Through a discussion of the articles of this issue, this introduction explores the ways in which the social landscape of post-liberalisation India can be seen through the question of value. We are particularly interested in elucidating how heterogeneous kinds of value—be they economic, ritual, aesthetic, ethical or otherwise—have come to be articulated to and thus constitutive of various forms of cultural practice in contemporary India. We suggest that one way to understand the question of value is through in-depth ethnographic analysis of ‘social value projects’: reflexive and purposive attempts by social actors to produce, negotiate, transform, maintain and sometimes abjure various types of value. We suggest that such value projects can be ethnographically approached through the interactional events that comprise them and that these, in turn, require attention to the emergent and contingent nature of value, its multiplicities and excesses and the ways in which value is articulated to, and through, the performing and ratifying of social identities.

Over the course of two years of fieldwork in the labor camps of Qatar, I frequently encountered myths, urban legends, and rumors told to me by the many labor migrants I came to know. In this paper, I take those urban legends as my data, and through a brief analysis, I contend that these rumors, myths, and legends provide a new and unique vantage point on these men's experiences and beliefs about the time they spend abroad in Qatar. More specifically, I see these stories as instruments of governance, as a testament to these men's vulnerability and powerlessness, as a lexicon of collective experiences, and much more.

The notification of Mudumalai Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu as a tiger reserve in 2007 has resulted in a contested politics between activists, non-governmental organisations and conservationists with regard to the future of protected area management. This paper presents an account of how these actors positioned themselves around not only the creation of the tiger reserve, but also the proposed elephant corridor and the Forest Rights Act of 2006. It suggests that due process of law has not been followed adequately and that sufficient scientific evidence has not been presented in the public domain as required. The Forest Rights Act is seen to offer an opportunity to democratise the management of natural resources with all its social and ecological complexities and provide the necessary checks and balances to bring about conservation based strongly on scientific evidence.

A discourse analysis of court documents in slum-related cases from the past 25 years leads to the conclusion that the basic statement that “slums are illegal” is a very recent juridical discourse and the rise of court orders to demolish slums in Dehli is due to reinterpretation of nuisance law. The “new nuisance discourse” that arose in the early 2000s re-problematised slums as nuisances and became the primary mechanism by which slum demolitions take place at present. The paper draws conclusions on how civil law is used to violently re-create urban space in the interests of private property owners.

Relatively high wages and the opportunity to be part of an upscale, globalized work environment draw many in India to the call center industry. At the same time, night shift employment presents women, in particular, with new challenges alongside the opportunities. This book explores how beliefs about what constitutes "women's work" are evolving in response to globalization.

Working the Night Shift is the first in-depth study of the transnational call center industry that is written from the point of view of women workers. It uncovers how call center employment affects their lives, mainly as it relates to the anxiety that Indian families and Indian society have towards women going out at night, earning a good salary, and being exposed to western culture. This timely account illustrates the ironic and, at times, unsettling experiences of women who enter the spaces and places made accessible through call center work.


Visit the author's website at http://www.working-the-nightshift.com/ and facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=106631019373960.

In the last chapter we saw how caste and nation came to be construed as representing two opposing and mutually contradictory principles—tradition and modernity—in the ideology and social morphology of Dumontian sociology. In this chapter I provide a different kind of critique of this position. I do this by showing how concepts of purity and honour function in the sphere of kinship as well as in constituting the nation.

De la caste marchande gujarati à la communauté religieuse fatimide : construction identitaire et conflits chez les daoudi bohras (ouest de l'Inde) JURY M. Gérard D. Heuzé (Directeur de la thèse) M. Michel Boivin (Rapporteur) M. Harald Tambs-Lyche (Rapporteur) M. Pierre Lachaier (Examinateur) Mme Aminah Mohammed-Arif (Examinatrice) Centre d'anthropologie sociale (CAS) Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Solidarités, Sociétés, Territoires Ecole Doctorale TESC 1

