Voluntarism in partition’s aftermath: the Faridabad story

ABSTRACT This article adopts an alternative framework for thinking about the Nehruvian state and the drivers that shaped India’s postcolonial development strategy. This is a firm shift away from viewing development as a technocratic enterprise, and towards a focus on how the Nehruvian state sought to deploy notions of voluntarism. Within the Indian context, voluntarism referred to the mobilisation of ordinary people to further local development projects. This article investigates voluntarism through efforts at rehabilitating able-bodied refugees in Faridabad. Like many refugee townships that were constructed in the immediate aftermath of Partition, Faridabad was built from the ground up entirely through reskilled able-bodied refugee labour. Within the environment of rehabilitation, the article shows how voluntarism through the cooperative model became an integral postcolonial development strategy adopted by the Nehruvian state to construct new distinct urban spaces on formerly uncultivated lands. However, the article will reveal how the Nehruvian state’s use of voluntarism was beset with tensions, challenges, and problems. The article shows how widespread refugee discontent, bureaucratic mismanagement and alleged financial misconduct ultimately impeded the Nehruvian vision of empowering and mobilising ordinary Indians to further projects of public utility.


Introduction
The independence of India in August 1947 threw up major challenges and questions for the postcolonial state. It was not immediately clear what form the new state would take, nor the shape of development. Historians have written widely about a deep-rooted anxiety amongst India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his senior planning experts about India's supposed 'backward nature', which they argued left India 'lagging behind' and needing to 'catch up' to the economies of the West (see Watt 2011;Parekh 2009;and Zachariah 2004). In this interpretation, 'India had to be made modern, its people dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into modernity' (Zachariah 2004, 192). This was fundamental to what has become known as the Nehruvian state. Although it remains an ambiguous term, Benjamin Zachariah argues that at its roots were attempts to achieve economic self-sufficiency, through improving productivity amongst ordinary Indians. This, Zachariah argues, led the Congress Party, under Nehru's leadership, to pursue projects of stateled developmentalism (Zachariah 2004, 10). However, crucial to realising Nehruvian state-led development initiatives was the active and collective participation, cooperation, and mobilisation of the people.
It is well known that Partition transformed the landscape of India. In the first few decades following Partition, new urban spaces were built by the postcolonial state, ranging from capital cities such as Chandigarh (Punjab) and Bhubaneswar (Orissa), to refuge townships such as Faridabad, Nilokheri, and Ulhasnagar, and later industrial towns such as Bhilai (Madhya Pradesh), Durgapur (West Bengal) and Bokaro (Bihar) (Gupta 1988, 6). This article investigates the process of rehabilitation in the aftermath of the Partition of India in the Faridabad refugee camp. By doing so, it reveals how Faridabad represented a distinct model of postcolonial Indian urban development, where policies of rehabilitation connected the construction of new towns with the development of 'backward, uncultivated, and empty lands' through the mobilisation of refugees (Koenigsberger 1952, 94).
Perhaps most significantly, the focus on rehabilitation at Faridabad allows this article to reveal how the postcolonial Indian state sought to pursue development after independence through voluntarism. Within the Indian context, voluntarism centred on the mobilisation of ordinary people for development purposes (See Jakimow 2010). This is a significant historiographical intervention that sheds light on the active contribution of ordinary people in the process of postcolonial development. As Taylor Sherman has argued, whilst the existing scholarship on postcolonial development tends to regard the populations of developing countries primarily as the objects of topdown policy interventions by political elites and experts, there is a growing need to investigate the active role that ordinary people played in this process (Sherman 2013, 3). A recent shift in the existing scholarship has concentrated on investigating how voluntarism, through the mobilisation of ordinary people, shaped postcolonial development. Nikhil Menon has argued that we need to shift away from understanding Indian postcolonial development driven by the Nehruvian state as a 'purely technocratic enterprise concerned exclusively with the economy', and towards an understanding of how Indian political elites conceived of development and planning as an expansive political project that sought to appeal and mobilise ordinary Indian citizens (Menon 2018, 222).
This article builds and expands on interventions by historians like Sherman and Menon. It argues that postcolonial development was not only about the postcolonial state, but that ordinary people also played an important role in this process. During the Nehru years, India adopted a socialist vision of development, but it was more expansive and decentralised than the existing literature recognises. At the core of India's postcolonial socialism was mobilising the active participation of its citizens, with the promise that the fruits of India's development efforts would be shared by all. A key historiographical intervention that this article contributes to this emergent literature is that the reliance upon popular participation and voluntary collective effort formed part of the broader effort by the postcolonial state under the leadership of Nehru, to project development as a 'peoples programme'. Menon's investigation focuses on how the Nehruvian state sought to popularise the Five-Year Plans and inform the ordinary Indians of their role in the planning process. In doing so, Menon successfully illustrates how the Nehruvian state used various ceremonial forms to bridge the gap between the people and the plan. Sherman, on the other hand, investigates how India's limited state resources and capacity forced the Nehruvian state to use popular action and participation to deal with India's food crisis after independence. This was through programmes such as the Grow More Food Programme (See Sherman 2013 andSiegel 2018). This article expands on these studies by suggesting that the mobilisation of the people formed a part of the broader development framework of the Nehruvian state. Popular action was not just concerned with the Five-Year Plans or increasing food productivity levels; it was also concerned with the construction of distinct new urban spaces through the transformation of ordinary Indians into productive citizens. As the Faridabad case highlights, refugee rehabilitation took the form of building new townships in formerly barren landscapes, which was reflective of new political thinking about urban housing and town planning following independence.
The broader historiographical significance here is that the Nehruvian state was not the main vehicle of development. Rather, the popular mobilisation of ordinary people also played an important role and must be considered when we think about the actors that shaped India's postcolonial development. The focus on voluntarism within this article enables a reconceptualisation of how we think of the Nehruvian state, how the state was deployed, and how it pursued development after independence. This centres on how the postcolonial state's political vision after independence was not only concerned with large or 'big' modernising projects pursued by the technocrats of the Nehruvian state (most notably the Planning Commission), but also the contribution of ordinary people. The theme of popular participation, with an emphasis on the nature of voluntarism, has been overlooked in much of the available literature, which continues to emphasise the technocratic nature of the Nehruvian state (See Sivaramakrishan 2011;Roy 2007;and Prakash 2002). This article argues that we need to shift away from an understanding of postcolonial Indian development as purely a technocratic enterprise concerned with the economy and the expansion of heavy industries (See Kumar 2019; Mohan 2019; Arnold 2013;and Phalkey 2013). The focus on voluntarism reveals how the Nehruvian vision consisted of empowering ordinary Indian citizens, through voluntarist action, to develop urban spaces and communities. Nonetheless, the focus on voluntarism, like technocratic approaches, reveals that the Nehruvian state was not necessarily adept in realising its plans. Whilst the refugees did construct townships, this article argues that beneath the veneer of strength lies an imperfect story of how the state pursued development through the mobilisation of ordinary Indians.
