naxalites, blurring the boundaries between civilians and combatants:
At each cluster level, one village defence squad should be formed. If we look at Naxalite
organisation, they have one dalam or squad over every 7580 villages. The Naxalites have
erected this structure after 25 years experience. We need to learn from this. If we want to
destroy the Naxalites totally, we will have to adopt their strategies, or else we will not be
successful. (District Collector Dantewada 2005, 25)
This peoples movement was then named Salwa Judum. In Gondi, salwa is something that
cools the body either purication or pacication while judum refers to the long hunts
carried out in summer months in which a number of people from different villages
16
Conversations with traders, 20052013.
478 Nandini Sundar
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participate. Depending on who is doing the translation, the name can be read as purication
hunt or as the more benign peace campaign. Few genuine peoples movements have been
as lucky as the Salwa Judum praised by the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh,
as the fragrance of the forest, a holy battle, and even a Gandhian movement. Instead,
most commonly, peaceful movements against displacement by dams or industries are met
with police re and arrests. In fact, Salwa Judum was a classic counterinsurgency move-
ment with parallels across the world in civil patrols, home guards, village defense forces,
special police ofcers and the like (see Starn 1995, Sanford 2003, Wood 2003, Elkins
2005, Richani 2007, Tate 2007, French 2011, Staniland 2012). Although calling it a
peoples movement was intended to displace culpability, as is the case everywhere, this
was also a tacit acknowledgment of the moral legitimacy such movements have in India.
The Salwa Judum in turn became a business model for the government in its counterinsur-
gency efforts elsewhere. As a Wikipedia entry on Salwa Judum helpfully tells us: Encour-
aged by the highly positive results of the movement (Salwa Judum) in the region, the
government is planning to launch a peoples movement in insurgency hit state of
Manipur, on similar lines (Wikipedia n.d.).
17
In Dantewada, the Judum (as it was colloquially called) took the form of a series of
public meetings summoned by the Congress opposition leader, Mahendra Karma, with
the support of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.
18
Judum meetings
were always accompanied by the police, and often attended by ministers and district of-
cials. They threatened to ne and burn villages which did not participate. Sangham
members, or those known to be active Maoist workers, were forced to surrender. Villages
which resisted were attacked, and their inhabitants forcibly evacuated into relief camps
controlled by the Judum. Whoever could ed, either to the forests with the guerillas or
to neighboring states. Over 1000 people were killed, mostly by the Salwa Judum and secur-
ity forces, and some by the Maoists, who attacked the Salwa Judum leaders and
informers.
19
The camps, known locally and in administrative documents as base camps, clearly
betraying their militarist origins, became the dening line in a new geography of civil
war. Beyond the camps, located mostly along the national highways, there was Maoist ter-
ritory. The police recruited some 4000 youths, including children of 1416 years, as Special
Police Ofcers (SPOs), drawing them from the ranks of either surrendered insurgents or
victims of the Naxalites, claiming this made them highly motivated in the ght against
Naxalism. The Maoists also poured in more battalions, in an effort to hold on to their lib-
erated zone. Since 2009, under pressure from activists and orders from the Supreme Court,
the Salwa Judum has been replaced by Operation Green Hunt, a more straightforwardly
state operation, conducted through paramilitary forces like the Central Reserve Police
Force (CRPF).
20
Many of the Salwa Judum leaders had been objects of Maoist justice (for instance, one
of them was a contractor who had been punished for not paying minimum wages to his
17
The Wikipedia entry is itself a battleground juxtaposing contradictory pro- and anti-Salwa Judum
statements.
18
While the two parties are often engaged in slanging matches, they are united on fundamental issues
such as neoliberal policies and opposition to the Maoists.
19
Kartam Joga and ors. (2007), litigation before the Supreme Court of India, provides a partial list of
over 500 people killed by the Judum and security forces between 2005 and 2007. A thousand casual-
ties since 2005 is, therefore, an informed guess.
20
In India, the paramilitary forces are part of the regular state forces and not vigilantes.
The Journal of Peasant Studies 479
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workers, while another, a former sarpanch, had been punished for stealing the money meant
for widows pensions), had had their land expropriated (members of Mahendra Karmas
family, for example) or had close connections with leading politicians. In other words,
they had a natural interest in siding with the state against the Maoists, in order to maintain
the exploitative status quo. The SPOs, however, joined for more varied reasons. Some
wanted a government job,
21
some had no choice as surrendered Maoists, some felt
stied by Maoist dictates to forgo government funds or contest elections. Some young
men joined for the sake of carnival, the fun of looting villages in an otherwise boring
life. Initially given bows and arrows, they were later armed with guns.
