South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

13 | 2016 Land, Development and Security in South Asia

Katy Gardner and Eva Gerharz (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4095 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.4095 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference Katy Gardner and Eva Gerharz (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 13 | 2016, « Land, Development and Security in South Asia » [Online], Online since 22 April 2016, connection on 08 May 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4095 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.4095

This text was automatically generated on 8 May 2020.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

SAMAJ-EASAS Series Series editors: Alessandra Consolaro, Margret Frenz and Roger Jeffery. image This thematic issue is the fourth in a series of issues jointly co-edited by SAMAJ and the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS). More on our partnership with EASAS here.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The editorial board thanks Arthur Cessou for his help in preparing this issue.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Land, ‘Development’ and ‘Security’ in Bangladesh and India Katy Gardner and Eva Gerharz

Alienation in Neoliberal India and Bangladesh: Diversity of Mechanisms and Theoretical Implications Shapan Adnan

‘Who Has the Stick Has the Buffalo’: Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion on a Pasture in the Indian Himalayas Richard Axelby

Land, Place and Resistance to Displacement in Phulbari Sadid Nuremowla

The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh Shelley Feldman

Seeing Development as Security: Constructing Top-Down Authority and Inequitable Access in Jharkhand Siddharth Sareen

The Politics of Land, Consent, and Negotiation: Revisiting the Development-Displacement Narratives from Singur in West Bengal Ritanjan Das

Dispossession by ‘Development’: Corporations, Elites and NGOs in Bangladesh Abu Ahasan and Katy Gardner

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Introduction. Land, ‘Development’ and ‘Security’ in Bangladesh and India

Katy Gardner and Eva Gerharz

1 Writing of the often violent processes of land expropriation in Bangladesh in which arable land has been reduced from 9 million hectares in the 1990s to around 8 million in the mid-2000s, Feldman and Geisler declare that the country is ‘an epicentre of displacement’ (2012: 973). In India, scholars have described similar processes, many focussing upon how state sponsored property speculation and business interests lead to the ongoing dispossession of farmers, whether in the form of Special Economic Zones (Levien 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2013, Cross 2014), large scale mining projects (Padel & Das 2010), conservation (Münster & Münster 2012), agribusiness and aquaculture,1 housing or industrialisation (Adduci 2009, Le Mons Walker 2008, Mishra 2011, Akram-Lodhi 2009, Münster & Strümpell 2014, Adnan 2013). Kathy le Mons Walker estimates that since Independence in India, over 30 million people have been displaced by ‘development’ (2008: 580), arguing that land is the biggest site of struggle in the subcontinent (Le Mons Walker 2008: 589). As land changes hands and usage, the implications for rural economies that were once based on agriculture are enormous. In most instances there are few economic opportunities for newly landless people, for even if the land has been cleared for Special Economic Zones or extractive industries, these rarely employ local people (Makki & Geisler 2011: 4, Levien 2011a, 2011b, Gardner et al. 2012). Rather, what awaits are increasing immiseration for those with the least social capital and opportunities for vast profits for those with the most, almost always resulting in a heightening of social and economic inequality (cf. Corbridge and Shah, 2013).

2 What sense are we to make of these processes? Whilst displacement and dispossession are hardly new to South Asia—the colonial period was characterised by the encroachment of land and forest by the Raj for railways, mines and plantations and Nehru’s India by large scale infra structure, mining and industrial projects—the pace and scale of dispossession, and the shift in the value of land from its productive use to

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its commodification, is notable in this, the neoliberal era of enclosure (Akram-Lodhi 2007). Crucially, in India the state has shifted from being the owner of industry in the post-Independence era to being a land-broker for private multinational and national corporations in the 2000s (Levien 2013), a period marked both by rapid economic growth and the persistence of poverty (Drèze & Sen 2013). This new space for officials and bureaucrats to broker land deals has transformed existing modes of governance with far-reaching consequences at all levels (Goldman 2011). Close relationships between business people and government officials, which have been described as ‘crony capitalism’, have not only shaped what has been commonly referred to as ‘neoliberal India’ (Münster & Strümpell 2014) but also contemporary Bangladesh, where hyper development is enabled by the state’s neoliberal ‘open door’ policies. An emerging literature from India charts these transformations, focussing largely upon increasing inequality and impoverishment (cf. Corbridge & Shah 2013, Münster & Strümpell 2014) as well as the crisis of agriculture, impoverishment of farmers and exploitation of labour in the informal sector (cf. Harriss-White 2005, Harriss-White et al. 2009, Reddy & Mishra 2009, Mohanty 2005, Breman 1993, 2007, 2010, Lerche 2011, Siddiqui 2015).

3 Whilst much of this work rightly stresses the effects of neoliberalism, other work addresses the process of dispossession: the means by which changes of land use and differential access take place2 and, indeed, the varying forms of resistance or compliance by different groups and individuals over time (see, for example, Levien 2011a, 2013, Feldman & Geisler 2012, Cross 2014). It is to the latter questions of process that this volume contributes. In particular we aim to flesh out issues raised by David Harvey’s widely discussed concept of ‘Accumulation by Dispossession’ (Harvey 2003). Whilst this has been used by scholars to analyse processes of land loss (see, in particular, Gardner 2012, Levien 2011a, 2012, 2013, Münster & Strümpell 2014), the concept is frustratingly vague as to the actual techniques involved. For example, Harvey points to the collusion between states and corporations, but gives little detail of what this involves and has nothing to say on the role of local elites or the ideological justifications involved. As others have argued, the commodification of land is not always met with resistance by farmers; industrialisation may evoke aspirations and hope as much as fear and resistance (Cross 2014, Vijayabaskar 2010). Combined with this, the appropriation of agricultural land, commons and forestry for industrial use or infrastructure has long been justified by national or local plans of ‘development’ or ‘security’. Only a few years ago concepts like ‘environmental justice’ highlighted that these development projects may have far-reaching ecological consequences which need to be analysed in relation to their socio-economic implications. Moreover, the very notion of ‘dispossession’ implies a straightforward transfer of rights in which those that once possessed are dispossessed. Yet as we shall see in the papers that follow, the local realities of land use, differential forms of access and property rights are often far more nuanced, involving complex interrelationships between groups of users, legality, the state, and customary forms of access, not to say cross cutting discourses of development, modernity, belonging and rights.

4 In order to interrogate these issues further, this volume brings together work from India and Bangladesh which explores three interlinked questions: (1) how different groups gain access to land, either via legislation, (re)negotiated customary rights, or material use (2) how rights and access are lost and restricted via collusions between states, the military and private interests and the techniques of disappropriation and

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discursive formations used and (3) the responses to this, which indicate that simply framing the contestations and negotiations involved in terms of local farmers’ resistance to corporations or states is too simplistic.

5 In this introduction we provide an initial framework for these questions. After exploring recent theoretical approaches to dispossession and land loss, an endeavor which is taken up in more detail in the subsequent paper by Adnan, we scope out the ideological apparatus of contemporary dispossessions—the discursive formations of ‘development’ and ‘security’. After this we explore coalitions between states, corporations and the military. Finally, we turn to questions of violence, security and resistance. The volume is based on a panel on land dispossession, development and security held at the EASAS conference in July 2014. Originally our intention was to draw upon work from the entire South Asian region; our call for papers was however met only by researchers working in Bangladesh and India. The comparison between these two countries is instructive. Whereas we can witness rapid rates of land dispossession and corporatisation taking place all over South Asia, Bangladesh and India (particularly West Bengal) share similar historical processes. During colonialism, agricultural production in the Bengal region faced substantial transformations when the Zamindari system was reformed in the late 18th century. Zamindars now had control over the estate and the cultivators were transformed into peasants without rights (Lewis 2011: 50). Many of the estates were owned by high-caste Hindus during colonialism, who left East Bengal after 1947 and were replaced by wealthy Muslims. Lewis (2011: 57) shows that this produced vertical patronage and factional ties and prevented the emergence of peasant movements based on horizontal solidarity. In post-colonial West Bengal, however, such movements are firmly established—a contrast which is also reflected in the papers in this volume. India and Bangladesh also share a post-colonial emphasis on food security, which partly stems from the devastating consequences of colonial mismanagement of food stock during the 1940s. Meanwhile, India and Bangladesh have followed quite different paths in the institutionalisation of democratic rule. In contrast to India where democracy has been, despite some well-known deficiencies, firmly established, Bangladesh has struggled with authoritarianism since the subcontinent’s partition. Thanks to communalism and subsequent nationalist ideals, ethnic divides have been high on the agenda when it comes to the distribution of land rights (see Feldman’s paper). The historical and political contexts of Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan are, no doubt, leading to different processes. Sri Lanka and Nepal have been dealing with land distribution quite differently from India and Bangladesh and in Sri Lanka at least, leftist governments pursued land reforms which transferred previously rivately owned land under state control. All three countries have also been struggling with different problems which postponed far-reaching reforms towards a neoliberal agenda. With our initial focus on India and Bangladesh, we hope that the papers offered here can both stimulate further research and be used to make comparisons with other countries within the wider region of South Asia.

Conceptualising land loss and displacement in India and Bangladesh

6 Land loss, enclosures and dispossession have long been features of life in South Asia (Adnan 2013, Le Mons Walker 2008). Wherever land has been valued for its productive

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potential, powerful elites have grabbed it from the less powerful via techniques such as money lending, intimidation, chicanery and explicit violence.3 State involvement is also nothing new. In post-colonial India the Raj appropriated large tracts of land for industry and infrastructure in the name of national projects of modernity and development (Levien 2013). Similarly in Bangladesh the government, often with the financial backing of international donors, has expropriated land for the building of bridges, roads and factories since its birth in 1971. Meanwhile, foreign companies have long taken over forest lands for plantations: witness the tea gardens of Northeast Bangladesh, some of which were owned by the British company Finlays and supported by British aid into the 1990s (Gardner 1997). Yet whilst the history is deep rooted, recent decades have involved a shift in the scale and nature of dispossession (Feldman and Geisler 2012; Adnan 2015: 28). In this context Levien’s concept of ‘regimes of dispossession’ is useful. He defines this as: ..socially and historically specific constellations of state structures, economic logics tied to particular class interests and ideological justifications that generate a consistent pattern of dispossession’ (2013: 383).

7 Levien’s stress on ideological justification and its link to the extent and success of resistance is of particular relevance to us. In the post-Independence Nehruvian era of state owned industry the loss of land to steel plants and townships was justified by nationalist projects of modernity and development; steel plants were to be ‘temples’ to India’s industrial, secular future, making ‘backward’ areas of forestry or ‘tribals’ a thing of the past (Levien 2013: 385). Levien suggests that the persuasive power of this vision, plus the large scale employment offered by the new industries, meant that resistance to land loss was muted and failed to gain widespread support. In contrast, in the current neoliberal regime of dispossession, which involves acquiring land for SEZs that fail to provide meaningful employment for the rural population and a state that has become a ‘gate-keeper’ for foreign investors, land grabs can only be justified by references to ‘economic growth’; resistance is thus protracted and more often successful than in the past (Levien 2013).

8 The historical specificity of Levien’s ‘regimes of dispossession’ builds in helpful ways upon David Harvey’s notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (or ABD) which has been used by many scholars seeking to analyse contemporary processes of land grab and dispossession.4 Arguing that capitalism’s chronic problem of over-accumulation is solved by ‘spatio-temporal fixes’ in which new markets are opened up or resources exploited, the concept helps us understand new forms of capitalism in terms of space and territorialisation (Harvey 2003, 2004). Explored in detail in Adnan’s paper in this volume, ‘ABD’ is a useful starting point in understanding the processes by which dispossession takes place in South Asia. Empirically the concept raises more questions than it answers and besides alerting us to the involvement of the state tells us very little about the actual techniques, alliances and ideological apparatus involved. Indeed, as Levien argues, Harvey fails to clearly distinguish ADB from primitive accumulation and is vague about the degree to which it is an economic or extra economic process, involving coercion other than market forces alone (Levien 2011a: 457). Combined with this, as Hall has pointed out, the term blunts our attention to specific histories and socio-political relationships (Hall 2011, 2012, 2013). For example, little attention is paid in Harvey’s work to the relations of property and land use that existed before ABD. It is also assumed that people wish to continue to work the land when the reality in South / South-East Asia is often to the contrary (Hall 2011, 2012, 2013, Li 2014). In a similar vein

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is the tendency to assume that locals / peasants / indigenous people / farmers, etc., are united in resistance when the truth is more messy: local elites who stand to profit may comply with corporations, even carrying out violence against those who resist, and forming a new rentier class (Welker 2009, Levien 2011a, Gardner 2012). Quite often, poor people act out violence against others on behalf of their patrons. Such loyalty can derive from affiliation to a political party but also from ethnic belonging.

9 What then, are we describing and how are we to capture the local and historical specificities? Before we proceed it might help to distinguish conceptually between four terms that are often used interchangeably: land grab; enclosures; dispossession and displacement. The first, land grab is defined by Zoomers as ‘large scale, cross border land deals or transactions that are carried out by transnational corporations or initiated by foreign governments’ (Zoomers 2010: 249). Most commentators describe these ‘grabs’5 as involving agribusiness, responding to the needs of urban populations in wealthy nations for food and bio-fuels. As Borras et al. put it: ‘The phrase ‘global land grab’ has become a catch-all to describe and analyse the global explosion of large scale (trans)national commercial land transactions’ (2011: 210; also Borras and Franco 2012). Though not confined solely to food and bio-fuel, for conservation, tourism and ‘hideaways’ may also feature (Zoomers 2010),6 these transactions are a response to global food insecurity, leading to corporations and in some instances states, taking over large tracts of land in distant ‘empty’ places to provide food for export, sometimes even importing foreign labour to do the agricultural work (Borras et al. 2011, Zoomers 2010, Makki & Geisler 2011). Overall, the global loss of land from small holders to large scale business concerns is proceeding at an alarming rate, a ‘frenzy’ of large scale land acquisitions on a ‘colossal’ scale (Makki 2014).

10 Whilst Zoomers (2010) stresses the ‘foreignisation of space’ as a key component of contemporary land grabs, the commericalisation of agriculture can also take place within national borders (Hall 2013). The large scale privatisation of land and / or common water resources for prawn and shrimp farming destined for export to far- flung markets including the US and China by private Bangladeshi companies is just one case (see, for example, Ito 2002, Guhathakurta 2008). Meanwhile, others have suggested that current land grabs of ‘undeveloped’ territory can be thought of as the globalisation of enclosures (Makki 2014). It is worth noting that this term is usually used in the context of land that was originally held commonly, and as such cannot be accurately used to describe all the processes described in this volume. Historically the term refers to the process whereby common land in England was enclosed under acts of parliament, particularly from the 18th to the mid-19th century. This resulted in approximately 6.8 million acres of land being enclosed, with fences and hedges, from 1604–1914, forcing large numbers of small holders and peasant farmers off the land. The Enclosures were a major cause of the demise of peasant farming and the creation of an urban proletariat supplying labour for the Industrial Revolution. Crucially, the transformation of common land into private property involved its commoditisation and integration into market relations. Though this history might be understood in terms of the incursion of capitalism into the English countryside, it should not be ‘naturalised’ as solely economic. Rather, the process was primarily political, involving acts of parliament, peasant resistance and violent coercion, or as E. P. Thompson classically put it, ‘a plain enough case of class robbery’ (Thompson 1963). Meanwhile, colonialism involved the forced enclosure of land abroad. Historians have argued that, like slavery, the enclosures of colonised common lands, either directly into plantations

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or indirectly via colonial taxes, augmented and funded enclosures and industrialisation at home (Makki 2014).

11 Perhaps it is already clear that any attempt to narrow the definition of either ‘land grab’ or ‘enclosures’ is doomed to failure. Examples from South Asia show that land grab cannot be described as the ‘foreignisation of land’, since national companies and states are often involved, whilst confining ‘land grab’ to expropriations made for the purposes of agribusiness and bio fuel excludes the vast tracts of land lost to industry, housing and property speculation. And whilst the term ‘enclosures’ reminds us of the historical antecedents of current processes, it occludes transfers in which land is already privatised and enclosed, as, for example, in the case of Bibiyana in Northest Bangladesh described in Ahasan and Gardner’s paper, or Singur-Nandigram in West Bengal, described by Das.

12 An important reason why we should be cautious in using the term ‘land grab’ is its temporal association. The imagery is explicit: land is suddenly and violently seized. Yet as several of our papers show, the transfer of land from one group of users to another is often incremental, shifting over time according to complex political processes literally on the ground. This is illustrated in this volume by Axelby’s paper on how access to and rights over grazing land by different ethnic groups in Himachal Pradesh are negotiated over the years and are affected by national political events.

13 Finally, we need to distinguish between those who use and those who own resources (Ribot and Peluso 2003), a distinction that the term ‘land grab’ is in danger of blurring. For example, changes in land ownership might be agreed upon by owners if not users, as was the case in Bibiyana, Bangladesh, where UK-based owners of land agreed to sell when the levels of state compensation were raised (see Ahasan & Gardner in this volume; also Gardner 2012). As this latter case shows, whilst violence might lurk in the background, the actual process in which fields are transferred from one group of users (the rural poor) to another (the multinational Chevron) is legal and orderly; here, the term ‘land grab’ clouds the actual techniques used and the complexities of local responses.

14 Similar problems face the term ‘dispossession’. Like land grab, ‘dispossession’ carries an emotional and political punch, but at times can be analytically fuzzy, obscuring rather than illuminating. To be dispossessed implies original possession. Yet as many of the cases discussed in this volume demonstrate, those who use land may not have legal tenure. Indeed, as Shelley Feldman shows, Hindus in Bangladesh have been constitutionally dispossessed since Partition. Again, we are cautioned to distinguish between legal property rights and access to resources, or as Axelby explains in his paper, ‘that which (people) are able to derive benefit from’ (this volume). Thus, as Nuremowla elaborates in his paper on the Phulbari case, even though they have cleared khas (government) land from forest, the farmers of Borogram have no papers and thus face little chance of gaining compensation if open-cast mining at Phulbari goes ahead. And whilst in the case of the commons, be this grazing land or wetlands used for fishing or khas land, the expropriation involves a traumatic and violently experienced loss of customary rights of access and can indeed be understood as a form of dispossession, in other cases the politics and socio-economic relationships are more complex.

15 To illustrate this, let us consider two cases from Bangladesh. In the first, what we might think of as ‘classic’ displacement and dispossession has taken place over many years in

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the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where large parts of the indigenous population have faced displacement in various phases. In the 1960s, a huge area was swallowed by a dam construction project; from the 1970s onwards, the government distributed the land used by the local population for shifting cultivation—considered ‘empty land’, among in-migrating settlers. Although the armed conflict in the area was officially pacified in 1997, the military continues to expropriate land, allegedly for security reasons and for business purposes (Adnan & Dastidar 2011, Gerharz 2015). Meanwhile, in other cases the processes are less straightforward, as for example in the Bibiyana gas field where the rural poor employed by transnational owners as labourers or sharecroppers on the land that was forcibly acquired had no say in the process and were not compensated. Whilst the gas field undoubtedly made their agrarian livelihoods even more precarious, to label them ‘dispossessed’ by the gas field is incorrect since they were never the owners of the land. Rather, they had been forced out of agriculture by wider processes which were taking place long before the gas field was constructed, in which agriculture was becoming increasingly commoditised and precarious (Gardner 2012). In this context, Misra’s distinction between large-scale involuntary and sudden dispossession, caused by land grab for industry or mining and ‘dispossession in slow motion,’ is helpful (Mishra 2011: 3). Citing the case of Orissa, Misra argues that both forms work in tandem to create capitalist accumulation at the expense of the rural poor. Whilst the state’s policy of encouraging large scale foreign investment for mining has led to substantial resistance, dispossession in slow motion, a quieter and often hidden process, has involved ‘voluntary’ transfers of land over longer time periods in which the pincer movements of rising production costs, indebtedness, and neoliberal policy have led to agrarian crisis and the longer term movement of the rural poor from their land.

16 Here it is useful to consider our final term ‘displacement’. Arising largely from a literature that focusses upon the large scale movements and resettlement of communities to make way for development infrastructure, mining or conservation projects (cf. Parasuraman 1999, Cernea 2006, Agrawal & Redford 2009, Mathur 2008), the term turns our attention from questions of property and possession to emplacement: the social as well as economic forces that structure relationships to localities and livelihoods, and indeed the costs of forced movement. This is illustrated in Nuremowla’s paper. Threatened by Asia Energy’s proposed mine in Phulbari, people in the village of Borogram are faced not only with the loss of land but also in hard won social capital, established over the years they have spent forming relationships within their village. For them, ‘displacement’ means not only the loss of land but vitally important social protection. Again, however, the term is in danger of being used too generally, and thus of concealing important differences in the processes involved. Feldman and Geisler make a useful distinction between in-situ and ex-situ displacement (Feldman & Geisler 2012). Defining in-situ displacement as ‘the critical impairment of the means of social reproduction,’ the authors argue that in-situ displacements, which are often invisible because they don’t involve people leaving their homes, are no less catastrophic than ex-situ displacements, yet are also caused by the processes of capital accumulation. In the hinterlands of Dhaka, for example, pollution and illegal building, the filling up of wetlands and threatened as well as actual violence all contribute to people losing access to land and livelihoods, even if they don’t actually lose their homes. Here too we should distinguish between forced displacements, caused directly by the state (for example, to make way for a mine, as threatened in Phulbari) or other

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agencies (for example, local mafia or mustaan who attack Hindu homes, causing them to flee in Bangladesh) and displacements which take place as a corollary of wider processes, such as the urbanisation and commodification of land described by Feldman and Geisler (2012), or the long-term market processes that have led to a gradual erosion of agrarian livelihoods over much of South Asia.

17 By scoping out the different meanings of land grab, enclosures, dispossession and displacement, our purpose is to strike a note of caution about the interchangeable or fuzzy use of terms, whilst at the same time revealing their analytic and political potential. Whilst some of the papers that follow describe land grab and violent dispossession and others show more subtle, or hidden processes, all indicate the complex local politics and meanings that surround the use of and access to land. As other work implies, people are also not always opposed to the loss of farm land, the privatisation of the commons or the incursion of the market into the rural economy.7 We therefore cannot make assumptions about the nature of resistance to land loss. In Das’ paper, for example, we see how opposition against the proposed TATA car plant in West Bengal arose partly from the manipulation of grass roots political cadres and party politics and not simply from a blanket opposition to the proposed development. Had levels of compensation been higher and the negotiations carried out in a more inclusive style, many farmers would have sold their land. Clearly, the potential gains of industrial development can be highly persuasive. In the development of the Mahindra World City in Jaipur, Levien shows how by allowing local farmers to retain 25 per cent of their expropriated land as developed plots, with the potential for substantial profit, the state was able to divide and mute resistance to the forced acquisition (Levien 2011a). Whilst tempting farmers with ‘get rich quick’ sweeteners is one way to hedge off potential resistance, in other cases persuasion is as much discursive as material, for as Jamie Cross has astutely pointed out, hopes and aspirations for development and modernity are often evoked at the sites of would be SEZs or other forms of industrialisation in India (Cross 2014). Let us turn to the discursive formations used in the appropriation of land.

Discursive formations

18 What is the role of discourse and ideology in justifying and enabling land grabs and dispossession? As Foucault has shown us, power emerges in discourses that arise from particular historically-constituted political economies. These ‘architectures of knowledge’ frame the world in taken-for-granted ways, leading to ‘regimes of truth’ that appear unquestionable. Power is dispersed and flowing, rather than being merely repressive: ‘In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault 1991: 194). ‘Development’ is a prime example of a ‘regime of truth’ which frames the world in particular ways, working to uphold the power of the North over the South. As Makki shows in his discussion of enclosures in Ethiopia, for example, the predatory land grabs of colonialism were historically justified by the notion of terra nullius, in which distant places were presented in terms of empty wilderness, their primitive nature in need of ‘capitalist redemption and valorisation’ (Makki 2014: 82). Indeed, in the post-colonial era, deconstructionist scholars such as Escobar have argued that the notion of development arose from the need for the North to continue to control the Global South via a discourse which constructed the ex-

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colonies in terms of technical problems and need (Escobar 1995; see also Ferguson 1990).8 More recently, work such as Emily Yeh’s ethnography of Chinese development projects in Tibet have shown how ‘gifts of development’ allow for state territorialisation, evoking ambiguity amongst the supposed beneficiaries (Yeh 2013).

19 The Tibetan case hints at a second discursive strand used by states to justify their incursions into new territories: ‘security’. Here we come to a paradox within the neoliberal era: the retreat of the welfare state and the deterioration of borders that hold people, ideas, finance and weapons at bay contribute to the production of (imagined) insecurity. Neoliberalism thus leads to a greater need for security, which in turn is masked as ‘development’ or programmes to win ‘hearts and minds.’ This tendency to disguise security concerns as development has become a dominant tool for controlling unstable regions in contemporary India. Duncan McDuie-Ra’s analysis of the North Eastern Region Vision 2020 released by the Government in 2008 shows that although the official aim of this policy agenda is to achieve peace and prosperity in India’s North East, it primarily aims at consolidating India’s hegemonic position in the region (McDuie-Ra 2009). Similar developments can be observed in post-conflict Sri Lanka, where reconstruction measures in the war-torn region have been explicitly related to counter-insurgency and enduring militarisation (Goodhand 2010, Höglund & Orjuela 2011). Meanwhile, in the case of Jharkand discussed by Sareen in this volume, ‘development for security’ is used by the state to justify large-scale road-building projects that seem destined for mining operations rather than the anti-poverty projects of the Sarenda Action plan. Whether we interpret the Sarenda Action Plan as a deliberate and explicit element of the ‘Ideological State Apparatus,’ or as a less- conscious discourse which brings the unintended (though for the state and corporate interests desirable) consequences of infrastructure and accountable local populations, is a matter of theoretical orientation.

20 Whilst development may be understood as a crucial component of the ‘regime of truth’ that justified colonisation, what distinguishes the current era is its use by corporations. A growing body of ethnographic work focusses upon the so-called ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) of extractive industries, often offered as an appeasing gift to populations in the areas where the extraction of resources takes place (Rajak 2011, Welker 2012, 2014, Frynas 2005, Kapelus 2002). As this demonstrates, extractive industries are keen to show a ‘smiling face’ (Shever 2010) by offering a range of development gifts which attempt to rebrand the corporation as compassionate, caring, in partnership with ‘local communities’ (Zilak 2004, Rajak, 2009, 2011) or manipulating the discourses of environmentalism with which they are critiqued to suggest that their work is sustainable and that they are protecting the environment and contributing to local culture (Welker 2009, Kirsch 2014, Rogers 2012).

21 A striking aspect of many of the CSR programmes of extractive industries is the use of NGOs to carry out their programmes, often in alliance with the local elite, who may also be acting as contractors or brokers for the company.9 In other cases, mining companies use NGO programmes to keep elites ‘on side’ by offering them leadership roles in the dispensation of development goods, whilst attempting to procure the NGO’s good reputation. In Ahasan and Gardner’s paper in this volume, two examples from Bangladesh are discussed which show how in order to gain the ‘social license to operate,’ corporations plug into discourses of development which present land loss and the extraction of resources as necessary for national growth and development, whilst

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offering development gifts that will supposedly benefit the community. In an interesting echo of terra nullis, in Bibiyana, Chevron’s CSR executives were keen to stress that before their arrival ‘there was nothing there’ in the way of NGO projects (Gardner 2012), whilst in Dumki, Sylhet, the JT Corporation set out an ‘uplifting project’ which would remedy the ‘problem’ of low productivity in the area.

22 Despite these efforts, the justifications used by corporations and states in the expropriations of land are not always accepted by local populations. Instead they are either vociferously contested (as in Phulbari, described in this volume by Nuremowla), ignored (as in the Dumki case, in which the corporation’s plans were rejected by the NGO, described in this volume by Ahasan and Gardner) or they find partial acceptance, with some groups taking up the plans and their ideological justifications whilst others remain unconvinced (as in Bibiyana). In these cases, discourses of development fail to convince, or clash with alternative understandings of what development should be (Gardner 2012). Issues of scale are important too: for whom is the justification made? For local populations in order to gain compliance, or for national and global audiences and shareholders, in which case reputation is all?

23 If the discourses of development—and agents in the guise of NGOs—are increasingly being used by corporations rather than states to justify land appropriation, questions are raised concerning the relationship between states and corporations. Is it the case, for example, that in the neoliberal era states have become ‘shadow states’ (Harriss- White 2003), mere land brokers for private interests? Let us turn to the varied forms of state-corporate coalitions in Bangladesh and India.

The ‘neoliberal’ state and its corporate coalitions

24 As our discussion so far implies, neoliberalism does not simply lead to the retreat of the state. Instead, recent tendencies towards trans-nationalisation and privatisation transform the state and the particular ways in which governance is performed (Randeria 2003, Ferguson 2004, Gupta & Sharma 2006, Sharma & Gupta 2006). In this context we can understand the institutions of states as part of an intricate constellation of actors, including NGOs, schools, communities and companies located at and acting across different spatial scales. In some cases, states may strategise in particular ways in their responses to global forces for justice or development. Based on her empirical inquiry into environmental justice in India, for example, Shalini Randeria has pointed out that states may become ‘cunning states, which capitalise on their perceived weaknesses in order to render themselves unaccountable’ (Randeria 2003: 306). But the contributions to this volume also reveal how we need to conceptualise the state as ‘a multi-layered, contradictory, translocal ensemble of institutions, practices and people’ (Sharma & Gupta 2006: 6) in order to understand the ways in which it regulates the access to and loss of land. In Sareen’s contribution, for example, the military renders ‘stateness’ visible in people’s everyday lives, while in Das’ paper, the political party takes over the functions of the local state.

25 Acknowledging that neoliberal reforms in India in the early 1990s mark a significant turning point, scholars have embarked on the use of concepts inspired by governmentality studies to figure out the ways in which neoliberalism leads to the carving out of exceptional spaces (Ong 2006) and the role of states in this (Le Mons Walker 2009, Baka 2013, Münster & Strümpell 2014, Adnan 2015). As we have implied,

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whereas earlier initiatives were regarded as initiated by the state and for the development of the entire nation, legitimised with the notion of ‘public purpose’ (Mehta 2009: xxxii), the involvement of, if not exclusive role played by, corporate actors has provoked a shift in perspective. In considering these processes let us briefly outline some differences between Bangladesh and India, a task taken further in Adnan’s article in this volume.

26 In India, neoliberal reforms were unleashed in 1991, when the government abruptly dismantled the so-called ‘License Raj system’, e.g. tight regulations for the establishment of businesses. The measure was a clear break with previous policies based on the ideals of a planned economy. Massive programmes of privatisation and structural adjustment followed (Le Mons Walker 2009: 559, Adnan 2015: 27). Whereas the drastic deregulation fostered rapid economic growth at the macro-level, the measures also went along with land grab at a large scale.

27 Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, the development of an export-oriented economy concentrating on the textile industry has led to a major source of income (Kabeer 2002, Dannecker 2002). It has been widely agreed that the garment boom in the 1980s ushered in the era of neoliberalism in Bangladesh, with comprehensive economic restructuration and transformations of urban spaces, as well as the agrarian sector: Feldman and Geisler argue that the transition in export production from agricultural commodities to manufacturing goods displaced agriculture as a central focus of investment (Feldman & Geisler 2012: 982). Similarly in India, financial liberalisation led to a decline in institutional credit for agriculture and provoked an agrarian crisis, which led not only to growing incidences of starvation and farmer suicides, but also the loss of land due to growing rural indebtedness after state subsidies were removed (Le Mons Walker 2008: 572). In both Bangladesh and India, the state and also the state governments promulgated laws and policies that facilitated corporate access to land and natural resources (Adnan 2015: 29). Meanwhile, rights and entitlements of vulnerable groups were denied, for example by dismantling constitutional provisions and laws protecting the rights of indigenous populations (Baviskar 1995, Khagram 2004, Ghosh 2006). In both countries, the displacement of indigenous populations has led to the formation of social movements which capitalise on the recent institutionalisation of indigenous people’s rights and discourses at international levels, but which the state has been remarkably resilient to. In Bangladesh for example, the state resisted the activists’ demands to implement the Peace Accord in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and despite massive international pressure continued to transfer power to the military (Gerharz 2014).

28 In India, the formation of SEZs has been a major aspect of state attempts to attract foreign investors since 2000. SEZs have been considered as a ‘systematic framework for land grabs’ (Adnan 2015: 28), and not surprisingly have involved substantial resistance, often over inappropriate levels of compensation (Costa 2007). In Bangladesh, SEZs have been established since the 1980s, when Ershad implemented structural adjustments programmes to counter the negative effects of nationalising all major industries after independence. In contrast to India, however, the establishments of SEZ’s and the textile sector in Bangladesh have met with little resistance, partly because of the generation of employment opportunities, especially in the textile industry which grew rapidly in the early 1980s and has not only turned into a major national source of income but has also generated a large number of jobs, primarily for women (Dannecker 2002). This garment

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boom took place in a period of intensive nation-building and served as the ‘natural reward for successful national integration’ (Ferguson 2004: 387).

29 Ironically, the Bangladeshi experience shows that whilst nation-building may be the characteristic rhetoric of the state, it does not necessarily lead to a strong state. In her work on micro-finance schemes of NGOs, Lamia Karim observes that in postcolonial countries where ‘the notion of citizenship as a set of entitlements that are bound up with a nation-state that guarantees those rights, is lacking’ (Karim 2008: 6), populations are served by non-state actors instead. Thus the country is characterised by an extremely high number of NGOs who govern the poor population in rural areas. This has led to the accusations that NGOs operate as a ‘shadow state’ (Karim 2011). It is in this context that corporations seeking a ‘social license to operate’ attempt to forge relationships with NGOs as well as states, as shown by Ahasan and Gardner’s paper in this volume.

30 Both the Bangladeshi and Indian examples show that neoliberalism does not lead to the replacement of the state by market forces or corporations, but ‘works by multiplying sites for regulation and domination through the creation of autonomous entities of government that are not [necessarily] part of the formal state apparatus’ (Gupta & Sharma 2006: 277). From this it is important to investigate the particular ways that governments and other actors govern access to land. Here again, the relationships and outcomes involved are complex. In this volume, Das’ paper shows how the Government of West Bengal, dominated by the Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPIM), turned into the land broker for Tata Motors Ltd in Singur in 2006. Das elucidates how the ‘alternative bureaucracy’ owned and controlled by the CPIM took over the tasks of the state institutions and how local responses were mediated and intricately linked to party politics at the grassroots level.

31 Whilst in Singur farmers resisting TATA’s development were ultimately successful, the process involved significant violence. As this implies, whilst discourses of development and security may be central to contemporary land appropriations in South Asia, and justifications of ‘uplift’ and ‘empowerment’, plus alliances with reputable NGOs, used to present a ‘smiling face’ by corporations, this is shadowed by a more traditional method: violence. Let us turn to the ways this is used by states and private interests to appropriate land in the neoliberal era. This introduces another crucial player: the military.

Security, violence, and the military

32 Clearly, the relationships between state, society and the market are complex. One thing which all the papers in the volume have in common, however, is the way in which land appropriations take recourse in either ‘legality’ or violence (or, in many cases, both). In this section we see how whilst discursive formations of development, modernity and security are habitually used in the appropriation of land, legal measures, often underpinned by the threat of violence, are a tried and tested back up. In this context, the role of the military is of great importance.

33 Feldman’s account in this volume of the Vested Property Act as a means to expropriate members of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh shows how the state is directly responsible for the loss of land amongst Hindus. The effect has been the ongoing migration of Bangladeshi Hindus in response to everyday insecurity and, more than

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often, violent expulsion. As Feldman’s papers shows, the state justifies land appropriation in the name of national security against ‘enemy’ Hindus.

34 While ethnic belonging and nationalist exclusion are justifications for land grab by the state, neoliberal reforms have resulted in the restructuration of state institutions. Feldman and Geisler (2012: 982) argue that civilian and military elites were given greater voice in decision making to secure Ershad’s security in Bangladesh during the 1980s, a strategy which has proved to have remarkable continuity. As a consequence, elites have been successful in gaining control over government properties, with devastating consequences for water quality and the livelihoods of small farmers.

35 Whilst Feldman and Geisler (2012: 982) refer to a well-known phenomenon in contemporary Bangladesh—gangs hired by elite encroachers who use violence to appropriate land illegally—fear is not only produced by extra-legal actors; the involvement of the military also gives good reason for anticipating violence. Ahasan and Gardner’s paper makes similar observations: whilst corporations stand back to allow land to be taken, in Bangladesh the state is likely to turn to violence, via the police and military. Meanwhile, in Phulbari and Singur, as documented by Nuremowla and Das, police violence at demonstrations led to deaths.

36 The actuality of potential violence resembles recent trends in other countries in the South Asian region and beyond. In Sri Lanka, for example, the militarisation of the territories ‘liberated’ from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009 has become a salient feature. In India, the dangers of ‘Islamic terrorism’ plus Maoist and Naxalite movements are regarded as a major security threat, serving as a justification to increase the budget for the securitisation of borders and counter terrorist measures. Within this context, Sareen’s paper addresses the security-development-nexus, a strategy employed by the Indian government to pacify unruly territories in Jharkand’s West Singhbhum district.

37 How do those at the receiving end of this violence make sense of it, whether in the form of its potential or its actuality? In Nuremowla’s paper we see how the anxieties produced by stories of the devastation caused by land appropriation can be read as a kind of violence in Phulbari. Faced with the loss not only of land but also community and the social protection it brings, people face an uncertain future. Many are prepared to use force to protect their interests, knowing that the state will respond with violence, for in previous years people have been killed by the police during protests. The ability and willingness to engage in protest varies. This raises important questions which remain beyond the scope of this volume but require further research: how is land loss and displacement experienced by different people? What are the prerequisites for engaging in resistance against the loss of land? Here, questions of gender, generation and ethnicity, but also education, cultural and social capital, are likely to be central.

38 To conclude, in the seven papers that follow we offer new empirical material and insights into the processes surrounding land loss and change of use in Bangladesh and India. Shapan Adnan’s theoretical review develops a typology of the mechanisms of land alienation and identifies the diverse range of land appropriating mechanisms in Bangladesh and India. The complex ways in which different groups get access to land and how this shifts over time are analysed in Richard Axelby’s article on grazing rights in Himachal Pradesh. Sadid Nuremowla’s contribution shows that dispossession is not limited to the mere loss of farming land, but extends to existing social ties of the people

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living in the locality of a proposed open-cast mine at Phulbari, Bangladesh. Taking the case of Bangladesh’s nationalist project as an example, Shelley Feldman’s paper shows how the exclusion of Hindus has been enshrined by law. In Siddarth Sareen’s paper, the actual practices by which governmental development interventions produce inequitable access to resources are analysed via empirical material on the Saranda Action Plan in Jharkhand, India. The last two papers deal with the involvement of multinational corporations and its consequences: Ritanjan Das shows the complexities emerging from resistance to land dispossession by TATA at Singur, West Bengal, and the ways in which resistance and acquiescence coalesce with state politics, while Abu Ahasan and Katy Gardner reveal the steps taken by corporations in gaining access to resources, in particular their attempt to build alliances with NGOs as well as states and local elites in Bangladesh. Whilst being aware of the geographical limitations of the work, we hope that the questions raised will lead to further research in South Asia.

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NOTES

1. See Ito (2002) for work on prawn cultivation in Bangladesh. 2. Though see older literature on land grab and peasant inequalities / violence in Bangladesh e.g. Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (1986), Hartman & Boyce (1983); more recently, see Feldman & Geisler (2012) and Adnan (2013). 3. See Hartman & Boyce (1983). 4. For a summary, see Münster & Strümpell (2014). 5. Makki and Geisler point out that in the African context these transactions are often long term leases rather than sales, making the term a misnomer (2011: 2). 6. See also Fairhead et al. (2012) on ‘Green Grabbing’. 7. See Li (2014) for an Indonesian example. 8. For extended discussion and critique see Gardner & Lewis (2015), Ziai (2004). 9. See Welker (2009) for an Indonesian example.

ABSTRACTS

This introduction to the volume addresses some of the complexities surrounding land acquisition in contemporary Bangladesh and India. By interrogating four conceptual issues concerning current land expropriation, we seek to develop some common ground and to reveal important questions addressed in the articles and beyond. First, we discuss recent theoretical approaches to dispossession and land loss and secondly, the ideological apparatus of contemporary dispossessions—the discursive formations of ‘development’ and ‘security’. Thirdly, by contrasting the historical trajectories of both countries, we also explore the coalitions between states, corporations and the military. Finally, we discuss the ways in which violence and security have played a changing role in displacement.

INDEX

Keywords: land expropriation, accumulation by dispossession, development discourse, neoliberal state

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AUTHORS

KATY GARDNER Professor of Anthropology and Head of Department, London School of Economics

EVA GERHARZ Junior professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Ruhr-University Bochum.

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Alienation in Neoliberal India and Bangladesh: Diversity of Mechanisms and Theoretical Implications

Shapan Adnan

Introduction

1 Alienation of land is hardly new to South Asia and has been a historically ongoing process.1 Also termed ‘land appropriation’ or ‘land grab’, the process involves the transfer of rights over land of one party to another. Since property rights or titles to land may not always be clear, it is convenient to define ‘land alienation’ as the transfer of effective or de facto control over land, rather than formal or de jure rights of ownership and operation (Hall 2013: 1585).

2 The colonial state undertook large-scale acquisition of land in British India for building major infrastructure such as railways and setting up state forests and plantations (Mohsin 1997). During the decades following independence in 1947, the post-colonial South Asian states acquired private and common lands for ‘public purpose’, typically for large-scale infrastructure constructions and development projects (Walker 2008: 580). Such state acquisition of land resulted in massive development-induced dispossession. It is estimated that ‘60 million people were displaced by development projects in India between 1947 and 2004’ (Hall 2013: 1588).

3 With the onset of neoliberal globalization from the 1970s, there has been a qualitative shift in the nature and purpose of land acquisition in India and Bangladesh.2 In contrast to its traditional use as the means of production in agriculture and forestry, land has increasingly become a commodity with high value that can be transacted profitably in real estate and financial speculation. The features of land appropriation in the era of neoliberal globalization display both continuity and change in relation to corresponding processes in earlier periods. While state acquisition of land has

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continued, the purpose has shifted increasingly towards supplying private corporations and elite groups controlling finance capital for investment. Moreover, a range of non- state actors, including multinational corporations, have become directly involved in appropriating land on an increasing scale. In addition to large-scale acquisitions, ‘everyday forms of land grabbing’ targeting weaker social groups have become significant (see Feldman in this volume). The combination of these trends has given rise to the contemporary phenomena of land grabs in India and Bangladesh, as in many other parts of the world.

