Since the mid-2000s, proliferating “land wars” have exposed a contradiction between the land requirements of neoliberal capitalism and the political weight of farmers in India’s democracy. Whether, how, and for whom this contradiction is resolved constitutes India’s “new” land question. But this chapter argues that Marx’s “primitive accumulation” or Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession” are inadequate to understand this conjuncture; and it advances the concept of “regimes of dispossession” as an alternative. It argues that from the early 1990s, India shifted from a regime that dispossessed land for state-led projects of material expansion to one that dispossesses land for private and decreasingly productive investments. This new regime, in which states have become mere land brokers for private capital, is arguably less “developmental” than its Nehruvian predecessor. The upshot is that India’s “land wars” are unlikely to dissipate any time soon; and the “land question” may be the largest contradiction for Indian capitalism for the foreseeable future.
PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION, GROWTH AND THE GENESIS OF SOCIAL CLASSES