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Policies and Practices 46
 
A Gigantic Panopticon: Counter-Insurgency and Modes of Disciplining in Northeast India
Sajal Nag explores the uneven transition in postcolonial India of modes of disciplining insurgency in the Northeast using Foucault’s idea of the transition of spectacular modes of disciplining in mediaeval Europe to surveillance in modern times. He argues, contrasting Nagaland and Manipur, that counter-insurgency strategies made a transition from the ‘corporeal’ – meaning, in this case, stringent armed operations, including aerial bombardment – to surveillance, in the form of the relocation of people from their original rural habitations into sequestered camps.
Essay by Sajal Nag

Policies and Practices 45
 
Governing Flood, Migration and Conflict in North Bihar
This essay explores the dynamics of seasonal outmigration from North Bihar, a flood-prone area, to Punjab and Haryana for agricultural work. Basing itself on two phases of fieldwork, Mithilesh Kumar argues that the scale of carefully calibrated and well-organized migration out of the region provided a safety valve that helped it remain comparatively free from Left extremist and caste-based violence when compared to Central Bihar, despite the fact that it was much more impoverished.
Essay by Mithilesh Kumar

Policies and Practices 44
 
Two Essays on Security Apparatus
Ranabir Samaddar’s essay examines historically the role of the wall as a multifunctional apparatus. While in historical time, he argues, physical walls were built to protect those in the inner space from, so to speak, the barbarians at the gates, in modern times symbolic walls are built by the strong and prosperous to keep out intruders, the flotsam and jetsam, of the poorer world out. But he also argues that the wall is often metaphorical as in the UK where policies of multiculturalism have created ‘walls’ between corporatized society and those outside the charmed circle. Yet walls create subjects that often defeat the purpose of the wall.

Anja Kanngeiser looks at the use of new tracking and surveillance technologies in the logistics industries – transport, distribution, inventory management, for example – to control supply chains through the control of the bodies and schedules in minute detail and in real time. She explores the implications of such surveillance in various arenas – labour rights and the right to privacy being important among them – in the larger context of borders, capital and geographical fragmentation and representation.
Essays by Ranabir Samaddar and Anja Kanngieser
 

Policies and Practices 43
 
Situating Transit Labour
As part of the Calcutta Research Group’s work on Transit Labour, we publish here four presentations on the idea of transit labour, reflecting on a larger platform on new forms of labour in the global context. These presentations serve to complicate the idea partially by historicising it and partially by expanding its scope. In other words, while one view of ‘transit labour’ looks at it as a form peculiar to sectors of the economy that have been generated by the post-Fordist global political economic structures and networks, these lectures suggest that the applicability of the concept has deeper historical roots and extends to what is hitherto considered as more traditional sectors. The concept of transit labour has, in this context, taken on a more protean, multivalent dimension. This volume presents four notes on transit labour.
Essays by Samita Sen, Mouleshri Vyas, Babu P. Remesh and Byasdeb Dasgupta