Book Review: Rob Jenkins,Loraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadhyay,eds,Power,Protest and India’s Special Economic Zones

Power, Protest and India’s Special Economic Zones is a coherent collection that uncovers the land-related conflicts unleashed by the process of industrialization in India. It analyzes the struggles around economic reforms, land and the state’s attempt to achieve contradictory goals through the policy lens of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). In consonance with the regional turn in India’s political economy it undertakes a detailed analysis of 11 states and their experience with SEZs. The states analyzed are as follows: Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. A couple of chapters are a two-state pair analysis: Gujarat and Punjab (Chapter 4) and Orissa and West Bengal (Chapter 8).

The editors in a valuable introduction lay out the theoretical parameters that span the subject of study: a rescaling literature drawn from political geography, literature on the political economy of reforms and a collective action literature spanning diverse bodies of arguments from economics to the more recent social movement literature. Each state chapter focuses on the policy environment governing SEZ and land acquisition as well as the institutional structure and policies that shape industrial development. The chapters also bring to light important contours of the political economy of each state, an important and valuable task. Many of them explore variation beneath the state level, highlighting different experiences of SEZ implementation within each state.

What is striking about this volume is the extensive empirical research that underlies all the chapters. There is much to learn from the varied research methodologies adopted by the contributors of this volume. Despite this strength, none of the chapters engage with the theoretical frameworks outlined by the editors, which means that the chapters lack the theoretical grounding that could have made the book more sophisticated. For example, I was especially curious to see whether the social movement framing of ‘political opportunity structure’ would travel to the Indian context but that exploration was missing in the state-level chapters. It would be of direct relevance to the Goa case study but is not used as a theoretical frame in any of the chapters. Despite this weakness, the book’s chapters are excellent examples of deep and careful regional political economies and are well written and well researched.

Power, Protest and India’s Special Economic Zones confirms a commonly held wisdom about India, challenges some others and reflects on a few puzzles. The volume finds that ‘All development is local,’ a generalization that has emerged across a whole host of writings on India (Lawrence Saez, Federalism without a Center, 2002; Aseema Sinha, The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India, 2005; Atul Kohli, The State and Poverty in India, 1989; Rob Jenkins, ed., Regional Reflections: Case Studies of Democracy in Practice, 2004; Sunila Kale, Electrifying India, 2014; and many others). In addition, some chapters find that Indian states also serve as laboratories for policy innovation that travels to the central level. Gujarat adopted its own SEZ policy in 2002 (Chapter 4). The UP SEZ law, for example, was introduced four years before the central law (Chapter 10 on UP). The implication of this finding is not explored fully as the volume adopts an exclusive sub-national lens and ignores the interaction across levels (centre–state).

The book and its contributors challenge the idea that economic reforms are only a concern of elite politics. Karli Srinivasulu (Chapter 1) makes an important point that modifies Ashutosh Varshney’s important argument about mass politics and elite politics. Srinivasulu finds that in Andhra Pradesh, opposition to the SEZ rests within the NGO sector and civil society rather than among political parties. Thus, economic reforms have become important to the civil society, which has become more involved with issues of equity and displacement than traditional political society with the exception of Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. Indeed, what emerges in all chapters is the insight that issues emerging from economic reforms have animated mass politics as much as elite politics.

The book frames a puzzle: If distributional coalitions beset Indian political economy as Bardhan (1984) and Kruger (1974) have argued, how does one explain the onset and sustainability of reforms in India? The editors’ answer is that SEZs allow the Indian state to isolate the pursuit of reforms to well-defined locations that are carved away from the larger political economy. Some of the state-level chapters arrive at other interesting answers to this puzzle. In many states, interests tied to land have been reduced and new interests tied to industrial and urban economy support the new SEZ policies. This is true for Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana. This reveals that new winners from the economic process have been created, which seek further advantages and opportunities to grow, export and seek benefits from the state.

Despite this finding, when states design more open land acquisition policies, the SEZ process enjoins less opposition or conflict: A state’s initiatives and strategies matter (M. Vijayabaskar’s chapter). The one common implication that emerges from all the chapters is the preeminent role of the state—the sub-national developmental state (Sinha, 2005)—in planning policies such as SEZ and responding to conflicts. The state has not withdrawn despite claims to the contrary. The new classes and groups that seek new benefits from the SEZ policy seek greater support from the state and get it for the most part. The state is required to serve many masters, may be ineffective or unaccountable, but it is central to the ongoing economic transformation in India.

These fine-grained variations across states reveal that it is not easy to generalize about India’s economic reforms. In some states, land acquisition has been opposed (West Bengal, Goa, Punjab, Orissa), while in others, it has been welcomed (Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka). Goa is a fascinating case, the only state where the SEZ policy was reversed (Chapter 3). What is common despite this variation is the role of agriculture in shaping the land acquisition process. So, for example, in Tamil Nadu (Chapter 9), agriculture’s share of the state’s domestic product halved, and agriculture seems to be the worst generator of incomes among most states. This is a common dynamic across many states with the exception of Maharashtra, where SEZs also reconfigured the urban landscape (Chapter 7). The chapters also highlight many local variations within each state. Chapter 10 by Sudha Pai and Avinash Kumar does a careful, well-executed intra-state comparison of two regions within UP, Noida and Ghaziabad. There are also pockets of resistance in many states, including states such as Gujarat or Andhra Pradesh, which tended to support the SEZ policies.

These variations, though, point to the larger, generalizable, fact that the process of economic development creates winners and losers. The authors label it as a ‘contested process’, but the contours of the contestations can have widely varying logics. The term ‘contested’ hides more than it reveals. I found it intriguing that many groups, states and classes are actively supporting reforms across India’s states, which points to expanding support for economic reforms.

Rob Jenkins’s chapter about the origin and implementation of the SEZ policy is excellent. It highlights the activation of new bureaucratic practices—specifically the Group of Ministers—that accompanied the implementation of SEZ policies. Interestingly, in my own research on the WTO, I found the early use of the Group of Ministers idea, which started in 1999. It is my understanding that this bureaucratic practice began in the context of India’s participation in the multilateral trade framework but was then diffused across India’s federal government, especially during the Manmohan Singh era.

I believe that China’s example, in terms of its coastal zones, was the origin of the SEZ idea. Jenkins mentions Maran’s visit to China but does not explore it further (Chapter 2). Interestingly, in the early 1990s South Korea was on the minds of policymakers, but by 2002 China had become the new benchmark. This relates to changing international sources of change within India, which is not discussed at all in this volume. How do these international ideas about SEZs travel to India?

Many chapters mention the similarities among different SEZ laws adopted by many states. This raises an interesting set of questions, which have not yet been explored by scholars of India’s political economy. How and when do state leaders learn from each other? The international relations literature discusses this in terms of diffusion; this volume does not address this theme.

One last puzzle: In my own research I came across an interesting fact that SEZs related to textiles and garments have been more successful than other industry’s SEZ. This anomaly is due to the specific model of public–private partnerships that undergirded the design of the SEZs in garments and textiles. The authors do not speculate on the divergent patterns across sectors and the specific design of different SEZs. Are there different SEZ models? Does the design of the SEZ make a difference? Perhaps that could be explored in a future volume or in a concluding chapter, which is missing from this volume. Overall, this is an excellent book, which offers a rare glimpse into the changing contours of a new political economy across India. It is worth a careful read.