From Colonial to Neoliberal Regime: Understanding the Paradigms of Land Dispossession in India

Introduction

While dispossession of land in India has a long, drawn-out diachronic history, only over the last two and half decades under the liberalized and globalized Indian economy, demand for land by private capital has escalated phenomenally. With the help of legal and political power of the state—phraseologically termed as ‘extra-economic forces’ (Marx, 1976; De Angelis, 2001; Hall, 2011, 2012), many Indian states have expropriated large tracts of rural land—forest, agricultural land and commons—for various private capital-intensive development activities. In most of these cases until now, expropriations of land have been carried through by the state forces without the consent of a majority of those who had a stake in the affected land, resulting in agitations and resistances against both the governments and land requisitioning agencies for depriving them of their means of subsistence and livelihoods (Roy, 2016, p. 33).

Although the rapacity of land dispossession presently in vogue has lately captured unprecedented controversies, peasants’ movements, academic and public debates and political and media attention, it has seemingly been central to the contemporary capitalist development in the Global South in general, and India in particular. Dispossession of peasants from land for capital has happened inevitably to be a fickle socio-electoral issue, reverberating an immoral connivance between the capitalists and states—what Levien (2012, 2018) calls ‘broker’ states—that virtually promote intrusion and accumulation of capital of the former through the predation of means of production of primary producers (Nielsen, 2010). While one strand of scholars (Cernea, 1997; Chakrabarty et al., 2015; Fernandes, 2007; Hui & Bao, 2013; Millar, 2016; Nayak, 2019) focusing on developing countries impute the alienation of traditional livelihoods, deprivation of property rights, social exclusion and marginalization to largely these expropriations, a second riposte considers them engines of oppression, unemployment, and eventually destitution (Council for Social Development, 2008; Sau, 2008; Venkatesan, 2011). A third riposte (Adnan, 2013; Arrighi et al., 2010; Banerjee-Guha, 2010; Borras et al., 2012; Levien, 2012; Walker, 2006, 2008; White et al., 2012), on the other hand, productively analyses these processes for the purpose of capital accumulation in the Global South through the lens of Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’ (1976), and Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2003)—a concept which is, as argued by Glassman (2006, p. 608), a reconstruction and redeployment of the former within the capitalist countries of the Global North. These studies have, however, linked the state-driven neoliberal ‘new enclosures’ (White et al., 2012, p. 621) and dispossessed labour force to the pre-industrial expropriation of land from the English peasantry who contributed to the reserve army of labour and ultimately ended up becoming urban industrial proletariat that virtually remained central to centuries of imperialism, and creation, expansion and reproduction of capitalist social relations (Hall, 2013, p. 1583).

As a means of capitalism, land dispossession antedates the enactment of the ‘Enclosure Act’ in England in the seventeenth century that facilitated consolidation of farmland for commercial farming by setting the immediate producers ‘free’ as proletarians (Marx, 1976, p. 725; Stromberg, 1995). Ever since that historic instance of dispossessed English peasantry, dispossession of peasants and tribals from land and livelihoods has always been identified as a condition of successful capitalist development across space and over time, and has exhibited no augury of ceasing. It virtually remains an underlying feature for restructuring of geographical spaces and economic change spawned by colonial, post-colonial and neoliberal political economies. While in India dispossession on a large scale embarked on with the enactment of the Bengal Regulation Act (I) of 1824 by the British East India Company ¹ (Ohdedar, 2012), its context, purpose and mode, inter alia, underwent utilitarian transmutations over time in tune with the ‘historical, social, political and economic constellations’ of the state apparatus—what Levien calls ‘regime’ (2013a, p. 383). In other words, because the term ‘regime’ refers to a particular but unspecific and relatively longer ‘time period’ dominated by a set of unequivocal ideological policy interventions of the state forces intending to attain certain social, political and economic goals, the character and pattern of dispossession become variable. Considering the notions of land-based development of the states and their convoluted legal and political power involved in expropriation of land on a large-scale, much research on land dispossession in India has so far theoretically and empirically focused primarily on its manoeuvre and apparent outcome in many productive ways while blanking out ‘why’ dispossession on a large scale under different politico-economic regimes at all became inevitable. In other words, the context and politico-economic backdrop in and against which the colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal India—a nation-state that in the second half of 2000s arguably became the epicentre of peasant movements and conflicts in the Global South popularly dubbed ‘land wars’ (Levien, 2013b)—undertook dispossession of land on massive scales remain under researched. While Levien’s (2013a) seminal work briefly, inter alia, covers this aspect, the analysis delimits to only post-colonial Nehruvian state developmentalism and neoliberalism, concentrating more on their outcome and structural differences than backdrop or logical footings. It excludes the ‘colonial regime’, which being the lengthiest of all regimes, I argue, plays a central part in understanding the diachronic ‘genealogy of dispossession’. Against this backdrop, this article aims:

to examine and understand the grounds and thrust for which state-mediated land dispossession in Indian on massive scales as a means to normatively laden term ‘development activities’ became inevitably necessary under colonial, post-colonial and neoliberal politico-economic regimes; and

The issues concerning acquisition of land or dispossession of peasants and adivasis on a large-scale from their means of subsistence (land) by the Indian states in the name of development activities have been myriad, broadly ranging from ‘impoverishment risks’ that include landlessness, unemployment, destitution, homelessness, marginalization, food insecurity, increased morbidity, loss of commons, social disarticulation and loss of sociocultural resilience of the dispossessed communities (Cernea, 1997; 2000; Fernandes, 1998) to their displuming social capital (Levien, 2015; Mallik, 2016) to proletarianization and devalorization of acquired land and accumulation of wealth/capital by the corporate (Aphun & Sharma 2017; Banerjee-Guha, 2010). While analyses or theoretical discussion on these aspects are beyond this article’s purview, its analytical lens does focus on and distinguish the logics and purposes of state-mediated large-scale land dispossessions destined for development activities under different politico-economic regimes, broadly shaping the structure of the dispossessed labour force. In what follows the methodology, I succinctly elaborate on the pedigree of the colonial Land Acquisition Act (LAA) of 1894 and its inherent and critical constituent—the ‘Eminent Domain’. Also, I portray the historical context, purpose and mechanism of dispossession of peasants and forest dwellers on a large-scale by the colonial state force, which would, as we move forward, help comprehend the genealogy of dispossession and how the political economy of dispossession kept on changing its sway with the change of a regime.

