On an early February afternoon in 2010, a group of activists from Jhiri Jamli, once a stronghold of the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan (AMS), gathered to talk to us about how the movement had emerged and developed in their village. When the conversation turned to the repression the Sangathan had been subjected to, their frustration was evident: ‘The politicians made one brother fight against the other, and then they went away. But we were the ones who suffered eventually’, one of them said ruefully. ‘They have weakened us’ (group interview, February 2010). They were talking about their experience during the late 1990s, when dominant groups in the region set out to smash the AMS. A campaign of coercion unfolded which saw the apex of the Madhya Pradesh Congress party join hands with merchant elites, the bureaucracy and police at district and tehsil levels, and village authorities. Over a six-month period, forces at the top of the state Congress party ensured that different echelons of the state apparatus worked in concert against the Sangathan and mobilised violence against its activists by orchestrating a vigilante group—paradoxically called the Shanti Sena (Peace Army)—through their patronage network in Adivasi villages.

In this chapter, I set out to decipher the politics of coercion that the KMCS and the AMS confronted as they mobilised to democratise state–society relations in the Bhil heartland. In doing so, I return to a key conceptual concern in this book, namely the need to develop a critical understanding of how the patterned workings of state power over time sustain the reproduction of hegemonic formations. As I argued in the introductory chapter, the mobilisation of coercive power is particularly expressive of how the institutional modalities of the state can be made to work in a way that maintains unequal power relations. Crucially, these workings evade the conceptual scope of Foucauldian perspectives centred on the notion of governmentality and dispersed conceptions of power. What is needed instead is a perspective oriented towards understanding how dominant groups act in and through the state to construct specific configurations of consent and coercion, and uncovering how their ability to do this originates in specific trajectories of state formation.