The Hindu right, DfID and diasporas in development (Part 2)

In the second part of this blog, Dr Kalpana Wilson explores the connections between the activities of Hindu supremacist groups in Britain, particular forms of development taking place in India, and dominant currents of British racism. Click here for Part 1, which argues that growing interest in the role of diasporas in development is related to specific strategies of capital and the consolidation of neoliberal policies

Prime Minister Modi’s UK visit: protests gather momentum

Ahead of Modi’s visit to the UK next week, a number of campaign organisations, academics and individuals are coming together to protest increasing violence against minority groups under the current government. Kalpana Wilson outlines the background to the #ModiNotWelcome campaign and the range of activities that are taking place

Resisting Hindutva, defending the right to vote in Bihar

Kalpana Wilson examines grassroots mobilisations in Bihar against an electoral victory for BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi—and the Hindu right’s efforts to suppress them

Production Relations and the Patterns of Accumulation in the Context of a Stalled Transition: Agrarian Change in Contemporary Central Bihar (India).

My thesis examines the series of changes which have occurred in the patterns of accumulation by cultivating landowning groups in Central Bihar from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, and the specific impact upon production relations of sustained struggles waged by agricultural labourers. Based primarily on fieldwork carried out in 1995-96 in Nalanda district of Bihar, it investigates changes in the structure of landholdings, the use of technology, the forms, conditions, and extent of agricultural labour and other interrelated variables. I conclude that conditions in the 1970s in this area, which is dominated by cultivating landowners from the intermediate Kurmi caste, indicated a potential for a transition to capitalism based on rich peasant accumulation. However this development has essentially come to a standstill during the period from the early 1980s to the present. This 'stalling' is traced to the failure of land reforms and the persistence of a highly skewed pattern of resource endowment which has meant that unproductive economic activities such as moneylending, the sale and hire of agricultural inputs to the growing section of small and marginal cultivators, and more recently, contracting and organised crime have remained more profitable than investment in agricultural production. Further, State power, rooted as it is in this same agrarian structure, has been used by successive landed groups to appropriate development resources through institutionalised corruption. This is intensifying a crisis in the availability of key inputs and the virtual collapse of the infrastructure. The initial spurt of capital accumulation among larger landowners employing wage labour provided the catalyst for the emergence in the late 1970s of an organised movement of agricultural labourers, the majority of whom were from 'dalit' castes. I discuss the questions of class, caste and gender which have shaped this movement, and conclude that it has succeeded in effecting a number of significant changes in production relations which have occurred from the early 1980s onwards. Finally, I place the changing phenomenon of private armies and criminal gangs associated with landowning groups in this context of a stalled transition to capitalist agriculture on the one hand, and a challenge from below to both the economic as well as the political bases of the power of the dominant classes on the other

Worlds beyond the political? Post-development approaches in practices of transnational solidarity activism

This article considers some ways in which one strand of post-development thinking has influenced NGO-led activist discourses and practices of transnational solidarity. It argues that there has been a tendency for these discourses and practices to rearticulate racialised constructions of unspoiled and authentic ‘natives’ requiring protection which are historically embedded in colonial practices of governance. In turn, this has meant the failure to acknowledge indigenous histories of political organisation and resistance. Further, the characterization of development in binary terms as both homogenous and always undesirable has meant the delegitimisation of demands for equality as well as the neglect of the implications of the decisive shift from developmentalism to neoliberal globalization as the dominant paradigm. Drawing upon a discussion of aspects of the local, national and transnational campaign to prevent proposed bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha (India), I argue that given that international NGOs are themselves embedded in the architecture of neoliberal development and aid, their campaigning activities can be understood as facilitating the displacement and marginalization of local activists and silencing their complex engagements with ideas of development. This potentially diffuses and depoliticises opposition to neoliberal forms of development, while transposing collective agency onto undifferentiated publics in the global North, processes which however continue to be actively resisted

In the name of reproductive rights: race, neoliberalism and the embodied violence of population policies

Contemporary population interventions by states, international organizations and corporates have during the last two decades been effectively reframed in feminist terms of reproductive rights and choices, while continuing to perpetuate and rely upon structural and embodied violence and racialised and gendered constructions of industriousness and altruism on the one hand, and disposability, hypersexuality and excess on the other. I argue that the 21st century resurgence of population control and its reframing cannot be fully understood however, except in relation to processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to which the intensification of women’s labour, and its mobilization for global capital, is central. The advent of the adolescent girl as the agent of international development, I suggest, marks the final stage in a transition from liberal to neoliberal feminism in development. Even liberal feminist critiques that sought to highlight discrimination which ostensibly prevented markets from functioning effectively are now marginalized. The focus on the pre-reproductive, pre-labouring years is thoroughly neoliberal in that intervention via education is constructed as necessary only to produce the idealized neoliberal subject who can negotiate unfettered and unregulated markets with ease, while simultaneously assuming full responsibility for social reproduction. The article goes on to reflect on India’s population policies in the context of the increasing mobilisation of gendered precarious labour for global capital, the escalation of corporate land-grab, dispossession and displacement and the growing dominance of Hindu supremacist ideology and its incitement to genocidal gendered violence against minorities. Against this background, I consider the significance of the concept of ‘reproductive justice’ and the importance of resisting current attempts to appropriate, eviscerate, and redeploy it