In the early stages of the war, SPOs stood at checkpoints, marching onto buses and
demanding IDs. Now their primary task is to accompany the paramilitaries on combing
operations.
22
Their knowledge of the terrain makes them invaluable guides. Becoming
an SPO was a path to modernity, with policemen who had long treated them as savage
others now recognizing their potential as defenders of the nation. But the SPOs were
ambivalent about both their friends and foes. Some SPOs hung out with security forces
learning how to play new games like snooker, acquiring new goods like walkmans and
headsets, wearing fatigues and acquiring uency in Hindi which marked them out as
national, educated and cosmopolitan. Some of them were personally loyal to local
Salwa Judum leaders, forming gangs which ruled a particular area. But the vast majority
socialized only with other SPOs, saying the CRPF made them feel inferior. Unhappy at
being posted in the jungle, far from city lights, where danger lurks around every tree and
a man can be felled by malaria as much as by a land mine, the CRPF blamed the adivasi
SPOs for their predicament, as part of a more general anger against the sheer impertinence
of the resisting savage. For the female SPOs (many fewer in number), patriarchy was auto-
matically transferred they washed the clothes of the CRPF ofcers and cleaned the police
station. As Orin Starn writes of the Rondas Campesinas of Peru, the peasant patrols who
were used as auxiliaries by the state to ght the Shining Path guerrillas much like the
Indian SPOs: Fujimori used them to show how he had rechanneled the dangerous
energy of Perus poorest inhabitants to the defense of democracy and nationhood .
However, the very existence of the rondas speaks of the second-class citizen- ship of pea-
sants (Starn 1995, 5556).
What constituted the fault lines of enmity between SPOs and Naxalites? For one, SPOs
were bound to follow orders, which could even override family ties as when an SPO was
part of a combing operation in which his own brother was caught and killed as a Naxalite.
But they were also propelled by machismo, drug-induced violence and a guilty fear. The
SPOs, especially former Maoists, claimed to the police that they would nish the
Maoists just give me a gun; I know the paths they travel and their local contacts
but their aggression was mixed with dread.
23
The Maoists, they knew, were formidable
enemies.
Just as SPOs targeted their former comrades, the Naxalites singled out the SPOs from
amongst other ordinary villagers living in camp. In an attack on Rani Bodli camp in 2007,
out of the approximately 55 people killed, 39 were SPOs. However, it was widely suspected
21
Initially the SPOs were paid Rs 1500 which, though cheap for the state, was substantial by local
standards.
22
In 2011, they were renamed Assistant Constables in deance of a Supreme Court order that they be
disbanded, but for the purposes of this essay I will continue to refer to them as SPOs (Justice Suder-
shan Reddy and Justice SS Nijjar, 2011)
23
Interviews with SPOs, 2005, 2010.
480 Nandini Sundar
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that the Naxalite attack was possible only with SPO help. Indeed, a couple of SPOs went
missing immediately after. Everyone is suspect Naxalites who have inltrated the ranks of
SPOs, as well as SPOs who are former Naxalites, pointing to the precarity of belonging in
civil wars like these.
But even as the SPOs were conscripted in a war not of their own making, they retained
authorship of some of its elements. Even when the killings were done by police or parami-
litary personnel, they may have originated in some never-settled village feud. On the bus to
Dantewada in 2007, a fellow passenger who had been in the police briey told me that he
left because his life had been miserable: The force looks attractive from the outside, but its
not what you think it is. There are constant encounters. In three months last summer we shot
6070 people on patrol in Bijapur. Were all these Naxalites? I asked. Of course not, he
said. None of them were Naxalites. Sometimes an SPO would point to someone and tell us
to shoot, sometimes we shot simply because the villager was running away and refused to
stop when we called out. Did you record these deaths somewhere? I asked. Now it was
his turn to be shocked: Our jobs would be in trouble if we did. We left the bodies in the
jungles. We recorded it as an encounter only if someone was actually wearing a uniform
or carrying a weapon.
The Indian state competes with Maoist memorials by surrounding its camps with statues
of dead SPOs dressed in fatigues and holding a gun (see Figure 3). But the living SPOs are
Figure 3. Memorial to a Martyred SPO.