Methodology

The article is essentially analytical in nature. Methodologically, it primarily draws from a broader research involving existing competent literatures while the secondary data and information gathered from various documents and reports of government and semi-government agencies such as the Comptroller Auditor General of India (CAG), the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) and the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), and archival materials (newspapers, unpublished document etc.) played a complementary part to it.

Eminent Domain and the Land Acquisition Act in India: A Diachronic Glimpse

The term ‘eminent domain’ was first coined by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) in ‘De jure belli ac pacis’ ² in 1625 as ‘dominium eminens’ (meaning thereby in Latin ‘supreme lordship’) to describe the power of the state over natural and private properties (Standing Committee on Rural Development, 2012). It is the power of the sovereign to take hold of any private property for ‘public uses’ with a due monetary compensation, without even having received the owner’s consent (Dalton, 2006). The nomenclature, however, changed over political boundaries while exercising this power to acquire land across the country, as in ‘compulsory purchase’ in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Ireland; ‘resumption’ or ‘compulsory acquisition’ in Australia, and ‘expropriation’ in Canada and South Africa (Nabutola, 2009). However, the fundamental axiom embodied in the Grotian ‘eminent domain’ remained unchanged, which holds that the interest of a community is always superior to the interest of an individual.

The origin of the Land Acquisition Act in India lies in the Bengal Regulation Act (I) of 1824 (Ohdedar, 2012) which helped the Colonial British Government to seize private land and other immovable properties on a large-scale for not only extracting mineral resources and growing plantation crops but constructing roads, canals and other public amenities at meagre compensation rates (Law Commission of India, 1958). Extraction of resources, inter alia, deemed to be an integral part of the British Government’s strategy to turn the country into an important supplier of cheap raw materials for industries in England (Fernandes, 1998). The quick freight of the industrial raw materials from hinterlands to ports, and finally shipping to England felt the urgency of building railway networks in the mid-nineteenth century, which in turn required a legislation for acquiring land on a massive scale. Consequently, the Act XLII of 1850 declared railways as a ‘public work’ and brought the provisions of the Bengal Regulation (I) of 1824 into force to expropriate land for constructing railway networks. To make the acquisition of land hassle-free, the colonial government further enacted the Act VI of 1857 which repealed all previous legislations used for acquiring lands and other immovable private properties and came into force in whole British India (Law Commission of India, 1958). The 1857 legislation was formulated keeping the two crucial goals in view: first, to make the acquisition of private land needed for any public purpose easier; and second, to determine the quantum of compensation to be paid for acquired land. Under this act, the collector was empowered as the compensation fixing authority. However, the experiences of the uses of this Act in the following several years debunked in ways that yielded profound disappointment among the persons interested. The methods of settling compensation remained much below the expectation as the arbitrators (collectors) were often found clumsy and sometimes even dishonest. Consequently, the British Legislature had to intervene and ordained the Act X of 1870 which notably, for the first time, acknowledged a civil court for determining compensation when the collector was not able to settle it by agreement with the persons interested. However, like the previous legislations, the Act of 1870 was found defective on many counts. Eventually, the British Government in India on 01 March 1894 passed the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, upholding the fundamental doctrines of Grotian ‘eminent domain’ integral and intact.

The LAA of 1894 extended to the whole of undivided India except the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was also amended several times in its due course of time. While the key concern for the colonial British Government was to acquire land swiftly at a minuscule monetary compensation, the 1923 amendment of the LAA, however, for the first time, consecrated an opportunity to the persons interested (dispossessed owners) to register their objections against the acquisition to the concerned authority. The colonial rules ceased in 1947 but the prolonged exploitation and pillage of resources by the British pushed the newly independent country into an ensuant financial penury. Consequently, despite having introduced the Republican Constitution in 1950, and despite having had an opportunity to prune the drawn-out injustices of the colonial LAA, the country had to go along with it (Roy & Patra, 2009) to embark on the post-colonial state developmentalism orchestrated and led by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

Land Dispossession under the British Raj: Colonial Exploitation and Expansion

Land dispossession in India under the colonial rule, is a classic instance of forceful ‘land grab’ for tea and coffee plantations, mining, forestry and railways on a large scale by the British colonial state, using ‘extra-economic’ means that involved ‘the use of legal or political power and/or (threat of) force’ (Hall, 2013, p. 1592). While it, as stated earlier, led off in the 1820s with the enactment of the Bengal Regulation Act, its magnitude, however, exalted with the railway enclosures in the 1850s, and subsequently with the enactment of the Indian Forest Act of 1865 and forest enclosures by the British Government. These legislations conferred absolute possession of forest to the state and vested legal mechanisms to assert and safeguard the imperial government’s exploitation and control over the Indian forest land. Both the legislations played critical role in dispossessing people from their land and commons, particularly forest and waste land, on a large scale. While the central objectives of building railways were to facilitate the movement of British troops after the mutiny and trading commodities, that is, to ‘export of primary commodities from the colony and import of finished goods into the colony from the metropolis’ (Guha, 1983, p. 1863), its spatial expansion, inter alia, required a sustained supply of three priceless Indian timbers: teak, sal and deodar which ‘were strong enough to be utilised in building railway crossties’ (Nayak, 2015, p. 253). The expansion of railway network in the 1850s and early 1860s was the most unprecedented formidable force that began to rapidly thin out the Indian forests (Gadgil & Guha, 1992). With the oak forest rapidly vanishing in England, the second crucial factor to deforestation (thinning out trees) in colonial India in the mid-nineteenth century, on the other hand, happened to be the enormous demand for durable Indian teak by the British Royal Navy for shipbuilding, which further intensified the exploitation of Indian forest. It was this ruthless depredation that awoke and impelled the British government sensing an urgency of a forest legislation that would inevitably be a possible solution to deforestation and preservation of teak, sal and deodar forests—the then three critical resources that were substantive and essential for the expansion of railways in the subcontinent. And the urgency shortly culminated into the Indian Forest Act of 1865, which was replaced with a more comprehensive and goal-oriented piece of legislation—the Indian Forest Act of 1878. While this act empowered the colonial government to appropriate any land covered with trees, it hitherto truncated the rural communities’ untrammelled uses of the forests, and virtually eliminated the rights and interests of the forest dwellers. Also, it ‘facilitated the acquisition of those areas that were earmarked for railway’ (Nayak, 2015, p. 254) and shipbuilding supplies. Expansion of railways under the colonial state force continued unabated to primarily shield its ‘long-term imperial interest’ (Guha, 1983, p. 1884).

