Janathana Sarkar (people’s government): rebel governance and agency of the poor in India’s Maoist guerrilla zones

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the agency of the poor in the context of rebel governance in rural India. During its five-decade-long armed agrarian struggle, the Maoist movement has established in several villages an alternative structure of governance called Janathana Sarkar (people’s government) with Adivasis and Dalits as the primary agents of social transformation. Drawing on the author’s long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Maoist guerrilla zones, this article explores the insurgent consciousness of Dalits and Adivasis by engaging with two interrelated questions. First, how does Janathana Sarkar function as a platform for radical democracy by the marginalised? Second, is violence inherent in the emergence and manifestation of this agency? These questions, although primarily focused on the agency of Dalits and Adivasis in Janathana Sarkar, have a wider relevance to the study of transformative politics of the poor and radical democracy, which have received inadequate attention in the scholarship on rebel governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Janathana Sarkar
• insurrectionary agency of the poor
• spiral of violence
• maoist movement
• radical democracy
• democratic autonomy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Janathana Sarkar, (‘people’s government’ in Koya and Gondi, indigenous languages in central India (Neelima 2019, 28)), has been known by various names in different regions, including Grama Rajya (‘village state’) Committee, and Krantikari Kisan (‘revolutionary peasant’) Committee, among others.

2. Names of all fieldwork villages have been changed in this article.

3. The first step in the merger was taken when the CPI (ML) Party Unity merged with the CPI (ML) People’s War in 1998.

4. The United Front comprises four classes – workers, peasants, urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. While the first two classes form the basis of the United Front, the other two classes are considered as allies in certain contexts for building up the mass movement against the enemy classes (CPI (Maoist) 2004).

5. Officially-elected panchayats today are more representative in their membership, but the Maoists view them as corrupt and in nexus with the state. Since RPCs function as local government in their areas of influence, the guerrillas find panchayats irrelevant, and demand that sarpanches (the head of the panchayat) should resign. In some instances, especially in DK, they are chased out of the villages (Paani 2016; Sundar 2018). In Jehanabad, some upper caste sarpanches were killed during the height of the armed struggle. In Krantipur, panchayats usually work under the influence of the Maoist party, mostly managing state-funded projects for local development.