The Journal of Peasant Studies 481
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reviled in their own villages. By 2013, most camp residents have been able to return to their
villages but the SPOs cannot, because of the killings, rape and arson they have engaged in,
and because the villages are now even more tightly controlled by the Maoists. Having sided
with the state, they are homeless; having crossed an unmarked border, from the Maoist state
to the government side, there is no safe return.
But the extent to which the ofcials of the Indian government are in charge of their own
side is debatable. In 2006, members of the Independent Citizens Initiative who were
stopped by SPOs outside Bhairamgarh police station were allowed to leave only after the
local Salwa Judum leader gave permission, despite having a letter from the Chief Secretary,
the top ofcial in the state (see ICI 2006). By 2012, the SPOs were so emboldened by the
change in nomenclature and higher pay they received following the Supreme Courts 2011
orders to disband them that they attacked ofcials of the Central Bureau of Investigation
(CBI). The CBI had been sent by the Court to investigate a particularly egregious attack
on three villages by the security forces. The CBI afdavit of 6 March 2012 describes
how they barricaded themselves inside a room while the SPOs, armed with automatic
weapons and hand grenades, tried to break down the defenses. The local ofcers who
tried to prevent them were also manhandled by the SPOs.
24
Yet none of this prevents
the state of Chhattisgarh from continuing to defend them in the Supreme Court, so
closely has it identied its own existence with vigilantism.
Uniforms and lists as markers of belonging
In these co-existing and tenuously balanced regimes with their systems of competing sover-
eignty, uniforms, lists and ID cards are markers of membership and yet dangerous forms of
identication. The role of state practices in individuating, differentiating, enumerating and
registering people, or, in other words, the governmentality associated with citizenship (see
Mamdani 2001, Fassin 2011, Sammadar 2011), is always dangerous for those they exclude,
and those who fall within bureaucratic cracks (see Caplan and Torpey 2001), but here I
point to a moment when inclusion is equally dangerous, particularly when the lines that
are being crossed and the people who are doing the crossing are never what they seem
on the surface (see also Aretxaga 2003, Das and Poole 2004, 10, 148, Poole 2004, Gordillo
2006, Thiranagama 2010).
Initially, the SPOs did not have uniforms and did not wear their paper badges, because
they were scared to be identied as such. In 2006, when my companions and I tried to
photograph the ID card of a youth who had stopped us at a checkpoint, we were
nearly lynched and my camera was seized. Later, the SPOs were issued with camouage
fatigues and guns. These uniforms gave them a sense of authority but one which was
forever under threat as the Maoists then singled them out precisely because of these
uniforms.
Uniforms are an important feature distinguishing legitimate targets from others. When
the police capture civilians as in the story I was told by a co-villager about a young
woman, Shanti, whose illness prevented her escape when the Salwa Judum attacked their
village they dress them in Naxalite uniforms. Sometimes they are made to parade for
the press with guns which are kept in stock with the police and conveniently brought out
at successive encounters. Like the rewards that accompanied tiger kills, capturing or
killing a Naxalite occasions promotions (see also Mahajan 2007). But for some policemen,
24
CBI afdavit, received 6 March 2012, in Sundar and Ors 2007.
482 Nandini Sundar
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adivasis dont deserve even these uniforms, including their cheap canvas shoes. In 2006, at
Dornapal CRPF camp, soon after the security forces had returned from a combing oper-
ation, I observed a policeman kicking the canvas-clad feet of the corpse of a woman mili-
tant, which had been brought in. He said contemptuously: Look, they have started wearing
shoes. It was not clear whom he hated more Naxalites or uppity adivasis who wore shoes.
Uniforms can also be disguises and weapons in a war of wits. Groups of SPOs have pre-
tended to be visiting Maoist squads, in order to identify their key supporters in the villages.
25
Villagers in Jaipal told me how SPOs came to their homes at night wearing Maoist uniforms,
asking for Masa, a sangham worker. Since they were native Gondi speakers no one suspected
them. TheyaskedMasa, Didnt you get the message that we were goingtoattack Korku police
station? He denied knowing anything about it, so they asked to be taken to the sarpanch. The
sarpanch recalled to me that he had been to a cock ght that afternoon and was sleeping off his
liquor. But when the SPOs knocked on his door at 3 am ostensibly in search of two squad
members, he retained enough of his wits to deny knowing them. Then Masa innocently pro-
duced a Maoist pamphlet, saying, I have one; howcome you dont? revealing the sarpanchs
close ties to the Maoists. At that, the SPOs fell upon and beat up the sarpanch.
The civil war has generated several rolls of the dead lists issued by the Naxalites, and
lists issued by the government.