The 1878 Indian Forest Act grouped the country’s forest into three categories: reserved, protected and village forests. This classification was, however, an upshot of the British dexterity on the footing that ‘the customary use of forest by the villagers was based not on “right” but on “privilege”’ conferred by the local rulers (Guha, 1983, p. 1884). The provisions of the 1878 Act consecrated ‘absolute power’ to the state, whereby the British colonial state demarcated vast tracts of priceless trees especially required for railways as ‘reserved forests’. This demarcation virtually led to an effective loss of forest dwellers’ control over their surrounding natural habitats—a control and lineage that they exercised over generations for making a living, forcing a hatful of them into venture. These estrangements and ‘forest annexation’ resembled (though not exactly equated with) the ‘land enclosures’ in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that alienated the prior rights of peasants to rural land cultivated for generations and set them ‘free’ as wage labourers—what Marx categorically called ‘primitive accumulation’ (Marx, 1976, p. 874). By 1890, this forest annexation led to acquisition of about 2.20 lakh square kilometres of forest area in India (Gadgil & Guha, 1992). This massive annexation of Indian forests by the colonial power became a critical diachronic watershed on three counts: politically, socially and economically. Politically, because it led to an unprecedented expansion of state power and control over forests while truncating the rights of forest dwellers; socially, because it crumpled and metamorphosed the traditional pattern of untrammelled uses of forests and social means of subsistence; and economically, because the reserved and protected forests underwent a paradigmatic process of commodification through ‘commercial timber production’ (Nayak, 2015, p. 254) for urban centres in India and England, which generated huge revenues for the British government, and also led to the formation of ‘merchant capital’ in England (Chatterjee, 2017, p. 5). Land dispossession under the colonial regime virtually became an indispensable means of resources exploitation and political expansion in the Indian sub-continent.

Among the British colonies, ‘India stood pre-eminent by reason of its vastness’ (Guha, 1983, p. 1883) and ‘the seemingly immeasurable extent of its natural resources’ (Whitcombe, 1972, p. ix). British colonialism and imperialism not only took control of these resources: land, water, minerals and forest, but also transformed their utility to greatly set-in commercial crops, railway network, and more importantly industrial growth in England and the British Royal Navy’s shipbuilding for World War I and its strategic maritime expansion across the globe (Gadgil & Guha, 1992, pp. 113–145; Guha, 1999; Nayak, 2015, pp. 253–254). With the enactment of the Indian Forest Acts of 1865 and 1878 and legitimization of the ‘eminent domain’ through the LAA of 1894 that conferred the state ‘absolute power’, the British Government in India expropriated forest and agricultural land on a large-scale by dispossessing forest dwellers and peasants from their means of subsistence for mining, constructing railways networks, expanding trade routes, transforming forests and pastures into commercial enclosures of tea, coffee, rubber and indigo plantations, establishing offices, cantonments and ordinance factories and constructing monuments, palaces, small dams and canals.

Post-colonial Dispossession and State Developmentalism

For several years that followed independence, India was one of the poorest countries in the world. Nearly two centuries of colonial plunder, extraction, exploitation, neglect and political subjugation by the British had left the Indian nation of over 350 million citizenries destitute, bemused and helpless. The imperial government in India had virtually formulated and executed its political, economic, administrative and infrastructural constellations in ways that solely served the needs of colonial interests and industries in England. While India being pre-eminent in terms of its endowed bountiful natural resources became inevitably indispensable to the British for plunder and extraction to make England the ‘epicentre’ of global power, the imperial ruler, however, ‘deliberately left India as an intellectually barren wasteland, depriving its population of any opportunity to develop scientific or creative thoughts’ (Roffelsen, 2016, p. 9). The cultivation of priority-based, exploitative commercial plantation crops by the British and their prolonged neglect over traditional agriculture had, on the other hand, led to a diminution in food grains production, resulting in a series of famine and widespread malnutrition during the drought years. Acute food shortages saw no sign of ending for several years that followed independence. India had to import 14 million tonnes of food grains between 1947 and 1953 to mitigate these crises (Roffelsen, 2016, p. 8). Moreover, colonial India’s all infrastructures, economy and bureaucracy were maneuvered such that until 1947, it was made to be completely dependent on developed world for technologies, capital goods and investments. Roffelsen (2016, p. 9) reports that ‘in 1950, over 90% of India’s capital, machinery, and even basic tools, had to be imported from abroad’. It is against this politico-economic backdrop that the first prime minister of independent India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru understood well that the nation-state building would not be possible without revolutionising innovations, industries, agriculture, infrastructures and scientific education and research. He took upon himself the task of reinventing the art of Indian statesmanship in order to strengthen the country as a nation-state in the new world order that witnessed the formation of many maiden countries after the Second World War and collapse of European colonialism; and in so doing, he designed a decentralised development planning that conflated socialism and state-capitalism to build heavy and capital goods industries, large dams, infrastructures and premier educational institutions—what was eventually popularly dubbed as ‘Nehruvian state developmentalism’.

