Chapter 5 details how the contemporary CEO MDR (1977–present) has legitimized poor and elite emig... more Chapter 5 details how the contemporary CEO MDR (1977–present) has legitimized poor and elite emigrants’ financial contributions from abroad (in the form of remittances, savings accounts, investments, and bonds), thereby reframing emigrants as a resource for India (rather than an embarrassment, as in the Nationalist MDR) and building consent for foreign capital inflows. This chapter also explains how the Indian state has justified these changes (which, in fact, echo India’s colonial-era MDR) to retain its political legitimacy, especially among domestic resisters to globalization. The state has emphasized poor workers’ demands for mobility while remaining tethered to electoral expectations of state protection. An important consequence of the CEO MDR’s reliance on circular/temporary emigration is that the state has inadvertently committed to reincorporating poor workers into India’s economy upon their return. Therefore, the state has extended protection in the form of emigration restri...
Chapter 3 details the rise and fall of the Coolie MDR (1834–1947). Contrary to claims that sendin... more Chapter 3 details the rise and fall of the Coolie MDR (1834–1947). Contrary to claims that sending-state governments throughout the world (including India) have only recently started to use emigrants to meet domestic development needs, this chapter shows that emigration has been an important state subject in India since the colonial era. The Coolie MDR instituted an overtly racialized development model, whereby the state exploited poor and middle-class Indian emigrants to serve as coolies for the British Empire, advancing economic accumulation in the colonies and ultimately in the United Kingdom. The Coolie MDR also inaugurated India’s first migration state. In response to public pressures, the colonial government gradually built a regulatory framework that empowered the state to not only use, but also control, the global mobility of “free” (as opposed to enslaved) commodified human workers. Underlying this framework was a class-based distinction of Indian emigrants. So successful w...
How can we explain global migration from the perspective of sending states and migrants? The Migr... more How can we explain global migration from the perspective of sending states and migrants? The Migration-Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to answer this question in India, the world’s largest emigrant exporter and largest remittance-receiving country. Drawing on archives, a new database of transnational migrant organizations, and unique interviews with poor and elite emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book exposes how the Indian state, as well as poor and elite emigrants, have long forged and legitimized class inequalities within India through their management of international emigration. Since the 1800s, the Indian state has sometimes forbidden and sometimes promoted emigration. And Indian emigrants have sometimes brought material and sometimes ideological inflows to India. But throughout, the Indian state has differentially used poor and elite emigrants to accelerate domestic economic growth and retain political legitimacy by imposing dif...
Chapter 8 analyzes the strategies and demands of elite emigrants’ transnational organizations wit... more Chapter 8 analyzes the strategies and demands of elite emigrants’ transnational organizations with a focus on the United States. Indian American transnational organizations overwhelmingly embrace, rather than critique, the CEO MDR’s development ideals of privatization, voluntarism, and self-sufficiency. In fact, they helped create the MDR by enthusiastically participating in the national government’s call for their social remittances. To channel these social remittances, Indian Americans have built hundreds of transnational diaspora organizations throughout the United States that promote private education, private philanthropy for poverty alleviation, and private business development. Almost none address social inequities based on class, caste, or gender. Although diverse, these organizations reflect exactly the portrait of the elite global Indian that the CEO MDR celebrates in India (a portrait that, in fact, masks the community’s more layered heterogeneity). Doing so valorizes and...
Chapter 7 analyzes the strategies and demands of poor emigrants’ organizations and migrant recrui... more Chapter 7 analyzes the strategies and demands of poor emigrants’ organizations and migrant recruiters. Poor Indian emigrants have drawn on their structural power as voters and “protectors of the nation’s foreign exchange” to demand from the government the liberalization of emigration, “rights-based” (as opposed to “paternalist”) welfare, increased data, and recognition. But the partisan and cross-class nature of their organizations have deradicalized them, especially compared to domestic labor organizations. This chapter examines how the CEO MDR has ironically undermined private recruiters, a class actor that the CEO MDR legitimized and legalized in the first place. Under the CEO MDR, small and medium-size private recruiters have become bankrupt, shut down, or returned to extralegal business operations, while large private recruitment businesses have prospered.