26
Appearance on one list or the other indicates to whom you
belong. Government records contain only the names of those ostensibly killed by the Nax-
alites, whose relatives are then compensated. Naxalite lists, on the other hand, released to
the press and to human rights groups, contain only the names of those killed by the Salwa
Judum, SPOs or security forces. By and large, these lists reect their respective followers,
though, in some cases, when people have protested at extra-judicial killings by the police,
the government has persuaded them to pass it off as a Naxalite murder and take compen-
sation.
27
Sometimes the police tie themselves into knots as in the case of a 2008 list
they gave to the National Human Rights Commission which had been tasked with investi-
gating the deaths and which in turn uncritically accepted it where they described several
people as naxalites killed by naxalites.
28
Sometimes, the state has to produce Naxalites from among its own ranks, when none of
the genuine articles are forthcoming. In early 2007, in a rare icker of opposition, the Congress
charged that out of 79 Naxalites who surrendered before the BJP Chief Minister in a cer-
emony held at the state capital on 3 January, many were really BJP workers (Newswebindia
2007). Surrendered Naxalites get rehabilitation grants, so faking identity works to the advan-
tage of both the leader who gets the glory for pacication, and the workers who get the money.
Human rights activists have also generated lists, in particular a list of over 500 people
killed based on testimonies given by villagers to the parliamentary Communist Party of
India (CPI), which was submitted to the Supreme Court in 2007 in Kartam Joga and ors.
25
Pseudo-operations or the use of organized teams which are disguised as guerilla groups for long
or short term penetration of insurgent controlled areas (Cline 2005, 1) is a common counterinsur-
gency strategy. See also Guha (1983, 2089) on the colonial use of decoys and perdy as an instru-
ment of pacication.
26
See annexures in Sundar and Ors, 2007, based on names and gures provided by the Government of
Chhattisgarh, and the Ministry of Home Affairs. See also Annexures I & II, in PUCL, PUDR et al.
(2006), which reproduce both government and Maoist handouts.
27
Despite repeated directions from the Supreme Court, the state compensates victims of Naxalite kill-
ings but not those killed by the Salwa Judum or security forces.
28
NHRC Annexures, not included in the published NHRC report (NHRC 2008), accessed in the
Supreme Court.
The Journal of Peasant Studies 483
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vs State of Chhattisgarh and Union of India, WP (Cr.) 119 of 2007. Some of these names
straddle both the government and Maoist lists. However, the NHRC declared that the majority
were simply the names of people missing because there were no First Information Reports
(FIRs) on their deaths (NHRC 2008). Villagers eeing frompolice attacks on their villages are
scarcely likely to register FIRs with the police, and such FIRs as the police have written bear
little resemblance to the truth (see also Grover 2002, Das 2004, 229). As far as the state is
concerned, these are people who are not missed, even if they are missing.
But, as Das (2004) writes, the signature of the state is reproduced even by those who are
outcast by it. Notice the stress on ofcial identication in this testimony submitted by a
widow to the Supreme Court, explaining why the killing of her husband was illegitimate:
In December 2006January 2007, when Polampalli camp was newly established, the Salwa
Judum SPOs and police attacked our village for the third time and burnt houses. Thinking
they had left, my husband and two others went to see the damage to their houses. They then
drank water at the boring pump. Hearing the sound of the boring hand pump, the SPOs
came back and red indiscriminately. Gunga and Potem managed to escape, but my
husband was shot and died of two bullet wounds.
Since he was carrying with him an election ID card, a land deed and Rs 2500, the SPOs realized
he was not a Naxalite and left the body lying in the village. They took away the money and ID
and land deed. The next morning the villagers went in search of him and found the body and
cremated him. We were too scared to le an FIR and it would have been pointless since he had
been killed by SPOs.
29
The signature of the Maoist state is similarly simultaneously authoritative and indetermi-
nate. A sarpanch friend received a letter purportedly from the Maoists demanding Rs
30,000: Sarpanch ji [term of respect], do you want to help the Maoists or die? While
the style of the letter made him doubt its Maoist authorship he suspected a local political
rival he could not afford to take any chances. He paid not just Rs 30,000 but two
additional installments, following more threatening letters written in red ink complete
with a seal of the CPI Maoist. He left home temporarily to be safe, but in the meantime
put out feelers to the Maoists. The Maoists ordered an investigation in which they asked
him to name the alleged impersonator. But, said the sarpanch, when it came to it, I
could not take his name, for if the Maoists did anything to him, his family would take it
out on me, and we both have to live in the same village.