The post-colonial Nehruvian state developmentalism through decentralized heavy industrialisation (mainly public-sector steel plants), establishment of industrial townships and premier educational institutions (e.g. Indian Institutes of Technology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, National Physical and Chemical Laboratories, All India Institute of Medical Sciences and so on), and construction of large dams and infrastructural projects involved expropriation of rural land on a massive scale. To be noted that these large-scale heavy industries and dams were built on the ‘greenfield’ sites by dispossessing and displacing several lakhs of primary producers. The four major public-sector-led steel plants: Durgapur (16,384 acres), Rourkela (19,722.69 acres), Bhilai (26,008.55 acres) and Bokaro (31,287.24 acres) and their accompanying industrial townships built under the ‘Nehru-Mahalanobis’ model of state-controlled industrialization (Das, 2016, p. 1036) in the 1950s and 1960s alone acquired 93,402.48 acres of rural lands that primarily included agricultural land and forests (Steel Authority of India, 2012) and displaced a population size of 185,200 persons, of which 135,200 and 50,000 were successively from landed and landless households (Parasuraman, 1999, p. 107).

The underpinnings, however, were that those new bold ventures of development described as the ‘temples to India’s industrial modernity’ by Nehru ‘would abolish centuries of economic stagnation’ (Parry & Struempell, 2008, p. 47) and penury that the nation had experienced under the prolonged colonial rule characterised by plunder, extraction, neglect and ruthless exploitation (Sharma, 2010), and would establish a ‘sovereign and planned national economy’ (Roy, 2007, p. 138). They would act as ‘beacons along the path of “progress” that would allow the new nation to “catch up” with the developed world’ (Parry & Struempell, 2008, p. 47). Nehru understood well that political independence would make little sense if it was not linked to economic independence (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, GOI, 1967, pp. 84–85); and he viewed the state-led development ventures a ‘means’ to achieving the latter. He presumed that the state-controlled large-scale industries would serve as a ‘spearhead of intensive and broad development’ (Das, 1997, p. 3268). Consequently, the Industrial Policy Resolution-1956 formulated in the beginning of the Second Five-Year Plan (1956–1961) aspired to accelerate the economic growth by decentralising and booming ‘the process of industrialization as a means to achieving a socialistic pattern of society’ (Jadhav, 2005, p. 2). Cees Roffelsen states that during the first three national 5-year plans of Nehru as a prime minister, India’s industrial sector grew at 7.1% a year, number of consumer-goods industries increased by 70%, production of intermediate goods quadrupled, and the output of capital goods increased tenfold. India scaled up from a situation where 90% of its industrial goods were imported, to halving that in 1960 (2016, p. 5).

The fundamental notion of establishing state-controlled heavy industries and accompanied urban-industrial landscapes was not merely about ‘forging steel’ but was ‘as much about forging a new society’ (Parry & Struempell, 2008, p. 47) by substantially creating numerous newfangled non-farm employment through industrialisation on rural green fields expropriated from the peasants and tribals on a large-scale. The large public-sector industrial firms of Durgapur, Rourkela, Bokaro and Bhilai, and the state-designed accompanied townships on the land acquired from the farmers and indigenous people thus corroborate the spatial signifier of post-colonial Nehruvian developmentalism. Because the Congress prevailed the political hegemony in the centre and all the states but Kerala, the two decades that followed independence ‘marked a distinct phase in the centre–state relations’, muffling ‘political tensions and differences that would arise in a federation’ (Das, 1997, p. 3268), and thus became a catalytic factor to the ideas of Nehruvian state developmentalism. To be noted, even the private industrial enterprises were functioning under the strong state control through intimidating licensing systems (Roy & Patra, 2009).

The steel plants fundamentally described to be spaces for production, progenitor of employment and footing of industrial modernity for post-colonial India by Nehru captured a wide public accordance due to their public-sector-led labour-intensive, socialistic approach, despite having witnessed a massive displacement ³ of the rural citizenry (mostly tribals) and peasant movements, as in Rourkela (see Parry & Struempell, 2008, p. 54). The Nehruvian government apparently, inter alia, understood that without being able to buy land from people at cheap rates, the new bold ventures of development would not be materialised and economically viable (Chakravorty, 2011). Besides, immediately after independence the government had a little financial leeway to offer ample compensation to the land owners. Given the situation and context, the newly formed constituent assembly of independent India broadly endorsed the colonial ‘LAA of 1894’ to acquire lands for various development activities primarily controlled by the state to modernise the impoverished Indian society that endured a long spell under the British rule. The post-colonial decentralised industrial development in the late 1950s and 1960s in collaboration with Soviet Union, Britain and Germany on the land acquired from the peasants and tribals was an endeavour to eradicate century-old impoverishment that the nation execrably underwent. While Nehruvian vision of development remained central to the Indian republic’s formative years, his development stride, however, attained only a partial success in terms of creation of employment for the dispossessed (I would elaborate on this aspect later). Despite being ‘the paradigmatic form of state-led development and potent symbols of national progress’ (Levien, 2018, p. 35), the major failure came from the large dams which marked a significant underachievement in creating alternative viable employment for the dispossessed and displaced households and left the project-affected people with an unhealed trauma. Constructions of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in Gujarat and the Hirakud Dam on the Mahanadi river in Odisha submerged 69,903 acres and 183,521 acres of lands respectively and together led to a massive displacement of 310,000 persons (Administrative Staff College of India, 2016, pp. 202–203). Similarly, the construction of the Gandhi Sagar Dam on the Chambal river in Madhya Pradesh under the Nehruvian state developmentalism submerged 167,960 acres of land and displaced a population size of 10,000 persons. Notably, the foundation stones of these three large dams were laid by the first Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Over the first four decades of post-colonial India spanning between 1947 and 1990, about 21.30 million people were displaced by various state-mediated development projects that included dams, industry, mines etc. (Fernandes & Raj, 1992; Lok Sabha Secretariat, 2013).

