Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

By Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of new land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these many localized and dispersed land conflicts, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private sector companies encounters resistance on the ground.

‘Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India’ is about the movement of Singur’s unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. The book analyses the practical, representational and political work that the unwilling farmers engaged in as they have sought to mobilize public opinion; represent and justify their claims to land to a larger public; forge useful political alliances; engage and manoeuvre the legal system; navigate internal differences and discrepant interests; and simply keep the movement together on the ground. How did Singur’s unwilling farmers frame their movement to save the farmland? Which notions of development and justice did they draw on? How did they navigate everyday social cleavages and conflicts along the lines of caste, class and gender? Who led, who followed, and who was silenced? By engaging these questions through the prism of everyday politics, ‘Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India’ makes an important empirical and ethnographic contribution to the still-limited anthropological understanding of the localized dynamics of India’s new land wars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783087495

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Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© Kenneth Bo Nielsen 2018

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nielsen, Kenneth Bo, author.

Title: Land dispossession and everyday politics in rural Eastern India / Kenneth Bo Nielsen.

Description: London; New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058323 | ISBN 9781783087471 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Land tenure – India – Singur. | Land use, Rural – India – Singur. | Farmers – Political activity – India – Singur. | Agriculture and state – India – Singur. | Protest movements – India – Singur. | Singur (India) – Social conditions.

Classification: LCC HD880.S56 N54 2018 | DDC 333.3/15414–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058323

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-747-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-747-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

TABLES

1.1‘Compensation’ payable to land losers in Singur

1.2The impact of the land acquisition in the five mouzas of the project-affected area

1.3Population of Shantipara

1.4Households by caste in Shantipara

1.5Population of Nadipara

1.6Households by caste in Nadipara

3.1Consent status as of December 2006 as per the LF government

4.1Frequency of household assets per 100 households in Nadipara and Shantipara

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has grown out of my PhD research on the Singur movement, a project on which I embarked in late 2006 while working at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) in Oslo. At SUM, special thanks go to Kristi Anne Stølen, Bente Herstad, Desmond McNeill, Kristoffer Ring, Gitte Egenberg and to the members of Dan Banik’s research group on ‘Poverty and Development’. SUM’s Research School, coordinated by Maren Aase, also provided an excellent venue for testing out new ideas.

Since this book has been a long time in the making, the list of people who have contributed to it – directly or indirectly – has grown very long, too long, alas, to reproduce here in full. Most of the chapters have been presented in draft form at conferences in Melbourne, Tromsø, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen, Århus, Amsterdam, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Uppsala, Stockholm, Lund, Zürich, Helsinki, Yale and Nottingham. I am grateful to the many conference organizers, commentators and participants who have offered valuable input and feedback along the way. I want to thank in particular Salim Lakha, Pradeep Taneja, Axel Borchgrevink, Mahesh Rangarajan, Rohan D’Souza, Anthony D’Costa, Achin Chakraborty, Uwe Skoda, G. Krishna Reddy, Dag Erik Berg, Srila Roy and Lars Eklund for giving me the opportunity to present aspects of my work at these venues. The discussion of caste benefited from a critical exchange involving Uday Chandra, Praskanva Sinharay, Sarbani Bandyopadhyay, Dwaipayan Sen, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Partha Chatterjee and many others. I am also grateful to Manuela Ciotti, Kristian Bjørkdal, Tanja Winther, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Harold Wilhite, Patrik Oskarsson, Michael Levien, Heather P. Bedi, M. Rajshekhar, Gordon Woodman, Sarasij Majumder and Anand Vaidya for input that has in crucial ways changed the ways in which I have looked at different aspects of the Singur movement over time.