Based upon the ethnographic study of two land disputes in the rural Assamese district of Karbi Anglong (India), this article challenges the idea that the entry of new institutional players, with their multiple sets of rules, inevitably leads to open institutional conflict. Although a wide range of political actors are involved in the regulation of land tenure in Karbi Anglong, they cannot be regarded as institutional structures ready to undercut one another. As in other parts of Northeast India, none of the claimants of public power involved —‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ or ‘the chief’— attain full sovereignty, which forces them to exercise authority predominantly through practices of negotiation and accommodation, and only selective contestation. If open institutional conflict does occur, as in the Dhansiri forest and the Singhason plateau cases studied here, this is due to the fact that one of the institutional players has overstretched and attempted to exercise authority beyond its realm of power. This article thus argues for a more agency-oriented method of analysis in the study of land relations. The focus on everyday interactions between ‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ and ‘the chief’ in Karbi Anglong is a first attempt in that regard.

This article examines young men’s concepts of status in urban Tamil Nadu, India, focussing in particular on their concept of ‘style’. The article shows how young men experience their position in the life cycle as between childhood and adulthood, and how this liminality mediates their concepts of status. In particular, I focus on the construction of the youth peer group as in distinction to, and transgressive of, the forms of adult respectability, propriety and authority from which young men are excluded by virtue of their age. I show how the peer group is marked by a productive tension between transgression and self-differentiation, and reciprocity, intimacy and peer pressure. The article then turns to two kinds of source material for young men’s performances of status: English-Tamil slang and counterfeit global brands. I show how the tension between, and negotiation of, the mandates to status-raise and status- level in the peer group transform and revalourise these signs of status. The article concludes by arguing that while from afar, such youth practice seems to be negotiating globalisation, modernity and tradition, a close analysis of peer-group dynamics shows that youth practice is more centrally concerned with peer-group status negotiations.

There is need of a rigorous and comprehensive history of Indian sociology-anthropology, constituted as a full-fledged research area, to study the material, ideological and institutional context in which these disciplines developed. A report on a national workshop on the issue.

Tartaron, Thomas F., 2018. "Geography Matters: Defining Maritime Small Worlds of the Aegean Bronze Age," in J. Leidwanger and C. Knappett, eds., Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61–92.

In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency is a fine-grained critique of the Naga struggle for political redemption, the state’s response to it, and the social corollaries and carry-overs of protracted political conflict on everyday life. Offering an ethnographic underview, Jelle Wouters illustrates an ‘insurgency complex’ that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate inter-personal and inter-tribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. It thus presses us to rethink our views on tribalism, conflict and ceasefire, development, corruption, and democratic politics

Politicized aesthetics have been a perennial subject of debate for philosophers, art historians and architects, but the politics of aesthetics have been largely unaddressed aside from Rancière’s examination of the distribution of the sensible. Instead of considering the politicization of aesthetic content, Rancière looks at the political context presupposed by aesthetics. Design’s political impact resides in its delineation of stakeholders and assignation of roles: who makes design decisions, and who is served by design. Design’s role and value are inextricably tied to a political climate, cultural context having as much political implication as content. As such, design is to be understood as a political act whose relationship with governance needs to be taken into consideration.

Trends in design discourse may seem to only reside in the esoteric annals of universities and their affiliated practitioners, but their impact upon practice has very tangible political consequences. Ecological urbanism is a case in point, embracing values that are presumed to be universally applicable without recognizing the specificity of their implicit politics. The latest incarnation of landscape urbanism, ecological urbanism is Charles Waldheim’s cynical take on a growing body of work that prizes “natural” evolution as a design process, blindly misreading and misapplying notions of ecology. While his criticism focuses on the gaping disparity between landscape urbanist projects and the ecological discourse that surrounds them, the political impact of this discourse, as unrealized as it may be, remains potent.

The tenets of ecological urbanism aspire to contextual sensitivity, but the tenets themselves are held to be absolute and deemed appropriate for exportation to diverse countries, especially in international development contexts. John Turner’s self-help housing and its recent avatar, incremental housing, fall in line with the open systems and user freedom embraced by ecological urbanism. It is precisely ecological urbanism’s attachment to indeterminacy and contingency that makes it apt for large-scale projects whose scale and lengthy implementation increase liability for unforeseen changes. Infrastructure projects need flexibility in order to remain functional for their anticipated lifespan and breadth, and ecological urbanism offers the tools and vocabulary to achieve it. Overlooked in the eager taking up of ecological urbanist principles are the political scaffolds upon which the principles were originally founded, scaffolds that are culturally specific and not necessarily transferable from country to country.