Notwithstanding these contradictions, the salient features that made the post-colonial Nehruvian regime of state developmentalism distinctive from its colonial counterpart is that whereas the former dispossessed peasants and tribals to produce value added commodities on land, the latter dispossessed merely to extract resources and expand political power within and outside the Indian territory.

Neoliberal Dispossession, Predation and Commodification

The legacy of coercive land dispossession of colonial regime lay in continuity far beyond the ‘post-colonial Nehruvian model of economic development’—what Levien calls ‘post-independence state-developmentalism’ (2013a, p. 383)—to the neoliberal regime of development which is overwhelmingly private capital centric. The huge foreign debt and inefficient management of the national economy in the 1980s led to an acute ‘balance of payments’ issue, resulting in national economic crisis in 1990–1991 with near bankruptcy, which propelled the Finance Ministry led and supported by the then finance minister Prof. Manmohan Singh and Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to embark on the economic liberalization in 1991.

The liberalization of Indian economy dismantled the post-colonial Nehruvian model of state-controlled capitalism that prevailed for about four and half decades that followed independence. However, under the doctrines of India’s liberalized economy, state capital investment for development activities was deprioritised and truncated, state-regulated complex licence raj was repealed, and priority sector lending was significantly reduced while, on the contrary, domestic and global private capital investments in IT and ITeS industries, power generation, manufacturing, upgradation of industrial infrastructures, aerotropolis and planned urbanisation in the form of new townships—mostly hi-tech cities—adjoining large metropolis were fiercely encouraged. The trade restrictions between India and foreign countries were eased off in order to increase the foreign direct investment (FDI), and to integrate the national economy with that of the world. The nationalized financial institutions were also liberalized by relaxing the interest rate controls and liquidity requirements, and allowed to provide domestic corporate investors with credit loans. These robust policy reforms thus promised to open up immense opportunities for both domestic and global corporate giants and began to transform the geography of Indian economy in ways that propelled the demand for land by capital on a massive scale to build infrastructures and corporate offices, and to establish manufacturing units and hi-tech cities that would primarily foster IT industries, business process outsourcing (BPO) and financial and academic institutions—what we now call ‘knowledge-economy’. However, from the outset, the skyrocketing demand for land by capital, inter alia, confronted a latent supply side constraint because of two reasons: first, the Indian states did not have sufficient land in its land pool that could meet the corporate demand; and second, the potential land that could satisfy such demands remained preponderantly in the hands of small and marginal peasants who consider this ‘non-producible’ resource a ‘pre-eminent asset’ (Bardhan et al., 2011, p. 1) in multiple ways—as a source of employment, economic security, social status (Chakravorty, 2013; Sau, 2008), patrimony, social identity (Levien, 2018, p. 49) and means of living, resulting in ‘holdouts’ on a large magnitude. The supply side obstacle was further deepened by land fragmentation caused by the division of joint family land holdings into divided family holdings (Roy, 2016, p. 36) leading to mutation problems and often shoddy land records with legal litigations. In order to transcend the limitations of these social and legal trivialities, the Indian states empowered by the eminent domain and their sovereign discretion over land started grabbing this coveted resource for capital.

Land acquired and destined for neoliberal development ventures by the Indian states, inter alia, reflects a fundamental utilitarian transmutation from a mineral and raw material extractive space of colonial exploitation and plunder, to a productive space of value added commodities in the postcolonial state developmentalism—what Nehru called ‘temples to India’s industrial modernity’—to a private capital-driven speculative and consumptive space (Roy, 2019a, pp. 1929–1930), promoting SEZs, infrastructure development projects, industrial corridors, and real estate projects in the form of planned townships and knowledge-based hi-tech cities. The data documented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India (GOI) revealed that only over a short span of four years between 2008 and 2012, India as a whole registered a decline of 10.03 lakh acres of cultivable land due to those development ventures largely governed by private capital (Times of India, 2013). According to the Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, GOI (2016), between 2004 and 2015 twelve Indian states together had acquired 1,229,438.72 acres of land for various development activities (ASCI, 2016, p. 202). These states were Andhra Pradesh (375,293.01 acres), Assam (14,288.56 acres), Bihar (75,322.63 acres), Chhattisgarh (25,382.63 acres), Gujarat (103,861.07 acres), Haryana (34,530.74 acres), Jharkhand (32,947.20 acres), Maharashtra (247,063.83 acres), Mizoram (160,905.66 acres), Punjab (914.49 acres), Rajasthan (19,283.24 acres), Tamil Nadu (10,191.19 acres), and Telangana (129,454.45 acres). Acquisition of land for capital with the state’s extra-economic forces in contemporary India, unlike the Nehruvian state developmentalism that prioritized state capital-driven labour-intensive development activities, represents a predatory regime that eradicates agrarian livelihoods and redistributes the geographic spaces destined for traditional production to capitalist development. In other words, the neoliberal regimes of dispossession is predatory because it considers land more of consumptive than a productive good, facilitating capitalists to appropriate speculative rents by commodifying it in fully competitive and developed land markets where buyers are plenty with diverse motives. The CAG report on ‘Performance of Special Economic Zones’ revealed that while 45,635.63 ha of lands were notified and acquired for the SEZs in India in 2006, operations, however, commenced on only 28,488.49 ha, representing a share of 62.43% (2014: 35). The report, inter alia, found that a considerable part of the remainder land was later on de-notified and allotted to other private companies by SEZ developers to grab benefits from post-acquisition price appreciation. For instance, of 39,245.56 ha of land notified and acquired for the SEZs in six states (Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha and West Bengal), 5402.22 ha (13.77%) were de-notified and diverted to commercial uses and real estatization. Interestingly, in most cases, these lands were acquired under the disguised ‘public purpose’ clause of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (The Hindu, 2015).