4 Given the wide range of processes, mechanisms and agencies characterizing contemporary land alienation, an appropriate theoretical framework is necessary for comparative analysis. The major existing theoretical approaches to land alienation are based on (i) Marx’s (1976, 2010: 500–02) concept of primitive accumulation in the process of capitalist development and (ii) the derivative notion of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) formulated by Harvey (2005) in the context of neoliberal globalization (Hall 2013: 1582–83).

5 Marx’s (1976) analysis of primitive accumulation highlights the mechanism of enclosure of land in Britain, involving direct dispossession through the use of state and class power. However, as elaborated below, evidence from India and Bangladesh documents the operation of mechanisms of land appropriation that are not necessarily based on force or directly aimed at grabbing land. Some kinds of mechanism are based on agreement or contract with the pre-existing landholders, involving voluntary processes based on persuasion, incentives or temptation, rather than coercion. Among these are ‘market-driven processes of dispossession’ (Akram-Lodhi 2012: 130–31, Hall 2013: 1585).

6 Significantly, certain theoretical interpretations of primitive accumulation and ABD hold that these processes are necessarily characterized by extra-economic coercion (e.g. Levien 2012, 2013) and/or non-market transactions (e.g. Khan 2004: 77). However, the state itself is a non-market mechanism which uses extra-economic coercion (e.g. land acquisition) in processes of capitalist, rather than primitive, accumulation. Consequently, the distinction between primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation needs to be pitched in more rigorous and theoretically defensible terms. Moreover, as argued in this paper, defining primitive accumulation/ABD as corresponding to extra-economic or non-market processes cannot capture the entire range of mechanisms of land appropriation evidenced in contemporary India and Bangladesh (Sampat 2015: 767 n. 4). In particular, mechanisms that are based on market transactions or do not involve the use of force would be excluded from such definitions and hence would need to be theorized in other ways.

7 Given these considerations, the objective of this article is to develop a comprehensive and logically consistent typology of land alienation mechanisms which could be applied to empirical case studies from contemporary India and Bangladesh. This would provide a comparative assessment of the roles and relative significance of different types of land alienation mechanisms in the specific social-historical conditions of India and Bangladesh in the context of neoliberal globalization.

8 Given constraints of space, it will not be possible to include in this paper an analysis of the politics of land alienation in terms of resistance, repression, negotiation and co- option, nor of ideological contestations about the justification and legitimacy of such acts (e.g. manipulation of discourses of development and security or corporate social

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responsibility). However, these aspects are briefly noted in context wherever possible (and are addressed in other papers in this volume).

9 The next section (2) provides a critical review of the theoretical features of primitive accumulation and ABD, leading to the postulation of a typology of land alienation mechanisms. This analytical framework is then applied to empirical evidence from contemporary India and Bangladesh in Section 3 to trace the detailed operational aspects of the mechanisms of land alienation. Conclusions and insights emerging from the analysis on the comparative aspects of the mechanisms of land alienation are stated in Section 4.

Primitive Accumulation and ABD: Theoretical issues

10 The discussion below is guided by the following considerations: First, how can land alienation be interpreted in terms of the theoretical concepts of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (ABD)? Second, what are the distinctive properties of land and how do these affect the mechanisms of the appropriation of land by one party from another? Third, how can the mechanisms of land alienation be categorized in terms of a typology that can distinguish analytically between the different kinds of mechanisms documented in the empirical studies?

Analytical features of primitive accumulation

11 The key features defining primitive accumulation as well as distinguishing it from capitalist accumulation are twofold (Marx 1976: 873–95; 2010). First, primitive accumulation involves the dispossession of non-capitalist owners or users and their separation from erstwhile lands and inputs, such that these resources become potentially available for deployment in capitalist production.3 Second, the accumulative mechanisms of primitive accumulation are analytically distinct from expanded reproduction and centralization of capital, which are components of capitalist accumulation. Expanded reproduction involves deployment of profit (surplus value) into successive cycles of production on an increasing scale. The centralization of capital pertains to transfer of resources (land) between capitalist production units, e.g. when a capitalist firm goes out of business and its assets including land are bought on the market by a surviving firm, or during mergers of capitalist units. Accordingly, while appropriation of the land of a capitalist unit by another corresponds to centralization of capital within the domain of capitalist accumulation, the transfer of lands of non- capitalist producers or institutions to capitalist producers corresponds to primitive accumulation.

12 The crucial theoretical distinction between primitive and capitalist accumulation therefore lies in differences in the nature of the respective accumulative processes and their potential outcomes. Provided the resources (lands) are transferred from non-capitalist to capitalist units, the varied mechanisms mediating alienation of land noted above— whether coercive or voluntary, market or non-market, direct or indirect—can be regarded as alternative means of primitive accumulation (Adnan 2013: 93–94). This formulation of primitive accumulation goes beyond simply the use of force (extra- economic coercion) or specific institutional means (non-market transactions), and holds

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the possibility of incorporating the wide range of land appropriation mechanisms noted in the empirical evidence from neoliberal India and Bangladesh.

13 Moreover, Marx’s (2010: 536) notion of primitive accumulation entails not only the quantitative transfer of resources, but also qualitative transformation in the form of property and social-institutional relations. Through the process of separation, different classes come to control (i) the resources to be converted into capital such as land and (ii) ‘labour power’. Thus, what is involved is a process of transformation of ‘social- property relations’ which creates the classes of employers and workers who can potentially come together in capitalist relations of production (Dobb 1963: 185–86, Wood 2002: 31–37, 2006: 19–20, Brenner 2006: 97–98).

14 These general features of primitive accumulation require further refinement when the concerned resource is land. As it is non-producible and location-specific, there can be only a fixed stock of land in a given place (Marx 1981: 915–24, Kautsky 1988: 72, 145, Banaji 1976: 17–39, Adnan 1985: 57). This gives rise to a ‘zero-sum game’ situation in which the acquisition of land by one party necessarily entails an equivalent loss for another. Consequently, when non-capitalist social groups/classes (e.g. peasants) already hold (‘pre-occupy’) a particular plot of land, capitalists wanting to produce in the same location have no option but to acquire it by any possible means, whether by force or otherwise (Kautsky 1988: 146–47, Banaji 1976: 31, Brenner 1977: 74, Hussain & Tribe 1981: 124–25).

Primitive accumulation as a historically ongoing process

15 In Marx’s writings, the notion of primitive accumulation varies between (i) a one-off event at the ‘genesis of capitalism’ and (ii) a historically ongoing process that continues to take place over time in different countries and economic sectors.4 Even when capitalist producers emerge and co-exist with non-capitalist classes, primitive accumulation does not cease but continues to take place because the reproduction and expansion of capitalist units generates recurrent demand for production inputs (Marx 1976: 912, Hall 2013: 1585). In particular, given fixity in the stock of land, capitalists have no other way of obtaining incremental plots except by appropriating them from the non-capitalist holders (Kautsky 1976, Adnan 1985). Consequently, the very functioning of capitalism drives a continuing process of ‘ex novo separation’ of land and other resources from classes possessing them in co-existing non-capitalist sectors (De Angelis 2001: 9, 2004: 63–64, 77).

16 It follows that, once capitalist production has begun, it becomes a critical driver of primitive accumulation in subsequent phases (Perelman 1984, MNC 2001:1–2). However, this does not explain why and how other kinds of primitive accumulation may take place that are not deliberately driven by capitalism, but nonetheless make available resources such as land for potential deployment in capitalist production (cf. Adnan 2013, 2014: 26). To understand how that can happen, it is necessary to identify other kinds of processes through which non-capitalist property rights are undermined and the released elements, particularly land, become available for possible use by capitalist producers. In so far as such processes are not deliberately driven by capitalism or any other force, they correspond to indirect forms of primitive accumulation, leading to the release of land and other resources as unintended consequences. These ideas pertaining to different types of mechanisms of primitive

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accumulation are fleshed out below with empirical evidence from India and Bangladesh and reiterated in the concluding section.

Analytical features of Harvey’s ABD and critical issues

17 Harvey’s (2005: 144–61) formulation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) broadens and updates Marx’s construct of primitive accumulation by incorporating newer mechanisms emerging in the context of globalized capitalism (MNC 2001: 4) and ‘neoliberal imperialism’ (Brenner 2006: 102, Ashman & Callinicos 2006: 115–17, Fine 2006: 143–44). The concept highlights the effects of neoliberal policies, including structural adjustment programmes, illustrated by the imposition of devaluation on vulnerable countries by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and powerful capitalist states. Such pressure can result in forced commoditization and privatization of resources leading to drastic reductions in the prices of land and other assets, which can then be ‘profitably recycled back into the circulation of capital’ (Harvey 2005: 150–56, Hall 2013: 1585–86). Neoliberal globalization also puts private corporations under intense competitive pressure, impelling them to grab land at very low or near-zero costs, e.g. by undermining the social and legal institutions protecting the rights of the pre-existing holders (Harvey 2005: 149, Luxemburg 2003: 348–51, Brenner 2006: 99, De Angelis 2004: 73–76).

18 The concept of ABD highlights the unprecedented growth and manipulation of the global financial and credit system. Large-scale loss of land and assets can be orchestrated by powerful institutions of finance capital through speculation and fraud, constituting ‘the cutting edge of accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005: 142–47, 2006: 142; cf. Moyo et al. 2012: 193). Financialization is a ‘key mechanism of ABD’ and involves the conversion of appropriated land ‘into an object of financial investment and speculation […] including securitization and the emergence of private equity funds dealing in farmland’ as well as ‘the deepening financialization of nature’ (Hall 2013: 1593–95).

19 In a critique of Harvey, Levien (2012) contends that extra-economic coercion is the defining characteristic of ABD. However, functioning of the ‘real estate and financial markets’ explicitly incorporates economic mechanisms, over and above extra-economic ones, in the conceptualization of ABD—a point forcefully reiterated by Harvey (2006) in a rejoinder to critics. Also, the notion of ABD has been subject to other criticisms, which are not presently taken up (however, some of them are addressed by Gardner & Gerharz in this volume).5

20 In comparative terms, there are certain differences in the conceptualization and empirical manifestations of primitive accumulation and ABD (Adnan 2013). Moreover, viewed in a long term perspective, the mechanisms and mediating institutions of primitive accumulation have been undergoing change with shifting social-historical circumstances. It is therefore arguable that new mechanisms of primitive accumulation are likely to emerge in the future as the underlying economic, political and social structures continue to change. Given these considerations, I have used the term primitive accumulation below to designate the generic capitalism-facilitating process by which resources from non-capitalist classes become available for capitalist production, cutting across different historical periods (Adnan 2013: 123, 2014: 39). Correspondingly, the term ABD is used to designate the distinctive forms of primitive accumulation that

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have arisen in the specific social-historical conditions of neoliberal globalization, as pointed out in context below.

Mechanisms of Land Alienation

21 Given monopoly control over land by current holders, voluntary transactions may not always be a feasible option for converting non-capitalist landed property into transactable commodities that can be deployed in capitalist production (Brenner 2006: 98–99). Nonetheless, direct use of force—‘extra-economic coercion’—is not the only possible means by which land can be made available for capitalist needs (Kautsky 1988: 146–47, Banaji 1976). For instance, imposition of money taxes or unfavourable changes in relative prices can undermine the viability of self-employed producers, constraining them to undertake distress sale of their lands (Perelman 1984: 46–58, Burawoy 1985: 216–19, De Angelis 2004: 78, Deininger 2003: 96–97). Such mechanisms correspond to indirect forms of primitive accumulation, because dispossession is a ‘by- product’ of processes primarily geared to other objectives. In this sense, processes quite unrelated to those driven by capitalism can lead to land alienation, corresponding to ‘negative externalities’ (De Angelis 2004: 77–79) or unintended consequences (Adnan 2013: 122, 2014: 26).

22 Even though a variety of mechanisms are listed illustratively in Marx’s (1976) exposition of primitive accumulation and Harvey’s (2005) formulation of ABD, neither orders them into a systematic typology. In the discourse on land alienation in South Asia, while the direct role of force or extra-economic coercion has received pre-eminent attention (e.g. Walker 2008), the significance of the indirect role of credit-land (or credit-lease) interlocked market contracts leading to constrained sale of mortgaged lands to settle cumulative debts has also been noted by scholars (Bharadwaj 1974, Bhaduri 1983: 41–2, 85–87, 106–07). These considerations point to the need for a systematization of the diverse mechanisms of land alienation within a logically consistent typological schema, which can distinguish between forced and voluntary acts as well as direct and indirect structures of causation.

23 Given these considerations, I propose a typology of land alienation mechanisms based on the combination of two binary divisions: (i) forced and unforced and (ii) direct and indirect. This leads to a fourfold classificatory schema of such mechanisms, represented in Figure 1 below.

Use of Force/ Directness Direct Indirect

Forced 1. Direct-Forced 3. Indirect-Forced

Unforced 2. Direct-Unforced 4. Indirect-Unforced

Figure 1: Typology of mechanisms of land alienation

24 In the discussion below, I illustrate this typology with empirical evidence from contemporary India and Bangladesh, specifying the details of the particular

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mechanisms subsumed under the broad categories in each of the quadrants of the figure.

Mechanisms of Land Appropriation in India and Bangladesh

Direct mechanisms using force

25 A major type of mechanism of land appropriation in contemporary India and Bangladesh corresponds to the category ‘Direct-Forced’ in the first quadrant of Figure 1. Even when the concerned laws, policies or commands do not involve use of overt violence, they are nonetheless backed by the coercive apparatus of the state or powerful private agencies and individuals.

State-mediated land appropriation

26 The most well-known institutional framework for attracting foreign and domestic investment within a delimited territorial location has taken the form of ‘special zones’ of various kinds for particular projects, set up by the state. In India, these were termed Special Economic Zones (SEZ), with the stated purpose of providing ‘incentives for the private sector to invest in the creation of world-class infrastructure’ including ‘tax concessions and regulatory exemptions’ (Jenkins 2014: 39, Sampat 2015: 766). Such Zones constituted ‘hyperliberalized economic enclaves’ aimed at ‘promoting exports, attracting FDI, developing infrastructure, and generating employment’ (Levien 2012: 934).

27 In Bangladesh, comparable enclaves were established with a variety of designations, including Export Processing Zones (EPZ), Economic Zones (EZ), Shrimp Zones and investor-specific enclaves such as the Korean EPZ in Chittagong. State acquisition of land has also taken place for standalone projects of private multinational corporations, e.g. in the case of the Bibiyana gas-field in the Sylhet district of Bangladesh operated by Chevron (Gardner 2012: 87, Gardner et al. 2014: §5–7, Ahasan & Gardner in this volume). In the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh, the state forcibly acquired the private and common lands of the indigenous peoples and leased these mostly to absentee Bengali elites for raising commercial plantations (Roy 1995, Mohsin 1997).

28 The territorial dimension of these various special zones and projects made land acquisition an integral element of setting them up (Levien 2012). In both India and Bangladesh, government agencies signed contracts with private domestic and foreign corporations which transferred large tracts of land and mineral rights to them on highly concessionary terms (Walker 2008, Bharadwaj 2009, Jenkins et al. 2014, Sampat 2015). This applied to the ‘special zones’ as well as standalone projects for purposes such as mining, commercial farming, physical infrastructure and economic development in general. However, the specific terms and conditions of the land concessions given to the various individual zones and projects varied due to policy differences, local politics, commodity-specific requirements, etc. (Jenkins 2014, Vijayabaskar 2014).

29 In India, regulatory changes led to successive shifts in the minimal proportion of a SEZ’s territory that had to be devoted to the ‘processing area’ concerned with ‘export-

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oriented activities’. This was eventually raised to 50% of the total area in 2007 (Jenkins 2014: 46–47). The remainder of SEZ areas were thus left free by policy design, and were usually utilized for building profitable commercial facilities catering to upper and middle class ‘life-styles’, e.g. residential complexes, shopping malls, hotels, golf-courses, and tourist resorts (Walker 2008: 588–89, Levien 2012: 934, Jenkins 2014: 48). Such patterns of land use frequently gave rise to thriving financial speculation in real estate in and around these special zones and project areas, particularly in sites close to major urban centres (Sampat 2008, Das in this volume). In Bangladesh, a proportion of grabbed lands in the Noakhali Shrimp Zone and the Chittagong Hill Tracts was deployed for speculation in real estate (Adnan 2013, 2014, Adnan & Dastidar 2011). Such connections between land grabs and financial speculation correspond to Harvey’s (2005: 158) conception of ABD.

30 The forcible appropriation of land involved dispossession of the erstwhile inhabitants by invoking the respective state acquisition laws operating in India and Bangladesh. Despite variations, this genre of laws contained sweeping provisions based on the legal principle of eminent domain, which empowered the state to acquire private land for public purposes, overriding objections by those dispossessed in the process (Vasudevan 2008: 41, Benjamin 2000: 38). For example, in the CHT of Bangladesh, a particularly draconian law6 has been used that empowers the state to use force for acquiring land without having to give prior notice or providing the right of appeal to the dispossessed landholders (Adnan & Dastidar 2011: 45–46).

31 In India, the archaic Land Acquisition Act (LAA) of 1894 has been widely used for this purpose, inclusive of procuring land for SEZs (Walker 2008: 589). The law had been subject to widespread criticism for inefficient, corrupt and inequitable outcomes, as well as the ‘insufficiency of the protections for land-owners’ (Jenkins 2014: 56). In 2007, an official decision was taken which ‘prohibited state governments from using the LAA to compulsorily acquire land for SEZs. This went to the heart of the land issue, addressing […] the appropriateness of forcibly acquiring land for SEZs at all’ (Jenkins 2014: 48–49). These developments created the grounds for drafting a new law, termed the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation, and Resettlement Bill (LARRB) 2011, which was enacted in 2013 (Jenkins 2014: 55).

32 Moreover, not all those evicted and displaced by state acquisition of land have been adequately compensated and/or rehabilitated by the concerned authorities. Typically, only those with formal land rights or titles were recognized as being eligible, while all those whose livelihoods depended upon common or customary ‘rights of use’ on open access lands and water bodies were denied compensation and rehabilitation (Walker 2008: 582–90; Gardner 2012, Banerjee 2014: 276–77). Even when compensation was paid, the acquired lands were usually valued well below open market prices (see Das in this volume). In such cases, the state would be in a position to acquire lands at cheap prices and then sell or lease them to private investors at much higher rates (Levien 2012: 947– 48, Walker 2008: 582–89, Banerjee 2014: 277). As specified above, such practices of undervaluing resources to enable them to be acquired at rock bottom prices are characteristic of ABD in the context of neoliberal globalization (Harvey 2005: 149–50).

33 In practice, the laws and procedures of state acquisition, compensation and rehabilitation were flouted in varying degrees. Even though government departments and security forces are required by law to follow formal land acquisition procedures, there are instances where they have taken over the territories of relatively powerless

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and politically weak social groups by using illegal force and fraudulent means, violating the very laws and property rights that they were supposed to uphold (Adnan & Dastidar 2011: 45–60, Banerjee 2014: 295, Feldman in this volume).

34 In India, the West Bengal state government ignored its own land use policy when agreeing to transfer agricultural lands to a major ‘Indian multinational’ for constructing a car factory in Singur (Basu 2007: 1283). It also failed to pay due compensation and provide the land titles promised to resettled families in Falta SEZ (Banerjee 2014: 279). The Hyderabad Urban Development Authority disregarded the Urban Land Ceiling Act in order to give retroactive legal sanction to illegal encroachments by powerful groups (Whitehead 2012: 32).

35 Furthermore, the legal-institutional rules and procedures that had formerly protected the land rights and entitlements of vulnerable groups were repealed, along with the promulgation of new laws and policies that facilitated corporate interests in getting hold of land and natural resources (Sebastian 2012: 10, Walker 2008: 590, Bharadwaj 2009). Promulgation of the National Mining Policy and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2008, provide instances of new rules and policies facilitating state-led land grabs in India. Existing constitutional provisions and laws protecting adivasi rights were dismantled or ignored by the state in order to enable private corporations to gain access to forests, minerals and other resources. For instance, the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act of 2005 was used to evict tribal groups in order to take over their mineral-rich lands for subsequent allotment to private corporations (Walker 2008: 558). Restrictions on acquisition of tribal lands without the consent of the concerned communities, stipulated in the PESA7 (1996) Act, were often circumvented by illegal means (Bhaduri 2008: 13).

36 What is noteworthy about the current neoliberal period is that not only is land being acquired by the state for transfer to private corporations, but also that it is being justified under the pretext of ‘public purpose’. In these instances, the state has served as ‘land broker’ par excellence for profit-making private corporations and commercial agencies (Bhaduri 2008, Walker 2008: 580, Levien 2012: 941–46). Such practices have been deeply unpopular, contributing to the erosion of the legitimacy of the state as an agent of development during the neoliberal era.

Land appropriation by non-state agencies

37 A wide range of non-state agencies have also been significantly involved in land appropriation in contemporary India and Bangladesh. These include private corporations and business houses, political party organizations, ‘commercial NGOs’, powerful individuals and interest groups, as well as organized mafia and criminal gangs (Benjamin 2000: 47).

38 Case studies of land appropriation in India ‘highlight a key trend: the use of officially sanctioned criminal violence at the level of the state and by private landholders against the rural poor’ (Walker 2008: 559, 591–93). In the SEZs of Chhattisgarh and the aborted SEZ in Nandigram, West Bengal, security forces of the state were joined by cadres of the respective ruling parties or criminal thugs in operations to crush the resistance of dispossessed groups (Nigam 2007: 6–7, Banerjee 2014: 282–83, 293–97). In the case of the POSCO SEZ in Odisha, ‘forces funded and instigated by the [private] SEZ developer

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allegedly led the crackdown on local expressions of dissent’ by protesters (Banerjee 2014: 293–94).

39 In Bangladesh, non-state agencies including private corporations, ‘commercial NGOs’, influential elite groups and political party leaders have been using violence by hired gangs to grab lands of weaker social groups and ethnic minorities (Feldman & Geisler 2012: 982, Adnan & Dastidar 2011: 86–94). Case studies of land grabs by multinational corporations extracting gas and minerals in Bangladesh indicate that they follow double-edged strategies that attempt to show a ‘smiling face’ while manipulating techniques of corporate social responsibility (CSR), public relations (PR) and ‘partnerships’ with local communities and reputable NGOs to rebrand themselves (Ahasan & Gardner in this volume). One multinational distanced itself from the unpopular task of land acquisition by delegating it to the administrative agencies of the state, while gaining from the process and facilitating it with higher rates of compensation and faster procedures of implementation (Gardner 2012).

Direct mechanisms without the use of force

40 The mechanisms in this category involved the direct appropriation of land without the use of force or violence (corresponding to the category ‘Direct-Unforced’ in quadrant 2 of the typology in Figure 1). Instead, other methods such as informal mediation, negotiations, persuasion, temptation, fraud, or forgery were used to orchestrate transfer of the lands, often through manipulation of the state and/or the market.

41 A remarkable instance of this mode of direct land acquisition with the use of relatively little coercion can be found in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Vijayabaskar (2014: 305) notes that compared to other states, there was very little organized resistance to the procurement of land for SEZs in this state, resulting in what he terms ‘the politics of silence’. One of the key factors underlying this outcome was a set of conscious ‘strategies deployed to curb resistance’ by the Tamil Nadu government, inclusive of ‘market mechanisms, facilitating negotiations between landowners and private firms’ (Vijayabaskar 2014: 306). As early as 1995, a Government Order (GO) established official committees that were empowered to acquire lands through private negotiations rather than the state acquisition law (LAA) (Vijayabaskar 2014: 313). Further scope for the operation of market-based pricing systems and streamlining the acquisition of land was formalized through conducive legislation—the Tamil Nadu Acquisition of Land for Industrial Purposes Act (TNALIPA) of 1999 (Vijayabaskar 2014: 313–14).

42 Moreover, substantive material incentives were offered to those who agreed to give up their land without fuss. In some cases, land acquisition was linked to provision of alternative land and new jobs as part of a package deal. ‘Housing plots in a planned residential zone would be provided to owners who sold their land, the size of the plots based on the amount of land sold’ (Vijayabaskar 2014: 320). The state finance minister promised ‘at least one job to each family that cedes an acre or more of land for an SEZ’s establishment’ as well as training facilities to equip such persons with requisite skills (Vijayabaskar 2014: 316).

43 Another instance of this kind of package deal to obtain land for the Mahindra World City SEZ in Rajasthan in India involved the use of material incentives to persuade landholders not to oppose the acquisition of their lands. The affected landowners were offered smaller but high-value developed commercial and residential plots in exchange

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for their acquired holdings, which effectively served to ‘buy peace’ by dissuading them from resisting land acquisition (Levien 2012: 953).

44 In the case of the Perambalur multi-product SEZ in Tamil Nadu, farmers are reported to have decided en masse to sell their land voluntarily ‘when the prices offered were much higher than anticipated’, exceeding the prevailing market price (Vijayabaskar 2014: 320). Similarly, in Bangladesh, opposition to the Bibiyana Gas Field began to dissipate when land owners were offered higher rates of compensation and promises of contracts by the land-acquiring corporation (Ahasan & Gardner in this volume).

45 Comparable techniques of appropriating land and water resources were based on sheer market bargaining power and/or technological superiority, reflective of direct mechanisms of primitive accumulation without the use of force and violence. For instance, municipal authorities in Bangalore acquired areas in IT corridors through ‘e- titling and GIS planning’ in ways that simply ‘erased’ from the city’s land records the erstwhile customary rights of local landholders (Whitehead 2012: 32). Correlatively, private corporations producing soft drinks in India extracted ‘pure groundwater as a free raw material’ from great depths using expensive capital-intensive technology that could not be matched by local peasant agriculturalists (Bhaduri 2008: 13, cf. Walker 2008: 564–65).

Indirect mechanisms backed by force

46 This category applies to mechanisms of land appropriation that are indirect, but backed by public or private force (and corresponds to the label ‘Indirect-Forced’ in quadrant 3 of the typology in Figure 1). These are not driven with the direct objective of land appropriation by capitalism or any other factor. Nonetheless, their outcomes are comparable to those of enclosure, working indirectly through processes triggered by policy and development interventions or autonomous factors that are primarily concerned with other objectives.

47 The operation of this type of indirect mechanism is illustrated by the consequences of setting up the Noakhali Shrimp Zone in Bangladesh with the avowed objective of promoting shrimp production for the export market (cf. Adnan 2013: 117–22). Paradoxically, establishment of the Zone did not lead to the realization of this intended objective. Instead, it raised land values in the area and triggered violent repression and land-grabbing by state agencies and private interest groups among dominant classes, which resulted in the mass eviction of the poor peasantry. In this instance, primitive accumulation was the indirect outcome of mechanisms activated by neoliberal policies and development interventions concerned with very different objectives (e.g. setting up an export-oriented shrimp zone).

48 The operation of such processes on a wider scale is illustrated by the impacts of the neoliberal policies followed by the government of India, which led to the restructuring of agricultural production. Among these policies were fiscal contraction and other measures deflating income and reducing support to agriculture and the entitlements of the poor (Patnaik 2008: 109, 2012: 35–37, U. Patnaik 2012: 249, Shah 2008: 80). Apart from impoverishing peasant producers in the short term, the cumulative impacts of these neoliberal policies also undermined their long term viability (Patnaik 2008: 113). As a result, peasant production units faced collapse when they could no longer afford to

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purchase necessary inputs, eventually leading to the sale of their lands and other resources.

49 The implementation of such neoliberal policies and development projects was clearly backed by state power, even if the state did not always apply overt violence. Moreover, such policies and project interventions were often promoted by international donor agencies and regulatory organizations, including the IMF, World Bank and WTO (Walker 2008: 573–74). Since the primary objectives of these nationally and internationally generated policy interventions were quite different from the capture of land per se, outcomes involving land alienation constituted unintended consequences, corresponding to indirect forms of land appropriation and primitive accumulation.

50 Accounts of land alienation frequently include instances of molestation, rape and sexual violence on women of the targetted communities. Such acts have been perpetrated by security forces and officially-mobilized vigilantes and criminal gangs in the SEZs and peasant villages of India (e.g. Chhattisgarh and West Bengal) (Walker 2008: 590, 599–605, Nigam 2007: 7), as well as various parts of Bangladesh (Feldman in this volume). These acts were frequently undertaken with the ulterior motive of grabbing land by targeting women in order to demoralize their entire communities, thereby pressurizing them to move out or give up their resistance (Walker 2008, Mohsin 1997: 178, Adnan & Dastidar 2011: 96–97). Such tactics reflect the use of complex and multifaceted mechanisms of land appropriation which operated indirectly through human rights violation aimed at women of the targeted social groups and communities.

51 It is, of course, quite possible that those initiating such indirect policies and interventions were not entirely unaware that land alienation would be a possible outcome—even if that was not explicitly declared as the objective. In this sense, the actual ‘degree of intentionality’ behind such acts and policies may remain somewhat uncertain and ambiguous.

Indirect mechanisms without use of force

52 This category of mechanisms neither involved the use of force, nor was directly concerned with appropriating land, even though the eventual outcomes led to such dispossession (corresponding to the label ‘Indirect-Unforced’ in quadrant 4 of Figure 1). As with the previous category, these mechanisms are not directly driven by capitalism or other forces with the explicit objective of land appropriation.

53 This type of mechanism is illustrated by the eventual sale of mortgaged land (collateral) to settle outstanding debt, noted above (Bhaduri 1983, Bharadwaj 1974). The borrower enters the credit-land interlocked market transaction, requiring mortgaging of land as collateral, but there is no intent to sell. However, the cumulative build-up of the principal and interest can eventually constrain the borrower to settle the outstanding debt through ‘distress sale’ of the mortgaged land. This credit-based mechanism does not involve external coercion, nor is it directed at land alienation in the first instance; nonetheless the outcome in terms of land loss is similar to that of direct dispossession.

54 Hall (2013: 1591–92) regards this as one of the basic means by which land alienation takes place: ‘people who cannot keep their heads above water as farmers take on more and more debt and, eventually, have to sell their land to survive. Such ‘economic’ or

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‘market sales’ are ‘voluntary’ in the sense that people are not coerced or legally obliged to sell to any particular party or at any particular price’. It is, of course, possible that the initial decision to enter the loan contract was a constrained choice, e.g. neoliberal agricultural policies had undermined the viability of the peasant production unit, impelling it into debt. In such instances, this would constitute an indirect mechanism which is partly driven by exogenous forces (see the next section for further elaboration of combinations of multiple mechanisms).

55 A more general formulation of this broad category applies to varied instances in which pre-existing forms of production have been undermined by factors that are not deliberately aimed at such outcomes, but nonetheless lead to the separation of the erstwhile landholders or producers from their lands. For instance, agricultural production can be undermined by a whole range of factors that are not directly aimed at land alienation, nor involve the use of force, such as rising market costs of production, defective water control structures leading to waterlogging, ecological degradation resulting from the advent of new technology, adverse impacts of climate change and saline inundation, etc. Such a process is illustrated by Mishra’s (2011: 3) account of ‘dispossession in slow motion’ in the Indian state of Odisha, which has ‘involved ‘voluntary’ transfers of land over longer time periods in which the pincer movements of rising production costs, indebtedness, and neoliberal policy have led to agrarian crisis and the longer term movement of the rural poor from their land’ (Gardner & Gerharz in this volume). Correlatively, in Dhaka city in Bangladesh, the filling up of wetlands due to environmental pollution and illegal constructions as well as the blockage of water channels have forced people to abandon or sell their land (Gardner & Gerharz in this volume).

56 Another instance of this kind of mechanism is provided by ongoing socio-economic, political and legal changes that bring about situations of legal pluralism and multiple titling, creating the ground for potential land loss. The sequential ‘stacking of laws’ and customary rights can lead to the co-existence of multiple de jure and/or de facto rights on the same plot, making conflicts about land endemic (cf. Jansen & Roquas 1998: 83–85, 92–94, Assies 2007: 12). Such ‘ambiguous’ lands (Sato 2000) with unclear titles have been particularly susceptible to expropriation because the fuzziness in their legal status provided scope for manipulation and expropriation by powerful agencies (Benjamin 2008: 725, Adnan 2013: 100, Banerjee 2014: 291–92).

57 For instance, the system of landed property in the CHT became highly complex and multi-layered with overlapping rights, following the emergence of pockets of private property in the context of pre-existing state lands and common property under customary rights (Roy 1995, Mohsin 1997). While the prevalent laws acknowledged and codified some of the customary common rights of the indigenous peoples, there were ‘grey’ areas which remained undefined, even when such lands were used by the locals for everyday livelihood needs (Roy 1995). In many cases, (i) individual households, (ii) the village community, and (iii) the state could simultaneously hold distinct rights over the same land. Such coexistences of partially overlapping state, common and private land rights was symptomatic of a situation of legal pluralism and multiple titling in the CHT. The resultant ambiguity (Sato 2000) in the status of these lands provided the basis of subsequent appropriation through more direct mechanisms. Accordingly, loss of land by the indigenous peoples of the CHT was partly the ‘unintended consequence’ of

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endemic contestations resulting from the plurality of legal systems and multiple land claims by contending parties.

58 In certain circumstances, it may be difficult to distinguish between the outcomes of indirect mechanisms that use force and those that do not. For example, this applies to the experience of the indigenous peoples in the CHT where extra-economic coercion by security forces resulting in violation of human rights (as contrasted to direct land grabbing) operated in parallel with the more diffuse long term processes generating legal pluralism and multiple titling, jointly leading to alienation of their lands.

Combination of multiple mechanisms

59 While the exposition above has considered individual categories of land alienation mechanisms, in reality these do not necessarily operate in isolation. The experiences of India and Bangladesh provide instances in which the structure of causation underlying land alienation involved several different mechanisms operating in combination, as follows.

60 Constrained sale of land by agricultural producers for settling cumulative debts have sometimes been the eventual outcome of income deflation triggered by neoliberal measures such as structural adjustment programmes advocated by the World Bank and IMF. Such a ‘distress sale’ (Deininger 2003: 96–97, Fortin 2005: 164) in the market thus constituted only the terminal link in an extended chain of causation driven by antecedent variables, ranging from global institutional pressures to state policies, violence and intimidation, legal harassment through false litigation, etc.

61 In the Bibiyana gas-field in Bangladesh, the acquisition of land was made feasible by the combination of several direct and indirect mechanisms and involved the use of force as well as the (deceptive) tactics of negotiation and making promises (Ahasan & Gardner in this volume). The specific factors included state acquisition of land, steps taken by the local administration which deployed security forces against protesters and intimidated those unwilling to give up their lands, raising of the compensation rates by Chevron through direct negotiations, as well as (false) verbal assurances of hope to the dispossessed villagers in terms of including them in development and modernization programmes (Gardner 2012: 87–90).

62 The use of multiple mechanisms of land alienation is also evident in the continuing takeover of the land and property of the minority Hindu communities of Bangladesh by the state and powerful elite groups. Specifically, this has involved invocation of the sceptre of ‘enemy property’, constructed through the Vested Property Act and a series of discriminatory state laws, social and cultural ‘rhetorics of othering’, as well as exclusionary practices by bureaucrats, political leaders and power holders (Feldman in this volume). Security forces such as the military have systematically expropriated lands of Hindus and other religious and ethnic minorities in different parts of Bangladesh on the pretext of ensuring ‘national security’ (Adnan & Dastidar 2011; Gardner & Gerharz in this volume). Such ‘slow motion’ land grabs, through which members of various ethnic and religious minorities have lost much of their erstwhile property, even while continuing to stay in their original homesteads, corresponds to the notion of in situ dispossession put forward by Feldman & Geisler (2012, cf. Mishra 2011).

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63 In Tamil Nadu, land alienation has to some extent been propelled by the joint operation of voluntary market transactions and decisions made under threats of coercive state action. Thus, ‘[p]rivate firms have long acquired land through market transactions for the development of plantations and other purpose’ and such ‘reliance on the market may seem to indicate that land acquisition in Tamil Nadu is accomplished more through consent than coercion. Still, […] the veiled threat of compulsory takeover by government, non-recognition of interests in land due to lack of clear title, and the takeover of ‘wastelands’ and ‘dry’ lands using misleading classificatory systems—all reflect the power of the state backed by privileged interests’ (Vijayabaskar 2014: 326).

64 The crucial role of political factors in influencing the actual outcome of land acquisition by the state and the market is brought out by the diverse experience of the Indian states of West Bengal and Odisha (Banerjee 2014). In West Bengal, this became evident from the factors leading to the abandonment of the Singur project, where the state authorities aimed to acquire a thousand acres of land for a car factory to be built by an ‘Indian multinational’ (Banerjee 2014: 275). Strong grassroots resistance by the social groups threatened with eviction, joined by movements of the major opposition political parties, eventually compelled the government to give up the project, while the concerned corporation moved its factory elsewhere (Nielsen 2010: 146, Banerjee 2014: 275–76).

65 Comparable political contentions arose in the case of a proposed SEZ in Nandigram in West Bengal. Official notification of state acquisition of land was met with immediate opposition from the majority of the local population, most of whom consisted of marginalized communities threatened with the loss of their existing access to lands and livelihoods (Banerjee 2014: 281–84). The intensity of the resistance made ineffective the local political organization of the Communist Party of India (CPI-M), the leading force of the Left Front government ruling the state. Its attempt to enforce the land grab by unleashing ‘state-sanctioned terror’ through armed violence by its cadres seriously backfired, eroding the CPI-M’s legitimacy not only in the local arena but also the state of West Bengal as a whole (Walker 2008: 591–92: Banerjee 2014: 282–84). This political blunder was seized upon by the major opposition parties of the state, led by the Trinamul Congress (TMC), which were successful in capturing popular support, resulting in the scrapping of the Nandigram SEZ (Banerjee 2014: 281–84).

66 Following the Nandigram debacle, the West Bengal government desisted from state acquisition in the proposed Rajarhat IT SEZ and delegated procurement of land to two private developers who were to undertake direct purchase from landholders. However, the land market was not allowed to operate unfettered by the pressure exerted by political forces. Local landowners were forced to sell their plots at set prices under threats from ‘“politically inclusive” land mafia syndicates’ involving ‘members of both the ruling and the opposition parties’, enforced by a ‘violent gang’ operating ‘in close collaboration with the state administration’ (Banerjee 2014: 286–87). Such experience in West Bengal corroborates the insight gleaned from Tamil Nadu that ‘market-based mechanisms are not [necessarily] neutral instruments’ that will automatically and inexorably lead to fair outcomes. In practice, their operations ‘are rendered “successful” in conjunction with political processes’ (Vijayabaskar 2014: 327).

67 As Hall (2013: 1593–94) has persuasively argued, ‘a dichotomous conception of economic and extra-economic means of accumulation in land acquisition will be difficult to maintain’ given that ‘land [transfers] are usually shaped by the powers of

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legitimation, regulation and force’. ‘In general, then, the economic/extra-economic distinction may be better seen as a continuum rather than a dichotomy’ (cf. Sampat 2015).

Concluding comments

68 In this section, I integrate the major conclusions of the preceding analysis of the mechanisms of land alienation in neoliberal India and Bangladesh and draw out their theoretical implications. As compared to the pre-eminent role of ‘enclosure’ in Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation, involving deliberate and forcible dispossession, the evidence on land appropriation in India and Bangladesh shows the operation of additional mechanisms with distinct features. While the range, diversity and complexities of the mechanisms of land alienation have been demonstrated above, the causal processes underlying them can be ordered into a few major patterns in terms of the typology put forward earlier.

69 On the one hand, there are clear instances of deliberate and forcible expropriation of land by the state and private interest groups. On the other hand, comparable outcomes have resulted indirectly from the working out of complex processes triggered by autonomous factors, including policy and development interventions that were primarily concerned with other objectives (cf. Adnan 2013: 122).

70 As noted in the discussion of direct mechanisms (quadrants 1 and 2 of the typology), capitalist production itself has been a force undertaking land appropriation through the deliberate dispossession of politically weak groups such as peasants and indigenous peoples. Viewed from this perspective, ‘actually existing capitalism’ has been directly expropriating stocks of land via primitive accumulation (in addition to the appropriation of flows of surplus value or profit by employing wage workers ) (cf. Marx 1976: 912, Adnan 2014: 40). In these instances, the structure of causation is one in which the needs of capitalist production drives primitive accumulation in the form of direct land appropriation.

71 However, not all mechanisms of land alienation have been deliberately driven by capitalist production or necessarily aimed at procuring its inputs. This consideration applies pre-eminently to the indirect mechanisms (quadrants 3 and 4 of the typology), such as neoliberal policies and development interventions as well as autonomous social, economic, demographic and environmental processes that were not directed at the dispossession of non-capitalist landholders but nonetheless led to such outcomes. To the extent that the lands released by these processes were subsequently deployed in capitalist production, such outcomes were ‘by-products’ or unintended consequences of these indirect mechanisms (Adnan 2014: 40). In these instances, the structure of causation is one in which primitive accumulation processes generated by autonomous factors lead to the release of land for potential deployment in capitalist production.

72 These two diametrically opposite structures of causation correspond to the direct and indirect mechanisms of land alienation, designated respectively by quadrants 1–2 and 3–4 in the typology postulated above. They also serve to provide a logical closure to the questions raised earlier about the differences between the mechanisms of primitive accumulation that are, or are not, deliberately driven by capitalism and other forces.

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73 The evidence from contemporary India and Bangladesh cited above indicates that there are land alienation mechanisms corresponding to each of the categories in the fourfold typology presented in Figure 1. Moreover, each of these broad headings can be broken down into more detailed sub-types. In this sense, the 2x2 typological schema of mechanisms of land alienation proposed here is relatively simple. It provides a first approximation in the attempt to order and categorize the numerous specific mechanisms, which can be further elaborated as necessary. Correlatively, more complex mechanisms of land alienation can be viewed as combinations of the various individual categories posited above, operating through an extended chain of causation and subject to the possible influence of political forces.

74 In sum, many different mechanisms of land alienation, mediating primitive accumulation/ABD, have been at work in neoliberal India and Bangladesh. These range from direct land acquisition for a variety of special zones and standalone projects to income deflation induced by neoliberal policies and adverse impacts of development interventions, leading to indirect forms of land loss. Taken together, these varied mechanisms constitute a diverse repertoire from which alternative options and strategies for land grabs and primitive accumulation/ABD have emerged under particular circumstances (cf. Peluso 1992, Burawoy 1985: 214–19, Harvey 2006: 159, Tilly 1978: 151–58, Adnan 2013, 2014: 37).

