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State, Discourse, and Development in India: The Case of West Bengal's Panchayati Raj

In this paper, I use the example of West Bengal's Panchayati Raj (local government reform) to address a number of wider issues of concern for geographers commentating on India's politics and development. Taking the work of Kaviraj as a point of entry, I examine the impact that the decentralisation of government has had on people's access to the state and on the internal politics of three rural communities in West Bengal. The complexities of the processes involved suggest that, rather than there being the unidirectional penetration of society by an ‘alien’ developmental state, rural Bengalis are able to make knowing use of the language and structures of modern government for their own ends. I end the paper by suggesting the possible consequences of these findings for Kaviraj's thesis, for accounts of a ‘crisis' of India's developmental state, and for the discursive turn in development studies more broadly.