Land for industry: state-society relations in agrarian Maharashtra

Usurping land and driving communities off it has been at the heart of state-driven ‘development’ processes in India since its independence from British colonial rule. Post-independence India has seen large-scale land dispossession for the grand ideological purpose of ‘nation-building’ through dams, industries, mines and ports. The conversion of rural farmland, commons, and forests has gone hand in hand with dispossession and displacement. In neoliberal India, land continues to be converted for a diverse set of contemporary uses, ranging from highways to golf courses, that are increasingly less productive. The purpose of the thesis is to make concrete how land is driven out of agriculture and with what implications for state-society relations in the neoliberal era. Using an empirical case where the state has driven land dispossession for the purposes of industrialisation, in a ‘backward’ district of Maharashtra, without facing organised opposition, I make three arguments. First, a set of structural and political variables forge a ‘near consensus’ around state-mediated industrialisation. This is buttressed by a strategic state that aims to balance legitimacy with accumulation. Second, rural classes carve out different economic trajectories in the ‘non-farm’ economy spawned by manufacturing industries. Third, while resistance to dispossession is absent at the time of land acquisition, I observe staggered political reactions over time. Rural politics here is thus seen as a more drawn-out process of negotiation between the state and rural classes.