The Messy Politics of Land Acquisition in West Bengal DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Sayoni Bose Graduate Program in Geography The Ohio State University 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Becky Mansfield (Advisor), Dr. Nancy Ettlinger, Dr. Ed Malecki, Dr. Kendra McSweeney Copyright by Sayoni Bose 2015 Abstract Land acquisition for the purpose of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) started to unfold at an accelerated pace across India since 2005. West Bengal, a state in eastern India, has not been an exception to this trend. The politics that emanated out of this acquisition in West Bengal is irreducible to a singular struggle between land grabbers and land losers at this given contemporary moment. I argue that land acquisition politics in West Bengal is messy, because of the way the history of changing property relations, their governance by the State and its attendant power relations, constantly produce and reproduce current-day land politics. Thus land politics stands at the nexus of the messy articulations of power across time. This also produces multiple responses around the land question. Throughout my dissertation I show how power works through property to produce current day messiness in land politics. The main finding in this dissertation is how the communist government in West Bengal has attempted to occlude the history of land reforms which it implemented in 1977, to materialize land acquisitions in 2006 by using colonial logics of power. By using such logics, the government treated the land holders and users as a “subrace” that needs to be civilized towards industrialization. This it did through a politics of forgetting the past reforms wherein agricultural relations were deemed as primitive, invisibilized the existent lived agricultural realities and affordances of land and used the technology of violence or threat thereof to subordinate those elements of the ii “subrace” that resisted. A related finding of this dissertation is that as the government tried to make the past disappear, it always reappeared, as the sedimentations of past relations of land reforms always interfered with the process of occluding the past. This reappearance of the past happened through stakeholders making claims, resisting for their rights in the language of entitlement and indignation because of the past history of reforms. Thus land acquisition standing at the dialectical interplay of sedimentation and absencing of the past produced a messy politics, which was always contested making the process of acquisition highly fragile. This research contributes towards showing how history shapes contemporary processes, it denaturalizes property to show how property relations are produced, not given and are highly contested. This work contributes to the land grabs literature to show how land grabbing unfolds in a populous part of the world and takes a historico-geographical view of the emergence of land politics in a part of South Asia. It also contributes towards understanding how power relations work, and how the simultaneous sedimentation and erasure of power create a messy politics. iii Vita March 1993 .....................................................................................Pratt Memorial School 1996..................................................................................B.Sc Geography, Loreto College 1998......................................................................M.Sc Geography, University of Calcutta 2001............................................................................B.Ed Education, A.J.C. Bose College 2010 ..............................................................M.A. Geography, The Ohio State University 2008-2015 ......................................................Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University Publication Bose S., Forthcoming. “Universities and the Redevelopment Politics of the Neoliberal City.” Urban Studies, doi: 10.1177/0042098014550950. Fields of Study Major Field: Geography iv Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ii Vita ...................................................................................................................................iv List of Tables ...................................................................................................................vi List of Figures ..................................................................................................................vii Introduction: The Messy Politics of Land Acquisition in West Bengal ..........................1 Chapter 1: The Establishment of the Rule of Property: Permanent Settlement and its Effects ..................................................................................................................16 Chapter 2: Land Reforms in West Bengal: Seeing (Not) Like a State (of Reforms).......61 Chapter 3: From Reforms to Acquisition: The Politics of Rendering Land Investible in West Bengal .........................................................................................................130 Conclusion: Future Directions .........................................................................................214 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................220 v List of Tables Table 1. Land and Land Reform Statistics.......................................................................77 Table 2. Glossary of Terms ..............................................................................................219 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Map of Study Sites in West Bengal..................................................................7 Figure 2: Fertile Lands of Singur .....................................................................................208 Figure 3: Fertile Lands of Singur .....................................................................................209 Figure 4: Relatively Less Fertile Lands of Salboni .........................................................210 Figure 5: Relatively Less Fertile Lands of Salboni .........................................................211 Figure 6: Walling at Singur..............................................................................................212 Figure 7: Walling at Salboni ............................................................................................213 vii Introduction: The Messy Politics of Land Acquisition in West Bengal This dissertation interrogates the messy politics of land acquisition in India. It particularly analyzes the land question in West Bengal, a state in the eastern part of the country. Land acquisition started to unfold at an accelerated pace, post-2005 across India. West Bengal has not been an exception to this trend. Such acquisitions were part of a State-mandated land assembling activity for the purpose of creating Special Economic Zones for industrialization and real estate development. However the politics that emanated out of this acquisition is irreducible to a singular struggle between land grabbers and land losers at this given contemporary moment. I argue that land acquisition politics in West Bengal is messy, because of the way the past history of property relations in Bengal and its attendant power relations constantly produce and reproduce current-day land politics. Thus land politics stands at the nexus of the messy articulations of power across time (Moore, 2005). This dissertation will therefore trace the evolution and transformation of property relations in Bengal. It will specifically look at the role of the State in grounding these transforming property relations in order to govern society. This work will then situate the contemporary land politics in West Bengal against this history of changing property relations and therefore power relations within the nexus of State- society relations. 1 The Context Land acquisition is not new in India. Land has been acquired since the British times and continues to happen in post-independent India (Levien, 2013; Lobo and Kumar, 2009). Soon after independence, a modernizing Indian State started acquiring land for the purpose of industrialization and building dams (ibid). This modernizing thrust was in part a product of elite vision, to catapult India to the ranks of other modern societies in the world (see Ray and Katzenstein, 2005; Gidwani and Reddy, 2011). The Indian National Congress which constituted the national government, was historically an elite clique with close ties to industrialists1, but later began to absorb socialist elements. These elements made economic justice a central issue in the party (Chibber, 2006; Ray and Katzenstein, 2005). This meant that the party and therefore the government was internally divided, supporting multiple interests. There was no unified ideology of progress within the party (Chibber, 2006). It was however Nehru’s vision of social democracy with dual focus on development and poverty alleviation that gained dominance (Ray and Katzenstein, 2005). However the path towards modernization and the “will to improve” (Li, 2007) through land acquisition for infrastructure and industrial development was not easy. There was resistance from agricultural capitalists who saw land acquisition as a threat. What complicated