75 As argued above, mechanisms of primitive accumulation/ABD are not confined solely to the use of extra-economic coercion or non-market transactions. Definitions based on such conditionalities are unduly restrictive because of their focus on only particular traits (e.g. force) and mediating institutions (e.g. non-market agencies), and correspond to special cases. Consequently, these formulations of primitive accumulation/ABD are unable to accommodate the entire range of mechanisms of land alienation that have been empirically observed in neoliberal India and Bangladesh.

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NOTES

1. Comments from four anonymous reviewers are acknowledged with thanks. 2. See Levien’s (2013) persuasive attempt to construct a periodization of modern Indian economic and political history in terms of ‘regimes of dispossession’. 3. This conditionality is necessary to exclude deployment of appropriated land for a variety of other (non-capitalist) purposes, including extraction of precapitalist ground rent, enhancing social status and cultural prestige, political and particularistic conflicts, etc. (Adnan 2013, Hall 2013: 1592). 4. See Marx (1976: 875–76, 2010: 501–02 & 527–31) and Perelman (1984: 8–12). 5. The objective of this article as well as constraints of space preclude detailed discussion of the theoretical criticisms of ABD. However, I have discussed these in earlier publications (Adnan 2013, 2014). 6. The CHT (Land Acquisition) Regulation, 1958. 7. The Panchayat (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA).

ABSTRACTS

In this article, selected evidence from contemporary India and Bangladesh is analyzed to identify the diverse mechanisms of land alienation at work. A typology of such mechanisms is developed for this purpose, based on a critical review of theoretical approaches to primitive accumulation (Marx 1976) and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) (Harvey 2005). In this typology, mechanisms of land alienation and primitive accumulation can be direct or indirect and may or may not involve the use of force. Moreover, multiple mechanisms can operate in combination. The application of this typology to the empirical evidence shows that mechanisms of land alienation exist under all its broad categories. Accordingly, it is concluded that notions of primitive accumulation/ABD which are confined to extra-economic or non-market characterizations are unduly restrictive and correspond to special cases that cannot accommodate the entire range of mechanisms displayed by the evidence from neoliberal India

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and Bangladesh. Moreover, capitalism itself can operate as a driving force of ongoing primitive accumulation/ABD, corresponding to direct mechanisms of land alienation. Correlatively, primitive accumulation/ABD can be generated by autonomous factors and the lands so released can be potentially deployed in capitalist production, corresponding to indirect mechanisms of land alienation.

INDEX

Keywords: land grab, alienation, primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, India, Bangladesh, neoliberalism

AUTHOR

SHAPAN ADNAN Associate, University of Oxford, Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme

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‘Who Has the Stick Has the Buffalo’: Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion on a Pasture in the Indian Himalayas

Richard Axelby

Picture a pasture high on a mountain ridge

1 In the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, the Dhar Khanda ridge looks down upon the forested slopes and terraced fields of the Chamba valley. Rising to an altitude of 3000 meters above sea level, the ridge is relatively level with two large alpine meadows—Bari Dhar to the East and Lamba Got to the West—divided by a wooded stretch of rough ground.1 Though snowbound for much of the year, from late March through to November, the meadows and forests of Dhar Khanda reveal themselves as a grazing space for buffaloes, cows, sheep and goats. These forests and alpine meadows are not only physical domains, but also contested social spaces to which different groups of people compete for access.

2 In formal legal terms all the land along the Dhar Khanda ridge is the property of the state and is managed by the Forest Department of Himachal Pradesh. Access to this particular pasture is supposedly regulated by an official system of ‘traditional’ rights, permits and quotas. Officially at least, it is the Forest Department that determines who may access and use the resources of Dhar Khanda and who is excluded from them. However, as I go on to show, state authority declines with altitude. This article therefore departs from the narrowly formal official system to consider wider informal access and use arrangement as demonstrated by those groups of Gaddi shepherds and Gujjar buffalo herders who visit Dhar Khanda each summer.

3 The difference between property and access is sometimes overlooked in discussions of land-grabs and accumulation by dispossession. Following Ribot and Peluso’s (2003) distinction between ‘property’ and ‘access’ this article explores the area between that

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which people have property rights to, and that which they are able to extract benefit from. In parallel to this, Sikor and Lund (2009) identify a second ‘grey zone’ existing between power and authority where decisions about the distribution of resources are legitimised. Taking as its subject the multiple ways that these two sets of relationships play out on the Dhar Khanda ridge, I consider their construction and discursive constitution. Like the other papers in this special issue, this article examines the techniques used by those seeking to appropriate land in South Asia. In it I show how discourses of indigeneity and belonging are used to justify and resist competing claims not just to resource ownership (property) but also to the ability to benefit from resources (access). Examining the politics of natural resource use in this way brings to the fore inequalities in access and explains the ways in which they occur.

Figure 1:

The Dhar Khanda ridge with Lamba Got in the foreground and Bari Dhar in the distance (photo: author’s own)

Pastoralism and property in the western Himalayas

4 The geography of the western Himalayas provides an ecological niche ideally suited to the practice of mountain pastoralism.2 Central to the coordination of temporal and spatial mobility are complex sets of access arrangements: nomadism in the western Himalayas requires the navigation of human landscapes as much as physical ones. One method by which the necessary flexibility of movement is achieved is through the collective holding of pasture resources as a form of common property (Sandford 1983, Scoones 1995). The literature on migratory pastoralists in the western Himalayas has focused attention on the existence and workings of these grazing commons and, in particular, on the negative impact that the modern state has upon them.

5 The historical practice of pastoral nomadism in the Kashmir and Punjab Himalayas has been examined by Singh (1998, 2009), Bhattacharya (1986, 1995) and Chakravarty-Kaul

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(1996, 1997). Traditional access to grazing is characterised as having been regulated through flexible combinations of collective and segmented property arrangements (Singh 1998). However, the arrival of British rule in the mid-19th century marked the beginning of an existential challenge to long-standing arrangements of shared resource ownership and management. Bhattacharya describes the colonial state as having sought to ‘redefine the temporal rhythms of pastoral activity’ (1995: 57). Through the latter half of the 19th century, ‘the gaddis and gujars of the hills.... found their access to forests closed, their rights redefined, the rhythms of their movements controlled, their spatial movement restricted’ (Bhattacharya 1995: 54). Land settlement saw grazing land internalised under village management while other ‘wastes’ were brought under direct government control (Singh 2009: 76). The micro-management of forest resources and the introduction of an official system of grazing permits, taxes and quotas restricted what had previously been fluid and flexible customary arrangements (Dangwal 2009). Post-Independence successive governments continued to prioritise settled agriculture over mobile pastoralism (Saberwal 1999, Chakravarty-Kaul 1996). With the timing and route of migration severely constrained, ‘pastoralists were frozen in their tracks’ (Chakravarty-Kaul 1997: 134).

6 These accounts of historical change consider what happens when ‘traditional’ shared forms of resource ownership and management collide with bureaucratic administration and ‘modern’ systems of private and state property. As such they successfully focus attention on the historical and contemporary processes of expropriation, dispossession, alienation and forcible exclusion that have been inflicted on pastoralists and other forest-dependent populations over the last two centuries. However, while recognising considerable upheaval in the way natural resources are formally governed it is also apparent that across much of the western Himalayas nomadic pastoralism remains a viable economic activity. Exploring alternative conceptualisations and configurations of state, community and property, it is possible to look beyond sweeping processes of macro change to bring out the details of contemporary resource use.

7 Previously I have compared the proposition that the modern state has critically undermined common property resource management arrangements against the example of a group of shepherds as they negotiated access to grazing (Axelby 2007). Following these shepherds through the course of their migration cycle I revealed the dynamic interactions of individuals, communities and the agents of the state through which officially recorded property regimes are creatively reinterpreted. While that earlier article celebrated the ability of migratory shepherds to obtain grazing in the face of official attempts to restrict their movement, this article probes deeper into questions of access, authority, legitimacy and ultimately power. Focussing on a single pasture with multiple users, here I expose a less optimistic picture which highlights the hierarchies existing within and between nomadic groups. By revealing who gains benefit from the pasture and how they do so, it provides a window on the ways that interests are negotiated, mediated and contested. Updating the macro changes in property regimes that swept India in the 19th century, this paper shares with the others in this special issue a focus on new processes of accumulation and new forms of access and exclusion that are taking place across 21st century South Asia.

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Access to grazing resources part 1: inclusion, cooperation and community

The shepherds arrive in the Saal valley

8 As the snow melts from Dhar Khanda, Gaddi shepherds leave their winter grazing grounds in Punjab and turn their flocks north. Those from the Saal valley aim to arrive back in their village homes in mid-April. Gaddi people live on either side of the Dhaula Dhar mountain range which separates Kangra from Chamba District, but they trace their origins to the upper part of the Chamba Valley known as Gadderan. Though Gaddis are well-known as nomadic shepherds, the majority of Gaddi households do not keep migratory flocks and from those families that do only one or two men will actually travel with them year round. Gaddi agro-pastoralism typically involves the combination of subsistence farming (typically a summer maize crop and wheat in winter) and migratory shepherding (flocks of sheep and goats provide a cash income from the sale of meat and wool). In recent decades the availability of new occupations— locally in government or private service; further afield typically labouring or in tourism—has increasingly provided Gaddi families with alternatives to shepherding. However, rises in the demand for, and price of, goat meat means shepherding remains a profitable occupation (Axelby 2005). After a few weeks grazing in village pastures, farmers’ fields and forests close to the river Saal the flocks of sheep and goats move on to higher pastures around the Dhar Khanda ridge. Dhar Khanda is close enough to spend time at home (it’s possible to make a return visit in a day) but with grazing sufficient for a stay of several weeks.

9 On my first visit to Dhar Khanda in May 2002, I found a group of shepherds had established camp on the meadow at Bari Dhar. Prithu3 was caring for the new-born lambs while the adult sheep and goats were grazing in the forest below. Prithu explained he travelled with four other shepherds: the hired hands (chotepuhal) Mohinder and Dimu were with the flock in the forest while the permit holders Deso and Bir spent a few days at their nearby homes. While Prithu and his groups enjoyed their stay at Bari Dhar, two other groups of Gaddi shepherds took up temporary residence at Lamba Got. Dharam Chand was one of the older and cannier of the Saal valley shepherds and his opinion carried some weight with the others. Sharing Lamba Got with Dharam Chand’s group was a small flock belonging to Harilal and Monnu, an uncle-and-nephew team from the nearby village of Chaghan. None of the above described groups of shepherds have ever had an ‘official’, permanent or specific right to graze their animals in the Dhar Khanda forests. They are able to do so because Forest Department officials recognise the need for flocks to spend some time around this area while travelling between their summer and winter grazing grounds. The claims made by these shepherds were based on their own long-term usage (i.e. over several generations) and the proximity of their home villages. According to Deso: When we settle in one place then others won’t come even though there is no permit [legal right] for that place. Going to the same place every year becomes tradition and others won’t use it if they know that someone else is already established there. An understanding exists about who stays where and that they shouldn’t be disturbed.4

10 From late April to the end of May these flocks grazed freely over the meadows and surrounding forested slopes. Sharing common residence in the Saal valley, the

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shepherds were well known to each other and travelled throughout the year along a similar migration path.5 Relationships were commonly expressed in kinship terms; they would eat and drink at one another’s camps and provide cover for one another allowing time to be spent at home. This confirms Agrawal’s view of ‘communities on the move’ as a defining feature of nomadism (1999). Prithu was not alone in commenting that working and travelling together with others ‘gives security’: where necessary they would club together and support one another in the face of external challenge. As we shall see, in 2002 the security provided by numbers was an important resource.

11 Occupying the mid-point of the Bari Dhar meadow are four large, flat-roofed shelters built from wood and mud. These kotas belong to Gujjar families who bring their buffaloes to pasture here in the summer months. The shepherds had already told me that the Forest Department permit rights to the pasture at Bari Dhar were held by a group of Gujjar buffalo herders that camped there during the summer months. Deso explained the arrangement that allowed him to bring his flock here: Gujjars own the permit of this area so they can stop us using it. [But] before they arrive and after they have gone we can use these pastures without any restriction. How long shepherds stay here depends on where they are going, what other pastures they have and the general condition of the grazing. If the pasture is green we may stay a day or two longer than usual. If the pasture is less green we stay a day or two less.6 Importantly Prithu assured me they would not stay for long. By the second half of May the shepherds start to leave for their own permit pastures in upper Chamba and Lahaul.

The Gujjars come to the mountain

12 Groups of Gujjars began to arrive at their Dhar Khanda kotas in mid-May having spent the winter at their village homes in the valley below. Like their Gaddi neighbours, Gujjars are listed as a Scheduled Tribe; and both Gaddis and Gujjars combine transhumance pastoralism with small scale agriculture. Important differences, however, separate the two groups: Gaddis are Hindu while Gujjars practice Islam; Gaddis travel with flocks of sheep and goats while Gujjars herd buffalo. The nature of the animals they herd determines the form and extent of their respective migrations: for the Gaddi shepherds pastures such as the one at Bari Dhar are intermediary locations on their migration path—transit points on the way to and from their summer grazing areas; for the buffalo-herding Gujjar such locations are a final destination. Three families (in contrast to Gaddi pastoralism it is usual for women and children to accompany men to the summer pastures) had moved up from home villages with a herd of around thirty buffaloes and a number of sheep and goats. Yusuf, the permit holder (lambardar) of the group characterised the group’s migratory cycle as ‘pahar ko ana-jana ’—coming and going to the mountain. While Yusuf and his younger brothers Shamu and Hassan established themselves at Bari Dhar, other groups of Gujjar began to arrive at Lamba Got. Compared to the isolated homesteads of Bari Dhar, the twenty kotas at Lamba Got look like a small village. The families who visit Lamba Got in the summer bring with them over 100 buffalo and also cows, sheep and goats. They remain at Dhar Khanda until late September.

13 Yusuf described an ideal grazing pasture as having a number of features. First it must be sufficiently far from village habitation that farmers (and their grazing animals)

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cannot reach it; there should be spring water for human consumption and water holes for the animals to wallow in; and the pasture should be flat enough to allow buffalo to graze easily. All of the characteristics are found at Dhar Khanda. Additionally, Dhar Khanda is accessible and close enough to Chamba town for Gujjars to take their milk for sale in the market.

Differentiating rights from access

14 As stated earlier, in formal terms the Dhar Khanda meadows and surrounding forests are the property of the state and are managed by the Forest Department of Himachal Pradesh. But this statement gives only the barest flavour of the ideas of property and strategies of access that are to be found at Dhar Khanda. Moving beyond a distinction between property types as discrete entities, Dhar Khanda illustrates a reality in which resources are held in ‘overlapping, and sometimes conflicting combinations of ideal property regimes’ (Feeny et al. 1998: 78). Conventional debates around the dispossession of the commons tend to polarise land use as either public or private; this article shows that for these herders the reality is far more complex. Against the master categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ property we can recognise the ability to access resources as being mutually constituted by varied constituencies of actors. State and market play a part in this but they are refracted through the lenses of contemporary society and local politics.

15 Property rights literature7 has tended to focus on the relative merits of private, state or common property and the forms and conditions that have ensured the long term survival and sustainability of particular examples of common resource management. But, as Agrawal points out, by concentrating attention exclusively on institutional arrangements and the rules governing resource use, common property theorists can overlook the shifting social and political-institutional environments in which access arrangements are situated (2003: 248). This leads us to Ribot and Peluso’s differentiation of property from access. Here property is defined as ‘the right to benefit from things’ while access extends to ‘the ability to derive benefits from things’ (2003: 153). While Ribot and Peluso recognise property as important, it is but one of a set of factors in an array of ‘institutions, social and political-economic relations, and discursive strategies’ that shape benefit flows (2003: 157). Aside from property there are to be found a variety of other access mechanisms—technology, capital, markets, labour, knowledge, identities and social relations—that condition people’s ability to benefit from resources (Ribot & Peluso 2003: 159-60). Ribot and Peluso point to the ways in which different actors hold and draw upon different ‘webs of relationship’ and ‘bundles of power’ to configure resource access (2003: 154). By viewing property relations as social relationships we are able to shine a light onto the networks of power and authority that enable people to gain benefits from resources or that prevent them from doing so.

16 Applying Ribot and Peluso’s framework to the examples of pasture use at Dhar Khanda allows us to map the mechanisms that determine forms of access to resources. Setting out the terms on which the above described groups of Gaddi shepherds and Gujjar herders gain access to the resources of Dhar Khanda reveals the differing ways and relevant institutions through which their practices are legitimated. Let us start with some history. A story is commonly recounted of how, a little more than a hundred

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years ago, having tasted fresh buffalo milk while visiting neighbouring Jammu, the Raja of Chamba invited a number of Gujjar families to settle in his state. Two brothers began to visit Dhar Khanda in the summer months; one brother established himself at Lamba Got and the other at Bari Dhar. The Raja formalised this arrangement when he requested that grazing tax be paid and milk brought daily to his palace. The settlement of rights in Chamba did not mean the termination of local people’s ability to access resources so much as the establishment of a legal relationship between citizens and the state. Holding the grazing licence for Bari Dhar gives Yusuf’s family an official right to exclusive use of the pasture. These are the ‘traditional rights’ (‘waris’) guaranteed by the Forest Department to the direct descendants of the herders who were initially invited to Dhar Khanda in the 19th century. Thus it is firstly through what Ribot and Peluso (2003: 161) term rights-based access that the Gujjars at Dhar Khanda claim their rights to pasture. Processes of forest settlement saw traditional rights formalised into grazing permits which specified the extent of a pasture, the ways it could be used, and imposed a grazing tax on right holders. Yusuf’s name is recorded on the permit which grants permission to take buffalo to the pasture at Bari Dhar. Other Gujjar families are similarly ‘permitted’ to graze their buffalo on Lamba Got. However, rather than the neutral enforcement of regulation, Yusuf acknowledges that the best he can hope for from the state is some form of (probably costly and always delayed) official arbitration over disputes. ‘Paper rights’ are not as secure as they are presented to be.

17 While legally recognised rights to property are important, actual access is constituted through a broader range of processes and social institutions. Ribot and Peluso’s distinction between ‘the right to benefit’ and ‘the ability to derive benefits’ allows us to identify the social, political and economic relations that shape benefit flows (2003: 157). The Forest Department’s official claim of ownership and the formal allocation of use- rights to named individuals are simply the basis from which negotiations over access proceed. Though rights of use are assigned to individuals, permit holders remain subject to a range of social obligations and group pressures that expose the simplicity of official definitions. To distinguish between institutional arrangements Cleaver employs the terms ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘socially embedded’ for, respectively, the explicit organizational structures of governments and ‘culture, social organization and daily practice’ (2002: 14). While processes constituting property may or may not be distinct from those constituting access, it is likely to be much harder to untangle the ‘bureaucratic’ from the ‘socially embedded.’

18 Comparing the situation of Gujjar herders with that of Gaddi shepherds demonstrates the different strategies required to turn particular rights into forms of access. While many of the Saal valley shepherds do hold permits for grazing, these only cover specific locations in the upper parts of the Chamba valley, in the District of Lahaul, and in the Siwalik Hills. As Phillimore (1981: 103) points out, the Forest Department and Gaddi migratory shepherds differ in their views of what constitutes a grazing right. To the Forest Department these permits relate to particular grazing runs i.e. it is a right to a specific place. Shepherds on the other hand view a permit as giving permission to hold flocks and move between summer and winter grazing grounds i.e. it is the right to travel. Gaddi legal entitlements to the resources of Dhar Khanda are not as strong as those claimed by permit-holding Gujjars. However, the shepherds are able to reinforce their weak legal entitlements with a series of overlapping informal claims to customary rights of use. Time spent at Dhar Khanda derives from its proximity to the shepherds’ home villages in the Saal valley. Villagers from this area have a long history of grazing

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their village-based flocks on the lower slopes of Dhar Khanda. On this basis, the Gaddi shepherds present claims to access the Dhar Khanda meadows that, if legally unauthorised, are socially acknowledged and supported.

19 As Ribot and Peluso explain, ‘privileged access to the individuals or institutions with the authority to make and implement laws can strongly influence who benefits from the resource in question’ (2003: 170). The numerically dominant Gaddis are adept at manipulating political processes. As a relatively unified ‘vote bank’, the political clout of the Gaddi community provides a means to gain improvements in access to pasture resources (Saberwal 2003: 214). Additionally, in comparison with the Gujjars of Chamba District, members of the Gaddi Scheduled Tribe possess a superior record of obtaining employment within the state, including at the lower levels of the Forest Department. This was the case for Gaddis on Dhar Khanda; close to their home villages, relationships with the institutions of the state are often intimately bound up with kinship relationships.8 Thus, on the one hand, the Gujjars’ official right of use is recorded in law and, in theory (if not in practice), is enforced by the institutions of the state while, on the other hand, the Gaddi shepherds’ claims derive from notions of custom that are legitimised through socio-cultural norms and political brokerage. Here we can identify two distinct webs of relationships through which users organise resource access. Ideally these two systems of access are separate in terms of the timing of migration and the needs of their respective sets of animals. While buffalo graze on the flat meadows (dhar), sheep and goats venture onto the steep forested slopes (dhad or fāt) to either side. The Gaddis argue that, as their sheep and goats eat differently, their short stay will not reduce the grazing available to the Gujjars’ buffalo.9 Gaddi flocks access grazing here from late April to mid-May and the Gujjars should not arrive until after they have left. Similarly, in the later part of the season the Gujjars should have gone down to their home villages by the time the Gaddi flocks return in October.

20 But this was not always the case on the Dhar Khanda ridge. At various times in the last decade the timings of migration have diverged from the required schedule. Furthermore, changes in the economics of nomadism—specifically the rise in the price of meat—have seen both Gaddis and Gujjars bringing an increasing number of goats to the pasture. This raises the question of what happens when two sets of customs governing access and use come into contact with one another. As Peluso and Lund point out, ‘the mechanisms of land control need not always align [but may be] wielded in concert or competition with one another’ (2011: 668). In situations characterised by normative pluralism and legal ambiguity, exactly who is entitled to access a particular resource, and the manner in which they do so, become highly contested. The next section presents two extended case studies that demonstrate struggles over access and clashes in the values and norms used to justify competing requirements.

Access to grazing resources part 2: conflict, competition and exclusion

Tensions on the ridge

21 In 2002 when I met Rustam at Lamba Got it was against a background of communal unrest. In February of that year an anti-Muslim pogrom was carried out in Gujarat as retaliation for the burning of a train carrying Hindutva activists from Ayodhya. The

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previous December an attack on the Indian Parliament building brought a rapid deterioration in relations with Pakistan. In the heat of May and June international concerns rose with the build-up of troops along the border between these two nuclear armed states. These tensions were reflected on the migration trail. Throughout the summer I witnessed frequent name-calling and occasional physical violence between Hindu shepherds and Muslim buffalo herders. From the Gaddi side there were mutterings about Gujjars sheltering terrorists and having weapons hidden in their kotas. When I returned to Dhar Khanda in late September tensions were simmering still.

22 Reflecting on the situation, Rustam told me that when the Gujjars had arrived at Dhar Khanda back in May the Gaddis were not ready to leave. Their refusal to move on was a direct challenge to the authority of the permit-holder’s right to graze: I have a permit from the Forest Department. It allows me to stay here for six months each year. My family has been coming here for 200 years. Before the month of May shepherds come here and stay a few days using the pasture and staying in the kotas. At that time it is too cold for buffalo to come here. The problem is when shepherds want to stay here after we have arrived. [This year] some shepherds started to graze their sheep and goats on the main [flat] meadow. If they are passing through they should use the [steep slopes of the] forest and maybe stay for one night but they were using the meadow and not passing through. They came onto the pasture because there was only one woman here and she couldn’t stop them.10

23 While Rustam accepted that the shepherds could use the Dhar Khanda pasture for grazing early and late in the season, many were less generous and accused the Gaddis’ animals of dirtying water holes and being ‘greedy for the leaves of trees [when] there is not enough here for them.’11

24 Though the shepherds generally aim to arrive back in the Saal valley in mid-October, in 2002 a number of flocks returned early from the high pastures complaining of animal disease and a lack of adequate grazing. As the largest flock owner and one of the most senior shepherds, Dharam Chand’s opinion carries a lot of weight. Though the Gujjars’ permits provide them with a legally irrefutable access claim to the pasture, Dharam Chand felt able to argue a right of use on the basis of tradition: This is a got—it is called Lamba Got—[which means that] it is a Gaddi grazing place.12 Because of the Gujjars we can’t use it anymore but in my grandfather’s time we used this place. Now we are forced to go down into the forest to find grazing. The Gujjars bought the permit from the Forest Department. They are supposed to use it for grazing only but now they are also growing crops here. I have made legal petitions to take back my rights but everyone says I am just an old shepherd and they give me no importance.13

25 Rather than being rigidly defined we see here that access can be subject to contestation even on the basis of place names and the implications these have for traditional usage. Recalling that relations between shepherds and buffalo herders had been more cordial in the past, Dharam Chand argued that recent disputes were caused by overpopulation: ‘Gujjars are having too many children and so have come to overuse the pasture. They are staying here for ten or fifteen days longer now.’14 Expanding on this theme Dharam Chand advanced a number of geographical, historical, demographic and political assertions. He concluded: Since 1947 ... the granting of rights to minorities has increased. But this is Gadderan —the land of Gaddis. This we should remember. I have done this work from my

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childhood. My family have worked as shepherds since before memory—all our forefathers were shepherds.

26 Other shepherds complained about sheep being taken as the price for taking shelter in abandoned Gujjar kotas. Deso also voiced his frustrations about the situation: Where there is good grazing Gujjars are always there before us. The problem is that the Gujjar block the way and stop us from using the pastures. They exaggerate their permit land beyond what is allowed. They stop our goats drinking the water even. Now the problem is worse than before—there are more Gujjar and more buffalo and they act like gangsters [goondas]—they steal the blankets we leave in our camps. Four or five shepherds can’t fight two or three Gujjar families.

27 While over the last decade, a certain amount of Hindu-Muslim (and Gaddi-Gujjar) tension has manifested itself on occasion, the complaints made in 2002 were particularly vociferous. Though undoubtedly the lack of adequate grazing and water played at part, the language used (‘chalo Pakistan’) demonstrated a communal edge to these conflicts over resources.

Access, authority and legitimacy

28 This article has moved beyond the analysis of ‘property’ to consider broader notions of ‘access’. While property may be legally recorded and recognised, processes by which access is legitimised require appeals to a range of institutional forms. Here notions of legitimacy are not fixed but rather are constantly renegotiated and refined as part of attempts to secure authority over a resource. To Sikor and Lund (2009) questions of access cannot be uncoupled from questions of authority and power. Where forms of authority co-exist, overlap and contradict one another they recommend that we investigate the processes by which claims to access and property are ‘made and solidified or challenged and, possibly, undone’ (2009: 6). Against a background of contested claims, the Dhar Khanda ridge is an arena within which struggles over ideas of legitimate authority are played out. As Pauline Peters points out, competition over claims takes place through competition in meanings: ‘whose right, which meaning, whose definition are critical questions in deciphering changes in systems of land rights’ (1987: 192). In this section we can see the ways in which the varied parameters of tenure are explained, justified and challenged by those that used to use them, currently use them or seek to use them.

29 At Dhar Khanda conflicts over resources are most obviously expressed in individual claims to long-standing customary use. A connected strategy relates a broader sense of tradition by forwarding a territorial dimension in which ethnic and religious identities, history and geography are interlinked. In both these instances custom and tradition are employed as discursive manipulations to justify resource access. The depth of the Gaddis’ attachment to shepherding as a way of life is expressed by their assertion that their shepherding dharma was allocated to them by Lord Shiva15 and that Gadderan— the Gaddi homeland—is coterminous with Shiv Bhumi.16 In contrast to the (relatively) newly arrived Gujjars, the Gaddis claim access to resources in ways that precede state- sanctioned rights of property. The right to graze at Dhar Khanda is thus claimed through the Gaddis’ ethnic and religious identity related through notions of indigeneity. Notions of Gaddi identity and of ‘Gadderan’ as their imagined homeland are used to counter the Gujjars’ association with the Chamba Raja and the old Chamba State.

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30 The constitution of categories such as ‘land’ and ‘people’ demonstrates the extent to which state forms have penetrated the way we think about property and identity. As Agrawal (2005) has argued, users’ interactions and relationships with their environments may be shaped, in informal and indirect ways, by state policies, institutional structures and official rhetoric. Elmhirst relates how the recording of traditional rights and customary laws produces what she calls ‘racialized territorialisation’ as the systematic classification of people gives rise to ideas of ‘legitimate belongings, entitlement and territorial attachment’ (2011: 174). Across the western Himalayas the settlements and censuses of the 19th century continue to resonate in one-dimensional forms of identification—as ‘Bakarwal’, ‘Gaddi, ‘Gujjar’, ‘Bhotiya’—that are uniformly connected to rights over particular territories. Berry (2009) points out that attempts to clarify property rights have frequently provoked, rather than alleviated, social and political conflict. The reverse side of granting access according to notions of ethnicity and territory is that those unable to articulate their identity according to prevailing notions of belonging will find themselves excluded. This explains some of the animosity between Gaddi and Gujjar herders that was so apparent when I first arrived in Chamba.

31 Explanations for the tensions of 2002 require an understanding that struggles over rights do not take place within a bounded locality. The wider political situation cannot be ignored as mounting political tensions between Pakistan and India found expression in the hills and forests of Chamba District. Local struggles were influenced by and fed- into national-level politics and ideas about how people should be ordered within national (and international) space. Conflicts over the rights to pasture resources at Dhar Khanda clearly parallel broader contestations over citizenship and the right to claim place in India as a whole.

32 So far we have seen how access arrangements are shaped by formal systems of state sanctioned property rights but are by no means limited to them. The power to produce categories of knowledge is significant in legitimizing state authority over property. But this is not to suggest that local people are solely without agency in processes of knowledge production. Kapila (2008) has shown the Kangra Gaddi to be familiar with the language of rights and adept at deploying ideas of indigeneity and ethnic identity when making claims to Scheduled Tribe status. Similarly, Bergmann et al. (2011) describe how nomadic Bhotiyas in the Kumaon Himalaya have been able to position themselves and act effectively along webs of relationships stretching from the local to the global (2011: 107). On the meadows and in the forests of the western Himalayas, justifications of resource access intertwine in complex dynamics that merge with a wider politics of identity and geography.

33 If access arrangements reveal something of the everyday processes of identity formation, they also allow insights into the everyday processes of state and authority production and legitimation. Interestingly, as Sikor and Lund suggest, when authority and power relations are contested, politico-legal institutions tend to compete for authority. Already we have seen how the Gujjars appeal to a particular idea of a hierarchical bureaucratic state able to confer rights over property. Against this the Gaddis attempt to legitimate their resource use by presenting ideas of tradition that fit with recent national efforts to democratise resource management and also with the lower levels of the state in which policy is translating into the vernacular. In making these appeals resource users confer authority in different ways. In the presence of

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competing forums for resolving disputes, contestants tend to ’shop’ for forums for dispute resolution: ‘and forums actively shop for disputes in an effort to consolidate their authority’ (Sikor and Lund 2009: 10). The next section presents another case in which particular claims to authority are forwarded and confirmed in disputes over the use of pasture at Dhar Khanda.

Tusli Ram’s land grab

34 While the arguments over resource access were particularly heated in 2002, other, less overt, conflicts have played out on the meadows of Dhar Khanda over the last decade. Here, differences did not derive from ethnic or religious identity, so much as reflect disparities in economic and political capital and the social authority that accrues to some individuals but not to others.

35 This paper has already outlined the ways access to Dhar Khanda pastures is negotiated by permit-holding buffalo herders and migratory shepherds with homes in nearby villages. An additional level of complexity is added by a number of flocks whose migration route follows the Dhar Khanda ridge but which are owned by shepherds who do not live locally. Of this category of transiting shepherds Tulsi Ram Bharmouri owns the largest flock. A barapuhal such as Tulsi Ram requires additional labour to manage his animals. 18-year-old Virū—one of the five chotepuhal employed by Tulsi Ram—filled me in on the roles and origins of this group of shepherds: Tulsi Ram is the permit holder [malundi]. Together with his brothers he owns most of the animals. I work for them as do my friends Sunka and Subhash. We are going to Bharmour which is Tulsi Ram’s home village, but I am from this area [the Saal valley].

36 Jobbing shepherds like Virū (and Mohinder and Dimu who travel with Prithu and Deso) work either for cash or for the opportunity to bring their own animals under a Forest Department-issued grazing permit. In this way labour is traded for being allowed to travel under the formal protection of a grazing permit. Lacking official or customary rights to property, these ‘small’ shepherds (chotepuhal) gain a precarious form of resource access by working for those who have such rights.

37 With their home villages (and related spring / autumn grazing) at the eastern end of the Chamba valley, shepherds like Tulsi Ram acknowledged they could pass through pastures such as the one at Lamba Got only at the pleasure of the local shepherds. By agreement they moved quickly through the area at the commencement and the tail- end of the grazing season. Tulsi Ram described the arrangement as follows: Everyone can use this got—it’s on the route up to Tundah valley and the Kalichho pass so hundreds of flocks pass through each year. Going to the mountains everyone can use this pasture as there is new grass here every year. In the autumn it is harder. If someone else had been here when we arrived we would have just stayed a bit higher or a bit lower or go on further—it’s not a big problem. We only stay at each place for a day or two so there is plenty of grass left for others.

38 Tulsi Ram confirmed that he would have to leave Lamba Got before the arrival from nearby Chaghan village of the small flock belonging to Harilal and Monnu. However, under certain circumstances, for example in return for payment or some later reciprocal arrangement, the Saal valley shepherds allowed transiting non-local flocks to stay for longer. In 2003 Tulsi Ram explained that it was acceptable for him to stay for a short time at Lamba Got while travelling to and from his own ‘permit’ grazing above

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Pulni close to Bharmour. As he pointed out, in turn, others used the Pulni pasture quite freely before and after his own stay there.

39 When I started my fieldwork in Chamba District, Harilal had been the oldest of the migratory shepherds whose family homes are in the villages surrounding Dhar Khanda. Together with his nephew Monnu, Harilal took a small flock of 50 animals from Punjab to Lahaul and back each year. The previous year Harilal and Monnu had lost over a third of their sheep and goats to disease. Even so, Harilal was adamant that he would continue migrating with the flock: If we finish this shepherding work we will have nothing. If there is no flock then we won’t be able to have meat. Society won’t feed us, we won’t have wool. The land on the mountain isn’t fertile so farming alone isn’t an option here. We can sell animals from the flock to get money when we need it.17

40 Returning in 2010 I learned that Harilal and Monnu had ‘retired’ from migratory shepherding. The family still owned a number of sheep and goats but these animals now grazed year round in the Saal valley. Piecing together the stories from a number of different sources, I heard how, over time, the large flock belonging to Tulsi Ram had outgrown his traditional permit pasture at Pulni. He had therefore decided to leave Bharmour earlier and to spend longer at other locations along the migration path. Whereas before Tulsi Ram had not tarried at Lamba Got, in 2006 he extended an overnight stay to a full week. The following year he remained for more than two weeks. Several of the Saal valley shepherds were openly critical of Tulsi Ram’s attempts to extend his stay at Dhar Khanda beyond the usually accepted time. The feeling was that Harilal and Monnu had been pushed off their rightful grazing place. Tulsi Ram had little interest in these complaints and argued that the pasture was underused. He reinforced his claim to the pasture by arguing that because the shepherds he employed all came from villages in the Saal valley they therefore had a legitimate right to access grazing there.

41 If the Saal valley shepherds benefited from the overlap of local state and local society, Tulsi Ram trumped them for influence. It was known that Tulsi Ram was from a wealthy and well-connected family and his influence extended through kinship ties to a powerful politician. Unsurprisingly, there was little appetite for or prospect of directly challenging his claims to spend more time at Lamba Got. Tulsi Ram’s annexation of a corner of the Lamba Dhar pasture rested on a web of relationships that spanned the economic, social and political. However dressed up, the bundle of powers available to Tulsi Ram was recognised as the ultimate form of authority: ‘jiski lathi uski bhains’: who has the stick has the buffalo.

What happened next?

42 In 2013 I walked up to Lamba Got to visit Rustam. He confirmed that tensions with migratory Gaddi shepherds had decreased. Forest Department officials had visited Dhar Khanda and had brought the conflicting parties together in an amicable compromise (rajinama) by which the shepherds could transit the pasture so long as they promised not to trespass.18 I also learned that Deso and Yusuf had come to an agreement whereby Yusuf’s son would take the family’s expanding flock of goats with the Gaddi flock to Lahaul to escape the monsoon rains. Shepherds liked to emphasise how normally restrictive social norms are considerably loosened while migrating: ‘at the high

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pastures these things [ethnic and caste distinctions] are less important—everyone eats from the same plate.’19

43 The same year I took the opportunity to see Harilal at his village house. When I reminded him of his earlier intention to work until he died, he replied: ‘I would have liked to keep visiting Lahaul but I don’t get to decide these things.’20

44 Finally what of those who have neither the legal right to graze nor the kinship ties to gain access to permitted grazing? I end this section with the permitless jobbing shepherds whose ability to access grazing at Dhar Khanda was dependant on providing labour to a permit holding shepherd. Virū had no animals of his own and was paid to look after the animals belonging to Tulsi Ram. Though the wages were reasonable, Virū found the work onerous: ‘other jobs are for only eight hours a day but this is a 24 hours job—and you only see home twice a year... If I could get a service job or even labouring it would be preferable.’21

45 Before moving to travel under Deso’s permit, Mohinder had worked for other malundis and had steadily built up his own flock while doing so. One such arrangement came to an end when the permit holder could no longer accommodate Mohinder’s growing collection of sheep and goats under his quota. Mohinder had been joined by his brother Dimu when he linked up with Deso, but they found their opportunities limited. Eventually their father decided they should cash in on the sheep and goats they had worked so hard to build up. The last I heard, Dimu was living at home and Mohinder was labouring in Solan District.

Inclusion, exclusion and inequality on the pasture

46 This article has mapped the varied strategies, means and processes by which the resources of the Dhar Khanda ridge can be gained. Concentrating on the changing access arrangements of a single area of pasture over the course of a decade allows us to see the circumstances in which individual and shared interests align, combine, separate and clash. Dhar Khanda can be seen as a ‘grey space’ on which ideas of property and access, and authority and power, are negotiated and tested. Stakeholders draw upon different bundles of powers and webs of relationships to configure resource access. Residence, family, caste, custom, tradition, ethnicity and religion are all deployed in attempts to bolster a continuum of claims ranging from the individual to the collective. Resulting configurations vary in temporal terms (across days, weeks, months, seasons, and years), depend on social settings (the relationships of different groups and individuals) and relate to wider political and economic contexts (changes in the respective roles and reach of the state and the market). At times groups of users coalesce around common interests. At others times identities harden and borders are thrown up. Constellations of social norms, kinship relations, economic calculus and political power come together in ways that promote access for some but deny it to others.

47 With regard to systems of shared resource use, much attention has been paid to questions of efficiency and sustainability but less to the question of equity. Negotiations and contestation over access take place within hierarchies of varied users. Examining who is able to negotiate access and how they do so highlights processes of inclusion and exclusion. In the Dhar Khanda case there has been a clearly obvious

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division between the Muslim Gujjars and the Hindu Gaddis. As climatic variation and economic incentives interact with wider political events, the friction between these two groups may flare up into conflict. However, given the longstanding cooperation between some members of these two communities and the complementarities of their respective activities, flashpoints usually prove short-lived; tensions dissipate into a new working equilibrium. Though often submerged beneath combative rhetoric around race and religion, this article also points to processes of differentiation within and between groups of Gaddi shepherds. The changing economics of pastoral production have widened differences between wealthy permit-holding barapuhals and labouring chotapuhals. Those with larger flocks are able to utilise their wealth and power to dispossess others who forward claims to access that depend on traditional use or state sanctioned rights. Ongoing changes in state and market are likely to exacerbate these trends.

48 These examples from the Dhar Khanda ridge present an alternative perspective on narratives of state efforts to restrict and regulate forest use. The cases presented here suggest dynamic relationships exist between resource users and various form of social and legal authority. Alongside state regulation of forest resources, other smaller, but no less significant, processes of enclosure, accumulation, dispossession and expulsion are taking place. And within these processes we can see how particular political visions of the ‘correct’ relationship between identity and territory are being legitimised.

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Gooch, Pernille (2004) ‘Van Gujjar: The Persistent Forest Pastoralists’, Nomadic Peoples, 8(2), pp. 125-35.

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Noble, Christina, (1987) Over the High Passes: A Year in the Himalayas with the Migratory Gaddi Shepherds, London: Collins.

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Peters, Pauline (1987) ‘Embedded Systems and Rooted Models: The Grazing Lands of Botswana and the Commons Debate’, in Bonnie McCay & James M. Acheson (eds.), The Question of the Commons, Tucson (Arizona): The University of Arizona Press, pp. 171–94.

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Saberwal, Vasant K. (2003) ‘Policy, Property, and Access: Shepherd Land-Use in the Western Himalayas’, in Aparna Rao & Michael J. Casimir (eds.), Nomadism in South Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 212–46.

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Sharma, Mahesh (2012) ‘State, Pastures and Rice-Fields: The Gaddi Shepherds of Himachal Himalayas (North India)’, Man in India, 92(1), pp. 13-35.

Sikor, Thomas; Lund, Christian (2011) ‘Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority’, Development and Change, 40(1), pp. 1–22.

