Encountering Land Grab: An Ethnographic Journey 9781032269306, 9781003290551

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ENCOUNTERING LAND GRAB

Taking possession of private land for ‘public purpose’ by the eminent domain of the state is a global phenomenon, but it displaces and marginalizes the people at the local-level. The researchers have mainly dealt with this phenomenon either from the field, or from the archive. In this book, the author has studied the observable fact of land grab, or acquisition for industries in a particular locale of the West Bengal State by combining the field and archive in a unique mode through a multisited ethnographic ‘journey’. Unlike the traditional anthropological ethnographies consisting of single ‘tribes’ or ‘multi-caste villages’, this vertical ethnographic voyage of the author led him to come across a group of dispossessed peasants in the villages, a bunch of files in the district land acquisition department, a rich text of proceedings in the West Bengal Assembly Library, the growing global literature on land grab, and also to reflect on his dialogues with the elected members of the parliamentary standing committee at New Delhi. Ethnography, for the author was the road map, which guided his journey in these apparently separate existential domains of land acquisition and throws new light on how development policies are made, and how they failed, and what were the lessons learnt. Abhijit Guha was a professor in Anthropology, Vidyasagar University, and a Senior Fellow of the ICSSR. He has published articles, and a book on land acquisition.

Encountering Land Grab

An Ethnographic Journey

ABHIJIT GUHA

MANOHAR

2022

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Abhijit Guha and Manohar Publishers The right of Abhijit Guha to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9781032269306 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003290551 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003290551 Typeset in Adobe Garamond 11/13 by Kohli Print, Delhi 110051

To the peasants who faught a heroic battle against land grab in Medinipur

Contents

List of Tables

8

Foreword

9

Preface

27

Acknowledgements

29

1. Introduction

31

2. How I Became Interested in Land Grab

43

3. Methods, Materials and Justifications

54

4. In the Villages

68

5. At the Land Acquisition Office

91

6. Clever Dialogues of the Politicians

121

7. Theoretical Insights or the Lessons Learnt

143

8. Conclusion

159

Abbreviations

169

Glossary

171

Bibliography

173

Index

185

List of Tables

4.1. Pre-acquisition agricultural landholding pattern of sample households affected by land acquisition for Tata Metaliks Limited (TML) Company. 4.2. Post-acquisition agricultural landholding pattern of sample households affected by land acquisition for TML. 4.3. Profile of utilisation of compensation money by the land loser households. 4.4. Changing pattern of dependence on staple food (paddy) in the market among land loser families. 5.1. Department-wise fund requirement of pending land acquisition cases in Medinipur District (1948 to April 1993). 5.2. Rate report of eight mouzas under acquisition in Kharagpur. 5.3. Succession of events showing the case of land acquisition for Century Textiles and Industries (CTIL). 5.4. A comparative account of compensation between landowners and BARGADARS in Malancha mouza for land acquisition for CTIL in 1996. 5.5. The detailed account of the unregistered bargadars who were denied compensation owing to acquisition for CTIL.

73

73 78 82

93 98

100

111

112

Foreword

Shortly after the beginning of 2019, I received the manuscript of a forthcoming book that appeared to be about the type of ‘land acquisition’ that is based not on purchase or the market, but on the legal doctrine of eminent domain. As it is well known, the ‘acqui­ sition’ consists of the expropriation of the landowners, and their forced displacement from their land and houses. Through the word­ ing of the title of the book, its author announced his critical position vis-à-vis this imposed process, describing it with a strong term: ‘land-grabbing’, rather than the more polite term, ‘land acquisition’. However, the book’s title also promised something quite enticing: to narrate the author’s ‘ethnographic journey’. Yet, the author’s message asked me not only to read his new book, but also invited me to write a ‘Foreword’ introducing it. These two invitations combined reminded me of an old proverb that tells us that ‘One cannot have his cake, and eat it too’. In this case, I thought, that the old proverb didn’t hold: in fact, I could ‘have the book’ and eat it too, the way we usually ‘eat’ books: by reading them. THE RISKS AND DESTRUCTIVENESS OF

LAND EXPROPRIATIONS

From the perspective of those, whose lands are being expropriated and houses demolished, land acquisition is a process that is forc­ ibly dispossessing them of their main assets and sources of liveli­ hood. The dispossession is, in many cases (although by far not always) mitigated by the payment of what is defined as compensa­ tion. The legal basis for such processes is the doctrine of eminent domain, which as it is well-known, prescribes that the state has the right to expropriate land that belongs to private owners, butis one way or another defined as indispensably necessary for activities and projects that are in the public interest.

10

Foreword

By providing what is called just compensation, the doctrine of eminent domain introduces a financial replacement for material assets, thus somehow conferring to this process the image of an economic transaction. However, while factually a certain amount of money is in most cases being paid, the close examination which social scientists on all meridians have carried out, revealed critically, that it is, in fact, a misrepresentation to define this kind of land acquisition as essentially an economic transaction. When I refer to social scientists in this context, I mean not only sociologists and anthropologists, who are concerned by the social impacts of land acquisition. A very strong critique of land acquisi­ tion by eminent domain comes from classical economics, which refuses to even consider compensation as an economic transaction, similar to many economic transactions in which a certain good changes ownership in exchange of a payment. The criticism by economists is that forced land acquisition occurs outside the mar­ ket, and as such is constantly subject to distortions resulting from the fact that this ‘transaction’ is not between willing sellers and willing buyers, but it is imposed administratively through the force of the state and the long and powerful arm of the law. And indeed, in the light of this critique, the acquisition by the eminent domain is and remains essentially an act of legal imposition, because the land is being taken away through force, regardless of the opposi­ tion and resistance of its owners. This brief discussion of the nature of land acquisition is not new, but I am bringing it up here, because it is directly relevant to the nature of the process described in this book, as well as to the ethnographic methodology he has employed to approach the topic of his present book. Indeed, the author declares his approach openly in the title of his book: his title announces that his book is ‘an ethnographic journey’. In anthropology, we are all accustomed to ethnography as a re­ search approach to collect, describe, and communicate to the reader the manner in which a certain book or study has been produced. Historically too, the study of forced displacement processes in an­ thropology has debuted by using primarily ethnography. Some of the most celebrated writings in the anthropology of development­

Foreword

11

caused displacement, such as Elizabeth Colson’s ethnographic monograph on the displacement caused by the Kariba Dam in Africa, has been, for decades, known and valued as one of the ear­ liest and best ethnographic writings on the displacement involved in the construction of a big hydropower dam. The approach of that monograph has subsequently been replicated worldwide by countless other anthropologists who studied the same process. In my attempt to highlight here, the distinct value of Abhijit Guha’s new book I will focus on his ethnographic methodology and particularly on the manner, in which he has chosen to re­ search his topic and also communicate to his readership why his particular way of using ethnography has enabled him to generate a more insightful and richer knowledge and image of the land ex­ propriation process, its mechanisms, and its consequences. Before highlighting Guha’s original manner of practising ethno­ graphy, I would like to make some personal observations about the status of ethnography today in the context of the extraordinary growth over the last four decades of the amount of published literature about development-caused forced displacement and resettlement. My point is that, while ethnography continues to be widely used, nevertheless, such use has been slowly decreasing, compared to other data producing manners. This shrinking is my own observation and it is not discussed by Guha in his book. But I think, that his book and his manner of ethnographically and holistically explor­ ing land acquisition offer implicit arguments and proof for other anthropologists about the poignancy and realism that can be achieved through multisited ethnographic inquiry and descriptions. Land acquisition by expropriation, and its inevitable comple­ ment—forced population displacement—have become one of the thorniest problems encountered by national governments in de­ veloping countries in their duty to protect the property and lives of their citizens and also to improve their means of livelihoods. This is because every major infrastructural development needs to find land for its own footprint, while land tends to be more and more densely inhabited, and scarcer. Large footprints are needed by industrial infrastructure, trans­ portation infrastructure, and even infrastructure for cultural acti­

12

Foreword

vities which amount cumulatively to large total areas. Both state and private sector projects constructing this new infrastructure are resorting to deeply destructive and painful imposed expropriation. Forced displacements, with their many inherent impoverishment risks and calamitous outcomes, are inflicting a terrible impact on the livelihood of many people, and also cause political challenges to governments and governmental bureaucracies. Over the last four decades, land acquisition and displacements have been studied increasingly by the social scientists. As a result, an entire new literature dealing with development-forced displace­ ment and involuntary resettlement has been growing in leaps and bounds throughout the developing and developed world. This has not been a growth only in the amount of writings, but has also brought up sets of new concepts and theories, as well as a change in researchers’ methodologies. In the following pages, I would like to refer to some of the re­ search strategies employed in this topical domain, to illuminate the value and cognitive benefits of the particular kind of ethno­ graphic approach employed by Abhijit Guha along his, ‘Ethnographic Journey’ through the institutionalised process of land acquisition by imposed expropriation in the state of West Bengal, and in many respects in India at large. Historically, the earliest anthropological studies of forced dis­ placements have been mostly ethnographic, and relied on the direct participant observations of the respective researchers carrying out such studies. On the basis of its approach, ethnography is primarily descriptive: it puts a premium on reporting what is happening as experienced by the people affected by such processes. The comparative advantage of ethnography as a method is that it enables researchers to offer a first hand, detailed, vivid, and colour­ ful image of the social territory—or site—under study. Ethnographic descriptions of social wrongs speak directly both to the minds and to the emotions of readers. More often than not, the ethnographer ‘horizontally’ covers his or her area, meaning the ‘site’ intimately. S(he) is in a better position to reveal how real individuals and uprooted families feel about the tragedy that forced expropriation and dispossession are inflicting on them.

Foreword

13

That limitation is also the result of a narrow epistemology that dominated the earlier stages of the development of anthropology. That epistemology preached that the anthropologist must limit herself/himself only to collecting and offering information to pub­ lic authorities about the existing situations. However, that canon explicitly prohibited the anthropologist to ‘venture’ beyond sup­ plying information, and told him never to engage in advocating specific actions, even if they could potentially improve or change the existing situation in various ways. Indeed, the epistemological norms taught by some of the fore­ fathers of anthropology instructed anthropologists that, at the most, they could supply only some factual information to ‘officials’ and ‘administrators’, but should refrain from recommending what kind of action ought to be taken and not engage in practical activi­ ties. For instance, Radcliffe-Brown,* one of the forefathers of British anthropology, had starkly formulated this prohibition as an im­ mutable rule for anthropologists. He wrote: ‘A wise anthropologist will not try to tell an administrator what he ought to do; it is his special task to provide the scientifically collected and analyzed knowledge that the administrator can use if he likes’ (RadcliffeBrown 1950). What Radcliffe-Brown did with his short-sighted normative pre­ scription was nothing less than instituting a dogmatic taboo on the activism of anthropologists. This ‘norm’ discouraged them from giving all the potential benefits of their thinking, creativity, and contributions to society, which today we think about not just as a possibility, but an obligation. This taboo had to be broken, and it was. I think we should not guide ourselves according to that pre­ scription. Such an abdication of responsibility is neither accept­ able nor necessary. On the contrary, I think that we should not shy away from the responsibility of becoming part of the policy-making process rather than just supply data for it. Of course, this is far from easy. But, policy writing should be recognized as crucial for * A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, 1950, ‘Introduction’, in A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds., African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-85.

14

Foreword

development social science, because we have valuable contribu­ tions to make. And we have to make it with prudence, with re­ sponsibility and without arrogance, well aware of the limitations to our knowledge and analytical tools. When social variables are reflected in policy guidelines, social concerns become part of the institution’s normative structure rather than just the agenda of some individuals. Every policy, as a regula­ tive stock of knowledge, is a multiplier. The multiplier results trig­ gered by policy formation are far more effective than the piecemeal feedback of happenstance lessons from past projects into new ones. Once the socio-cultural recommendations derived from the sound social science analyses prerequisites are written in as policy compo­ nents, those guided by that policy are mandated to consider the cultural variables, to look into people’s social organization and bring in the professional skills needed to do the job competently. But to achieve policy impacts, we must have a significant and persuasive message and be apt in articulating it. It is only decades later that ethnography and its anthropologist users gradually moved from descriptive anthropology to activist anthropology. Fortunately, other eminent anthropologists took a different po­ sition, as did Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth. At the present time, however, it is widely accepted that ethnography can and should also be pro-active and constructive. Ethnography can and must not only be meticulously descriptive and sharply analytic, but could certainly be also militant, and able to contribute con­ structively with solutions to crafting policies with contributions in formulating normative frameworks for statecrafts. When displacement processes were still occurring with low fre­ quency, the limitation of using anthropology for describing iso­ lated cases was not yet perceived as a limitation of the potential contribution of this group of social researchers to society and even to policy-making. But realities developed faster. Displacement pro­ cesses multiplied, and already some 40 years ago, it became obvious that the practice of forced displacement has gradually become not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a global size process occur­ ring to speak for the latter with the gravest effects and the highest frequency in developing countries. It became obvious that the