Chapter 6 exposes how the CEO MDR has forged an elite class pact of “global Indians” that include... more Chapter 6 exposes how the CEO MDR has forged an elite class pact of “global Indians” that includes India’s state officials, domestic business leaders, and elites abroad. This celebrated group dominates Indian development and attains material wealth and status in the process. To seal this class pact, the CEO MDR has tapped elite emigrants’ social and ideological contributions to development (in the form of their ideas, ideals, tastes, networks, and technical expertise). It has invited elite emigrants to forge partnerships with Indian businesses, reshape India’s voluntary sector, invest in Indian real estate, and serve in elite policy positions within the government. And it has framed Indian Americans, in particular, as successful, hard-working, private-sector professionals and entrepreneurs whom domestic Indians should emulate. The CEO MDR has not, however, tapped poor emigrants for their social and ideological remittances. Rather, it has tried to cement their consent to elite ideals...
Chapter 2 explains the book’s methodological approach and analytical framework of Migration-Devel... more Chapter 2 explains the book’s methodological approach and analytical framework of Migration-Development Regimes. To do so, it draws on the global literature on migration to identify four sets of forces and actors that shape sending-state emigration practices. The first highlights the power of northern-imposed development ideologies/norms, particularly neoliberal globalization. The second exposes how, at certain moments, sending states act as agents in and for themselves—striving to ensure domestic material accumulation, political legitimacy, and material redistribution at the global level. The third reminds us how poor and elite emigrants, as well as their transnational organizations, sometimes resist and reshape sending state emigration practices. The final emphasizes the role of history. Building on this global migration literature, this chapter explains the MDR framework. MDRs are defined as the full set of emigration practices and policies that enable sending countries to ensure...
Chapter 4 details the rise and fall of India’s first postcolonial MDR. The Nationalist MDR (1947–... more Chapter 4 details the rise and fall of India’s first postcolonial MDR. The Nationalist MDR (1947–77) retained much of the Coolie MDR’s class-based regulatory infrastructure but instituted a new development model defined by the nation’s new geographic boundaries. To maintain its domestic image as a protector of vulnerable Indians and its global image as a self-sufficient nation, the new Indian state extended a paternalist brand of protection over its poor workers by legally forbidding their emigration. In doing so, the state legitimized its control over poor Indians and ensured their availability to serve India’s domestic industrialization. At the same time, the state permitted elites to emigrate. To secure political legitimacy for this class-based distinction, the state distanced elite emigrants (at least in public) from its development agenda. This approach, however, had important and unintended consequences. First, it broke the cross-class solidarity among emigrants that had arise...
Chapter 9 explores the future prospects of the CEO MDR by underscoring its contradictions and eme... more Chapter 9 explores the future prospects of the CEO MDR by underscoring its contradictions and emerging weaknesses. First, the promise of entrepreneurship has (unsurprisingly) failed to uplift most poor emigrants. State welfare programs for emigrants have also failed to deliver. Second, given most private recruiters’ class position as small and medium-size entrepreneurs, their current discontent exposes a fallacy in the CEO MDR’s claims to promote this very line of labor. Third, elite emigrants’ call for privatization and their underlying distrust of the government’s ability to deliver on development is fomenting fault lines in their relationship with Indian NGOs and the Indian state. If history is any guide, the CEO MDR will eventually fall. This chapter thus explores the potential for the CEO MDR’s weaknesses to mobilize resistance.
India's attempt to spur growth, boost exports, and create jobs by establishing Special Econom... more India's attempt to spur growth, boost exports, and create jobs by establishing Special Economic Zones (SEZs) is a paradox: the policy represents an intensification of the country's increasingly market-oriented development paradigm, but implementation has required active government involvement. More than a decade after importing the SEZ concept from China, India has hundreds of these walled-off, deregulated, low-tax enclaves. But an industrialization strategy pioneered in authoritarian China has faced huge political resistance in democratic India. Protest movements arose in many localities where SEZs were proposed. Resistance varied in terms of the intensity and sustainability of opposition, the grievances articulated, and the tactics employed. A central issue has been the alienation of privately owned land by business interests, abetted by the state. To date, no systematic study of the politics of India's SEZ experiment has been undertaken. This book remedies this gap, examining variations within and between eleven states. Detailed case studies investigate differences in the nature and extent of SEZ-related political mobilization and the means employed by governments to manage dissent. By covering a broad range of regional contexts, industrial sectors, and political conditions, this volume furnishes a comprehensive picture of the politics surrounding one of India's most controversial reform measures. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Manshi Asher is an independent social activist and researcher working on issues of livelihood and environmental rights; Partha Sarathi Banerjee is an independent social science researcher; Solano Jose Savio Da Silva is Lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Management, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Goa; Avinash Kumar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi; Benita Menezes is a graduate student in comparative development planning at the University of British Columbia and an executive member of the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (Mumbai);Anjali Mody is a freelance journalist and researcher; Rohit Mujumdar is a doctoral candidate at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia, where he also works with the Comparative Urban Studies Network and the Beyond Text Collective; Sudha Pai is Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Karli Srinivasulu is Professor of Political Science, Osmania University, Hyderabad; M. Vijayabaskar is Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies.