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NOTES

1. I am grateful to the following people for reading versions of this paper and providing helpful advice and comments: Professor Peter Molinga, Dr. Saurabh Gupta, Professor Jonathan Parry, Dr. Bengt Karlsson, Dr. Jens Lerche, Dr. Alpa Shah, Professor Katy Gardner and Professor Eva Gerharz. 2. On Bakarwal shepherds in Kashmir see Rao 2002; for the Gaddi shepherds of Himachal Pradesh see Saberwal 1999, Axelby 2007, Sharma 2012; literature on Gujjars includes Gooch 2004, Irfanullah 2002, Dangwal 2009. 3. Pseudonyms for people and local places are used throughout. 4. Deso, interview by author, Dhar Khanda, 7 November 2002. 5. See Axelby 2007 for a detailed account of the full migration route. 6. Deso, interview by author, Dhar Khanda, 19 October 2002. 7. e.g. Ostrom 1990; Baland and Platteau 1996; Ostrom et al 2002. 8. Sudha Vasan’s (2002) ethnography of forest guards in Himachal Pradesh details the social influences that work upon the lower levels of officialdom. 9. Sheep nibble grass; goats range widely and consume young shoots and the leaves of low- hanging branches; buffalo need to be supplied daily with leafy branches cut from trees. 10. Rustam, interview by author, Dhar Khanda , 31 July 2002. 11. Rustam, interview by author, Dhar Khanda, 31 July 2002. 12. Gujjar grazing pastures are called dhar. 13. Dharam Chand, interview by author, Lamba Got, 21 October 2002. 14. Dharam Chand, interview by author, Lamba Got, 21 October 2002. 15. Noble 1987: 21. 16. Gadderan may refer to the Gaddi heartland in the upper part of the Chamba valley (around Bharmour and the Mani Mahesh Kailash massif), but on occasion expands to encompass the entire Chamba valley and a significant part of neighbouring Kangra District. 17. Harilal, interview by author, Chaghan village, 3 April 2002.

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18. Rustam, interview by author, Dhar Khanda, 2 August 2013. See Axelby (2007) for more on this kind of informal agreement between Forest Department officials and resource users. 19. Harilal, interview by author, Chagan village, 3 April 2002. 20. Harilal, interview by author, Chagan village, 30 July 2013. 21. Viru, interview by author, Kiri Village, 18 October 2002.

ABSTRACTS

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of ten years this article details the access arrangements that govern the use of a grazing pasture in Chamba District of Himachal Pradesh, India. Following Ribot and Peluso’s (2003) distinction between ‘property’ and ‘access’ I explore the area between that which people have property rights to, and that which they are able to extract benefit from. In parallel to this Sikor and Lund (2009) identify a second ‘grey zone’ existing between authority and power where decisions about how resources are distributed in society are legitimised. Taking as its subject the multiple ways that these two sets of relationships play out, this article considers the everyday politics through which Gaddi shepherds and Gujjar buffalo herders activate and justify their presence on the pasture. Examining the politics of natural resource use in this way brings to the fore inequalities in access and explains the ways in which they occur.

INDEX

Keywords: common property, resource access, inequality, nomadism, Himalayas

AUTHOR

RICHARD AXELBY Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Inequality and Poverty Research Program, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. (Funded by the ESRC and the EU, Principal Investigator: Alpa Shah).

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Land, Place and Resistance to Displacement in Phulbari

Sadid Nuremowla

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This article results from my doctoral research which was part of a larger research project on Mining, Livelihoods and Social Network in Bangladesh led by Professor Katy Gardner at the University of Sussex funded by the ESRC/DFID joint research scheme. The author is grateful to the ESRC/DFID for the funding that made the research possible and to Professor Gardner and Professor James Fairhead who supervised my research with great enthusiasm.

Introduction

1 On the 26 August 2006, five people died and many others were injured when security forces1 reportedly opened fire on some 50,000 people gathered in a small town in Phulbari, a sub-district of Dinajpur in north-western Bangladesh. The gathering was a protest in response to a proposal by Asia Energy, a UK-based mining company, to engage in open-pit coal mining. In 1998 The Asia Energy Corporation (Bangladesh) Pty, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Coal Management Resources plc. (GCM),2 was awarded a contract by the Government of Bangladesh to mine coal in Phulbari. The Phulbari coal mine is an open-pit coal mining project which involves digging huge pits with heavy machinery to access the coal deposit. In Phulbari, this method would require removing people from their homes and farm lands. Estimates of the number of people that would be affected by the project vary from 40,000 to 470,000. Following the protest, the Government suspended the field activities of Asia Energy to review the details of the mining deal. The Government did not, however, cancel the mining contract, and Asia Energy continues to lobby through different channels to resume mining while community mobilisation against the mining project persisted. The protest

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was one of the largest against land dispossession in Bangladesh in recent times, and set an example for the kind of response that initiatives of displacing people from their land were facing (Gardner 2012, Levien 2011, Padel & Das 2010).

2 An estimation of the economic loss the country would be likely to incur from the mining deal and the environmental threat to rivers and the water supply to Phulbari were stressed in the messages of the protests. The national activist group (the National Committee), based in the country capital of Dhaka, who are mainly left-aligned political activists, intellectuals and sympathetic professionals, use these messages to create a general ‘anti-mining’ position. The National Committee’s (NC) political project is publicized in documents and leaflets where national interest is emphasized, as illustrated by the following points found in a NC leaflet: ‘1. No to foreign company. 2. No to coal export. 3. Yes to the extraction of coal by a state-owned body for the best interest of the nation. 4. No to open-pit coal mining.’3 My long-term participant observation in a village in Phulbari later revealed that people’s position regarding the mining was not always consistent with that of the NC. The ‘anti-mining’ position of the villagers referred to anti-mining in any form, regardless of method and ownership, foreign or national.

3 The protest has so far been successful in forcing a halt to the mining project. The events of August 2006 in Phulbari town show that the protest was dependent upon the participation of people whose homes and livelihoods were directly threatened by the mine. However, my fieldwork revealed that the stories that characterise local resistance to land loss involve more complex realities and situated practices than the national protest movement acknowledged. The paper presents evidence and stories that show the multi-dimensional nature of land and the relationships that surround it within my fieldsite, issues that remained far outside the public space of protest.

4 The threat of the destruction of land and displacement of local people by the mining project has been a rallying point in public protests. The question is: To what extent does the threat of changes to land and displacements have implications for social relations in the proposed mining sites? Filer (1990), using the case of Panguna mine in the later part of the 1980s, shows that the destruction of waterways, and the making of huge holes in the middle of a community’s territory, deeply impacted the local sense of self and community. In addition, the relationship between the changes in landscape and changes in lifestyles and identities is evident in the testimony of the Panguna landowners.

5 Perreault and Valdivia (2010), through a comparative analysis of Ecuadorian and Bolivian resource politics, show how these cases of social movements against the natural resource governance should not be read as yet another case of locals struggling against global structures. Rather, these movements are linked to what is seen as the interests of the population and are aligned with how the resource policies give meaning to development and the nation. Perreault and Valdivia argue that as the ideas about the nation and development may take various trajectories, so may people’s position on and connection to issues around natural resources. The paper argues for a perspective which would explain people’s connection to resistance to dispossession by going beyond a fixed notion of struggle and taking into account the meaning that the people give to their land place and home.

6 Stuart Kirsch (2006), in his book Reverse Anthropology, examines environmental and social relations among the Yanggom, an ethno-linguistic group in south-central New

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Guinea. Kirsch shows how the Yanggom people’s analysis of the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi mine offers ‘alternative perspectives that take social relations into account’ (Kirsch 2006: 129). This perspective can capture the claims and accusations that derive from the individual’s vulnerability, which, as Kirsch observes, increases the recognition of the mining company’s responsibility for the community. This, in turn, translates into political mobilisation through the formation of social solidarity between the people affected by the mine. In this sense political mobilisation is related to ‘specific consequences for persons and social relations’ (Kirsch 2006: 222). Following these examples, this paper presents evidence of how local opposition to the threat of displacement and land appropriation relates to the core aspects of life such as safety and survival as well as to the very production of sociality, dignity and personhood. It presents stories of how these aspects conflict with official regimes of land and property.

7 What follows is based on my doctoral research, which involved a nine-month study of Borogram, a village located in the proposed mining site of Phulbari in the north- western district of Dinajpur, Bangladesh. My research in the village was carried out in keeping with the ethnographic tradition of longer-term dwelling in a ‘community’. I conducted participant observation to explore the specificities and realities that shaped the resistance to the proposed mine. The ethnographic materials presented here are derived from interactions and interviews with the village people. I also conducted 20 informal interviews and collected ten oral histories from the protest activists.

8 The first section of the paper shows how the history of settlement and forest clearance has created a strong sense of ownership via physical labouring and customary rights over land. The second section elaborates on people’s own analysis that they use to rationalize their possession and rights to the land. I then move to stories of land dispossession in nearby villages, which produce acute anxieties for the people of Borogram, especially since their land is not even Kagojer land, land owned by those with a formal ownership document, making the prospects facing them even more bleak. I show how Borogram people’s shared history of displacement adds to these worries and drives their claims to the land.

Land in Borogram: customary rights via clearance and labouring

9 Borogram is located approximately five kilometres from the town centre of Phulbari sub-district. The total population of Borogram lives in over 500 different households. According to documents from the Phulbari Coal Mine Project, published by Asia Energy, it is projected that over the 35-year lifetime of the mine it will gradually span over 5,933 hectares of land, roughly 60 square kilometres. Along with parts of Phulbari Town, the total area of Borogram Village is to be acquired during the initial stages of the project, as this is where the first part of coal extraction activities are planned (Asia Energy 2008a). The total land acquired is to be used for two activities: one, the removal of soil of up to 270 meters in order to make pits for the extraction of coal, and two, building of associated establishments for dumping coal and constructing offices, employee quarters and roads. According to the project plans and mine maps presented in the Company’s project publications, most of Borogram and the surrounding areas are planned sites for digging pits and dumping coal (Asia Energy 2008b).

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10 The establishment of Borogram village took place after the migration from a few neighbouring areas in the district of Chapainawabganj in Northern Bangladesh. According to some of my informants a group of approximately 20 people, forced by repeated river erosion and consequent land loss, first migrated to the flat forest area around Phulbari Rail Station in 1968.

11 The first group of migrants found a flat forest area in the vicinity of Phulbari Township that promised to be fertile for agricultural activities. The forest was gradually cleared into plots where crops could be produced and cattle raised. These initial efforts to clear the forest were hindered by interventions from forest officials, as, according to state laws, destruction of such lands was illegal. On several occasions arrest warrants were issued against male members of the group on charges of illegal destruction of natural forest, but the village continued to grow through the migration of families, landless relatives and neighbours. In turn, a large area was gradually cleared to accommodate a population that now exceeds 2500 individuals living in approximately 500 houses. The area has a literacy rate of 45.06 % with agriculture as the main source of income (BBS 2001). Over the last four decades the people have asserted their rights to the land through their presence, despite legal action from the forest authority supported by the Government. The first group’s initial success in securing land by clearing the forest attracted more people from the river-erosion affected areas to migrate to this ‘new place’.

12 Having located an area of flat forest-land in a relatively higher area meant that residents of Borogram needed to develop the means for large quantities of irrigation. Underground water levels remain low in the village, making irrigation through a petroleum-run shallow-tube well difficult, particularly during the dry season. These difficulties with irrigation resulted in an increased popularity of crops that require less water, such as corn. Lower lands are preferred for rice production where shallow-tube wells can be set in a hollow in the ground to reach the water level throughout the production season. Irrigation machines are owned by those villagers who have invested money in setting up mechanisms to meet their own irrigation needs and who simultaneously earn rental income by providing water to other land. Machine owners and their clients are engaged in longer-term seasonal deals based on trust and the faith that both will do their part. Rental fees are usually paid after crops are harvested, and a good harvest is contingent on regular and adequate irrigation service from the machine owners. The longer-term relations of trust, among many others, between these two groups feature in the dynamics of Borogram community.

Land rights and access in Borogram

13 There are two main types of land in Borogram, popularly categorized as Kagojer jomi and Khas jomi. The meanings of these terms are varied, according to context. In ‘local’ terms, Kagojer jomi refers to land whose owner has a deed in their possession, while Khas jomi are those lands possessed without an ownership document; in this case ownership is established by the value of efforts put into the land over the years to transform it from a forest to cultivable land. The local terms Kagojer jomi and an insider’s assertion of Khas jomi become much more complicated as the village embarks on the protest against mining. Contestation between the rights that the village people have established over the land and the possibility that these rights may be denied by

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the State’s legal system or the Company’s compensation mechanism plays a significant role in the spread of the protest in Borogram village.

14 In Bangladesh, Khas land generally connotes government-owned land. This also applies to common bodies of water, such as rivers. The Ministry of Land has the authority to manage these lands as per state legislation. During the 1980s, the Bangladeshi government recognised that Khas land was to be used by the poor, and declared that people who were landless and affected by flooding and river erosion had the right to be allocated Khas land. The Land Reforms Action Programme of 1987 is one such example where landless people’s right to be allocated Khas land was prioritized.

15 These initiatives created a public discourse that supported the relocation of people affected by river erosions, and/or landless people to Khas land. In fact, there were some government projects in Phulbari sub-district where landless people were resettled in the area and provided with Khas land and tiner ghor (a house built with corrugated tin). This public discourse of Khas land therefore created an expectation that landless and displaced people could relocate to unoccupied or ‘empty’ land, as this was assumed to be khas land. For the original settlers of Borogram the availability of forest land, which they perceived as Khas Land, attracted them to the Phulbari area. One of the elderly villagers who was part of the group that first migrated to Borogram states: The Government has given Phulbari land to other landless people. Why can’t we live on the government’s forest land? River erosions made us landless. Why is the government’s land left idle and we can’t use it? Lots of other people from our home district have moved to Dinajpur area and they are living in the government land. We have heard that government gives away Khas land to the poor. So why can’t we get land? (Field notes, 15 May, 2009).

16 Challenging the idea of keeping forest-land in the hands of the forest department when it could be used for food, this gentleman continues, ‘The corrupt forest officials eat up all the benefits that the country could get from this forest land. They collaborate with local wood thieves and sell all the trees, and they lease out the forest land in breach of the law and destroy the forests anyway’ (Field notes, 15 May, 2009).

17 He then rationalizes the villagers’ possession and rights to the land: During our initial migration forest officials threatened to sue us. One day I told a forest officer who came to visit the area that we were producing crops for the country in this infertile land. I told him that if he could prove that the government earned more from this forest than what we were producing we would leave this land. The officer couldn’t answer me (Field notes, 15 May, 2009).

18 The long and arduous efforts put into clearing the land by people who have turned this apparently uncultivable area into cultivable fields adds to their assertion of their rights over it: I proposed to my neighbours that I knew a place where we could find land to live. Initially I brought 20 to 25 people in Borogram to clear forests for building houses and for agriculture. Some of them went back as they found it very hard to clear forests and prepare it for agriculture. It was tough because the land was high and hard and needed a lot of irrigation. At that time there were no irrigation machines. We all worked very hard for some years on each piece of land that you see are so fertile today. No one thought of cultivating here until we came and worked so hard. It is no longer the government’s forest land; it is now our agricultural land4 (Field notes, 30 May, 2009).

19 The suffering and harassment faced by the elderly villagers to protect their land during the initial period of establishment enhances their claim over it. Dewani continued:

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Look, there were hardly any nights we could sleep without fear of police in the early days of the village. Forest officials sued us and filed cases against a number of village people. I, along with many others, was arrested and harassed. I spent more than one year in the prison. We suffered but we didn’t leave this land. The land you see today didn’t come to us easy (Field notes, 30 May, 2009).

20 These testimonies describe the ways in which people assert their rights over an area of land, making it their own, even though it was originally government land. However, even if there has been long standing local acknowledgement of ownership, based on the histories of hard physical labour, the mine threatens to take all this away. Indeed, their relatively secure land possession has now become volatile and ‘insecure’ (Jansen 1986: 227) because of the possibility of displacement by the mining company. Let us turn to the second type of land ownership: Kagojer jomi.

21 ‘Kagojer jomi’ also has various ownership patterns. Generally the term ‘Kagojer jomi’, or ‘documented land’, is used to indicate land that was not acquired by clearing the forest and whose ownership was documented. A stronger sense of ownership rights over these types of land is asserted as these lands are either bought from previous owners or made socially ‘legal’. The process that makes land ‘Kagojer jomi’ is attached to the means and ways the lands are transferred, sold and exchanged, and the ways that the new ownership is legitimized in the village. Several forms of land transfer processes are practiced in Borogram, none of which necessarily involve the official land transfer processes of the State. Regardless of ownership history, a land becomes ‘Kagojer jomi’ if the seller and the buyer sign a paper that indicates the selling terms and price. The presence of witnesses during the deal makes it stronger in the face of any possible disputes, which are usually dealt with in the village Bichar, an informal village court. The ‘legality’ of ownership is defined by the socially-legitimate rights of an individual owner of the land in line with factors such as inheritance. Land owned by a neighbouring villager that has a socially accepted history of official ownership is often not challenged by the new buyers. It is common practice in the village to transfer land ownership with verbal and/or written terms set between the buyers and the sellers, where the Bichar guards the deals and settles the cases of disputes. New buyers carry a particular plot’s socially-established history of legality. The land is, thus, always called ‘ Kagojer jomi’, regardless of the number of times the ownership has changed. This notion of land ownership builds on the internalities of long-standing land relations, which are, people believe, beyond the scope of the official procedures of identifying a landowner for any possible compensation. ‘I bought this land with my hard earned money. Everyone knows it. But how will I prove it to the officers? I never went to the land office.’5 (Field Notes, October 23, 2009) As the next section shows, these anxieties are exacerbated by stories that circulate at the village market concerning the fate of people from neighbouring villages whose land was taken by mines.

Stories of dispossession

22 The Borogram evening market serves as a meeting point for people from different social categories and a platform for sharing the latest news, including discussions about the mining deal between the Company and the government and information about protest activities. I became a regular participant in these activities during my stay in the village, in part due to the importance of this place for my research, and partly for the same reasons as some others, to charge my mobile phone and laptop. This social

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setting of Borogram village market acts as a forum for forming shared ideas of ‘particular patterns’ (Gardner 1995: 21).

23 The stories of land and compensation issues in an on-going coal mine in Baropukuria, a neighbouring coal mining area, are examples of this. The Boropukuria coal mine is located in Chowhati village under Parbatiur sub-district in Dinajpur district of Bangladesh and is about six kilometres from Borogram village, and roughly five kilometres from Phulbari town centre. Boropukuria coal mine is an underground coal mine, where coal is extracted from underground without displacing surface soils. It is fully owned by a state-owned company and operated by Chinese contractors. The coal was first discovered in 1985 and the operation started in 1998. The development of the mine affected the land and livelihood of the local people and their stories and miseries are regularly discussed at the evening market in Borogram. One such story is that of Nasimon Khatun which I present in the next section. I have collected the story through repeated discussions, interviews, and informal chats with Nasimon and her family, as well as other village members.

Story of Nasimon Khatun

Nasimon Khatun lived with her husband and children in an area where the offices and other structures of Boropukuria coal mine were constructed. Her husband owned enough agricultural land in the present mine office complex to meet their expenditure and save money for the future by selling crops. Overall, Nasimon’s family was considered by the village to be well off. One day a survey group came to Nasimon’s house and took some information about their land and assets, and promised that the family would be given good compensation if the mine company had to take their land. They believed them. Meanwhile, Mrs. Nasimon’s husband died of an illness before the mine was established leaving her with the seven children. Then, one day, after some time had passed, a group of labourers from the mine arrived at her home and, in the presence of police, started to cut trees from their land. They were told that the company had acquired the land and they would be given proper compensation following the official procedures. The police took Nasimon and her eldest son to the police station where Nasimon denied giving permission for the company people to clear that piece of land. Nasimon and her son were released the next day under the promise that they would not try to hinder the process of land acquisition. They were assured that the government would pay proper compensation for all the land to be acquired. After this incident they didn’t try to stop the acquisition of land for fear of getting taken away by the police. A few months later they had to leave their house and all of their land and move to a small piece of land in the village owned by one of their relatives. Because they didn’t have space to keep and raise their cows, goats, chickens, and ducks in the new land, they had to sell their animals. Then began the ‘official’ process of getting compensation, which neither Nasimon nor her illiterate sons were familiar with. Nasimon couldn’t read or write and never went to the district town where the land office, which was responsible for settling land compensation issues, was located. It was no different for her sons. Soon after they were displaced, a high-up official from the district administration office came to the village and asked for a bribe with a promise of giving proper compensation quickly. Nasimon was living on her tiny savings that her husband had left and didn’t have money to bribe the officer. After this, her eldest son with a few other affected villagers went to the district land office to claim their compensation. There, they were asked for a 500 taka (£ 5) bribe in order to get the list of documents required to submit a compensation application; this was on top of the 200 taka (£ 2) they had incurred to get there. In this one visit half of the family’s

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total monthly grocery expenditure was gone. It was only the first of many visits that her son had to make for settling compensation matters.

24 The ownership and legal documents required by the land office were unfamiliar for Nasimon and her son. When Nasimon’s husband originally acquired the land, it was equally divided verbally by him and his brother after the death of their father without making any legal documents, a normal practice in the village. The land office requested proof that Nasimon was actually the wife of the landowner in addition to a recommendation from an elected representative of the local government, the Union Chairman, to prove it. Further complicating matters, they required that Nasimon’s husband’s brother be present in front of the land officer to prove land ownership. These are some of the complexities that kept arising while they were trying to get their compensation, without much success. The land office was settling the case by the official land holding numbers where Nasimon’s lands, according to formal documents, were dispersed and recorded in several holding numbers. Thus, each full procedure had to be followed for every field in each of the holding numbers. Nasimon and her son ran out of money for lobbying for the compensation, forcing them to give up after receiving a couple of instalments. Whatever money they did get was received in instalments at a rate determined by the land office, which was much lower than the usual market prices. The land office determined the price according to the average price mentioned in the land registration document from that village, which was always lower than the actual price at which lands were bought/sold in practice. Mentioning lower prices in the registration document to evade registration tax payable to the government was a normal practice in the village. Moreover, getting compensation in instalments didn’t create enough capital to buy land elsewhere. Money was spent on lobbying the land office and used for other everyday purposes. All of Nasimon’s seven sons turned to agricultural labour and the family now belongs to the poor segment of the village.

25 Stories such as this, that show the impossibility of villagers acquiring compensation for their land and the denial of their rights by the ‘formal’ procedures, are blowing in the wind of Borogram village in the form of evening chats at the village tea stalls.

26 Having heard Nasimon’s story, local people know what is at stake and how unlikely it is that they will receive adequate compensation, especially those people with Khas land: ‘if owner of ‘Kagojer jomi’ can’t claim their rights over their land and get proper compensation how would people living in ‘Khas jomi’ claim their rights? We just cannot allow mining to take place in our land’ (Field notes, May 17, 2009).6

27 Resistance to mining is evident. As Barrington Moore notes, ‘what infuriates peasants (and not just peasants) is a new and sudden imposition or demand […] that is a break with accepted rules (Moore 1979: 474).

‘In a new place I will have to live with my head down’: Anxiety breaks out

28 This section will discuss how local resistance is inspired by some concerns and anxieties of a ‘private’ nature that often remain unexpressed in public forums of protests in the village. I examine how the lived experiences within social groups, such as the ‘Samaj’,7 and the observed ‘good’ qualities of the ‘community’ play a role in forming the resistance to the threat of displacement. Here we see how, whilst framed around ‘land’ and ‘land grab’, dispossession involves much more than losing property

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or even livelihoods, it also involves losing community ties and social capital that may have taken generations to build up.

29 While land, assets, and a house were all noted as quantifiable units by which an amount of money could be fixed as compensation by the impact assessment team of Asia Energy, these also carry other meanings to the people of Borogram in unquantifiable terms. These aspects are not readily open to the ‘outsider’ surveyor, and are much more complicated than a commodity to be compensated. In the realms of village life, ownership of land represents ‘Samman’ (respect), which brings people social leadership and pride. A house is more than just a living place; it is a ‘home’ built upon generational community relations. Displacement from land and house means the loss of ‘home’ and community. Loss of community means loss of ‘Samman’ that was earned over years. Previous experiences of migration compound the trepidations of losing a ‘home’.

30 For Borogram people stories of migration are of losing homes, land, ‘Samman’, ‘protipotti’ (pride), and the struggle of making a new home. Repeated river erosions resulted in total land loss, forcing migration, and causing homelessness and economic insecurities. The life story of Dewani is one such example:

31 Dewani was a mobile trader and supplier of ornaments and stones during the 1960s before the independence of Bangladesh. He travelled the entire North Bengal area often for his business and earned enough money to buy over 20 acres of land in his village in Chapainawabgang in North Bengal. His brothers also had a considerable amount of land, some of which was owned hereditarily. He and his brothers enjoyed social leadership and gave final verdicts in mitigating village conflicts. Having gained knowledge about the outside world from his small business, he enjoyed the respect of other villagers.

32 The River Padma was five kilometres from their village, but it made its way to the village in just a few months. Most of Dewani’s agricultural land, including his house, like many others in the village, sunk into the river. In just a few months’ time he became homeless with his five children and wife. He moved to his brother’s land, which was further away from the river, and built a makeshift house to live in. Having lost almost all of his land, Dewani lost his ability to hire people to work on his land. Hit by river erosions, landless people were desperately looking for work and Dewani was busy looking for additional work outside the village to maintain his family. He was no longer a leader of the village, which had been hit by food and work crises due to the river erosions. People started to move to neighbouring districts in search of work. Many left for cities to pull rickshaws, which was considered disgraceful work. While travelling for his business, Dewani started to look for a place to migrate to, as living on his brother’s land was also considered shameful. He chose to migrate to what is now Borogram village. He initially came with 25 other villagers affected by the river. Many others of a similar economic condition followed them in order to build a new village. He left his mother with his brothers in Chapainawabganj, his former village, as she didn’t want to move from her home village.

33 The case of Dewani would be best described as forced displacement, which resulted in a degraded socio-economic status and the loss of the ‘forms of social capital’ (Wood 2005). The separation from ‘home’ and land loss implies not only the loss of physical capital but also the loss of social capital such as ‘Samman’ and these ‘lived experiences engender fear […] and uncertainty’ for Dewani (Malkki 1992, 1995). The process that followed was one of regaining his socio-economic position in a new place. Though he

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left his brothers and mother in his former village, a new sense of home was built through a long process that was ‘related and intertwined’ in forms of collective struggles and cooperation, as well as events of conflicts (Abbas 1994: 442). The people of Borogram migrated from a couple of neighbouring villages in Chapainawabganj; some of these people are known or related to each other, while some are not, but they share the experiences of trauma and rupture of river erosions, which shape the ‘collective memories’ of displacement in Borogram and add value to the ‘new place.’

34 The hardships of the early days in the ‘new’ forest land demanded that the people work together and co-operate with each other. People helped each other to clear their pieces of land, as it was impossible to do it alone. Building new houses also required the help of others. Working together helped to bring previously unknown people together to form a society. Visits from forest officials and arrests by the police were regular events which were handled by bribing officials with money raised proportionately from all residents according to the amount of land cleared. Members of the village who were considered clever and/or relatively educated conducted negotiations with officials and were then regarded as ‘Dewans’, or social leaders.

35 They also needed to act together in order to guard their crops and cattle from thieves from neighbouring localities, as they were outsiders and thus vulnerable targets. Lacking social connections with other local villages around them, the people of Borogram had to help each other to protect their crops and assets. They formed a group to patrol in the night to prevent thefts and new family relations were built through marriages between families. As the village expanded and the number of people increased, disputes and conflicts within the village also increased. Land disputes, family conflicts, and competition for control of resources, such as irrigation systems, are some examples of the social tensions in Borogram village. To manage the increasing differences between groups, a group of new Dewans were declared by the elderly Dewans to manage conflicts and disputes for their respective clusters of people living in different corners of the village. All these social processes continued to build a feeling of ‘samaj’ (home, society and societal relations) in Borogram, which were expressed again and again whenever the issues of displacement came up during my stay in the village.

36 While a house can be built overnight and replaced by another one, a home it cannot be. It is this social and cultural dimension that is inseparable from a sense of home and cannot be compensated in the case of displacement by the development of a mine (Constable 1999). As one village shopkeeper questioned, ‘say they will give us a new house […] but how will they give us our Samaj that we have built here?’ (Field notes, March 2, 2009)

37 More than a home, new social capital built through shared experiences of displacement, struggle over land and cooperation in the ‘new place’ plays a role in forming the extreme anxiety experienced by the possibility of dislocation by the mining company. Though away from their original home village, this ‘new place’ brought them what they lost in Chapainawabganj: land and Samaj. It ended the homelessness that was characterised by the disgrace of living on others’ land, creating ‘new experiences and ways of thinking’ (Grundy-Warr and Wong 2000: 93) about the value of Samaj. The early experiences of living in a ‘new place’ away from the original ‘home’ accompanied anxieties of being ‘new’ to the place. Stories are told by the elderly generation of Borogram of how, in the early days, they felt frightened by the neighbouring villagers in cases of conflicts over land, as they were isolated in the ‘new

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place’ and did not have much support from other villages. Stories are also common of how muggers from the neighbouring villages kept the early residents of Borogram in fear of theft and robbery, as the group was too small to resist and did not have much help from outside the village. These stories influence the way people anticipate the effect of dislocation and the loss of Samaj, as is evidenced by the worries of one Borogram resident, ‘If I am displaced to a place where I don’t know anyone I will have to live with my head down’ (Field notes, 16 May, 2009).

38 How will I cope with a new place? This question expresses a ‘more private, personalized, or idiosyncratic’ worry in contrast to public concerns that are discussed and talked about in public (Grundy-Warr & Wong 2000). The concerns expressed in the previous quotes are of a more public nature and are talked about more openly, while male anxieties about the security of the female members of their family are of a private nature. Living within their own village where people are either related or known to each other for a long time provides a sense of security for the women and girls. In the absence of the male members of the family, relatives or friends next door are there to make the women feel secure. It is common for poor male members of Borogram to work outside of the village and Phulbari town between harvesting seasons when there is a scarcity of work in the village, leaving the women and girls at home. Some go to other districts and towns to work for weeks at a time, leaving their family in the village. Any cases of harassment towards women are dealt with through the Bichar, and the persons responsible are punished verbally, physically, and/or with fines, according to the degree of the harassment. Living in a Samaj provides people with security for the female members of their family and allows them to work outside of the village during crisis periods.

39 There are other concerns of a private nature that are not expressed explicitly in regular public forums, such as village meetings organised by the national activists. It is only through longer interactions with the people that more subtle concerns are revealed. One aspect of this concerns the informal financial institutions in the village. Access to informal and semi-formal credit facilities is an integral part of village life in Borogram, like elsewhere in Bangladesh (Wood & Sharif 1997, Sinha & Matin 1998.). Starting during the 1970s with the innovations of Grameen Bank and its founder Professor Younus, the collateral free village group-based semi-formal small loans and savings facility has become the main financial service system in all of rural Bangladesh. Along with big national social developments, non-governmental organisations and hundreds of small local NGOs provide small credit facilities in the villages. Village solidarity groups are formed to guarantee the repayment of loans taken by any individual and to create peer pressure in cases of default. It is now well established that this system of credit has become extremely popular in all villages in Bangladesh, as is evident by annual reports produced by some of the big players of credit providers (BRAC 2009). Borogram is no exception, with a number of local and national NGOs providing small loans to villagers. However, a closer look at the financial behaviours of Borogram’s people reveals a contrasting picture of how and why people in the village, in certain cases, prefer other forms of credit that are more informal in nature and attached to the realms of social relations, despite the presence of numerous credit providers.

40 Moneylenders still play a role in Borogram’s financial market even where NGOs provide credit at a relatively lower interest rate. Sinha and Matin (1998) found that the NGOs

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are unable to substitute for moneylenders due to their insensitivity to local variations in financial conditions. In Borogram, some aspects of the financial behaviours of poor people are visible to local moneylenders, and are thus better communicated by these lenders than the NGOs. The need for money for the poor in Borogram is related to the specificities of the village. As the village is a high land area, its timing and pattern of agricultural production is a little different than that of flat land areas. As we have seen it needs more irrigation than flatter land for rice production in the dry seasons, creating a high demand for loans among the poor during the month prior to irrigation. Since rice production is costly due to extensive irrigation, alternative crops, such as corn, are widely produced in the village. The timing of corn production is different to that of rice production, which is generally the main crop in the area, and so there is a need for loans to meet the cost of production.

41 Maloney (1986) observed some years ago that local moneylenders in Bangladesh have local knowledge about the trends of loans needed in the villages, in addition to the experience of when to provide loans and to ask for the money back. With knowledge about the poor borrowers specific loan needs, local moneylenders provide flexible loans before production and require repayment right after harvesting when people do not mind paying higher interest. In addition, membership in the same Samaj plays the role of collateral for moneylenders and borrowers where default cases are negotiated using long-term social relations. Membership in the Samaj also provides the borrower with the facility of getting a loan without following any fixed procedures and time criteria, which are set by credit organisations during emergency need. Moneylenders often live next door to the borrowers and are related to the borrowers through secondary or tertiary lines of kinship which can be used to convince moneylenders to lend money to people with bad repayment histories. Moreover, it is common in Borogram to repay a loan and interest with the equivalent portion of the crops produced in the land, creating an option for the borrowers who do not want the hassle of going to Phulbari town to sell their crops, or who do not feel confident of getting the proper price for their crops in an unknown town market. They have enough helping hands in the village to weigh their crops properly and give the lender his portion back. Loans often come in kind and take very tiny forms such as a bowl of rice on a day when the main earner is not working due to sickness, or a few eggs to treat relatives making a sudden visit. The entire financial life in the village revolves around a mechanism that is rooted in the qualities of Borogram Samaj. A breakdown of that Samaj poses a particular threat to the poor in need of credit, as one of the poorest farmers in the village noted: People who have money will buy new land and build new houses in the cities […] but where will we go… In a new place who will lend us money in an emergency, say, if I need to take my wife to hospital? No one trusts the poor. Here, people know that I will not run away with their money. I can at least ask for some rice from next door when I don’t have food in the house. I will at least not die from hunger here... I go to protest meetings regularly (Field notes, August 28, 2009).

42 Newly developed economic abilities and social statuses, for some, through the acquisition of land in Borogram, also play a role in forming resistance to the possible displacement from mining. A few members of the village acquired large amounts of land, as the result of being early settlers to the village when there was more land available to clear and establish rights to. Possession of such land provided them with the capacity to employ poor villagers to work on their land, thus gaining them a higher social status in the village. Increased economic capacity allowed some to invest money

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into better institutions in the cities for their children’s education thereby further enhancing their social status. One such villager states, ‘I might be illiterate but my sons are educated […] people respect my sons, they come for suggestions and help for different matters. People respect me’ (Field notes, 7 July, 2009). This enhanced socio- economic status, which has been attained over the years, is now under threat due to the proposed mining; money will not buy the status he has gained. He continues, I will just be another person in a new place! There would be lot of other people with a lot more money than me. Who would give me so much land in a new place? People won’t give a damn if I can’t employ a person or two. What will I do with the money? I am not going anywhere from this place […] they can do whatever they want (Field notes, 7 July, 2009).

43 What will I do with the money? This question builds on other ‘inner’ and unexpressed area of disquiet. Bangladesh is a country with more than 80 percent of its total household engaged in agricultural activities (BBS 2008) and numerically dominated by its peasantry (Wood 1976). Historically, agriculture is the main occupation for people in Bangladesh (Barkat et al. 2001) and Borogram is no exception with most of its resident’s dependant on generational skills of agriculture for their livelihood. From wage labour to petty landowners, all members invest and re-invest their labour, skills, and money into land-related production activities. Whatever surplus money is earned from other seasonal occupations, such as short-term migration to the cities, tends to be invested back into the village to better equip themselves, i.e. buying cows to plough the land, for production. Savings accumulated by selling the surplus crops of larger landowners is usually re-invested into buying more land or production equipment, such as an irrigation machine. Small amounts of money accumulated from petty trading in the village market, along with some credit taken from lenders, are used to obtain a piece of land on a fixed yearly or seasonal rent from a neighbour in order to maximize savings by producing cash crops. Money-use patterns revolve around land and production- related activities. Promises by the company and the government for equivalent money for land and assets are received with uneasy anxiety because of people’s relative inexperience of using compensation money with good effect in the case of displacement, as is expressed by one participant: ‘money doesn’t stay in your pocket. A king’s treasury would be finished if you can’t use it properly. Agriculture is all I know. There is no readymade land waiting for me to be bought. The money they will give me for my assets will go out of pocket quickly’ (Field notes, 10 May, 2009). Even when people actually believe that they will get a sum of money for their land and assets, the specific patterns and experiences of money-use which are tied to community relations and based on the land they possess form this denial of the proposals of displacement. These forms of denial are very different to the nationalist framings of the protest and provide a ‘more prosaic description’ of people’s resistance (Baviskar 1995: 213).

Conclusion

44 Languages of national interest characterized the protest, organized on a national scale by the activists based in the capital, against land dispossession and mining planned in Phulbari. However, my research, on which this paper is based, shows that local people’s concerns are very different.

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45 As this paper has shown, the particular notion of land ownership in Borogram plays a critical role in forming the local resistance against mining. While the local land category of ‘Kagojer jomi’ is owned through the socially defined ‘legal’ means, Khas land, on the other hand, is possessed through the presence of the occupier and the value of the long hard work that has been invested in the land to make it cultivable. Rights to Khas land are acquired and earned over periods of struggle to protect and nurture the land. The owners of this land find their moral authority to possess the land in the government’s declared commitment to landless people.

46 As the paper also shows, on a more private level, anxieties related to the loss of Samaj, characterised by generational social relations, act to form resistance to the proposal of displacement by the mining development plan. ‘Personal and idiosyncratic’ aspects of individuals, which are not expressed and talked about openly, such as the male concern for the security of the female members of the family in a new place, enforce the importance of not losing Samaj (Grundy-Warr & Wong 2000). A particular pattern and timing of crop production in the village presents specific credit needs for the poor which are understood better by relatives or friends in the village who are involved in moneylending.

47 As Levien (2015) argues, the consequences of dispossession are varied across diverse settings which we must pay attention to. In their own analysis what matters most for the people in Borogram is the protection of their place and accompanying rights. The place produces certain ‘social resources’ for the individuals in the form of ‘kin, status and inclusion in networks, comprising obligations and entitlements’ (Wood 2005: 5-6). Any discussion of resistance to land dispossession that fails to recognize these patterns of rights and claims would lack an understanding of the important ‘local dynamics’ (Ferguson 2006). Understanding local people’s analysis could reflect their needs, lived experience and subjectivities that shape the vernacular politics around land.

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Wood, Geoffrey (2005) ‘Poverty, Capabilities and Perverse Social Capital: The Antidote to Sen and Putnam?’, in I. A. Khan & J. Seeley (eds.), Making a Living: The Livelihoods of the Rural Poor in Bangladesh, Dhaka: UPL.

Wood, Geoffrey & Sharif, Iffath (eds.) (1997) Who Needs Credit? Poverty and Finance in Bangladesh, London: Zed Books Ltd.

NOTES

1. Police and Bangladesh Rifles (BDR). BDR is a paramilitary force mainly involved in guarding the borders of the country. 2. GCM resources plc (GCM) operated under its former name Asia Energy plc. Asia Energy Corporation (Bangladesh) Pty now operates as a wholly-owned subsidiary of London-based GCM resources plc. 3. Similar demands were made in numerous newspaper articles, for example, Shomakal (2008), 18 December. 4. An elderly Dewani (social leader) who took the initiative to first establish Borogram village. 5. Local landowner. 6. Karim in Borogram village, ‘owner’ of two acres of Khas land. 7. Bertocci (1996) described Samaj in rural Bangladesh as a mutual social group which is based on reciprocal obligations that ‘act[s] out what is morally and ritually meaningful as a community— reinforcing when necessary the normative standards to which all are supposed to adhere’ (p. 17).

ABSTRACTS

This paper argues for a more context-specific understanding of dynamics of resistance to land dispossession in Bangladesh. The context is Borogram, a village in Phulbari where a large scale land appropriation has been planned for a proposed mining project. Emotion against possible displacement from land runs high in Phulbari. Whilst national resistance to mining involved ideas of nationalism and imperialism, local people’s experience was different. The paper shows how the stories of resistance to land appropriation need to be understood in relation to social relationships and accompanying entitlements, claims and mutual obligations which exist around

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a place. The paper argues that dispossession is not merely about the loss of farming land for those threatened by it, but the social ties they have built up over generations in their village.

INDEX

Keywords: displacement, resistance, Phulbari, land rights, compensation, Bangladesh

AUTHOR

SADID NUREMOWLA PhD in Social Anthropology (University of Sussex, UK), Adjunct Faculty, Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Independent University Bangladesh (IUB)

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The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh

Shelley Feldman

Depeasantization and victimization are active elements in the process of [exclusion,] […] Not only [are] the Muslim peasants depeasantized, pauperized and lumpenized on their arrival in India, the Hindu peasantry of Bangladesh is cynically and most systematically robbed of land on communal considerations in the villages of Bangladesh and this [results in] peasants […] [being] forced to flee. The catalyst in this case is the enemy (vested) property laws (Trivedi 2007).

Introduction

1 In this paper, I argue that the Enemy or Vested Property Act (VPA)1 and its multiple reforms provide a window into on the construction of Hindu citizens of Bangladesh as Other. I draw particular attention to the regimes in power since 1971 for what they reveal about the reproduction of a minority population, since the country is premised on democratic principles of equality among citizens. In so doing, I expose the paradox that resides in the relationship between the genocidal struggle for independence and secularism and a presumed ethnic, rather than religious, basis for belonging. I suggest that the construction of Hindus as the other legitimates state appropriations2 of their property and, by challenging their rights to land ownership as a right of all citizens, constructs Hindus as a threat to national security. This construction legitimates land appropriation in the interest of state needs, as well as for private accumulation. It finds a parallel in Ayesha Jalal’s suggestion of a significant feature legitimating the offensive position of Pakistan during the independence struggle: ‘If Hindu India is the enemy

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without, the proponents of regional autonomy alongside the ungodly secularists3 are the enemies within’ (Jalal 1995: 82).

2 To explore these themes, I draw on interviews conducted during three periods of fieldwork, in 2013 in Rajshahi, a northern district of Bangladesh, and in 2014 in Dhaka, as well as over the course of numerous field trips in Bangladesh during earlier stays in the country. I also draw on lengthy discussions with a key informant, a scholar from Bangladesh temporarily in the U.S. Finally, the argument builds on cases examined from the Dacca (subsequently Dhaka) Law Review, 1960–2011, although it does not focus on particular cases, and an exploration of newspaper reports that are critical for signalling recent public expressions of violence against Hindus. The discussion unfolds first by examining land appropriation as a relation of subjection. This is followed by an examination of the making of majoritarian rule, both before and after independence, including a focus on the current conjuncture about what it portends for property relations and the differential rights of Bangladeshi citizens. The principal purpose of the paper, however, is not to offer new evidence on land appropriation. Rather, I provide a new interpretation of extant evidence, one that moves from structuralist accounts that contribute to our understanding of accumulation practices, to an argument for the inseparability of accumulation practices in/as a relation of rule and subjection. In other words, I argue that distinct from studies that view subjection as a response to structural and political change, these processes are relational and co- constitutive. I also show that marking people as the other from whom property appropriations could be justified was not an outcome of a single policy, fixed once and for all, but, instead, a set of ongoing and contradictory policy reforms and practices that reproduce both difference and majoritarian rule.