Foreword

15

global dimension is not captured by focusing on describing indi­ vidual processes, and that sub-description did not communicate the global magnitude of this process properly as studies by an­ thropologists. Looking at the evolution of displacement literature in retrospect, we can clearly distinguish the anthropologists’ efforts to commu­ nicate the magnitude of the process they are concerned with, not just through the use of ethnographic case description, but resort­ ing to macro statistics and to aggregate statistical processing of data found in large numbers of collecting of development project reports of various types. The use of such statistics also became easier because of the expanding role of anthropology in develop­ ment aid and agencies, where data came from multiple sources and locations and where producing aggregate numbers became a more effective instrument and strategy than producing simply ethno­ graphic studies limited to singular cases. Of course, the use of macro statistics represented a new approach useful within devel­ opment communities, which by their mindset are more interested in aggregate figures than in individual case studies that may not be equally representative. And indeed, the increasing use of statis­ tics empowered the argument of anthropologists and also gave them a more solid authority to produce not only ‘information’ for ad­ ministrators, but also to justify their step toward a more activist position embodied in recommendations for actions usually to cor­ rect negative impacts. However, we know and can see that each progress also has its potential risks, and the increasing reliance of many anthropologists on the use of aggregate statistics and the production of macro-anthropological analysis also had one unan­ ticipated negative effect. This adverse effect is a relative decrease in the use of detailed ethnographies. Having worked myself for over three decades within the organizational settings of a large global development agency like the World Bank, I was able to acutely perceive the additional power that the use of statistics brought to the role and contribution of anthropologists, but slowly, a realization that has crept back under light was the statistics themselves. The exponential growth of the Development Caused Forced Displacement (DFDR) literature has displayed a trend of growing

16

Foreword

interest in the statistics of development and displacement and of its poverty and social disorganizational impact. This led to less and less minute ethnographies about displacement and resettle­ ment which by definition are aimed at capturing the details of such complex and consequential processes at the level of the people who are suffering their impact. At this point in the present ‘Foreword’, and particularly after I emphasized the duty of ethnographers to be also activists and to contribute constructively to the processes they are studying, it is time to discuss more and highlight how Abhijit Guha accomplished these activist duties and inclinations. Since I insisted about the original and multi-sited way in which the author has conducted his ethnographic journey, I will attempt to comment on the main sites and stages of his journey. Further, I think that the readers of this book should benefit in this description from the personal voice of the author, not only from my comments on his work. Therefore, in the remainder of my Foreword, I will rely directly on several substantive statements made by the author himself about how and why he conducted his research work at every site, and more importantly, how and why he moved from one site to another. The actual move from site to site is important because of the unusual way of this particular book and journey. I would say that the author’s move had a vertical orientation. Of course, the first site of his exploration was at the community level, and at this level, he moved horizontally in describing the land-grabbing pro­ cess in ethnographic details. This manner of observation and data collection had been already well-tested and productively used by Abhijit Guha in his first book about land grabbing titled Land, Law and the Left: The Saga of Disempowerment of the Peasantry in the Era of Globalisation (2007). I would suggest that any reader pro­ fessionally interested in the processes occurring during land acqui­ sition through land expropriation could have an even broader view both of the author and the topic under discussion by visiting the pages of that book as well. However, what the author learned then has motivated him to go back to that process and to explore it further. This is what prompted the author to not only describe land grabbing, but also to explain how such a process that affects so

Foreword

17

many people destructively, has come to happen. That exploration led the author to climb up to the levels, where he could study the administrative bureaucracy and the political leadership which were the deciding and the implementing force of land grabbing. This vertical climb enriched his perspective considerably as his second book demonstrates, compared to the first one. Then, Guha wanted to know more and asked himself who wrote and adopted the laws as a normative system that provide for expropriation. For this, he had to go beyond the implementing level to a higher level in the hierarchy and also to the level of the political leaders where the legal framework applied in West Bengal was crafted. The overall conclusion of the author is to some extent unex­ pected and paradoxical. He wanted to get to the roots of the pro­ cess, and ‘roots’ are usually below the surface. Nonetheless, he eventually found that the roots of the injustices and of the manu­ factured impoverishment that he witnessed at the community level were in fact at a higher level at the top of his figurative ascent on the ladder of his research in the content and prescriptions of policy and legal frameworks which were crafted at those levels. THE MAIN SITES OF THE

ETHNOGRAPHIC JOURNEY

The readers of his book will be able to follow the author’s journey throughout its clear succession of stages. This is a rare opportu­ nity, because in most ethnographic studies the researcher aims to describe almost only what he or she has seen, but leaves his own presence out of the narrative. Guha decided to do the opposite. Throughout the book, and step-by-step, he delivered in a frank manner his empirical findings as ethnographer. However, at every important turn, he also reveals the reasons for the decisions he had to make on how to continue his work, often disclosing his thoughts, self-questionings, uncertainties, surprises. In this way, we as readers also get to see the cognitive gains, as well as the rationale of the investigation and its difficulties, in each one of the ‘five main sta­ tions’ of his ethnographic journey. Guha explains this in his own words:

18

Foreword

My ethnographic journey was not limited by the single-site type of fieldwork approach common to a vast number of anthropological on-the-ground investi­ gations, in which, the ethnographer has fully embedded himself/herself in the village(s) and came out with a micro-holistic description of the daily life and the various institutions of the village in order to reveal the social structure and the culture of the community. My journey, on the other hand, although began from the villages in which the land acquisition took place, went also upward and back on the chain of events that preceded and led to what I had been observing at the field level. This way, one can directly see the generating mechanisms and the multifarious effects of dispossession of the peasants from their primary means of production. SITE 1: THE VILLAGES

Guha explains how he reached his final decision to undertake this ethnographic study and through it also provide some support to the population at the grassroots that was affected by displacement. The first ‘station’ of his ethnographic journey were of course the communities that became the subject of land grabbing. He calls that station ‘The Villages’. He encountered the usual group of people deeply and painfully affected by the land expropriation. He learned about their thoughts and feelings, about their discontent, frustration, anger, and also about their vulnerability, insecurity and fear of their unknown future. They were concerned about their access to food after losing their land, yet they felt incapable of resisting the forces which were turning their existence upside down. Getting the ‘compensation’ did not give them the confidence that they would be able to continue their existence elsewhere. SITE 2: THE LAND ACQUISITION OFFICE

The second ‘station’ on his journey was totally different from the first in terms of its actors and activities. Guha asked himself why and how the farmers were experiencing came to happen at the hands of the administrative apparatus of the West Bengal State. Therefore, he decided to do ethnographic work in the administra­ tive department of the government which had been tasked with executing the expropriation process, and its ‘components’, such as: notifications, measurements, examining grievances to be sorted out,

Foreword

19

calculating and dispensing the compensation, identifying the land parcels that had to be ‘taken’ and allocating them to other users (including the blatant case of a private textile company which first requested for land but then the factory was not even constructed, yet the confiscated land was not returned to the expropriated farmers). During this stage he also identified various kinds of bureau­ cratic inefficiencies that aggravated the rigours of the expropriation law unnecessarily, worsening the losses to the affected people, such as in the case of one large area of land of about 525 acres which was first expropriated but then remained unused, yet was not turned back to its original owners. In other cases, the Solatium surplus due by India’s law to be paid to expropriated and displaced farmers was not delivered to them. And also, during his work in the ad­ ministrative department the researcher found that the West Bengal leftist government, which previously was much committed to the protection of the rights of the bargardars (sharecroppers) did not spare even the agricultural lands that was given to them previously. Asking many questions—first to himself—brought the researcher to another strategic place, which he treated as another site for eth­ nographic examination and description. That site was the next rung on the ladder of the process of dispossession that he observed in the villages. Honest in describing his journey from his initial lack of knowledge to understanding how the actual mechanism of expropriation works in real life, the author does not hesitate to admit that: I had no idea about the huge administrative department of the government, which meticulously worked on how the land should be acquired and how the compensation had to be calculated according to law. This was one of the largest government departments doing many jobs, like land survey, settlement of legal disputes, gazette notification, compensation calculation, hearing of objections, and above all, taking possession of private land for governmental purpose.

Facing this unusual-for-him territory, the ethnographer switched to studying and treating as informants, a totally different popula­ tion than the villagers of his first research site. In addition to carry­ ing out his conversations and interviews with the personnel of this segment of the government bureaucracy, the researcher remained

20

Foreword

faithful to the anthropological demand of studying the sources of information as ‘cultural artefacts’, that could illuminate him. Indeed, we can find in the book the confession that, The land acquisition files for me were not only sources of information, but also cultural artifacts created and manipulated by human beings for meeting their purpose. The staff of this department, like the villagers, also enlightened me about the multifarious problems of land acquisition. The reports, letters, notices, and memoranda constituted the living archive of what was happening around land grab, not only in the villages where I was conducting my field survey but also in other parts of the district. SITE 3: THE WEST BENGAL ASSEMBLY

The next step in the author’s journey continued the verticality of his ethnographic work, bringing him to yet another level up the ladder of the land-grabbing process to a ‘site’ propitious to study­ ing the thinking and behaviour of politicians and policy makers, which was quite logical and indispensable for deepening his un­ derstanding. Guha again shares with his readers ‘questions that plagued him’ during his fieldwork to which he was unable to find answers in the two previous levels of the ladder in his upward examination. At this stage, the researcher had to confront not only the implementers of the land expropriation decisions, but con­ front in substance the very policies and the legal framework which ultimately triggered the land grabbing. Those questions, for example, were, Why didn’t the leftist government of West Bengal consider looking into the adverse impact of land acquisition on small peasants and share croppers at the policy level? What was the opinion of the opposition political parties on the impact of land acquisition on the peasants? Neither the available anthropological or sociological studies, nor the land acquisition officials, provided me with any clues about how to answer these questions.

While discussing with other faculty members, his colleagues at Vidyasagar University (where he was teaching at the time), Abhijit

Foreword

21

Guha received an unexpected suggestion. Namely, to study how the West Bengal politicians addressed those issues during their Assembly debates, when the legal provisions of the law he was studying, were being crafted and adopted. This transported the ethnographer to yet another research site, which he had never in­ vestigated before. That site was the West Bengal Assembly, and the source of information existed in the form of the transcripts of the debates that took place in the Assembly. Those transcripts were located of course neither in villages nor within the regular lower levels of the bureaucratic apparatus, but in the Library of the West Bengal Assembly. Of course, we can safely assume that Guha had previously spent months and years of his life as a student and as a professor in many libraries. But he never treated those libraries as sites for ethnographic research, nor was he interested before in reading the kind of transcripts of political debates, that he felt to be a ‘must read’ commandment for keeping consistent with his approach, in order to understand better how the actual process of land grabbing had been theoretically justified and triggered. What Guha found in the library of the West Bengal assembly is described as very precious and directly relevant to his questions. That information in itself is described in detail in the chapters of this book, and I do not need to summarize it here. What is, how­ ever, relevant to emphasize in recognition of the power of what I call vertical ethnography, is how the author of the book himself describes the cognitive benefits of studying this unusual source like the debates of the parliament of a state. Abhijit Guha describes this experience as the following: The reading of texts of assembly proceedings revealed many interesting facts on the role of the various political parties and their elected members and ministers on land acquisition. In fact, this rich storehouse of political narratives not only gave clues to my questions but also provided me with a wealth of information on the history and the politics of land acquisition in the state of West Bengal since the independence of the country.

The same conclusion is articulated even more clearly and strongly towards the end of Guha’s book, where in the last chapter, he is reporting the analysis and conclusions that he reached about the

22

Foreword

fact that the very principle of expropriating agricultural land should be subject to questioning. As he wrote in that chapter about the position of the members of West Bengal Legislative Assembly, There was no occasion when the members asked questions on the varied justifi­ cation of acquiring agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes… no elected people’s representative of West Bengal, irrespective of political affiliation was found to raise the issue of the impoverishment of peasant by land acquisition who were direct beneficiaries of the land reform process. For the elected mem­ bers of the Legislative Assembly, debates around land acquisition for develop­ ment projects were a routinised ritual. SITE 4: DIALOGUES WITH THE POLITICIANS

AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL

In the common parlance of researchers, there is one term which describes an unanticipated finding—or by extension an unantici­ pated chance to observe and understand—that happens sometimes to tenacious researchers. This term, in vernacular, is ‘researcher’s lucky chance’. Scholars are defining such unexpected findings as ‘Serendipity’, referring to those situations in which a tenacious researcher may come upon a source of valuable information through an unanticipated turn of events for which s/he didn’t plan or think before. But as Louis Pasteur famously said, ‘chance favours the prepared’. And indeed, it seems that the author of this book had this lucky chance at this point in his investigation. Without expecting it, Abhijit Guha was officially invited to meet a group of elected parliament members as part of a pre-legislative consultative process by the Indian government in New Delhi. This, of course, was not in his original investigation plan, but he trans­ formed that encounter into yet another ‘station’ of his ethnographic journey. In the book, Guha uses a different wording—‘golden oppor­ tunity’—for his serendipitous event: he informs his readers that ‘a golden opportunity’ appeared for him during his long and multisite ‘ethnographic journey’: A golden opportunity came to me to meet the elected parliamentarians of the country—those located at the highest level—in discussing and deciding on legal matters about land acquisition. I was invited as an expert to give my

Foreword

23

suggestions on reforming the then-colonial Land Acquisition Act of the country dating from 1894, and this was one of the most interesting parts of my ethno­ graphic journey. I was sitting in front of about 20 members of the parliament (MP) from different parts of the country . . . in June 2008. I was feeling nervous, although I was an invited expert . . . [on matters regarding] the government’s power of eminent domain exercised to acquire land for ‘public purpose’. . . . These members of parliament are all politicians whom I had never studied ethnographically, but to whom I had in fact addressed recommenda­ tions in my articles.

