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Regimes of Dispossession: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Land in India

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Regimes of Dispossession: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Land in India Regimes of Dispossession: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Land in India By Michael James Levien A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Michael Burawoy, Chair Professor Raka Ray Professor Peter Evans Professor Michael Watts Spring 2013 Abstract Regimes of Dispossession: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Land in India by Michael James Levien Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Burawoy, Chair The aim of the present work is to advance a theoretical framework for the comparative study of dispossession by explaining how the political economy of land dispossession has transformed from state-led developmentalism to neoliberalism in India. The dissertation compares the archetypical forms of dispossession in each period and argues that they constitute different regimes of dispossession. A regime of dispossession is an institutionalized way of expropriating landed assets from their current owners or users. Each regime of dispossession is distinguished by: 1) a set of purposes for which a state is willing to dispossess land and 2) a way of producing compliance to that dispossession. Under different regimes, dispossession facilitates different kinds of accumulation with variable developmental consequences. These consequences crucially effect the long-term political stability of a regime of dispossession. Between independence in 1947 and economic liberalization in the early 1990s, India operated under a developmentalist regime of dispossession. Under this regime, the Indian state dispossessed land for state-led industrial and infrastructural projects, ensuring compliance through coercion and powerful ideological appeals to national development. This dispossession facilitated productive agrarian and industrial accumulation that disproportionately benefited the industrial bourgeoisie, big farmers, and the public sector elite, but also delivered some benefits to other classes. This development was, however, based on the impoverishment of tens of millions of people that it dispossessed. For many decades, this regime was able to convince a wide public that such dispossession constituted a necessary sacrifice for “the nation.” Social movements in the 1970s and 1980s challenged this view, but they could not substantially impede dispossession before the developmentalist regime gave way to economic liberalization. Economic liberalization in the early 1990s generated a transition to a new neoliberal regime of dispossession in which state governments restructured themselves as land brokers for private capital. No longer just dispossessing land for state-led industrial and infrastructural projects, states turned to dispossessing peasants for private real estate. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are the archetype of this regime. Based on 19 months of ethnographic research on one of the first large SEZs in North India, this dissertation illustrates the character and consequences of this neoliberal regime of dispossession. First, it argues that dispossessing land for SEZs lacks 1 legitimacy, fuelling “land wars”; however, states may be able to generate material compliance among some farmers by absorbing them into real estate markets. Second, it argues that dispossessing land for SEZs facilitates real estate and knowledge-intensive accumulation that benefits a narrow set of class interests, while disaccumulating agrarian assets and marginalizing rural labor. Third, it argues that the major economic effect of this accumulation is real estate speculation, which generates unequal and involutionary agrarian change that leaves the majority of the dispossessed impoverished. The result is “dispossession without development.” The dissertation concludes that India’s neoliberal regime of dispossession will remain politically tenuous. It ends by outlining a comparative research program on the sociology of dispossession. By integrating land dispossession into theories of capitalist development, the theory of regimes of dispossession fills an absence in development sociology and reconstructs Marxist theories of “primitive accumulation,” enhancing our understanding of states, economic development, agrarian change, and rural politics. 2 Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables ii Preface iii Acknowledgements iv 1 Introduction: Regimes of Dispossession 1 2 The Developmentalist Regime of Dispossession (1947-1991) 29 3 The Land Broker State (1991- ) 55 4 A Stake in the Game: Real Estate and Compliance to Dispossession 82 5 Special Economic Zones and (Dis-)Accumulation by Dispossession 97 6 Dispossession without Development: Real Estate and Agrarian Change 117 7 The Politics of Dispossession and the Future of India’s “Land Wars” 155 8 Conclusion: Towards a Sociology of Dispossession 172 Bibliography 177 i List of Figures and Tables Figure 3.1: The Rate of Accumulation by Dispossession Figure 3.2: The Growing Public Rate of Accumulation by Dispossession (Land revenues of the Jaipur Development Authority) Figure 3.3: Increasing Scale of Dispossession: Time Series of Land Acquisition by the Rajasthan Industrial Development and Investment Corporation (RIICO) Figure 4.1: Location of the Mahindra World City SEZ Figure 6.1: Land Sales in Rajpura, 2000-2010. Figure 6.2: Percentage of Farmers Who Allocated Real Estate Earnings to Various Purposes Figure 6.3: Percentage of Families and Lower Caste Families that Experienced a Decrease in Income, Food Security, and Subjective Well-Being Table 4.1: Caste-wise Distribution of Land in Four SEZ-affected villages (Rajpura, Shivpura, Neempura and Jatpura) Table 4.2: Initial Caste-wise Support for the SEZ Table 6.1: Distribution of Socio-economic Attributes of Households by Caste in Villages Rajpura, Jatpura, Shivpura and Neempura Before the SEZ. Table 6.2: Ability of Different Castes to Profit from Land Markets Table 6.3: Percentage of Farmers Within Each Caste Who Allocated Real Estate Earnings to Various Purposes ii Preface This project has grown from a long-standing interest in the dispossession of land from rural people for economic development, often known as “development-induced displacement,” and a growing hunch about how it was changing in post-liberalization India. When I first arrived in India in 2003, the locus of land dispossession still appeared to be remote river valleys where indigenous groups (adivasis) continued to be displaced for Nehruvian-era dams. Struggles against dams and other state-led industrial and infrastructural projects had emerged relatively late in the developmentalist period (picking up steam in the 1980s), remained largely marginalized despite often heroic efforts, and were only rarely successful in preventing their dispossession. The pioneering “people’s movement” in the Narmada Valley against the displacement of tens of thousands of people for the Sardar Sarovar dam project was, despite tremendous efforts, in the process of losing successive battles to prevent further construction. The tragic flooding of dozens more villages with each passing monsoon had come to symbolize the destructive underside of “development” and the bleak prospects for successfully opposing it. In hindsight, however, I had arrived at a moment of transition. By the mid-2000s, it became clear that a new constellation of land struggles was emerging, increasingly in the plains rather than forests and river valleys, and in response to projects that clearly bore the stamp of free-market capitalism rather than state-directed development: hi-tech parks, real estate colonies, privatized infrastructure, factories for multi- national corporations, and Special Economic Zones. Above all, the Indian government’s strategy from 2005 onwards of acquiring land for private developers to build hundreds of Special Economic Zones unleashed widespread and militant farmer protest across the country. Not only were so-called “land wars” becoming more prevalent, but they were actually forcing the cancellation and delay of countless projects. While these new agrarian struggles had similarities with the older struggles against dams, their character, scale, and success were indicators that a transformation had occurred in both the politics and economics of dispossession in the neoliberal age. This dissertation was conceived as an attempt to understand precisely what had changed in the political economy of land dispossession with the transition to neoliberalism in India, and in the process advance a sociological framework for the comparative study of dispossession. I call this framework regimes of dispossession, and this dissertation tries to illuminate the consequences of India’s move from a developmentalist to neoliberal one. By arguing that dispossession is organized through socially and historically specific regimes, I hope to provide a theoretical framework for understanding dispossession that is less functionalist and economistic than existing frameworks of “primitive accumulation” or “accumulation by dispossession,” and that consequently elevates the politics of dispossession to the center of analysis. I hope this effort is not only analytically illuminating, but politically empowering. Once we recognize that dispossession is fundamentally a political process that looks very different across time and space, we can finally leave behind notions of its necessity and inevitability. iii Acknowledgements
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