In Oslo, the unique Oslo South Asia Symposium has provided a tremendously stimulating environment in which to present and discuss work in progress. Whenever my analyses of the Singur material developed in too outlandish a manner, the South Asia Symposium was there to remind me of the virtues of remaining committed to the devil in the ethnographic detail. Thanks especially to ‘sympers’ Pamela Price, Claus Peter Zoller, Ute Hüsken, Francesca R. Jensenius, Annika Wetlesen, Guro Aandahl, Kathinka Frøystad, Lars Martin Fosse, Guro Samuelsen, Moumita Sen, Karina Standal, Jostein Jakobsen, Anne Waldrop and Ruth Schmidt; to my PhD supervisors, Arild Engelsen Ruud and Susanne Brandtstädter; and to Lucia Michelutti and Sirpa Tenhunen. Lars Tore Flåten, Geir Heierstad and Alf Gunvald Nilsen helped make the task easier by meeting up for coffee at the right moments and by providing encouragement and critical academic input.

Thanks also to Stig Toft Madsen for introducing me to South Asia studies in the first place and for being my mentor over the past many years; to Dayabati Roy for her generous help, friendship and assistance in Kolkata; to Parthasarathi Banerjee for his kindness; to my field assistant and co-researcher Prabir Neogi for his dedicated work and perseverance; and to the team at Anthem Press for working overtime to finalize the book with me. To my hosts, friends and interlocutors in Singur a warm thanks for opening your homes to me and letting me hang around for such a long time. You will be forever in my heart. Hilde, Thomas, Mathias and ‘Maggie’, the most important people in my life – this is for you.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

On the morning of 31 August 2016, hundreds of villagers in West Bengal’s Singur area gathered in front of their televisions. After several hours of waiting in tense anticipation, the villagers burst out in jubilation. Soon, men, women and children emerged from their houses to congratulate each other as they danced, cheered and greeted their neighbours and friends with green gulal (coloured powder) and sweets.

The cause of the emotional celebration was a news flash that announced that the Supreme Court of India had just quashed a land acquisition that had taken place in Singur ten years earlier, when 997 acres of fertile farmland had been expropriated by the then-incumbent Left Front (LF) state government. Many of the local landowners – popularly called ‘unwilling farmers’ by the media because of their unwillingness to comply with the land acquisition – had mobilized to stop the land acquisition from going ahead, but to no avail. In December 2006 their farmland had been fenced, walled and handed over to the private company Tata Motors, which had built a car factory on it. The land losers, though, had not given up and had continued their movement, which eventually led to Tata Motors abandoning Singur in 2008. But their land had remained walled and inaccessible even after Tata’s departure. On this day, however, the Supreme Court had declared the land acquisition to be illegal and had ordered the state government to take possession of the land and return it to its erstwhile owners within 12 weeks. A decade after having been deprived of their land, the jubilant villagers were now on the verge of getting it back. A few weeks later, work to dismantle the abandoned Tata Motors sheds and the issuing of new pachas (proof of land ownership) to the farmers was in full swing.

Land is back on the political agenda in India. As the price and use value of land have increased steadily over the past decade – particularly in urban and peri-urban areas, or areas that are rich in minerals – struggles over land and its uses have mushroomed almost across the country. Urbanization, real estate development, industrialization and mining have increased the demand for land, pushing up prices (Chakravorty 2013) and prying open new spaces for profit and accumulation – not just for large corporations and high-ranking politicians and administrators but also for small-time land brokers (Levien 2015), petty officials in control of land records or land conversion processes (Chandra 2015), and a host of other ‘men in the middle’ (Sud 2014a) who remain well positioned to benefit from the increase in land transactions. At the same time, people and communities threatened with land dispossession or displacement have mobilized to various degrees to retain their land or to obtain better terms of compensation and rehabilitation. These contestations over land and dispossession are at the heart of India’s political society today and have found their way to the highest levels of national politics: during most of 2015 a heated tug of war played out in both houses of parliament as the incumbent pro-liberalization government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), tried to push through a series of amendments that would make compulsory land acquisitions both swifter and easier, only to be forced to backtrack by broad-based popular mobilizations and a political opposition that claimed to champion farmers’ interests (Nielsen and Nilsen 2017).