The broader purpose of focusing on events in Faridabad is that much scholarly attention has already been given to the high modernist aspirations of technocratic bodies of the Nehruvian state, like the Planning Commission, and their ability to implement a technocratic vision of India's future (See Kudaisya 2009 andByres 1994). This article rather argues that more attention needs to be given to the practical institutions that upheld this vision on the ground. Francine Frankel has referred to these as 'people's institutions' which became crucial to the development strategy of the postcolonial Indian state, and which sought to liberate and disseminate new productive energies amongst India's vast rural population (Frankel 2005, 26). The article explores this through the mobilisation of Partition refugees, who contributed to the construction of new distinct postcolonial urban spaces. The case study of Faridabad reveals how the Nehruvian state projected the development of uncultivated lands into productive ones as a patriotic act, which was concerned with its broader objectives of creating a postcolonial society of informed, disciplined and productive citizens.
After Partition, the Nehruvian state's projection of the ideal refugee was as a productive labourer whose labour would be harnessed to construct the emergent Indian nation's built environment. The state was determined to ensure that able-bodied refugees did not become economically dependent on the resources of the state. The Nehruvian state neither projected refugee labour nor the rehabilitation efforts in Faridabad within a 'welfare framework'. Rather, state discourse was driven by a desire to 'turn a large number of useless people into useful citizens' 1 through voluntary collective action. Therefore, in a broader context, the construction of new urban spaces through refugee labour was projected by the state as a 'people's programme', whereby every citizen of the emergent Indian nation was to be a productive member of society. This formed part of a singular, top-down statist ideal of productive citizenship, which Uditi Sen (2018) demonstrates as gradually becoming dominant within the regime of rehabilitation in West Bengal. Refugees were increasingly recast as productive agents of postcolonial development (Sen 2018, 15). More recently, Ria Kapoor has shown how the Nehruvian state projected rehabilitation as essential to the development of the nation-state and its built environment. Therefore, whilst being acknowledged to be part of the nation, the treatment of the first refugees in independent India was determined by their incorporation and contribution to new development projects, rather than through securing their legal status (Kapoor 2022, 95-97). Building on this, this article also reveals the limitations, tensions, and challenges that underpinned the statist notions of a productive citizenship. The Faridabad case study reveals that these problems manifested in three principal areas: refugee discontent, bureaucratic mismanagement, and alleged financial misconduct. Thus, when we shift the perspective from the top to the bottom, the transformation of refugees into productive citizens was far from straightforward, and instead was beset with challenges and problems. On a broader level, this article argues that like other developmental experiments of the Nehruvian era, the Faridabad experimental project in community development similarly had a mixed record.
Regarding Faridabad, the article builds on the work of L. C. Jain's autobiographical book The City of Hope, which painstakingly reconstructs the experiment at Faridabad. Jain's account is heavily descriptive and provides little critical engagement with the documents cited, presenting them in order to narrate of events rather than analysing their broader implications. Furthermore, Jain's narrative draws out the political and bureaucratic nature of the experiment predominantly through Nehru's speeches, interactions and correspondence (Jain 1998). In a somewhat similar vein, Sudhir Ghosh's earlier account of Faridabad, in Gandhi's Emissary, discusses its development into India's broader community development drive, without acknowledging the challenges, tensions and problems that underpinned the process, including the absence of any reflection on his own role. Significantly, Ghosh frames his narrative of Faridabad as a model of community development in his attempt to 'create a climate of opinion favourable for U. S. assistance to India' for its rural development projects (Ghosh 1967, 258 and chapter ten). This article aims to build on these existing accounts of Faridabad by situating the events of the camp in the broader framework of India's postcolonial development.
In addition to Jain's study, there have been more recent investigations into other refugee-constructed townships. For example, Jack Loveridge has focused analysis on the Nilokheri township that was led by S. K. Dey, who sought to transform the refugee through vocational training into a disciplined citizen of the nation. Loveridge's research sheds important light on developments at Nilokheri, and it does so from a community development framework. For instance, Loveridge is more concerned with tracing the roots of India's later community development drive and subsequent interventions of the Green Revolution than with the refugee crisis (Loveridge 2017). Notable studies of community development include contributions by Nicola Sackley and Daniel Immerwahr. However, such studies are limited in that they tend to frame their investigations of the global community development movement through how it was influenced by the Cold War priorities of the United States, or shaped through the interventions of American philanthropic organisations (See Immerwahr 2015;Sackley 2013Sackley , 2012Sackley , 2011. Whilst these are important contributions, this article provides a distinct contribution to the existing and emerging literature, because it firmly situates the narrative of community development within the broader trajectory of India's postcolonial development. Whilst both Nilokheri and Faridabad were built from the ground up by the refugees of Partition, crucially, this article seeks to use the refugee crisis and Faridabad as a case study to reconceptualise how we think about the Nehruvian state and its pursuit of development after independence. In doing so, the article therefore argues for a reconceptualisation of the Nehruvian state. In this framework, the postcolonial state (either central or state-level) is no longer considered the main vehicle of development, and the structures of the state are redesigned to meet the new needs of an independent India. Those who led India's early experiments in development set up institutions like the Faridabad Development Board (FDB) and the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU) at a firm distance from the existing bureaucracy and structures of the central government. Thus, to put it simply, the broader significance of this article on histories of development, in India and beyond, is to investigate alternative sites of development that allow us to recognise the important contribution of ordinary people. This will enable us to delve deeper into understanding what factors shaped development on the ground, and whether ordinary people's participation had to be engineered, or whether they were conscious of their role in accelerating the pace of development and building the nation.
The sources used are the accounts of actors on the ground in Faridabad and material available through the digitalised portal of the National Archives of India. Due to these limitations, the article is not able to capture the voices of the refugees within the camps. Nonetheless, through the sources available, it does provide an important historiographical intervention, by revealing that the use of voluntarism within the broader scheme of refugee rehabilitation was far from straightforward, and fraught with difficulties and tensions. Yet, the article also argues that the Nehruvian state's use of voluntarism formed part of its wider vision of empowering and mobilising ordinary Indians to further projects of public utility. By mapping out the ideas and policies of rehabilitation that were driven by actors on the ground in Faridabad, the article reveals the tensions and the bureaucratic hurdles that shaped, and ultimately impeded, this aspect of the Nehruvian state's vision. On a broader scale, the case study of rehabilitation at Faridabad enables the article to argue that under the veneer of strength, the Nehruvian state was not necessarily adept in realising its plans.