Today, the places in India that exemplify private capital’s illustrious speculative rent appropriation through expropriation and redistribution of rural lands by state’s eminent domain are SEZs, and planned townships or hi-tech cities fostering ‘knowledge economies’ predominantly governed by global private capital—what Sassen (2001) calls ‘global cities’, for example, Rajarhat Newtown adjoining Kolkata, Noida and Gurugram adjoining Delhi, Mahendra World City SEZ near Jaipur, Navi Mumbai SEZ, Hinjawadi and EON on the outskirts of Pune, the Hi-Tech City in Hyberabad, and Bangalore—what is known as ‘Asia’s self-proclaimed “Silicon Valley” and a model for world-city making’ (Goldman, 2010, p. 556). These new landscapes on acquired rural lands are today the epicentres of real estate surge, reflecting a strident manifestation of neoliberal capitalist transformation of rural spaces whereby the overaccumulated capital is progressively bringing the vertical spaces onto horizontal plane and invoking more accumulation through commodification by making them ‘available by the square foot in a fully capitalist land market’ (Levien, 2012, p. 948). In each of these instances, the progressively maturing market economy and private capital are disintegrating the dispossessed peasant economies and proliferating ‘a more intensive mercantile exploitation of the rural interior’ in ways that facilitate ‘expansion of the spaces of consumption’ (Banerjee-Guha, 2013, p. 175).

While the contemporary land grabs for capital on a large-scale have resulted in widespread farmers’ protest and socio-political unrest in the affected areas across the country, the neoliberal Indian states continue to justify such rapacity in terms of its catalytic effect in attracting corporate investments and their potential role in the future economic growth. The productive and labour-intensive approach of the ‘spatial Nehruvianism’ (Levien, 2013a, p. 397) that remained central to forging steel cities and modern urban-industrial societies has now thawed to an extent where the neoliberal state with its ‘eminent domain’ only channelize and redistribute land and commons to the capitalists who appropriate their speculative rent. The neoliberal Indian states have thus emerged as ‘suppliers of non-producible land as a commodity’—what Levien calls ‘broker states’ (Levien, 2012; 2018), indiscriminately facilitating capitalists: to grab this preeminent fictitious commodity—land, and to accumulate wealth through ‘land appropriation’ and speculative ‘value grabbing’ (Anwar, 2018, p. 52). Nothing about neoliberal land-based development activities matches the grandeur, social commitments and generosity of Nehruvian ideology of public sector-led, labour-intensive heavy industrialization that charmed the post-independence Indian citizenry to a great extent.

From the analysis portrayed in the preceding paragraphs, it appears that the contemporary dispossession of land for development activities in India in general, whether linear or clustered, does not largely equate with the normatively laden term ‘development’, instead it reflects a substantial slippage on the Nehruvian standard and connotations, focusing primarily on economic growth while ignoring the wellbeing of those who had a stake in the acquired land. Dispossession under the neoliberalism reflects an underlying means of predation and commodification of land by capital.

Dispossessed Labour under the Colonial, Post-colonial and Neoliberal Regimes

The analysis drawn in the preceding sections vividly substantiates that the context, purpose and pattern of dispossession variegate across space and over time depending upon the ‘socially and historically specific political and ideological factors’ of the state forces called ‘regimes’ (Levien, 2013, p. 383) and their economic logics tied to a particular development mediation. It would now be of utmost importance to briefly sketch the scenario of dispossessed labour under the three different regimes: colonial, post-colonial and neoliberal regimes.

The ‘enclosures’ of land—both farm and wasteland ⁴ —under the colonial rule virtually began with the proclamation of the ‘Permanent Settlement’ in 1793 by Cornwallis that abnegated customary and communal rights of the masses of Indian peasantry to land that they had cultivated for generations and vested perpetual and hereditary property rights in a class of gentry farmers called ‘Zamindars’. While the underlying goal of the colonial government was to increase revenue collection from the Indian peasantry, it was believed that secure private property rights in a ‘class of gentleman farmers’ would ‘provide the best incentive for value-creating labour that would increase agricultural productivity and, hence, wealth in general’ (Whitehead, 2012, p. 6). These enclosures led to the formation of an upper aristocrat class of landlords who enjoyed luxury and social prestige arising out of the acquired wealth, and political and administrative connection to the ruling British elite. Their lofty presence and social privileges prominently manifested a class of nobility at the top, and a class of deedless poor tillers of land at the bottom.

The Indian forest Acts, and mining, railways and plantation enclosures by the imperial colonial state in the second half of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Indian peasants and forest dwellers from their social means of subsistence, the majority of whom were partly set free as wage labourers and partly forced to be engaged as ‘indentured labourers’ in the British-controlled commercial plantations, sugar refineries and indigo factories in India, and several other colonial territories in the Global south (Habib, 2006). However, the wages paid to the indentured labourers in the Indian subcontinent were much below the value of their labour power (Das Gupta, 1986, p. 7)—what Marx (1976, p. 320) called ‘exploitation of labour-power’. Exploitation of labour in the plantations was not, unlike other factory industries under colonialism, confined to only dispossessed male labourers but substantially involved their women and children, and thus led to an expansion of capitalist social relation, racial dominance and even sexual exploitation. Having constituted the Assam Company in 1839 in London, the colonial Indian state started giving away lands ‘practically free’ (₹6–₹12 per hectare) to aspiring British planters, especially retired civil and military officers to undertake commercial exploitation ⁵ (Habib 2006: 80). The unprecedented expansion of commercial plantations largely on capitalist line from the 1860s onward, located mostly in sparsely populated areas (hills and foothills), encountered an acute shortage of labour at the origins. Faced with such clogging supply of labour locally, the planters—mostly British—under the aegis of colonial state power started employing tribal, semi-tribal and non-tribal peasants from far-off places of several eastern and central provinces in India in a way in which ‘instead of market mechanisms, outright force and politico-legal mechanisms’ (Das Gupta, 1986, p. 3)—what Marx (1976) and Hall (2013, pp. 1583–1586) call ‘extra-economic forces’—played a central part. In other words, the absorption of labour in the British-controlled commercial plantations in the subcontinent was not driven by market power but extra-economic forces that completely quashed the native labour’s wage choices. Placed in such a complex politico-economic convolution engendered by the colonial power, the tribals and peasants were hardly able to even make their modest sustenance. The dispossessed and impoverished tribals and peasants eventually left their traditional habitat in despair and slipped into the ‘reservoir of cheap labour’ ⁶ —a prerequisite that remained central to the expansion of colonial capitalism. It was this influx of cheap labourers who became an integral element of the capitalist economy patronized by the colonial power (Das Gupta, 1981, p. 1782) that transferred many peasants and tribal folk from non-capitalist economies to the circuits of capital.

