‘Village Communities’ vs ‘Business Corporations’: The Multilayered Articulation of Local Conflicts with Contention Surrounding Industrial Development in India

Abstract

India’s current ‘pro-business’ development regime has been both challenged by depictions of malevolent corporations oppressing helpless village communities and legitimised by depictions of socially responsible corporations ‘developing’ grateful backward communities. To overcome these contradictory narratives, which fail to account for the intricate relationships between villagers and corporate actors, the article analyses how these narratives are constructed in interaction with local conflicts surrounding industrial activity. Guided by a framework based on social systems theory, a detailed study of two cement plants located in Chhattisgarh shows how this interaction operates through multiple discursive layers, which vary in terms of their degree of specification/generalisation and concreteness/abstraction.

Keywords:

• Capitalism
• CSR
• development
• India
• industry
• systems theory
• villages

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for South Asia for their thoughtful comments, as well as the organisers and participants of the panel, ‘Who Speaks for the Village? Representation of the “Rural” in India from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial Era’, at the 25th European Conference on South Asian Studies (Paris, 2018) for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sarah A. Soule, Contention and Corporate Social Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Brayden G. King and Mary-Hunter McDonnell, ‘Good Firms, Good Targets: The Relationship among Corporate Social Responsibility, Reputation, and Activist Targeting’, in Alwyn Lim and Kiyoteru Tsutsui (eds), Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 430–54.

2. Binay Kumar Pattnaik, ‘Tribal Resistance Movements and the Politics of Development-Induced Displacement in Contemporary Orissa’, in Social Change, Vol. 43, no. 1 (2013), pp. 53–78.

3. Rob Jenkins, Loraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadhyay (eds), Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Anthony P. D’Costa and Achin Chakraborty (eds), The Land Question in India: State, Dispossession, and Capitalist Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

4. ‘Land Disputes and Stalled Investments in India’, Rights and Resources Initiative, Nov. 2016 [http://rightsandresources.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Land-Disputes-and-Stalled-Investments-in-India_November-2016.pdf, accessed 11 July 2018].

5. By development regime, we mean a stabilised—yet dynamic—set of institutions, political objectives, professional knowledge and cultural views which support one another and define in an authoritative way what counts as ‘development’ in the mainstream of a given period of time. This definition builds upon David Ludden’s argument on the various ‘development regimes’ characterising colonial and post-colonial South Asia; see David Ludden, ‘Development Regimes in South Asia: History and the Governance Conundrum’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 40, no. 37 (2005), pp. 4042–51.

6. Nita Mathur, ‘Shopping Malls, Credit Cards and Global Brands: Consumer Culture and Lifestyle of India’s New Middle Class’, in South Asia Research, Vol. 30, no. 3 (2010), pp. 211–31; Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (eds), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011); and Sandhya Krishnan and Neeraj Hatekar, ‘Rise of the New Middle Class in India and Its Changing Structure’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 52, no. 22 (2017), pp. 40–8.

7. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (London: Penguin Books, 2013); Sunanda Sen and Byasdeb Dasgupta, Unfreedom and Waged Work: Labour in India’s Manufacturing Industry (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009); Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, ‘Indian Income Inequality, 1922–2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’, in Review of Income and Wealth, Vol. 65, no. S1 (2019), pp. 33–62. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Democracy and Economic Transformation in India’, in Sanjay Ruparelia et al. (eds), Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 17–34; Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014); and Michael Levien, Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

8. Damien Krichewsky, Corporate Social Responsibility and Economic Responsiveness in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Kenneth Bo Nielsen, ‘Unclean Slates: Greenfield Development, Land Dispossession and “EIA Struggles” in Goa’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 4 (2017), pp. 844–61.

9. See, for instance, Rohit Varman and Ismael Al-Amoudi, ‘Accumulation through Derealization: How Corporate Violence Remains Unchecked’, in Human Relations, Vol. 69, no. 10 (2016), pp. 1909–35; and Patrik Oskarsson, ‘Diverging Discourses on Bauxite Mining in Eastern India: Life-Supporting Hills for Adivasis or National Treasure Chests on Barren Lands?’, in Society & Natural Resources, Vol. 30, no. 8 (2017), pp. 994–1008.

10. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, ‘Contesting India’s Development? Industrialisation, Land Acquisition and Protest in West Bengal’, in Forum for Development Studies, Vol. 37, no. 2 (2010), pp. 145–70; Alpa Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

11. Radhika Krishnan and Rama Naga, ‘“Ecological Warriors” versus “Indigenous Performers”: Understanding State Responses to Resistance Movements in Jagatsinghpur and Niyamgiri in Odisha’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 4 (2017), pp. 878–94; and Georgina Drew, ‘The Cultural Politics of Development in an Indian Hydropower Conflict: An Exploration of “Fame-Seeking” Activists and Movement-Abstaining Citizens’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 4 (2017), pp. 810–26.