With primary data emerging from maps, technical drawings, and interviews with city engineers, consultants, grassroots organizations, slum dwellers, and sanitation professionals in Ahmedabad, this paper looks at the socio-political assumptions underlying design choices with a focus on freedom, autonomy, agency and individuality. It endeavours to examine the consequences of ecological urbanism in developing countries, taking Ahmedabad’s sewerage system as a case study to discuss broader issues of the politics of aesthetics.

In a much-publicized paper, Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) reported evidence that feelings of moral cleanliness are grounded in feelings of physical cleanliness: a threat to people’s moral purity leads them to seek, literally, to cleanse themselves. In an attempt to replicate and build upon these findings, we conducted a pilot study in which we unexpectedly failed to replicate the original results from the second study of Zhong and Liljenquist’s report. To investigate the source of this issue, we conducted a series of direct replications of Study 2 as reported in Zhong and Liljenquist (2006). We used the authors’ original materials and methods; we investigated samples that were more representative of the general population than in the original experiments; we investigated samples from different countries and cultures; and we substantially increased the power of our statistical tests. Nevertheless, we still failed to replicate Zhong and Liljenquist’s initial reported findings. Our research suggests that more work is needed to clarify the scope and robustness of the original results.

This paper submits that practical concerns have overtaken the theoretical in contemporary anthropology,especially in India. A perilous consequence of this trend is that instead of illuminating the functioning and dynamics of society and culture in particular and general terms  it confines itself to the question of policy prescription. By directing their energies to the 'issues, of  usefulness', anthropologists have come to think
that the future survival of anthropology is incumbent upon its immediate market value.
The future of anthropology can be enhanced, instead, by giving primacy to an interpretative understanding of societies and cultures, thereby making comments on existing policies for development and social justice more perceptive and relevant.

While struggles over land dispossession have recently proliferated across the developing world and become particularly significant in India, this paper argues that existing theories of political agency do not capture the specificity of the politics of dispossession. Based on two years of ethnographic research on anti-dispossession movements across rural India, the paper argues that the dispossession of land creates a specific kind of politics, distinct not just from labor politics, but also from various other forms of peasant politics that have been theorized in the social sciences. It illustrates how the process of land dispossession itself shapes the targets, strategy and tactics, organization, social composition, goals, and ideologies of anti-dispossession struggles. It concludes with reflections on why land conflicts are less easily institutionalized than labor conflicts and may therefore constitute a significantly disruptive force in the emerging centers of global capitalism for the foreseeable future.

In a radical departure from previous ethnographies of food, this book asks how and why food is pivotal to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not-normal. It does so by describing the production, consumption, distribution, and disposal of ‘normal Bengali food’ in middle-class households that employ cooks from poor classes, and in Bengali restaurants, in contemporary Calcutta (India) and Dhaka (Bangladesh). In a rare comparative foray into Bengali Hindu and Muslim food-ways on both sides of the border, the book includes addas (‘idle-talk’) and interviews with both men and women. It initiates a dialogue that links issues of agency, place, hospitality, and ownership with a new field that places food as an ‘artefact’ at the centre of its inquiry. It invites the reader throughout to approach food afresh, as the key that unlocks the complexities of what is mundane yet profound — the everyday.

The book thus analyses the constant and fraught negotiations that feed into definitions of normality, class and identity through networks of human and non-human interactions – persons, places, and things - in the deeply intimate yet intensely public domain of food. Food transactions here provide a window into shifting configurations of trust, power, and conflict integral to social relationships, shaped by events such as the 1943–44 Bengal famine, the 1947 partition of India, and the 1971 Bangladesh War.