While creation of newfangled employment alongside forging new industrial, modern societies was one the major goals of the Nehruvian post-colonial state developmentalism, heavy industrialization and building of steel towns on land acquired from the peasants and tribals failed to absorb the entire dispossessed labour force. Because the industrial units were built on rural green fields in sparsely inhabited regions where the native peasantry and tribals had little or no technical know-how and industrial experience, the workers required for value-added production system in the steel plants were largely drawn from all over the country (Parry, 2003; Parry & Struempell, 2008). Despite the fact that the post-colonial Indian state promised a regular job for one able-bodied member of each dispossessed household in the industry, the dispossessed failed to secure complete ascendancy in the newly emerged industrial labour market in Bhilai, Bokaro, Rourkela and Durgapur—the four spatial signifiers of Nehruvian state developmentalism. The dispossessed were considered ‘inferior’ in a way that deprioritized unskilled rustic, agrarian labour force. While their partial absorption (mainly non-tribals) in the production units, including accompanied ancillary industries, however, remained concentrated in the lower strata of the industrial labour pyramid, the white colour and managerial jobs were primarily hegemonized by the well-educated outsiders. In an ethnographic study of Bhilai and Rourkela steel plants, Parry and Struempell (2008, p. 54) point out that:

The promised jobs often took years to materialize, and sometimes never did…the concentration of displaced malcontents in resettlement colonies on the edge of town, especially the younger men who hung on in the hope of secure employment but actually eked out a meagre living from irregular casual labour.

Despite having involved a massive displacement of rural population, the Nehruvian developmentalism of primarily state-led large-scale steel plants reflected a regime of dispossession for production that could obtain wide public legitimacy and the veneer of social justice (Levien, 2013a) for its impregnable vehemence of a decentralized, inclusive (to a considerable extent) labour-intensive approach. The state-controlled steel plants managed by the Hindustan Steel for about a decade in the early phase, and by the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) from the 1970s onwards offered ‘unquestioned aristocracy of labour’ to its regular workers by providing munificent pay, perks and other benefits (Parry & Struempell, 2008, p. 48) ‘that make them the envy of every other working-class family in the area’ (Parry, 2003, p. 223). Furthermore, the government also undertook a holistic approach that closely considered the caste, gender, war-widows and differently abled persons while employing the members of dispossessed households. Notwithstanding the clearly embedded novelty in the Nehruvian ideology of decentralized development, the state force divided the dispossessed labour force into two strata: absorbed and abandoned, which in turn produced and heightened social differentiations and inequalities within the dispossessed households in the post-development stage. The former being uplifted economically and socially due to their ‘labour aristocracy’ largely settled in the steel towns while the latter—mostly adivasis (tribesmen)—concentrated in the peripheral resettlement colonies and ended up becoming casual wage earners.

The large dams as a spatial signifier of the post-colonial Nehruvian state developmentalism, on the contrary, had miserably failed to generate alternative employment opportunities for the dispossessed workforce. Neither could they reinstate or reconstruct the affected resource base that remained the keystone for majority of the affected households to earn a living in the pre-dispossession stage. Being dismantled from traditional production systems and torn apart from social and cultural fabrics, the dam-induced dispossessed work force, with the exception of a few due to their political link, network and social connection, flung into impoverishment (Cernea, 1997; 2000; World Commission on Dams, 2000) and reduced to only owner of their labour power for barter and wage.

The land-based neoliberal development ventures, on the other hand, unlike the post-colonial Nehruvian state developmentalism, undoubtedly exemplify a non-labour-intensive and exclusionary growth model that has, as evidenced in many scholarships (Adnan, 2013; Banerjee-Guha, 2010; Dey et al., 2011; Guha, 2004; Hui & Bao 2013; Kamei & Sharma, 2017; Levien, 2012; 2018; Sanyal, 2007; Sau, 2008; Roy, 2019b), largely marginalised the dispossessed labour force. The neoliberal regime of dispossession has deprioritized the absorption of dispossessed labourers who are ‘“permanently excluded” and trapped outside the circuit of capital’, resembling Marx’s ‘stagnant reserve’ of the unemployed (Bardhan, 2018, p. 19). This excluded labour force being rustic in character is refused to be accommodated in the neoliberal capitalist enterprises that purport skilled and qualified human capital.