Before Faridabad
The absence of an effective state authority and control over the trajectory of post-Partition rehabilitation set the stage for Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's socialist intervention to rehabilitate refugees in East Punjab. Isolated pockets of refugees had been organised into makeshift camps, where government department and voluntary relief workers provided them with rations, fuel, clothes, soaps, tents, and medical aid (Rao 1967, 17). When Chattopadhyay visited the Kingsway Camp (Delhi) to offer a helping hand, she was horrified that the refugees, here and elsewhere, had become dependent on the dole. She was highly critical of the short-termism that had shaped state and voluntary relief efforts. For Chattopadhyay, the question of refugee rehabilitation had to be developed into a bigger national plan for reconstruction, where all efforts should be concentrated on securing improved welfare through the construction of new urban spaces achieved by cooperative action (Nanda 2002, 109).
In early October 1948, Chattopadhyay met with a small group of people, including L. C. Jain, from among the socialists in the Congress Party. For hours they deliberated over the 'refugee question' and arrived at the conclusion that the refugees had to build their own futures through the self-help model. It was at this meeting that the ICU was founded, with Chattopadhyay as its first president to spearhead its efforts (Dhamija 2007, 60). The ICU was a 'voluntary organisation' that sought to provide Indians with the practical means to increase their productivity in agriculture and industry. This was part of a broader initiative about people developing themselves and not becoming reliant on the state. The ICU was distinct from other types of Indian cooperatives, given that it was entirely a non-state institution. This caused issues when Chattopadhyay tried to register the ICU. For instance, the Delhi State Cooperative Department proved to be quite hostile to the ICU because it considered the independent cooperative organisation a challenge to its established authority. Nonetheless, despite the challenges offered by the Cooperative Department, Chattopadhyay was able to successfully register the ICU with the Cooperative Department under the Cooperative Act. Jain hints that the reason for this change in the Cooperative Department's attitude was because of the limited capacity of the state (central and state level), which led to a greater reliance on non-state efforts (See Narasimhan 1999;62 and Jain and Coelho 1996, 16-18). Significantly, the ICU did not rely on state funding for its practical initiatives unless the ICU was responsible for running a state project, like in Faridabad.
Yasmin Khan has shown how in the immediate period after independence, India and Pakistan both faced relentless and protracted difficulties because of the refugee crisis. In the immediate aftermath of Partition, neither state yet had a smoothly running parliament or a fully functioning military to deal with the unfolding refugee crisis and the development aspirations of the newly formed states. Khan argues that in this transitional moment between the colonial and postcolonial regimes, government agencies struggled to cope with the incessant and desperate demands to provide shelter, sustenance, and protection for the refugees (Khan 2017, 168). In addition to this, Kapoor has recently argued that political activist's advocacy on behalf of the refugees regarding their poor treatment by the central government became an avenue for challenging the state (Kapoor 2022, 118). Whilst there was no catch-all solution to 'refugee rehabilitation', the central government's aim throughout the rehabilitation process was to prevent able-bodied economic dependency and general idleness in campsthe Nehruvian state tied refugee policies to the construction of the Indian nation's built environment. Therefore, inevitably, state projections of refugee rehabilitation centred on promoting a 'success story' (Talbot 2011, 115). However, almost fourteen months after Partition in both East Punjab and West Bengal, rehabilitation failed spectacularly in its initial objective to quickly resettle refugees on new lands and in new homes despite extensive central government intervention (Loveridge 2017, 3). Khan argues that this was unsurprising given that the refugee crisis and the process of rehabilitation was distinct and had to be managed locally, and through a process of trial and error (Khan 2017, 168). This point is reflected in the writings of Chattopadhyay, who wrote that the task of 'refugee rehabilitation required urgency and at times they muddled through' (Dubois and Lal 2017, 212). Later, she described the initial days at Faridabad as 'grim days of severe test of numerous errors and trials' (Bakshi 1999, 230), which served to further reinforce the chaotic environment that rehabilitation initially occurred in.
Issues over land quickly became a growing concern for Chattopadhyay. This led her to approach the authorities in charge of the lands left behind by Muslims, in the hope that they could be used to resettle refugees. To her dismay, rather than proportionally distributing the land of Muslim evacuees to refugees who had held land in West Pakistan, she was alarmed that the East Punjab officials had allowed massive tracts of land to become consolidated in the hands of a few non-agriculturalists, to the neglect of refugees from the North-West Frontier Province. While officials in East Punjab had resettled most Punjabi Sikh refugees within a year of Partition, most Hindus and refugees from the North-West Frontier remained in the camps (Loveridge 2017, 4). This led to the ICU's first foray into refugee rehabilitation at Chattarpur (Delhi).
The land at Chattarpur was dry and arid, and the refugees who were to be resettled there were dismayed at the conditions. This was unsurprising given that they had been used to the riverine lushness of the Punjab that they had fled from. Everything at Chattarpur had to be done through the refugee's own labourthis was the environment in which Chattopadhyay put her cooperative model into practice for the first time. Chattopadhyay took personal responsibility for shifting the refugees to the new land site, putting up huts and tents for immediate shelter, and helping them reclaim the land.
The use of the cooperative model at Chatterpur was far from straightforward. The initial aim of the experimental cooperative venture was to help the refugees to construct their own homes. It was Chattopadhyay's intention that in the process of construction the refugees would acquire new technical and industrial skills that would enable them to fashion new livelihoods in place of the old ones they had left behind in Pakistanthe task was anything but easy. The refugees rebelled, shouting, 'we are not labourers, we are zamindars living comfortable lives, we cannot work with our hands!' (Loveridge 2017, 66). The impasse was eventually broken by refugee women, who declared that they were ready to do any work since it was for their own betterment and welfare, with the refugee men following suit. The refugee's ability to contribute to construction efforts was facilitated by various training workshops that were established at Chattarpur with the aim of reskilling them. Significantly, in the absence of central government financial assistance, the rehabilitation efforts emerging at Chattarpur were funded through donations that Chattopadhyay collected from her friends. Donations enabled Chattopadhyay to obtain the necessary tools and implements for the construction efforts, seeds for food production, and most significantly, they allowed her to hire local experts to run the training workshops. It was the reskilling that occurred in these workshops that facilitated both male and female able-bodied refugees, who had never used their hands, never lifted a plough or broken earth, to contribute to efforts to construct the township.
