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ABSTRACT
Widespread “land wars” in contemporary India have rekindled older debates over the implications of capitalism for caste, with some arguing that land dispossession for new economy projects may be liberating for Dalits. We assess this argument through comparative ethnographic and survey research into the consequences of dispossession for Dalits in the cases of two Special Economic Zones built during the 2000s. We advance three arguments. The first, methodological, is that approaching this question requires systematically comparing the outcomes of dispossession for Dalits relative to upper castes. The second, based on such an assessment, is that the interaction between exclusionary growth and caste-based agrarian inequalities has in both cases expanded socio-economic inequalities between upper and lower castes and left most dispossessed Dalits worse off in absolute terms. Third, the cases demonstrate important qualitative differences across generally bad outcomes for Dalits, which derive from the combination of project characteristics and pre-existing agrarian inequalities. While demonstrating how the exclusionary growth driving dispossession in contemporary India is generally unpromising for Dalits, we underscore the importance of comparative ethnographic research into the interaction between different forms of dispossession and specific agrarian social structures.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. While Rajpura is a pseudonym, Polepally cannot be anonymised given that it is the main village dispossessed for the eponymous SEZ.
2. These are somewhat different from, though overlap with, the three mechanisms connecting class and caste proposed by Shah et al. (Citation2018): inherited inequalities of power, super-exploitation of casual migrant labour, and conjugated oppression. We find it useful, following Weber (Citation1978, 43–46) and Wright (Citation2009), to separate the unequal caste-wise distribution of economic resources from the corporatist power of dominant castes to exclude and hoard: although related and rooted in the same history, the significance of the two can, as we show, vary across local caste structures and economic context, and may not change in concert. While Shah et al. discuss caste discrimination under the category of “conjugated oppression” (Bourgois Citation1988), it is unclear to us whether the latter is a distinct mechanism or a term for the sum total of mechanisms by which caste (and tribe) structure class relations in India. We agree that all of these mechanisms combine to place Dalits to the bottom of the labor market, though not exclusively as migrant workers.
3. This reading finds textual support in Ambedkar’s 1952 Scheduled Castes Federation’s Manifesto where he advocates for privatisation where “national undertaking is not essential” (cited in Prasad and Anand Citation2016) and appeals to the “emerging Dalit middle class” (Teltumbde Citation2017, 84).
4. And, yet, even on this dimension one needs to emphasise the pervasiveness of caste discrimination in almost all domains of life, staggering levels of Dalit atrocities, and the common indifference of authorities towards them.
5. Although there are important differences between SCs and STs in India, in our cases their pre-SEZ socio-economic positions and post-SEZ outcomes were similar. We therefore group them together while presenting survey data. When we later contrast upper-caste and Dalit outcomes specifically, we use SC data only.
6. Kapur and colleagues (2010) treat the shift from draft to tractor cultivation as an unambiguous indicator of lessening caste inequality, even though they also find that tractors are disproportionately owned by upper castes who rent them to lower castes.
7. Palamur is the former name of Mahbubnagar, as well as a particular type of bonded labour which originated there in the 1930s and remains in place today (Picherit Citation2014, 152).
8. There are at least 20 OBC sub-castes in Polepally; the largest are Gouds and Mudiraj (Sūrēpalli, Bhushan, and Rawat Citation2012, 149).
9. Assignees reported receiving only Rs 6,070 per hectare, charging that the remainder was demanded by village middlemen. The exchange rate varied from approximately Rs 45 to Rs 60 to US$1 during fieldwork.
10. Chakravorty (Citation2013, 196) lists compensation prices in 69 cases of dispossession that took place from 2000 to 2010. The compensation for Polepally assignees is by far the lowest among all these offers.