The major dominant forms of neoliberal capitalist landscapes on acquired lands are SEZs and real estate-driven planned new townships or ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 2001) on the fringes of large metropolises, promoting ‘knowledge-based economies’. The new townships are virtually ‘the command centres of a globally dispersed world economy’ (Bhattacharya & Sanyal, 2011, p. 42) hegemonized by corporate capital where the dispossessed producers play no role. They instead, as asserted by Sanyal (2007, p. 65), reintegrate into a predominantly non-capitalist economy in the space of development (alongside capitalist economy), involving variegated informal self-employments as masons, carpenters, e-rickshaw and taxi drivers, contractors, grill-makers, cycle and motorbike mechanics, vegetables and fruits sellers, tea and betel sellers, roadside small restaurant owners, grocery shopkeepers, packaged drinking water sellers and real estate brokers (Roy, 2014, 2016). These economic activities are, however, largely menial and contingent upon the daily needs of the new townships—what Sanyal (2007) and Bhattacharya and Sanyal (2011) call ‘need economy’. The need economy thus emerges outside the accumulation economy ⁷ —an economy which is governed by the large corporate capital. The dispossessed labour forces in the need economy virtually ‘survive at the margin of subsistence through political negotiation and struggle’ (Bardhan, 2018, p. 19), and have no place in the accumulation economy proper. However, interestingly, the skilled and qualified labour of the knowledge economy engaged in programming and simulations, digital networking, consultancy and stockbroking, and providing logistics and supply chain management—what Hardt and Negri (2004) call ‘immaterial labour’—valorise the dispossessed labour force by purchasing their services as janitors, domestic helps, cooks, sentinels, drivers, baby-sitters and gardeners who resemble Sassen’s (2001) ‘survival circuits’. During my field visits in 2016 in five (Rekjuani, Patharghata, Chakpachuria, Baligori and Chapna) of the twenty six revenue villages affected by the expropriation of rural land on a large-scale for ‘Rajarhat Newtown’ ⁸ adjoining Kolkata metropolis, I observed that some dispossessed households well-linked with the ruling political party have scaled up their fortune by establishing a foothold in employment as property dealers, real estate brokers, contractors, rentiers, and household hardware and construction material suppliers. The dispossessed labour force under neoliberalism and their variegated livelihood activities (mostly menial) outside the accumulation economy, unlike the dispossessed English peasantry in England in the seventeenth century, in no sense equate with the capitalist class relations and their reproduction. Instead, contemporary capitalism under the state’s extra-economic forces grabs rural spaces previously destined for traditional modes of production and transforms into capitalist landscapes of material modernity in ways that transmute the traditional livelihoods of dispossessed labour force in the newly emerged market economy. While many being completely dismantled from agrarian economy establish a foothold in precariously petty self-employed activities (Sanyal, 2007; Roy, 2014, 2016), a few become flourished businessmen (Roy, 2016). Some opt to be petty service providers. A few become neo-rentiers and asset managers (Kundu, 2016; Roy, 2016) while some end up becoming partly proletariats (Kamei & Sharma, 2017; Levien, 2012, 2018; Roy 2022) and partly unemployed (Roy, 2016).

Conclusion

The analyses heretofore drawn in this article substantiate that dispossession of land from the peasants and tribals in India is an age-old phenomenon illustrating ever-changing politico-economic perspectives of development over time, and corresponding to a condition of capitalistic and/or socialistic patterns of transformation. While the central goal of colonial land dispossession for railways, mining, establishment of cantonment and ordinance factories, construction of monuments, palaces and canals, and commercial enclosures for tea, coffee, rubber and indigo plantations on a massive scale was to keep the British ‘imperial interest’ unabated and perennial, the colonial imperialism turned the country into a marquee ‘space for extraction of resources’ for capital and a ‘supplier of raw materials’ for industries in England. And the central to this imperial interest was to accomplish a massive annexation of India’s priceless forests (particularly teak, sal and deodar that eventually became ‘pre-eminent’ for railway crossties and shipbuilding) by dispossessing and truncating the rights of forest dwellers that would lead to an unprecedented expansion of colonial state power and imperialism. This maneuver, however, largely set free many dispossessed peasants and tribals as wage earners, virtually forcing them into venture while the residual slipped into the British-controlled commercial plantations, sugar refineries and indigo factories as indentured labourers who eventually became a ‘subject’ for violence, cruel exploitation, racial dominance and sexual exploitation. The partial absorption of dispossessed labour in the colonial production systems, especially in commercial plantations, was however primarily governed by the extra-economic forces which provided them with no wage choices but to surrender to colonial subjugation.

The post-colonial Nehruvian state developmentalism through public sector-led heavy industrialisation, steel towns, and construction of large dams and infrastructural projects on the lands acquired from peasants and tribals marked a substantial utilitarian transmutation from an ‘extractive space’ of colonial exploitation and plunder to a state-controlled ‘productive space’ of value-added commodities. And this transmutation was paradigmatically mediated to extirpate the drawn-out penury of the Indian citizenry in a way that would not only enhance labour productivity but forge a modern, urban-industrial society at a juncture where the predominantly Indian agrarian society stood execrably impoverished due to centuries of colonial political dominance and extraction of resources, labour exploitation and deprivation. Despite having adopted decentralized socialistic approach to development, the Nehruvian developmentalism essentially centred on expropriation of rural land could only partly absorb the dispossessed labour force in heavy industries and provide them with ‘aristocracy’ in terms of munificent pay and perks. The majority being dismantled from their traditional means of subsistence, particularly tribesmen, otherwise eventually ended up becoming wage labourers.

Dispossession of land—commons, forest and agricultural land—for private capital-intensive development ventures (IT and ITeS hubs, large manufacturing industries and SEZs, industrial corridors and infrastructure development projects, aerotropolis, and real estate driven hi-tech cities) by the neoliberal Indian states were, on the other hand, undertaken to set a new trajectory of faster economic growth. These new landscapes of neoliberal regime largely on capitalist lines, inter alia, signified a strident manifestation of spatial restructuring, and represented a predatory regime of dispossession whereby the questions of wellbeing and alternative livelihoods of the dispossessed had faded away in a process of economic change. The neoliberal land-based development ventures thus, unlike colonial and post-colonial regimes, exemplified a ‘non-labour intensive’ and ‘exclusionary’ growth model that had entirely deprioritized the absorption of rustic dispossessed labour force while facilitating capitalists in appropriation of speculative land value through its devalorisation and commodification.