Samantha Agarwal is the third Next System Speaker for 2025.

*This event is in person AND virtual. You will receive a link to join the Zoom after RSVPing.

Kerala's "People's Planning Campaign" (PPC), initiated in 1996, represents a landmark in decentralized governance and resulted in the transfer of significant decision-making power and resources to local self-governments (LSGs). While the PPC demonstrably increased local participation in the process of governance and planning in Kerala, its long-term sustainability and ability to address entrenched inequalities remain contested (Heller 2000; Tharakan 2004; Oommen 2014). This talk will focus on a less-explored aspect of decentralization, which is the ways in which it creates political opportunities for the growth of political parties and movements previously considered fringe. Based on ten months of ethnographic research and 200 interviews in Kerala’s capital city of Trivandrum, this talk explores the ways in which the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu nationalist affiliates expand their reach and influence in Kerala by engaging in the LSGs. For the BJP, which has virtually no presence at the state level in Kerala (while being dominant at the all-India level), the LSGs not only serve as a source of funding for local-level party work but also as a much-needed source of legitimacy. Further, this talk will show how the BJP concentrates its local efforts in hyper-segregated, marginalized urban spaces, using the resources of the LSGs to address–and effectively capitalize on--grievances arising from caste-oppressed populations who have been relatively excluded from the spoils of Kerala’s social democracy. This analysis uncovers the unintended consequences of decentralization, demonstrating how it can facilitate the rise of far-right, authoritarian political currents within a seemingly progressive framework.

Dr. Agarwal is currently a Changemaker Postdoctoral Fellow at American University. She holds an MA and PhD in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Political Science and Environmental Policy from The Ohio State University. Prior to becoming an academic, she worked for five years with indigenous land and labor movements in central India. She is currently involved in and is the co-founder of The Cornerstone Project which trains groups in the DMV area and beyond on the fundamentals of grassroots organizing.