Differences in Workers' Narratives of Contention in Two Central Indian Towns

Abstract

Contract work in India, though legally regulated by a 1970 Act, is widespread and mostly unrecognized. With the implementation of neoliberal policies in India since the 1990s, contract work has become the norm. There are now few spaces in which contract workers can get redress through the legal system. Using oral history narratives of contract workers' participation in a labor movement, this article shows how narratives of contention differ in the rendering of agency, success, and future, between one group of contract workers employed in the 1970s in a state-owned mine and another employed in the 1990s in an industrial area owned by private and foreign capital. The evidence for the article is ethnographic, collected in Chhattisgarh region in central India. This article suggests that these workers' narratives show the transformation in practices of citizenship, resistance, and militancy in India over time. Such differences are essential in understanding phenomena like the resurgence of the Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh.

‘Blind laws’ and the bureaucracy of rights migrant industrial workers in post‐lockdown India

“…But they also show that the successes gained from appealing directly to the state tend to be based on the workers' residency and identity as locals. Agarwala explains that the government provides benefits and legitimacy to the workers because they are a voting force, while Nair highlights the important role of the workers' Chhattisgarhi ethnicity in the legitimacy of their claims (Nair, 2011). This is something which does not apply to India's precarious migrants who remain disenfranchised while at destination.…”

Globalization and Its Countermovement: Marxian Contention or Polanyian Resistance?

“…On the other hand, there are voluminous studies on contentious politics instances where the intensification of the market economy is met with protests by groups such as peasants, students, and urban poor. These are social groups who are unmade by economic globalization and neoliberal reforms (Almeida 2007;Auyero 2001Auyero , 2003aAuyero , 2003bAuyero and Moran 2007;Bandelj, Shorette and Sowers 2011;Epstein 2003;Evans 2000;Gemici 2013;Hammond 1999Hammond , 2009Munck 2007;Nair 2011Nair , 2016. In this article, we survey the two streams of scholarship on the countermovement against the global integration of capitalist markets by using Beverly Silver's distinction between Marx-type and Polanyi-type protests (2003).…”