In a situation where ordinary people are ventriloquised by armed insurgents and secur-
ity forces, and in turn see their agency in duping either side and even each other (Nelson
2004), seals, signatures, signs and speech are all imbued with uncertainty. Broken speech
serves here as the marker of a broken citizenship.
Who represents the state: teachers or paramilitaries?
The government has repeatedly claimed that the Salwa Judum has enabled it to expand its
reach into areas formerly controlled by the Maoists. This is debatable, as even though CRPF
camps have extended to more areas, they are themselves under siege. Police stations are
heavily fortied with barbed wire, and in remote areas, supplies are airdropped.
Far from gaining more territory, the government has lost whatever presence it had. Of-
cially, the government claims that it is the Naxalites who have driven teachers and other
29
Testimony of SB, village A, 8 July 2008, recorded by the author.
484 Nandini Sundar
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government staff away. But in 2005, it was the government which ordered school teachers
and fair price shops to work only in camps. This was compounded by the CRPF occupation
of schools while on combing operations. The Maoists retaliated by blasting the buildings. A
whole generation has now grown up unschooled, or been forced to leave their homes and
live in faraway hostels if they hope to access any education at all.
30
For the SPOs and others who left their elds and livestock behind when they came to
camp, teachers and health workers were the only property they could lay claim to, a mark
of their own superiority over those who had not joined the Judum. In Basaguda camp, I was
told in 2008: These teachers belong to our government. We have kept them (teachers) all
together in one place. Those who dont join the Judum will get no school or be allowed to
go to school. For the teachers themselves, always reluctant to travel to interior villages, the
period since 2005 has meant pay without work; many have prospered so much with the
Salwa Judum that they have become contractors.
In December 2008, the district administrator showed CPI leader Manish Kunjam and
me a letter written in a purposely illiterate hand, ostensibly from the Naxalites to a
village school principal: Shut down the school within two weeks or prepare to be put at
peace forever. He used this as an example of Naxalites hindering education. On enquiring
in the village concerned, we learnt that it had originated from a disgruntled teacher upset
with the principals insistence that he report to work on time. Government functionaries
think of Naxalites as uneducated and therefore produce poorly written fakes, whereas
when villagers counterfeit Maoist letters, they are very neat. For villagers, the Maoists rep-
resent literacy and knowledge and their most lasting impression of cadres is of people who
keep reading. In a situation where sovereignty is contested, there are more contenders for
power than just the two main warring parties.
Curiously, what applies to government staff does not apply to traders and tendu patta
collectors. Many of them are supporters and bankrollers of the ruling BJP, but dependent
on the Maoists to operate in their areas, and thus serve as the chief boundary crossers
and intermediaries. In the midst of all the mayhem that Salwa Judum created, tendu leaf
collection barely stopped, and it was the traders who supplied rice and other essentials to
those inside the forest, when government supplies were stopped.
For the Maoists, state withdrawal of services has rendered the area even more comple-
tely within their control. Now, with the sarpanches and richer farmers gone and no govern-
ment staff, there is no room for dissension in the villages. People wishing to leave or to
return to their villages write letters to the Maoist leaders asking for permission. While
this is sometimes felt as a constraint, it also helps to check the large-scale trafcking of
women that has been going on by unscrupulous agents. What the Indian government has
done is to effectively prop up its other, giving it a cohesion and solidity which it did
not possess before in terms of either territory or people.
Whereas the Indian state is now a straggly space along the highway, electried with
search lights around the camps, the Maoist state stretches large into the mysterious interiors
unknowable, unmappable, dark and with unmarked routes, where the leaders come and
go. But to the extent that people are silenced, and carry their allegiances in their hearts,
31
the borders of both states will never be known.
30
While the Maoists have an education department which publishes textbooks and runs a few schools,
this is no substitute for government schools. See Dasgupta (2010).
31
As Dule of a forest village told me in 2013: I can only say what is in my heart, I cannot speak for the
hearts of others.
The Journal of Peasant Studies 485
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Conclusions
This contribution studies sovereignty and citizenship as a set of practices, identications
and acts that emerge in the mimetic relationship between states at war. Here, the display
of sovereignty is authored not by a consenting people from below or a law-generating
state acting on its own from above, but by the states perceived enemy as in the
outlaw-envy that drives the state to set up vigilante groups or the hubris that drives the
Maoists to distribute their own land records and uniforms. These opposing states are,
however, linked through their personnel the sangham members turned SPOs, the pro-
BJP traders turned Maoist suppliers and also intertwined through the conicting alle-
giances of their subjects, who are engaged in a constant back-and-forth ventriloquism
with both governments, albeit from positions of subjugation.