It is at this stage, in the last chapters of his book, that Abhijit Guha’s pen of ‘Ethnographer as describer’ is changing explicitly and dramatically into Abhijit Guha’s pen of the ‘Ethnographer as activist’. His activism is expressed in challenging the practices that his ethnography has patiently observed, described, and analysed, and outlines his thoughts to the higher-level political personalities who assembled to listen to his opinions. His observations and ques­ tions attract in exchange a question that he perceives as a trap. He engaged in the clash and continues his sharp challenge, in which he doesn’t shy to put forward his thoughts and proposals in terms of a constructive alternative and approach to the process that would reduce the asymmetry of power in land acquisition, by giving voice also to the village government. The exercise of ethnography as research methodology implies intense reflexivity throughout. All of a sudden, the reader will no­ tice that the same Abhijit Guha, who has meticulously described the processes he observed is also the person who has thought criti­ cally about what he was seeing and is reporting objectively. He developed his own independent thinking, became obviously up­ set, and asked himself about the ethic or the immorality of the process, about this and through his analysis of the situations that he studied and aimed to conceive of remedies and alternative ways of conducting land acquisition, which will put the farmers in a better position for defending their rights and entitlement vis-à-vis the government. The action-oriented thinking that this scholar developed is re­ volving around a principle, which he is convinced is embedded in the Indian Constitution, but a principle that he found out through

24

Foreword

empirical research is being disregarded, ignored, and violated. Namely, at stake for him is the role of the government, not only at the higher level, but at the level of local government, and the role of farmers local village organization pattern: specifically, the Gram Panchayat. THE ETHNOGRAPHER’S THEORETICAL INSIGHTS,

LESSONS LEARNED, AND CONCLUSION

Further, Guha brings back in his last chapter his field-discussion with the villagers, when he also interviewed members of the Gram Panchayat asking, how they reacted to the inequitable and destruc­ tive treatment that the application of eminent domain was inflict­ ing on the villagers. When he inquired about whether the Gram Panchayat members have been able to intervene in the process, he was told again and again that they had been completely ignored by the implementers of the expropriation process. In fact, they were not only ignored as individual farmers, but also as an institu­ tional structure of self-organized villagers. Referencing the responses given to him by the farmers, the author informs the reader that the villagers were consistently told that, ‘it is not the business of the panchayat, it is the duty of the government’ (meaning the higher levels of government), but not of the local government. In other words, he had concluded from his earlier research at the level of the rural communities that the peasants were systematically excluded from any meaningful participation and negotiation about land matters that were absolutely vital for their existence, and for the production of their family’s livelihood. Guha has used the discussion with those central parliamentarians not only to share his knowledge, but also in turn to question and challenge their thinking. The content of that discussion, as well as of another comparable meeting that he had later with central politi­ cians and experts working on India’s new Land Act, that was adopted by the Lok Sabha in 2013, was directly relevant to the subject of the present book; of course, the narrative of his research journey, includes descriptions of those encounters, and what they revealed to him.

Foreword

25

In other words, at various stages of his research the ethnographer was exploring the thinking of the power elite; in keeping with the term of ‘vertical ethnography’ that I have used for commenting on this elaborate book, the researcher has moved vertically from the bottom level of the process of land grabbing the level where the affected people reside upward to the very top, where the land grab­ bing is decided and enacted as legal. Another way to describe the trajectory could be a move from observing the effects of a certain process and tracking them all the way back through intermediate steps to the causes of the process. Early on in his research, Abhijit Guha felt it was his duty as ethnographer to start his research by first exploring the experi­ ences and thinking of the victims of land grabbing at the bottom rung of the social and power pyramid. Further, at the second site in his research journey, he proceeded to explore the thinking and the ‘cultural artefacts’ of the administrators and bureaucrats who were those implementing the land acquisition procedures. Further, on his multi-site ethnographic journey, he decided to focus on the political elite of West Bengal. Unhesitatingly, in addressing this more difficult to reach group, Guha stuck to the same ethnographic approach of exploring the thinking and analysing of the state­ ments of those located at the top of the social and power pyramid. The readers will find the full meat and substance of this narrative further in the book in greater detail. In concluding this Foreword, I would suggest not just to other colleagues, social scientists and students interested in this set of thorny subjects, but also to state officials, development practitioners, and legislators as well that: There is indeed much to gain accom­ panying Abhijit Guha on his ‘Ethnographic Journey’ and reflecting on his findings and argument. Then, they would be better pre­ pared to continue further and forward their own search for more adequate and equitable solutions to the dysfunctions revealed in this book. MICHAEL M. CERNEA Former Senior Adviser for Social Policies and Sociology of the World Bank

Preface

‘. . . when someone tells you what he states happened to himself, you are more likely to believe that he is telling the truth than when he tells you what happened to somebody else. It has besides the merit from the story-teller’s point of view that he need only tell you what he knows for a fact and can leave to your imagination what he doesn’t or couldn’t know’. W. Somerset Maugham (Preface, Collected Short Stories, vol. 2. Penguin Books, 1963).

This book on the subject of land grab has been in the making in my mind since I wrote my first book, titled Land, Law and the Left: The Saga of Disempowerment of the Peasantry in the Era of Glo­ balization (2007). Much has happened, since I described and analysed the tragic saga of large-scale land grabbing going on in India, and particu­ larly in West Bengal. For centuries, West Bengal has been one of India’s better-known states internationally. But since 2006-7, West Bengal re-entered the national and international scene in an even bigger way, yet unfortunately, it did so for bad reasons. The names of Singur and Nandigram became familiar for peasant resis­ tance against land grab, not only in India but also in New York, London, Paris, Sao Paulo and Johannesburg. This sudden national and international notoriety of names, such as these was strange for me, considering that I had observed Singur and Nandigram like events at least a decade earlier in my field area of study in erstwhile Medinipur district of West Bengal. When I was observing these places, fertile lands were being acquired for private industries, and a large portion of the land was also kept unused for years in the villages, where I began my anthropological fieldwork in 1994-5. No political party or civil society group in Kolkata or in other areas of West Bengal raised their voices of protest against these land grabs in my field area. Development and progress through industrialization were the mantra for every political party in the period of liberalization in West Bengal.

28

Preface

I continued my research and writing following the policy fail­ ures of the then ruling leftist government in West Bengal, putting under the wider global context of resettlement and rehabilitation. The pro-peasant government could not take on these policies, let alone implement them. With the fall of the leftist government, after the tragic events in Singur and Nandigram, not by military coup d’état, but by the same democratic elections that brought the left into power and kept them there for more than thirty years, new dramas began in India, especially around West Bengal. The cen­ tury-old colonial land acquisition law was replaced by a pro-peas­ ant law, and in case of West Bengal, the apex court of the country passed a historic judgement. The court ordered the government of West Bengal, this time the ruling anti-left government to return the acquired agricultural land in Singur to those who were unwill­ ing to part with their source of livelihood for a huge and rich private car manufacturing company. Quickly, more dramas played out around the new law under a rightist government at the centre, signalling a grim scenario. I too was caught up with these historic events through my writing, including popular research-based articles in newspapers, international journals and books. My articles throughout the decades before and after the Singur episode, inter alia became good sources on this ethnographic voy­ age. I adopted the style of story-telling in this new book Encoun­ tering Land Grab: An Ethnographic Journey, which in a sense is a continuation of my first book, but also different in many ways. In the former book, I had emphasized the policy aspects of land grab by bringing in factual materials from the field and archive. In this book, however, I highlighted my personal experiences in a histori­ cal and multisite form of narrative. Thus, this new book was born partly out of the policy-oriented focus contained in the earlier one, but more from my personal journey over two decades of land grabs ranging between villages and parliamentarians through the inter­ stices of academia. 6 September 2021 Medinipur

ABHIJIT GUHA

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the cooperation of the villagers in the Paschim (West) Medinipur district of West Bengal and their grass-roots level leaders, who taught me how to fight and bargain against land grab with intelligence. They first pointed me the loopholes of the land acquisition law. I owe my debts to the officers, surveyors, clerks and other staff of the district land acquisition department of the Medinipur dis­ trict who provided me with the records, files, reports and their own observations on how land acquisition actually takes place, its prob­ lems and difficulties around making surveys, hearing objections and calculating compensations for landowners and sharecroppers. I am grateful to the librarian and staff in the library of the West Bengal Assembly, who were kind enough to supply the volumes of the Assembly proceedings and other important materials available in the library, which was one of the richest archival sources from where I collected the debates, dialogues and opinions of the poli­ ticians around land acquisition and the laws. I am indebted to my students of the Department of Anthropo­ logy at Vidyasagar University, who accompanied me in carrying out the difficult fieldwork in the villages. I particularly express my appreciation to Tapan, Raghu and Laxman, who took me to the field for the first time, and then to Arup, who collected invaluable information while doing his PhD under my supervision on the impact of land grab on the villages after a decade of my own first fieldwork there. My acknowledgements will remain incomplete until I express my sincerest gratitude to Professor Michael Cernea, who accompa­ nied me in this long and eventful journey regarding land grab almost from the start. Michael was always my friend, philosopher and guide in this thrilling encounter with land grabbing by ‘legal’ expropriation and failed resettlement, through his articles, books,

30

Acknowledgements

long letters, and short emails, which have a personal and loving touch. His Foreword to my first book, as well as this one, are not only solid argumentative supports of my own findings but also sources of future inspiration to walk further ahead in this journey. I also remain grateful to Arielle Klein, student of Michael Cernea, who earnestly helped me in the copy editing process with her excellent skill in English. I am also in great debt to my faculty colleagues Professor Kaushik Bose and Professor Rajat Kanti Das, who carefully listened to me and commented on my arguments and narratives on land grab. I am also grateful to late Professor Tarun Kumar Banerjee and Professor Ambarish Mukherjee of the Political Science Department of Vidyasagar University for their useful advice to consult the Assembly Proceedings. I am indebted to Manohar Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi and particularly, Mr. Ramesh Jain for showing keen interest to publish this book and also to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve my manuscript. Last, but not the least, I thank my wife Priti and son Ruru for inspiring me to take up the work after my retirement from university teaching. ABHIJIT GUHA

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY OF

LAND ACQUISITION

The issues around land and land acquisition from an anthropo­ logical perspective bear special significance, mainly because of the small scale, field-based and micro-level perspective of the disci­ pline. The mainstay of the anthropologist is still ethnographic, which despite its interesting transformations since the days of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski basically remained a descriptive business. Theories on ethnography revolved round how the ethno­ grapher as author told the story, how the factual materials were collected through selection, rejection and finally arranged in the form of writing to make the narrative believable to the readers (Geertz 1988, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Nader 2011). Land acquisition or land grab by the state, therefore, is not same for the anthropologist as it is to the economist, political scientist, socio­ logist, geographer or historian. Social scientists other than the an­ thropologist search mainly for macro-level theoretical generali­ zations and land acquisition is no exception. Thus, we find theories on accumulation by dispossession in economics since the time of Marx till today (Marx 1973, Harvey 2003, Sanyal 2007, Hall 2013). We also find recent attempts by sociologists to build up macro-sociological theories (Mukherjee 2012, Levien 2011, 2017 & 2018, for a good review of Levine, see Noy 2019). There has also been an attempt by an economist to provide politico-economic explanation of land acquisition in India based on the study of a single village (Sathe 2017). One interesting study by an econo­ mist in a personalized ethnographic style, though not exclusively on land grab deserves mention. The Economist’s Tale (2003) by Peter Griffiths is an unusual description of the daily events in Sierra

32

Encountering Land Grab

Leone, in which the author narrated World Bank imposed policies that led to famine. Political scientists, historians and geographers also take up a bigger framework and/or theoretical construct to in­ terpret the phenomenon of land acquisition (Chatterjee 2017, Hall 2013, Hobsbawm 1994, Chakravorty 2013, Mukherjee 2017). Even among the anthropologists, ethnographies vary a lot and there are novel attempts to view participant observation through intro­ spection (Tedlock 1991). For some, it is limited in a specific space and time, for others it is part of a larger whole and still others view it as multi-sited (Geertz 1973, Appadurai 1986, Marcus 1995, Tsing 2004, Auyero 2004, Graeber 2009, Gellner 2012, Burawoy 2013). Of course, there are attempts to champion theory over ethno­ graphic description among anthropologists, but these attempts towards theory building could not also avoid the question of ethno­ graphy in anthropology (see for example, Ortner 1984, Ingold 2008). In his recent and extremely brilliant book entitled Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, sociologist Matthew Desmond revealed one of the tragic events of USA—urban displacement among the poor in a rich country just by following eight families around Wisconsin. Matthew’s first person narrative of a handful of families showed the real power of ethnography (Desmond 2017). My Ethno­ graphy on the development caused displacement by University campuses in the local and global contexts added diversity in the literature (Guha 2013a: 158-77). Ethnographies of displacement caused by land acquisition in the earlier days of its history were rare, although anthropologists were foremost among the social scientists to create an empirical database on development caused forced dis­ placement. Michael Cernea is one among the few anthropologists and sociologists, who devoted his lifetime to build up some general principles, if not theory out of global empirical database on dispos­ session caused by land expropriation by the state in the impoverish­ ment risk reconstruction model (Cernea 1996a and b, 1997, 1999, 2008). In India also, it was the anthropologists who studied the consequences of land acquisition for industries and dams inten­ sively, since the early period of independence of the country from the British rule without really trying to generate any theory (Das Gupta 1964 & 1965, Roy Burman 1968, Karve and Nimbkar 1969, Mahapatra 1999). An early, but brilliant and rare ethno­