Table of Contents:

List of Photographs

Foreword by Marilyn Strathern

Preface and Acknowledgements

Note on Language, Translation, and Transliteration of Bengali Words

1. Food as Agency: Introducing Normality

2. The Actants of a Normal Foodscape

3. 'Like Everyday’: Creating Normality

4. The Everyday Normal Sacred Kitchen

5. Of Seducing and Respectable, Hospitable and Stingy Foods: Subjectivities of Normal Food

6. Cha (tea), Gan (song), aar (and) Adda (‘idle’/’care-less’ talk): Making and Consuming Normal Food Identities

7. Normal Food and Ownership

8. Postprandial Ruminations

Bibliography

Index

This article engages historically and ethnographically the idea and idiom of the prototypical Naga ‘village republic.’ Even as the popular imagination of Naga villages as ‘republics’ traces back to colonial writings, and while much has changed since, I illustrate the remarkable
resilience of the ‘Naga village’ as a political, partisan, self-protective and affective unit. I perceive the Naga village as encompassing a moral community characterized by its temporal and spatial rootedness, and whose inhabitants define themselves through the conduit of historical memory – a nexus locally between history, locality, ancestral genealogy, and identity – and which orients their relations with neighbouring and nearby villages and villagers. More specifically, I discuss the contemporary form and substance of the ‘Naga village’ in relation to
(1) identity and identification, (2) local governance, particularly Nagaland’s policy of communitisation, and (3) democracy and elections.

Here, I delve into pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Indian history in order to understand recent (as of December 2014) political changes affecting LGBT rights in India. Specifically, I sought to understand and unpack the supposed contradiction—understood as such by many Western observers—between the Indian Supreme Court recognizing transgender rights while upholding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law that effectively criminalizes homosexuality. Previously, there had been much speculation about the subject in the media but no thorough attempts to illuminate the issue. This research paper, written at the conclusion of the graduate class 'Politics of Religion in South Asia' (Dr. Jonah Blank, Fall 2014, JHU-SAIS), was meant to fill that gap.

Highlighting 'pre', 'trans' and 'new' tribal formations amongst upland Nagas in India's Northeast, this article formulates both a historical critique against dominant categorisations of the region's social landscape and posits alternative ways of 'seeing' local patterns of kinship, identity and belonging. Drawing on ethno-historical perspectives from the Chang and Chakhesang Nagas, I illustrate the problematic cultural transitivity of the idea and idiom of 'tribe' which conceals the social formations that existed—and occasionally persist—before, beneath, betwixt and between categories of 'tribe'. This realisation brings us to a dilemma which, I think, ought to be at the heart of the anthropology of Nagas and of India's Northeast more widely—namely, how to account for the ethnographic observation that social organisation—both past and present—is based on interpersonal, village and clan networks which cut across tribal and ethnic groups with clearly permeable boundaries and yet most people maintain a view of the whole society as made up of partitioned, culturally coherent and historically immutable entities.

This article introduces the concept of the "Indian Face" as a discursive and somatic image, or a face-scape, that represents the Indian nation with the aim of rendering legible the existing confusion between Mongoloid phenotypes, preponderant in India's Northeast, and Indian citizenship. We posit that Mongoloid phenotypes have not found a place in the common imaginary of the "Indian Face," although the latter is itself a highly diversified and inclusive concept. Northeasterners are often nonrecognized and misrecognized, or mirrored back by the wider Indian society as foreigners, hailing from such places as China, Nepal, Thailand, or Japan, and this withholding of "Indianness" works to discriminate against and marginalize them. To theorize this predicament we propose to substitute the logo-map, central to much theorizing of nationalism, with a "physiognomic map," drawn on the imaginings of what a co-citizen might look like. The nonrecognition, or nonacceptance, of Northeasterners as equal Indians extends, we will show, into the sphere of certain Northeastern vernacular cultural practices, which are deemed "Un-Indian" and subjected to "cultural policing." Taken together, the "Indian Face" and "cultural policing" work to delineate the physiognomic and cultural boundaries of "Indianness" and hence Indian citizenship.

