The Wild East The Wild East Criminal Political Economies in South Asia Edited by Barbara Harriss-White and Lucia Michelutti First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Contributors, 2019 Images © Contributors, 2019 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Harriss-White, B. and Michelutti, L. (eds). 2019. The Wild East: Criminal Political Economies in South Asia. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/ 111.9781787353237 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons license, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-325-1 (Hbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-324-4 (Pbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-323-7 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-326-8 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-327-5 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787353237 Contents List of figures vii List of tables viii List of boxes ix Notes on contributors x Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Barbara Harriss-White and Lucia Michelutti 1. The criminal economics and politics of black coal in Jharkhand, 2014 35 Nigel Singh and Barbara Harriss-White 2. Jharia’s century-old fire kept ablaze by crime and politics 68 Smita Gupta 3. Sand and the politics of plunder in Tamil Nadu, India 92 J. Jeyaranjan 4. Himalayan ‘hydro-criminality’? Dams, development and politics in Arunachal Pradesh, India 115 Deepak K. Mishra 5. Crime in the air: spectrum markets and the telecommunications sector in India 140 Jai Bhatia 6. The inter-state criminal life of sand and oil in North India 168 Lucia Michelutti 7. ‘Red sanders mafia’ in South India: violence, electoral democracy and labour 194 David Picherit 8. The ‘land and real estate mafia’, West Bengal, East India 215 Tone K. Sissener v 9. Politics, capital and land grabs in Punjab, India 240 Nicolas Martin 10 . The politics of contracting in provincial Bangladesh 262 Arild Engelsen Ruud 11 . Putting out the Baldia factory fire: how the trial of Karachi’s industrial capitalism did not happen 288 Laurent Gayer Epilogue South Asian criminal economies 322 Barbara Harriss-White Appendix Laws alleged or established to have been broken – with main offenders 352 Glossary 359 Index 361 vi CONTENTS List of figures Figure 11.1 The remains of Ali Enterprises, Baldia Town (August 2017 – Photograph by Laurent Gayer) 289 vii List of tables Table 5.1 Indian government revenue receipts 143 Table 6.1 Indicative revenues from selling sand, 2014 179 viii List of boxes Box 1.1 The system of interlocked transactions in black coal 42 Box 6.1 Banas sand business (Rajasthan), 2014 180 Box 6.2 Chambal sand business (Madhya Pradesh), 2014 181 Box 6.3 Yamuna river sand business (Uttar Pradesh), 2014 182 ix Notes on contributors Barbara Harriss-White is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, Professorial Research Asso- ciate at SOAS and Visiting Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has written, edited or co-edited and published 40 books and major reports and published over 250 scholarly papers and chapters and over 80 working papers. Her book Rural Commercial Capital (2007) won the Edgar Graham prize. Since 1969, through field research, she has worked on India’s political economy, in particular the agricultural and informal economy, aspects of deprivation and waste. Lucia Michelutti is Professor of Anthropology at UCL. Her major research interest is the study of popular politics, religion, law and order and vio- lence across South Asia (North India) and Latin America (Venezuela). She is the author of The Vernacularisation of Democracy (2008) and co-author of Mafia Raj (2018), and has published scholarly articles on caste/race, leadership, muscular politics and crime and political experi- mentations. She is the convener of the UCL MSc in politics, violence and crime. Nigel Singh graduated from St Antony’s College, Oxford in 2009 with an MSc in contemporary India. He published on solar energy policy in India as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. Subsequently, he was South Asia Analyst at Control Risks, advising multinationals on the region’s political economy. He is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Royal Holloway, completing his first novel. Before Oxford, he produced BBC and Channel Four television programmes; he also has a BA (Hons) in English and drama from Bristol University. Smita Gupta is an economist working on employment, rural develop- ment, land acquisition, land rights, tribal rights, displacement, mining and natural resources policy. She has prepared policy documents for the x planning commission and written several research notes for parliamen- tary committees on employment guarantee, forest rights, mining and land acquisition. She is associated with the Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch and the Centre for Adivasi Research and Development. She has just completed two primary surveys – of tribal schools and environmen- tal degradation due to mining – in tribal areas and is now engaged in a survey of tribal migrants from Central India to Delhi. J. Jeyaranjan is an economist specialising in the socio-economic devel- opment of Tamil Nadu state, India. Recently, he co-edited two volumes of the Telangana Social Development Report, published by the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, India. He has published several arti- cles in leading academic journals and has contributed articles to several edited books. Deepak K. Mishra is Professor of Economics at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests are in the political economy of agrarian change, rural livelihoods and agrarian institutions, migra- tion, gender and human development. He has co-authored The Unfolding Crisis in Assam’s Tea Plantations: Employment and Occupational Mobility (2012) and has edited Internal Migration in Contemporary India (2016). Recently he has co-edited Rethinking Economic Development in Northeast India: The Emerging Dynamics (2017). Jai Bhatia is a PhD researcher at SOAS, University of London. Her research examines the neoliberal system of accumulation in India through the lens of the telecom sector. It highlights the growing dominance of finance and the emergence of India-specific modalities of financialisation through an exploration of the political economy of regulations, the role of the state and its institutional structures, political processes, and the interrelations between state, business and public sector banks. She aims to build a portrait of progress and economic development in post-liberal- ised India. Prior to her PhD she worked in finance. She holds an MBA and an MSc in Contemporary Indian Studies from the University of Oxford. David Picherit holds a PhD in anthropology and is a Research Fellow at CNRS – Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative (LESC), Paris. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldworks, his research explores the everyday articulations between economy and politics and the forms of violence in South India. He has conducted research on labour NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi migration, brokerage and politicisation of low-castes in Telangana, and on criminal politicians-cum-businessmen and their henchmen in Rayala- seema (Andhra Pradesh). Tone K. Sissener is a social anthropologist from the University of Ber- gen. Her major research interests include corruption, politics, law and order and land disputes, as well as violence in South Asia. Research for the chapter in this book was done as a postdoctoral Fellow at the Depart- ment of Health Promotion and Development, Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen, and as co-researcher of the research programme ‘Democratic Cultures in South Asia’ at UCL. She is presently working at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen. Nicolas Martin is currently an Assistant Professor in Indian/South Asian studies at the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies of the University of Zurich. He was trained as a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics, where he produced a dissertation and a subsequent book about landed power in the rural Pakistani Punjab. Since 2012 he has shifted his attention to shifting power relations in the rural Indian Pun- jab, paying particular attention to new forms of dominance through con- trol over state resources. Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia studies at the University of Oslo. He writes on issues of democracy and politics in South Asia, spe- cifically West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is author of Poetics of Village Politics (2003), on West Bengal’s rural communism, co-editor of Power and Influence in India (2010, with Pamela Price) and co-author of Mafia Raj (2018, with Lucia Michelutti et al.). Laurent Gayer is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), currently posted at the Centre for Inter- national Research and Studies (CERI-Sciences Po), Paris.