Anticipating Future Capital: Regional Caste Contestations, Speculation and Silent Dispossession in Andhra Pradesh

ABSTRACT

In 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated by the Indian government, leaving the truncated state without a capital city. A period of political uncertainty before bifurcation and the announcement of the new capital city created possibilities for land speculation and for the acceleration of the commodification of real estate in different parts of the state. Concentrating on Guntur-Vijayawada in the Coastal Andhra region and Donakonda town close to the Rayalaseema region, this article explores how speculative investments based on political calculations by members of regional elite castes translated into the emergence of competing regional investment zones as possible future choices of the capital city. Through an extended and largely ethnographic study, this article shows how caste politics and regional processes of land speculation led to land transfers without violent struggles between different groups. Rather, the cultural politics of regional differentiation and the economy of anticipation allowed a pragmatic convergence of interests to emerge, where acquisition of agricultural land was followed by silent dispossession.

KEYWORDS:

• Andhra Pradesh
• accumulation
• Amaravati
• anticipation
• dispossession
• speculation

Acknowledgments

This article partly draws on my PhD research conducted under the Provincial Globalisation Programme, funded by the Science for Global Development programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). It was supplemented by self-funded research trips to Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra between 2013 and 2018. I thank Patrik Oskarsson and Kenneth Bo Nielsen for their extremely useful comments on the initial drafts of this article. Thanks are also due Siddharth Sareen and Kevin Hewison for carefully reviewing a revised draft of the article. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose comments proved very insightful while revising the article for publication. Any oversight or shortcoming, however, is entirely mine.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names of interviewees are anonymised to maintain confidentiality.

2. See Elliott (2011) for more discussion on YSR’s politics of welfare and development combined. For details on how Andhra Pradesh has used market-oriented policies of development, where land related projects have become a vehicle for development, see Cross (2014).

3. Andhra Pradesh was formed in 1956 on a linguistic basis, with Hyderabad as its capital. The state consisted of three distinguishable agro-economic and socio-political regions based on their distinct histories, namely Coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana (Parthasarathy 2013). In part based on claims of distinctness and that its resources had been exploited by non-Telangana communities, the demand for a separate state of Telangana arose, first in the late 1960s and again in the 2000s.

4. Data gathered for this article stretches over seven years. In 2011, the author made her first visit to Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema respectively for short field trips. Thereafter, between 2011 and 2012, 15 months of intensive multi-sited ethnographic research was conducted, primarily anchored in the Krishna basin, but with four months of fieldwork split equally between Hyderabad, India and New York, New Jersey and California in the USA to grasp the different dimensions of diaspora resource flows. The primary research methods were qualitative, including participant and non-participant observations and interviews. However, these were paired with a short 100 household survey in Guntur in 2012. In 2013, another short fieldtrip was made to Rayalaseema, followed by six months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2016. This fieldwork relied largely on interviews combined with non-participant observation. While the Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra fieldwork was conducted for two different projects, land-based speculation was a common thread, especially around the question of imminent bifurcation of the state and the possibility of a new capital. The author followed the trails of money spent on buying and selling land, interviewing a host of people who were involved in land speculation, including real or potential buyers and sellers, brokers and a handful of bureaucrats and consultants working for the various governments. The last field visit was made in August 2018.

5. “Ryotwari” refers to a land revenue collection system instituted by the British, in which agricultural taxes were directly collected from individual cultivators, in contrast to the zamindari system where local landlords were responsible for revenue collection.

6. YSR’s son Jagan Mohan Reddy was keen to be chief minister after his father’s death, even as the Congress Party’s high command rejected his demand. He went on to launch his own party in 2011, but was jailed immediately afterwards in a case of political graft.

7. East and West Godavari districts (that together with Guntur and Krishna form the green belt in Coastal Andhra) are a Kapu stronghold.

8. OBC refers to “middle” castes, below Reddys and Kammas in the regional caste hierarchy, but above Dalits. The Constitution of India designates certain categories of people eligible for quota (or reservation) in government jobs and places in educational institutions. This positive discrimination is intended to remedy past caste discrimination. The official categories include Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes (tribals or adivasis, considered indigenous people) and, since 1991, OBCs.

9. After the TDP government announced Amaravati as the capital city, it actively proceeded to implement a land-pooling scheme, where an agricultural tract of some 33,000 acres of land on the banks of the Krishna river were taken over by the government and designated as the space where the new capital would be built, almost from scratch. It aimed to build the city along the lines of Singapore and promised to attract foreign investments. For details about the contestations that followed the decision on land pooling (see Ramachandraiah 2016).

10. NRI is an official term denoting citizens who live outside the country for more than 180 days a year, mainly for taxation purposes. The acronym is widely used to refer to any Indian residing outside the country, regardless of citizenship status. NRIs in Coastal Andhra, mostly Kammas, were one of the significant groups who invested in land, initially in Hyderabad and then in and around Mangalagiri after the agitation for Telangana as the capital (see Biao 2007; Roohi 2016, 2019).

11. One name that frequently cropped up was Lingamaneni Ramesh. His father had made investments around Nagarjuna University along Mangalgiri Road in the early 1980s, anticipating infrastructure development after the TDP came to power and promised that the High Court would be shifted to Guntur. Following the resurfacing of demands for a separate Telangana state, Ramesh commoditised part of these farmlands into real estate and even invested some of the profits in the fledging airline company Air Costa. His proximity to Chandrababu Naidu made speculators buy land around his estate before the capital was announced. When Naidu shifted his secretariat to Amaravati, he made Lingamneni’s guesthouse into his temporary office.