Whilst the rebellious activity was short lived at Chatterpur, it was only foreshadowing the larger problems that Chattopadhyay and the ICU would face at Faridabad. Chatterpur had shown Chattopadhyay that the cooperative model worked. Its larger significance was that it showed that the 'uncultivated' urban landscape of India could be transformed through voluntary and cooperative labour. Reflecting on the development at Chattarpur, Chattopadhyay wrote, 'we aspired to make the Chattarpur area a stimulating pattern in many faceted community progress for this was long before the government's launching of the community projects' (Dubois and Lal 2017, 211). The building of a distinct and new urban space would be better associated with Faridabad, yet it is important to see that its roots lay in the Chatterpur cooperative venture. Seeing the success of voluntary collective action at Chatterpur was the reason why Nehru insisted that the ICU extend its activities to Faridabad. 2

Planning Faridabad
In February 1949 it was decided by the central government to transfer some twenty-six-thousand refugees, mainly from the North-West Frontier Province, to Faridabad, 3 an ancient village on the Delhi-Muttra Road in the Guragon District in the Punjab, seventeen miles south-east of Delhi. Faridabad was chosen as the site for the construction and development of a new township for refugees because its open and 'uncultivated lands' offered the potential to build a new urban space. The Faridabad camp was expected to develop into a productive and self-sufficient industrial township. 4 In August 1949, the FDB was set up under the chairmanship of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, who continued in that capacity until his election to President of India in January 1950. From the beginning, the construction of Faridabad was fraught with controversythere were issues with the management and financial implications of the new township. Tensions between the central government and the East Punjab Government over the trajectory of refugee rehabilitation set the stage for the postcolonial state's first foray into community development (Loveridge 2017, 3). Initially, the plan was for the Faridabad township to be funded on a 50:50 basis by the East Punjab and the central government. However, the East Punjab Government was critical and anxious over the method of organisation and operations which had been planned, and of the way it was proposed to recoup its investments in the camp from the refugees (later individual tenants). They expressed reluctance at taking on any responsibility and expressed anxiety at the intended programme of construction of Faridabad, viewing it as a 'loss making enterprise'. 5 The East Punjab Government was similarly hesitant on the construction of Chandigarh, citing a lack of capital. Consequently, much to the frustration of Nehru, a decision on the construction of its new capital was postponed until it received financial support from the centre (Kalia 1987, 10). Additionally, the East Punjab state officials expressed fear that the departure of the highly productive Muslim tenant farmers, technicians and artisans who had populated the East Punjab countryside would spell the state's doom, precipitating not just an economic slump, but also famine (Loveridge 2017, 4). This related to the larger concern regarding the skill composition of the refugees, that their occupational backgrounds were predominantly shopkeepers, clerks, and merchantswith little experience with manual labour (Malhotra 1949). However, the central government did not express these concerns, instead opting to argue that the East Punjab Government did not possess the necessary administrative tools to carry out the project successfully.
By May 1950, the East Punjab Government had fully withdrawn from the Faridabad scheme, leaving it responsible to the central government and the FDB entirely. This led to a simplification of the process of granting centrally appropriated funds to the FDB. The financial relationship between the Ministry of Rehabilitation (MOR) and the FDB became direct, with the former granting loans to the latter, which was then able to distribute the funds to the ICU directly. It is important to note that the FDB did not have statutory authority as intended due to legislative issues. As a result of this, despite its legal status, the FDB functioned as an autonomous body, as a non-state organisation with a great deal of independence in the matter of planning and the construction of the Faridabad township. This was evidence of the complex nature of the 'state', the significant role that autonomous bodies had within its structures, and the lack of definition of the nature of the state and non-state relationship. Whilst the state was full of autonomous bodies, in this instance, the FDB was able to somewhat overcome its institutional connection to the central government, and retain greater levels of control over its initiatives due to the absence of effective central government and state-level control and authority. On a broader level, the FDB allows us to consider the limitations of the postcolonial state's capacity, how the state after independence was deployed, and counter arguments of a 'strong state'. For instance, the central government's involvement in Faridabad during the period between 1949 and 1952 began and ended with the loans granted to the FDB by the MOR. It is important to note, other than financial assistance, both the FDB and the ICU were operating beyond the authority of the central government.
On a broader level, this case study provides us with an insight into the complex nature of the state. This allows us to interrogate further the relationship between the state and society. In this instance, how the limited capacity of India's postcolonial state left it reliant on the contributions of ordinary Indians to further local development projects. The Faridabad case study revealed how refugee labour was harnessed and deployed by the postcolonial state to contribute to the construction of the nation's-built environment. Specifically, it showed how the distinction between the state apparatus and non-state institutions was blurry, fluid, and not clearly defined (Mitchell 1991). 6 As a result, notions of a 'strong state' have been refuted through the recognition that the state did not monopolise development and modernisation by revealing the important contribution of organisations like the FDB and the ICU. Crucially, despite their activities being funded by the central government, these types of non-state organisations were able to operate within the structures of the state and yet retain a degree of authority and control over their initiatives due to an absence of effective state control and authority. Significantly, this showed that as we move into the postcolonial period, it became increasingly difficult to definitively separate and isolate the state from the non-state. Perhaps most significantly, as the Faridabad case study reveals, this lack of definition made the broader tensions and fraught relationship between the state and non-state more visible. This created an environment that enabled a lack of central government scrutiny of the FDB and the ICU and their activities, and a broader lack of accountability. This was most visible in the accusations of financial misconduct levelled at the FDB and the ICU by the central government, and the bureaucratic challenges that faced the FDB and the ICU in running the Faridabad township that the article goes on to discuss. To sum up, from its inception in 1949, the administrators running the Faridabad experiment did not have a strong impetus towards central government control, and they sought to bypass the structures and institutions of the state to implement their ideas and plans.
Given the complex relationship between the central government in Delhi and the agencies operating the Faridabad township to ensure that there was constant liaison between the MOR and the FDB, the Deputy Rehabilitation Adviser, Sudhir Ghosh, was appointed as Secretary of the Faridabad Development Board. Prior to his appointment, Ghosh had previously worked for some months under Vallabhbhai Patel's Ministry of States, as Regional Commissioner in East Punjab. In his role, Ghosh toured a lot of villages, as his main responsibility was to ensure that the Hindus and Sikhs of the state did not unlawfully take possession of the former Muslim lands that were going to be used to resettle Hindus and Sikh refugees from West Pakistan (Ghosh 1967, 229). Soon, Ghosh was moved directly to work within the MOR, and it was here he was able to see first-hand the millions of rupees the state was spending in giving out rations and shelter to refugees, without any hope of a return. Shocked at this, Ghosh approached Nehru with the idea of being involved in the social experiment at Faridabad, specifically through investing central government capital to create work for the refugees, thus allowing them to create a self-sustaining township.