Recent tragedies in Bangladesh and Pakistan have led to greater public attention on the garment a... more Recent tragedies in Bangladesh and Pakistan have led to greater public attention on the garment and textile industry. Hence, this study is timely and provides insights into the current working conditions, organizing efforts, and the changing organization and structure of the industry in question. Our central question in this study is the extent to which worker organization can improve monitoring and enforcement of labor standards in subcontracted and home-based work in the garment and textile sectors in Brazil, China, India, and South Africa. Existing research literature suggests that in at least some cases of informalized and casualized work, formation and mobilization of worker organizations can do much in this regard. The research has particularly pointed to the importance of innovative and alternative forms of organization that depart from standard trade union models—in line with the departure of whole sections of the world of work from standard forms of work organization. While...
Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. ... more Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. Yet in the subcontinent class has lost its centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a major force in the eclipsing of class through discursive strategies of constructivist idealism. Formalism in social sciences finds class relations elusive and difficult to measure. Market triumphalism eclipsed concern with rehabilitation of “weaker sectors” and redressing of exploitation as measures of national success. Class analytics, however, continues to serve two critical functions: disaggregating development and explaining challenges to rules of the game. Restoring agency to class requires attention first to relations that structure choice in restricted or expansive ways. Global forces have altered people's relations to production and to one another, as have changes in the political opportunity structure, with significant effects on tact...
Chapter 5 details how the contemporary CEO MDR (1977–present) has legitimized poor and elite emig... more Chapter 5 details how the contemporary CEO MDR (1977–present) has legitimized poor and elite emigrants’ financial contributions from abroad (in the form of remittances, savings accounts, investments, and bonds), thereby reframing emigrants as a resource for India (rather than an embarrassment, as in the Nationalist MDR) and building consent for foreign capital inflows. This chapter also explains how the Indian state has justified these changes (which, in fact, echo India’s colonial-era MDR) to retain its political legitimacy, especially among domestic resisters to globalization. The state has emphasized poor workers’ demands for mobility while remaining tethered to electoral expectations of state protection. An important consequence of the CEO MDR’s reliance on circular/temporary emigration is that the state has inadvertently committed to reincorporating poor workers into India’s economy upon their return. Therefore, the state has extended protection in the form of emigration restri...
Chapter 3 details the rise and fall of the Coolie MDR (1834–1947). Contrary to claims that sendin... more Chapter 3 details the rise and fall of the Coolie MDR (1834–1947). Contrary to claims that sending-state governments throughout the world (including India) have only recently started to use emigrants to meet domestic development needs, this chapter shows that emigration has been an important state subject in India since the colonial era. The Coolie MDR instituted an overtly racialized development model, whereby the state exploited poor and middle-class Indian emigrants to serve as coolies for the British Empire, advancing economic accumulation in the colonies and ultimately in the United Kingdom. The Coolie MDR also inaugurated India’s first migration state. In response to public pressures, the colonial government gradually built a regulatory framework that empowered the state to not only use, but also control, the global mobility of “free” (as opposed to enslaved) commodified human workers. Underlying this framework was a class-based distinction of Indian emigrants. So successful w...
How can we explain global migration from the perspective of sending states and migrants? The Migr... more How can we explain global migration from the perspective of sending states and migrants? The Migration-Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to answer this question in India, the world’s largest emigrant exporter and largest remittance-receiving country. Drawing on archives, a new database of transnational migrant organizations, and unique interviews with poor and elite emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book exposes how the Indian state, as well as poor and elite emigrants, have long forged and legitimized class inequalities within India through their management of international emigration. Since the 1800s, the Indian state has sometimes forbidden and sometimes promoted emigration. And Indian emigrants have sometimes brought material and sometimes ideological inflows to India. But throughout, the Indian state has differentially used poor and elite emigrants to accelerate domestic economic growth and retain political legitimacy by imposing dif...
