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- Title
Re-Thinking Demographic Engineering Practices: New Insights from the Case of the Indian Emergency State (1975–77).
- Authors
Singh, Sourabh
- Abstract
In this article, I claim that demographic engineering scholarship cannot adequately explain the production of demographic engineering practices because they suffer from two classic limitations of state theory: (1) assuming the political elite to be the sole producers of the state practices, and (2) treating the state as an actor. Following the latest theoretical insights on the complex ontology of the state, I claim that we can overcome these limitations of the current demographic engineering scholarship by focusing on interactions between political and bureaucratic actors involved with the demographic engineering policy. I use this insight to examine the population control policy of the Indian state during the Emergency period (1975–1977). My main finding is that the strategies of federal bureaucrats to reproduce their authority over the regional bureaucrats, lowered by political elite dynamics during the Emergency period, enabled the street-level bureaucrats to adopt coercive strategies for achieving their unrealistically high sterilization targets. My study contributes to the studies on demographic engineering, state theory, and the Emergency period in India by highlighting the significance of studying interactions among the political and bureaucratic actors in producing state practices, including but not limited to demographic engineering.
- Subjects
INDIA; EMERGENCY management; POPULATION policy; POLITICAL elites; PSYCHIATRIC emergencies; ENGINEERING; GENE ontology; CIVIL service
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 2024, Vol 47, Issue 1, p95
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11133-024-09558-w