The decade-long struggle over the land in Singur that began in 2006 was undoubtedly among the first and most talked-about of what is now commonly described as India’s new ‘land wars’ (Levien 2011; 2012; 2013a, 2015; Steur 2015). Most of these land wars have centred on the phenomenon of state-led land expropriation for the benefit of private investors, the speed and intensity of which has skyrocketed over the past decade (Chandra 2015). In this regard, the conflict over the land in Singur is hardly unique. It was a precursor of things to come and paradigmatic (Bidwai 2007) of many of the challenges and conflicts that may arise when a state-led policy of swiftly – and sometimes forcibly – transferring land to private sector companies is enacted in what one with the anthropologist Anna Tsing (2005, 1) can call ‘the sticky materiality of practical encounters’.

This book is about the movement of Singur’s unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. It explores the interlinkages between land dispossession, local everyday sociopolitical relations in the villages impacted by dispossession, and the making and evolution of the anti-dispossession movement. In doing so, the book has both an ethnographic and a conceptual mission. Ethnographically, it seeks to offer a detailed account of the everyday politics of the Singur movement by foregrounding what the anthropologist Jonathan Spencer (2007, 15) in another context has called the ‘politics of semiotic excess, of transgression, of occasional violence, of humour and entertainment, love and fear’ in the context of a protracted struggle over land. Since relatively few ethnographically grounded accounts are currently available on the everyday politics of India’s new land wars, Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India offers a first attempt at filling this ethnographic gap. Conceptually and analytically, the book engages with Partha Chatterjee’s (2001; 2004; 2008; 2011a; 2012a/b; 2013) ideas of political society and popular politics as developed through a series of writings over the last more than one decade, to argue that a focus on everyday politics and land dispossession offers a fruitful point of entry for rethinking some of his basic conceptual distinctions. To this end, the chapters in Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India analyse the practical, representational and political work that the unwilling farmers have engaged in as they have sought to mobilize public opinion; represent and justify their claims to land to a larger public; engage and manoeuvre the legal system; and navigate internal differences along the lines of caste, class and gender.

The land war in Singur began in May 2006 when the LF government announced that Tata Motors, a major Indian car manufacturer, was coming to the state to set up a manufacturing unit where the company’s future ‘people’s car’ would be produced. With a price tag of only INR 100,000 the car, later christened the Tata Nano, would be by far the most affordable car the world had seen to date (Freiberg et al. 2011). Later that same month the LF’s chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, from the Communist Party of India (Marxists), the CPI(M),¹ disclosed that his government had, after consultations with Tata Motors, chosen Singur – located some 45 kilometres from the state capital Kolkata – as the future site for the Tata factory. The factory, it was estimated, would bring in much-needed industrial investments worth INR 1,000 crore² to the state and would generate more than 10,000 new jobs.

Yet the Tata project ran into trouble almost from the beginning. Many landowners were enraged by the prospect of being dispossessed of their farmland, and they organized to prevent the land acquisition from going ahead. Under the aegis of its local organizing committee, the Singur Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee (SKJRC; committee to save the farmland of Singur), these ‘unwilling farmers’ organized agitations, rallies and demonstrations on a daily basis to express their opposition to the land acquisition. When a scouting delegation from Tata Motors came to inspect its future production site, it was met with slogan shouting, and the state industries minister, Nirupam Sen, was greeted with black flags when he visited Singur to convince the landowners that the Tata project would do wonders for the area.

Over the following weeks and months, what had begun in Singur as a very localized mobilization against forced expropriation gradually, but increasingly, drew the attention and support of social and human rights activists, intellectuals and politicians of many persuasions from across the state and other parts of India and abroad (Roy 2007, 3326). This included the main political opposition in West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), whose party activists and party leader, the flamboyant Mamata Banerjee, travelled to Singur to lend their support to the SKJRC.

By December 2006, however, the state government went ahead and used its power of eminent domain to acquire and fence the land under heavy police cover and amidst considerable violence. Soon after, employees of Tata Motors performed bhumi puja – a Hindu ceremony performed before commencing the construction of a house or building – on the site, and proclaimed that the factory would be ready and up and running in just over a year. Yet this never happened. Throughout the construction period the SKJRC continued its protests, and in late August 2008 it mobilized a large number of unwilling farmers to lay siege to the construction site. They were joined by supporters and sympathizers from across the state – many of them supporters of the TMC – who set up more than 20 camps on the Durgapur Expressway, the national highway from which the factory site could be accessed. The protesters, led by Mamata Banerjee, vowed to go on an indefinite dharna (sit-in) until Tata Motors withdrew from Singur. During the daytime, speeches encouraging the villagers to continue their agitation were delivered amidst poetry recitals and singing; huge public kitchens cooked and served khichuri (rice and lentils) and vegetables to the protesters who, when night fell, would roll out their bedding and sleep on the highway.