Re-centring ‘race’ in development: population policies and global capital accumulation in the era of the SDGs

This article argues that contrary to some recent theorizing of contemporary development interventions, ideologies of race and discursive and material processes of racialisation remain central to development in the era of the Sustainable Development Goals. This is explored through an examination of current population policies, and in particular the ‘global family planning strategy’ initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the British government. Population concerns are now routinely invoked in the context of neo-Malthusian discourses which relate migration, climate change and conflict. This article argues however that contemporary population policies represent more than a discursive smokescreen for the destructive impacts of global capital accumulation – they are in fact deeply enmeshed in strategies for its expansion. As such, they rely upon embodied coercion and violence which is racialised and gendered, even as they invoke narratives of reproductive rights and choices

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the necro-populationism of ‘climate-smart’ agriculture

Agricultural and reproductive technologies ostensibly represent opposing poles within discourses on population growth: one aims to ‘feed the world,’ while the other seeks to limit the number of mouths there are to feed. There is, however, an urgent need to critically interrogate new discourses linking population size with climate change and promoting agricultural and reproductive technologies as a means to address associated problems. This article analyses the specific discourses produced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in relation to these ‘population technologies’ and ‘climate-smart’ agriculture in particular. Drawing on concepts and approaches developed by Black, postcolonial and Marxist feminists including intersectionality, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and reproductive and environmental justice, we explore how within these discourses, the ‘geo-populationism’ of the BMGF’s climate-smart agriculture initiatives, like the ‘demo-populationism’ of its family planning interventions, mobilises neoliberal notions of empowerment, productivity and innovation. Not only do these populationist discourses reinforce neoliberal framings and policies which extend existing regimes of racialised and gendered socio-spatial inequality, but they also underwrite global capital accumulation through new science and technologies. The BMGF’s representations of its climate-smart agriculture initiatives offer the opportunity to understand how threats of climate change are mobilised to reanimate and repackage the Malthusian disequilibrium between human fertility and agricultural productivity. Drawing upon our readings of these discourses, we critically propose the concept of ‘necro-populationism’ to refer to processes that target racialised and gendered populations for dispossession, toxification, slow death and embodied violence, even while direct accountability for the effects of these changes is dispersed. We also identify a need for further research which will not only trace the ways in which the BMGF’s global policies are materialised, spatialised, reproduced and reoriented by multiple actors in local contexts, but will also recognise and affirm the diverse forms through which these ‘necro-populationist’ processes are disavowed and resisted

A Renewed Call for Feminist Resistance to Population Control

We are feminist advocates for reproductive, environmental and climate justice who are deeply concerned about rising sea levels and rising inequalities. We are troubled that population numbers, composition and movements are often seen as causing or worsening climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, war and conflict. For instance, the United Nation’s 2019 World Population Prospects says that rapid population growth will stand in the way of accomplishing the Sustainable Development Goals related to poverty, equality and hunger

Women construction workers in Nepal: collectivities under precarious conditions

In this article we explore the experiences of women construction workers in Nepal, and the strategies that these workers have adopted to challenge the exploitation and inequalities they confront. We firstly argue that the experiences of women construction workers in Nepal are shaped by compulsive engagement in labour markets under conditions of informality, precarity and gendered responsibility for social reproduction. These experiences reflect multiple intersections of gender, class, caste and ethnicity in the arenas of the household, the workplace, trade unions and the state. However, policy interventions relating to women’s participation in labour markets and inspired by the Gender Equality as Smart Economics approach, such as Nepal’s post-earthquake mason training scheme targeting women construction workers, render invisible these structures of inequality, exploitation and violence. Secondly, we argue that women construction workers negotiate – and in some cases challenge and change – working conditions, primarily through a variety of informal and formal collective strategies. Women construction workers’ own narratives and practices, we find, bear little resemblance to the narratives promoted by the international financial institutions (IFIs) and the state, in which women workers appear as resilient, altruistic and industrious entrepreneurial subjects seeking individual self-improvement within the neoliberal framework. They rather invoke informal and organised collectivities, negotiate and often resist gendered norms of behaviour and at times radically re-envision the scope of trade union struggles