Chapter 8 analyzes the strategies and demands of elite emigrants’ transnational organizations wit... more Chapter 8 analyzes the strategies and demands of elite emigrants’ transnational organizations with a focus on the United States. Indian American transnational organizations overwhelmingly embrace, rather than critique, the CEO MDR’s development ideals of privatization, voluntarism, and self-sufficiency. In fact, they helped create the MDR by enthusiastically participating in the national government’s call for their social remittances. To channel these social remittances, Indian Americans have built hundreds of transnational diaspora organizations throughout the United States that promote private education, private philanthropy for poverty alleviation, and private business development. Almost none address social inequities based on class, caste, or gender. Although diverse, these organizations reflect exactly the portrait of the elite global Indian that the CEO MDR celebrates in India (a portrait that, in fact, masks the community’s more layered heterogeneity). Doing so valorizes and...
Chapter 7 analyzes the strategies and demands of poor emigrants’ organizations and migrant recrui... more Chapter 7 analyzes the strategies and demands of poor emigrants’ organizations and migrant recruiters. Poor Indian emigrants have drawn on their structural power as voters and “protectors of the nation’s foreign exchange” to demand from the government the liberalization of emigration, “rights-based” (as opposed to “paternalist”) welfare, increased data, and recognition. But the partisan and cross-class nature of their organizations have deradicalized them, especially compared to domestic labor organizations. This chapter examines how the CEO MDR has ironically undermined private recruiters, a class actor that the CEO MDR legitimized and legalized in the first place. Under the CEO MDR, small and medium-size private recruiters have become bankrupt, shut down, or returned to extralegal business operations, while large private recruitment businesses have prospered.
Chapter 6 exposes how the CEO MDR has forged an elite class pact of “global Indians” that include... more Chapter 6 exposes how the CEO MDR has forged an elite class pact of “global Indians” that includes India’s state officials, domestic business leaders, and elites abroad. This celebrated group dominates Indian development and attains material wealth and status in the process. To seal this class pact, the CEO MDR has tapped elite emigrants’ social and ideological contributions to development (in the form of their ideas, ideals, tastes, networks, and technical expertise). It has invited elite emigrants to forge partnerships with Indian businesses, reshape India’s voluntary sector, invest in Indian real estate, and serve in elite policy positions within the government. And it has framed Indian Americans, in particular, as successful, hard-working, private-sector professionals and entrepreneurs whom domestic Indians should emulate. The CEO MDR has not, however, tapped poor emigrants for their social and ideological remittances. Rather, it has tried to cement their consent to elite ideals...
Chapter 2 explains the book’s methodological approach and analytical framework of Migration-Devel... more Chapter 2 explains the book’s methodological approach and analytical framework of Migration-Development Regimes. To do so, it draws on the global literature on migration to identify four sets of forces and actors that shape sending-state emigration practices. The first highlights the power of northern-imposed development ideologies/norms, particularly neoliberal globalization. The second exposes how, at certain moments, sending states act as agents in and for themselves—striving to ensure domestic material accumulation, political legitimacy, and material redistribution at the global level. The third reminds us how poor and elite emigrants, as well as their transnational organizations, sometimes resist and reshape sending state emigration practices. The final emphasizes the role of history. Building on this global migration literature, this chapter explains the MDR framework. MDRs are defined as the full set of emigration practices and policies that enable sending countries to ensure...
Chapter 4 details the rise and fall of India’s first postcolonial MDR. The Nationalist MDR (1947–... more Chapter 4 details the rise and fall of India’s first postcolonial MDR. The Nationalist MDR (1947–77) retained much of the Coolie MDR’s class-based regulatory infrastructure but instituted a new development model defined by the nation’s new geographic boundaries. To maintain its domestic image as a protector of vulnerable Indians and its global image as a self-sufficient nation, the new Indian state extended a paternalist brand of protection over its poor workers by legally forbidding their emigration. In doing so, the state legitimized its control over poor Indians and ensured their availability to serve India’s domestic industrialization. At the same time, the state permitted elites to emigrate. To secure political legitimacy for this class-based distinction, the state distanced elite emigrants (at least in public) from its development agenda. This approach, however, had important and unintended consequences. First, it broke the cross-class solidarity among emigrants that had arise...