Constructing Faridabad
In the middle of 1949, the ICU began to extend its activities to Faridabad and help with the rehabilitation process through the creation of a network of industrial cooperatives. It was necessary for the ICU to establish the conditions in which the refugee community could be helped to understand the value of voluntarism and the fostering of voluntary collective action. 7 The role of the ICU in Faridabad, working alongside the FDB, was integral, if not fundamental, to the implementation of this process.
The first job for the ICU was the patient persuasion of the refugee population to take control of their own futures. The ICU focused on the individual refugee voluntarily securing the future welfare of their families through the construction of factories that would later develop into functional cooperatives with the aid of small agricultural loans. The central government expected new industries to emerge within Faridabad's newly built environment, and provided basic facilities like water, power, and communications to facilitate and aid this process. The refugees formed cooperatives of earth workers, brick manufacturers, road workers, brick layers and carpenters, who were all geared towards the construction of the township (Koenigsberger 1952, 122). The developmental significance of Faridabad lay in the fact that the refugees had no pre-existing vocational or technical skills but acquired them in the process, along with the knowledge and experience of organisation and management, and that this laid the foundations for them to set up as small-scale traders, manufacturers, and service providers. It was the manual labour skills the refugees acquired through this process that enabled them to transform the Faridabad camp into an industrial township. This in turn propelled Faridabad, and other townships that were constructed on a similar basis, as exemplars of what voluntary collective action could achieve for the emergent Indian nation.
The ability to shift refugee attitudes on manual labour would be an uphill task for the ICU, and reflected a broader stigma attached to technical education (See Bhattacharya 2018). The ICU began its work with the establishment of a Technical Training Centre. The purpose of the centre was to reskill able-bodied men and women for construction work. It was the ICU that had to organise the construction of the factory buildings, the erection of necessary machinery, and to employ technical instructors to train the refugee workers. The task of the ICU was fostering an enthusiasm among the refugees for manual work. Many inhabitants of the camp had been shopkeepers, clerks, and merchants. With such occupational backgrounds, these refugees had little if any manual skills or experience. The ICU greatly emphasised the value and the need of the refugees building their own town and following the cooperative way. However, the refugees resisted bitterly the prospect of carrying out manual work, viewing it as demeaning and harmful to their caste status. In large numbers, they initially openly refused to wield the shovel and the spade.
To this end, and not wanting to encourage able-bodied dependency on state funds, the central government removed the dole for the able-bodied refugees at Faridabad. The state was against relief since it was felt that handouts would attract 'economic migrants', as opposed to 'genuine refugees' (Chatterji 2007(Chatterji , 1000. The result was that the centre, to which the Constitution of 1950 had given the powers to dictate rehabilitation policy throughout India, did little to assist the FDB in dealing with the 'refugee problem'. 8 This led the FDB to decide that from a social welfare and financial point of view, 'it would be criminal to keep the population on cash doles any longer'. 9 Going forward, any further payments of the cash dole became dependent on the refugee carrying out manual work through the construction of Faridabad. It is worth noting that those refugees who were not ablebodied, fell sick, or were injured, remained entitled to and were provided with cash doles. Unlike at the Kurukshetra transit refugee camp, where the Public Works Department (PWD) was heavily involved in providing public work schemes, at Faridabad, Chattopadhyay eliminated the involvement of the PWD and its contractors. Whilst Nehru accepted and supported Chattopadhyay's people-centred approach, the PWD and its contractors were utterly disappointed and became actively hostile towards the Faridabad project. They indulged in mis-information campaigns and malice to thwart the people-centred construction strategy adopted by the FDB and the ICU (Jain 1998, 73). Chattopadhyay was horrified to discover that under state regulations there had to be a contractor in charge. This reflected the kind of state bureaucracy that she had set out to circumvent in the first place. Ghosh asserted that given the autonomous nature of the FDB, it was free 'to execute the job in a way in which was not the "Government way" (…) and the Board was free to devise its own means to do an unusual job in an unusual way'. 10 In addition to rising political challenges, other problems were quickly emerging within Faridabad. Despite the emphasis on the 'cooperative way', the desire for the refugees 'to work the actual prospect of physical labour (…) upset the refugees, who were now (May 1949) resorting to excuses of a varied nature to shirk the work'. Far from refusing state handouts, the refugees were more inclined 'to remain spoon fed for the rest of their lives on the dole'. Ghosh noted 'that in their present state of mind no refugee is going to co-operate with me as he is not used to physical labour'. 11 Despite discontent from the refugees, the state pushed ahead with its discontinuance of the dole for able-bodied refugees in favour of pushing labour and training. The FDB, who had been instructed by the state, argued that since they held the moral authority, they should ignore all refugee work, hunger strikes, and demonstrations against the discontinuance of the dole. This was despite the FDB describing the policy as 'inhumane and unsympathetic'. 12 On this matter Nehru noted that 'the system of giving free rations in camps is gradually (being) stopped everywhere and is being replaced, as far as possible, by work centres and reskilling in training centres'. 13 The central government aim throughout the rehabilitation process was to prevent economic dependency amongst the refugees.
Ghosh described the challenges faced by the Faridabad administrators: To convert the middlemen into a producer of wealth is a very painful process of conversion. You struggle with them for months and months and talk and talk with them until you are blue in the face and induce idle men to get down to work and give up charity. 14 To entice the refugees to begin labouring, the FDB launched a propaganda campaign consisting of lectures run by welfare workers. These lectures attempted to persuade the refugees that it was not only in their interests, but in the interests of the nation to build the township with their own labour. In addition to this, the FDB began to issue food rations to able-bodied male and females in relation to the work performed in the construction of the township.
We shall require many millions of bricks for the town and in brick making work which has already been started there is any amount of room for expansion and a very large number of people will be kept occupied in this trade.
Beginning from doors to windows down to bolts and nuts necessary for the construction of the 5,000 houses we propose to build should be produced as far as possible by the refugees themselves in the work-sheds that we are going to build in the immediate future. 15 In this quote, Ghosh outlines the scale of the construction task in Faridabad that faced the refugees. As a result of reskilling refugees through technical training provided by the camp's training centre, soon refugees began to earn a living producing bricks, doors, and windows, carrying stones from quarries, doing earthwork, and building houses. Despite this, it is important to stress at this point that under the apparent veneer of success, in the initial construction of Faridabad through refugee labour, there was a visible manifestation of challenges and tensions that underpinned the process. This visibly contrasted to the standardised, unproblematic, and successful story of rehabilitation that was projected by the central government. Despite their participation, discontent was rising fast amongst the refugee population in Faridabad. There were significant failings of the role of the state in exacerbating tensions and discontent amongst the refugees. There were accusations levelled at the officers of the MOR that they were 'averse to a speedy rehabilitation of the refugees because such an event will lead to the dissolution of the ministry itself'. Furthermore, it was suggested that there were MOR officers working to ensure that conditions in the camp deteriorated in the 'hope that discontent (be) kept alive among the refugees (which) will be a potent weapon against the Congress in the next election'. 16 Chattopadhyay also alluded to a concerted campaign by government officials to derail the Faridabad project. She argued that 'there were ugly men in the Secretariat who were doing their best to smash up the experiment' (Bakshi 1999, 230).