While the dharna turned out to be less than indefinite – it was suspended after a fortnight – construction work inside the factory never resumed. In October, the corporate leadership of Tata Motors announced that constructing and operating a plant amidst continued agitation and hostility was impossible. The chairman of the Tata Group, Ratan Tata, said that since intimidation, assault and general obstruction had for so long been the order of the day, his company would abandon its yet-to-be-completed car manufacturing plant (Ray 2008) for greener pastures in the state of Gujarat. By then, the land war in Singur had become a matter of public and political concern across the state and nation and had been instrumental in raising new debates about displacement, dispossession and the meaning of industrial development in contemporary India (Nielsen 2010); it had contributed to the formation of a public critique of the legal regime underpinning the state’s exercise of eminent domain and the place of social justice and rehabilitation within it; and it had inserted itself into a broader emerging critique of the incumbent LF government that ultimately led to its fall in 2011 (Bhattacharyya 2016, 155–212).

While my approach to the everyday politics of the Singur movement is primarily ethnographic, any analysis of the interlinkages between land dispossession, everyday politics and the making of anti-dispossession politics would be incomplete without a consideration of the political economy of land and development in contemporary India. Indeed, it is commonly accepted that the many land conflicts that we have seen in India over the past decade are directly linked to certain fundamental changes to the global political economy, and to the political economy of development in post-reform India more specifically (D’Costa and Chakraborty 2017). For example, structural adjustments, neoliberal reforms and the opening of markets have been important drivers of the most recent wave of global ‘land grabbing’, that is, the large-scale acquisition of land by or for corporate entities, whether for large-scale agribusiness accumulation in Latin America and Africa, for extractive industries everywhere or for extensive infrastructure development and industrialization such as in China and India (White et al. 2012). This ‘capture of ordinary people’s rights and assets by capital-led and class-creating social transformation’ (ibid., 623) is thus a global phenomenon that is intimately connected to processes of neo-liberalization that are equally global in nature, even as different mechanisms of accumulation lead to different forms of land dispossession which impact differently on people’s livelihoods and social relations. A political economy perspective thus has, or should have, politically enabling consequences: it allows us to identify similarities and shared challenges and concerns across other anti-dispossession struggles elsewhere in the world so as to establish at least some kind of connection between many diverse local struggles, which, as David Harvey has put it (2005, 179), ‘often refuse to abandon their own particularity’. In other words, it helps us link dispersed land conflicts ‘at intra- and inter-country levels through a strong anti-capitalist ideology’ (Banerjee-Guha 2013, 179).