The term kuravar is often used rather loosely by people in Tamil Nadu, South India, today. It is often used as a nontechnical term (something like the English word "gypsy" or "tribal") which covers a number of demi-tribal and tribal communities-groups which often

In the last chapter we saw how caste and nation came to be construed as representing two opposing and mutually contradictory principles—tradition and modernity—in the ideology and social morphology of Dumontian sociology. In this chapter I provide a different kind of critique of this position. I do this by showing how concepts of purity and honour function in the sphere of kinship as well as in constituting the nation. It will become clear that in moving from the sphere of kinship to that of nation these concepts undergo major transformations.' ...

Il libro è dedicato a lei, alla Dea Madre e ai suoi mille volti, a quell’energia femminile, ora più che mai necessaria per creare una nuova condizione di pace. Questa particolare ‘guida di vi-aggio’ enfatizza lo sguardo femminile presente in ogni creatura vivente. Il libro si concentra sull’Eros e il Tantra, incontrando le misteriose Dakini e il loro potere penetrante e creativo, nei luoghi più segreti dell’India, e non solo. Anche Yogini, Apsaras e altre mille creature ci guideranno negli angoli più remoti della natura, in quel tempo ove il cielo era una parte della terra, e la terra era fusa con tutti gli elementi…

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness. By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.

Like many other anthropologists compelled to write on violence, the grammar of terror, or on the dismay of images, I have been caught in a scene of writing in which the moral urgency has far outpaced the capacity to render the violence intelligible. In this chapter I want to reflect on this very poverty as a virtue.

P. R. Sarkar describes Ráŕh, an ancient land in eastern India, as the “Cradle of Civilization” and as one of the points where human beings first appeared on Earth about a million years ago. He also claims that the historical Shiva visited Ráŕh about 7500 years ago, stimulating the explosive development of its culture and civilization. This article contains Chapters 1-9 of P. R. Sarkar’s 31-chapter book Ráŕh—The Cradle of Civilization.  P. R. Sarkar (also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) (1922-1990), was the spiritual guru of Ananda Marga and a Tantric and Yogic Preceptor in the tradition of Shiva and Krishna. – Richard Gauthier, Santa Rosa, California, October 26, 2020.

Tarak Chandra Das is one hero who has not found a place befitting his importance in Indian anthropology. That his contributions to this field are enormous is never denied and it is time that matters are set right in an age where the examination of anthropology is becoming so significant. It is time for students of anthropology and even the layman to renew their interest in him. Very few have studied Tarak Chandra Das thoroughly enough to understand how he applied the anthropological approach as an effective way of enriched understanding of human experiences in specific situations or in relation to specific issues. More than a translator or depicter of human experiences, Das distinguished himself as a complete anthropologist by clearly defining his research areas and asking crucial questions. His confidence in the scientific method of anthropology was reflected in the way he approached research problems. In his presidential address at the anthropology section in the 28th Indian Science Congress, 1941, Das strongly advocated the role of anthropology in nation-building, showing remarkable foresight and demonstrating his conviction in the anthropological approach to issues of national concern. He took a more synchronic and functional view of socio-cultural anthropology in his theoretical orientations, in all likelihood. This was confirmed in his observations at the Science Congress address: " Anthropology is commonly believed to be a borderline science which has no practical application. This misconception is due partly to lack of knowledge of the scope and recent advances in anthropology on the part of the ordinary man and partly to the anthropologists themselves who have in the past laid too much emphasis on the historical side of the subject (Source: Abhijit Guha, 2016) ". Things have not much changed since then. Regrettably, his concerns did not evoke the deserved response from the academic world and Tarak Chandra Das was relegated to a position of relative

