Accepted Panels

The paper focuses on the configurations of the everyday State that emerges with increasing mobility of labour, capital and discourses. We seek to understand how these configurations are encountered in diverse spatial locations and across scales. The State and migrants are often presented as homogenous entities where the State understands ‘migrant’ to be a category of analysis and subject of welfare. We seek to unsettle this homogeneity by unraveling the homogenous ‘State’ and the homogenous ‘migrant’. We focus on the interactions between the State at multiple levels of governance across real and imagined locations, and the migrants as  itinerant agents circulating between multiple spatialities and societies. Specifically, we  draw upon our work with  migrant workers employed by the Border Roads Organization (BRO) in the Upper Himalayas Region particularly during the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath. In doing so we draw connections between the State as enforcer of the lockdown (central government), State as employer (BRO) and the state as the  regulator and benefactor (Jharkhand government) across diverse  geographies, interconnected through the experience of migrant labour. Our study of the State(s) as it is encountered in the context of migrant road construction labour from Jharkhand zooms in on the negotiations between the tribal-indigenous state of Jharkhand and the BRO. While we build upon legacies of the colonial state in understanding the practices and ideologies of labour engagement in India’s frontiers; we primarily focus on the welfare-state in the post-colonial context to argue how despite the well-meaning schemes of the State(s) - both Union and State governments, most schemes fail and structural violence is enacted precisely at the sites of care. Further, we argue that the migrant needs to be understood as a differentiated subjectivity that experiences the state(s) differently as they move between diverse spatialities and temporalities of governance.