Yet, as the emerging anthropological literature on the everyday experience of neo-liberalism in India has shown us, while central explanatory tropes of a political economy nature – such as ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – enable us to link ethnographic detail to wider national and transnational contexts, they may also lead us to shortcut questions of scale and to produce a social theory that is disembedded from ethnographic practice (Münster and Strümpell 2014; Gardner and Gerharz 2016; see also Hall et al. 2015). In line with my aim of foregrounding the ethnographic and its politics of semiotic excess, Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India therefore grounds its questions in what Banerjee-Guha (2013, 179) calls ‘the terrain of everyday life’. As the growing anthropological work on everyday popular politics in India has shown us (e.g. Forbes and Michelutti 2013; Michelutti 2008; 2010; Shah 2013; Witsoe 2013, 140–86; Wouters 2015; Piliavsky 2013), this grounding allows us to pose new questions about the role of localized life-worlds, social relations and moral and political imaginaries in the dynamic constitution of the political and the exercise of power and authority. Dispossession-driven land struggles, however, at first sight do not seem to lend themselves readily to first-hand, in-depth ethnographic investigation, which might explain why India’s new land wars have only to a relatively limited extent been subject to prolonged ethnographic scrutiny (Levien 2012, 935). Land acquisitions in India can often be announced almost out of the blue or be notified without any prior public debate. This makes planning for doing fieldwork on a ‘land war’ very difficult, if not downright impossible. Land conflicts also often turn violent. People are beaten up or killed, something which raises important ethical and safety concerns for the prospective field researcher. We may also misleadingly tend to think of conflicts centred on land dispossession as ‘events’ of a relatively short duration, lasting only from the date when the land acquisition notification is posted and until the resistance has either been quelled and the land acquired or, alternatively, the acquisition plans annulled. In this book I adopt a contrary view and treat land wars as protracted, temporal processes that both draw from and feed into the everyday lives of the people engaged in them.³ From this perspective, I argue, land struggles come to appear to us as being about much more than merely instrumental control over land. As the chapters that follow seek to illustrate, they impinge on multiple aspects of everyday life and politics and their meanings; they produce transgressions and reconfigurations of gendered social boundaries; they open new spaces for contesting and consolidating caste-class relations; they enable and undermine leadership, authority and political agency; they urge farmers to reflect on what it means to be a farmer; and they enable popular engagement with and reconfigurations of the emancipatory and tyrannical powers of the law. It is by unpacking this temporal, circular relationship between land dispossession and the everyday political and social that this book seeks to add to our understanding of the making and the implications of India’s new land wars.

The remainder of this introduction contextualizes the Singur movement by embedding it in a broader politico-economic perspective. I then lay out how an approach to anti-dispossession movements centred on everyday politics offers a fruitful supplementary perspective on India’s new land wars that also allows us to rethink some of the central tenets of Chatterjee’s work on popular politics. I end with an overview of the chapters.

The Political Economy of India’s New Land Wars

It is commonly accepted that India has since the 1980s pursued a pro-business growth strategy (Kohli 2012) and a piecemeal process of economic liberalization which, however ‘half-hearted’ at first (Harriss 1987), entailed the gradual dismantling of the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy of development that had marked the first few decades of post-Independence Indian economic growth. The Nehru-Mahalanobis development model was rooted in the nationalist struggle for independence and aimed inter alia at creating self-sufficiency and an economy free from external and metropolitan domination, and in this endeavour planning became the handmaiden of government. The Indian state actively intervened in the planning framework by setting up a planning commission that determined national development interests, ostensibly in relatively splendid isolation from the partisan squabbles and conflicts of politics (Chatterjee 1997a, 271–97). According to Chatterjee, and unlike what has more recently been the case in Singur and many other places, questions of industrialization were not ‘political questions to be resolved in the battlefield of politics’ (Chatterjee 1986, 159; see also Pedersen 2017).

The state also assumed a central role in the supply side of the economy by actively pursuing a strategy of rapid import-substitution industrialization that focused on self-sufficiency and the building of state-owned industries producing capital goods. In crucial spheres the state occupied the commanding heights of the Indian economy. Rajni Kothari (2005, 37) argues that there was at the time a consensus across the board, from industrialists to left-of-centre politicians and radicals, on the conception of a positive and interventionist role for the state on behalf of the masses. While it is an exaggeration to claim that the hegemony of the Nehru-Mahalanobis development model was entirely uncontested, dissenting voices were often overpowered by the dominant strength of the Indian state and the Congress party, or had their agendas appropriated and deflected by the discourse of Nehruvian social democracy (Ray and Katzenstein 2005, 13). This is brought out, for instance, by how dispossession and displacement, which occurred on a large scale also during the Nehruvian era, unlike today generated only relatively sporadic popular protests that found little support among the established political parties (Pedersen 2017).

