For the radical activists and critical scholars who encounter and observe the juggernaut of the development machine, anti-politics is a quotidian reality. States, international development agencies, NGOs and donors are, to varying degrees, accomplices in the vehement and unrelenting tendency to treat politics in the widest sense with disdain or disquiet, or both, and the desire to ‘depoliticize’ development is as strong as ever. This book is not trying to prove otherwise. Indeed, it is in large measure an attempt to document the making and unfolding of a definite discourse of depoliticization through the premier state-led and nationally implemented participatory watershed development programme in India. This is a country with an unequivocal history of antipolitics, since colonial times, through technocratic development planning embedded within a large state bureaucracy. Being a vibrant and dynamic democracy with a highly differentiated social fabric, India puts James Ferguson's views about development as an anti-politics machine to the test in very unique ways. While there is no doubt that there is an anti-politics machine in India, its outcomes are different from those Ferguson predicted for Lesotho. Studying the particular contours of the anti-politics machine in India is the principal business of this book, and in doing so, the book develops a distinctive approach to examining the problem of depoliticization in general. The book concludes not just that India presents a different context for the anti-politics critique of development that Ferguson levelled at Lesotho, but also that there is a need to go considerably beyond what Ferguson proposed.