Introduction

33

graphic study of large-scale displacement of people caused by famine was written by Tarak Chandra Das of the University of Calcutta in the year 1949 (Das 1949).1 Recent attempts to study governmental land acquisition by anthropologists with the help of ethnographic methods through personal journeys in which subjective impressions rather than macro-level theories played important roles deserve at­ tention (Roy 2014, Hatzfeld 2016). Along with these attempts, situating the daily struggles of people within, and wider theoretical constructs by anthropologists are also found in the Indian context (Nielsen 2015; Nielsen & Nilsen 2017). In this connection, it would be worthwhile to take a quick glance over the scenario of land grab and changing land use pattern in different parts of India under a liberalized economic order. In a recent publication entitled The Great Indian Land Grab (2011) by Vandana Shiva and others, it has been shown how the commodification of land was fuelling the corporate land grab in India, both through the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and foreign direct investment (FDI) in real estate. They have found that the biggest threat to the farmers of the country was land grab through real estate development fuelled by urban sprawl. The authors of this important book have cited the example of the National Capital Region (NCR), wherein the land use pattern was rapidly shifting from agriculture to urban use. In the case of Delhi alone, it has shown a sharp decline of agricultural land from 23.5 per cent in 1987 to 4 per cent in 2004. It was clear that land was being diverted to real estate development in the NCR region and taken away from farming communities to fulfill the man­ date of liberalization (Shiva et al. 2011: 49-56 & 68-71). Similar stories of dispossession of farmers from various other parts of the country were reported in the book. One stark example is the cre­ ation of an urban zone ten times the size of Noida by the Uttar Pradesh government, which in 2010 decided to convert the entire rural belt along the Greater Noida-Agra Expressway into an urban zone, making it the biggest such plan attempted in India. The Uttar Pradesh government initially assured the framers along this express­ way that their land will be bought and compensated at a fair price and that they will not be left destitute but in reality The Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority acquired thousands of hectares of land in the areas adjoining the expressway and sold

34

Encountering Land Grab

them to real estate companies at prices 10 to 20 times given to the farmers. The builders and real estate companies, in turn, are sell­ ing the same plots of land at 50 to 100 times the price originally given to the farmers (Shiva et al. 2011: 79). By and large, the scenario of forced eviction of people from their homes for various reasons, like beautification of cities, slum clearance, and imple­ mentation of development projects worsened after liberalization. In most of the cases, the affected population belongs to people of lower socio-economic strata, adivasis, dalits and other marginalised groups and majority of them are displaced without proper resettle­ ment. Another recent example of blatant land grab practice comes from the Aerocity Expansion project in the vicinity of Chandigarh and Mohali, which has overlooked the issue of food security in the ‘Food Bowl of the Country’ (Reuter et al. 2021: 97-118). Suffice it to say that in the absence of official data on the magnitude, extent and the nature of forced evictions adequate policy response towards the problem or resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) of the evicted populations are rarely addressed in a proper manner (Housing and Land Rights Network 2019 and 2020). In the case of West Bengal, there were some recent empirical studies on governmental land grab for urbanization (in the Rajarhat area of Kolkata) and SEZ (in Nandigram of East Medinipur dis­ trict) done by the Anthropological Survey of India, the largest governmental organization of anthropologists (Chakrabarty et.al. 2015, Sarkar et al. 2015). A huge compendium on developmentinduced displacement in West Bengal containing a plethora of empirical data has also been published by Walter Fernandes and his team before the sub-regional books published by the researchers at Anthropological Survey of India (Fernandes et al. 2012). All this is not to say that theories should not be developed by the anthropologists while studying land grab or acquisition by the state but the point I am trying to make in this book is that studying land grab from an ethnographic perspective gave me the opportu­ nity to go through a series of personal encounters, which enabled me to learn beyond what I have experienced at the local level in some villages of erstwhile, Medinipur district in the West Bengal State of India. This again, would not have been possible without encountering the many facets of land grab at different sites (Guha

Introduction

35

2017a: 283-301). Let me now enumerate the sites with some de­ tail, wherein I encountered land grab. THE VILLAGES

The villages constituted the site, in which I first encountered land grab by the government. This is the area, in which I first started my ethnographic journey. At first sight, the villages looked unlike ordinary and traditional Bengal rural settlements because of the presence of gigantic iron and steel made machines and concrete buildings right on agricultural lands. Take for example, the village named Paschim Amba. If you have got down at Gokulpur Railway Station (a small railway station on the south-eastern track between Kharagpur and Medinipur), and walked straight along the unmetal­ led road of the aforementioned village towards the west you would have found a big industrial plant, named Tata Metalliks surrounded by agricultural fields. This would seem unusual for a typical village in Bengal and in the surrounding area. There were two other lesser manufacturers in the adjoining lands; one was a coke coal manu­ facturing plant and the other a cement factory. Forget about these three concrete-steel-iron structures spread over 200 acres of land area, and you will see a typical rural landscape of upland Bengal. Vast agricultural fields, mud houses arranged in linear and/or clustered fashion on higher lands with roofs thatched with tin and/or straw, small dug wells, ponds, ploughs, cattle and quite a good number of fruit and other trees with large canopies. Ask the villagers, and they would name their villages. Question them further about the factories and you will come to know that these were recent additions in their landscape with signs of hope, frustration, anger, illusion, as well as disillusionment in terms of losing lands, getting jobs and compensation money. THE LAND ACQUISITION OFFICE

When I conducted my anthropological fieldwork in the villages on

land grab by asking people about the amount of land they lost and

the compensation money they received, I had no idea about the

36

Encountering Land Grab

huge administrative department of the government, which meticu­ lously worked on how the land should be acquired and how the compensation had to be calculated according to law. This was the second site in my ethnographic journey—the district land ac­ quisition department. This was one of the largest government de­ partments doing many jobs, like land survey, settlement of legal disputes, gazette notification, compensation calculation, hearing of objections and above all, taking possession of private land for governmental purpose. This administrative department provided me with invaluable information about how the decision by the state to acquire land for public and private projects were actually executed, the difficulties encountered by the government and pro­ cedures to overcome the difficulties. The staff of this department like the villagers also enlightened me about the multifarious prob­ lems of land acquisition. The reports, letters, notices and memo­ randa constituted the living archive of what was happening around land grab not only in the villages where I conducted my field survey but also in the others parts of the district. The land acqui­ sition files were not only sources of information for me but also cultural artefacts created and manipulated by human beings for meeting the needs of their time and purpose.2 THE WEST BENGAL ASSEMBLY LIBRARY

The questions which plagued me most during my fieldwork in the villages among peasants and collection of official data on land acquisition from the files, reports, letters, and notifications of the department were related to governmental policies and laws. For example, why the then Left Front Government (LFG), did not consider looking into the adverse impact of land acquisition on the small peasants and sharecroppers at the policy level or what was the opinion of the opposition political parties on the impact of land acquisition on the peasants? The published anthropological or sociological reports did not provide me with any clue about how to deal with these questions. The officials in the land acquisi­ tion department also could not give me any answer to the afore­ mentioned questions. Two of my faculty colleagues of the Political Science Department at Vidyasagar University, however, suggested

Introduction

37

to me to visit the library of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly to read the proceedings of this house of elected members, which according to them might throw some light on my policy-level queries that arose out of my field and archival work at the sites entitled by me as ‘The villages’ and ‘The Land Acquisition Office’ respectively. I followed the suggestions of my Political Science col­ leagues and worked for some months at the West Bengal Assembly library. The reading of assembly proceedings revealed many inter­ esting facts on the role of various political parties and their elected members, and ministers, on land acquisition. In fact, this rich storehouse of political narratives not only gave clues to my ques­ tions but also provided me with a wealth of information on the history and the politics of land acquisition in the state of West Bengal since the independence of the country. PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARY BUILDING

In 2007, I got an official invitation to meet a group of elected members of the Indian Parliament (Lok Sabha) at its library build­ ing in New Delhi. The meeting, in which, I was invited was part of the pre-legislative democratic consultative process undertaken by the Government of India to reform the age-old colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. By that time, I had completed my doctoral work on land acquisition and published my book and a number of articles on the topic. It was not an accident that I was invited to speak and provide suggestions with evidence before the policy and law makers of the country. I had sent my suggestions in response to the governmental public notification to all Indian citizens on the amendment of the century old colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894, along with some of my publications in the journal Economic and Political Weekly (EPW ). Of course, it was quite good news for me when I was invited to give my opinion as an ‘expert’ before the parliamentarians. I went to Delhi, met the Members of Parliament (MP) and placed my opinion and engaged in interesting dialogues with them on various issues around land acquisition. This is the fourth site of my ethnographic journey that helped me to under­ stand how difficult it was to bridge the gap between the visceral resistance of the impoverished peasants in my field villages and the

38

Encountering Land Grab

clever dialogues of the politicians in the state Legislative Assembly and the parliamentary library building. THE TERI CONFERENCE 2018

The process to reform the colonial land acquisition law which began in 2007 culminated to a success and the Indian parliament finally enacted a new law entitled Right to Fair Compensation and Trans­ parency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (RFCTLARR, hereafter LARR), on 29 August 2013. Under this background my fifth and final site was the conference halls at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi during 25-26 October 2018, in which I was invited to act as an expert on how the new law could be improved further to cater to the needs of the country. This con­ ference was organized by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), which is a New Delhi based think tank that conducts research work in the fields of energy, environment and sustainable development. The conference entitled Five Year Journey of The RFCTLARR Act, 2013: The Way Forward was aimed to examine the extent to which the stated objectives of the new land acquisi­ tion law have been met, identify challenges to its implementation, comprehend the emergent land acquisition scenario and explore the approaches and strategies for a sustainable land procurement framework. In this conference I met among others Mr. Jairam Ramesh, MP, Rajya Sabha (upper house of the parliament) and the former Minister of Rural Development in the United Pro­ gressive Alliance (UPA) government during whose tenure the RFCTLARR Act, 2013 was enacted.3 The TERI conference pro­ vided me with the experience of how the much-awaited new law was viewed by the different stakeholders of the country.4 LINKING THE SITES

Consequently, my ethnographic journey was not limited by the typical single site fieldwork based anthropological study in which the ethnographer embedded himself/herself in the village(s) and came out with a micro-holistic description of the daily life and the various institutions of the village in order to reveal the social struc­

Introduction

39

ture and the culture of the community. My journey, on the other hand, began from the villages in which the land acquisition took place and one can directly see the multifarious effects of disposses­ sion of the peasants from their primary means of production. My trip continued through the various domains, which stood in some kind of relationship with the village and the families who were affected by land acquisition. These domains were situated far away from the affected villages and also from one another but have a relationship with land acquisition in which the villages were at the receiving end of this state generated gigantic process. Land, after all, was acquired from the villagers, food insecurity was experi­ enced at the level of household, compensation money was spent by the individuals, and movement against land acquisition began at the local level. These could also be seen as effects of administra­ tive actions decided in the land acquisition department. The de­ partment was again being governed by a set of laws, rules, regula­ tions and policies, which were in existence in the country since the colonial period. Laws and policies were being enacted and formu­ lated by the elected representatives of the country, who debated or remained silent over various issues around land and land acquisi­ tion and the proceedings of the state legislative assembly, as well as the views of the parliamentarians loomed large over the executers at the land acquisition department. There existed a chain of do­ mains, which were interlinked in my ethnographic journey and more interestingly, it seemed to me that as if I was being pushed from one domain to another sometime to answer the research ques­ tions raised in the preceding one and sometime just accidentally. Whatever may be the triggering factor, the different domains or sites have to be united in an integrated whole and ethnography was the answer. Ethnography for me was the roadmap, which guided my journey in these otherwise separate existential domains of land acquisition. It was only my personal experience and en­ counter which united a group of dispossessed peasants, a bunch of files, a rich text of assembly proceedings and my deliberations in the parliamentary library with elected MP and speakers in a con­ ference who evaluated a new land acquisition law. This ethnography is simultaneously descriptive, interpretative and multisited. It is descriptive, when I narrated the stories of the dispossession of the

40

Encountering Land Grab

peasant households, often backed by quantitative data on the nature of landlessness, food insecurity or spending of compensation money by the land losers. It became interpretative when I found a link between land acquisition and land reform in a particular area and could reveal the policy failure of a pro-peasant government by com­ bining the quantitative and the qualitative data. My ethnography was also multisited, since I narrated land acquisition at many sites, like villages and land acquisition department in Medinipur, as­ sembly proceedings at Kolkata and at the meeting hall of the parliament’s library building at New Delhi and could find link among these different sites through descriptive integration (Guha 2022: 99-122). NOTES 1. Interestingly, Tarak Chandra Das’s ethnographic data depicted in his mono­ graph Bengal Famine (1949) were cited by the Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen in his book Poverty and Famines (1999) several times. Sen, however did neither mention the contribution of Das as regards the causes of the Great Bengal famine nor Das’s suggestions towards the preventive measures for the development of agriculture and industry in Bengal (Guha 2011c: 245-65). 2. In one of my recent articles, I have dealt with this question of archives as ‘cultural artefacts’ in detail bringing in the contributions of Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks who dealt mainly with colonial archives in India. My point of departure lay in using post-colonial archives as cultural artefacts in the field of land grab (see Guha 2017d). 3. The entire proceedings of the TERI conference is now available in the link given below https://www.teriin.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/ RFCTLARR%20Conference%202018%20Proceedings.pdf Interested readers may see my exchanges in the conference on pages 73, 85-6 and 129. 4. The United Progressive Alliance government led by the Congress Party of India by following the democratic processes of the country enacted a revised land acquisition law named Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (Ministry of Law and Justice, GOI, 2013). This new law has two important provisions having immense anthropological implications which are (i) socio-economic impact assessment study before land acquisition and (ii) getting the consent

