The Micropolitics of Dispossession and Resistance: Case Study of a Proposed Dam in Central India

Abstract

This article presents a study of the micropolitics of dispossession for a proposed medium‐sized irrigation project in an Adivasi region of Central India. The article explores the complex micropolitics of dispossession and collective action in the project planning stage, long before the formal processes of land acquisition actually begin. It highlights the importance of training the researchers’ gaze on the functioning of the local state in the pre‐acquisition phase. It shows how the local state uses various powers of exclusion to fracture emerging cross‐class, multi‐caste alliances, while maintaining formal compliance with a range of social safeguard policies aimed at protecting vulnerable groups and fragile landscapes. The ‘everyday’ decisions of local state actors during the project planning stage produce site‐specific, differentiated and shifting matrices of risks and opportunities for the local people, who are already divided along class and caste lines. This, in turn, is likely to inform their political responses at the actual moment of enclosure. Thus the durability and success of anti‐dispossession collective action is likely to vary depending on the dynamic interactions of local state and non‐state actors, mediated by regional electoral politics and the overall safeguard policy regime governing land acquisition.

Rangeland Conservation, Pastoralist Displacement, and Long-term Implications of a Grazing Ban in the Indian Himalaya

“…Earlier research conducted in the field of conservation-induced displacement in India mostly focussed on the immediate implications of displacement, barring a few exceptions where researchers have maintained a long-term engagement with displacement geographies and their micropolitics (Kabra and Mahalwal 2019). Given the 15-year gap between the evictions and this research, our study seeks to further understand the long-term implications of unplanned evictions and highlights the socioecological complexities of pastoral evictions in Indian Himalaya.…”

Global Land Grabbing: A Critical Review of Case Studies across the World

“…Only two case studies involving industrialisation were found, both centring around China for the same reasons driving urbanisation: the first case focused on China as an investor in Mauritius to acquire land for promoting the special economic zone model abroad [66]; and the second one was a domestic case of a county in Jiangxi Province in the central south region of China being used to obtain land for industry park development [67]. Only one case study examined a land grabbing conflict caused by a dam development project in Madhya Pradesh, India [68], despite debates on mega-infrastructure heating up globally.…”

Examining Displacement, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Processes: The Case of Rengali Dam Displaced Communities in Odisha, India*An earlier version of this article, titled—‘Why Development Brought Vulnerability for Them? A Situational Analysis of Resettled Colonies of Displaced Communities’, was presented at the International Conference on ‘Conflict Resolution and Sustainable Development’ organised between 10 and 11 December 2016 at Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre For Development Studies, Bhubaneswar, Odisha

“…The continuing process of land acquisition for different infrastructure projects has witnessed enormous people’s resistance in different parts of India (See, Bosshard, 2011; Huber & Joshi 2017; Kabra & Mahalwal, 2018; Kipgen, 2017; Oskarsson, 2017). The resistance to large-scale dams are not merely an opposition to the promised benefits of the project; instead, it is standing against the social, economic and environmental cost it involves.…”