Since 2008-09, the Indian state has adopted a dual strategy to deal with the ‘Maoist problem’: Security and Development. In the Jungle Mahals of West Bengal, where the Maoists no longer constitute an active threat, a heightened focus on ‘development’ has been noticeable, particularly after the end of communist rule in 2011. Development, as a counterinsurgency tool, has been pushed by both central and state governments through a range of schemes and policies that target poor rural women. Through these 'development' schemes and policies, the state enters the lives and homes of women via discourses of 'empowerment' in erstwhile zones of insurgency. In this paper, I examine the relationships that have evolved between the counter-insurgent state and poor rural women as development subjects in rural eastern India. Through case studies of rural women's self-help groups or SHGs from the Lalgarh region of West Midnapore district, I show how women's everyday encounters with the state have led to paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, former supporters and even participants in insurgency have now started to appropriate the languages and practices of the state, thereby deepening the process of statemaking in the area. On the other hand, however, the centrality of women to counterinsurgency measures has embedded statemaking processes in local webs of gender and politics in ways that planners in Delhi and Kolkata had hardly foreseen. Far from being simply a top-down process, therefore, statemaking in this ex-Maoist liberated zone ought to be understood from below and, indeed, within in order to grasp the mutual constitution between gender relations and political authority in this corner of rural eastern India.