Introduction

41

of a majority of the people who would be affected by the governmental acquisition. The international experts hailed these two provisions as ‘Pro­ gressive’ and it seemed that the draconian piece of legislation created by the empire had gone forever (Cernea 2013). That the dream was not reality, soon became clear. Ominous signals hovered on the heads of the farmers as well as anthropologists of India when the new rightist government of the country under the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. The new National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government passed successive ordinances (Ministry of Law and Justice, GOI, 2014) to withhold the application of the two aforementioned provisions of the newly enacted law, although the BJP as the major opposition party participated in the two parliamentary standing committees which, after public hearings recommended the new law to the Lok Sabha and the BJP also supported the law in the upper and lower houses of the parliament. The landmark law, could not therefore come into application since the NDA government which came to power in 2014 restrained the application of the new law by amendments on the consent clause and the provision of social impact assess­ ment through the promulgation of the Ordinance, a move which had been viewed by experts as the ‘weakening of the democratic and constitutional institutions’ (Ramesh and Khan 2015: 124-30, Iyer 2015). ‘The Ordi­ nance made the new law quite like the 1894 law’, said Rajya Sabha member Jairam Ramesh. The Amendment Bill was introduced in Parliament on 24 February 2015 and passed in the Lok Sabha. But it could not be passed in the Rajya Sabha and was referred to the Joint Committee of Parliament. In its several sittings, the committee could not reach a consensus. The fate of the Amendment Bill now rests with the Joint Committee of Parliament. I now quote from a recent report published in Down To Earth which revealed the current scenario around the implementation of the RFCTLARR Act. ‘Five years after the Act was introduced, Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) filed Right To Information (RTI) queries with 28 states. The questions were commonplace which could fetch straight answers—under which law was land being acquired; were social impact assessments conducted; were people’s consent taken; which projects were in the pipeline; and, how much land was acquired under RFCTLARR Act. State governments took months to send their replies. Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh did not reply at all. CSE investigation reveals that seven states—Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh—have

42

Encountering Land Grab bypassed the law and implemented their own Acts by replicating the Ordinance. The latest to change its law is Andhra Pradesh. The state was complying with the Central Act, conducting social impact assessments and taking people’s consent until 23 July 2018 when Andhra Pradesh received the President’s assent on its amendment Act. Now, the amended Act exempts defence, rural infrastructure, affordable housing, industrial corridors or industrial projects from social impact assessment and consent. The Act lays down provisions for voluntary acquisition or private negotiations, and reduces the gram sabha’s role to giving advice. Jharkhand passed its own Act about a month before Andhra Pradesh. Jharkhand’s Amendment Bill was presented to the President twice. The Bill brazenly overlooked the five pillars of RFCTLARR Act. Within a year, it was enacted with only slight changes. Now Jharkhand, too, does not need to conduct social impact assessment to acquire land for schools, hospitals, irrigation projects and housing for the economically weaker section; the gram sabha’s only role is to give advice’ (Sonak 2019: 32-40).

CHAPTER 2

How I Became Interested

in Land Grab

IN THE BEGINNING

During the mid-1990s, three students of the Department of Anthropology at Vidyasagar University1 were assigned to do field­ work for their MSc dissertations in a village, named Paschim Amba, only eight kilometers from the Medinipur Railway Station on the south-eastern railway track, in former Medinipur district2 of West Bengal. They selected a hamlet inhabited by a Scheduled Tribe named Kora3, and started to take anthropometric measurements on human bodies and also collected data on family, marriage and kin­ ship following the standard anthropological methodology involv­ ing fieldwork with participant observation. In one usual afternoon in the Department, when we were discussing about the colourful Kora marriage ceremony, one of the students remarked, ‘The colour and pomp of Kora marriage will soon wither away since their lands were being taken over for a big pig-iron industry of the Tatas.’ The remark of the student was an ample jolt for me and on one Sunday morning in 1995, I landed up in Paschim Amba village with my students. There, I first met a peasant leader named Trilochan Rana4, who was then leading a militant movement against the acquisition of agricultural land for private industries by the state government. In Trilochan Rana’s house, we met a good number of peasants5 hailing from Amba, Mahespur, Kantapal, Gokulpur, Baharapat, Shyamraipur and other villages of the area. Rana was informed by my students earlier about my visit from the university and passed the information to the agitating peasants, who were affected by the governmental land grab. Very quickly, they started to narrate quite enthusiastically the gloomy story of how their lands have been

44

Encountering Land Grab

taken away for the industries. Rana narrated how they were trying to protest against this kind of anti-peasant policy suddenly adopted by the left government in the wake of the liberalization policy in India under the global structural adjustment programme. Ironi­ cally, Mr. Rana, who was an ex-Naxalite6 (a left militant insurgent group) took refuge under the Congress party to organize this peasant movement. He asked me, ‘But sir, how coming from a university, you can help us in this struggle for survival?’ At that moment, I could not give any direct answer to this straight-forward and pointed question. While returning to Medinipur after the brief, but signifi­ cant interaction with the peasants, I was thinking of the possible course of my individual action towards this land acquisition. Should I take up a research on this problem? Should I start doing a kind of academic activism in favour of these affected peasants? Or, should I simply leave this problem? In fact, I had to struggle within my­ self for months on this issue simply because it was not just passing through the railway station Gokulpur twice a week like some of my faculty colleagues commuting from Kolkata to Medinipur, but something very challenging and risky. When I was planning to embark on my research on land acqui­ sition one of my senior anthropologist friends gave me a warning regarding the risks of undertaking such a study on land acquisi­ tion. He, however, reviewed my book in Journal of the Indian Anthro­ pological Society (JIAS) with admiration much later. His warning now seems to me rather premonitory when later, I was not allowed to proceed on for a study leave to write my second book on the dis­ courses on development by the Vidyasagar University authorities in December 2009 (The Statesman, 2 April 2010, p. 4). Dr J.J. Roy Burman of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), was one among my few friends, who gave me a lot of inspiration to study the problems of displacement from a policy perspective. Late Prof. Amitabha Basu, a life-long bio-social anthropologist, was the person who not only raised critical questions on my methodology, but he referred my publications as examples of socially responsible re­ searches in Indian anthropology in his published articles (Basu 2004 & 2009). After my maiden visit to the villages, many events occurred and

How I Became Interested in Land Grab

45

I had to go to those places several times accompanied by my stu­ dents or alone. During this period, I took two decisions. One was to do my doctoral dissertation on this problem, and the other was to support the dispossessed peasants by writing popular articles on the various adverse effects of land acquisition on the socioeconomic life of the enterprising Sadgope cultivators and poor Lodha and Kora families living on both sides of the southeastern railway track between Medinipur and Kharagpur railway stations. I started doing both. Gradually, I could build-up a friendly relationship with the peasants, and while collecting data I also took an active part in orga­ nizing a public meeting within Paschim Amba village in collabora­ tion with the district unit of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), which ultimately culminated into a deputation to the District Magistrate on the adverse economic and environmental impacts of land acquisition in this area. Suffice it to say that my entry into such a politically sensitive field site was made possible by the peasants, who were organizing a movement against the decision of the government to acquire their fertile land for an industry. But at the same time, I also realized that the middleclass urban leadership of APDR would not advance further to sup­ port the cause of these land loser peasants in a rural area, which was located in the vicinity of the Medinipur town. What I could ultimately keep up was continued research on land acquisition for development projects by combining field and archival materials and dissemination of my research findings in various academic and popular forums. The methodology of my research can hardly be called ‘purely anthropological’ since it did not end in the villages, but went beyond through the files, notes, and gazette notifications at the Land Acquisition Department of the District Collectorate Office of Medinipur to the West Bengal Assembly Proceedings (Guha 2002). LAND GRAB IN WEST BENGAL IN THE

ACADEMIC LITERATURE

The first striking thing one could observe in the field of development

caused displacement in West Bengal during the time of my field­

46

Encountering Land Grab

work was the virtual absence of any empirical and theoretical work. In a recent period (2006 onwards), however, there was an upsurge of popular and journalistic writings and some scholastic debates in the newspapers and journals on the subject of development caused displacement and rehabilitation in India. But this outburst of writ­ ings have been generated by peasant uprisings in Singur (a place in the Hooghly district in West Bengal) and Nandigram (a place in the East Medinipur district in West Bengal) against governmental acquisition of agricultural land for a small car factory and chemical industries respectively. This of course does not mean that dis­ placement and rehabilitation were non-existent in West Bengal, before the Singur and Nandigram episodes, which in the pre-inde­ pendence period, was the leading state in terms of industrialization, and where, after independence, large industries and thermal power plants have been built up displacing many families (including tribals) from their agricultural land and homes.7 West Bengal has also experienced large-scale mining on the western part of the state bordering Jharkhand state of India. In an article published in 1989, Walter Fernandes and his co-workers, quoting from government sources, have shown that for the Durgapur Steel Plant in Bardha­ man district of West Bengal 6,633.44 ha of land was acquired, which displaced 11,300 persons, 3.39 per cent of whom were tribals (Fernandes et al. 1989). In the same article, Fernandes quoted another government source which showed that up to 1983, there were 114 coal mines in West Bengal. Although, he did not give any concrete figure about the total number of displaced persons (DP) owing to the acquisition of land for the establishment of mines. Through extrapolation, Fernandes, however, arrived at an estimate of 1,380 DP per mine in India, which brings out a figure of 1,57,320 persons in case of West Bengal. In more recent period, particularly since the adoption of a liberalized economic policy by the central government, quite a good number of development projects have been launched by the West Bengal government. The building up of a new township near Kolkata and the establishment of industries in the rural areas of West Bengal, including a port-centered industrial complex at Haldia in the Purba Medinipur district constituted the development package of the government of West Bengal. For the

How I Became Interested in Land Grab

47

successful implementation of this development policy, large-scale acquisition of land had already been taken place in West Bengal, which displaced quite a good number of small and marginal farmers. No published statistics on displaced (DP) and project affected persons (PAP), let alone their caste/tribe affiliation, were available from any official source of government of West Bengal. Displace­ ment and rehabilitation have not yet entered the official agenda of the government of West Bengal like the routinized recording of bargadars (sharecroppers) and the number of landless labourers who have been given land by the government. On the other hand, the West Bengal scenario did not figure in any substantial manner in the academic literature with respect to land acquisition, development induced displacement and rehabili­ tation before the Singur and Nandigram episodes. There were four special volumes of important Indian journals devoted exclusively to displacement and rehabilitation, but none of them contained any empirical case study or policy-oriented paper on West Bengal. These journals are Social Action (vol. 45, no. 3, 1995, July-Sep­ tember), Lokayan Bulletin (vol. 11, no. 5, 1995), EPW (vol. XXXI, no. 24, June 1996) and Eastern Anthropologist (vol. 53, nos. 1-2, January-June 2000). The same was true about the then published monographs viz., Development Displacement and Rehabilitation edited by Walter Fernandes and Enakshi Ganguly Thukral (1989) The Uprooted edited by V. Sudarsen and M.A. Kalam (1990) and Development Projects and Impoverishment Risks edited by Hari Mohan Mathur and David Marsden (2000). None of the above collections did contain any empirical or theoretical chapter on West Bengal. During this period, the internationally famed social scientist Partha Chatterjee, had undertaken a study on R&R in West Bengal. His paper, which remained unpublished, was presented in a workshop on ‘Social Development Research’ in West Bengal held during 6-7 July 2000 at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. In this significant paper, Chatterjee pointed out that participatory rehabilitation through NGOs has become a ‘mantra’, which was being repeated by the governments, funding agencies, experts and activists, but ‘little attention has been given to the specific forms

48

Encountering Land Grab

of practice through which appropriate and adequate ‘participation’ can be ensured’ (Chatterjee 2000). Chatterjee used three cases of displacement and consequent rehabilitation in West Bengal to assess the role of the political parties vis-à-vis government bureau­ cracy in providing rehabilitation to PAP in West Bengal. His findings on the political processes that centered on the rehabilitation mechan­ isms of industrialization in Haldia (1988-91) and the establishment of a new township in Rajarhat, near Kolkata clearly demonstrated the dominance of the local political society over the government administration. Quite interestingly, in both the cases, the distri­ bution of rehabilitation benefits was based on a ground-level agree­ ment between the representatives of the ruling and the opposition political parties of West Bengal. The net result of this process was the distribution of a better and quicker rehabilitation package to the project affected families, than it would have been made by the usual land acquisition procedure carried out by the bureaucratic machinery alone. According to Chatterjee, in West Bengal, it was the political society (represented by the political parties) rather than the civil society (represented by the NGOs), which took the role of a mediator between the state and the PAP. Chatterjee’s account was based not on his personal encounters in the villages, but on governmental archives and media reports. Field-based empirical accounts of development caused displace­ ment in West Bengal was published for the first time by me with my students, who took me to the site of land grab and then, under single authorship in peer-reviewed journals including EPW, and these publications prepared me to complete my doctoral work based on a case study, in erstwhile Medinipur district (Guha et al. 1996, 1997, 2002, 2004a). During this period Michael Cernea, the international guru on R&R inspired me to stick to my study on displacement through his articles and books, which he used to send me from his World Bank office at Washington. I was awarded a PhD by Vidyasagar University for my work on land acquisition and this achievement provided me confidence to continue my research on the topic. In any case, my publications and academic achievement centering round land acquisition during the rule of a leftist government in West Bengal could not raise much interest

