Toward a Political Sociology of Dispossession: Explaining Opposition to Capital Projects in India

• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Smriti Upadhyay,Michael Levien
• DOI: 10.1177/00323292211016587
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211016587

Politics & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/00323292211016587

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Article

Toward a Political

Sociology of Dispossession:

Explaining Opposition to

Capital Projects in India

Michael Levien and Smriti Upadhyay

Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

Land dispossession is a major source of protest in many countries. This article

asks, How common are cases of mobilization against land dispossession relative

to cases of nonmobilization? Why do we see protests against land dispossession

for some projects and not others? These questions are taken up in the context

of India, a major global hotspot for land dispossession protest. Using a database

of all major capital projects in the country, the article looks at the effects of

project characteristics and context on incidence of delays or cancellations due to

land acquisition problems. The findings demonstrate that a project’s sector and

subnational location affect the emergence of opposition to land dispossession.

Further, differences in political competitiveness and agrarian social structure are

significant factors driving subnational variation. By identifying important factors

shaping opposition to land dispossession, the article aims to stimulate comparative

research that can advance a political sociology of dispossession.

Keywords

land grabs, farmer protests, social movements, siting, India

Corresponding Author:

Michael Levien, Johns Hopkins University, 521 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore,

MD 21218, USA.

Email: levien@jhu.edu

1016587PASXXX10.1177/00323292211016587Politics & SocietyLevien and Upadhyay

research-article2021

2022, Vol. 50(2) 279–310

Acquiring rural land for large capital projects has become a contentious political

issue across much of the Global South. Rapid economic growth in countries with

large rural populations has exposed a major problem: where to put large public and

private investments. While greenfield capital projects often require access to rural

land, farmers who depend on that land are often unwilling to relinquish it. Protests

against forcible land dispossession—increasingly termed “land grabbing”—appear to

have increased in number and visibility over the last few decades in many countries

of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.1

Alongside China, where land grabs are estimated to be the single largest source

of rural protest,2 India is arguably the global epicenter of land dispossession protest.

Using the case of India, this article seeks to advance an incipient political sociology

of dispossession by providing one of the first quantitative analyses of opposition to

land dispossession. Land dispossession has been a relatively neglected topic in

Western sociology—studied far more intensively in geography and anthropology—

but this has changed over the last decade.3 Attention to new forms of political con-

tention generated by economic dislocation in the Global South, but not reducible to

labor struggles per se, began to interest sociologists in the antiglobalization upsurge

of the 1990s and 2000s.4 David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession

importantly linked—however abstractly—various dispossession struggles to the

contemporary dynamics of capitalism and has generated significant scholarship.5

Sociologists have since advanced their own theories of the economic drivers of land

dispossession.6 Scholars in multiple disciplines have directed their attention to the

dynamics of dispossession protests and the consequences for rural people when they

fail.7 This burgeoning scholarship provides important insights into the politics of

land dispossession, which we review below. It has also—like social movement stud-

ies generally—tended to focus on cases of actual mobilization.8 As a result, we still

have limited ability to answer the question, How common are cases of mobilization

against land dispossession versus cases of nonmobilization? And why do we see

protests against land dispossession for some projects and not others? This article

represents, to our knowledge, the first attempt to address those questions—in India

or elsewhere—through quantitative analysis.

Quantitative research on land dispossession has been hampered by the fact that

most governments do not keep track of the number of people they dispossess, much

less the number of protests that result.9 We overcome this obstacle by using a data set

on capital projects in India that provides us with an indirect measure of such conten-

tion: the number of capital projects stalled or stopped by land acquisition problems.

“Land acquisition” is the euphemistic term used in India for the forcible appropriation

of private land by the state—what is known elsewhere as eminent domain and what we

call land dispossession. Since the mid-1990s, the Centre for Monitoring Indian

Economy (CMIE), a for-profit business research company, has built the most compre-

hensive database of capital projects in India: the CapEx database. CapEx tracks the

progress of all major capital projects in the country, noting major events in project

timelines, including whether they encounter problems acquiring land. The number of

such projects has become substantial in the last decade. Whereas the CapEx database

280 Politics & Society 50(2)

has so far been used to estimate the total value of projects delayed by land acquisition

(estimates we update), our analysis goes farther by asking what the CapEx database

can tell us about the most important factors influencing land acquisition problems in

India, including their cost, sector, ownership (public or private), size, and location

(subnational state). In addition, we draw on other data on subnational variation in

political, agrarian, and developmental contexts to analyze what drives variation in land

acquisition problems across India’s states.

The article presents several main findings. First, it demonstrates the scale and sig-

nificance of resistance to land dispossession in contemporary India. We find that 3

percent of all capital projects implemented in India between 2007 and 2015 encoun-

tered problems acquiring land. The total cost of these projects amounts to INR 22

trillion (or USD 368.3 billion). For reasons explained below, we suggest that this fig-

ure likely underestimates the difficulty of acquiring land in contemporary India.

Second, and most important, we find that the sector of a project significantly affects

opposition to it. Our findings confirm the qualitative impression of large dams and

special economic zones as lightning rods for land acquisition protest: they, along with

railway projects (a sector we did not expect), are the most likely to encounter land

acquisition problems by a large margin. Infrastructure and real estate and construction

projects are also more likely to be delayed or abandoned than those in mining, manu-

facturing, and services. Third, we find that private infrastructure projects are more

likely than public infrastructure projects to encounter land acquisition problems.

Finally, our findings confirm that the state location of projects is an important determi-

nant of land acquisition conflict, which aligns only partially with scholarly and popu-

lar perceptions of “pro-business” and “politicized” states. More specifically, our

analysis shows that state-level variations in political competition and agrarian social

structure—particularly land tenure and the average size of holdings—are significant

determinations of land acquisition conflict.

The article is organized into the following sections. First, we provide a brief over-

view of land dispossession politics in India. Second, we review the existing scholar-

ship on land dispossession politics and develop the theoretical implications of the

study. Third, we discuss the strengths and limitations of the data set. We then use the

data to present an overview of India’s land acquisition problem since 2007, which

shows how land acquisition problems vary across project characteristics. We use

regression analysis to isolate and estimate the effects of these characteristics on the

likelihood of projects running into land acquisition problems. In the conclusion, we

discuss the implications of these findings, including the many questions they pose for

a comparative sociology of dispossession.

The Politics of Land Dispossession in India

The politics of land dispossession has a long and rich history in India. Historians have

documented significant resistance to the forest enclosures and agrarian dispossessions

of the colonial period.10 Localized and largely ineffectual resistance also emerged to

some of the major development projects of the immediate post-Independence decades,

281

Levien and Upadhyay