Whether these political accusations were true or not is uncleareven Chattopadhyay does not elaborate further on her accusation. However, there are further hints of widespread political attempts at frustrating and obstructing the Faridabad experiment, because of the jealousy over the autonomous authority the FDB possessed that enabled it to 'successfully cut across the normal government rules, routines, and red-tape'. A report into Faridabad stated that disgruntled refugees 'received constant and definite encouragement from state officials who had all along nourished a grievance and a sense of jealousy'. 17 Yet, it was the autonomous nature of the FDB that enabled it to bypass and ignore state officials who engaged in methods of bureaucratic obstructionism, malpractice, and indiscipline, to threaten its experiment in Faridabad, and foster a general mood of lawlessness amongst the refugees. 18 Significantly, this challenging political climate is further evidence of how the Faridabad experiment was indicative of the broader shift away from the bureaucracy of the state, and how administrators like Chattopadhyay and Ghosh sought to avoid at all costs the normal machinery of the state and its institutions, like the MOR, in conducting their experiment'.
Alongside rising political tensions and challenges, the discontent of the refugees remained very visible within Faridabad. In response to the deteriorating conditions in the camp a large group of refugees from the Faridabad camp besieged the home of Nehru. Nehru dismissed the 'mass invasion' as nothing more than a 'nuisance', however, it brought home the gravity of the challenges facing the camp. 19 Nehru remained focused on the job of making Faridabad a success and not giving in to the refugees despite the heightening discontent amongst them.
There were other issues with the camp that worked to further strengthen refugee discontent. For instance, Faridabad had a meagre set of basic tools available to commence the manufacture of bricks, a lack of a stable water supply, and most importantly, the absence of brick moulds. It was revealed that the PWD, which had earlier been removed from the construction of the township, was selling building materials to the ICU at 10% over and above the stock cost. This formed part of their broader obstructive campaign to derail the Faridabad project because of their removal after earlier involvement. To make matters worse, by September 1949 the Consumer Store at the camp had received no supplies from the Ministry of Food. Because of this, the store had no food rations to sell to the refugees. As a result of dwindling supply levels, already low levels of enthusiasm amongst the refugees deteriorated further. Despite the deteriorating state of conditions in Faridabad, by October 1949, the number of refugee workers who were actively involved in the construction of the township was estimated to be five thousand.
An editorial in The Times of India reported: The outstanding feature of Faridabad is that it has been built entirely by the refugees themselvesby men and women who quite apart from house-building, have never done manual labour before, but who have first grudgingly then gratefully learnt the dignity of labour. 20 Collectively, able-bodied refugees had managed to manufacture the bricks, doors and windows, and built a town that included five-thousand houses, a hospital, schools, and a polytechnic institute. Significantly, the construction of the township's built environment was achieved through tapping into, harnessing and deploying the labour of the refugees. Consequently, the postcolonial state projected and lauded Faridabad as the ideal developmental model of independent India because it showcased what voluntarism and notions of self-help could accomplish for the nation. Not long after the construction of the township was completed, Faridabad garnered attention from international development experts (Ghosh 1967, 250). Development experts, most notably from America, were sent down to Faridabad to spend time with Ghosh during their visits to Delhi between 1949 and 1952. Whilst visiting Faridabad they saw a demonstration of what a community of ordinary men and women could achieve, given little capital and some leadership, to build a new life for themselves in a community development project. However, whilst the Nehruvian state was eager to project the success of Faridabad's self-help model on both the national and the international stage, this did not mask or resolve the visible tensions and challenges that were mounting there. Whilst Faridabad garnered much positive international attention (Ghosh 1967, 233), refugee discontent within Faridabad strengthened, as conditions in the camp deteriorated and employment opportunities dried up.

Discontent in Faridabad
The most visible manifestation of refugee discontent was the formation of a Labour Union at Faridabad in 1952. The refugees created the Labour Union in direct response to the deteriorating conditions in the township due to a lack of alternative forms of employment once the construction of the township had been completed. On this matter, the Labour Union wrote, 'to the condition of the people (being) (…) so critical that many families are crying against starvation'. 21 It could be argued that their discontent with this situation formed the start of a broader resistant politics where ordinary Indians, in this instance refugees, began to openly contest the Nehruvian vision of development. In Faridabad, the refugees had grown tired of the deteriorating conditions and wanted the FDB to take action to resolve the growing employment crisis. The removal of the dole meant that many ablebodied refugees had no way of obtaining rations or a means of sustenancewhen the construction of the township was completed there were no alternative jobs for them to take on. The refugees wanted the FDB, in their view the institution whose duty it was to secure their welfare, to alleviate their difficulties and anxieties. The refugees had two demands: firstly, to reinstate the dole in the absence of alternative forms of employment; and secondly, to provide training in alternative industrial occupations. However, due to the limited capacity and stretched resources of the FDB and the ICU, neither demand was possible. 22 The FDB had received over five-hundred applications for factory sites in Faridabad, which was estimated to have the potential to absorb eight-thousand workers in the township. The lack of industrial activity in Faridabad, Ghosh argued, was the fault of the Ministry of Finance (MOF). It was the MOF that Ghosh argued insisted upon imposing high prices for the factory plots. Consequently, except for a few very rich industrialists, the applicants could not afford to pay such large sums of money. This was because most of the applicants were refugee industrialists. Whilst they possessed the will and the talent to rebuild their industries in India, they had lost their capital in Pakistan. The lack of central government financial assistance meant that there were no options for them to fund new industrial ventures on factory plots within Faridabad. Similarly, Chattopadhyay was highly critical of this, but despite her and Ghosh's protests, they were forced to secure employment for the refugees in adjoining areas, including Delhi (See Ghosh 1967;250 and Nanda 2002, 114).
