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[Display omitted] • The paper shows how spirituality strategically supports an Adivasi self-empowerment movement in India. • Spirituality provides motivation, makes groups' indigeneity visible, and protects their activities against reprisals. • Tribal groups in India using this strategy can escape debt bondage and gain their own land. • Action organisations working with subaltern groups can orchestrate spirituality to achieve progressive goals. Spirituality strategically enables self-empowerment in a clandestine movement of Adivasis which this paper calls 'the Programme'. To explain how social movements and action organisations can orchestrate spirituality, this paper examines how the Programme helps landless rural people overcome debt bondage and gain land by employing spiritual repertoires. The paper addresses the question how, in the context of an increasingly tribalised politics in India, spiritual orchestration allows some Scheduled Tribes to make substantive economic gains, especially on debt freedom and land rights. The paper draws on an analysis of qualitative data collected through workshops, interviews and visits to villages across several Indian states, which has been anonymised to protect identities and avoid divulging sensitive information. The study finds that spirituality supports self-empowerment in three ways: first, it provides motivation and ideological reinforcement for people engaging in struggles against debt bondage and for land rights; second, it makes tribal identity more visible and helps groups make claims as indigenous owners; third, it offers groups protection from reprisals and creates platforms for engaging powerful actors. These findings are significant because, for activists and scholars who work with subaltern groups in India or other contexts, they demonstrate that the orchestration of spirituality can strengthen action repertoires for self-empowerment and help groups secure or protect economic and social gains. The paper adds insights to research on social movements and organisations on how to strengthen the 'weapons of the weak'; it contributes empirical knowledge about how strategies to overcome debt and exploitation can succeed; and it underscores the importance of protecting freedom of religion and belief in development practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper re-focuses attention on the big picture question of the persistently low level of female labour force participation in India. • We show how attention on a binary indicator (in the labour force or out of it) misses a crucial aspect of women's economic/productive work. • We suggest that women's work in developing countries should be viewed in terms of at least three categories. • We find that the social norm that places the responsibility of domestic chores exclusively on women is primarily responsible for women's inability to participate in paid work. • We demonstrate the existence of 'virtuous cycles' within families: a history of working women in the family increases the probability of the woman being in paid work. Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying low labor force participation of women. In developing countries, women who are engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers, whereas the men are. We show that for women, not being in paid work is not synonymous with not being in the labour force. Women are often involved in expenditure saving activities i.e. productive work within the family, over and above domestic chores and care work. We document the fuzziness of the boundary between domestic work and unpaid (and therefore invisible) productive work that leads to mismeasurement of women's work and suggest methods to improve measurement. Counting women's expenditure-saving activities yields a substantially higher estimate of women's participation in economic work. On social norms, we show that religion and visible markers such as veiling are not significant determinants of the probability of being in paid work. We find that being primarily responsible for domestic chores lowers the probability of "working", after accounting for all the conventional factors. Our data shows substantial unmet demand for paid work. Given that women are primarily responsible for domestic chores, we find that women express a demand for work that would be compatible with household chores. We demonstrate the existence of 'virtuous cycles' within families: a history of working women in the family (mother or mother-in-law ever worked) increases the probability of being in paid work between 18 and 21 percentage points. This suggests that the positive effects of increasing women's labour force participation today are likely to have positive multiplier effects on the prospects for work in future generations of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between social diversity and state-provided public goods is a central political economy problem. This paper highlights how status inequality is a distinct political channel when diverse groups are spatially segregated. Social status impacts citizens' ability to petition the state successfully and modulates state favoritism or discrimination. We use data from nearly 600,000 Indian villages to show that caste-based status inequality modifies the effect of diversity on local public goods politics. Diversity only negatively impacts local public goods in units where lower-caste groups are numerically preponderant. Such diversity deficit is further amplified when higher-caste groups numerically dominate larger administrative units and lower-caste groups are segregated. • We revisit the theoretical and empirical relationship between status-inequality and development, at a local scale. • We show that when local units are dominated by lower-status groups, public goods are negatively associated with diversity. • The association reverses when higher-status groups are numerically preponderant. • We also show that spatial segregation modulates diversity-development association much to the detriment of low-status groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Agenda 2030 commitment to LNOB operates as a form of 'doublespeak' in India. • The Agenda 2030 call to end extreme inequality requires facilitating the 'hegemonic struggle'. • The absence of religion in Agenda 2030 masks the way that religion is leveraged by populists. • Pastoralism is a 'pious occupation' where religion shapes connections to the land and animals. • Religion is an important factor in the hegemonic struggle that the LNOB commitment should enable. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development pledged to 'leave no one behind' (LNOB). This article suggests that LNOB can be a form of 'doublespeak', susceptible to being used to mask ideologies and policies that worsen social, political and religious divisions. Despite stated commitments to LNOB, both Agenda 2030 and the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of India adhere to narrow models of development that fail to address and exacerbate the growing problem of religious and other inequalities. This article argues for reclaiming LNOB's radical potential by conceptualising it as an empty signifier that takes on meaning through the hegemonic struggle to articulate what 'left behind' means. It develops this argument through a case study of Hindu Nationalist developmental normativity and two mobile pastoralist communities in Gujarat: Hindu Rabaris and Sufi Muslim Fakirani Jats. The empirical data show that in Gujarat's marketised neo-liberal land regime, mobile pastoralism as a livelihood is increasingly stressed and liable to be constructed as 'left behind'. Simultaneously, the Hindu and Sufi religious practices that shaped pastoralists' relationships with land and animals are being transformed and, framed by the BJP government's promotion of a Hindu nationalist religious identity, are shifting towards adoption of communal Hindu and Muslim identities that exacerbate social and religious inequalities, with particular effects on women. The paper concludes that LNOB has potential to tackle religious and other inequalities and generate a more radical and democratic politics of development if the range of demands that are met by this 'empty signifier' is broadened to challenge the hegemonic representations that dominate, and religion's centrality in this struggle is recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]