The Politics of Dispossession

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329213493751
• Published date: 01 September 2013
• Date: 01 September 2013
• Author: Michael Levien
• Subject Matter: Articles

Politics & Society

41(3) 351 –394

© 2013 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329213493751

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Article

The Politics of Dispossession:

Theorizing India’s “Land

Wars”

Michael Levien

Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

While struggles over land dispossession have recently proliferated across the

developing world and become particularly significant in India, this paper argues that

existing theories of political agency do not capture the specificity of the politics of

dispossession. Based on two years of ethnographic research on anti-dispossession

movements across rural India, the paper argues that the dispossession of land

creates a specific kind of politics, distinct not just from labor politics, but also

from various other forms of peasant politics that have been theorized in the social

sciences. It illustrates how the process of land dispossession itself shapes the

targets, strategy and tactics, organization, social composition, goals, and ideologies

of anti-dispossession struggles. It concludes with reflections on why land conflicts

are less easily institutionalized than labor conflicts and may therefore constitute

a significantly disruptive force in the emerging centers of global capitalism for the

foreseeable future.

Keywords

accumulation by dispossession, land grabs, social movements, agrarian change, peasant

politics, Polanyi, India

Corresponding Author:

Michael Levien, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, 533 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400 N.

Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.

Email: levien@jhu.edu

493751PAS41310.1177/0032329213493751Politics & SocietyLevien

research-article2013

352 Politics & Society 41(3)

There is a growing recognition that frameworks of political agency premised on the

position of wage laborers in capitalist production do not capture many of the most

significant political struggles against neoliberal capitalism. In many parts of the world,

labor struggles have been overshadowed by social movements, insurgencies, and

resistances that do not originate from the proletariat—strictly speaking—and that are

fighting not exploitation but innumerable forms of dispossession of private and com-

mon wealth: what Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession.”1 Rural land has

become a major locus of such dispossession in many developing countries, bringing

the state and metropolitan capitalists into direct confrontation with rural agricultural-

ists. In India, the use of eminent domain and other state powers to expropriate land

from farmers for increasingly privatized industrial, infrastructural, and real estate proj-

ects has, in recent years, generated widespread agrarian uprisings, popularly dubbed

“land wars.” While so-called land wars have moved to the center of Indian politics and

are attracting greater scholarly interest globally, this paper argues that existing theories

of political agency do not capture the specificity of the politics of dispossession. Based

on a broad mapping of anti-dispossession movements across India, this paper advances

some parameters for such a theory.

Although the dispossession of agrarian land has long been an aspect of capitalist

development in most parts of the world, its economic and political significance appears

to be generally increasing. This renewed significance appears to be global, and “land

grabs” are now attracting significant scholarly attention in Africa,2 Southeast Asia,3

and Latin America.4 However, it is arguably in the two rapidly growing countries that

together contain 45 percent of the world’s rural population that land struggles have

reached the greatest scale and political explosiveness.5 In China, scholars estimate that

between 50 and 66 million people were dispossessed for various kinds of development

projects between 1980 and 2002, and that land grabs now constitute the single largest

source of peasant protest,6 and possibly of “mass incidents” more generally.7 The

efforts of local governments to cheaply acquire farmland for private developers has

triggered a series of farmer protests, including high-profile clashes in the villages of

Wukan in 2011 and Shangpu in 2013, which appear to be drawing inspiration from

each other. These proliferating land struggles have forced Chinese leaders to pay some

obeisance to protecting farmers’ land rights,8 and prompted limited efforts to rein in

the land brokering of local governments.9

In India, the accelerating dispossession of land for private investment in the post-

liberalization period, combined with a relatively open democracy, has made the land

question perhaps even more politically consequential than in China. While it is esti-

mated that 60 million people have been displaced from their land for development

projects since independence in 1947, the rate of dispossession has by all accounts

increased after liberalization in the early 1990s.10 Its character, moreover, has changed

as Special Economic Zones (SEZs), high-tech cities, real estate, and privatized infra-

structure have joined dams, mining, heavy industry, and commercial forestry as causes

for dispossessing peasants. Since 2005, privately developed and real-estate driven

Special Economic Zones have become the epicenters of “land wars,” with farmers

across India refusing to give land for them. In 2007, India’s land wars boiled over

Levien 353

when fourteen farmers in Nandigram, West Bengal, were massacred, with many more

raped and severely injured, for refusing to give their land for a petrochemical SEZ

promoted by an Indonesian conglomerate. The resulting public outcry catapulted land

dispossession to the center of Indian politics, forcing the central government to limit

land acquisition for SEZs and to introduce amendments to the Land Acquisition Act

(LAA). It also contributed directly to the eventual defeat of the communist Left Front

government that had ruled West Bengal for thirty-four years. And Nandigram was only

the tip of the iceberg.

Across India, farmers have been opposing the efforts of state governments to forc-

ibly transfer their land to private companies. Most surprisingly, they have started to

win in an unprecedented fashion. Farmers have effectively stopped the two largest

proposed SEZs in India (promoted by Reliance Industries near Gurgaon and Mumbai),

all of the SEZs in Goa, and four in Maharasthra. Many more, in all parts of India, are

stuck in land acquisition purgatory. India’s largest proposed Foreign Direct Investment

ever—the twelve megaton POSCO Steel SEZ to be built in coastal Orissa—has been

stalled since 2005 due to fierce resistance by local forest cultivators. The factory that

was to produce Tata Motors’ flagship Nano car had to be relocated from West Bengal

to Gujarat in the face of a strong protest movement by local farmers with the support

of an opposition party.11 In Orissa, resistance by indigenous (adivasi) groups to having

their mountain turned into a bauxite mine for London-based Vedanta forced the central

government to cancel the project.

Although the government keeps no record of these land struggles, by the late 2000s

they were clearly endemic across most of India. While several dozen of them have

achieved a relatively high profile, daily reports in Indian newspapers suggest that their

numbers are easily in the hundreds (Figure 1 illustrates the locations of those that will

be discussed in this paper). The relatively politicized struggles are, moreover, under-

lain by widespread legal opposition to routine government land acquisition. It is not

just that protest is increasing as the scale of dispossession increases; also farmers

appear to be responding more aggressively to being dispossessed for private corpora-

tions under India’s neoliberal growth model than they did to public sector projects in

the period of state-led development.12 With India’s liberalized growth model depen-

dent on the state’s ability to make large tracts of land available to private investors,13

this increasing noncompliance of farmers is now seen as a critical bottleneck for eco-

nomic development.14 Land acquisition has become, in the words of Prime Minister

Manhoman Singh, a “very sensitive” issue that has exposed a contradiction between

the land requirements of India’s liberalized growth model and the exigencies of elec-

toral democracy.15

To assess the long-term significance of this contradiction, we need to better under-

stand the politics of dispossession. David Harvey’s framework of “accumulation by

dispossession” provides a starting point. By freeing Marx’s “primitive accumulation”

from its narrow role in the transition between modes of production, Harvey has created

a versatile concept that is better able to capture diverse forms of contemporary dispos-

session that emanate from, rather than create the preconditions for, advanced capital-

ism. Harvey makes a strong case that Marxists have focused too exclusively on the