Land appropriation as a relation of subjection

3 Debates focused on land grabbing, including both large-scale appropriations by governments as well as everyday takings from small producers, have renewed interest in Marx’s conception of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ understood as the enclosure of private land holdings and the separation of direct producers from their means of subsistence and production.4 These debates have opened to scrutiny the character of accumulation processes, as well as their costs for particular constituencies who are most often the poor and unprotected. The basis of these debates is Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation that transforms ‘the social means of subsistence and of production into capital [and] the immediate producers into wage labourers’ (Marx 1983: 668).

4 Crucially, Marx presupposes ‘the complete separation of labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour’ as the basis of capitalism. Debate continues, however, as to whether this separation or ‘historical premise’ refers solely to the original appropriation or to an ongoing process of social transformation. As Marx maintains: As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for capitalist production, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production (Marx 1983: 668, emphasis added).

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5 Two points are significant for the discussion to follow. One is that the appropriation of land is central to the reorganization of capitalist agriculture and, hence, to processes of accumulation. This builds on the assumption that meeting the world’s food needs requires increasingly large-scale commercial agricultural production that can no longer be accommodated under the mix of large, medium, subsistence, and under- subsistence producers. This assumption, and declining support for small-scale agricultural producers, sets the conditions for the consolidation of landholdings. This assumption is part of a neoliberal development strategy that supports investment in non-farm work, credit, and micro-enterprise development under the premise that wage labour is better able than agriculture to meet the reproduction needs of small-scale producers.5 Second, and following from the separation of people from their productive resources, is the need to continually reproduce this separation through both direct and indirect property appropriations. Together, these processes enable ongoing, if historically contingent, relations of accumulation. Further, tethering land appropriation and the commodification of labour power produces particular subjectivities, since how people make a life through work and social reproduction casts them in relation to each other, to their communities as sites marked by specific senses of security and responsibility, and to the constitution of a national imaginary that shapes identification, identity, and belonging.6

6 Following S. Charusheela (2011: 323), I engage the connection between land appropriation and the violent establishment ‘of the conditions for the subjugation and subjective emergence of the wage labourer’, a relation that is particularly suggestive in examining contemporary land relations in Bangladesh, with three critical qualifications. First, unlike the need to release labour to support a large and emergent labour market that explained the first so-called primitive accumulation, today the expropriation of people from their property ‘release[s] a set of assets (including labour power) at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Over-accumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use’ (Harvey 2003: 149). This expropriation, often by private capital, has transformed the landscape in the areas around Bangladeshi cities, particularly Dhaka, as agricultural land becomes the ground for both industrial production and residential communities. Under eminent domain, the state has also seized large tracts of peri-urban land for military housing.

7 A second qualification of Charusheela’s contribution concerns the people from whom private property can be confiscated. To be sure, the category of the poor is highly differentiated in ways that lead one to ask: From whom, among the vulnerable, can land or property grabs be legitimated without sparking broad-based reprisal? What context shapes identification of this constituency, and precisely how are property and resource grabs justified and enacted based upon the specificity of a group’s identity? These questions raise the third qualification of Charusheela’s suggestive intervention, the importance of understanding relations of rule and the constitutive character of belonging, identification, and national identity for policy reform. Focusing on this constitutive process draws attention to how institutional, bureaucratic, and governance practices shape the ways in which rule is enacted. It also draws attention to how building legitimacy, as the substance of rulemaking, aids in establishing who belongs and who is marginalized or excluded, who has rights, and whose rights can be compromised without fear of public outrage. Included in this process is what Philip Abrams (1988: 61) understands as the building of hegemony, constituted by

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institutional and discursive practices that are often enshrined in law, embedded in the ‘public aspects of politics’ (Abrams 188: 61), and routinized in symbolic gestures and moral judgments. These processes provide the ground for patterns of social inclusion/ exclusion,7 ethnicization, 8 and minoritization, 9 which produce communities in a hierarchy of economic and social security positioned in relation to their rights and ability to demand legal accountability.

8 In examining these relations of othering, I ask the following questions: How do the social relations that embody land and property appropriations, notorious for their enactment through ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, and in short, force, [which] plays the greatest part’ (Marx 1983: 668), help to create particular kinds of subjects? What role does policy and governance, including claims of national interest and security play in legitimating land appropriation? What, for example, is the role of bureaucratic elites in facilitating and securing land grabs through violent, as well as non-violent, means? Finally, how do rhetorics of othering secure the legitimacy of dispossession among minority populations? Responses to these questions will expose the mutually constitutive character of relations of accumulation and subjection.

9 As a predatory political formation, Bangladesh’s so-called democracy includes universal suffrage and free and fair elections. As popularly understood, however, the political process consists of competition over which party will benefit from the ‘unethical but, nevertheless, socially accepted’ struggle over state resources and privileges, including exploitation of the environment and extractive and natural resources (Pertev 2009: 9). A variant of crony capitalism, these predations entail illegal appropriations that further the control and concentration of scarce resources that can be leveraged for state patronage, as well as for private gain. But importantly, such appropriations are not usually directed at an undifferentiated vulnerable population. Rather, such seizures target particular populations through practices that are legitimated in state rule. This is precisely the case in Bangladesh, where Hindu citizens have been subjected to property appropriations legitimized by the Enemy/Vested Property Act, established specifically to justify land enclosures of their property. The result is the constitution of forms of rule and subjection that are best understood as both the process and product of the construction of the Hindu as other.

The Vested Property Act (VPA) and the making of majoritarian rule: the East Pakistan period

10 Following the 1947 partition of India into the predominantly Muslim state of Pakistan, including its East and West Wings, and the Hindu majority state of India, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and first governor general of Pakistan, initially repudiated the theocratic foundations of the Pakistani state, noting that, ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed. That has nothing to do with the business of the state. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of the state’ (Jinnah 2004). But despite this proclamation, he soon thereafter attempted to build a nationalist project in an idiom of a shared Urdu language, ostensibly to create a sense of collective belonging that would bring the East and West Wings together. The argument against Bengali, and for Urdu, was that Bengali did not comport with the construction of a national narrative articulated in the sacralized language and cultural traditions of Islam. At this time, the Hindu population was estimated to be between 10

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and 12 million with Muslims accounting for 32 million (Lambert 1950, Schechtman 1951). Thus, introducing Urdu as the lingua franca was a response to the perceived threat of Bengali nationalism in the East, where Bengali language and culture were infused with Hindu religious and linguistic idioms, and a significant proportion of the population was Hindu. This language initiative can thus be understood as an effort to mark Hindus as a community distinct from East Bengal’s Muslim majority.

11 In addition to the 1948 struggle against Urdu, the 1949 effort to introduce the Arabic script instead of the Sanskritized Devanagari Bengali script, led to the Language Movement—bhasha andolan—in East Pakistan. The Movement sought recognition of the East as a multi-religious community whose mark of national belonging was shared language rather than religious identity.10,11 A bloody battle ensued following a five-year struggle against the imposition of Urdu as the lingua franca. A number of university students were killed and today, for many Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims alike, Ekushy, 21 February, remains a hallmark of national pride.

12 Struggles over recognition of the multiethnic character of East Pakistan, and the particular place of Hindus in the body politic, also included the State’s proposal for a separate electorate for minorities. But Bengali Muslims and Hindus alike rejected this proposal, even as a 1956 Constitutional provision only allowed Muslims to serve as the president of Pakistan. Arguing against the proposal were Basant Kumar Das, Peter Paul Gomez and B.K. Dutta, as well as H.S. Suhrawardy and Mujib-ur-Rahman,12 all members of the Constituent Assembly that included Hindus, Christians, and Muslims. They claimed that the proposal would relegate minorities to the status of second-class citizens and, significantly, would put Muslims residing in India at risk, since the politics of the period reflected an implicit or explicit engagement with policies in India.

13 Passage of The East Bengal (Emergency) Requisition of Property Act (XIII of 1948)13 was Jinnah’s final action aimed at marking Hindus as second-class citizens. The Act empowered the government to ‘acquire, either on a temporary or permanent basis, any property it considered needful for the administration of the state’ (Barkat et al. 1997: 27). Although claimed to be necessary to meet the administrative needs of the newly independent province, including the need to accommodate government offices and civil servants, it also obfuscated illegal appropriations, particularly of Hindus (Mohsin 2004). According to Lambert (1950), ‘80 percent of the urban property in East Bengal was in the hands of Hindus’, as were large estates. The value of real property and other assets assumed abandoned in East Pakistan ‘was officially estimated by the Chief Minister of West Bengal at 870 million rupees (US$ 182,700,000)’ (Schechtman 1951: 412). Such unequal ownership of property helped to publically justify state confiscations without compensation.

14 Thus, in theory, the agreement signed by Prime Ministers Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan, and Jawaharlal Nehru of India on 10 April 1950, provided a hopeful sign for migrants, as it acknowledged that refugees would be permitted to take with them their movable personal effects, including up to 150 rupees. It further acknowledged that immovable property would not be confiscated, even if occupied by another person, if its owner returned to East Pakistan before the end of 1950. If, however, landowners chose not to return, they were free to either sell or exchange their property (Schechtman 1951: 412). Significantly, the agreement promised that ‘[r]ent or compensation for requisitioned property was to be promptly assessed and paid over to the owner’ (Schechtman 1951: 412). In practice, however, these Acts instead dispossessed Hindus who opted for

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Pakistan and instantiated a long, and still ongoing, process that reproduced religious difference as central to the project of Pakistani state- and nation-making.

15 The India-Pakistan War in 1965 also legitimated relations of Hindu othering by providing the state with an opportunity to reiterate the criticality of Muslim unity in Pakistan and to mark Hindus as potential threats to this unity. This short war also legitimated President Ayub Khan’s passing of Order XXIII of 1965, The Defense of Pakistan Ordinance, declaring India an enemy country and authorizing the confiscation of all interests of the enemy.14 This ‘undisguised act of retaliation’, (Benkin 2009: 79) included taking possession of property from those who were citizens of India but also citizens of territories in which Hindus, now proclaimed as the enemy, resided, occupied, controlled, or were captured. The conflation of India with all Hindus in undivided India justified Ayub Khan’s passage of the Ordinance with the Enemy Property (Custody and Registration) Order of 1965 and 1966, and the East Pakistan Enemy Property (Lands and Buildings) Administration and Disposal Order, 1966, under Rule 182 (1) of the Defense of Pakistan Rule. Together, both Ordinances reconfirmed in law the Hindu as other, thus framing the national narrative in an idiom of Islam.

16 Despite revoking the state of emergency on 16 February 1969, The Defense of Pakistan Rules relating to the control of trade with the enemy and their firms continued, as did use of the term ‘enemy’. This continuance empowered the District Commissioners, who held bureaucratic control in the rural areas, to implement these ordinances and rules under the Government’s declaration of the Enemy Property, Continuance of Emergency Provisions Ordinance, 1969 (Ordinance I of 1969), even in the absence of war (Barkat et al. 2008).

17 Shrouded in claims of national security, together these orders imposed draconian rules aimed at Hindu landowners and those owning firms and buildings that sanctioned property acquisition by the state (Shafi 2007, Mohsin 2004). The enemy, couched in an idiom of state security, included all Hindus who resided in India, even if they had family or kin in Pakistan and who, according to Hindu inheritance law, could be the recipients of their property (Barkat et al. 1997). Thus, declaring India an enemy state meant that even Hindus living in East Pakistan were included among those whose allegiance was suspect and assumed to be inevitably tied to India. It led, as well, to a second major displacement, since Hindus were now deprived of their rights to property and to its transfer, sale, and gifting.

18 Despite these takings, Hindus continued to opt for East Pakistan as their country of belonging, a choice that valorized its syncretic tradition, language, and the identification of the majority of its inhabitants as Bengali rather than Muslim. Those Hindus remaining in the East, however, challenged the leadership in the West, who feared their potential electoral power and their progressive orientation, and viewed their decision as a threat to national security. These challenges eventually helped catalyse the West Pakistan response to the East Wing’s call for autonomy—the threat of Bengali nationalism and a questionable identification with Islam, stemming, in some measure, from the haunting success of the Language Movement and the struggle against Urdu as the national language.

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Reproducing majoritarian rule: the politics of independence

19 Paradoxically, recognizing the syncretism that defined what was distinctive about Bengali cultural practices provided not only a marked other for the West but also the grounds for the secular demands that would shape the movement for an independent Bangladesh. This claim acknowledges that, following the Indo-Pakistan war, there was a growing demand for political and economic autonomy of the East Wing. This was especially so following Army Chief Yahya Khan’s passing of the Enemy Property (Continuance of Emergency Provision) Ordinance in 1969, which, by declaring martial law, annulled the Constitution that recognized the fundamental right to ‘profess any religion’. This militarization of the region sustained state efforts to eliminate from the East any association with the region’s Hindu past and to control progressive elements that sought regional autonomy. Notable here is not only Khan’s refusal to address Sheik Mujibur Rahman’s initial demand for the autonomy of East Pakistan—and, eventually, an independent Bangladesh—but also his ordering of military intervention to suppress the Awami League, as well as to curtail political mobilization. Rather than negotiate for autonomy, the military entered East Pakistan, targeting Hindus and progressive forces in one of the most brutal genocides in world history.

20 Hindu faculty at Dhaka University were among the first assassinated by the Pakistan army during Operation Searchlight on 26 March 1971, as they, and other progressive faculty, were assumed to have instigated the movement for autonomy. The military was particularly hostile to Hindus—who, they believed, ‘played a malevolent role in East Bengal’,—given their assumption that Hindus were ‘natural’ inhabitants of India and, thus, were intent on either exterminating or driving them out of the country (Beachler 2007: 467). As van Schendel (2009: 162) wrote: In these first gruesome hours of army terror, people all over Dhaka were picked up from their homes and ‘dispatched to Bangladesh’—the army’s euphemism for summary execution. There were verbal and later written orders to shoot Hindu citizens. Dhaka’s old artisan neighborhood of Shankharipotti […] was attacked and Hindu inhabitants murdered. Many prominent Hindus were sought out and put to death.

21 US Senator Edward Kennedy likewise remarked about the targeting of Hindus during the independence war: Field reports to the US Government, countless eye-witnesses, journalistic accounts, reports of international agencies […] document the reign of terror which grips East Bengal (East Pakistan). Hardest hit have been members of the Hindu community who have been robbed of their lands and shops, systematically slaughtered, and in some cases, painted with yellow patches marked ‘H’. All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad (Lintner 2003: 2).

22 The result of this reign of terror was another mass migration of Hindu East Pakistanis to India, signaling the complex identifications shaping the lives of those who chose to remain in the country.15

23 This targeting of Hindus institutionalized the right to violence that can turn neighbors into enemies and people to be feared for the threat they pose to conceptions of national belonging. It also can destroy community and forms of sociality that make such behavior against kin or neighbor possible. Paradoxically, this construction of the Hindu

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as other became most evident when, on 10 April 1971, after declaring liberation on 26 March 1971 following a nine month bloody struggle, the provisional government, under the Vice President and Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam, ordered that all laws in force on 25 March would continue. This included the Laws of Continuance Enforcement Order, 1971, which retained those same laws regarding enemy property that were promulgated prior to Independence. The following year, on 4 November 1972, the Bangladesh Parliament adopted the independence principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism, but also The Bangladesh (Vesting of Property and Assets) Order which recognized the new government as vested with ‘enemy’ properties seized since the 1965 War and stipulated that its provisions shall not be subjected to judicial review. Consequently, land owned by Hindus, their legal heirs, or family members currently residing on the property, was subject to dispossession, including by force.16 The Order also led to illegal appropriations as government officials were given the power to arbitrarily designate land as enemy property, thus undermining the ownership rights of Hindus as citizens, as well as their rights to state protection.

24 Later, in 1975, and following the murder of Sheik Mujibir Rahman, popularly known as Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal) and the founding father of Bangladesh, religious and ethnic identities were again challenged, especially by Bangladeshi nationalism which accompanied the ascendency of the military regimes of Zia Rahman (1975–1981) and Hossain Mohammad Ershad (1981–1990). Bangladeshi nationalism was a project aimed at purging Hindu idioms from Bengali national identification in efforts to distance the country’s cultural landscape from both the Awami League and (Hindu) West Bengal. Crucially, it answered the national identity question by reframing ‘we are Bengali first and Muslim second’ as ‘we are Muslims first and Bengalis second’, recasting national belonging from an ethnic identification with Hindu West Bengal, India, to a religious identification with Pakistan. Unsurprisingly, this shift also recognized Islamist interests and political party participation, particularly of the Jaamat-i-Islami, thereby compromising the secular principle of independence. The change led first, in 1977, to the deletion from the Constitution of secularism as a state principle and, second, in 1988, to the declaration of Islam as the state religion. At play during the shift from Bengali to Bangladeshi nationalism was a rhetoric that emphasized the specter of caste Hindu domination, the tensions of partition, and the communal violence that shaped political rule in what was characterized as Hindu India (Chowdhury 2009).

25 The reproduction of Hindus as other was thus further entrenched by practices of cultural and social enclosure, including when, under military rule, Muslim prayer before public meetings and on television, was first promoted and then required; and again, in 1979, when Zia Rahman added ‘Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim’ before the Preamble of the Constitution and replaced the words ‘historic struggle for national liberation’ with ‘historic war for national independence’. This latter move signals the shift from a liberation struggle to a nationalist project to claim sovereignty and safeguard Bangladesh from her foreign enemy, India. These changes reflected Zia’s effort to elide connections between the liberation movement and those of the 1952 Language Movement that recognized struggles for a shared Bengali culture against an Urdu dominated Islamic one. To accomplish this shift, he introduced ‘Islamiyat’ (Islamic religious study) as compulsory from Class I-VIII, giving minority students the option of taking similar religious courses (Samad 1998) and requiring school instruction in vernacular Bangla, including at the university, as a way to encourage identification with Islam and Pakistan (Guhathakurta 2002). Critical to his state-making

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project was Zia’s distinction between Bengali and Bangladeshi identity, which not only marked Hindu Bengalis and Bangladeshis as dissimilar, but also gave credence to the sense that all Hindus, those in India as well as Hindu Bengali citizens of Bangladesh, were always potential enemies of the state. Such practices reignited insecurity and fear in the everyday lives of minority populations, while also encouraging the temporary and permanent migration of Hindus to India.

Contingencies of ownership and the politics of difference under democratic rule

26 Expectations changed with the public uprising against the autocratic regime of General Ershad that led, in 1991, to the first democratic elections that brought Khaleda Zia and the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) to power. Their alliance with the Jamaat-i-Islami made the victory of the BNP possible and raised, again, the specter of Islam as a defining feature of the ruling project. Ali Riaz (2003) suggests that the turn to Jamaat occurred precisely because the two leading political parties failed to secure hegemonic rule and, thus, allied with Jamaat simply for electoral expediency. Claims of expediency notwithstanding, such alliances have long-term consequences that build on Jamaat’s institutionalization during military rule and continue as part of a process of Islamization that threatens the security of minority populations. Meghna Guhathakurta (2012) acknowledges this threat as contributing to a growing sense of alienation, while Abul Barkat and his coauthors (2008) show that it led to ongoing Hindu forced, or ‘last resort’, migration.

27 Sheikh Hasina’s ascendency to power in 1996 led to passage of the Restoration of Vested Property Act, 2001 (Act No. 16 of 2001) which stipulated that previously confiscated lands should be returned to their original Hindu owners. However, the Act referred only to properties vested prior to February 1969, while ignoring properties confiscated afterwards that were likely in the hands of government officials or miscreants, and often confiscated illegally. It also excluded land that was no longer in government hands or currently used by or leased to an authorized person. Thus, despite this initial sense of promise, these and other restrictions of the Act failed to offer claimants access to the return of land that they or their families owned.

28 Khaleda Zia’s return to power further diluted the Restoration Act by removing time limits on the government’s responsibility to enforce the return of property. Emphasizing the role of political power in illegal land appropriations, Barkat (2000) calculates that 44.2 percent of vested property was appropriated by members of the AL, 31.7 percent by the BNP, 5.8 percent by Ershad’s Jatiya Party, 4.8 percent by Jamaat-e- Islami, and 13.5 percent by others. And, under BNP rule (2001 to 2006) an additional eight percent of the incidents of land encroachment were added to the more than 2 million acres of land, or 45 percent of all land owned by Hindus taken before this period (ASK 2006).

29 Also consequential for the social and economic security of Bangladeshi Hindus are communal relations in India. For example, soon after the elections, the country witnessed the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists that led to the death of more than 2000 people, not only in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, but also in a number of cities across the country. The Gujarat riots that followed a decade later, in 2002, resulted in the death of more than 2000 Muslims and displaced hundreds more. In

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each case, there were retaliatory attacks on Hindu people and property in Bangladesh with little government intervention to stop them, which further deprived Hindus of a sense of social security and access to adjudication.

30 The result of such failures of government has been a growing sense of alienation among those against whom violence can be justified by routine practices of rule that reflexively render them different, unworthy, and devalued. Such practices recall women who met the wrath of witch-hunters as they resisted usurpations in their struggle for more egalitarian gender relations, leading to, among other acts of violence, ‘the murder of the accused and the confiscation of their properties’ (Federici 2008: 21). Reproducing such difference, in other words, is a process of ongoing social enclosure— othering, devaluation, and exclusion—that entail public discourse that constructs the other as enemy and makes subjects of presumed citizens. Critical to this account are the claims that such appropriations are carried out in the name of protecting the Muslim majority and securing their rights as citizens of the state.

31 Such practices build on demonizing narratives against Hindus that once initiated gain currency as they circulate in the press, in literature, and in memoirs, as well as in private discussion and rumor within families and communities (Guhathakurta 2012). They are materialized in state policies that construct difference and justify differential state action that gradually alienates, marginalizes, and discriminates against Hindus. But, importantly, they include reluctance amongst Hindus to adjudicate or claim ownership rights because they fear retribution. Further, even among those with the social networks and financial resources to fight for control of their property, fear, angst, and disrespect shape processes of adjudication. Arild Ruud (1996) suggests that such practices can lead personnel, acting on behalf of state institutions, to refuse or fail to safeguard members of the Hindu community by ignoring illegal practices, including violence committed against them, or to defer responsibility when requests for fairness or recompense have been made. Benkin (2009: 80) suggests these actions can lead to legalized oppression, even ethnic cleansing. Another way to make the same point, indicating the recursive character of policy reforms and subjection, is that the Hindu minority community in majoritarian Bangladesh is deemed to require destruction of their power through ‘extermination’, an experience that also characterizes relations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Federici 2004: 63, Introduction to this volume).

32 Importantly, these relations of social enclosure and, in the extreme, extermination, both accompany and justify forms of expropriation that recast social life, turning peasants into proletarians or worse, since today, processes of land appropriation go hand-in-hand with the withdrawal of state support for the rural poor. For all Hindus, but particularly the land-poor, this leads to lives that are increasingly precarious, as usurpation through legal and contractual transgressions are secured, as a matter of state, in a context that includes the privatization of public resources and market-driven solutions to social issues. Differential access to new resources can be legitimated on the basis of Hindu difference/enmity and claimed in the name of national security. Finally, in struggles over land claims and illegal expropriations by government personnel, aligning the management of vested property claims with primarily rural and town administrators turns a blind eye to the state’s complicity with elite expropriators in ways that further limit the possibilities for redress.

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The current conjuncture: amending the VPA

33 The return to power of the AL, following the Caretaker government (2006–2008), again led to rising expectations among those seeking redress for the VPA. On 6 November 2008, the High Court division of the Supreme Court challenged the Enemy Property (Continuance of Emergency Provision) (Repeal) Act of 1974, arguing that it contradicts the fundamental rights and charter of the Bangladesh Declaration of Independence. The Government followed with the Vested Property Repeal (Amendment) Act, 2011, which was amended again in 2012 and 2013.17 Each of these amended Acts raised expectations among Bangladeshi Hindu citizens, even as pre-election violence in 2013, including demolition of Hindu temples and failure of the government to protect those targeted, dashed their hopes for redress.

34 But this time, frustration with the failure of the AL to implement the return of seized property led to a critical public discussion organized by nine rights organizations and citizen groups18 which argued that the amended Vested Property Repeal (Amendment) Act of 2013 ‘is part of a plot by corrupt land officials to prolong the return of “vested property”’.19Under current law, not only do ‘corrupt officials’ illegally enlist land as vested property, but they also publish gazettes on newly identified lands that create opportunities for the continual harassment of Hindu landowners by district officers. Moreover, Subrata Chowdhury of Arpito Sampatti Ain Protirodh Andolon (ASAPA) suggests that the move to allow the publication of supplementary gazettes, expand the list of properties, and extend ‘the timeline for publishing the supplementary gazettes is an attempt to prolong the crisis of vested property laws in a new form’ (Jahangir 2013).

35 Identifying the complicity of ‘corrupt officials’ was a central concern. As Kazal Debnath of the Bangladesh Hindu Buddha Christian Oikya Parishad (HBCOP) makes evident, each of the 16 or 17 documents required under the law to file a complaint entail bribes to officials. Barkat et al. (2008) similarly argued in reference to an earlier period that ‘the notorious ordinance of 1965 began the vesting of property of religious minorities who were temporarily forced out of the country, but corrupt land officials benefit from refusing to enforce the Supreme Court verdict of 23 March 1974 that declared the Enemy Property Order 1965 dead’ (Guhathakurta 2002: 82). The new amendment similarly advantages land officials who have been involved in vesting for a long period, allowing them 300 more days to list vested properties while offering the plaintiffs only 30 days to file their complaints (Jahangir 2013).

36 Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the amended Act has yet to be implemented, further contributing to Hindu insecurity and affecting forms of adaptation and avoidance, including everyday linguistic choices that people make when in public. As Guhathakurta explains, ‘Muslim terminology [is often chosen] […] in order to disguise their (Hindu) difference of identity in public; either to cause less hassle or simply to avoid eyebrows being raised’ (2002: 82). Such relations of sociality are constitutive of the vulnerabilities of those who are likely to fall prey to potential land expropriation and the poor who fear reprisal should they complain or challenge the behavior of Muslim elites or government officials.

37 Middle class Hindus express similar feelings of vulnerability, although they are more likely to assert their rights and use legal resources to secure family property. As one key middle class informant lamented, ‘I have the resources and the connections to fight for my property, but it takes a lot of money and connections to do so… we always have

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to worry… we don’t often win’ (Feldman 2014). Thus, despite their status as members of the middle class, living with the continual threat of land grabbing means that many Hindus choose not to seek redress: This is the story of 23 acres of land in Faridpur District: The original owners went to India during the Indo-Pak War, the land was recorded as vested property but was actually taken by three men, Khaleque, Rashid, and Hakim. Khaleque ‘prepared’ false documents for part of the land, ignoring the fact that vested property cannot be sold, and subsequently sold a portion of it to Muktar and Ismail. Ismail sold ‘his’ land to Hafizur. Yet, what is also clear is that a nephew of the original owner still resides in the area, a 50-year-old village physician (Feldman 2014).

38 While this window on the social life of land ownership illuminates the violence and illegal transfers associated with the VPA, it fails to address what these processes mean for Hindu owners. In this case, Mr. Das does not have living relatives in the area; nor did his uncle formally transfer the land to him or his family. However, any legal successor to the real owner is eligible to petition for the property if they can produce a legal succession certificate. Yet, as a man of some means, he has not petitioned for his land and makes plain why he has not done so: ‘The court may issue an order in favour of me, but if I would like to take possession, they (those currently on the land) will kill me. Moreover, I […] am in doubt whether I would be able to secure my own properties from the grabbers’ (Feldman 2013). This and numerous similar stories reveal the costs of being a Bangladeshi Hindu, particularly regarding everyday social behavior and access to resources and rights.

39 In other instances, a person’s village status changes when their land is vested. To summarize a finding from Barkat et al. (2008: 133–37): As a school teacher, Mr. Debnath was a respected member of the local School Managing Committee, the local Puja Committee, the shalish (local village court), and regularly contributed to community ceremonies. However, his financial security deteriorated when he brought a legal suit against Abdul Aziz and Kalipad Ghoshal, who had grabbed his agricultural land. He first discovered that someone had claimed his property when he visited the tehsil office to pay his taxes and was told the land was recorded in the name of two others. After working with the Deputy Commissioner, he was informed that the title would be reissued in his name, but, when he went to harvest his crop, a violent exchange ensued with Aziz’s gang. A shalish followed only to confirm that the land belonged to Aziz, a prominent BNP businessman in the community.

40 In addition to revealing the Bangladeshi Hindu’s own cautious behavior and routine disrespect from others, Barkat et al. (2008) show how usurpers both threaten Hindu landowners with eviction and harass young girls (‘eve-teasing’) in ways that lead families to stop sending girls to school simply to avoid harassment. Others note that in some communities, every male has been beaten at least once. But, as community members argue, most disturbing is the lack of response to such acts of violence by authorities who implicitly condone continued attacks and harassment. As Shuruz (2004) similarly notes, the desperation of a Gopalpur villager is evident as she recounts that the brutality of crimes committed this year was greater than the brutality committed by this same group in last year’s attack: ‘In the past, women were spared, but now some are even forcefully disrobed… Yet no officer from the police station or administration […] showed up to ‘assure our security’, except after the news of it hit the press that the apathetic administration received a stirring.’ Another villager recalls how, after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in India, a different cremation ground

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was usurped by this same group: ‘It is a vicious, manmade cycle.’ These experiences highlight the reproduction of senses of insecurity and fear in a context where perpetrators of local, community-based tensions, threats, and outbursts against Hindus do not face government redress and, in some instances, even have their actions condoned by state authorities.

41 In a final example, Mr. Das, a Hindu and member of the Land Ministry who accompanied me on a drive to a peri-urban area of Dhaka, made quite evident that the region, once the vegetable basket of the city, was now a major site for industrial and export production. On the drive, I queried Mr. Das about the dramatic transformation of this once rural countryside. But, he met every effort I made to casually discuss this dramatic change in the landscape with a variant of ‘I cannot really discuss land matters since they are a matter of national security.’ And when, over tea, and in the company of an Upazilla officer, I shared my experience of having been in the area 15 years earlier, and now was surprized at how quickly Bangladesh was being urbanized, Mr. Das quickly intervened, making it clear that his junior officer was not permitted to comment. Even when talking about the recent amendments to the Vested Property Act, and whether and how it was affecting his office—more work and a backlog of cases— Mr. Das quickly cut the conversation short, saying that they had no information, since the gazetteers listing vested properties had yet to be released. In sharing my experience with other researchers, policy makers, and NGO members, my interpretation of the lack of transparency and obfuscation on the part of government representatives was confirmed (Feldman 2013).

42 As land seizures continue, including the taking of buildings located in provincial towns where they are increasingly valued, even those with resources and connections to top- level administrators may be unable to ward off property grabs. Under these conditions, and without holding accountable those who use their power and are complicit in land grabbing, there is little guarantee that Hindu owners will ever be able to secure their rights to property and full citizenship. What these examples also show is that dispossession depends on the expropriation of property, the governance structures that legitimate the practice, and the constitution of fear among those who might have legal claims to the property. One can only wonder whether the tease of policy change, and accompanying claims of opportunities for redress, will actually be able to deliver on the promise to stop illegal land grabbing. And one can only wonder if patterns of othering, engendering fear among Hindus marked as threats to national security, will also be undermined, particularly under current regimes that claim to be, and are recognized internationally as, democratic formations.

Conclusion

43 In this paper, I have sought to explain the loss of as much as 75 percent of religious minority property confiscated and justified under the VPA (Choudhury 2009). Not only did the Pakistani state claim rights to Hindu land for government and public use prior to Independence, but the most concentrated appropriations, often taken illegally, occurred immediately following independence during the first AL and BNP governments (1972–1975; 1976–1980) (Choudhury 2009). These expropriations were followed by a period of unregulated land grabs during continued military rule (1980– 1990) and, again, under the democratically elected formations of the Bangladesh

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National Party (1991–1996; 2006–2008) and the Awami League (1996–2000; 2009–2013; 2014–). Despite these appropriations, aspirations for Hindu recognition, under Sheik Hasina and the AL, and fear of Hindu hostility under Khaleda Zia and the BNP, characterize the experiences of Hindu citizens. The fear of retribution by Hindu property owners, and the class and regional dispersion of the Hindu population have contributed to limited resistance but also to a sense that survival may sometimes depend on hiding one’s sense of self. In Arjun Appadurai’s words, identifications can become unstable, indeterminate, and socially volatile, [and] a means of satisfying one’s sense of one’s categorical self. […] Uncertainty about identification and violence can lead to actions, reactions, complicities, and anticipations that multiply the pre- existing uncertainty about labels. Together, these forms of uncertainty call for the worst kind of certainty: dead certainty (Appadurai 1998: 922–23).

44 I have argued that focusing on the Vested Property Act and its various iterations offers an optic through which to explain relations of dispossession and subjection that simultaneously constitute the logic and the institutionalization of the Act. In so doing, I offer four critical interventions to contemporary discussions of land grabbing. First is the need to explore further everyday forms of expropriation as constitutive of contemporary neoliberal practice. By exploring neoliberal practice, I emphasize the continued valorization of accumulation for some, on the one hand, and wage labour, rather than subsistence production, on the other. To realize processes of accumulation, I lend support to what Gardner and Gerharz (Introduction to this volume) refer to as ‘crony capitalism’, a form of hyper development enabled by the state’s neoliberal ‘open door’ policies. Second, I argue that the material and structural aspects of land grabbing should be understood as mutually constitutive processes that depend on both cultural enclosures and relations of subjection. This means that cultural enclosures and relations of subjection are not merely effects of legal and illegal land grabs; rather, they depend on such relations of rule for their enactment.

45 To understand the institutionalization of land grabbing, in other words, requires attention to the ways in which relations of rule minoritize, subjugate, and create fear among selected members of a social formation and how such fear is deployed to legitimize their subjugation. In some instances, they enable removal, extermination, looting, burning, eve-teasing, and other forms of violence, or what Appadurai (1998) perceptively reveals in his discussion as ethnic violence in the era of globalization. The third point, then, is that while all vulnerable people are potential targets of land grabbing, only the construction of particular others from whom such grabs can be legitimated will secure popular support and not spark general unrest. I have also emphasized the criticality of historically specific relations of dispossession as the basis for understanding land appropriations and the need to tether forms of rule to the expropriation of people and communities from their property as well as economic and social security. Finally, in showcasing these points I have emphasized the criticality of viewing land grabs as an ongoing process that is reproduced under changing circumstances, where tensions of property ownership are not claimed once and for all, but rather, are constituted through continual, if changing, processes of rule and the creation of difference.

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NOTES

1. Under the “Defense of Pakistan Rules” (DPR), the Government of Pakistan passed the Enemy Property (Custody and Regulation) Order II of 1965 that was reconfirmed as the Enemy Property Ordinance, 1969 after the Indo-Pakistan war. This was followed by the East Pakistan Rule 161, the East Pakistan Enemy Property (Lands and Building) Administration and Disposal Order, which continued after the independence of Bangladesh. While the practice remained the same, the name formally changed under the Vested and Non-resident Property (Administration) Act (Act XLVI) of 1974. 2. Included here is theft by private interests and the state’s failure to intervene to protect the property rights of Hindu citizens. 3. The ‘ungodly secularists’ include the Hindu population who were especially targeted during the war. While other groups in Bangladesh have been marginalized, particularly the Bihari and tribal communities, it is Hindu property that is the target of the Vested Property Act and the sole focus of this paper. 4. See, for example, the contributions of Bonefeld 2001, De Angelis 2001, 2004, Hall 2013, Harvey 2003, Marx 1983, Midnight Notes Collective 2001; and, for a Bangladesh example, see Adnan 2013. 5. Unlike previously, when low-wage non-farm employment was a growing sector, today illegal and legal seizures are more likely to generate precarious lives and livelihoods with limited opportunities for work, even at below-subsistence levels. In this context, NGO and other parastatal institutions have helped the transition to market dependence, a hallmark of neoliberalism, which is realized through credit/debt schemes and training programs assumed to help generate income for the rural and increasingly the urban poor. 6. Hall (2013: 1584) supports this claim in noting that ‘only some definitions [of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession] mention the actors involved (these include capital, states, state-owned enterprises and non-profit entities)’. Yet in his 2011 work, he too fails to acknowledge the dispossessed as actors, whether through organized and collective resistance or as individual or family resource owners. 7. Relations of exclusion are more provocatively explored as relations of inclusion to emphasize the fact that experiences of exclusion and the protections of state are particular characteristics of belonging, however unequal. From this perspective, there is no position of social exclusion, only a lack of rights and access to resources as a condition of unequal inclusion. 8. See, for example, the collection by Vermeulen & Govers (1994), particularly the essays by Barth, and Verdery (1994) for her focus on political economy. 9. It is impossible to explore these processes of ethnicization and minoritization here. It will suffice to offer the critical question posed by Appadurai (1996: 41): ‘are we in the midst of a vast

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worldwide Malthusian correction, which works through the idioms of minoritization and ethnicization but is functionally geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers?’ 10. The insecurity this created for Hindu citizens during this period of Pakistani rule led to one of the largest migrations of Pakistani Hindus to West Bengal, India. 11. The Language movement remains significant for Bangladesh’s national narrative and is celebrated each year on 21 February, Ekushy. 12. Both H.S. Suhrawardy and Mujib-ur-Rahman would be central to the movement for regional autonomy and, subsequently, to the independence movement. 13. This was followed by The East Bengal Evacuees (Administration of Property) Act (VIII of 1949), The East Bengal Evacuees (Restoration of Possession) Act (XXII of 1951), The East Bengal Evacuees (Administration of Immovable Property) Act (XXIV of 1951), The East Bengal Prevention of Transfer of Property and Removal of Documents and Records Act of 1952, and The Pakistan (Administration of Evacuees Property) Act (XII of 1957). In the context of the Indo-Pakistan War the following acts were passed: The East Pakistan Disturbed Persons (Rehabilitation) Ordinance (No 1 of 1964), The Defense of Pakistan Ordinance (No. XXIII of 6 September 1965), The Defense of Pakistan Rules of 1965, The Enemy Property (Custody and Registration) Order of 1965, The East Pakistan Enemy Property (Lands and Buildings Administration and Disposal Order of 1966), and The Enemy Property (Continuance of Emergency Provision) Ordinance No. 1 of 1969. 14. Hindu citizens of East Pakistan did resist some of these initiatives, but others chose to participate in the Constituent Assembly and work alongside Muslim leaders. Class differences among Hindus may also have limited mass opposition—many were part of the educated elite and among university faculty and civil servants, while others were dispersed throughout the country and among poor farmers and fishers. 15. A great deal has been written on Hindu families who have left East Pakistan/Bangladesh for West Bengal, but far less has been written about those who chose to remain in their country of birth. 16. While the Order included the seizure of so-called abandoned property from ethnic Biharis residing in Bangladesh prior to 1971, Hindus, who were its immediate target, owned the majority of appropriated land. 17. The Vested Properties Return (Amendment) Bill, 2011, enables Hindus to reclaim their property taken by the government or by individuals. The 2013 Amendment allows the government to publish gazettes on new vested properties and identifies two property schedules, one for land under the district commissioner and the other for land illegally occupied by individuals. 18. The nine co-organisers include Ain o Salish Kendro, Bangladesh Hindu Buddha Christian Oikya Parishad (BHBCOP), Nijera Kori, Association for Land Reform and Development (ALRD), Arpito Sampatti Ain Protirodh Andolon (ASAPA), Bangladesh Puja Udjapon Parishad, Bangladesh Legal Aid Services Trust (BLAST), Sammilito Samajik Andolon, and Human Development Research Centre (HDRC). 19. http://www.dhakatribune.com/law-amp-rights/2013/oct/09/js-passes-vested-property-act- amendment-bill#sthash.CWwrmAXw.dpuf.

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ABSTRACTS

Constructing religious difference as a national security threat, the Vested Property Act, whose legacy dates from the period of East Pakistan, marks Bangladeshi Hindus as citizens whose allegiance to the country is always suspect. This paper explores the social production of Hindu difference through legal claims to the right to private property. I draw on shifting policy reforms to show how land rights and the control of private property, embedded in historical, social, political, and cultural relations, shape the security of people and their subjectivity. I argue that constructions of Hindu identity are marked by particular relations of social inclusion that are consequential for enacting rights claims in the interests of private accumulation.

INDEX

Keywords: dispossession, land grab, subjection, law, social rights, Bangladesh

AUTHOR

SHELLEY FELDMAN Binghamton University (USA)

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Seeing Development as Security: Constructing Top-Down Authority and Inequitable Access in Jharkhand

Siddharth Sareen

The author wishes to express gratitude to Iben Nathan, Christian Lund, Jens Lund, Mattias Rasmussen, Patrik Oskarsson, Celie Manuel, Aashish Gupta, participants at the Ghent summer school on ‘Governance at the edge of the state’ in September 2014, participants at the Danish Institute of International Studies’ seminar on Global Political Ethnography in November 2014, and the editors for helpful comments. Generous funding from the Erasmus Mundus joint doctoral programme on Forest and Nature for Society and the University of Copenhagen made this study possible. ‘Perhaps to some extent, and at least for some time, in order to promote the idea of itself, it is in the interest of the new Jharkhand state to have a competing notion of an enemy state within’ (Shah 2006: 311). ‘[...] there is no appreciation for adivasi lifestyles or any attempt to build upon existing strengths, and tired versions of modernization theory continue to be espoused by India’s ruling politicians’ (Sundar 2012: 163).

1 Governments try to determine resource allocation. In state-building contexts, the extent to which they exercise control is both indicative of their authority and critical for determining distributional outcomes. In India’s recently-formed federal state of Jharkhand, the authorisation of access to natural resources and schemes through governmental development interventions presents the following conundrum: How do policies designed to empower marginalised groups and informed by concerns of democratic decentralisation get implemented in ways that enable the top-down authorisation of inequitable access through such interventions?

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2 Jharkhand was created out of resource-rich southern Bihar in central eastern India in 2000. Complex decades-old political movements demanding its statehood gave way to the challenge of state-building (Shah 2010, Tillin 2011). Having been part of India’s attempt at democratic decentralisation since the 1990s, Jharkhand’s people in principle became empowered to implement government schemes and authorise access to natural resources in democratic, equitable ways (World Bank 2003).