In terms of appearances, each side must claim that their authority comes from below,
from the consent of the governed (see Howland and White 2009, Skinner 2010 on
classic theories of sovereignty). Both the state through its winning hearts and minds cam-
paign and the Maoists ostensibly compete for the hand of the villagers. In practice, the
Indian governments sovereignty over adivasi areas has historically been based on subjuga-
tion and conquest as against consent (see Foucault 2003 on conquest as the basis of sover-
eignty). The land and forest laws which independent India inherited from the British, and
which have traditionally been used to expropriate adivasis, code violence into the very
notion of the rule of law.
Faced with growing resistance to these laws, not just from the Maoists but from a range
of social movements protecting indigenous rights to land against mining companies or big
power projects, the Indian government has resorted to propping up support groups for its
projects. Backed by the police and company-hired vigilantes, they attack protest move-
ments. The Salwa Judum as a so-called peoples movement is perhaps the most egregious,
but not the only, example of re-engineering the people in order to maintain the ction of a
social contract. Unlike the nested or outsourced sovereignty that Hansen and Stepputat
(2006) describe as a durable feature of post-colonial states, counterinsurgent vigilantism is
directly attributable to state agency.
The Maoists claim that they are replacing subjugation in the Indian state by citizenship
in their own regime. As Foucault notes, sovereignty as an ideal provides arms to both mon-
archs and contenders, to legitimize their rule or to overthrow arbitrary authority (see Fou-
cault 2003, 35, Kalmo and Skinner 2010, 8). It is true that people initially welcomed the
Maoists, and the JS is based on active participation and consent. However, for both the
state and the Maoists, continued membership is on suffrage, contingent upon compliance
with their rule. People can be jailed or killed when expedient (as government informers
or Maoist sympathizers), without the guarantees that a law-ruled state would provide. In
the process, the stated raison dtre of both states fragments or gets reformulated under
the pressure of exceptions demanded by war. The Constitution in whose name the Indian
government claims to be acting is increasingly laid waste by the war against its own
people, while the Maoist dream of a Red ag over the Red Fort
32
or a new democracy
for the whole of India is shrinking to the space of the forest where the Indian government
has hemmed them in.
For the adivasis who live in the intersecting penumbras of these labile sovereignties,
their belonging or citizenship is uncertainly dened. Their participation in the Maoist
32
The Red Fort in Delhi has been the symbolic seat of Indias power from the Mughal period onwards.
486 Nandini Sundar
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state makes them vulnerable in the Indian one and, in turn, the benets of everyday govern-
mentality in the Indian state are treated with suspicion in the Maoist parallel regime. Even
worse, the contested sovereignty of civil wars produces subjects at war with themselves,
doubting their neighbors and even doubting themselves.
The more interesting question today is not how legitimacy was instituted in the Indian
state, since it clearly has its origins in both a long colonial past and a shorter history based
on the freedom movement and the Constitution. Far more interesting is the attempt to
understand what happens when such a state willfully chooses to dissolve itself ceding
both its foundational principles and its monopoly over violence to vigilantes after
people have grown accustomed to it, or at least grown used to the state-idea in dening
their own citizenship.
33
Agamben (2005, 59) claims that for those at the receiving end of
states of exception, the only option is civil war and revolutionary violence. However,
citizens continue to maintain a practical relation to the idea of law, if only as a sign of
hope that ourishes despite the anomie and despair. If the state is responsible for its own
dissolution, it is ordinary people, especially non-combatants, who intervene to prop up a
state-idea, which they dene in terms of justice and a minimal degree of welfare.
Drawing on materials from the parallel states they inhabit, they appeal to the Indian
courts for justice, while simultaneously pledging to continue with their JS, even if in
secret. Through all the uncertainty, the doubting and the ghting, they continue to hope,
to look to the state(s) to make their fractured selves whole again. These are signs that
stand for wonders in the parched landscape of civil war.
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Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her
publications include Subalterns and sovereigns: an anthropological history of Bastar (2nd ed., 2007).
She serves on the boards of several journals including American Anthropologist, the International
Journal of Conict and Violence and the International Review of the Red Cross. In 2010, she was
awarded the Infosys Science Foundation prize for social anthropology. Her public writings are avail-
able at http://nandinisundar.blogspot.com. Email: nandinisundar@yahoo.com
490 Nandini Sundar
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