12. Krichewsky, Corporate Social Responsibility and Economic Responsiveness in India.

13. Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, ‘Building Theories from Case Study Research’, in The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 14, no. 4 (1989), pp. 532–50.

14. Following the merger of the French group, Lafarge, and its Swiss competitor, Holcim, in 2015, the Indian production units of Lafarge were sold in 2016 to the Indian conglomerate, Nirma.

15. For an overview, see, for instance, Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vols. 1–2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, 2013); Daniel B. Lee and Achim Brosziewski, Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009).

16. For a more formalised definition: ‘Semantics is the conceptual reservoir of society…. On the one hand, it can be defined as the sum of forms which can be used in society for the selection of meaning contents—or as the sum of meaning premises worth retaining. On the other hand, semantics can be defined as the reservoir of themes which are kept available to be introduced in social communication. Semantics therefore comprise the condensed and re-usable meaning contents (also called culture) that are available for communication’; Claudio Baraldi, Giancarlo Corsi and Elena Esposito, Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 168, translation mine.

17. Clive Dewey, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 6, no. 3 (1972), pp. 291–328; and Ambedkar, quoted in Sandipto Dasgupta, ‘Gandhi’s Failure: Anticolonial Movements and Postcolonial Futures’, in Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 15, no. 3 (2017), pp. 647–62.

18. Claude Markovits, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Pushpa Sundar, Business and Community: The Story of Corporate Social Responsibility in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013).

19. Stanley A. Kochanek, Business and Politics in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 200.

20. See, for instance, Steve Hamm, Bangalore Tiger: How Indian Tech Upstart Wipro is Rewriting the Rules of Global Competition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); Peter Cappelli et al., The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2010); and Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009).

21. See, for instance, Swapna Banerjee-Guha, ‘Accumulation and Dispossession: Contradictions of Growth and Development in Contemporary India’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 36, no. 2 (2013), pp. 165–79; and Roy, Capitalism.

22. See, in particular, David Kaldewey, ‘System, Diskurs, Semantik: Methodologische Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Differenzierungstheorie, Kultursoziologie und Wissenssoziologie’, in Martina Löw (ed.), Vielfalt und Zusammenhalt: Verhandlungen des 36: Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Bochum und Dortmund 2012 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014), pp. 1–12; and Rudolf Stichweh, ‘Semantik und Sozialstruktur: Zur Logik einer systemtheoretischen Unterscheidung’, in Dirk Tänzler et al. (eds), Neue Perspektiven der Wissenssoziologie (Konstanz, Germany: UVK, 2006), pp. 157–71.

23. CSE, Concrete Facts: The Lifecycle of the Indian Cement Industry (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 2005).

24. In the mid 2000s, the ratio of profit to turnover in most cement companies operating in India was between 17 percent and 25 percent; ibid.

25. The present analysis has no claim of ‘objectivity’ regarding, for instance, how the cement plants impact the social welfare of villagers in the surrounding area. What matters here is the social reality as it is described and thereby constructed in various terms by social systems and their participating actors. For more details on this constructivist perspective, see, for instance, Cristina Besio and Andrea Pronzini, ‘Niklas Luhmann as an Empirical Sociologist: Methodological Implications of the System Theory of Society’, in Cybernetics & Human Knowing, Vol. 15, no. 2 (2008), pp. 9–31; and Lee and Brosziewski, Observing Society.

26. The Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM) was founded by the legendary activist and trade unionist, Shankar Guha Niyogi, who was murdered in 1991. The CMM has been engaged in trade union activities and legal battles for the protection of contract workers in the cement industry and other industries of the region since the 1980s.

27. These quotes are excerpts from the leaflet which was distributed in the villages prior to the public meeting.

28. Sudha Bharadwaj, ‘Gravest Displacement, Bravest Resistance: The Struggle of Adivasis in Bastar, Chhattisgarh against Imperialist Corporate Landgrab’, Sanhati (1 June 2009) [http://sanhati.com/excerpted/1545/, accessed 15 July 2018].

29. Lafarge India, 2010 NIDHEE Annual Report—Corporate Social Responsibility (Mumbai: Lafarge India, 2010), p. 4.

30. See, for instance, Julien Bouissou, ‘Lafarge’s India-Bangladesh Cement Project Remains Frozen’, The Guardian (20 Aug. 2010) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/13/india-bangladesh, accessed 5 July 2018]; and Supratim Dey, ‘Meghalaya Tribal Council Moves SC for Lafarge Project’, Business Standard (21 Jan. 2013) [https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/meghalaya-tribal-council-moves-sc-for-lafarge-project-110100800099_1.html, accessed 5 July 2018].

31. Damien Krichewsky, ‘CSR Public Policies in India’s Democracy: Ambiguities in the Political Regulation of Corporate Conduct’, in Business & Politics, Vol. 19, no. 3 (2017), pp. 510–47.

32. See ibid.