How I Became Interested in Land Grab

49

among the academic community in the state. I was rather viewed as kind of a scholar, who tried to find fault with a progressive and pro-peasant government, led by the major political party of West Bengal. My popular newspaper articles published during 1998­ 2000 in local and Kolkata-based dailies, however, were more effective in terms of the verbal feedbacks from my friends, colleagues, relatives, students and a very few activists, who congratulated and shared my views and findings on governmental land grab. But, by and large, I remained a bitter and irrelevant critic of the left on the issues of land acquisition in the intellectual front. I was rather on the margin from the mainstream academic discourse, which was going on during the heyday of the Left Front rule in West Bengal.8 THE CHANGE AND TRANSITION

The scenario, however, changed after the massive resistance of the peasants against land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram during 2006-7. During this short period a large number of articles, inter­ views, opinions, debates and news items were published in the newspapers and journals on the development caused forced displace­ ment in West Bengal. Leading economists (including the Noble Laureate Amartya Sen), journalists, social activists (like Medha Patkar), and politicians began to write and talk vociferously on the displacement and rehabilitation of farmers by land acquisition for private industries in West Bengal. Editorials, articles and books by academicians and political commentators got published in EPW, which is one of the of the most widely circulated journals of the country during 2006-7 (Lahiri & Ghosh 2006, Banerjee & Roy 2007, Banerjee 2007, Fernandes 2007, Patkar 2006, Banerjee et al. 2007, Bhaduri 2007, Sarkar 2007, Bose 2007, Patnaik 2007, Bhattacharya 2007, Da Costa 2007, The Telegraph 2007, Ray 2008). Websites named sanhati.com and counterviews.com were launched in the cyberspace. Development caused forced displace­ ment and resettlement under the communist party led LFG, which ruled the West Bengal state of India became the national and international agenda for debate and discussion in the academic

50

Encountering Land Grab

and political arenas. Despite the spurt of literature on development caused displacement in West Bengal, after the Singur and Nandi­ gram episodes, there was virtually no field based intensive anthro­ pological account of the short- and long-term impacts of land acquisition in any location of the state. However, this radical change in the displacement scenario of West Bengal created new grounds for my earlier decade long intensive research on land grab by the leftist government in the state. I came into the centre stage of the academic and policymaking domain of land acquisition. Two events marked this sudden transition of my encounter with land grab. The first was the publication of my book Land, Law and the Left: The Saga of Disempowerment of the Peasantry in the Era of Globalisation by an Indian publisher in 2007 and the Foreword of the book was written by Michael Cernea from World Bank. In his Foreword Cernea wrote: The book on involuntary population displacement written by Dr. Abhijit Guha covers only one out of India’s many hundreds of administrative districts: Medinipur in the West Bengal state. This is however a microcosm of the vast ocean of India’s ubiquitous forced displacement processes. I would, therefore, like to use this Foreword as the opportunity to put Medinipur’s displacements, and the book about them, within the broader national context of India’s displacements, and within the international context of development-caused displacement in the developing world. I am doing so because, indeed, the analysis and findings reported in this book about land acquisition much surpass in significance the borders of the Medinipur district (Cernea 2007).

On the flip side of the coin my own university authority, after some delay, finally sanctioned a small grant provided by the Uni­ versity Grants Commission towards the publication of my book based on my PhD thesis. One of the reviewers chosen by the uni­ versity authority was Professor Atis Dasgupta, who was a socio­ logist at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Dasgupta was also a well-known leftist intellectual on the then LFG’s side. His comments on my book manuscript made a nice contrast to the Foreword of Michael Cernea. In the concluding paragraph of his review Dasgupta commented:

How I Became Interested in Land Grab

51

One may not totally agree with the data base of Dr Guha, which is limited to one block, and which may not justify broad generalizations envisaged for West Bengal as a whole. Nonetheless, the thesis has been prepared in a thoroughgoing manner which has brought into focus several questions on development induced displacement. Though such questions are controversial in nature, the thesis may be recommended for publication. Let it pave the way for more transparent debates (Dasgupta 2007).

Interestingly, my book forwarded by Cernea was just a slightly revised version of my thesis on which Dasgupta commented! The second event of the transition was more spectacular. During 2008, the then central government of India started a pre-legislative consultation on the amendment of the century old colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The government invited the citizens of India to send their opinion/suggestions on the reform of the colo­ nial land acquisition law through the media. I responded with my suggestions along with my research articles in EPW and to my utter surprise, I was invited as an expert to meet the members of the Parliamentary Standing Committee at New Delhi. I went to New Delhi and interacted with the Members of the Parliament at the Standing Committee, and gave my suggestions both orally and in writing. This tour enabled me to gain one of my most precious experiences on land acquisition in India and fuelled my interest to study land grab with more intensity. In fact, the 2006-7 incidents of Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal in which land acquisition led to large scale policy failure of the LFG made my research undertaken during the mid-1990s more significant. I continued to publish articles in important national and international journals and presented my findings and analysis in a number of seminars and conferences in India and abroad. Meanwhile, the left government in West Bengal lost power through elections and the new land acquisition law had been enacted in India in 2013. My interest and research commitment on land grab continued with renewed vigour as I went along with my ethno­ graphies on land grab in different sites. Under these broader policy and academic orientations, I use the term ‘land grab’ in this book to refer to the expropriation of land by the domestic government with the help of the eminent domain

52

Encountering Land Grab

of the state for the profit making private companies for non-agri­ cultural uses in the West Bengal state of India. I now begin my ethnography on land grab.

NOTES 1. Vidyasagar University is one of the small rural universities of West Bengal state of India which was established in the early 1980s with the mission of conducting interdisciplinary research which would cater to the needs of the underprivileged people of the rural areas, particularly of the district of erstwhile Medinipur where it was located. I taught at this university during 1985-2016. 2. Medinipur or Midnapore was one of the districts of West Bengal which was bifurcated into two districts, viz., Purba (East) and Paschim (West) in 2002 by the government of West Bengal for better governance and other admin­ istrative convenience. 3. Kora is a small tribal community in West Bengal who are found to be engaged in agricultural occupations in the rural areas of the state (Mitra 1951). 4. Trilochan Rana has passed away few years ago and he was the man who first enlightened me about the problems of land acquisition at the ground level. He always insisted me to write on their movement and read my writings in the newspapers with great interest. He was a science graduate from Medinipur college. Rana always wanted that I use his name in my writings and was very happy to see my book Land, Law and the Left, which I presented him in 2007 before his death. 5. In this book I have used the terms ‘peasant’ and ‘farmer’ synonymously. In my study area some of the land losers who were subsistence farmers before acquisition were buying their staple food (paddy) from the market but at the same time they were also selling vegetables grown in their unacquired homestead lands just to survive under the crisis created by the land grab. 6. Naxalite movement was a peasant uprising against the oppression of big landlords which arose in West Bengal in the late 1960s. The Naxalites believed in the ideology of Mao-tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party. 7. One of the leading academicians of the Left Front Government in West Bengal, Late Professor Biplab Dasgupta who was the former Vice-Chairman of the Comprehensive Area Development Programme of the Government of West Bengal, in an exchange with me commented: ‘Problems arising out

How I Became Interested in Land Grab

53

of the displacement of the tribal population for industrial activities are still quite minor and unimportant, taking the state as a whole, and comparing West Bengal with other states, and they affect both tribals and non-tribal equally’ (Dasgupta 2000). The West Bengal Human Development Report which was published in 2004 by the Development and Planning Department of the Government of West Bengal does not contain any chapter or even a section on development caused displacement in West Bengal. Only in the chapter I on ‘Environmental Issues’ it has been mentioned: There has been an appreciable decline in barren and uncultivable land by 41 per cent, which can be explained mainly by the increase of 20 per cent in the area under non-agricultural uses, essentially a transfer of land in favour of urbanisation, industrialisation, mining, infrastructural growth (WBHDR 2004). 8. Even today in India, there is no governmental or non-governmental source of data on the nature, extent and degree of food shortage and its consequent effects on the biology on the different population groups caused by land acquisition for any period. The government and the anthropologists have not also collected and published any data on how do people in different places have been adapting biologically and culturally under the stress caused by the acquisition of their land which forms one of the vital life support systems of the majority of the tribal populations in the country. The largest and the only governmental organization, the Anthropological Survey of India collected huge amount of data on the tribes and castes of India in the fashion of the anthropologists of the British Empire. Not a single piece of information was collected on any tribe or caste of India as regards the bio-cultural impacts of land acquisition which took place all around the country regarding the endangerment of food security and its after effects by the application of the land acquisition law (Guha 2017c: 23-5).

CHAPTER 3

Methods, Materials and

Justifications

METHODOLOGICAL DIVIDES: ARE

THEY REALLY GREAT?

In this chapter, I will narrate my methodological journey of study­ ing governmental land grab from an ethnographic perspective. As indicated at the end of the introduction, my ethnography did not only involve me with the collection of qualitative data but it also included quantification, and I made a sincere attempt to combine the narratives with numbers. Combining quantitative with the qualitative data under a broader framework of policy evaluation constituted the crux of my methodology, and I used ethnography as a tool to achieve this end. Let me begin the story on methods and materials. In any standard textbook on methodology in the social sciences ‘quantification’ is defined as an activity that involved ‘measurement’ and ‘counting’, while ‘qualitative’ is characterized as something which was not a product of measurement and counting but one of de­ scription and subjective evaluation (Johnson 1978). In the class­ room of anthropology or sociology, the teacher in methodology courses places the contrast between quantitative and qualitative approaches with the help of some examples from familiar domains like agricultural techniques, kinship and rituals. Through these courses, the students become aware that the degree of kinship rela­ tion revealed through the genealogical method is qualitative informa­ tion, while the number of times a particular person gets help from his/her affinal kins living in a neighbouring village in carrying out agricultural activities is quantitative data. The culture of methodo­

Methods, Materials and Justifications

55

logy in the social sciences has created amongst us an idea that clear-cut division between quantitative and qualitative data did exist and they should not be mixed up for the sake of specialization. There is another dimension to this problem. This is related with the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ studies. The macro-micro dichotomy has created another level of methodological divide within the social sciences (Appadurai 1989: 250-82). Very broadly, macro and micro studies are not only distinguished by the scale, on which they operate, but also by the type of data that are collected and the methods employed for collection of data. Accordingly, the census and the National Sample Surveys Organization represented macrostudies, while village studies by the social anthropologists in India and sociological researches of urban slums were regarded as micro studies. In the former type, large volumes of quantitative data were collected through surveys with structured questionnaire schedules and were used mainly by the economists and planners to arrive at certain large-scale generalizations about the socio-economic con­ ditions of countries and regions. But in the micro-level studies, conducted by the social anthropologists and sociologists, the whole range of qualitative data on the socio-economic life of a small group of people (usually selected in a non-random manner) were col­ lected by employing protracted participatory type of fieldwork methods. Ironically, these methodological paradigms have become polar opposites in the social sciences and the followers of one group often viewed the other as ‘irrelevant’ to their own project even when both were looking at the same set of problems. For example, the major users (the economists) of National Sample Survey Organization data in India looked at anthropological studies as being preoccupied with trivial matters of social life having little or no value either for generalizations (since they have small and unrepresentative samples) or for development planning. The fol­ lowers of micro-studies on the other hand, considered large scale quantitative survey data as ‘distributional’ rather than ‘relational’ and hence, the generalizations derived from the latter ignored differences among various human groups and produced aggregate figures, but hardly made any attempt to understand social pro­ cesses hidden within such aggregates. Till today, there is very

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Encountering Land Grab

little systematic attempt in the social sciences to unite the micro and macro studies, qualitative and quantitative data as well as parti­ cipatory and survey types of research. One of the important reasons behind the lack of effort towards unification may lie in the separation of the different branches of the social sciences within our university curricula. With this general background, I would now come to the issue of development research and its relation with the micro versus macro levels of study in the social sciences. In general, develop­ ment studies have a dual character. Let us try to understand the matter with the help of some examples. Suppose a development economist in India wants to evaluate the results of land distribu­ tion among the landless peasants through land reforms programme by the government in a region. The economist would definitely collect official data from the Land and Land Records Department of the state government. But at the same time, he or she has to conduct some micro-level studies in order to understand the ac­ tual impact of this development effort on the landless peasants on the ground level. Furthermore, in order to involve the beneficiaries of the development programme (in this case, land reforms) within the research process the economist cannot remain confined only within the jungle of official statistics. Now, consider the case of a development anthropologist doing his/her research on the same problem, viz., evaluation of land reforms programme in a state in India. The anthropologist may have a different starting point. He or she may select a village, where land distribution has taken place and conduct a participatory type of research on the socio-economic impact of the said development programme. But in order to make this development research policy oriented, the anthropologist would have to move up from the village level and consult the government archives for understanding wider macro-level implications of the study. In order to carry out dialogues with the policy makers in a meaningful way, the anthropologist cannot remain satisfied with the rich qualitative data collected at the micro-level, but also make use of legal, administrative and policy level information collected from government archives. Examples can be multiplied, but the point is, since development research involves at least two major stake­

Methods, Materials and Justifications

57

holders—the policy makers and the people, the researcher would have to make sincere efforts to reach both of them along the micromacro continuum. To put it rather bluntly, the academic divide produced by the curricula between qualitative and quantitative research is bound to collapse in a policy-oriented development research and that is exactly what happened in my case. DEVELOPMENT INDUCED DISPLACEMENT IN

WEST BENGAL: IS IT A MATTER OF

NUMBERS ONLY?