In retrospect the result of the Nehru-Mahalanobis model has been described as a mixed economy with a mixed record (Ghosh 1999, 166). However, as the state in India in effect oftentimes took on the form of a regulatory state and not a developmental state (Corbridge and Harriss 2000, 113), the state-led model came under increasing pressure in the 1970s and 1980s. Popular movements against state-led, development-induced displacement – most notably in the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s (NBA) struggle against the building of large dams in North India (Nilsen 2010) – heralded the coming of a new zeitgeist that brought an increased awareness about environmental and human rights issues to bear on development-related questions (Aandahl 2009). Movements like the NBA tapped into a more widespread disillusionment with Nehruvian policies of development, fuelled in part by growing regional and sectoral inequalities (Ray and Katzenstein 2005, 17) and by India’s evident inability to keep up with the emerging economies in Southeast Asia, in spite of a comparable starting point at the time of independence. And neo-liberal voices such as Jagdish Bhagwati’s (cited in Corbridge and Harriss 2000, 112) that had otherwise remained rather marginal in the overall Indian debate (Desai 2016) began to find an audience for their view that Indian planning as we knew it was bound to promote an economic system that was not only overlicensed and bureaucratized but also inefficient and corrupt.

India’s fiscal crisis in 1991 marked an important point of transition with regards to the role of the state in the development process. The liberalization of the Indian economy that had gradually got under way in the 1980s later accelerated with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s New Economic Policy (Kurien 1994, 94–98). These reforms, in combination, entailed a gradual redefinition of the role of the Indian state in the development process from planner to manager. But while several new policies contributed to the flourishing of the domestic market and a national ‘consumer boom’ in the 1980s, this was achieved in part by a colossal increase in public expenditure and borrowing. The result was that by the end of the decade India had become one of the largest debtors among the developing countries of the world, and in 1991 India opted for the implementation of a package of structural and economic reforms ostensibly aimed at stabilizing and liberalizing the economy. Post-1991 the Indian state adopted a new and more pro-business model of development (Kohli 2009; 2012) and dismantled much of its industrial licensing system. It allowed private sector companies to trade in industries that had once been arrogated to state-owned enterprises; removed constraints embedded in, for example, the Monopoly and Restrictive Trade Practices Act; offered tax concessions; and increasingly facilitated rather than provided investments (Levien 2013a, 393).

Even if the reform process can best be characterized as a long and continuous ‘limited and stop-go process’ (Corbridge et al. 2013, 130) carried out by stealth rather than with pomp (Jenkins 2011; Corbridge and Harriss 2000; Kennedy 2014, 36–50), the early reform initiatives in particular benefited industrial capitalists disproportionately. An outcome of this has been the rise of this group as the dominant group within the state apparatus, increasingly displacing other influential groups such as the rich farmers and the salariat (Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011, 5–6; Chatterjee 2008). This is brought out by the persistent virtual consensus among all major political parties about the priorities of rapid economic growth led by private investments, both domestic and foreign (Chatterjee 2008, 57). In this regard there is little doubt that business has become increasingly ideologically dominant in India in terms of redefining what counts as ‘development’. This is evident in how more and more activities have been brought under the purview of ‘development’, a word which has now ‘become a shorthand for a package of vaguely defined terms including urbanisation, industrialisation, and infrastructure creation in which it is assumed that the private sector will take the lead’ (Chandra 2015; see also D’Costa and Chakraborty 2017), and which also includes the acquisition and allocation of land by governments to profit-making private companies (Reddy and Reddy 2007, 3325) such as Tata Motors in the case of Singur. In other words, land has becoming increasingly commodified and directed towards non-agricultural development, and its role as a dynamic source of agrarian accumulation has declined (D’Costa and Chakraborty 2017). Yet the political dominance of business – its ability to have business-friendly policies approved and implemented with little contestation – is less totalizing (Chandra 2015, 57). Indeed, it is through the cracks and fissures that emerge from the disconnect between the ideological and political influence of business that spaces and possibilities for contestation arise. In the context of India’s new land wars, this is most clearly brought out by the fate of India’s Special Economic Zones (SEZ) policy, the policy that is widely regarded as perhaps the most important trigger of many of India’s recent land conflicts.

The SEZ Policy, Dispossession and Resistance

To further advance liberalizing economic reforms and to redefine and fast-track India’s engagement with global capitalism, a new SEZ Act was introduced – and very tellingly passed with minimal debate – in 2005 (Jenkins 2011; Jenkins et al. 2014; Kennedy 2014). Inspired by the Chinese example, this act carved out pieces of national territory and placed them under a distinct regulatory framework in which taxes and bureaucratic burdens on business activity were substantially reduced (Jenkins et al. 2014; Bedi 2017). The stated purpose was to boost ‘development’ by creating news jobs, attracting investments and creating a world-class infrastructure that could efficiently cater to the needs of leading businesses. The response from investors was very positive, and by 2011, 582 SEZ projects had received formal approval (Kennedy 2014, 81).