3 Yet, despite its natural resource wealth, Jharkhand today remains an under-developed region, politically unstable and with historically inept governance (Shah 2010, Prakash 2011). In the 15 years since its formation, it has had ten different governments and three instances of President’s Rule.1 It is also at the heart of an enduring insurgency led by Maoist groups, with a government counter-offensive (World Bank 2007). In recent years, academic work has frequently cited former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement portraying the Maoist movement as India’s biggest internal security threat (Levien 2013a: 367, Chandra 2014: 414).

4 Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum, my study district, boasts India’s largest iron ore deposits and shorea robusta (sal tree) forest, the 800 km 2 Saranda. Comprising a significant minority indigenous population of forest-dwellers, it is populated predominantly by the Ho. The Indian Constitution recognises the Ho as a Scheduled Tribe, thus according them strong rights over resources and the right to determine local development (GoJ 2006).2 Such positive discrimination tries to provide disadvantaged groups sufficient voice to influence processes that affect them (Fraser 2001). But thematic literature shows that populations inhabiting resource-rich areas are nonetheless frequently marginalised (Peluso & Watts 2001). Studies in Jharkhand show that governmental interventions authorising access to schemes and natural resources have been top-down rather than democratically-driven (Lahiri-Dutt et al. 2012, Sundar 2009, Shah 2010).

5 Thus, the central and state governments attempt to simultaneously promote economic growth through mining, battle the threat of Maoist insurgency, and build a stable, developed state. Local-level institutions manoeuvre through the resultant top-down governmental development interventions; i.e., Ho’s customary authorities and nascent decentralised institutions try to exercise their constitutional rights to access resources and determine the nature of development (Jewitt 2008). Hence, authority over and access to resources are fluid and contested in politically-volatile West Singhbhum. Particular governmental actions can impact and transform them both locally.

6 India’s central government has made a point of claiming it wants development for West Singhbhum’s inhabitants. This is one of 60 districts across India which were funded 55 crore rupees (nine million dollars) each during 2010–12 through an ‘Integrated Action Plan for Selected Tribal and Backward Districts’. This anti-insurgency, pro- development intervention has since been extended to 88 districts until 2017 in the form of ‘Additional Central Assistance for Left Wing Extremism Affected Districts’. In addition, Saranda forest division within West Singhbhum was earmarked in 2011 for a Saranda Action Plan (SAP). This two-year, 250 crore rupee (41 million dollar) intervention sought to deliver a package of development and security in this forest region (MoRD 2011). Through this ‘high modern’ or ‘hegemonic project’ (Scott 1999), the government wanted to ‘cleanse’ Saranda of Maoists. SAP envisaged increasing military presence and bringing development to the forest’s Ho inhabitants, to make or keep them pro-government instead of siding with insurgent groups.

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7 This article takes this elision of development and security by the government as its point of departure, adding to recent literature that links the state, development and dispossession in India (Baka 2013, Banerjee-Guha 2013, Oskarsson 2015). The Indian Constitution accords Ho communities the authority to determine the nature of development and resource access as the region’s inhabitants (GoI 1992, 1996). Typically, those with power try and influence how resource access is authorised through various means (Ribot & Peluso 2003), which in this case would necessarily mean co-opting the Ho’s right to determine and benefit from regional development. Governmental development interventions play a crucial part in influencing the balance of outcomes between these two extremes. Recent regional literature roundly criticises these, arguing that ‘in renewing state legitimacy against internal dissent, development goals are made to coincide with traditional security concerns for state survival and stability’ (Basu 2011: 373).

8 In what follows I demonstrate how the government, seeing development as security, enables interventions that promote top-down authority, inequitable resource access and dispossession. I argue that the government adopts a prescriptive rather than democratic approach to development, using security concerns to justify impositions that inequitably benefit powerful actors and disenfranchise already marginalised groups. As Gardner and Gerharz note in this volume, whether such governmental interventions are theoretically formulated as explicit elements in an ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, pace Althusser (1971), or as unintended consequences of a less conscious discourse that nonetheless favours the powerful, studying them shows the practices characteristic of ‘regimes of dispossession’ (Levien 2013b), and explicates their role in constructing a development paradigm. I explore this in detail by examining the role of several cases of interventions in constructing local-level access to and authority over resources.

9 To do so, I use a framework comprising six practices devised by Li (2007) to unpack community forest management, as an analytical strategy to understand the assemblage of governmental development interventions in Jharkhand. Through this analytical lens, I demonstrate ways in which these interventions enable top-down authority and inequitable access to resources despite legislation against precisely these outcomes. This contributes to an emerging literature on authority and access that currently lacks empirical detail from South Asia (Ribot 2011, Ribot & Peluso 2003, Sikor & Lund 2009, Stacey 2015). Matching Gardner and Gerharz’s focus in this volume on the use of ‘security’ and ‘development’ discourses to justify appropriation and mask dispossession, I show how these occur in both the extreme case of SAP and in ordinary cases of other interventions within the district. Thus, rather than the effects of resource appropriation, my concern is to engage with processes whereby governments, and indirectly corporations, mask dispossession while simultaneously enacting it.

10 Towards this, my article presents a mixed-methods study of two of West Singhbhum’s four forest divisions—Saranda (primarily using secondary research) and adjoining Sadar Chaibasa (mainly using primary research). Saranda presents, as described, a case of ‘extreme’ interventions, particularly the SAP. Difficult to access in terms of safety and permission for field research, it nevertheless comprises communities that, in terms of authority over and access to resources, are comparable to those in forest villages in the adjoining, more ‘ordinary’ Sadar Chaibasa forest division. Here it was possible to safely conduct detailed empirical research in Ho village communities

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socioeconomically and culturally similar to those in Saranda, maintaining the same focus and studying relatively more everyday forms of governmental development interventions. Showing how interventions construct authority and access in both forest divisions, I argue that this is supported by the elision of development and security in government programmes and discourse.

11 The remainder of the article comprises five sections. I summarise the data collection methods before delving into some background information on the actors and institutions relevant to the authorisation of access in both the forest divisions studied, based on regional literature complemented by field observations. Next, the choice of analytical framework is explained, defining and theoretically locating the main concepts of access and authority in relation to it. Thereafter comes the findings and analysis section, which details how governmental development interventions are assembled and reflects on the six practices that hold them together, using multiple cases to explain the impact of these interventions on local-level access and authority. To conclude, I address the main research question, i.e., how eliding development with security constructs authority and access locally.

Data collection

12 This article is based on six months of empirical research carried out between January 2013 and January 2015 in Sadar Chaibasa forest division. Fieldwork was conducted both in Ho using a Ho-Hindi interpreter and in Hindi by the author, who also transcribed all field material into English. Interviews took place across 20 villages, with an emphasis on five villages in which relations of trust were built up over four phases of field research. The study comprises 107 semi-structured interviews and six focus-group discussions focussing on authority over and access to resources. It includes 49 key informant interviews and 48 structured interviews focussing on property, authority and access to government schemes and local livelihoods. A study of thematic grey literature and 150 newspaper and magazine articles (via national media websites) specifically about SAP during the 2011–2014 period, undertaken in addition to two field visits to the Saranda forest division, covering a dozen of the 56 villages included under SAP, complements this material.

Background: Institutions authorising actors’ access in West Singhbhum

13 West Singhbhum district is a Fifth Schedule area inhabited by constitutionally- recognised Scheduled Tribes, primarily the Ho people. Through the 73rd Constitutional Amendment, the Panchayat (Extension of Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act (FRA), India’s constitution and community-oriented legislation give the Ho authority over resource access and local development in accordance with their tradition (GoI 1992, 1996, 2007). At the local level, the government recognises two parallel institutions. One is mandated by the government as a legacy of a legislatively distinctive part of the district that includes my study region, the colonial-era Kolhan Government Estate. A government officer called the Kolhan Superintendent is supposed to assist customary village chieftains who preside over matters of local

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development and resource access in this part of West Singhbhum (Rath 2006). Besides this system of customary chieftains or munda-manki, there is a local democratic institution called the village assembly, set up as an outcome of the democratic decentralisation process attempted nationwide from 1992 onward (Sundar 2005). The village assembly is by definition a participatory body at the community level. But the Jharkhand government’s line agencies—such as Panchayati Raj (decentralised governance), Tribal Affairs, and Land Revenue—who are in charge of implementing the mentioned constitutional acts, lack the requisite strong ground presence to enforce and support the benefits of such recognition in remote forest villages (ELDF 2012).

14 The Forest Department is a line agency actually present on the ground, but lacking sufficient manpower and experienced staff (GoJ 2013a), and has a history of conflict with communities (Areeparampil 1992). The Forest Department de facto manages a great deal of government-owned forest, large parts of which are categorised as protected or reserved forest in the study region, which consists of two of West Singhbhum’s four forest divisions. Historically, it benefitted from commercial forestry revenues accruing largely from contracting out forest compartments to private companies on fixed short-term leases, and in recent years has done little to fulfil its function of managing these forests sustainably (Kumar 2002). Moreover, in Saranda forest division there are over 60 existing and pending mining concessions leased out to large mining companies for 20-year periods (Shah Commission 2013). Not only are the Forest Department and mining companies functioning at odds with legal safeguards provided to the Ho, there is also a lack of awareness and implementation of safeguards by both forest inhabitants and government officials (Padel & Das 2010).

15 Another relevant line agency is the District Rural Development Agency, which provides livelihood-generating schemes meant to lead to resource access for villagers in two ways: directly, by creating durable assets like wells and ponds and undertaking forestation and landscaping activities at the village level, and indirectly, through income accruing to villagers, which helps them to purchase resources that would otherwise be unavailable. It is known that, typically, local elites work as contractors and pocket some of the money from such schemes,3 and Maoist groups at times demand a share as well (Shah 2006).

Theory and analytical framework

16 The two main concepts this article engages with are access and authority. I define access as ‘the ability to derive benefits from things’ (Ribot & Peluso 2003: 153), where ‘things’ for this study specifically refers to mineral and forest resources, land, and development schemes. Access is broader than the term property, including benefits that accrue to actors not only through legal rights but also via structural and relational mechanisms. These latter access mechanisms have to do with exercising power. Power thus exercised, when recognised by an institution as legitimate, constitutes authorised access. In this regard, authority refers to ‘the capacity of politico-legal institutions to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on social actors’, combining Lund (2011: 887) and Sikor and Lund (2009: 1). Since authorising access determines configurations of distribution of benefits, it is a political act (Freudenburg 2005). Authorisation recursively impacts various actors’ access in myriad ways. In a resource- conflict, state-building context, institutional authority is shaped by actors at multiple

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sites. Authorising access in turn authorises the authoriser; hence access and authority are co-produced (Sikor & Lund 2009, Ribot 2011).

17 This definition of authority is based on the understanding that the state has a ‘double nature as an idea and an apparatus’ (Abrams 1988, Lund 2008: 181). I understand ‘apparatus’ after Foucault (1980) as constituted of heterogeneous discourses, institutions, regulations and laws, i.e., of ‘positivities’ that are enforced or obligatory (Foucault 1972), and study authority through investigating how some of these positivities ‘act within the relations, mechanisms and ‘plays’ of power’ (Agamben 2009: 6) that determine actors’ access to resources.

18 The state can comprise multiple governmental and non-governmental politico-legal institutions exercising authority at the local level. My choice of cases (of governmental development interventions) necessitates foregrounding the role of the government, which comprises multiple line agencies. It includes India’s central government and Jharkhand’s state government. The former is established strongly enough that the idea of authority remains linked with the government. But the latter has been fragile, even dyfunctional in some ways (Tillin 2011). Since some legislative decisions and most policy execution is up to the state government, there are gaps in authority and contestation over determining resource access, and thereby the nature of development, at sites of resource struggle (Bedi 2015, Sundar 2009, Sud 2014).

19 If governmental actions do successfully authorise access, the way they do so builds a certain kind of state. They can establish or nurture local-level authority and democratic decision-making in keeping with progressive, equity-oriented policies, or they can favour some actors over others by authorising access in a predetermined, top- down manner. Studying governmental interventions thus enables an understanding of how access and authority are constructed (Oskarsson & Nielsen 2014). It is here that a process-based analytical approach can capture the implications that state-building has for how resources are allocated and to whom.

20 The act of governmental intervention, or more broadly of government, which I consider several cases of in this article, has been richly theorised. Foucault (1980) addresses the ‘conduct of conduct’, or how disparate elements are assembled into a governable configuration. This is an apt framing upon which to base an approach to untangling interventions. Building on a broadly Foucauldian understanding of government, Li (2007) proposes an analytical framework through which to understand this act of bringing together, of assemblage. Her framework situates individual agency and employs six generic practices to unpack how an assemblage works. As Legg (2011: 131) comments, this ‘explicitly blurs any distinction between assemblage and apparatus, [...] turning the former into an act of labour and governance’. While at times using her own long-term ethnographic work in Indonesia, Li draws widely on other scholars of community forest management to explicate these practices. She explains the latter as a 30-year-old assemblage, arguing that six practices hold together the diverse elements comprising it. I use the generic practices she elaborates as an analytic strategy to approach the assemblage of governmental development interventions examined here, linking interpretations of my findings to these more abstract practices.

21 By ‘practices of assemblage’, Li (2007: 263) means ‘the on-going labour of bringing disparate elements together and forging connections between them’. She argues that this happens through these six practices: forging alignments, rendering technical, authorising knowledge, managing failures and contradictions, anti-politics, and re-

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assembling. Li (2007: 263) uses these to study ‘the gap between the will to govern and the refractory processes that make government so difficult.’ In this article I employ these practices to understand that which animates the gap between the discourse of democratic authority and resource access and the actual practice of top-down authority and resource access, namely governmental interventions based on seeing development as security in Jharkhand. This analytical approach enables an emphasis on processes rather than effects, with each practice helping to bring out different aspects of how resource access and authority are constructed.

The practices of authorising resource access through governmental development interventions

22 In this section, I take up various cases of governmental development interventions, approaching each of them using one of the six practices of assemblage in order to analyse how the intervention impacts authority over and access to resources. Proceeding sequentially through the practices in six sub-sections, I begin each sub- section by summarising the case or cases it is concerned with and the outcome of my analysis. These summaries are then elaborated by using the specified practices to analyse how these interventions affect authority over and access to resources. To conclude each sub-section, I refer to Li’s (2007) definition of the practice, reflecting on how the analysis of my material relates to this definition.

Forging alignments

23 This practice helps explain how governmental interventions transfer land from indigenous inhabitants and conservation purposes to mining companies in Saranda by forging alignments between national interest, biodiversity conservation and mineral extraction. Aligning land acquisition with national interest on the one hand, and aligning environmental clearance processes with industry-sponsored environmental plans on the other, authorises access to land for mining. Simultaneously, such alignment vests authority in a national-level pro-industrialisation body, detracting from the authority of community-level democratic institutions.

24 Government policy is contradictory in terms of authorising access to land and resources in Saranda. On the one hand, national-level acts safeguard the Ho’s resource access and authority as a Scheduled Tribe (GoI 1992, 1996). Moreover, a colonial-era tenancy act renders their privately-owned and community land untransferable to non- tribal people (Sen 2011). But the earlier ‘Land Acquisition Act, 1894’ and its recently legislated replacement, the ‘Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013’ (LARR Act), enable land to be taken away for mining, prioritising this as a public purpose despite the Ho’s constitutional rights. The Forest Department continues to control large chunks of forest, authorising its own access in contravention of PESA and FRA (cf. ‘Background’ section in this paper). Here I show how these contradictions are overcome by the practice of aligning and converging various interests.

25 The disjuncture between the objective of democratic access and the processes actually configuring access is apparent in how mining concessions are authorised in Saranda. Granting mining concessions requires two stages of environmental clearances through

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a process involving multiple authorities. These include the national-level Forest Advisory Council and Ministry of the Environment and Forests (MoEF), state and sub- state Forest Department officials,4 community-level village assemblies with the constitutional right to self-determine their development, and the Cabinet Committee on Investment (CCI, formed 2012). Granting concessions also requires taking over land from private or community ownership and/or from conservation purposes of the Forest Department. For this the government has used land acquisition laws to claim land for a ‘public’ purpose. This banks on the government’s ‘eminent domain’ over territory in the ‘national interest’ (Sharan 2005), with land subsequently often transferred to mining companies.

26 Apart from aligning the transfer of indigenous land to mining companies with the discourse of development in the national interest, the government also has to sidestep its own conservation rules. Development in the Saranda forest requires the MoEF’s approval as it is a core elephant reserve area. Applications for mining licenses and concessions often remain stuck at this point, pending second-level clearance. But in recent years, quick shuffles in the ministerial position and the CCI’s formation have effectively circumvented this obstacle for mining companies. Two MoEF ministers with two-year tenures each (2009–11 and 2011–13) gave way to an MoEF minister (2013–14) who already held the petroleum and natural gas ministry portfolio, and who cleared a record number of applications (70 projects in 20 days) prior to India’s 2014 national election.5 He has been succeeded by the current minister, whose actions within a ‘pro- growth’ industry-championed new government have been heavily criticised in the national media (e.g. Sethi 2015, Gupta 2015), while environmental clearances continue flowing rapidly.

27 All projects affecting the environment have not, of course, suddenly become more benign. A recent government report highlights severe irregularities in granted environmental clearances and the prevalence of widespread illegal mining (Shah Commission 2013). But approval processes have failed to relate to environmental implications, instead making choices aligned with the government’s and companies’ political and commercial ends respectively. For instance, a court ruling required an Integrated Wildlife Management Plan (IWMP) to be produced for the Saranda forest before any clearances could be issued, due to the conservation-linked potential of the forest as a core elephant habitat and Asia’s largest sal forest. Before the IWMP was finally approved in 2013, the recently-founded CCI within the government lobbied to have the IWMP delinked from the clearance grant. Such a request undermines the entire logic of environmental regulations, working with a predetermined idea that all environmental clearances should be given. The eventual IWMP’s acknowledgements section thanks the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) for sponsoring it, expressing gratitude to Tata Mines and others (GoJ 2013b). Despite the clear conflict of interest, this became the basis for allowing mining companies to lease the land. Its recommendations align environmental sustainability with mining-driven development: ‘It is important to ensure the conservation of the rich biodiversity along with the extraction of minerals for prosperity’ (GoJ 2013b: 200).

28 Li (2007: 265) defines forging alignments as ‘the work of linking together the objectives of the various parties to an assemblage, both those who aspire to govern conduct and those whose conduct is to be conducted’. This sub-section has shown how interventions

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align national interest with industrial interests to acquire land for and grant environmental clearances to mining companies.

Rendering technical

29 This practice illustrates how interventions reduce complex political issues in Saranda to technical requirements for development and security, while actually helping achieve infrastructural and security prerequisites for mining companies. This technicisation obscures the contradictions (Rose 1999) over authority and resource access that are at the heart of struggles for different kinds of development in Saranda. Similarly, in Sadar Chaibasa, rendering livelihood-generating schemes technical makes it difficult for inhabitants to actually access the benefits intended for them, and favours decision- making by higher-level institutions over local democratic authorisation of development.

30 While access to land was authorised in the form of 20-year mining leases, the SAP was the vehicle for rendering the requirements of development and security in Saranda technical. It purported to aim for Ho community development, primarily through pre- existing but unimplemented welfare schemes in Saranda’s 56 villages, and for security against Maoist insurgent groups in the region. Its short-term (half-year) goals included distributing solar lanterns, bicycles and transistors to every household, ensuring all qualifying households became registered recipients of existing welfare schemes and implementing the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (known as NREGA) to support local livelihoods. It also envisioned providing employment-linked skill training to young villagers, conducting health camps, installing handpumps to supply drinking water, and undertaking road construction and watershed development under existing schemes. A mining company sponsored the handpumps, which were meant—but failed—to fix the problem of high iron content in the water that large-scale active mining in the Saranda forest had exacerbated by colouring its rivers red (Ray 2012, Pandit et al. 2014). The entitlements SAP offered were already part of existing nationwide government programmes, though some guidelines were relaxed to enable prompt, inclusive coverage.6 Less specific medium-term (two year) components focussed on enabling local livelihoods, starting residential village schools, and constructing 11 ‘integrated development centres’ for welfare service delivery. In parallel, the Indian government planned to establish its military presence in Saranda.

31 An analysis of the published SAP (MoRD 2011) reveals a simplistic approach, one which tries to achieve ‘development’ and ‘security’ through the above technical measures. It aims to render villagers—antagonised through decades of government-community conflict and indifference (Areeparampil 1992)—pro-government by providing basic entitlements, while undertaking militarisation and road-building to consolidate territorial control recently gained through military operations against Maoist groups in the Saranda forest.7 But road-building does not appear to be for community development alone. Building heavy-duty motorable roads has also opened up Saranda for multi-tonne mining trucks. In parallel, the government has set up paramilitary camps at strategic locations throughout the forest, claiming that this is to ensure secure implementation of the development schemes.

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32 The SAP has thus directed attention away from the contradictory legislation authorising resource access, towards issues of security and development. It has highlighted that these latter two are conjoined and require a combined strategy, assuming rather than publicly examining the feasibility and merits of this task. Media coverage relating to SAP has frequently mentioned ‘flushing out Maoists’ and mining concessions. Thus, rather than prioritising the Ho’s constitutionally-safeguarded continued resource access in Saranda, the SAP has presented development and security in a technical manner that has established infrastructural and security prerequisites for leasing land to mining companies. On the one hand, the Indian government has explicitly claimed that its purpose in securing and developing the iron-rich Saranda forest is not to open it up to large mining companies (Vishnoi 2013). On the other hand, it gave out a spate of land concessions and iron-ore mining licenses to several corporate houses in precisely this region shortly after SAP commenced.8

33 Interventions in Sadar Chaibasa are also based on a governmental understanding of its issues as technical problems. The District Rural Development Agency implements development schemes under the NREGA, paying a daily minimum wage for up to 100 days of work per household per year on manual labour-driven infrastructural projects within villages. Physical inspections in 20 villages indicate that these projects most often fail to result in durable assets, with interviewed villagers stating that ‘even if a pond is sanctioned it doesn’t get dug properly and there is no water in it’9 and that ‘There are no durable assets made but people get employment.’10 Projects serve primarily as a local off-season income source for villagers, instead of those villagers migrating or engaging in illegal wood sale. But rules meant to ensure accountability and transparency hold back even this scheme’s performance due to other factors being insufficiently addressed.

34 For instance, district-level officials reported that instituting electronic payments into individual accounts is a technical requirement of NREGA to prevent project contractors siphoning off labour wage funds. But the banking infrastructure is poor and awareness on how to use bank accounts is low. This has resulted in delayed payments, making many villagers lose interest in the scheme. It has also cut off many villagers’ access because they have been unable to open bank accounts and specify bank account numbers in order to obtain a job card that the scheme requires. Moreover, project contractors can exploit some villagers’ lack of awareness of the banking system and appropriate profits in their name anyway.11 For instance, interviewed villagers stated that ‘assets made do not work because the contractor eats up the money’12 and that the ‘mukhiya [local councillor] earns out of it, taking most of the money for personal use’,13 with a contractor boasting about extracting money: ‘a tender gives 3.5 lakh rupees for each km of road, I spend 1.5 lakh rupees and pocket the rest’.14 Special central- government schemes, funding similar infrastructural projects as a way to render villagers pro-government, are exploited despite similar technical safeguards. On the one hand, contractors illicitly increase their profit margins. On the other, the very Maoist insurgent groups these schemes are targeted against ironically demand protection money from project contractors to let the projects proceed.

35 Not only are these technical solutions unable to achieve their intended outcomes due to complex factors they do not apprehend, they also undermine PESA’s constitutional mandate to let village assemblies determine development. While they go through the motions of getting village assemblies’ formal approval, projects are actually selected in

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a top-down manner and influential men become scheme contractors and gain benefits repeatedly.15 A UNDP-funded project improving NREGA implementation tried to target this by training and involving some villagers near the tail-end of my fieldwork. Even so, specifying technical requirements such as village-assembly approval does not address substantive problems like the fact that power and resources remain concentrated in the rural development line agency at higher levels, and are allocated inefficiently without downward accountability, a substantive basis, or democratic decision-making. Interviewed street-level bureaucrats complained that there were insufficient funds and resources to ensure meaningful implementation according to technical requirements, and that their own salaries were six months delayed.

36 Li (2007: 265) defines the act of rendering technical as ‘extracting from the messiness of the social world, with all the processes that run through it, a set of relations that can be formulated as a diagram in which problem (a) plus intervention (b) will produce (c), a beneficial result.’ This sub-section has shown how interventions institute technical requirements, enabling a top-down security agenda to drive resource allocation, and keeping local demands from determining the nature of development.

Authorising knowledge

37 This practice illustrates how interventions shape the dominant discourse around development and security, selectively authorising knowledge that contributes to this while containing critique. In Saranda, this takes place through government officials’ individual actions and mobilising a positive image of SAP as the requisite response to an urgent need. While inhabitants in Sadar Chaibasa are critical of similar militarisation around them, the government does not concede mistakes or entertain the possibility of intervening differently. This helps bring about and maintain governmental control over territory and, consequently, top-down authority over resource access.

38 Saranda forest division’s SAP was made the focus of attention by the government, highlighting anti-insurgency operations in the region alongside welfare measures for local marginalised groups. It was based on a trip made by bureaucrats and international development agency officials in consultation with the district administration, without the participation of village assemblies or local representatives mandated by India’s constitution (GoI 1992, 1996). Thus, SAP’s claims of bringing the Saranda’s Ho people ‘development’ lacked nuance, contextualisation, and even legality. But with the backing of the then-Union Minister for Rural Development, it shaped the dominant discourse around Saranda and West Singhbhum district. Despite mixed media attention, the government’s official line has been unwaveringly positive. A letter to the Minister based on a joint fact-finding mission by the Jharkhand Human Rights Movement and National Human Rights Commission criticised SAP on two main counts (JHRM 2012), but prompted no government action to address these charges: • It accused SAP of being a cover-up for government atrocities against indigenes during an August 2011 anti-insurgency paramilitary Operation Anaconda, involving a month-long military occupation of several villages’ land. • It pointed out that most money being spent in Saranda was being used to make heavy-duty roads motorable by loaded trucks, despite villagers only being given bicycles, indicating a

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state-industry nexus in favour of mining disguised as building security through pro-villager rural development.

39 Seen as the champion of SAP, the then-Minister’s role is worth considering for its sheer performativity in selectively authorising knowledge. He visited frequently, calling Saranda a ‘liberated zone’ from Maoist influence, flying the flag on a national day and taking a personal interest in monitoring SAP’s progress. Newspapers took note but also pointed out villagers’ daring negative comments concerning how SAP had not delivered effectively after two years. In fact, SAP featured 11 tarred roads under the ‘Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana’ rural roads project. 16 While villagers were being given bicycles, the larger development of an extensive network of heavy-duty tarred roads throughout the Saranda forest was left unexplained, save as means to improve governmental communication and increase security. A journalistic exchange in a national newspaper with the then-Minister failed to result in a transparent explanation of why the only really operational aspect of SAP seven months into implementation was the setting up of 21 police camps, purportedly to ensure the progress of development schemes which there was little evidence of (Sethi 2012a, 2012b, Ramesh 2012). The then-Minister’s response failed to recognise or address any of the substantive issues put forward, leaving the research and journalistic community engaged in these questions in little doubt that the infrastructure development was to open up the region for mining even beyond existing leases.

40 Despite consistent coverage by journalists,17 sources of in-depth knowledge about SAP’s implementation remained scarce. A dedicated government-run SAP website (saranda.nic.in) gave sporadic and dated information, and the ‘Special Nodal Officer’ had not been given any special powers or authorisation. Currently Sadar Chaibasa’s Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) and ex-DFO of Saranda, he confirmed to me that no 41- million-dollar SAP budget had been set aside. It was all supposed to come from the ‘convergence’ of various government schemes towards similar ends for integrated development. Thus, what made SAP special was not its substantive content but the discourse mobilised around it: the knowledge authorised about what it was supposed to be rather than what it actually was. Aspects at odds with seeing development as security were simply erased from the official picture.

41 This selective authorisation of knowledge is part of a larger narrative. In 2008–2009, a national report omitted an officially-commissioned chapter on governance in tribal districts (Kirpal 2010). This chapter highlights progressive legislation like PESA, that enables adivasis (tribal people in India) to self-govern, revealing ‘a damaging mix of misgovernance, alienation and violent insurgency’ by the government against them (Dandekar & Choudhury 2010: 16). In my Sadar Chaibasa study villages, I commonly encountered tales and even village assembly minutes detailing abuse of authority by government paramilitary forces, ranging from harassing Ho women to robbing village households of grain, fruits, poultry and other valuables, all while claiming to protect them or search for insurgents, confident that the government would not bother bringing its soldiers to book. Most villagers, when interviewed and during informal exchanges, said the Maoists didn’t harm them, occasionally visiting overnight in a group, asking for a meal and enquiring about whether the government was helping them. Government schemes were reported as being occasionally helpful, but hard to access and often dysfunctional, and villagers saw themselves as largely unaffected by both entities.18 They said Maoists were a threat to the government and took protection

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money from scheme contractors, but treated villagers well; the latter had nothing the Maoists would want to take from them anyway.

42 This narrative is entirely missing from media coverage or the government narrative about bringing security to the district. Resistance to SAP-like interventions has been visible in the form of protests against the proposed setting up of paramilitary camps at multiple sites. Yet this knowledge has not been authorised. There has been no official discussion of the fact that villagers do not necessarily see Maoists as a security threat to them. Even though Maoists disrupt government development schemes by demanding protection money from contractors, paramilitary interventions also have negative effects on villagers for reasons that are neither accepted nor addressed.

43 Li (2007: 265) defines authorising knowledge as ‘specifying the requisite body of knowledge; confirming enabling assumptions; containing critiques.’ This sub-section has shown how interventions authorise information that equates development with securitisation to maintain top-down governmental control over resources, ignoring critique directed towards more democratic authorisation of access.

Managing failures and contradictions

44 Muddling through requires compromise. This practice is evident in governmental interventions such as forest working plans in Saranda that are written without the intent of implementation. Knowing it lacks the wherewithal to implement plans, the Forest Department nonetheless replicates the form of authority without the substantive content, underscoring its authority over access to the forest’s resources. In Sadar Chaibasa, the Forest Department stops supporting a successful village-level democratic institution rather than addressing security threats that crop up there. Where the government’s top-down authority over resource access is not adversely affected, it manages failure by deserting interventions without risk of political fallout rather than supporting both development and security.

45 At the sub-district level, the Forest Department controls most forest land, despite overlapping, unclear legislation, based on long-term institutional history here and elsewhere in India. It is only allowed to design interventions based on ten-year forest working plans. In West Singhbhum’s four forest divisions, these plans were delayed, with ad-hoc annual plans serving as interim contingency measures for about five years. The new ten-year plans were finally completed and approved for 2013–2023 in Saranda and Sadar Chaibasa. The Saranda DFO told me they lacked a baseline study and the wherewithal to do one—he estimated it would take two years and significant skilled manpower and expense to develop a meaningful long-term working plan. Instead, re- hashed versions of dated old plans with some available current details were put together, with little empirical basis but a technical proforma. Though things were not quite as neat and tidy as one might like, schemes were planned as if they were, just as for SAP.

46 The same DFO admitted that he and most forest staff had never seen forestry interventions, such as felling series, being implemented during their entire careers, due to a history of conflict since the 1970s between local communities and the Forest Department, which prevented commercial forestry from being conducted in a ‘scientific’ manner (Areeparampil 1992, Corbridge & Jewitt 1997). In spite of the staff’s lack of training, the new Saranda ten-year plan details various felling series, bolstering

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the Forest Department’s authority. The forest working plan also makes detailed rules about villagers’ resource access, despite the department lacking manpower to monitor access and the common knowledge that rules are not implemented. This act of rule- making runs counter to constitutional mandates to devolve power and resources to local communities. The manpower crunch, which the vast supposed expenditure under SAP did not envisage changing, shows that actual implementation of the working plan is not on the government’s agenda. Rather, making plans is a way of managing contradictions through the display of authority (Nightingale & Ojha 2013).

47 I did, however, encounter an outstanding success story during my research in Sadar Chaibasa, in a village called Bhatu.19 Through its village assembly, Bhatu’s inhabitants regulated resource access through forest boundary demarcation, group patrols and levy of fines for breach of rules, and demanded local livelihood-generating schemes from the Forest Department with frequent success during 2012–14. Dozens of villages within a 10-km radius cited Bhatu’s village assembly as a remarkable success. However, in late 2014, some of these villages were witness to three incidents in quick succession: a post office robbery, a kidnapping of four mining security officers by insurgents, and the arrest of three Maoists with arms and ammunition from a villager’s house. On interviewing the Sadar Chaibasa DFO in January 2015, I found the district administration had advised him to cease visiting Bhatu for his own safety. Consequently, in late 2014, the Forest Department stopped sanctioning work in Bhatu, depriving its village assembly of the governmental support that had been crucial to its becoming a model local self-governance institution.

48 Instead of extending this success and building security through further development and support of Bhatu’s self-governance and livelihood-generation efforts, the government opted to withdraw even its rare functional intervention. This was precisely a conjuncture where development and security could have been substantively combined to the benefit of local inhabitants. But the government’s response to the security failures in Bhatu was to abandon rather than support both villagers and development. The governmental depiction of Saranda as being qualitatively different in its security challenges than this adjoining division allowed it to neglect its failure here. Thus another way that the government managed failure was to abdicate responsibility if it did not have high-profile political repercussions.

49 Li (2007: 265) defines managing failures and contradictions as ‘presenting failure as the outcome of rectifiable deficiencies; smoothing out contradictions so that they seem superficial rather than fundamental; devising compromises’. This sub-section has shown how interventions help perpetuate undemocratic governmental control over resources and fail to direct efforts to support substantive developmental efforts as long as there is no cost to the government’s authority over resource access.

Anti-politics

50 This practice shows how interventions turn political issues, such as authorising access to resources, into developmental ones in Saranda, by camouflaging land concessions for mining as regional development. Not recognising such acts as political and dealing with them as technical issues (Ferguson 1990, Mitchell 2002) constructs forms of access that support the status quo, limiting deliberative spaces in the process (Cruikshank 1999).

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51 In February 2011, the then-MoEF minister cited ‘national interest’ while sanctioning public-sector company Steel Authority of India’s (SAIL) lease of Chiria, India’s largest iron ore deposit, in Saranda forest division, despite national-level Forest Advisory Council recommendations against it. SAIL’s existing lease on the Gua iron ore reserves, also within Saranda, lapsed in June 2011. Three months later, the Minister in his new capacity as Minister for Rural Development launched SAP, stating its intent to be ‘development’ (MoRD 2011). In April 2012, SAIL’s Gua mine lease was renewed. The Minister approved SAIL’s mining leases in the ‘national interest’, emphasising that this was an exception rather than a precedent for concessions to private companies in Saranda. But his successor at the MoEF pointed out that he had in fact also approved a lease to Usha Martin, a private company. The company used this precedent as the basis to lease out thousands of additional hectares in mining concessions.

52 Despite guaranteeing that no private-sector company would be given mining leases, the Indian government thus approved multiple leases in this mineral-rich reserved forest to large mining firms. Since the start of this study in 2012, several pending mining leases have been approved, in addition to the 42 that already existed. Widespread illegal mining is being carried out alongside these discrepancies in according mining leases (Shah Commission 2013); yet the government does little to address such problems, while continuing to give out leases citing questionable technical and legal grounds.

53 Li (2007: 265) defines anti-politics as ‘reposing political questions as matters of technique; closing down debate about how and what to govern and the distributive effects of particular arrangements by reference to expertise; encouraging citizens to engage in debate while limiting the agenda’. This sub-section has shown how interventions approached political issues concerning the very nature of development as a matter of ‘national interest’ to keep sanctioning mining leases in a reserved forest.

Re-assembling

54 This practice illustrates how governmental development interventions take on new life, with some components added and others removed. The SAP is deemed a model programme and is planned to be replicated elsewhere (Gupta 2015), promoting how it constructs access through top-down authority by conflating development and security. Recent progressive legislation is co-opted by higher-level authorities in Sadar Chaibasa, keeping villagers from using it for establishing land claims through their local democratic institution, while the Forest Department maintains its historical hold over most forest land.

55 The official coordinating most activities under SAP’s umbrella was the District Planning Officer, who is closely associated with the Deputy Commissioner, the district’s top official. Both were positive about SAP when interviewed in 2015, but felt it had succeeded only in very modest terms to bring security to the region, which remained unsafe due to Maoists. They agreed that a lot remained to be done in terms of development. Indeed, a quick comparison with my study villages in Sadar Chaibasa shows a rather different set of self-stated priorities of villagers than SAP addressed: local livelihood provision and improved market linkages for non-wood forest products with support for fair prices, regular access to entitlements such as pensions and labour wage payouts, and better healthcare and education services.20

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56 In 2014, SAP was still far from fulfilling even its short-term objectives. However, the district officials I interviewed emphasised skills training and schooling for Saranda youth at centres that required them to move out of their villages. They showed no concern for the Ho being allowed to maintain their way of life or define the terms on which development takes place in the region. Their overall perspective reflected that development is going to happen in this manner anyway, and that it is good for the Ho to have received some benefits and been made aware of decisions (such as mining concessions) that would have been taken regardless of their views, even though they are the ones most affected by the decisions.

57 The Indian government has termed SAP a model for similar interventions in other insurgency-affected (and natural-resource-rich) areas. In August 2012, the Minister credited with conceptualising SAP launched a 400 crore rupee (64 million dollar) Sarju Area Development Action Plan in Jharkhand’s Maoist-affected, mineral-rich, forested and indigene-populated Latehar district, modelled on SAP. Even with new central and state governments having replaced the national party that promoted SAP, national media quoted Jharkhand’s top officials as planning at least ten interventions modelled after SAP in other districts characterised as resembling Saranda (Gupta 2015). Thus an intervention eliding development with security has become a template for dealing with insurgency and enabling ‘development’ in the form of large mining concessions to private companies, while distributing some largesse to displaced and affected forest inhabitants. This instantiates the practice of re-assembling.

58 Another example of re-assembling comes from my field research in Sadar Chaibasa. Despite ‘affirmative action’-based constitutional recognition of village assemblies as legitimate democratic self-governance bodies, the government has failed to empower these community-level institutions, resulting in top-down administrative decentralisation without downward accountability. This can at least partly be attributed to the land-rich Forest Department being a stronger line ministry than the line ministry for decentralised self-governance, and the devolution of power and resources still being a bureaucratic, top-down process (Lele et al. 2010). As the district administration has placed little emphasis on awareness-raising, most Ho communities remain largely unaware of the full extent of access and authority vested in them.

59 This is most evident in the functioning of the FRA. A modest 2,800 land claims have been granted to villagers in the entire district since the progressive act’s advent in 2006, according to the District Welfare Officer. This number is very low considering that the FRA empowers village assemblies to authorise such claims, followed by two higher-level government committees. Some decades ago, families from several of my study villages set up a cluster of 30-odd households by clearing the forest in the Ho’s traditional style: khuntkatti.21 Thrice they have pooled 500, 300 and 150 rupees per household respectively—not a trivial sum across over 30 households—and paid it to officials in various relevant government offices to file a land claim under the FRA, which is supposed to be free. Yet no claim has been filed and their land rights remain unrecognised.

60 Relevant officials for helping execute the FRA are the District Welfare Officer and Kolhan Superintendent (cf. ‘Background’ section in this paper). From my interviews and observations, these officials came across at best as indifferent and passing the buck, and at worst as acting in a self-serving manner while assigning blame elsewhere. With no downward accountability, the mentioned households have not succeeded in filing a

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land claim, let alone receiving a title deed. Despite new laws like FRA, the substantive reality remains the same—getting land registered is a top-down process, with a few claims granted sporadically.22 Meanwhile, villagers with a legitimate claim do not have village assemblies empowered to approve their claims and hold higher authorities accountable. The status quo of the Forest Department controlling land and villagers being unable to decide about their own land has been maintained.

61 Li (2007: 265) defines re-assembling as ‘grafting on new elements and reworking old ones; deploying existing discourses to new ends; transposing the meanings of key terms’. This sub-section has shown how interventions are reinvented in ways that replicate and perpetuate the status quo of top-down authorisation of inequitable resource access, despite attempts at democratisation.

Conclusion

62 This article began with the conundrum: How do policies designed to empower marginalised groups and informed by concerns of democratic decentralisation, get implemented through governmental development interventions in ways that enable the top-down authorisation of inequitable access in Jharkhand? I have tried, using cases from two forest divisions of West Singhbhum and focussing on many instances of authorising access, to illustrate the practices through which governmental development interventions build an inequitable state in a top-down manner. I have argued that the six practices respectively show how SAP and other interventions have: i. privileged powerful actors without a substantive legal basis; ii. opened up the area without serving local needs, and excluded ordinary people without managing to solve targeted problems; iii. let the powerful decide and contained any critique, without holding the powerful accountable; iv. authorised access without a scientific basis, and failed to offer continued support to a successful local-level democratic institution; v. broken governmental promises to privilege access for powerful actors; and vi. been replicated without taking lessons from substantial failures, and not compelled officials to be responsive to demands.

63 In untangling the practices through which governmental interventions construct inequitable access locally, I have argued that the conflation of development and security (and at times the narrow definition of development based on the governmental prioritisation of security-related concerns) that frames and justifies these interventions enables the mutual constitution of top-down authorisation and inequitable access. This builds an inequitable, undemocratic local-level state. There are doubtless many governmental development interventions besides those I have examined here. My intent has been to present an argument firmly grounded in empirical data, with each practice illustratating not just governmental action in a single instance, but rather representing certain tendencies in terms of how access is authorised and to whose advantage.

64 Whether through forging alignments, rendering matters technical, authorising knowledge, managing failures and contradictions, practicing anti-politics or depoliticisation, or re-assembling themselves, governmental development

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interventions consistently served to favour de facto top-down authorisation of inequitable access rather than to ensure the democratic authorisation of access. This was not only the case in the ‘extreme’ case of Saranda forest division, but also in ‘ordinary’ Sadar Chaibasa. I have argued that this was enabled by the government seeing development as security, which, even though it pertained primarily to Saranda, favoured those with power and resources in both forest divisions, rather than supporting democratic local decision-making processes and institutions.

