The proposed paper maps and accounts for formation of new publics, political imaginaries, ethics, governance and leadership owing to deeper enmeshing of state and capital in towns and localities from the 1980s onwards in North India in a transforming political context.The paper tracks this movement along the twin axes of representative institutional architecture of the state and its power to distribute work and services, especially at local level, and the economy of local contract work, and even illegalised domains such as sand mining or extortion ‘rights’. The paper argues that it is this entanglement of the local state with the economy that gave rise to new idioms of politics, leadership and social and political desires.The paper provides an account of political-economic developments in towns and cities of Uttar Pradesh which are of non-metropolitan character, thus traversing a complicated domain encompassing but not limited to the non-elite middle classes.
The paper provides a short lay of the land for the entanglement of local state with capital and market from the 1980s to 1990s. The body of the paper presents field material and data on Uttar Pradesh from 1990s onwards to sketch the contours of democratic reshaping: formation of new publics, political imaginaries, ethics, governance and leadership. The concluding portion offers analytical insights on the material presented and arguments made. The paper employs methodological tools drawn from the evolving ‘ethnography of democracy’ paradigm as well data based methods to track sociological changes as reflected in political institutions. The paper is undergirded by the notion that a far more effective understanding of state and political developments is generated at the intersection of state institutions, capital movement and formation of publics.