The literature on displacement caused by development revealed that there was a major emphasis on the quantitative aspects of the problem. Most of the researchers including sociologists and anthro­ pologists tried to calculate the magnitude of displacement in terms of the number of people, who have lost their traditional occupa­ tion, the amount of agricultural land acquired for a development project, or the number of families who have lost their homes for the launching of some development project by the government (Fernandes et al. 1989). Researchers on displacement, however, already identified several dimensions of impoverishment where both quantitative and qualitative data were combined to develop a risk model of rehabilitation (Cernea 1999). The quantitative thrust in displacement research has political, as well as the policy implica­ tions. For example, raising the issue of displacement owing to de­ velopment projects by me in the context of West Bengal met with an inevitable response both from the policy makers as well as politicians of the then ruling state government. The response was like this: ‘The magnitude of development induced displacement in West Bengal is not very great, at least not as much as it is in other Indian States’ (Guha 2000: 85-92). Any further discussion on the attitude and policy formulation about displacement and reha­ bilitation was thus, closed by this type of response which was backed by a quantitative and comparative agenda. The implications of the response could be ordered in the following manner. If West Bengal did not have an appreciable amount of development induced dis­ placement then there was no point in raising this issue, and even if

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Encountering Land Grab

West Bengal had displacement, then too it was lesser than other Indian states. So the government did not have to be worried about the formulation of a comprehensive policy on displacement. There­ fore, for the policy makers and politicians in West Bengal, dis­ placement was a matter of numbers both in absolute and relative senses of the term. THE MICRO PICTURE OF DEVELOPMENT INDUCED

DISPLACEMENT: EVIDENCE FROM THE FIELD

Under this background, in the year 1995, I selected a particular area situated 7-8 km in the south from the Vidyasagar University campus for studying the socio-economic and political consequences of land acquisition, through which displacement had taken place in a recent period in the erstwhile Medinipur district (now Paschim Medinipur) of West Bengal. The study began through repeated visits to villages where the peasants, who had been affected by land acquisition were, then, organizing a movement against the district administration for getting higher rates of compensation and jobs in the industries for which their fertile agricultural land was ac­ quired. Group discussions and reading the letters and memoranda submitted by the peasants were the first primary sources of data for me in this study. Certain interesting developments took place during this phase of anthropological fieldwork. First, the displaced peasants and their leaders started to request me to write popular articles and publish news items in the local as well as Kolkata­ based newspapers to draw the notice of the general public and the administration about their worsening socio-economic condition. I also started to publish articles and became instrumental in the publication of news items in the local and Kolkata based newspa­ pers, which served two purposes. On the one hand, I could gain the confidence of the affected people and their local leaders and on the other, the procedure made the local people conscious about the importance of collecting detailed household level socio-economic and political information on the displacement scenario of the af­ fected villages. Second, the quick and frequent publication of news items and articles in the local dailies and their circulation among

Methods, Materials and Justifications

59

the affected people was also a source of encouragement to the local leaders and these acted as a bridge between me and the villagers affected by land acquisition. This can be called a kind a research with participatory activism, that was followed by collection of house­ hold level quantitative data. This constituted the second phase of my fieldwork which yielded a lot of rich information (both quanti­ tative and qualitative) on the economic impact of land acquisition as well as the attitude and views of the affected people towards the acquisition of land for industries. In short, if I consider my at­ tempt to understand the process of displacement through land acquisition at the micro-level as an unbroken string of research activity then it would be very difficult to separate numbers from narratives. My first interaction with the peasant leaders was not only a rapport establishment activity, but it also yielded valuable data on the attitude of the affected peasants towards the ruling government, various strategies adopted by the peasant leaders and also on the number of land losers in the villages. In the second phase, which can be called the household survey phase, quantita­ tive data in the form of numbers were collected by me assisted by my students, but here also narratives of informants regarding their crises arising out of displacement played a complementary role. The latter formed the human dimension of the survey data with its qualitative richness. FROM FIELD TO ARCHIVE: MOVING TOWARDS

THE MACRO-LEVEL

Social anthropologists following the British structural-functional tradition have narrowed down their field locations to specific locales (villages or urban areas) manageable for one or two participant observers and developed the tradition of collecting detailed in­ formation (mainly qualitative) on almost every aspect of social life. This Malinowskian embeddedness of the individual anthropologist within his/her locality had helped to generate a bounded definition of ‘field’, wherein only participant observation could take place. The wider politico-economic context within which the anthro­ pologist’s village was located not usually considered as the real

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Encountering Land Grab

ground of a typical anthropologist. This kind of methodology has had an important consequence as regards inquiries into macrolevel policy decisions and their implementation by an admin­ istrative bureaucracy backed by a politico-legal structure. ‘The anthropologist is not supposed to look beyond the field’, so goes the disciplinary folklore. Because, going outside the so-called field to search for data in government offices, record rooms and legislative assembly proceedings was not regarded as the job of the anthro­ pologist. It was to be done by the political scientists or contem­ porary historians. But what happens, when the anthropologist moves out from the typical village site and tries to reach the different levels of policy formulation and implementation? In my study, this is what exactly I have done and as a result of this I could com­ bine the numbers with narratives within the overall framework of policy formulation of the LFG in West Bengal. In the following sections, I describe in brief the different stages of my research through which this number-narrative, quantity-quality and micro-macro combination have been done for a critical evaluation of the land acquisition policy of the government of West Bengal. I will now narrate my methodological journey by dividing it into three main stages. STAGE I: THE PEASANT MOVEMENT AROUND LAND

ACQUISITION IN KHARAGPUR: COMBINING THE

QUALITATIVE WITH THE QUANTITATIVE

The protests launched by the landowning peasants of my field area against land acquisition in the Kharagpur region took many forms, even though these did not last long maintaining the same intensity. The movement reached its peak from the latter part of 1995 up to April 1996, during which the farmers even went to the extent of violent means. My fieldwork in the villages for this study also began during this period. My entry in the field during this time of turmoil was quite significant, in terms of the type of data collected, as well as the nature of my participation as an ethno­ grapher. The active participants of the movement provided me with the list of affected peasant households in different villages

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61

and discussed the rationale behind their demand, and I could also directly observe their nature of protest in the field. All these gave me ample opportunity to collect factual materials on the (i) chro­ nology of the movement; (ii) caste/tribe affiliation of the participants of the peasant agitation, (iii) peasant perception of the administra­ tion, (iv) land acquisition policy of the government and (v) the political dynamics of the movement. Action oriented and participa­ tory type of field research helped me to build up a new kind of relationship with the leaders of the movement wherein the peasants were also looking into my research outputs as they were being published in the local and national level newspapers in the form of news items, popular articles and letters. I have already touched on this aspect of my research in the previous section. STAGE II: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE ARCHIVES: LAND

ACQUISITION AS REVEALED BY THE DOCUMENTS

AND THE EXECUTERS OF POLICY

The household surveys and case studies of a good number of fami­ lies (194), who have lost all or most of their agricultural land owing to the establishment of industries revealed the disempowerment of the peasantry by the LFG in West Bengal. Interestingly, this democratically elected government championed the cause of the poorest section of the peasantry through a pro-people land reform policy. Both land reforms (which involved giving land to the land­ less) and land acquisition (which dispossessed the peasants), have to be executed by the district-level Land and Land Reforms De­ partment. This department and its land acquisition section have to keep records of all documents related to land acquisition. The typical anthropological definition of ‘field’ did not include this kind of arena within it. The village studies in India rarely taken into account the data of the Land and Land Records Department in the District Collectorate in order to understand the relationship between administration and the people at the grass-roots. When I had taken up the study of the displacement of the peasants in Kharagpur villages, I found that the phenomena of displacement could not be viewed in isolation from the administrative and bureau­

62

Encountering Land Grab

cratic processes of land acquisition. In my study area the displace­ ment of peasants (not from their homes but from their agricul­ tural land) took place through the acquisition of land, which was basically a legal and administrative process that formed the inter­ face between the people and the government. The documents of the Land Acquisition Department and the officers who executed the acquisition provided me a rich source of data on the govern­ ment-people interface.1 From the Land Acquisition Department, I have collected data from five different sources, viz., (1) gazette notifications, (2) letters and departmental notes, (3) departmental reports, (4) written pro­ tests and objections of the land losers in the form of letters and memoranda, and (5) verbal opinions and attitudes of the officials of the land acquisition department on the various problems and hurdles of land acquisition. These five kinds of data sources again yielded a variety of qualitative and quantitative information, which were combined in my ethnography and suffice it to say, that this kind of combination helped me to generate certain specific policy recommendations on displacement by land acquisition. Let me now describe each of the five data sources in some detail. 1. Gazette Notification: This was the most important official and legal apparatus of land acquisition by which the government in­ formed a private landowner that his/her land would be acquired for some ‘public purpose’. The published notification contained three types of quantitative data, viz. (i) location of the piece of land, (ii) amount of land in acres, and (iii) the date of notification. There was also a piece of qualitative information in the notifica­ tion, viz., the purpose for which the land was being acquired. Both the qualitative and quantitative information in the gazette notifi­ cations over a period of time enabled me to understand the trends of land acquisition in terms of the type of development projects (e.g., dams, industries, urban settlements, roads, power stations, etc.), as well as the rate at which the government desired them to come up. In this way, data from gazette notifications could be used as development policy indicator of a government in India. For example, in my study on the former Medinipur district, I have observed that over a period of seven years since the adoption of the

Methods, Materials and Justifications

63

economic liberalization policy by the Government of India, land acquired for industrial projects showed a quantum jump since 1995 (49.66 per cent). Analysis of gazette notification in Medinipur also showed certain other interesting points in terms of social de­ velopment. For example, acquisition of land for rehabilitation of PAP constituted only 2.41 per cent of the total land acquired in the erstwhile Medinipur district during 1991-7 (Guha 2001). 2. Letters and Departmental Notes: The execution of the Land Acquisition Act is an administrative process that involves keeping of records, making clarifications, giving instructions, and asking for necessary actions. All these took place through written com­ munications within the different sections of the bureaucracy and outside agencies (e.g. private companies in case of acquisition for industries). The files in the Land Acquisition Department con­ tained a wealth of materials, from which one could study the dayto-day activities of the administration regarding specific cases of land acquisition. From the letters and note sheets, I could also arrange the various events of land acquisition chronologically over a period of time. From these materials in case of land acquisition for a private company in Kharagpur, I have been able to describe in detail the chronology of events which ultimately led to the failure on the part of the state government to utilize a huge piece of agri­ cultural land acquired for an industry. The letters and notes pro­ vided the archival source for the study of the, then, policy of indus­ trialization of the LFG in West Bengal. 3. Departmental Reports: The unpublished reports of the Land Acquisition Department of Medinipur district provided me many important quantitative as well as qualitative data on the various problems of land acquisition in the district. Interestingly, these reports also revealed the attitude of the bureaucracy towards land acquisition and also the severe financial and legal constraints for the completion of the acquisition cases, which, in turn, delayed the payment of compensation to the PAP. In short, the depart­ mental reports provided the ‘insider’s account’ of the executors of the government’s decision to establish industries on agricultural land.

64

Encountering Land Grab

4. Written Protests and Objections of the Land Losers: If the depart­ mental reports provided the ‘insider’s view’ of the bureaucracy, the various protest letters and objections filed by the land losers revealed the reactions and demands of the people on the ground. I have however, collected qualitative materials on the nature and dynamics of peasant protest in Kharagpur through my participa­ tory fieldwork in the earlier phase of the research. The most inter­ esting aspect about written objections lay in the way they have been ruled out by the administration. In fact, the objections by the people and the way they have been dealt with by the bureau­ cracy can be viewed as a kind of dialogue between the people and the government. For example, I learnt from a memorandum signed by 342 peasants that the acquisition of their land for a company would throw them out of their only source of livelihood, that is agriculture. A short departmental report dealt with this objection, which, however, before ruling it out recognized that acquisition would seriously affect a large number of farmers. But this is the only sentence in the report which upheld the interests of the peasants. The rest of the report was devoted to justify the acquisition by citing the locational advantage and low fertility of the land which was acquired. 5. Opinions and Attitudes of the Officials of the Department: The record of the district land acquisition department was not only an archive, but also a living arena where officials, clerks, surveyors and company representatives interacted with me on the different di­ mensions of land acquisition. This enabled me to collect interest­ ing data on the views and attitudes of the persons who executed acquisition. For example, regarding the power and functioning of screening committees at the district level on the approval of project proposals from private companies there were certain revelations. Experienced land acquisition officials enlightened me by saying that, when the Kolkata level of administration agreed, the district had to abide by it although theoretically, the district level screening committee (constituted by elected people’s, representatives) could reject any proposal for land acquisition. During my research in the

Methods, Materials and Justifications

65

collectorate, the land acquisition officials succinctly pointed out that the rules for giving compensation to sharecroppers for acqui­ sition was unjustified and should have been improved. This point motivated me to examine more closely the details of compensation payment of sharecroppers, and that helped me to think in terms of policy recommendations rather than the construction of a simple descriptive account of the various bureaucratic aspects of compen­ sation payment. My interactions with the officials of the Land Acquisition Department yielded rich qualitative data which led to in-depth probing at the level of policy. STAGE III: HOW THE POLICY MAKERS MADE