65 In an era of continuing land grabbing and struggles over resources, eliding development with security enables the government to gain control over resources and territory alongside casting a bid for legitimacy. Too often, unfortunately, this is at the cost of marginalised populations, often overlapping with their being inhabitants in resource-rich areas (Peluso & Watts 2001). Deconstructing the manner in which access is authorised through practices of governmental development interventions is a telling technique for ascertaining whose interests these interventions favour and which actors bear the brunt of inequity. Analysing the ongoing practices and key struggles is essential for improvement.

66 There are naturally practices that are easier to access than others as a researcher, and struggles over authority are more evident in some contexts than others. This is because some are better at hiding such practices whilst others are unable to openly contest issues of access. But even based on available evidence, the case of SAP in Saranda reveals a government abdicating its responsibility towards marginalised communities in favour of large-scale mining companies by seeing development as security. While the practices are less animated in Sadar Chaibasa, the outcome suggests indifference rather than an attempt at building a democratic state. Seeing development as security in Jharkhand thus seems to be a policy choice that structures access through top-down authority in ways that depart from the mandate of the Indian Constitution. It is a strategy worth reconsidering and changing.

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NOTES

1. Control by the central government when a state government cannot function constitutionally. 2. See also Rycroft & Dasgupta (2011). 3. This requires a license and some political and economic reach. 4. Forests are typically controlled by this line ministry rather than the Revenue Department. 5. From national media reports. 6. Interview with West Singhbhum Deputy Commissioner, January 2015. 7. As Sundar (2012: 162) anticipates for a similar case. 8. See Yeh (2013) for an interesting parallel with China’s development interventions in Tibet. 9. Interview code 12-06 (anonymised) conducted on 17.02.2013. 10. Interview code 14-04 (anonymised) conducted on 14.02.2013. 11. I established this through semi-structured interviews, structured interviews on scheme functioning, and key informant interviews, including with project contractors who admitted this. 12. Interview code 01-06 (anonymised) conducted on 02.02.2013. 13. Interview code 05-03 (anonymised) conducted on 11.02.2013. 14. Interview code 14-03 (anonymised) conducted on 04.02.2013.

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15. For similar, more nuanced accounts elsewhere in Jharkhand, see Kumar & Corbridge (2002), Shah (2010). 16. These cost about 17 million dollars for 130 kilometres. 17. An average of roughly an article a week about Saranda in the national media during 2011–14. 18. This is reminiscent of what Shah (2010) terms being ‘in the shadows of the state’. 19. Name anonymised. 20. See Corbridge et al. (2004) for elaborate treatment. 21. Tenure of lineage (khunt) members who reclaimed land (katti). 22. Many interviewed villagers said these were granted to score political points for politicians.

ABSTRACTS

This article examines governmental development interventions and their local-level implications for access to and authority over resources, using a framework of assemblage practices (Li 2007) as an analytical strategy in a mixed-methods study in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum. This insurgency-affected district, populated by the Ho tribe, has India’s largest iron deposits. It hosts the Saranda Action Plan (SAP), a controversial intervention that exemplifies how India’s government elides development with security in resource-conflict regions. SAP aims to bring security and development to mineral-rich Saranda forest division, but has been widely critiqued for its failure to deliver community-oriented development, while the security agenda paves the way for mining concessions. Meanwhile, neighbouring Sadar Chaibasa division, with comparable development issues but less minerals, is treated indifferently. Based on secondary research in Saranda and empirical work in Sadar Chaibasa’s forest villages, this article untangles the practices through which governmental development interventions construct inequitable resource access locally in both extreme and ordinary cases. It argues that seeing development as security enables the mutual constitution of top-down authorisation and inequitable resource access, building an undemocratic local-level state.

INDEX

Keywords: governmental development interventions, security, Jharkhand, access, authority, assemblage

AUTHOR

SIDDHARTH SAREEN Visiting Researcher, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies

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The Politics of Land, Consent, and Negotiation: Revisiting the Development-Displacement Narratives from Singur in West Bengal

Ritanjan Das

Introduction

1 With the triumph of capitalism in the post-Cold War era, most countries in the global South embarked on a path of ‘transition’, initiating economic reforms and attracting foreign investment according to the strictures of global capitalism (Steur & Das 2009). Particularly interesting amongst such ‘transition’ cases are countries that explicitly legitimise their rule in terms of communist ideals, the general alliance of peasants and workers toward an egalitarian society, and whose ideological pillars include a pro-poor redistributive land reform (Steur & Das 2009). This paper highlights one such case in the Indian state of West Bengal, and recounts a story of land struggle and unrest in Singur (a small cluster of villages) between 2006 and 2008, as a thousand acres of prime arable land was forcibly acquired by the government for an automobile factory, much along the trend in contemporary capitalism that David Harvey (2005) conceptualises as the shift in emphasis from expanded reproduction to accumulation by dispossession.

2 In the face of severe criticism and frequent protests, the Singur project was eventually abandoned. It has attained a cult status amongst activists ever since, being a rare instance of a state government capitulating in the face of peasantry-led protests. However, in the development-displacement narratives of India, Singur was neither the first (an ICSSR study estimates the level of displacement across the country between 1951 and 1990 to be at about 21.3 million),1 nor the last (much larger struggles continue

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to rage in several states, for example, around the Posco project in Orissa. See Jenkins et al. 2014 for a detailed discussion on the politics of India’s special economic zones).

3 Nonetheless, the bitter and violent feud at Singur was unique in a different context: it took place in West Bengal, a state ruled by a communist government—the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—CPI(M)—led Left Front coalition—from 1977 to 2011. The coalition was a remarkable instance of political stability, especially in the wider context of caste/religion/ethnicity-based politics and frequent regime changes elsewhere in India (Banerjee 2010). It also brought in significant land reforms, was the first to initiate democratic decentralisation via panchayati-raj (a system of local governance), and gained unprecedented popularity as a government for the poor. Even in the 2006 state elections it earned a historic majority riding on a much-touted industrialisation drive,2 but the Singur episode followed immediately afterwards,3 and for the first time in over 30 years, the Left Front steadily lost electoral support, eventually relinquishing office in 2011.4

4 Such a dramatic turn of events, where a Left government with a rich history of pro- poor governance suffered rapid electoral decline following the brutalities it unleashed on the peasantry at the apparent behest of a multinational corporation, expectedly, led to a multitude of debates. Questions were particularly raised about (a) procedural inadequacies in the acquisition attempts (hurried acquisition-limited compensation) (P. Banerjee 2006, Sarkar 2007, Chandra 2008); and (b) development model centric debates about whether the state should act as a facilitator for private projects (as opposed to providing infrastructure and/or focusing on public sector initiatives) (Banerjee et al. 2007). In addition, the long-standing criticism of the neoliberal economic order in its re-enactment of the 19th century paradigm of industrialisation by expropriating agricultural land—a form of primitive accumulation—was also invoked (Bhaduri 2007, Bhattacharya 2007, Patnaik 2007, Sau 2008). A fourth strand of criticism emerged as well, interrogating the changing class character of the Left regime, from a pro-poor, agriculture/public sector focus to an aggressive facilitator of private industrialisation via forceful acquisition of agricultural land (Mukharji 2009, Bandopadhyay 2006, S. Banerjee 2006, 2008).

5 Diverse as they are, implicit assumptions about the very ‘official’ nature of the state— one where the government and its institutions are at the helm—are a commonality amongst all these criticisms. It is however important to interrogate assumption of this kind. While (correctly) questioning the role of the state (for example, questioning the acquisition legislation and the compensation amounts, debating the state’s role in private projects, criticising the economic model and the development ethos of the state), these debates do not venture to enquire what Harriss-White (2003) calls the ‘shadow state’. In her writings on the Indian society and economy, Harriss-White dismisses views of the state that are formalistic, or too focused on statutory responsibilities, and contends that the official part of the state has been hollowed out over the course of the last few decades and replaced by a ‘shadow state’.

6 The idea of the shadow state takes root in Harriss-White’s analysis of the local state and the informal economy in India, in which she questions the conventional categorisation of an institutional state with juridical boundaries, a market, and a civil society, and argues that no such clear separation exists at local levels. If one looks below the level of a state capital, then there is an economy ‘on the edge of—or frankly outside—the ambit of state regulation’ with a great deal of disorder (2003: 74). This is precisely where the

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‘shadow’ lies: a vast assemblage of brokers, advisers, political workers, crooks and contractors surrounding the ‘official state’, depriving it of funds, and helping to ensure that it is run in part for the private benefit of some of its employees. The shadow state is not wholly an informal entity, nor are its boundaries entirely separate. The shadow state comes into being because of the formal State and co-exists with it. It can be defined as that part of the informal, ‘real’ economy that cannot operate without the particular form taken by the State […] the ‘shadow’ State is a part of the actually existing State [...] the real State, including its shadow, is bigger than the formal State, and has a vested interest in the perpetuation of a stricken and porous formal State. (Harriss-White 2003: 89, emphasis in original)

7 Harriss-White admits that while the shadow state is widely visible in India,5 it has rarely been used as an analytical framework. However, it will be an important conceptual tool for this paper, as over three decades of Left rule in West Bengal, transactional spaces between the state and the margins can be easily seen as blending into the ‘shadow’. Furthermore, discussions on West Bengal have long been focused on the transformation of the CPI(M)/Left Front far beyond the institutional ambit of the formal state, turning into almost a parallel social institution with absolute control over all facets of (particularly rural) society (for example, see Ruud 1994). Particularly notable in this context are Bhattacharyya’s concept of party-society (2001, 2009, 2010), which highlights how the ‘party apparatus’ came to occupy centre-stage in all forms of state-society transactions, and Roy’s notion of ‘informality as a mode of governance’ (2005), which locates such informality in the functioning of local clubs and mid-level CPI(M) leaders (2002, 2004), and contextualises it with respect to larger development conflicts in India/South Asia (2009).

8 But surprisingly, though the CPI(M)’s incursion into every realm of the Bengali society has been extensively discussed, the debates around Singur lend themselves to a (formal) state vs. peasantry format. There remains a story to be told about the role of local party functionaries in the process, who often acted with a purpose at odds with the declared objectives of industrial development. The objective of this paper is therefore to produce an alternative narrative of the Singur events, by focusing on certain ground-level elements and dynamics that might be described—following Harriss-White —as constituting the ‘shadow’. It does not propose to counter, and in fact complements, the three strands of debate around Singur, but brings to the forefront a set of dynamics that has gone largely unnoticed by those debates. The story presented here emerged out of an ethnographic study of Singur conducted by the author as a part of doctoral research in 2009–10,6 when the conflicts and tensions in the region were highly volatile. The project had been successfully stalled barely a year before, and yet apprehensions about the future were gradually setting in.

9 A broader point also needs to be made here. Amidst rampant industrialisation- urbanisation across India (and much of South Asia), ‘land’ remains a central arbiter of power. As this volume aptly demonstrates, appropriation of land in the name of development/national security and associated struggles is an increasing phenomenon in the subcontinent. Peasant land is cleared for capitalist investments, purportedly aimed at ‘industrialisation’ and employment creation, but often driven by real estate speculation and elite consumption, accompanied by the creation of huge reserve labour armies (Banerjee-Guha 2008). However, most discussions of land struggles7 suffer from what Harriss-White criticizes as too neat a categorization: the ‘state’, the ‘market’, and

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‘civil society’, missing much of the local-level dynamics. Recounting the Singur story through the lens of the shadow state, this paper thus also tries to make a broader point that the very idea of the ‘state’ needs to be revaluated while examining land struggles in South Asia, looking beyond the formal ambit of institutions and legislations, and venturing into the uncharted networks that dominate much of the transactions at the grassroots level.

10 The paper is organised as follows: the next section provides a brief summary of the events in Singur; the following section develops a conceptual framework through which to understand the nature of ‘shadow’ in West Bengal; thereafter, the multiple narratives of political negotiations around Singur are discussed, drawing on evidence collected during the study. The final section presents some concluding remarks.

Revisiting Singur

11 Industrial development in West Bengal under the Left Front has been extensively written about (see Dasgupta 1998, Chakravarty & Bose 2013), and only a brief discussion of the context is necessary here. The Left Front took office in 1977 amidst a stagnating industrial scenario, but the following decades saw even further decline in the state’s industrial fortunes, as the government maintained a militant attitude against all forms of private investment.8 In 1994, the government came up with a new Policy Statement on Industrial Development, which for the first time signalled a departure in favour of the private sector and foreign investment. However, the industrial scenario post-1994, though improving gradually, continued to remain sluggish.9 In 2000, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya succeeded Jyoti Basu as the Chief Minister, and pursued an aggressive industrialisation agenda from the outset. In fact, his push for large scale industrialisation is seen as the decisive factor behind the CPI(M)’s impressive show in two subsequent state elections.10 The government now seemed focused on attracting private investment and generating employment through developing industrial parks, townships, special economic zones (SEZs) and so on. Singur was its first flagship project.

The Singur project

12 Immediately after its 2006 ‘industrial development’-led electoral victory, the government started an intensive campaign to win a big-ticket project to catapult the state into the big league of investment destinations. The much coveted ‘Nano’ project of TATA Motors (a small car with a promised price-tag of Rs. 1 lakh11 only) was announced as that elusive ticket, courted with a range of fiscal incentives, most of which were never made public. Amidst much fanfare, the government promised that the Nano project would turn West Bengal into India’s next automobile hub (Chandra 2008).

13 The controversy was sparked by the decision to acquire 997 acres of agricultural land for the factory, as the site chosen was in the agriculturally prosperous town of Singur, approximately 40 km from the state capital Kolkata. The land was mainly spread across five mouzas12—Berabheri, Gopalnagar, Singherbheri, Bajemelia, and Khaserbheri—with marginal/small farmers constituting more than 50% of the population. There was also a

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sizeable section (25–30%) of unregistered sharecroppers and landless people (WBIDC 2006, P. Banerjee 2006). The initial compensation offered was Rs. 8.7 lakhs and Rs. 12.8 lakhs per acre for single-cropped and double-cropped land respectively for landowners; registered sharecroppers were to receive 25% of this value.

14 The project’s announcement caused immediate apprehensions about the loss of land and livelihood. The first organised agitation took place on 25 May 2006, and soon after, a Krishijami Raksha Committee (Save Agricultural Land Committee) was formed, which held its first demonstration on 1 June. Between 9 May and 27 September there were nine meetings between the government and local representatives, including four with the Krishijami Raksha Committee, but they failed to reach a consensus (Mohanty 2007). The protests escalated rapidly, bringing together a motley political coalition spearheaded by the TMC13 under its leader Mamata Banerjee. Their specific demand was to return 400 acres that belonged to unwilling farmers (plot-holders who refused to part with their land and collect compensation, although some were absentee landlords/ businessmen) (Sau 2008). The movement received widespread support from civil rights and human rights groups, legal bodies and social activists.

15 On 25 September, the day scheduled for compensation disbursement, the local block office was surrounded by thousands of protestors demanding the process be stopped. What happened during the following hours remains unclear, but the police finally resorted to a lathi (stick or baton)-charge that resulted in one dead, and several injured. Another phase of violent clashes took place in December, and the government imposed prohibitory orders to continue operations. A ceremonial inauguration of the factory took place on 21 January 2007, with the prohibitory orders still in place.

16 Construction continued throughout 2007 and the first half of 2008 amidst regular protests and agitations. However, a fresh bout of intense agitation led by Mamata Banerjee in August 2008 brought work to a complete standstill. This led to another series of inconclusive negotiations between the government and the opposition, culminating in a formal withdrawal of the project by TATA Motors, announced on 3 October 2008.

Debates around land acquisition

17 Naturally, a wide range of questions emerged about the entire episode (see Nielson 2010 for a comprehensive discussion). There were debates about the high-handed manner of acquisition following an archaic law (the Land Acquisition Act, 1894). The problem was primarily twofold: land pricing and compensation quantum. Estimating adequate market value in a sparse market for agricultural land is rather difficult. Additionally, a small farmer usually self-consumes a proportion of his production, but having parted with his land will be compelled to buy food at market price. Market valuation therefore, even if accurate, fails to provide adequate compensation. Questions were raised about evaluating land price based on earnings from its present use, rather than possible returns from future industrial usage. While it might be deemed appropriate that the present owner should also receive a share of this increased valuation, as per the Land Acquisition Act, ‘any increase to the value of the land […] likely to accrue from the use to which the land acquired will be put’ has to be neglected when determining compensation (Sarkar 2007: 1435, emphasis added). Compensation based on the market valuation of land was thus naturally judged

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insufficient. Furthermore, the compensation package completely ignored inflationary pressures. Once adjusted, the future returns fell ruefully short of even the current monthly income from an acre of multi-cropping land (Sarkar 2007: 1435).

18 Not only were these issues widely debated in West Bengal, they also found a national resonance, as the parliament soon enacted a new land acquisition bill. However, amidst wide-ranging discussions about procedural inaccuracies (along with debates about development paradigms and the Left class-character), the intense political nature of the events was hardly emphasised. There remains, outside the dominant criticisms, an undercurrent of ‘grass-root politicisation’ that has been the cornerstone of West Bengal politics over the last three decades. Much along the lines of the shadow state, West Bengal witnessed the increasing importance of political managers/workers/cadres during the Left rule, and true power, especially in the countryside, rested squarely with them. This can be described as the functioning of an alternative bureaucracy, which— while operating in the shadow of the state—did not just coexist with the latter, but enjoyed almost absolute control over all its institutions. The next section develops this concept further.

The shadow state in West Bengal: the CPI(M)’s alternative bureaucracy

19 Political discourses built around the Left Front during its first fifteen years remained dominated by (mostly positive) accounts of its institutional initiatives (see Kohli 1987, 1990). Debates and criticisms, though increasingly forthcoming, were restricted to methodological aspects, without providing any alternative intellectual hypothesis.

20 It was only in the late 1990s that a new line of argument emerged, focusing on a culture of political mediation embedded in the operational character of the CPI(M). It was not in governance or ideology, but rather in the party’s ‘mediation between the government and the population in a field of popular transactions that the regime’s durability lay’ (Bhattacharyya 2009: 60). Well-orchestrated party machinery was not a governance channel, but an instrument for mediation aimed at strengthening electoral position.

21 During the Left rule, transactional spaces between the state and society in West Bengal gradually came to be dominated by one single form—political allegiance and association. Here no negotiation was allowed, or even recognised, unless it was backed by a recognisable party allegiance or had a distinct party identity of its own. So entrenched was this practice in the political culture of the state, as it still is today, that all parties, irrespective of size or strength, were compelled to conform to it. It was, however, the Left parties—especially the CPI(M)—that were most successful in their ‘day-to-day management of the [...] society with the help of a well-orchestrated, locally- embedded and vertically-connected party-machinery’ (Bhattacharyya 2009: 60).

22 In practice, this ‘day-to-day management’ took the form of the CPI(M) entrusting a network of well-disciplined party cadres with the task of overseeing implementation of all governance initiatives. However, over time, the overwhelming presence of party cadres did not remain restricted to monitoring governance initiatives alone, as local figureheads started to extend their custodianship into every aspect of rural social life: from private affairs such as marrying one’s daughter (the party might question the

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choice of groom depending on political allegiance), to family feuds (property affairs), building a house (choice of contractor), and social/administrative issues such as procuring a ration card (which was much quicker if one belonged to the ‘correct’ party). Local clubs, cultural associations, and even schools and colleges were brought under the political umbrella as the party began to enjoy the last word in all matters of right and wrong within local communities.14

23 This is precisely how the shadow state took shape in West Bengal. With a vast assemblage of party-cadres overseeing most forms of social transactions, there was rapid erosion in state institutions’ legitimacy, as they could hardly function without the approval of the ‘shadow’ (party functionaries), with the latter enjoying the tacit support of the former to ensure electoral support. Entrusted by the party leadership with the task of fostering political allegiance, these local chieftains quickly became the sole benefactors of rural socio-political lives, carefully monitoring the political returns of all governance initiatives. Some of these party functionaries were panchayat members or bureaucrats in block development offices; others could be party local/ block/district committee members. In effect, the CPI(M) had created an entire parallel structure to supervise and control crucial state institutions, as well as to monitor the provision of even the most basic civic services with an eye to upholding partisan motives.

24 A parallel phenomenon reinforced this development. While West Bengal was routinely criticised for bureaucratic inefficiency, historically, given the level of party- supervision, it was rare that administrative decisions, particularly below state level, could be taken without political approval. In effect, formal administrative channels not only suffered from partisan incursions, but also became heavily dependent on political leadership for normal functioning.15 Therefore, while the rhetoric emanating from the top government offices post-1994 promised a transition in industrial policy, political control over the process was barely relinquished. Adjustments were only made to the extent that would suit localised political priorities. As a result, in spite of some attempts to bring the new economic priorities to the forefront, the transition could hardly generate the intended impact. With an almost defunct channel of administration, having lost the capability to perform autonomously, real control of the process shifted back to party quarters (in the ‘shadow’), and implementation exercises became an opportunity to maximise local political interests.

25 What this meant was that the government was reliant on party networks even for daily administrative purposes. While this is certainly not a unique phenomenon, the Left Front stands apart due to the degree of this reliance, which in all senses was absolute. Another factor that sets West Bengal apart was the ideological legitimisation of such dependence, routinely provided by party heads (see the Anil Biswas quotation below). From assessing ground-level priorities to formulating policy decisions and implementation, the party’s parallel structure was in charge. This structure was analogous to an alternative bureaucracy—owned and controlled by the party—working primarily to maximise political interests by virtue of its authority over formal administrative services. The idea of an alternative bureaucracy does not indicate that it replaced state bureaucracy, but that at every stage of formal administrative processes there was a parallel party authority, providing political supervision and vetoing administrative decisions based on political mileage (for example, party local, zonal and district committees would oversee panchayats (village or supra-village councils) at the

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village, samiti (regional), and zilla (district) levels respectively. See H. Bhattacharyya 1998 for a detailed discussion). It would also act as a more reliable source of ground- level information, or at least filter formal information sources as ‘politically appropriate’.

26 This was certainly not an unexpected development. Controlling various administrative units was a declared political-ideological goal of the CPI(M). Anil Biswas, ex-CPI(M) Secretary and Left Front Chairman, explained in a 2001 interview (with The Statesman) that the government and the party remained in a symbiotic relationship, and went on to assert that a true Marxist gladly follows the party diktat and is proud to be a ‘puppet in the hands of the party’.16 Given this attitude, it is hardly surprising that the government, instead of using its official channels for administration, started to rely on the party’s own people or own sources.

27 The alternative bureaucratic structure gave rise to some key area-specific political managers or party supremos, who oversaw all operations in their localities/districts. Some, who operated on the fringes of Kolkata, were established mid-level CPI(M) leaders like Kanti Ganguly or Subhash Chakraborty (both were long-serving ministers of the Left Front). Similar figures emerged in other districts, for example, Lakshman Seth (former MP) and Sushanta Ghosh (former MLA and district committee member) in East Midnapore, Dipak Sarkar (district committee member) in West Midnapore, Balai Sanpui (district committee member) and Suhrid Dutta (zonal committee secretary) in Hooghly, and so on. These people became the go-to men for the government for almost anything in their respective areas—law and order, agriculture, health, educational services, and industrialisation. The usual practice was to entrust them with the overall responsibility for any project; they would then involve the appropriate people/ channels (local political leaders and cadres in the zonal and local committees and the panchayats) to carry out monitoring on a daily basis (see Banerjee 2010 for a discussion on the role of such party bosses). Formal administrative channels such as block development offices or local municipalities were completely subservient to the panchayats or the local committees.

28 The workings of this alternative bureaucracy were clearly evident in Singur. But surprisingly, a coherent narrative of its role never came to the forefront. Admittedly, the nature of the events easily lent themselves to a ‘state versus peasants’ format, but ignoring the political nuances leaves a void in understanding the layered nature of the party’s role. In the following discussion, three interrelated themes—the choice of land, acquiring consent, and negotiating the transactions—are examined in order to build such an understanding. Each of these themes not only demonstrates the role of the CPI(M)’s alternative bureaucracy in Singur, but also provides an alternative narrative that shows how the notion of the formal ‘state’ and its development initiatives collapses as one approaches the grassroots. The events narrated next also have a larger resonance in the context of appropriation of land in South Asia, as they show how local political actors and priorities—employing techniques that can be often dubbed paralegal—subvert the very discourse of development that legitimises such appropriation by the ‘state’ in the first place.

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The narrative of land

09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 B8 CB A8 BE B0 A7 BE A8 AC C1 95 C7 A7 B0 C7 , 9C AE BF AE CB A6 C7 B0 AE BE 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 A4 C1 AB BE A8 86 B8 C1 95 , AA C1 B2 BF B6 86 B8 C1 95 , 9C AE BF A6 C7 AC 09 09 A8 BE । The land is our mother, harvesting golden crops. Come storm, come police, we will not give our land. (Text from a poster at Berabheri village, Singur)

29 One of the major questions that emerged as events at Singur unfurled (see Sarkar 2007) —but was never satisfactorily answered—was: why choose such a fertile area for a project that requires large scale acquisition and transformation of agricultural land for industrial usage? Understandably, acquisition of some cultivated land was unavoidable, but the fact that the government completely ignored the fertility aspect is inexplicable. The Interim Report of the Citizens’ Committee on Singur (2007) observed: According to the Status Report issued by the CPM, most of the affected area is mono-cropped. They, however, seem to have used a land survey of the early seventies after which […] soil fertility [has increased] enormously [...] most of the land is under four to five crops. Nirupam Sen (senior CPI(M) leader and ex-industry minister) tries to explain the decision: We showed the TATA people several sites, but they chose Singur. Given the importance of the project, we saw no reason to disagree. The nature of the land was never taken into account.17 Given its location,18 Singur is a great site for entrepreneurial activity. However, it is surprising that land fertility was never a concern. In fact, Sen admits that they were unaware of it. Singur was predominantly a low land, that is why almost all mouzas in the area have the suffix bheri in their names19 […] in our records, most of the area remains sali (low yielding or single-crop), and only a small proportion is suna (high yielding or multi-crop).20

30 This admission does not explain why the government did not bother to verify its records before approving the project. What is even more perplexing is that in the face of widespread contrary reports in the media, the government stuck to its version. The following is an excerpt from a television interview with the Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, broadcast on 25 February 2007, almost ten months into the entire episode (IBN Live 2007).21 Interviewer: So you […] decided to give them [the TATAs] fertile land, knowing that it was the only way they would come to Kolkata? Bhattacharya: No, no. What you are saying about the nature of the land [is not right]—maybe our reports are not up to date. Interviewer: You concede that? Bhattacharya: Yes. But I tell you that the major portion of the land is mono-crop. I stick to that.

31 The reasons behind such discrepancy between the official and public versions of land fertility levels (mono crop/unprofitable vs. multi crop/profitable) have rarely been questioned. But it is here that the role of the alternative bureaucracy lies. In the absence of land records, the government relied blindly on the party’s local political

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managers for the necessary information. Bhattacharya categorically admits this in the interview: Interviewer: If your report is not up to date, how can you say the major portion of land is mono-crop? Bhattacharya: Then how can they [the citizens’ committee] know that? Interviewer: Because they visited it. They have spoken to the farmers. Bhattacharya: I know these farmers better than them… My colleagues are working there, my party, my peasants’ organisation knows better than these people.22

32 Evidently, Bhattacharya’s source of information was his party. He precisely echoes the kind of information that was fed up the chain by the political managers at ground level. For example, Balai Sanpui, an influential local CPI(M) leader, said: This is predominantly a mono-crop area. The whole area is lowland. Out of the 997 acres, at most 100 acres are two-crop. Agriculture is hardly a profitable venture […] not even 2000 rupees per bigha [is earned] annually.23 Contrast Sanpui’s version with the following excerpt from Subrata Sinha’s (ex-Deputy Director General, Geological Survey of India) observations: The crème de la crème of this prime alluvial basin is the Hooghly river valley, capable of diversified multi-cropping the year round. This is because of rich alluviation during the monsoons, prolific groundwater and a network of stream channels. If cultivated with care, virtually every bit of its land is a veritable gold mine (Sinha 2008). In Singur, farmers concurred with Sinha’s observations. A woman, taking a break from sowing seeds in a plot adjacent to the factory walls, said: We are now sowing dhan (paddy), next will be alu (potatoes). After alu, dhyarosh (okra), and then jhinga (ridge gourd). If time permits, we will grow alu again after jhinga. There are at least four crops per year.24 The overarching consensus among the locals was that they grew three to four crops on average. Krishnachandra Manna, a local farmer and ex-school teacher, gave an estimate entirely contradictory to Sanpui’s claims: Over the years with improved agricultural methods, four different crops per year is a norm. On average, our annual net income was 12–13000 rupees per bigha.25 The most interesting comment came from Rathindra Ghosh, a farmer who now runs a small tea stall, having lost all his land (about 5 bighas). He accused the local party people of providing incorrect information to their political bosses, and claimed that neither the government nor the party authorities ever bothered to check with the locals. No one came to us to enquire or discuss. The government asked their local committee workers, people like Balai Sanpui, Surhid Dutta. We know that they have misinformed the government. They said that not much rice grows here. That is a blatant lie.26

33 It is difficult to ascertain the purpose behind such deliberate misinformation, as the fertility level of Singur is not difficult to determine. Opposition quarters barraged the state with allegations and conspiracy theories. For example, it was said that: (1) the real intention behind the project was to recover lost political ground; (2) the demarcation of the factory site was a covert exercise to undermine the opposition stronghold by marking plots owned by TMC supporters for acquisition while leaving CPI(M) loyalists’ land untouched, thus resulting in a zigzag shape instead of a conventional quadrangular area for the site; (3) contrary to the government’s claim that TATA Motors’ representatives chose the location, it was a local CPI(M) leader who informed the party that if the project were brought to Singur then local youth would rally behind

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the party in anticipation of employment, and their support could be used to regain the assembly seat, etc.

34 While there are is some anecdotal evidence in favour of these claims, it is difficult to ascertain its validity. Nonetheless, these stories do support the main argument: that right from the onset, not only were local CPI(M) leaders involved in the project, they were also the main ground-level facilitating agency entrusted by the government. Furthermore, such was the scale of this dependence that only information from party sources was considered reliable, even if there were contradictory reports elsewhere. This was the first instance of the alternative bureaucracy taking over—with the tacit support of the formal state—and underscores how the latter gradually retreated into its own shadow. The negotiation with the landowners to acquire consent forms the remainder of the story.

The narrative of consent and negotiation

35 As events unfolded in Singur, so did various versions of how many landowners had given consent for acquisition. For example: 23 October 2006: Buddhadeb Bhattacharya announced that consent had been given for 800 acres,27 and compensation had already been disbursed. 6 November 2006: Nirupam Sen said that consent had been given for 854 acres.28 23 November 2006: Buddhadeb Bhattacharya announced the amount to be 913 acres. As per the Status Report on Singur (WBIDC, 2006), by 2 December 2006 compensation had been awarded for only 635 acres, though the report also claimed that consent had been given for 952 acres. 9 January 2007: 789 farmers claimed that they had not given consent/taken compensation. The total amount of land owned by these farmers amounted to 337.97 acres.29 Nirupam Sen admitted that consent was given for 70% of the area, and compensation had not been collected for the remaining portions.30 This estimate is closer to the above claim by the Krishijami Raksha Committee and contradicts the earlier announcements by Sen and Bhattacharya.

36 This idea of acquiring consent is rather intriguing. The Land Acquisition Act had no separate provision to acquire consent. However, of its own accord the government designed a consent form, promising an additional 10% to those who would sign within the deadline.31 The various consent estimates are based on these forms. The advantage of gathering consent was threefold: first, the government could claim that a large proportion of the farmers/sharecroppers supported the project and thereby readily agreed to sell their land; second, it also allowed the government (at least initially) to claim that the acquisition process and the compensation amount decided were just; and finally, a high proportion of ‘consent givers’ could be used as a political tool to undermine the opposition, accusing them of being anti-development.

37 During the course of this research, it gradually became clear that the actual exercise to garner consent was not just a case of collecting signatures, but a party-mediated exercise. The overt consensus at Singur among farmers who refused to give consent seems to be that from the announcement of the project to the specific decisions about which plots would be acquired, the party played a major role, with very limited negotiation with local people. The Interim Report of the Citizens’ Committee’s also concludes: ‘Singur villagers learnt of the […] acquisition […] from newspapers, there

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being no Panchayat meeting or Party spokesman who informed them’ (Citizens’ Committee on Singur 2007).

38 Not only did the party play a crucial role in demarcating the plots for acquisition, it was also in charge of overseeing the list of farmers who would be eligible to receive compensation. The locals gave vivid examples of how the party controlled the entire process from the start. Rathindra Ghosh, (quoted earlier), recalled: We were never officially informed about the acquisition. Notices were apparently put up in the block development office, but we had no idea. Once the details came out in the newspapers, we went to the office, and were straightaway told that our land has been earmarked for acquisition. There was no question of giving consent, nor did anybody discuss compensation adequacy.32 Krishnachandra Manna (quoted earlier) recalled a party meeting organised to discuss the project. The party called a meeting with all the farmers. We went, expecting information about the project and to negotiate compensation. Instead, they showed us a finalised map of the project site with the plots to be acquired already earmarked. Some of us protested, demanding a discussion before details were finalised. But the meeting was full of party cadres and our voices were drowned. We tried to argue that this was not the process, we could not just be ordered by the party, but in vain. Actually, the party knew discussions with the villagers might lead to many awkward questions. Instead, they planned to straightaway initiate the acquisition process, anticipating no further questions once compensation disbursement commences.33 What are these ‘awkward questions’ that Manna refers to? This is where the entire consent story comes in. Ratan Ghosh, a local TMC leader, elaborated: We asked the CPI(M) leaders to call meetings with the villagers. Instead, they adopted a clandestine approach. For example, in place of registered sharecroppers, the party listed many names who were not even sharecroppers, but local cadres, or sharecroppers from other areas, even as far as […] 10km from Singur. The party office even issued patta (ownership rights for vested plots) to their cadres for khas (non-vested) plots, who could then claim compensation. This also increased the number of people who could be shown to have given consent. They even managed to get some of their cadres to sign empty consent forms.34

39 Even if the majority of the above claims are dismissed as political blame-games, a farmer who did sell his land and claimed compensation and is also a CPI(M) supporter said (speaking strictly on condition of anonymity): The government claims to have organised negotiation camps. True, there were camps, but by the party and for party members. The local leaders encouraged us (party supporters) to quickly sell our lands, and promised that we would be given something extra. We were also asked to convince other party supporters. No government official was present. The party may have also included some of its cadres’ names—even though they were neither landowners nor sharecroppers—in the list of consent givers.35 Many versions of such stories can be heard in Singur, not only from dissenters, but also from estranged CPI(M) supporters. Balai Das, who used to be an active CPI(M) cadre until he refused to part with his land, asserted: I was a CPI(M) supporter, a regular in party meetings and demonstrations. But I realised that only if one abides by what the leaders say, one can survive and be rewarded, but otherwise the party will coerce you into submission, even by brute force if necessary. That is what has happened to us because we refused to sell our land.

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40 In an ethnographic account of Kadampur—another village in Singur—Dayabati Roy found a similar polarisation: [A] section of people residing in Ghoshpara [...] offered their land […] under the influence of CPI(M) […] which could maintain its stronghold in that particular hamlet [...] The influence of the […] party in the village was spread by some farmers [...] One of them, Karuna Das, a retired primary school teacher, is the present CPI(M) leader in the village and is organising people in favour of land acquisition [...]. He had been a panchayat member several times since 1978 and worked in the position of ‘pradhan’ (chief) and ‘upapradhan’ (deputy chief) (Roy 2007: 3324–25).

41 Interestingly, the claim that the entire ground level mobilisation at Singur was a party- mediated exercise received support from local CPI(M) leaders as well. When asked to what extent the government depended on local party leaders, Balai Sanpui (local CPI(M) leader) not only admitted, but boasted, that he was one of the most reliable go- to men for Nirupam Sen. I used to talk directly with Nirupam babu. He instructed me to organise meetings and get the locals to agree. There were no officials here. We were in charge. Apart from me there were Srikanta Chatterjee (local committee member), Dipankar Das (district committee member) and Anil Basu (ex-MP). Everybody who wanted to sell their land used to come to us for advice.36 Sanpui even admitted, albeit indirectly, that they did not try to negotiate with the people who were known to oppose the project. We did many meetings and explained the benefits of the project. But we used to avoid areas where they opposed it. What was the point?37 Finally, political managers like Sanpui were also the most reliable source for the higher authorities on the state of ground-level affairs, and even had a say in policy decisions. A very senior WBIDC official—who was an integral part of the project right from the onset —clearly voiced some of his concerns and suspicions: I feel that local agents were pursuing their own political vendetta. We were extremely cautious, appreciating the emotional/psychological attachment of the villagers to their land, but the ground-level incidents were getting totally politicised, and unfortunately our political bosses would only listen to what their party people had to say.38

42 The point of recounting these stories is not to argue that the entire Singur project was an exercise in territorial subjugation by the CPI(M) under the garb of industrial development, but to highlight the presence of a certain degree of political control at the grassroots level by the alternative bureaucracy of the CPI(M), which has been largely missed by mainstream literature. Some of the major problems in Singur— particularly the lack of ground-level negotiation that led to much of the initial apprehension—stemmed from this. Owing to its partisan character and hegemonic tendencies, the alternative bureaucracy’s attempt to facilitate the project remained parochial at best, never seriously engaging in consensus building. This trend was particularly apparent when many dissenters admitted that their initial opposition was actually a pressure tactic to force the government to increase the compensation amount. Even Ratan Ghosh, the local TMC leader, admitted: If the government had increased the compensation amount, the opposition could not have cemented itself the way it eventually did. I saw many agitators convincing the farmers that the government would give in and raise prices if they could just hold on a little longer.39 A group of unwilling farmers at the forefront of the agitations openly stated (requesting not to be named):

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Only later did the central demand of the agitation become the return of 400 acres. Initially we were protesting against the price, nobody in their right mind would have sold their land for such a meagre price, especially when their entire livelihood depended on that land. Had the government negotiated the price with us directly, none of this would have happened. But they relied on their local leaders, who in turn assumed that given their political clout in the area, convincing the farmers to sell their land at the pre-determined price will not pose much of a problem. So they did not even bother to talk to us, and convinced their supporters to sell their land first, promising additional benefits. By doing this, they managed to convince their political bosses that there was sufficient consensus, and acquisition would not be a problem. The government blindly trusted them, and was caught off-guard once the protests escalated.40 This is a fairly accurate summary of the fundamental conflicts at Singur. While the issue at stake was land price, the nature of the conflict was evidently political, the seeds of which were sown when the local party channels resorted to clandestine tactics to create a shroud of consensus around the project instead of recognising the legitimate concerns and aspirations of the stakeholders.

43 Such outcomes, however, are not surprising. These clandestine tactics reflect the same tendencies that the alternative bureaucratic channel had become so adept at executing. For decades it had perfected the art of manufacturing consent and extracting personal and/or localised political dividends out of all government initiatives, even resorting to violence if necessary.41 There were quite a few instances of police brutalities in Singur as well, particularly on 25 September and 2 December 2006. The Interim Report of the Citizens’ Committee on Singur observed: It is generally acknowledged that Singur villagers have not used violence […] so far, even though there has been considerable violence by the police against villagers […] especially on 25 September and 2 December […] protestors are arrested for congregating, and ordinary vehicles are stopped and searched. Women were beaten up by male policemen, filthy language was used, villagers and student protestors lathi charged […]. The charge of possession of dangerous weapons had been clapped on a two and a half year old girl who was sent to prison for several days (Citizens’ Committee on Singur and Nandigram 2007). Rajkumar Bhul, a 21-year-old farmer died in the violence of 25 September. Even more tragic is the case of Tapasi Malik, a young girl of 19, (allegedly) raped and brutally murdered. Her half-burnt body was found in the early hours of 18 December on the factory premises.42 In June 2007, Debu Malik (a local CPI(M) cadre) and Suhrid Dutta (the CPI(M) Singur zonal committee secretary) were arrested as the prime suspects in the case and three other local CPI(M) cadres—Mahadeb Santra, Subodh Kole and Dilip Malik—were also interrogated.43 The case is still on-going; Dutta was released on bail in 2009.

Conclusion

44 The combined narratives of land, consent, and negotiation bring certain dynamics that were at work in Singur—beyond the official ambit of the state—to the forefront. While the role of the state in the entire episode has been questioned repeatedly, it was the shadow state (conceptualised here as the alternative bureaucracy) that was all- pervasive on the ground. State institutions were barely present or functional, and much of the procedural inaccuracies were germane to how the state could influence the political managers that constituted the ‘shadow’ (or be influenced by them). In fact,

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these narratives show that within the imperatives brought by a strategy of industrial development, in reality the government had no choice but to depend on its trusted alternative bureaucratic structures, which kicked in not only to negotiate land ownership, determine price and usage patterns but also to encourage land invasion, exact electoral discipline and maintain political loyalties. Furthermore, the alternative bureaucracy had also become less attuned to the larger objectives of the government over time and had started to focus more on maximising localised political and even personal interests. The government, on the other hand, had become so dependent on the political managers for its administrative functions that it had no other way to counter such trends.44 The shadow state, evidently, ‘exists at the most local level of all’ (Harriss-White 2003: 83), as Singur, a story of peasant struggle, celebrated in the development-displacement tales of India, at some level becomes a story where the state was subsumed by its own shadow, forcing us to rethink the very idea of the ‘state’ in the context of land struggles in India.

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NOTES

1. Ramanathan, Usha (2006) ‘Creating Dispensable Citizens’ The Hindu, 14 April, URL: http:// www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/article3147114.ece. 2. The CPI(M) alone won 176 seats (37.13% vote share), the highest since 1991.