Chapter 9 explores the future prospects of the CEO MDR by underscoring its contradictions and eme... more Chapter 9 explores the future prospects of the CEO MDR by underscoring its contradictions and emerging weaknesses. First, the promise of entrepreneurship has (unsurprisingly) failed to uplift most poor emigrants. State welfare programs for emigrants have also failed to deliver. Second, given most private recruiters’ class position as small and medium-size entrepreneurs, their current discontent exposes a fallacy in the CEO MDR’s claims to promote this very line of labor. Third, elite emigrants’ call for privatization and their underlying distrust of the government’s ability to deliver on development is fomenting fault lines in their relationship with Indian NGOs and the Indian state. If history is any guide, the CEO MDR will eventually fall. This chapter thus explores the potential for the CEO MDR’s weaknesses to mobilize resistance.
India's attempt to spur growth, boost exports, and create jobs by establishing Special Econom... more India's attempt to spur growth, boost exports, and create jobs by establishing Special Economic Zones (SEZs) is a paradox: the policy represents an intensification of the country's increasingly market-oriented development paradigm, but implementation has required active government involvement. More than a decade after importing the SEZ concept from China, India has hundreds of these walled-off, deregulated, low-tax enclaves. But an industrialization strategy pioneered in authoritarian China has faced huge political resistance in democratic India. Protest movements arose in many localities where SEZs were proposed. Resistance varied in terms of the intensity and sustainability of opposition, the grievances articulated, and the tactics employed. A central issue has been the alienation of privately owned land by business interests, abetted by the state. To date, no systematic study of the politics of India's SEZ experiment has been undertaken. This book remedies this gap, examining variations within and between eleven states. Detailed case studies investigate differences in the nature and extent of SEZ-related political mobilization and the means employed by governments to manage dissent. By covering a broad range of regional contexts, industrial sectors, and political conditions, this volume furnishes a comprehensive picture of the politics surrounding one of India's most controversial reform measures. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Manshi Asher is an independent social activist and researcher working on issues of livelihood and environmental rights; Partha Sarathi Banerjee is an independent social science researcher; Solano Jose Savio Da Silva is Lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Management, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Goa; Avinash Kumar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi; Benita Menezes is a graduate student in comparative development planning at the University of British Columbia and an executive member of the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (Mumbai);Anjali Mody is a freelance journalist and researcher; Rohit Mujumdar is a doctoral candidate at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia, where he also works with the Comparative Urban Studies Network and the Beyond Text Collective; Sudha Pai is Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Karli Srinivasulu is Professor of Political Science, Osmania University, Hyderabad; M. Vijayabaskar is Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies.
Recent tragedies in Bangladesh and Pakistan have led to greater public attention on the garment a... more Recent tragedies in Bangladesh and Pakistan have led to greater public attention on the garment and textile industry. Hence, this study is timely and provides insights into the current working conditions, organizing efforts, and the changing organization and structure of the industry in question. Our central question in this study is the extent to which worker organization can improve monitoring and enforcement of labor standards in subcontracted and home-based work in the garment and textile sectors in Brazil, China, India, and South Africa. Existing research literature suggests that in at least some cases of informalized and casualized work, formation and mobilization of worker organizations can do much in this regard. The research has particularly pointed to the importance of innovative and alternative forms of organization that depart from standard trade union models—in line with the departure of whole sections of the world of work from standard forms of work organization. While...
Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. ... more Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. Yet in the subcontinent class has lost its centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a major force in the eclipsing of class through discursive strategies of constructivist idealism. Formalism in social sciences finds class relations elusive and difficult to measure. Market triumphalism eclipsed concern with rehabilitation of “weaker sectors” and redressing of exploitation as measures of national success. Class analytics, however, continues to serve two critical functions: disaggregating development and explaining challenges to rules of the game. Restoring agency to class requires attention first to relations that structure choice in restricted or expansive ways. Global forces have altered people's relations to production and to one another, as have changes in the political opportunity structure, with significant effects on tact...
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