" The proposed paper treats a particular aspect of the literary production and the oral lore transmitted among the Bauls and Fakirs of Bengal: the methods and views on conception, contraception and control of fertility transmitted by the practitioners through oral teachings and songs.
A consistent part of Bauls' lyrics deals with body-centered practices that aim at controlling sexual desire, purifying the body and attaining longevity. The recommended methods are the result of a complex and sophisticated system of beliefs about the alchemy of the subtle body, ontogenetic development, metaphysical anatomy and secret gynecology. The esoteric knowledge of conception and contraception is revealed in the lyrics of the songs through an obscure, enigmatic language that needs to be decoded by the guru in order to be understood and experienced.
Thus Baul gurus are regarded as the guardians of the “secret of both suppression and enhancement of fertility, for knowledge of conception is also knowledge of contraception” (Jeanne Openshaw 2004: 207); they are teachers of sexual education and awareness about the initiates' body. In the songs they use for explaining these doctrines, ontogeny is a crucial theme, for cosmogony, and the conditions that were present at the creation of the universe, are believed to be recreated every month in a woman's body when she menstruates (Carol Salomon 1991).
Attracted by the practical benefits of the esoteric teachings regarding birth control, a wide group of followers among the lower castes and the rural population joined the practice of jugal-sādhanā (esoteric body-centered practice to be performed by a couple). However, with the diffusion of healthcare and modern contraceptives, it is possible that the role of a Baul guru has, or is going to, drastically change. How does the impact of modern, governmental healthcare interfere with the transmission of esoteric knowledge? How is this interacting with practices rooted among the initiates? To what extent is medical technology and the diffusion of modern contraceptives threatening the transmission of the traditional sādhanā?
These problematic developments have not been researched thoroughly, and many of these questions are still to be satisfactorily answered. Here I will try to offer possible solutions employing an inter-disciplinary methodology that combines folk literature with ethnography, based on the approach proposed by the field of verbal arts and the contextual theory of the study of oral traditions."

Interrogating the normative notion of 'man the voter' , this article draws on ethnography among the Chakhesang Naga in Northeast India to communicate a cosmopolitan, culturalist critique – and an answer to this critique – of liberal democracy's hallmark of party-based elections, individual autonomy and equal voting rights. While Nagas have been decorated as 'traditional democrats' , their sense of the good political life is shaped by values of communal harmony, consensus-building and complimentary coexistence. However, these are threatened by practices and principles of liberal democracy, which led Phugwumi villagers to attempt a procedural adaptation of elections by substituting individual voting for consensus-building and the selection of a leader. I use this ethnographic case to provincialize the sprawling contemporary sense of 'liberal universalism' , and to postulate that, in their political sociality, Nagas are a 'society against voting' , an adaptation of Pierre Clastres' (1977) Society against the State.

This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a ‘social good’, that is capable of simultaneously combating disease, tackling poverty and realizing value for shareholders.

"Opposing the neoliberal rhetoric of a shining middle-class India, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has, since 2004, called for a New Democratic Revolution. Indian Maoists dismiss parliamentary democracy as a sham insofar as it fails to address the concerns and aspirations of the majority of its citizens, nearly four-fifths of whom live below two dollars a day. In their party programme, Maoists characterize the postcolonial Indian state as ‘reactionary’ and ‘autocratic’ and seek a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ to overthrow ‘imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism’ via an armed revolutionary struggle. The CPI (Maoist) politburo, which constitutes its ideological leadership, is thus supported by an underground People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The party’s long-term objective is to establish a ‘people’s democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat’ that will ‘guarantee real democracy for the vast majority of people while exercising dictatorship over a tiny minority of exploiters’.

The CPI (Maoist) is active mostly in eastern and central India, where human development levels rank among the lowest in the world, forest cover and rugged terrain facilitate guerrilla tactics and protracted low-intensity insurgency, and tribal and lower caste groups are preponderant. According to the Indian prime minister, Maoist rebels pose the greatest internal security threat to India since independence. In reality, however, Maoist cadres are estimated to be anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 in a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, though this number does not include sympathizers and non-combatants. These thinly-spread cadres are concentrated chiefly in what journalists, policymakers, and scholars call the Red Corridor, running from the Nepalese border through the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh. In these areas, regular elections are held, state and non-governmental organizations routinely participate in rural development, and state police and forest officials coexist with armed rebels and their rural supporters. Since 2005-06, the state has deployed paramilitaries to supplement state police forces in combating Maoist guerillas, which has intensified state-sponsored violence and led to widespread human rights abuses, yet it has been incapable of establishing anything akin to a monopoly of legitimate violence. Shared sovereignty is thus the norm, not the exception, as in other insurgent zones in India such as Kashmir and the northeastern frontier. This state of affairs also suggests that the everyday realities of Indian Maoism are somewhat different from its ideological self-image as a vanguardist revolutionary movement."