Rethinking Participation: Water, Development and Democracy in Neo-Liberal Bangalore

This paper focuses on the discursive notion of participation central to two discourses, democracy and development. The contemporary rhetoric of development not only opens up the market for the economic progress of developing nations, but also demands a change in the political structure to facilitate the process. Thus, democracy is recruited as collateral for development, which theoretically improves the participation of the target population. However, my ethnography in Bangalore-the Silicon Valley of India-shows that the new middle class is partaking of development projects to reclaim participation solely for democracy. As a 'reassemblage', participation is employed to reconfigure democracy and development along different political axes. I present a public water supply project to describe the boundaries between the two discourses, arguing that they are drawn internally rather than externally.