The anthropologist Jamie Cross, who did long-term fieldwork in an SEZ in Andhra Pradesh, concluded that India’s SEZs were, in spite of their ‘special’ status, fairly unexceptional zones. Here, a multitude of relatively mundane futures could be dreamt about, including rather unexceptional ones about a moderately better life and some form of social mobility (Cross 2010; 2014). However, a more dominant view within the literature on SEZs (Ong 2006; Majumder 2012; Bedi 2017) sees them as indexical of variegated sovereignties, that is, as distinct and exceptional governing regimes within a broader landscape of normalized rule. These spaces of political and administrative exception are, it is argued, the outcome of zoning technologies that are inherently neo-liberal in character. Jenkins et al. (2014, 4) argue that India used the zoning tool of the SEZ to relegate the most radical manifestations of neo-liberalization to a limited number of confined spaces, or zones, ‘where capitalist dynamism could be unleashed in small, concentrated doses’, in the hope that this would reduce the likelihood of widespread popular opposition to the land acquisitions and dispossession that setting up an SEZ often entailed. Scholars writing from the point of view of Marxist political economy, however, tend to be dismissive of this view of India’s SEZs as expressions of a ‘confined neoliberalism’, arguing instead that they are in fact ‘the pre-eminent institution used to attract investment and provide a systematic framework for land grabs’ (Adnan 2015, 28, emphasis in original; see also Levien 2013a). For that reason their introduction in India has been likened to a ‘new enclosure movement’ (Corbridge et al. 2013, 210) – a term also widely used in the literature on the global land grab (e.g. White et al. 2012) – and taken as evidence that advanced global capitalism has, following Harvey (2005), decisively moved from a phase of expanded reproduction to one of accumulation by dispossession, a process in which the Indian state is seen as crucially involved – not just in terms of legislation and policymaking but also in its deployment of the means of violence to evict peasants and crack down on protests. This argument exists in many varieties (see, for instance, Banerjee-Guha 2013; Basu and Das 2008; Kapoor 2011; Levien 2011, 2012, 2013a/b; Adnan 2015; Strümpell 2014; Ramachandraiah and Srinivasan 2011), but often the basic claim is that, as Nikita Sud (2014b, 45) puts it, under the SEZ policy, land is being taken from the poor, for the rich, with the collusion of the state.

These very different views on SEZs and their capacity for fuelling land-based conflicts are not just expressions of different analytical orientations, but also testify to the polysemic nature of SEZs and land transfers more generally, and to the great variation that exists across India’s federal geography. The implementation of the SEZ policy took place in a context in which a decisive shift in the dynamics of India’s federal structure was well under way. Whereas the Indian states often engaged in a game of vying for discretionary largesse and public sector investments from the central government during the dirigiste regime, they have, following economic liberalization, acquired a much freer hand when it comes to attracting both foreign and domestic private investments directly. As Levien (2012) and Sud (2014b) argue, it is in this context of increased interstate competition in a liberalized economic order that the effective and swift provision of land to investors has emerged as a key technique for attracting private capital. The modalities through which land has been ‘made available’ for investors has, however, varied greatly across India, thus creating an uneven pattern of compliance with and resistance to land acquisitions and dispossession. Land transfers for industrial or mining purposes or SEZs in states such as Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh (Cross 2014; Oskarsson and Nielsen 2014; Sud 2014b; Vijayabaskar 2014) have, for example, faced considerably less resistance than what has been the case in West Bengal, Goa or Odisha. The tenor and intensity of struggles over land have thus been closely related to the vastly different ways in which state governments have acquired land and obtained clearances (Jenkins et al. 2014), or have sought to balance concerns with attracting capital with the need to appease key constituents and manage political consequences at the state level (Bedi and Tillin 2015). Yet