‘This is all waste’: emptying, cleaning and clearing land for renewable energy dispossession in borderland India

ABSTRACT

Renewables are imagined in India around features of ‘greenness’ and ‘cleanness’ and are presented as the modern pathway towards sustainable development and unlimited growth. But this shining story entails problematic land politics and the related (un)making of space for capital accumulation: previous property regimes and land uses are erased while a new set of land technologies and territorial rules legitimates land dispossession and the private takeover of commons. Wind infrastructures are specifically targeting (common) lands categorized as ‘deserted’, ‘empty’ and ‘waste’, and subaltern groups (tribal, pastoral and Dalit communities) whose livelihood practices have been historically described as ‘unproductive’ and ‘backward’. These both violent and discursive logics of (neo)colonial and green energy land politics are mediated and fixed to the ground levels by powerful (land) brokers, contractors, wind companies’ land teams and political mediators who embark land on its tortuous, bureaucratic and yet material journey towards clearing, cleaning and holding value. This article offers perspectives from political geography and critical agrarian studies to understand the territorial process, the persistence of class-caste relations and the legacy of coloniality underlying the land politics of green energy development in borderland India.

KEYWORDS:

• Renewables
• land politics
• extraction
• dispossession
• mediation

Introduction

I first visited the area around Pamori village with a representative of a wind energy company in search of potential ‘good’ locations for windmills. Pointing to the nearby lands, he commented:

you see this is all waste [emphasis added], nothing grows here, only shrubs and rocks. It doesn’t belong to anyone; it’s just lying there. We are going to put some nice wind farm here, green and clean technologies that will produce tons of electricity and tons of money for us. All the electricity will go directly to Delhi and Mumbai¹

Indeed, for the past 20 years, the Kutch district, situated in western India along the border with Pakistan, has been completely invaded by what is presented as ‘green’² and ‘clean’ technologies: renewable energy (RE). These technologies are imagined as the modern pathway for sustainable development and the solution to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel energy. They are fully integrated in the sustainable development discourse and part of the Northern-established and imposed consensus that key solutions to address and mitigate the global climate crisis, particularly in the South, are through ‘green growth’, low-carbon society and energy transition (Harris 2010; Newell 2018). Electrification projects in post-colonial India historically relied on the large availability of coal resources alongside a profound civilizing narrative of bringing progress and development through science and technology, with the powerful image of ‘enlightening’ the ‘darkness’ and ‘backwardness’ of rural India (Kale 2014). RE also advances powerful nationalist imaginaries and representations around energy sovereignty, security and climate leadership (Shidore and Busby 2019).

Transitions are rarely radical transformations or revolutions. Rather, the energy transition operates more as a global-scale, albeit temporary, ‘socioecological fix’ to interlocking capitalist accumulation and climate crises (McCarthy 2015). The ‘fix’ concept is largely inspired by Harvey, who understood it as the reconfiguration of geographic and spatial relationships in order to alleviate crises tendencies (2001, 2004). The ‘green new deal’ is indeed providing capitalism with new avenues for accumulation on a more socially and environmentally sound basis and ensures its survival by appropriating and commodifying new elements of nature in unexplored frontiers of the earth (Bridge 2009, 2017; Moore 2015). This scholarship points out that ‘green’ energy is not a substitution or disruption to traditional ‘black’ (coal) or ‘brown’ (oil) resources, but rather they follow the same complementary and overlapping extractive logics (Dunlap 2019). Albeit interesting, these global and macro-level conceptualizations don’t help us to grasp the diversities and nuances of energy dispossession situations on the ground, how they are entangled with local social relations and power hierarchies. The ‘fix’ concept doesn’t engage with caste relationships which are prominent in India, and it doesn’t explain why certain local actors not only comply but actively participate to dispossession. Other scholarships have suggested that energy infrastructures are not neutral or even hermetic to the ground context and realities where they are deployed (Bridge et al. 2013; Bridge and Gailing 2020). They are embedded in specific land politics, territories and local contexts, where they exercise considerable coercive and discursive power and domination over resources, space and populations. This contentious land politics of ‘green’ energy infrastructures is concretely mediated and fixed to ground levels by powerful (land) brokers, contractors, wind companies’ land teams and political mediators who embark land on its tortuous, bureaucratic and yet material journey towards clearing, cleaning and holding value.

There are already well-established studies on extraction and land dispossession in the traditional mining sector (Ghosh 2016; Oskarsson, Lahiri-Dutt, and Wennström 2019), in conservation and reforestation programmes (Brockington and Igoe 2006; Kabra 2009), and even in wind power or related rare earth metals in a South American context (Dunlap 2018a; Sanchez-Lopez 2019). Only few case studies have been conducted on renewables in the Indian sub-continent (Yenneti, Day, and Golubchikov 2016; Lakhanpal 2019; Stock and Birkenholtz 2019), and none of them has truly looked at the dialectics between RE making, land politics and its mediation. In this article, I investigate the micropolitics of land transitioning in RE extraction from the perspective of frontier-making, territorialization and mediation, and how it precisely reconfigures local resource governance and power hierarchies. It is not intended as a critique of the source of RE itself; this contribution acknowledges the threat posed by the climate crisis, particularly to vulnerable and marginalized communities, and the need to disrupt our fossil-fuel-based existing energy regime. Nor is this paper dealing with protest, political (re)actions and alternatives voices to renewable energy dispossession. Rather, I offer a critical analysis of the social relations and (re)configurations underlying this new RE regime, the local elite and the different interests trying to capture this ‘green’ wave. After a discussion of the conceptual framework guiding this investigation and a presentation of the case study and fieldwork, I first engage with the complete erasure and the concomitant (un/re)making of space, land and nature following wind power territorial expansion in borderland India. Subsequently, I analyse the fixing alliance that emerged from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-affiliated upper-caste strongmen to negotiate and control the (extra-)legal processes on, in and around land.