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3. Alongside Singur, a significant incident took place in Nandigram, another cluster of villages in the East Midnapore district. The locals had been protesting since January 2007 against a proposal to acquire land for a chemical hub. On 14 March, 14 people were killed and hundreds injured in an indiscriminate police action, as the state government (allegedly) let loose armed party cadres alongside police forces, who engaged in indiscriminate violence (Sarkar & Chowdhury 2009). In common parlance, Singur-Nandigram are mentioned together, with Nandigram equally evocative in public perception. However, for analytical clarity, this paper focuses on Singur alone. 4. The CPI(M)’s seat share reduced to 40 (30.08% vote share). 5. And also elsewhere, for example, in Sierra Leone in the context of civil war (see Herring 1999). 6. The doctoral research itself focused on the politics of policy transition in West Bengal as engineered by the Left Front since the early 1990s. It involved a wide variety of methods: archival research, about 100 qualitative interviews, and the ethnographic study at Singur. During the ethnography, people from all walks of life were interacted with, such as, local CPI(M) cadres/ supporters, the local BDO (block development officer) and panchayat pradhan (the panchayat head), farmers who sold their land and received compensation and those who opposed the acquisition, sharecroppers affected in the process, villagers injured in clashes with the police, and so on. While it is not possible to elaborate on the research design process here, it is nonetheless relevant to point out that at the onset of the ethnography, the concept of the ‘shadow’ was not envisaged to emerge as strongly as it eventually did. The initial interactions with the villagers were mostly based on their experience of the acquisition ‘process’. It was only after a few months in the field—and having established a trust base so they started talking about the underlying politics—that the idea of using the shadow state as a conceptual framework eventually took root. 7. See, for example, Sarkar and Chowdhury (2009), Sarkar (2007), Bandopadhyay (2007), and P. Banerjee (2006) for discussions of various perspectives on land struggles, but with the implicit assumption of an ‘official’ state with statutory responsibilities. 8. Between 1977 and 1990, West Bengal’s share in gross national output declined from an already low 10.5% to a paltry 6.1%. (source: Annual Survey of Industries, GoI, 1977–1992). 9. Between 1991 and 2003 West Bengal’s share of all-India industrial proposals was only 4.73%, and the actual investment was 3.85% of all-India investment. For a state like Maharashtra, these figures were 19.9% and 21.11% respectively (Sinha 2004). 10. In 2001, the CPI(M) won 143 seats (36.6% vote share), and 176 seats (37.13% vote share) in 2006. 11. Approximately $1500 in the current exchange rate. 12. A mouza corresponds to a specific land area within which there may be one or more settlements, still used for land revenue administration. 13. Trinamool Congress: the main opposition party in West Bengal at the time, and currently in government. TMC came to power in 2011, and while it is not within the purview of this paper to trace these subsequent developments in West Bengal, the growth and operational style of the TMC reinforces the conceptualisation of the ‘shadow state’ in the state’s socio-political environment. 14. This is a commonly known phenomenon in West Bengal; see Bandyopadhyay (2009) and Roy (2002) for detailed descriptions. 15. See Bhattacharyya (1998) for a detailed discussion. 16. ‘It’s Now or Never’ (2001), 25 May, URL: http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&show=archive&id=26739&catid=39&year=2001&month=5&day=25&Itemid=66. 17. Interview by author, Kolkata, 22 September 2009. 18. Singur is located adjacent to National Highway 2, with easy access to Kolkata.

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19. Bheri means ‘low-land’. So the names Singher-bheri, Bera-bheri, etc. imply that these were once low lands. Being water logged most of the time, such low lands were hardly suitable for cultivation. 20. Interview by author, Kolkata, 22 September 2009. 21. ‘Devil’s Advocate’, 25 February, URL: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/devils-advocate- buddhadeb/34441-1-p2.html. 22. An interesting parallel can be drawn between such symbolic power of party networks and Bourdieu and Boltanski’s notion of ‘multipositionality’ (1971). 23. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. Bigha is a land measurement unit widely used in India. One bigha = one-third of an acre or 1337.9 square meters of land (approximately). 24. Interview by author, Singur, 1 September 2009. 25. Interview by author, Singur, 1 September 2009. 26. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. 27. Anandabazar Patrika 2006, 24 October. Status of the Singur Project. 28. Anandabazar Patrika (2006), 3 November. Adequate Consent among Singur Farmers. 29. Source: List of peasants unwilling to sell their land (based on the affidavits of their statements), prepared by Singur Krishijami Raksha Committee. 30. Interview by author, Kolkata, 22 September 2009. 31. This decision was questioned by the Kolkata High Court. See The Telegraph (2007), 24 February. HC Seeks Singur Explanation. 32. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. 33. Interview by author, Singur, 1 September 2009. 34. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. 35. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. 36. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. 37. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. 38. Interview by author, Kolkata, 29 August, 21 and 28 September 2009. Anonymity requested. 39. Interview by author, Singur, 23 September 2009. 40. Interview by author, Singur, 1 September 2009. 41. See Namboodiri (2006) for details. 42. The Telegraph (2006), 19 December. Throttled, Dumped, Burnt, report by Kinsuk Basu. 43. The Telegraph (2007), 29 June, Singur Enforcer in Dock: CPIM Leader Held for Murder, Bureau Report; and 30 June, Lackey Sings, Leader Faces Test, Bureau Report. 44. Although beyond the ambit of this paper, a different point can be extrapolated from this observation. The ‘shadow state’ in West Bengal went much beyond the land struggles in Singur and elsewhere, and naturally played a crucial role in maintaining the political as well as the moral hegemony of the CPI(M), particularly in the countryside. Its role in exacting electoral discipline in the early/mid part of the Left Front rule, and the part it played in the last few years of the Front, deserve special attention, and could be a future research project in itself.

ABSTRACTS

India’s rapid economic growth has frequently been marred by struggles over land acquisition and displacement. This paper re-examines one such case. In 2006, protests erupted in Singur (a small

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cluster of villages in West Bengal) against government initiatives to acquire land for a private industrial project. The protests gathered enough momentum to stall the project, and went on to have a decisive impact on the electoral fortunes of the government, thus attaining a cult status in the country’s development-displacement narratives. This paper presents the Singur story in a new light, arguing that there was a political character to the entire episode, largely ignored by mainstream literature. Based on the idea of the ‘shadow-state’ (Harriss-White 2003), the paper examines the role played by the political managers of the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist)—CPI(M)—and highlights three themes—choice of land, acquiring consent, and negotiation—to build its narrative.

INDEX

Keywords: Singur, West Bengal, CPI(M), land acquisition, shadow-state

AUTHOR

RITANJAN DAS University of Portsmouth

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Dispossession by ‘Development’: Corporations, Elites and NGOs in Bangladesh

Abu Ahasan and Katy Gardner

1 Agricultural land in Bangladesh is disappearing fast. World Bank figures show a drop from 77.1% of the country’s total land area being given over to agriculture in 1990 to 72.2% in 2000 and 70.12% in 2011. Add to this the wetlands and natural lakes or haors (areas which seasonally flood and are treated as commons and used for fishing) which are rapidly being filled for building or privatised for shrimp cultivation and it is clear that there are seismic changes underway. What processes are involved? As in other parts of South Asia, researchers have pointed to a mixture of corrupt governance, hyper development and criminal entrepreneurialism (Geisler & Feldman 2012, Adnan 2013). More generally scholars across South Asia have documented how elites, criminal entrepreneurs, property speculators and corrupt governments work together in land expropriation, often taking Harvey’s theory of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2003) as a starting point. (Adnan 2013, Misra 2011, Münster & Münster 2012, Walker 2008, Münster & Strümpell 2014, Levien 2011). Yet whilst this work points to the interplay between the state, local political elites and ‘crony capitalism’ (Geisler & Feldman 2012) so far there has been less discussion of the role of Western-based multinationals (MNCs). For example, although valuable research shows how Special Economic Zones are associated with rampant property speculation and entrepreneurship, leading to the dispossession of the peasantry by a rentier class (Levien 2011), the sometimes contradictory mechanisms used by multinationals which benefit from the newly released land have attracted less attention (though see Cross 2014).

2 In the following article, based around two case studies of extractive MNCs in Bangladesh, we show how these formed shifting alliances with NGOs as well as the state and local elites in order to gain a ‘social license to operate’ (Prono & Slocombe 2012, Kirsch 2014). As this implies, it would be simplistic to understand ‘accumulation by dispossession’ solely in terms of a state-corporate nexus, or indeed to portray the

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‘locals’ as sharing the same agenda, or necessarily unwilling to participate in processes of land speculation and industrialisation (cf. Cross 2014, Hall 2011). As we shall see, the reality is more complex. In both cases the MNCs worked through local and national political networks, often treading a difficult path through the contradictory interests of the different groups. Both also drew upon powerful discourses of ‘development’ in order to justify their presence, discourses which resonated with local and national aspirations for modernity. A notable strategy in this context was the contracting out of projects of community development to NGOs, which added ethical respectability to the MNCs and, in the first case, acted as a buffer between the local population and the corporation. Indeed, as has been noted in other parts of the world where extractive industries have followed similar tactics, NGOs are increasingly drawn into the state- corporate nexus, even when violent dispossession is involved (Welker 2009, 2014, Zalik 2005). Welker describes how in Indonesia, for example, the Newmont mining company supported local elites who ran NGOs in the name of CSR and then violently attacked other groups who protested against the mine (Welker 2009, 2014). In this and other cases, researchers have described how discourses of ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘partnership’ and ‘development’ mask and or legitimise the extraction of resources by the corporation. Clearly, whilst Harvey is correct to point out the role that the state-corporate nexus plays in land appropriation, we need to go further, considering also the role of local elites, NGOs and other agencies.

3 In what follows we attempt to unravel some of the contradictions as well as describe the shifting interests and alliances involved. In the first case, the American corporation Chevron gained access to approximately 60 acres of farming land in order to construct and operate a huge gas plant which was inaugurated in 2007 in Bibiyana, Habiganj. In the second, the multinational company JT accessed soil, land and water for its construction materials production plant in Dumki, Sylhet. Both corporations sidestepped the actual process of land appropriation, either by leaving its forcible acquisition to the government (in Bibiyana) or by turning soil into a commodity (in Dumki). Both also used the promise of development either via projects of improvement and/or by encouraging the anticipation of industrialisation and new economic opportunities as a means to pacify local resistance. To this extent, dispossession is not an unintended consequence of development (development by dispossession). Rather, the promise of development emerges, whether intentionally or not, as a means to dispossess (dispossession by ‘development’). In both cases the corporations gained the support of local elites by offering developmental gifts and contracts for supplying labour and raw materials; these elites in turn helped to repress local conflict and allow the change in land use to take place. Finally, and significantly, both attempted to co-opt national NGOs. The research on which this paper is based was, in the Chevron study, a mixture of participant observation, interviews and detailed case studies of household coping strategies, carried out by Katy Gardner, Zahir Ahmed, Masud Rana and Fatema Bashar and funded by the ESRC-DFID. Interviews took place amongst transnational villages in Bangladesh and the UK, amongst low-income households in the villages concerned and amongst Chevron staff in Dhaka. In the Dumki case, qualitative research was carried out by Abu Ahsan, Raniya Shams and Marup Hossain from BRAC. This entailed interviews with people involved in the project, famers and landowners, fishermen, local activists, journalists, politicians, businessmen, contractors, JT management and security staff, group discussions with villagers and observation of various sites in Dumki. A few more interviews took place in Dhaka with BRAC and JT

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staff. Information on JT was also gathered from extensive desk research. Before turning to our cases in more detail, let us start by briefly outlining the historical background to what Karim has described as ‘the shadow state’ of NGOs in Bangladesh (Karim 2011: xviii).

The ‘Shadow State’: A brief history of NGOs in Bangladesh

4 Bangladesh complicates the standard concept of clearly demarcated states, civil society and private sectors. Since the country was formed in 1971, the NGO sector has experienced phenomenal growth, evolution and diversification, delivering public goods to such an extent that Rehman Sobhan (1997) has forecast an erosion of state sovereignty. This role developed in the aftermath of the war of independence from Pakistan, a time when much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed, poverty was rampant and Henry Kissinger infamously referred to the country as a ‘bottomless basket case’ (White 1999: 307). In this early period NGOs were predominantly focussed on rural poverty. Over the 1970s two of the country’s leading NGOs, BRAC and the Grameen Bank, had been experimenting with a cooperative approach to rural community development. The assumption of a cohesive village society was, however, fractured. In the late 1970s, a BRAC initiated study, The Net: Power Structure in Ten Villages, reported on widespread corruption and exploitation in the programmes (BRAC 1980). Disillusioned by the cooperative model, the Grameen Bank began to work exclusively with poor women through a model of collateral free small credit. Meanwhile other pioneering NGOs, including BRAC and PROSHIKA, used Paolo Freire’s theory of ‘conscientisation’ as a source of inspiration for critical literacy programmes. The language and appeal of activism drew numerous left leaning university graduates to these NGOs. Along with small-scale economic activities, skill training, and collateral free credit, young educated NGO field organisers carried out critical literacy—an iterative educational method to evoke critical reflections and political consciousness among its participants. This led to some early successes in which landless people accessed khas (government owned) land or common property, though challenges were to follow from both local elites and the state (Rafi 2003).

5 By the mid-1980s, international aid had shifted its focus away from the politics of mobilisation towards market participation as the route to empowerment (Kabeer 2003). NGO leaders also found themselves increasingly integrated into the international aid industry, with its demands for efficiency, cost effectiveness and sustainability (Feldman 2003). This was also the period of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment, in which the country was undergoing reforms aimed at trade liberalisation, denationalisation and privatisation. In 1990 Ershad was removed by a popular student- led democracy movement and the pace of neoliberal reform programmes accelerated. Donors invested heavily in micro credit and emphasised ‘partnership’ between corporations, government, big NGOs, small NGOs, CBOs, local elites and ‘the community’ (Lewis 2004). During this period, the amount of international aid coming to NGOs ‘ballooned from roughly [US]$150 million in 1990 to nearly [US]$450 million in 1995, the peak year of the decade to 2000’ (Stiles 2002: 837). Relying on the microfinance infrastructure, some of the pioneering NGOs scaled up massively whilst small-scale NGOs mushroomed, covering almost all of the country’s many thousand

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villages. The private sector was also booming, with the rapid expansion of the garment sector plus the arrival of MNCs in telecommunication, energy and Banking.

6 During the late 2000s, the Grameen Bank focussed on profit, constantly reinventing its financial package, as did BRAC, Asa and others in what was becoming a highly competitive and sophisticated credit market. BRAC also invested heavily in the new private sector, including ventures in commercial banking, clothing, IT, a private university and the food industry. Today BRAC is the biggest provider of employment after the government (Smillie 2009). In the late 2000s it extended its reach to Africa, Asia and Latin America, whilst in 2006 the Nobel peace prize went to Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank. Meanwhile, Bangladesh outperformed India and Pakistan in a number of key social indicators including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, education and women’s development (Sen 2013). The World Bank reports that Bangladesh had graduated from being a lower income country to a lower- middle income country. By the late 2000s financial viability had become crucial for NGOs, especially in a time when donor funding was shrinking. The private sector and CSR is therefore an increasingly important source of funding for NGOs, as is the new emphasis on ‘social enterprise’ and ‘social business’. It is from this context that ‘partnerships’ with corporations keen to push their agendas of ‘corporate social responsibility’ take place. Let us return to our case studies.

Chevron in Bibiyana

7 We start with Chevron in Bibiyana, North East Bangladesh, where land appropriation between 2005-and 2007 enabled the company’s construction and operation of a large gas field. The land was forcibly acquired by the government and then leased back to the corporation. While distancing the corporation from threatened state violence, Chevron had to negotiate carefully with a variety of state and non-state actors in order to construct and operate the plant, allying themselves with members of the local elite to whom they offered development gifts and contracts and enlisting reputable NGOs to carry out projects of community development. All the while, however, their presence was dependent upon their relationship to the state and, in turn, the land acquisitions that the state enforced. Indeed, the process of land acquisition was expedited when the corporation’s representatives negotiated a higher rate of compensation with the government. Their successful navigation through these tricky alliances and ethically contradictory positions has led to the corporation’s current position as the largest gas producer and foreign investor in Bangladesh.

8 The Bibiyana gas field is situated on paddy land between four populous villages in Habiganj, Greater Sylhet, an area with high levels of transnational migration to the U.K., which has been described elsewhere by Gardner (e.g. 1995, 2008, 2012). When natural gas was discovered in the early 2000s the contract for extracting the gas was granted by the government to the energy company Unocal, or ULB. A smaller gas field had already been built by Occidental in the late 1990s a few kilometres away, but this was to be far larger, using 60 acres of prime agricultural land for the actual gas field, plus much more for the pipeline and high banked roads that would connect the gas fields (or ‘pads’) to each other and to the main road. Given the intense use of agricultural land in the area, and the value put on it both by absent landlords in the UK

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and those using it in the desh (home), it was immediately apparent that there would be opposition.

9 Given the local opposition to the land loss, how was the corporation to manage the contradiction of compliance with global moralities of ethical business practice, yet also gain access to the land? In 2005 the District Commissioner announced that the land would be forcibly acquired by the government, at a rate of approximately one-tenth of the market value (Reyes & Begum 2005: 26). According to accounts gathered during the research, local people were swiftly mobilised by local leaders against the operation, presenting a united front between and within the affected villages. Although much of the land was owned by a relatively small group of elite families who had members living in the UK (known locally as Londonis), poorer households either sharecropped or worked on it as agricultural labourers; any net loss of land thus impacted negatively on what were already precarious agricultural livelihoods (Gardner 2012). Crucially, those leading the protests, the Londoni landowners, were patrons to land poor and landless households, providing shahajo (‘help’, charity) to many in times of crisis. Political support given to their patrons was necessary to the survival of many of these households (Gardner 1995, see also Wood 2003).

10 As the protest movement grew in size there were marches and road blockades, leading to the eventual halting of construction. The police were quick to respond: the gas field was a major project for the BNP government and they were keen that Unocal complete the building by 2007. Here the government faced its own contradiction. Whilst nationally the presence of extractive multinationals was highly controversial, with national uproar over planned open-plan mining by Asia Energy at Phulbari (see Nuremowla 2011 and this volume, Gain 2006), few disputed the need for energy security (cf. Islam et al. 2008, Wesley 2006). By 2008–11 this had become pressing; power shortages were hampering the industry which had motored Bangladesh’s growth rate of 6.6 % (in the first part of 2010). Meanwhile, the leaders of the two main parties, the BNP and the Awami League, shifted their positions according to whether or not they were in power. In an account given by one of the leading lights of the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Ports (a Dhaka based protest group against extractive MNCs), Sheikh Hasina, the leader of the Awami League, was supportive of their movement whilst in opposition to the BNP before 2008, but quickly changed tactics after the Awami League came to power in 2008, acting to suppress anti-MNC protests in Dhaka that year.

11 Meanwhile, in Bibiyana in 2005 armed police escorts were provided for company and government officials and violence threatened. In a visit to the area the District Commissioner reminded local people that in similar situations in Bangladesh, troops had been called in and publically threatened to have the leaders arrested (Reyes & Begum 2005). During the research conducted in 2009–11, informants talked of the beatings and arrests that took place in 2005. In another story the researchers were told how one of the local activists was taken in the night by the Rapid Action Battalion to their base in Habiganj, thus severely compromising Unocal’s attempts to build ‘community relations’.1 As this story implies, the relationship between MNCs and national governments can be difficult to negotiate: whilst Unocal had to gain access to the land it was not in their interest for local leaders, with whom they were attempting to build relationships, to be arrested. Whilst needing to avoid the financial and political costs of failing to complete construction on time, the corporation did not wish to be

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associated with the dirty stuff of everyday governance in Bangladesh, for this could damage both their local and their global reputation. In a report commissioned by consultants tasked to advise Unocal on improving community relations, they are cautioned to: Ensure that company related vehicles and other infra-structure are not used to commit human rights abuses […] the company reputation is directly linked to the reputation of the user, or how the vehicles are used. For example, several companies currently face court cases (in criminal court) because ‘their’ vehicles were used by the police or army to commit human rights abuses […] (Begum & Reyes 2005: 24).

12 Just as MNCs cannot control the governments in the countries where they work, neither are all their employees necessarily working towards the same agenda. Community Relations staff may, for example, have particular aims and objectives or views of ‘the community’ that are not shared by their colleagues in Security. In another section of the report, a ‘senior UBL staff member’ is quoted as saying: ‘Unocal is really the David here and the people are Goliath. If they stand up and demand something in protest they have all the power’ (Reyes & Begum 2005: 8). While from the perspective of local people such a view of power relations verges on the ludicrous, it is worth noting the potential threat that local activism was deemed to pose during this period.

13 Although there is no evidence that Unocal condoned the use of violence against the activists, they accepted the use of police escorts for their visits to the area and provided accommodation for a specially assigned police force, a tactic that indicates the prioritising of ‘security’ over human rights considerations. As the Reyes & Begum report states: UBL (Unocal) has agreed to provide barracks, located 7 km from the site, and a vehicle for a special police contingent assigned to the area. While such support is not unusual, there is always a risk that, in the event of the use of force, the company will be associated with any abuses. For example, threats of violence have already been applied. In addition, one high ranking official told us there is no space in the land acquisition process for human rights considerations, and UBL admits to ‘having no control over the police […]’ (2005: 23, emphasis added). If state threats of violence were risky for Unocal’s reputation, other government tactics had hidden costs for the company. Many of the accounts collected during the research indicate that pressure was put on union parishad level BNP (Bangladesh National Party, which was in power during the research) leaders to stop their opposition to the plant by high ranking BNP members. As Reyes & Begum report: people are aware that pressure was applied by BNP government officials at very high levels to the local BNP leader who organised the community protests. The resulting perception is that UBL is aligned to the ruling party (2005: 6).

14 As the protest movement was gathering force, those responsible for community relations in Unocal were keen to present a ‘smiling face’ to the locals (Shever 2010). Holding meetings in which grievances were aired was one way to do this, as advised by the Reyes & Begum report. Another was the distribution of appeasing gifts, including, in these early days of community relations, T-shirts for children, sweets and building materials offered to poor people whose houses had been damaged in recent floods (Gardner 2012). Crucially, the company also became involved in negotiations with the government to increase the rate of compensation for land, correctly identifying this as the key issue for the leaders of the protest who as landowners had the most to lose financially. When they were successful, persuading the government to offer rates at

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market value, some of the mainstays of the activism became less confrontational, realising that land loss was inevitable and they should take what was offered. As those leaders withdrew their support for the protest movement, they started to persuade others to stop too.

15 The company’s success in negotiating the price of land upwards was boosted by their strategy to expedite the compensation process. Recognising that if left to the inefficient and corrupt government land offices, landowners might not receive payment in time or would have to pay large bribes, the company installed mobile land offices in the vicinity and in 2009 reported to us that 95% of all claims had been settled. This is what the company state in their 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report: During the Bibiyana Project’s development more than two hundred meetings were held with community members to understand their concerns and explain the project’s impacts and benefits. Residents were surveyed to understand their perceptions of the project and relations were built with local leaders, communities and non-government organisations. Considered a cultural and economic asset in Bangladesh, land was important to the project’s development. Chevron took steps to mitigate the impact of land acquisitions and leases by building the pipeline without displacing people from their homes. Also, five temporary offices were located along the pipeline route to help landowners register their deeds, secure payment from the authorities and answer questions about the project.2 As this implies, by 2007 Chevron had taken over from Unocal, the companies having merged in 2005. One effect of this merger is that past mistakes and problems could be blamed on Unocal whilst Chevron appeared to be doing things better, even though the actual personnel on the ground were the same. For example, during the research an official responsible for community relations mentioned that Unocal had made ‘a lot of mistakes’, which Chevron had now put right. What he didn’t mention was that he was the person in charge of community relations during Unocal’s time: when the merger took place, he had stayed in post.

16 Having expedited the land compensation process, Chevron set to work offering the surrounding communities a range of development programmes. Whilst accounts of the negotiations over this period differ, with some informants reporting that the company originally pledged to provide much more, the promises of community development were an additional reason why some of the leaders changed tactics and now negotiated with, rather than activated against, the company. In addition to development goods, which they presided over, their relationship with Chevron officials also led to contracts for the supply of labour and building materials. Meanwhile, for Chevron the objective was for the company to present itself as ethical, socially responsible, and ‘partners’ with the local people whose land had been lost and livelihoods damaged (Gardner 2012, Gardner et al. 2012). As stated in the 2007 CSR report: We told them that we were more interested to know about where their strength lay, what their capacities were, before we set out to address their needs. Our goal was always to forge a partnership with the local community to play a part in the overall development of the community.3 Partnership with various well-known NGOs was another component of the community development programs. The Sylheti NGO Friends in Village Development Bangladesh was funded to carry out a programme of ‘Alternative Livelihood Programmes’, whilst the Smiling Sun Franchise of Health Clinics was responsible for two clinics.4 A further programme of stipends and scholarships for school children was also funded by the

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company. The strategy was about more than simply gaining community compliance, or a ‘social license to operate’ (Prono & Slocombe 2012). It was also aimed at creating a particular image of Chevron, or rebranding the company for local and national consumption. This was done in part by buying into the good reputation of the NGOs, whose logos were displayed prominently beside that of Chevron, thus creating an image of an ethical and caring company working for the good of local people. Whilst road signs featuring children or madrasa students wearing Chevron hard hats and reminding drivers to take care to mark out ‘Chevron territory’ (cf. Yeh 2013, also Ferguson 2005), other signage displayed prominently outside the clinics or sites of other good works (a ‘friendship bridge’, or FIVDB’s offices) are marked with the Chevron logo. Meanwhile, researchers noted how NGO fieldworkers, rather than Chevron employees, tended to be in the frontline of complaints from local people concerning the gas field and Chevron (Gardner et al. 2012).

17 Whilst in its public statements the company stressed ‘partnership’ with NGOs, the degree of equality of this partnership is debateable. For example, in an event funded by the research project held in Dhaka in which the role of CSR in Bangladesh was discussed in 2011, the NGOs funded by Chevron showed PowerPoint slides concerning their good works in the area, whilst those not funded by the company and members of other civil society organisations were highly critical, giving the impression that the event was stage-managed by Chevron. Meanwhile, the leaders who had formed alliances with Chevron met with varying success. While some made money by becoming labour contractors and / or headed the ‘Village Development Organisations’ that oversaw the provision of development goods, several described how they were unable to match local expectations of the largess they should offer and came under severe criticism from their supplicants, leading to a reduction rather than an increase in status and political power. As one man explained: Of all the demands we made to Chevron, we achieved about 5%. Our fellow villagers started insulting us because we hadn’t achieved their demands. They became very suspicious, saying that we’d been ‘bought’ by Chevron and were no longer looking out for their interests. I suppose the reason for these suspicions is that I’m working as a contractor for Chevron, so people think I’m their man, not a man of the people. Through my tree planting project I can hire a few women labourers, but not much more, so everyone’s dissatisfied with me. Their demands are so high, but I can’t recruit 100 people, only 15… (field notes 2009). As the leaders and NGOs who had formed alliances with Chevron faced a negative backlash from the local population, Chevron were able to sidestep confrontation since they were now working through these intermediaries, their ‘partners’. While the road ahead remained strewn with difficulties—the company’s policy of bringing labourers from outside was to lead to more protests in 2013/2014 when the gas field expanded— for now at least they had successfully gained a social license to operate.

18 It would be wrong to deduce from this account that NGOs are necessarily willing partners with corporations. Let us turn to our second case study, in which the corporation ‘JT’ attempted to form a partnership with one of Bangladesh’s biggest NGOs, BRAC. Here we see a similar set of corporate techniques which, on the one hand use discourses of the ‘value of land’ and development and seek alliances with national NGOs and on the other hand assist local elites in their pursuit of resource appropriation. This two pronged strategy took place in Dumki (a pseudonym), a haor5 region in Sylhet in Northeast Bangladesh, where the JT industry plant is located.

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JT in Dumki, Sylhet

19 JT, a European multinational company specialising in building materials production, offered the NGO BRAC to be its CSR partner in the ‘Dumki Uplifting Project’. Written by international consultants in engineering vocabulary, a fifty page report laid out a large- scale landscape engineering plan. This involved construction of artificial lakes and embankments in the wetland. It was intended to supply the plant’s raw material—clay— but also to set up an aqua-agricultural farming system, which would generate employment and uplift the lives and livelihoods of affected people. This was presented as a scientific solution to land scarcity in Bangladesh, poverty in the haor region, and a way of meeting the increasing demand for raw materials on which the country’s development rested. JT applied for government approval with this plan and invited BRAC to initiate community mobilisation on the proposed project. Partnership with a reputed NGO was also seen as constructive in getting government approval. In the post-2000 NGO scene in Bangladesh, CSR projects are taken as a potential source of funding, as aid donor funding has been shrinking along with the rise of the private sector.6 In-mid 2013, BRAC’s Research and Evaluation Division (RED) carried out field research in Dumki to investigate community perceptions of the proposed project. Soon after their arrival in the field, the researchers learned that the project was primarily to do with land appropriation. The following account is based on this research. We use pseudonyms to conceal the identity of the corporation in question, the name of the proposed project and the project area to maintain anonymity and confidentiality as part of the agreement with BRAC.

20 We start with an analysis of the project report.7 Comparing this with our field data, we realised how the report left out crucial information to portray the project area in a way that would fit into their plans for resource extraction in the area. As James Ferguson has demonstrated in Lesotho, the project narratives were produced to provide a charter for intervention, becoming the perfect ‘anti politics machine’ (Ferguson 1990). The second part of the case study shows the expectations of connection and experiences of disconnection that characterise the local population’s relationship with JT (cf. Gardner 2012). Then, we discuss how JT, in spite of failing to secure government clearance and partnership with BRAC, was able to access raw materials by offering contracts to local elites (cf. Geenen & Honke 2012, Welker 2009). What is interesting in these myriad processes is the centrality of development—as a discourse, or bribe— through which multinational corporations attempt to forge alliances with states, NGOs and local elites and extract mineral resources.

21 The ‘Dumki Uplifting Project’ arose from JT’s decision to switch to clay from shale as a raw material for manufacturing. For the first few years the industry relied on imported shale, but as this became gradually more expensive and difficult to access the company saw a cheaper solution in clay, which they thought they could excavate from the perceived backwater of Dumki. Before laying out the landscape engineering plan, the report discussed the problems of the project area. Dumki, an area of nearly three hundred hectares, was presented as ‘less productive, isolated and impoverished’. (JT 2011: 5) This was due, the report claimed, to the very characteristics of haor agro- ecological systems—‘early flash floods’, ‘a prolonged monsoon limiting livelihood opportunity in only wild-catch fishing (is possible)’; ‘mostly uncultivable land’, ‘poor

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yield one crop production’, and ‘low input based agricultural practices’ (JT 2011: 5–8). Therefore, the farmers and owners in Dumki were not getting ‘expected benefits from the land’, the report claimed (JT 2011: 9, emphasis added).

22 Large-scale infrastructure projects such as building embankments are not new in Bangladesh. Indeed, as a number of studies point out, this approach to flood control remains the single most important factor for large-scale displacement of people in the country (Zaman 1996). It is interesting to note that although ‘extracting’ clay was its main focus, ‘uplifting’ remained the most used term in the project report outlining its ‘Sustainable Mining’ (JT 2011: 8). The use of such oxymorons, as the anthropology of extractive industries identifies, is one of the main strategies of corporate elites, used to conceal the harm caused by mining to people and the environment, to manage and neutralise critique (Kirsch 2010: 2014).

23 During their field visit researchers found the land at Dumki to be much more productive and meaningful to the villagers than implied in the project report. Although the whole project area was represented as ‘low-lying and flood prone’ (JT 2011: 8), a large chunk of land was found to be elevated, as a result of sedimentation. The majority of villagers identified themselves with agricultural livelihoods. Although a large segment of land in Dumki yields only one crop a year, a significant portion yields two and some three. In addition, the silt deposited by annual floods constantly increases the haor’s soil fertility level, leading to higher crop yields. The return from boro rice is much higher in haor areas than the national average, and can be achieved without the use of fertilisers (Alam & Islam 2010).

24 Crucially, the report ignored local patterns of landownership and neglected to detail the various ways in which land and water were held commonly, providing a vital resource for poorer people. Landownership in Dumki is dominated by a few hundred medium and small owners spanning at least seven villages. A section of Dumki comprised of government owned (Khas) land and Jolmohal. The literal meaning of Jolmohal is water (jol) area (mohal). This can be a section of river, floodplains, land depressions or an individual pond owned by the government. It is the policy of the Bangladesh government to distribute Khas-land and Jolmohal to marginalised populations with the objective of redressing social disparities (Barkat et al. 2000). The Jolmohal in Dumki was leased out to the local mosque committee through which local landless and sharecroppers were engaged in fisheries. In the dry season, the vast swath of Khas-land is used by farmers for grazing their animals. This turns into wetland in monsoon, a common resource for villagers, a crucial aspect of haor lives and livelihoods.

25 As the BRAC researchers showed glossy visuals of the ‘Dumki Uplifting Project’ to a group of villagers, they were met with anger: ‘We will not sell our land to JT’, they were told. ‘We will not let the government lease its Khas-land for this project’; ‘It’s not a development project, but a trick to steal our land’ (fieldwork, May 9, 2013).Yet understanding the history of the JT industry plant through the perspectives of Dumki’s inhabitants allows us to see how large-scale infrastructure projects are built upon, as Cross puts it, an ‘economy of anticipation’ (Cross 2014).

26 In the wake of the new millennium, the news of JT’s investment excited the nation. It was one of the largest foreign investments in the industrial sector, which matched with the country’s booming real estate market. The construction of JT’s gigantic plant and an impressive cross border convenor, which supplied its essential raw ingredients from

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India, was a testament to the industrial and developmental ambitions of Bangladesh. Villagers in Dumki shared these dreams. They expected formal employment, electricity and gas connections, bridges, roads, high schools, colleges, hospitals.

27 JT bought the land to build its plant from a few wealthy villagers. Many villagers worked as labourers in the construction phase. A community centre was built, in between the plant and Dumki, to run development activities such as primary education, basic healthcare and vocational training. These ‘gifts’ from JT were welcome, but after the construction only a handful of locals were given permanent employment in the plant. As in Bibiyana, villagers claimed that the company had a deliberate policy to not recruit locals (see also Cross 2009, Gardner 2012, Gardner et al. 2012). Locals demanded that the company hire their people. Seeing no response, they protested against the company’s recruitment policy, but learned that their complaints were not being heard beyond the hired contractors, field organisers and security guards. The real decision- makers remained outside of their reach, inaccessible and unapproachable. Meanwhile those living close to the plant suffered physically from environmental hazards caused by factory smoke and dust. Researchers were shown trees in their homesteads which could no longer bear fruit due to air pollution. These families remained uncompensated. A few years ago, JT decided to block the muddy road surrounding its plant through which villagers accessed the river port. The company had to retreat from this decision in the face of protest. Meanwhile, JT wanted to lease Khas-land and Jolmohal from the government to extract the clay. This was also met with local resistance. In an interview a farmer remarked with irony, ‘once we were told that JT’s investment would make our area as developed as Singapore!’ (fieldwork, May 15, 2013). In spite of expectations of social mobility and modernity, the majority of villagers stayed behind, ‘physically, culturally and economically disconnected’ from their hoped source of capital (Gardner 2012: 44).

28 In the face of ongoing opposition JT followed a similar strategy to Chevron, offering contracts to local elites, who then effectively co-opted the resistance. Some of the most influential political elites in the Upazila and district levels were offered contracts; the contractors then convinced individuals to sell soil from their land, which they then sold to JT at disproportionately higher prices. It’s important to note that these contractors are buying soil not land, thus avoiding the problem of land acquisition. The practice of soil extraction has brought about adverse socio-economic, environmental and political effects. The BRAC researchers were taken to several excavated plots. These not only become unusable after a few years but risk causing the erosion of adjacent land, which, village activists told us, may force the owners to sell them cheap to the contractors. Frustration is rising amongst those trying to preserve their land as their attempts to appeal to higher authorities such as the Environmental Ministry are failing. The village activists, who once displayed tremendous unity against JT, feel incapable of stopping individual community members from selling their soil. Tensions emerge from within, diminishing the strength of collective decision-making capacity and united resistance as individuals sell their land and move away. JT’s tactic of outsourcing clay supply is fracturing the political as well as physical landscape of Dumki as clay piles up in its compound.

29 Ahmed, Union Parishad Chairman, is such a contractor. He is a strong man of the ruling party. When researchers met him in his office, he was telling his followers how to confront opposition. In 2013 Bangladesh saw a peak of political turmoil as the national

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election was approaching. In interview, Ahmed accepted the fact that soil extraction was damaging Dumki, but he said his role was only nominal. He instead pointed to the bigger players and blamed JT for failing to maintain good relations with the locals.

30 During the democratic era in Bangladesh, party politics has become an increasingly important means for gaining access to key resources, services and goods. The overlap between political party activity and mastaan (musclemen) activity dominates the struggle for valued resources. Whilst in Bibiyana the elites were persuaded to stop their opposition to the gas field via political pressure from the government, an increased rate of land compensation, and the opportunity of running development programmes and becoming contractors for the corporation, in Dumki JT authorised soil subcontractors were political entrepreneurs coming from both ruling and opposition political parties. This explains why Dumki’s protest never received support from political organisations, despite many promises. In a country which is dominated by a bipolar polity (Sobhan 2004), cultivating relations with both the opposition and ruling party is a standard way of doing business. This strategy is particularly popular among real estate companies for large-scale land appropriation. As Devine notes, ‘informal and sometimes shadowy procedures and relationships have become the primary management mode of the state. These informal relations are what really make things happen in Bangladesh’ (Devine 2007: 25). Thus we come across a situation where though the ‘Dumki Uplifting Project’ had to be halted in the face of local resistance, the company’s outsourcing strategy of hiring contractors from the local elite meant that organised protest gradually lost its potency and direction. After reviewing the research BRAC declined the invitation to work with JT on the project, forcing the corporation to rely on informal and shadowy procedures as they failed to establish a formal partnership with state and NGO actors.

Conclusion: Dispossession by ‘Development’

31 Drawing upon evidence from South and South East Asia, Derek Hall has argued that Harvey’s theorisation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is somewhat simplistic in its portrayal of a nexus of state-corporate interests that dispossess resistant rural peasants (Hall 2011, 2013). Rather, landowners may be keen to speculate on their land and people surrounding sites of industrial development or resource extraction may welcome the ‘development’ that the coming of the corporation heralds (Cross 2014). Indeed, nowadays extractive MNCs routinely deploy promises not only of ‘uplift’ or new job opportunities but also development gifts as part of their strategies of ‘community engagement’ (Welker 2012, Rogers 2012, Shever 2010, Rajak 2011). This involves forming alliances with a range of actors, including local elites and NGOs, leading the corporations to negotiate difficult and contradictory relationships, especially when working alongside repressive or corrupt states. Rather than the state simply clearing the way for MNCs to operate, the negotiations and tactics involved can be highly complex and are not guaranteed to meet with success.

32 In order to illustrate these processes in this article we have briefly described the strategies employed by two extractive MNCs in their operations in Bangladesh. In both cases the MNCs attempted to make alliances with the state, NGOs, and local elites, offering potentially lucrative contracts to the latter in order to bring individuals who had initially led opposition movements ‘on the side’. Whilst the relationship of both

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MNCs to the state was central, this had to be carefully managed, especially in Bibiyana when forcible acquisition and threatened violence compromised the corporation’s ‘ethical business stance’. Significantly both MNCs turned to national NGOs to carry out their community development programmes, leading in the case of Bibiyana to a new and potentially compromising role for those NGOs involved: as providers of programmes working to a corporate agenda.

33 In deploying these tactics, the MNCs present their work as ethically irreproachable; according to them, rather than presiding over dispossession they are responsibly contributing to development, empowerment and ‘uplift’. In these instances the term development dispossession refers not so much to the side effect of people losing land and livelihoods as part of wider processes of development or urbanisation, but to the use of discourses of development, in particular the tropes of ‘uplift’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘CSR’, to enable dispossession to take place. Tellingly, these discourses are not simply impositions consciously created to fool people. Instead they chime with widely held dreams of development and connection, shared by those producing the programmes as well as those to whom they are offered. In Dumki, the people living on the outskirts of the JT plant saw epochal changes in the local haor region, with their dreams and desired futures turning to disconnections, losses and ruptures. Meanwhile, in Bibiyana, alliances with the state and national NGOs helped pave the way for Chevron’s operations. In both cases nationally respected NGOs were approached to carry out the good works, under the banner of ‘partnership’.

34 Clearly, we have much to learn about the role of corporate capital in rural South Asia. In particular, major questions are raised concerning NGOs tasked with supporting the poor and creating community ‘development’ whilst accepting funding and contracts from extractive MNCs. Whilst espousing ‘development’ these also aim, by definition, to profit from the extraction of resources, often leading to environmental damage. By offering contracts and patronage to local elites, they may also be exacerbating inequality. Whilst unable to offer more than sketches in this brief article, we hope that the cases presented here will stimulate more research.

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NOTES

1. The relationship between governments and oil / mining companies is highly complex and varies according to context. In Nigeria, for example, WikiLeaks have revealed documents that show that Shell inserted staff into all of the major ministries (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ business/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-shell-nigeria-spying) accessed 5/4/11. 2. Chevron, 2007, URL: file:///C:/Users/GARDNERK/Documents/bibiana/ Chevron_CR_Report_2007.pdf 3. Chevron: Bibyana Gas Field, First Anniversary Report: 2008: 11. 4. http://healthmarketinnovations.org/program/smiling-sun-franchise-program-ssfp (accessed 26/05/14). 5. The haors are large saucer-shaped flood plain depressions located mostly in Northeast Bangladesh covering about 25% of the entire region. This inland freshwater wetland ecosystem is enriched with aquatic biodiversity but can be prone to annual flash flood from rivers and high rainfall compared to other parts of the country. Silt, deposited by annual floods, however, keeps haor soil fertility high, leading to higher crop yields during the dry season. 6. Source: personal communication with Andrew Jenkins, BRAC’s Donor Liaison Officer. 7. ‘Dumki Uplifting Project’ (pseudonym) report was forwarded to BRAC in 2011. The date of publication, however, was not mentioned in the report. Several original quotes from the report have been used in the following paragraphs. Some words/terms from the quotes are emphasised in italic by the author.

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ABSTRACTS

In this article, which is based around two case studies of extractive multinationals in Bangladesh we show how the multinationals concerned worked with states, local elites and national NGOs in order to gain access to land and resources. In negotiating these complex relationships the multinationals often found themselves in potentially contradictory positions, requiring the muscle of the state where land had to be forcibly acquired but also the partnership of national NGOs in order to carry out development programmes as part of their policies of ‘community engagement’ or ‘uplift’. As this implies, whilst the state-corporate nexus is central to land appropriation in South Asia, we must also consider the role of NGOs and other development agencies, especially in a context such as Bangladesh where NGOs have taken on the role of ‘shadow state’ (Karim, 2011: xviii) . Indeed, the growing links between NGOs, private finance and corporate interests requires urgent attention.

INDEX

Keywords: multinationals, Bangladesh, land, NGO

AUTHORS

ABU AHASAN Research Fellow, Research and Evaluation Division (RED), BRAC, Dhaka, Bangladesh

KATY GARDNER Professor of Anthropology and Head of Department, London School of Economics

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