The formation of the Labour Union revealed a critical tension within Faridabad. The Labour Union was openly critical of the state, challenging it for being responsible for refugee starvation, from a policy the FDB itself had earlier described as 'inhumane'. However, the Labour Union also revealed problems with the long-term nature of community development in terms of providing adequate forms of employment. 23 The refugees collective organisation and protestations refute state claims that either refugee rehabilitation or community development was a coherent and unproblematic process. It was clear from the limited correspondence of the Labour Union that the refugees' discontent emerged from the lack of alternative employment and training opportunities within Faridabad beyond construction. The Times of India reported how the refugees felt the state had 'cheated' them, with one refugee remarking, 'they (the central government) have a conspiracy to reduce me to the status of a beggar'. 24 By the late autumn of 1952, there were clear signs that the Faridabad township's economy had failed to thrive. During this time, the situation in Faridabad was described by Ajit Prasad Jain, Rehabilitation Minister, as 'chronic', with 'half-starved refugees wandering the camp with no purpose'. He went on to describe how 'wailing widows and ill-clad children came out by the hundred from clusters of tattered, low tents sprawled across a water-logged stretch of land, to pour out their heart' 25 to him when he visited the camp. The chaotic and tense conditions of the camp were further reflected in the account by Indian Civil Service Administrator, S. G. Barve, who took over the running of the camp upon the departure of Ghosh. In late 1952, Barve published a report on the conditions of the camp, where he described the current situation as a 'period of anarchy' due to the 'intensification of unemployment' (Jain 1998, 280). These narratives were far removed from the successful image of refugee rehabilitation the central government had projected. Soon, Ghosh was writing to Nehru seeking to dispel rumours about the failing condition of Faridabad, writing 'that there is no mess at Faridabad'. 26 Given that Faridabad had been propelled by the Nehruvian state as an exemplar model of community development, fostering voluntary collective action to further progress and development, it could not fail. 27 At the root of rising refugee discontent was a lack of alternative employment, which was a result of the limited nature of the technical training they had received. For three years, the industrial cooperatives established by the ICU had provided a steady and successful form of employment to refugees who had been reskilled by undergoing a course of technical training geared towards construction jobs. However, as construction of the township was nearing completion, neither the ICU nor the FDB had a plan for how to provide alternative forms of employment beyond construction (Ghosh 1967, 249). Chattopadhyay admitted that the accelerated pace of the construction of the township by the refugees took the ICU by surprise. Significantly, the 'mess' at Faridabad was not a failure of the cooperative model or voluntarism, but a failure of adequate industrial planning. Chattopadhyay argued that the ICU was not equipped to organise alternative forms of employment. The ICU was clear that whilst most of its energies had been concerned with creating new forms of employment, their efforts were 'met with not only indifference but numerous technical and unnecessary difficulties and obstacles'. The ICU was explicitly critical of the harassment that was projected towards them by various government departments, particularly the Cooperative Department (Jain 1998, 308). The challenges faced by the ICU were exacerbated when the central government withdrew financial support to the industrial cooperatives in Faridabad by 1952. The ICU had been sanctioned Rs. 24 lakhs to generate employment through small-scale units, of which only brick kilns were in operation. The bricks were no longer needed in Faridabad, and were sent to Delhi. Beyond the construction of Faridabad there was a lack of adequate long-term planning on how to build up the urban township. Alternative industrial cooperatives were established such as the printing press, trunk, buttons and sports good production, hosiery, and other industrial craft units. In the Indian Parliament, Sucheta Kripalani described these new urban spaces as 'dead cities whose life springs had dried up' (Nanda 2002, 114). The problem was that long-term industrial growth could not be sustained on the production of trunks, buttons, and sports goods alone.
The absence of alternative forms of employment within Faridabad was further exacerbated by a lack of training facilities for the refugees to undergo reskilling once again for trades beyond construction. On a visit to the township in October 1952, the Minister for Health, Amrit Kaur, described the 'great discontent in this little township because of a lack of training amongst its inhabitants'. In her account, the technical and vocational training centres had been 'allowed to become white elephants without being utilised'. 28 To remedy the situation, the rationalisation and coordination at every level of the rehabilitation process was required, giving it new and purposeful directionhowever, actions in this area were not forthcoming.
The fear of the community projects disintegrating into failure caused great anxiety upon the central government. The Planning Commission stressed that the Faridabad project rested on two principles: firstly, the encouragement of voluntary non-state agency in state development projects; and secondly, the encouragement and harnessing of collective voluntary action amongst ordinary people for development purposes. It wrote that 'these two principles are essential for the success of all the schemes visualised in the First Five Year Plan and of the community projects'. The Planning Commission was fearful that 'if the Faridabad scheme should break down for any reason it will have a depressing effect all round on national development'. 29 For Chattopadhyay, the experiment at Faridabad could not fail because of the importance of ensuring the success of the cooperative model that she argued was fundamental to securing long-term welfare through the raising of new urban structures. By 1952, this view also came to be shared by Nehru, who had come to realise the importance of Faridabad in spreading the ideals of voluntarism across India.
In addition to this, criticisms continued to be levelled towards the autonomous nature of the FDB and its ability to advance loans to the ICU without regulations and checks. Nehru defended the actions of the FDB in advancing the loans to the ICU on the grounds that they were 'anxious to further the cooperative effort in Faridabad'. He went on to criticise adherence to red-tape bureaucracy in limiting the development of cooperatives.
The ultimate aim is to spread the cooperative movement and not to have beautiful rules and regulations hanging in the office. The delays that occur (…) are heart breaking and make one despair of the success of the cooperative movement. 30 It was taking risks that Ghosh similarly stressed in his own defence of the running of Faridabad. Ghosh wrote of the need 'of cutting out red tape with a long pair of scissors' given that the task ahead of them was 'a race against time'. 31 Similarly, Nehru was anxious for the Faridabad scheme to succeed as broader developmental aspirations depended on it. In his view, it would be 'heart-breaking' if rules and regulations impeded success. Nehru went on to emphasise the nature of taking risks, arguing it was better to risk money and lose money than to do nothing, as the funds would have been spent on relief no matter the outcome. The staunch defence of cooperatives by Nehru was unsurprising given that they formed an integral part of the community development projects that were the central government's first major developmentalist initiative after independence. Nehru went as far as to suggest that administrative irregularities in Faridabad could be overlooked as the government remained grateful for the work carried out in the township, particularly when the larger project of spreading the voluntarist movement extended across India. 32 It is important to remember how integral the ICU was to the overall running of Faridabad. Its responsibilities included everything from the construction of the cooperatives, production of building materials, advancing capital to the cooperatives from funds provided by the FDB, the organisation of factories, erection of machinery and technical assistance, procuring raw materials, and marketing finished goodsthe heaviest burden fell upon the ICU in Faridabad. The ICU was expected to carry out all these duties on its own with no government aid. Chattopadhyay had always desired to circumvent government bureaucracy, but even she could not have planned or foreseen the scale of the task before her in Faridabad.
