Over the past two decades, land dispossession for private industry has emerged as one of the most contentious political issues in contemporary India. Building on my book Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (2018) and subsequent collaborate research, in this talk I will argue that there remains a moving contradiction between the land requirements of Indian capitalism and the political weight of farmers in Indian democracy. I will first show how land dispossession changed from the developmentalist to neoliberal periods. Whereas in the developmentalist period, the state dispossessed land for public sector infrastructure and development projects, in the neoliberal period states started dispossessing land for private companies, for increasingly speculative purposes. No longer able to promise farmers inclusion in economic development, India’s federal and state governments have since struggled to find a formula for producing compliance to dispossession, generating diverse but widespread anti-dispossession struggles. While waves of farmer protest push compensation up and achieve limited protections against dispossession, industry counter-offensives achieve dilutions that, in turn, makes more farmer resistance likely. Although slowing growth has temporarily lessened this contradiction, it remains an unsolved and unsolvable one for the present BJP government that will likely re-explode in the future.
The speaker, Michael Levien, is associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University.
The seminar is organized by the Centre for South Asian Democracy and the Center for Religion and Politics.