POLICIES: NARRATIVES FROM THE STATE

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY

From the District Collectorate, I moved up towards the nerve centre of policy making in West Bengal, which was the state legislative assembly. I read the published records of assembly proceedings on the specific subject of land acquisition since independence in West Bengal. The assembly proceedings contained the lively narratives in the form of debates and questions on land acquisition, displace­ ment and rehabilitation by ministers and elected members be­ longing to various political parties. These narratives also contained qualitative and quantitative information on displacement in various districts of West Bengal since independence, i.e. 1947, up to mid­ 1990s. The assembly proceedings also gave me an idea about the common themes that dominated the attitudes and actions of the policy makers towards land acquisition by the government for de­ velopment projects. The radical and class oriented approach of the elected members belonging to the left parties towards land acqui­ sition, whenever they were in the opposition was one of the main themes that was revealed from this narrative. The questions and replies on various aspects of land acquisition in West Bengal assembly followed a pattern that did not change much over the years. The questions revolved round the compensa­ tion and rehabilitation. The elected members seemed to be more concerned with the deprivation of the landless peasants owing to

66

Encountering Land Grab

the non-payment of compensation. With only one notable exception, there was no occasion when the policy makers raised questions on the justification of acquiring agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. There was also a virtual absence of discussion in the state assembly on the adverse effects of land acquisition on land reforms. In a state, which claimed to have made remarkable progress in the distribution of land to the landless, it was really surprising not to find any member of any political party saying something on the subject (Guha 2001). The assembly proceedings helped me to identify the gaps and shortcomings of the policy makers in adopt­ ing a pro-peasant land acquisition policy in the context of liberali­ zation. It also helped me to develop a wider policy perspective on land acquisition, displacement and rehabilitation, in the state of West Bengal. SUMMING UP

The anthropological concept of holism is basically methodological. Because, whatever may be the philosophical underpinnings of holism, anthropologists are regarded as experts at the level of prac­ tice who have to work with the concept. The different varieties of holism (bio-cultural, environmental and socio-cultural) is another methodological problematic. The question of combining quanti­ tative and qualitative methods can also be viewed as a kind of methodological holism, which needs good practice. In this ethnographic endeavour, I have made an attempt to tran­ scend the arbitrary limits of anthropological holism developed through the small-scale qualitative studies of Indian villages. The point of entry too was non-conventional when compared with the typical social anthropological studies of tribal or caste villages in India, which usually dealt with stratification, ethnic identity, en­ vironmental adaptation, religion, local-level politics and agrarian change. I started from a broader policy question, which was directly related to the development policy of a democratically elected popu­ lar government and its contradictions. The peasant movement against large-scale land acquisition under state patronage for in­ dustries in Kharagpur provided me with a unique arena for studying

Methods, Materials and Justifications

67

the contradictions of the land policy of the LFG in West Bengal. This was the first level of my ethnographic data source. The policyoriented approach of this study led me to search for data sources beyond the village. The district collectorate provided me a number of data sources for studying land acquisition as a policy in practice. This was the second level. The third level of data source was as­ sembly proceedings which provided the debates and questions in verbatim on development, displacement and rehabilitation among the policy makers since independence down to mid-1990s. At all these levels, qualitative and quantitative data had been collected, arranged, classified, tabulated and combined to understand the changes in the development policy of the LFG in West Bengal during the early 1990s. The policy direction of this ethnographic research kept me on the search for data sources in the field as well as archives, which not only crossed the boundaries of the village but also helped to combine quantitative and qualitative data under the wider policy framework around development (Guha 2017d: 321-38).

NOTES 1. In a recent book The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, there are interesting case studies and discussion on how the state and the government come to the life of the Indians. There is, however, no case study on land acquisition in this volume (Fuller and Bénéi 2000: 1-30).

CHAPTER 4

In the Villages

THE WIDER CONTEXT OF LAND ACQUISITION

IN WEST BENGAL

West Bengal is an agriculture-dependent state, which occupies only 2.7 per cent of the India’s land area, though it supports over 7.8 per cent of the Indian population, and is the most densely populated state in India. West Bengal had been ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)]-led LFG for three decades, making it the world’s longest-running democratically-elected communist government. The LFG in West Bengal claimed its uniqueness among the Indian states not only in staying at power for 34 years through parliamentary democracy, but also for implementing a pro-poor land reforms programme with fair amount of success (Mukarji and Bandopadhyay 1993). The key to this success lay in involving the poor peasants of the vast rural areas in the execution of the govern­ mental land reform policies related to their empowerment (Leiten 1990 and 1996). The district planning committee (DPC) (the first of its kind in West Bengal) of erstwhile Medinipur visualized the whole process of development by putting the poor peasants at the centre of the entire planning process. The DPC published a small monograph entitled Village based District Planning Process: An Outline of Metho­ dology in September 1985 that described and analysed how relevant socio-economic information on every village could be collected in detail by the panchayat workers for using them in this microplanning process. Among a number of pro-poor planning elements, the document gave much importance to the (i) identification of the nature and amount of agricultural land as well as their improvement through ecologically sustainable use and (ii) exploration of the possi­

In the Villages

69

bilities of developing industries in terms of local demand, raw

material and/or skill (DPC 1985: 14-15). In the late 1980s, and particularly in the wake of liberalization in 1991, the focus of the development policy of the LFG had shifted radically. The government, which was fully committed to land reforms started to invite capital intensive and technologically sophisticated private industrial entrepreneurs, including multi­ national corporations in the state. Quite interestingly, the success in land reform in the state was cited in a report by the government as one of the justifications for huge industrial investment (West Bengal: Industry News Update 2000: 44). But contrary to what has been dubbed as a ‘success’ in order to justify industrialization, an earlier report of the government devoted to the evaluation of the panchayats in West Bengal observed that land reforms was still an incomplete programme (Mukherji and Bandopadhyay 1993: 41). Another document named WBHDR published in 2004 noted with concern the landlessness among rural households. On pages 39-42, under the second chapter of the report Land Reforms, a ‘disturbing feature’ was noted, which referred to the increase in landlessness among the rural households in the state despite land distribution and registration of bargadars (share-croppers without ownership right on the land) [WBHDR 2004: 40]. In spite of these findings, the government of West Bengal pushed its agenda of industrialization in the era of globalization ignoring its immediate and long-term effects on land reform and the farmers. This forms the wider policy context in which I would look into the conse­ quences of the establishment of heavy industries in an agricultural site in Paschim (West) Medinipur district through my ethno­ graphy. THE MICRO-LEVEL STUDY

SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF LAND ACQUISITION FOR TATA METALIKS Before describing the socio-economic consequences of land acqui­ sition for a private industry named Tata Metaliks in the vicinity of the villages, wherein I conducted my study, a brief outline of the

70

Encountering Land Grab

area from where the sample households have been selected are provided below along with the methodology adopted for this particular fieldwork. THE AREA

In this background, anthropological field investigations were conducted by me with my research students during 1995-7, and 2006-8 in some of the villages within the Kharagpur subdivision of Paschim Medinipur district. The area lay in western Medinipur and was characterized by undulating lateritic soils and the rural people subsisted mainly on a combination of mono-crop agriculture and collection of forest products. The specific area of our study was situated on the bank of the river Kansai, which was the largest river of the district. Cultivation of paddy (staple of the district) in the villages under study depended primarily upon rainfall and no adequate irrigation facilities were found during the period of land acquisition by the government. The villagers residing on the south­ eastern bank of the river cultivated a variety of vegetables on the land adjoining their homesteads owing to a very good supply of ground­ water from traditional dug wells. Just west of the south-eastern railway track, the groundwater level was not congenial for cultivation of vegetables. The main agricultural activity on this side of the railway track centred round rain fed paddy cultivation, which took about four to six months of the year. Land for four private industries had been acquired by the government on this side during 1991-6. Among these four, three had already started production and these were: (i) Tata Metaliks [TML] (it manufactured pig-iron), (ii) the coke oven unit of the Wellman Company (which supplied coke coal to the Tata Metaliks) and (iii) Bansal Cement factory. The fourth was a proposed pig-iron plant owned by the Century Textiles group, for which fertile agricultural land was acquired in 1996 but no industry was built up on this land till 2004 since the Company finally withdrew its project. Interestingly, the West Bengal govern­ ment had acquired agricultural land for all these industries despite the fact that a huge uncultivable undulating lateritic terrain (‘waste­ land’ in the official jargon) lay just by the side of these agricultural lands on both sides of the railway track that extended almost up to

In the Villages

71

the highlands on the bank of the river. During my field survey, no member of the land loser families got permanent job in those industries although the local left political leaders created an impres­ sion that at least one member of those families would be given employment. SELECTION OF HOUSEHOLDS

In the selection of the households for this study, I followed a com­ bination of purposive and opportunity sampling. At the outset, my main aim was to locate the households whose farmlands had been acquired for the establishment of the Tata Metaliks. Instead of searching through the records of landownership kept in the Land and Land Records department of the district, my investiga­ tion depended directly upon fieldwork by following the traditional anthropological method of intensive interviews of the project af­ fected people. Apart from knowing the current status of landownership (which were not promptly made up to date in the Land Records Office), micro-ecological variations and local level political move­ ment centring round land acquisition, it was possible to know from the active members of the movement, the names of the villages whose inhabitants had been affected by the acquisition of agricul­ tural lands for the industries. Later, at the time of conducting the household survey, snowball sampling was taken recourse to, wherein the affected households gave the names of family members whose land had also been acquired. Household survey had to be com­ pleted within a period of three months owing to time constraints and as a result all the affected households could not be covered. A rough estimate about the total number of households affected by the acquisition of land was made available by the leaders of the farmers’ movement, who took the help of the Congress party. They estimated that about 200 families had been affected by the ac­ quisition. Within the stipulated time, a total of 144 households (72 per cent of the estimated total) belonging to different landhold­ ing categories, caste and community affiliation as well as families residing on both sides of the south-eastern railway track had been covered in the survey. In the following section, I describe the find­ ings of the consequences of land expropriation.

72

Encountering Land Grab LANDLESSNESS

The foremost consequence conforms to the observation of Michael Cernea, which he mentioned in his series of publications on the ‘eight major risks’ involved in involuntary displacement caused by development projects all over the world (Cernea 1991, 1995, 1997). Industrialization in the liberalization decade in Medinipur has led to dispossession of the small and marginal farmers from their principal means of production. Through fieldwork in the area, I found that the villages situated on the eastern side of the railway track had been affected more in terms of the number of families, who had lost their farmlands. The people of these villages were excellent farmers, who kept them­ selves engaged throughout the year in agriculture. Besides paddy, they also grew almost all kinds of vegetables like green chilli, lady’s finger, mustard, water gourd, pumpkin, bitter gourd, brinjal, po­ tato, cabbage, cauliflower and radish. These vegetables were grown in lands adjoining their home­ steads not acquired by the government. The villagers sold these vegetables mainly in the local markets, which fetched cash. On the other hand, the families who lived in the villages on the western side of the railway track, belonged to the Kora tribe. Many of the Kora women and men worked as temporary unskilled labourers in the coke oven industry. The majority of the affected households in the study area belonged to a middle ranking Hindu caste group named Sadgope,1 who happened to be one of the enterprising ag­ riculturist castes of south-west Bengal, while the Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste families (e.g. Lodha2 and Kora) comprised almost a quarter of the total number of affected households. Despite the presence of various constitutional safeguards and job reservation for the scheduled communities, there was no special provision for rehabilitation of these groups affected by the state sponsored dis­ placement in India. In this region too, these communities had become further marginalized, due to the establishment of industries on their farmland and no step had been taken either by the state or the central government to rehabilitate these groups under constitu­

In the Villages

73

tional safeguards. In the following two tables (4.1 and 4.2), I have made an attempt to present the pattern of landlessness caused by the acquisition of land among the affected households in the study area. TABLE 4.1: PRE-ACQUISITION AGRICULTURAL LANDHOLDING

PATTERN OF SAMPLE HOUSEHOLDS AFFECTED BY LAND

ACQUISITION FOR TATA METALIKS LIMITED (TML) #/-0!.9

Size category of holdings (in acres)

Number of households

Mean household size

Landless < 0.5 0.5-1.5 1.5-2.5 2.5-3.5 3.5-4.5 4.5-5.5 5.5-6.5 6.5-7.5

Nil 19 (13.194) 58 (40.277) 32 (22.222) 13 (9.027) 8 (5.555) 6 (4.166) Nil 8 (5.555)

– 4.73 6.43 8.84 8.60 8.86 12.6 – 13.3

144 (99.996)

5.76

Total

Note: Figures in parentheses represent percentage. Source: Author’s own fieldwork.

TABLE 4.2: POST-ACQUISITION AGRICULTURAL LANDHOLDING

PATTERN OF SAMPLE HOUSEHOLDS AFFECTED BY LAND

ACQUISITION FOR TML COMPANY

Size category of holdings (in acres)

Number of households

Mean household size

Landless < 0.5 0.5-1.5 1.5-2.5 2.5-3.5 3.5-4.5 4.5-5.5 5.5-6.5 6.5-7.5

22 (15.277) 35 (24.305) 51 (35.416) 14 (9.722) 13 (9.027) 5 (3.472) 3 (2.083) 1 (0.694) Nil

6.36 5.48 8.25 7.57 12.07 9.20 10.33 15.00 –

144 (99.996)

5.76

Total

Note: Figures in parentheses represent percentage. Source: Author’s own fieldwork.

74

Encountering Land Grab

In the pre-acquisition stage, there was no landless family within the sample households and 75 per cent of these families belonged to the size category of 0.5-4.5 acres. According to the, then, standards set by the government of West Bengal, these families were regarded as marginal and small farmers. The pattern of land holding among the same families after land acquisition showed that 15 per cent of the families had become landless and the number of households belonging to the lowest landholding category (