By January 1953, the ICU resolved that given its small size it could not continue to run the Faridabad township and its cooperatives indefinitely against the pressures of the slump and wider deterioration of conditions within the township. Therefore, it withdrew from the project and informed the MOR that they should make immediate arrangements for taking power of its activities in Faridabad. In a report into Faridabad, the ICU was scathing about the role of the MOR in obstructing its work and progress which only served to exacerbate the deteriorating conditions the community in Faridabad were living under. The ICU wrote: By and large the actions of the Government and the Ministry were designed to hamstring the activities of the ICU, to destroy faith in the idea of cooperation and to deal a death blow to the foundations of the Faridabad project itself. 33 This formed part of a broader accusation that the ICU levelled at the central governmentthat its departments were actively obstructing their work. For instance, the ICU argued that government departments were circulating correspondence that the ICU was responsible for creating the unemployment crisis at Faridabad (Jain 1998, 309). This critique was also reflected in the writings of Chattopadhyay. She was highly critical of the central government, who she argued 'deflowered the blossoming Faridabad'. She went as far as to argue that the central government committed an act of 'vandalism under the title of Development (…) completely destroying its original character of a compact small town of self-help' (Dubois and Lal 2017, 212).
In November 1952, the FDB had been wound up by the central government and its authority over Faridabad was replaced by the direct rule of the MOR. A few months later (January 1953), because of widespread central government interference and hostility towards them, Chattopadhyay concluded that the ICU was no longer able to serve the community of Faridabad and withdrew herself and the ICU from the Faridabad experiment. Chattopadhyay argued that voluntary organisations like the ICU should withdraw from the service of a given community within a short span of time. However, no one considered or expected the abrupt turn of events that saw the FDB get dissolved, and the ICU withdraw from Faridabad within a few months.
Despite his earlier staunch defence of the FDB, Nehru came to confess 'that the present Faridabad Board can serve no useful purpose any longer'. 34 The Report into Faridabad wrote that 'the tripartite of unity, purpose and action between the ICU, the board and the people of Faridabad had been shrewdly and successfully torn too asunder'.
The Report wrote a scathing critique of the state and the MOR, suggesting that they were responsible for: destroying what was built with great labour (…) it destroyed the tripartite cooperation between the ICU, the people and the Board (…) Next it destroyed the feeling that had been instilled in the refugees that it was their job and that they were respected, consulted, and treated like a respectable community. Then it harassed the ICU about its work in the past and even for the failures of the various government departments, particularly the Cooperative Department (…) In fact whatever, the ICU tried to do during this period (the eight months before it withdrew) met with not only indifference but numerous technical and unnecessary difficulties and obstacles put in its way. 35 In the aftermath of his withdrawal, Ghosh wrote that 'Faridabad needs fresh minds'. Ghosh argued that what Faridabad needed now was not clerk or administrator, but industrialists. This would ensure that Faridabad 'will not end in a "mess" but in a thundering success'. 36 In the aftermath of the removal of the FDB and the withdrawal of the ICU, Faridabad became dependent on big industries and large influxes of private capitaland was soon to be 'throbbing with industry'. The state did not waiver from its commitment in transforming Faridabad into an urban industrial suburb of Delhi, and it pushed ahead with its utopian vision of a 'Greater Delhi'. 37 On withdrawing from the Faridabad project, Chattopadhyay continued her voluntary work through social welfare agencies furthering localised industrial development. The Faridabad project was an experiment of her socialist ideas, the cornerstone of which was the cooperative model and notions of self-help, which continued to determine and shape her work. Ghosh, on the other hand, shifted his attention towards the United Nations Technical Assistance Programme and focused his efforts on creating five-hundred self-supporting rural communities on the cooperative model (Ghosh 1967, 266-267).
For both Chattopadhyay and Ghosh, the significance of the Faridabad experiment was that it was a distinct urban development in the Nehruvian era that was built entirely through the collective voluntary efforts of refugees who had no prior vocational or technical skills. The refugees had laid roads, erected houses, built hospitals and schools, and as a result, a whole township had emerged from their own manual labour. Despite their lack of experience, the efforts of Chattopadhyay and Ghosh in Faridabad left an indelible mark, and provided a model of how voluntarism and notions of self-help through community development would be pursued going into the 1950s across India, and what it could accomplish for the nation's development aspirations.

Conclusion
This article has attempted to tell a different story about India's postcolonial development. It has argued that we need to adopt a new approach to allow us to reconceptualise how we think about the Nehruvian state. The article has shown how the limited resources and capacity of India's postcolonial state led it to harness the voluntary collective participation of ordinary Indians to attempt to fulfil its developmental aspirations. This resulted in the Nehruvian state's mobilisation and empowerment of ordinary Indians to develop new urban spaces and communities. Perhaps of most significance here was that India's developmental state was not just about technocratic projects; as has been demonstrated, it is important to recognise and incorporate the contribution of ordinary people into development narratives.
By using rehabilitation efforts at Faridabad as a case study, this article has shown how the Nehruvian state's use of voluntarism to further postcolonial development was far from straightforward or unproblematic. Significantly, we have seen how the state's use of voluntarism had limitations. The story of refugee rehabilitation as it unfolded in Faridabad was one of tension and conflict. Ultimately, the Nehruvian state's attempts to mobilise refugee labour to construct thriving new industrial townships revealed the precarious nature of postcolonial Indian development. As was discussed, this process was fraught with bureaucratic, financial, and structural challenges, which ultimately impeded the Nehruvian state's vision of postcolonial Indian development.
On a broader level the article has argued that when we write about the builders of postcolonial India, the state was not the sole vehicle of development, as ordinary people played an important role. Yet, through the FDB, the article has also illustrated the complex nature of how the postcolonial state functioned and was deployed in the formative years of India's independence. It has highlighted how the FDB was indicative of a broader shift away from using the machinery of 'the state' to further development. Thus, the article offers a crucial historiographical intervention that provides nuance to India's postcolonial development narrative. It has emphasised the importance of voluntary efforts by individuals and organisations to further development. Perhaps of most significance, the article has presented an alternative image of Nehru's India. It has firmly moved away from the technocratic framework, which has shaped much of the existing literature of development during the Nehruvian era. Overall, the article has proposed and laid the groundwork for an alternative model of investigating the formative years of India's postcolonial development through a voluntarist framework, which emphasises the mobilisation of the people through collective voluntary action to the construction of the nation's built environment. However, this investigation, like India's technocratic development narratives, has revealed how the Nehruvian state was not necessarily adept in realising its developmental plans.