Percpetions of the state among contract workers in India, 1977-2006.

Recent ethnographies of the state study the latter from the eye of the subjects. They focus on the everyday practices where state and subjects intersect, thus making the concept of the state "relational" and sometimes, "interactional". Taking the cue from that scholarship, this paper studies how participants in a militant labor movement recall the state in their experiences of thirty years of struggle. Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha emerged in 1977 as a trade union of the manual workers employed in the state-owned iron-ore mines in central India. It struggled with the mine management demanding to be officially recognized as labor. The narratives of the participants in the movements were recorded during my ethnographic research in the mining township in the summers of 2003 and 2004, and spring of 2006. Most of the interviewees were small leaders (mukhiya) in the movement.This paper finds that the participants experienced and perceived two different states: they regarded the "developmental" state with respect, and feared and ridiculed the "network" state. The experiences were interactional: they countered the developmental state as the mine management, national political leaders and office bearers, and the network state as the state government, local political leaders, bureaucracy and police. Through choosing the case of participants in a labor union of contract workers, this paper captures the state as it appears to its subjects in situations of conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]