Conceptual framework

The conceptual foundation of this paper assumes that any type of extraction is concretely embedded into a specific kind of land politics, a specific relation to nature and space, and a dynamic process of frontier-making and territorialization where long-standing (neo)colonial³ governance instruments and development justifications enforce ways of ruling new spaces, resources and populations. Resource extraction is also considerably moulded and shaped by local players in ways that align with established forms of domination and oppression.

Frontier-making, territorialization and land

Rasmussen and Lund suggested that the discovery and exploitation of new resources are always followed by a cyclical dynamic of both frontier-making and subsequent territorialization (2018). The frontier dynamic appeals to the breaking down of existing institutional orders and involves a continuous process of erasing and destroying previous property regimes, land politics and its specific uses, claims and rights as well as past livelihood practices (Cons and Eilenberg 2019). Territorialization follows a reverse dynamic as it is about the building of a new institutional order. It involves a series of governmental techniques where territorial rules, new property regimes and land acquisition laws are established and performed by both public and private actors (Elden 2013). Land lies precisely at the crossroads of these two trajectories: the unfixed and multi-dimensional nature of land makes it enlivened, enclosed, territory (or territorialization), property (or legalization), access and exclusion (or violence) (Peluso and Lund 2011; Sud 2020a). Its politics is defined by a set of manipulations, assemblages and (re)configurations aimed at aligning land with resource extraction projects and capitalist accumulation. Frontier-making and territorialization trajectories enforce therefore a specific kind of land politics that ‘fix or consolidate forms of access, claiming, and exclusion’ (Peluso and Lund 2011, 668). When deployed in an RE context, these dynamics create violent situations of ‘green-grabbing’ (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012), ‘energy dispossession’ (Baka 2017) and climate injustice (Dunlap 2017).

Colonial governance practices and development justifications

Resource frontiers and territories are discursively and coercively supported and sustained by a regime of governance instruments and development justifications that largely draws from the colonial legacy: the construction of ‘wasteness’ in land structure and parallel ‘greenness’ and ‘cleanness’ in RE relies on the same ideology of modernity, discourses of progress and enlightenment through technological development as during the colonial period (Gidwani 2008). These constructions reveal how much energy and climate issues are framed in both technical, simplified and depoliticized ways that voluntarily elude questions of dispossession, ownership, property rights or inclusive development (Li 2007). Because interventions define what can qualify as development and what doesn’t, and how it can be achieved, they feature as an important exercise of power and control. In the same way that colonial agents had the right over subjects to ‘make live or let die’ (Li 2010), climate technological interventions define ‘lives whose labour is valued and rewarded’ and ‘lives that are of utter indifference to global circuits of capital. Lives worth preserving, lives easily abandoned’ (Gidwani and Reddy 2011, 1652). Strategies of control are also enforced by the power of discourses, knowledge production, science and data: the ‘framing’ problem is crucial to the construction of meanings and the mobilization of ‘rationalities’; ‘science’ and technology helps to build shared beliefs, representations and impose ‘regimes of truth’ (Li 2007; Harjanne and Korhonen 2019; McCarthy and Thatcher 2019). Finally, ruling resource frontiers and territories also implies to govern populations, shape new identities and livelihood models and produce ‘governmentalizable’ subjects, ‘i.e. open and amenable to governmental interventions and techniques’ (Odysseos 2011, 445).

Power, mediation and brokerage

This paper is also attentive to the issue of mediation, power and brokerage in extractive and dispossessive contexts, and more specifically how formal territorial rules, regulations and land control are concretely carried out by a diversity of local actors when they ‘hit’ the ground reality. Brokers are indeed highly involved in the land politics of development and resource extraction projects. They facilitate the expansion of international capital and the ‘advancement of rural markets by mediating financial, service and commodity transactions’ (Simon 2009, 198). But middlemen are not merely rule-takers or facilitators; they constantly translate, redesign and reinterpret development programmes and land policies on the ground, and therefore they can be imagined as rule-makers, ‘active agents’ rather than ‘passive recipients (Sud 2014b). Because exploitative capitalist class relations are inseparable from caste oppression (Lerche and Shah 2018; Parry 2013), brokers have been strengthening their control and domination over subordinate groups as they perform day to day basic government jobs and mimic governmental practices of paperwork (Sud 2021). Fixers reflect the ways in which boundaries between the State and society are blurred or stretched within everyday state practice (Fuller and Bénéï 2001; Gupta 1995; Berenschot 2011). If the generic category of broker – dalal in the South Asian context – middleman, fixer or even gatekeeper certainly enfolds a nuanced and complex diversity of actors, levels and types of activities (from land brokering and consulting, political mediation, paper-working, contraction to more violent muscle power), mediation aggregates powerful strategies of accumulation developed by dominant classes and castes (Pattenden 2011).

Background: RE development, Gujarat and Kutch

Electrification in India has been considered for a long time by policy makers and academics as a form of the State’s infrastructural and political power over territories, space and populations (Dubash, Kale, and Bharvirkar 2018). Post-1991 economic liberalization era has led to a deregulation of the sector, the opening of power generation to private actors and a fierce subnational competition compelling states to adopt fiscal incentives and ‘smooth’ land acquisition policies to attract private investors (Joseph 2010). RE extraction is fully rooted within this liberalization logic, advancing an even more privatized development pathway as ‘the generation of power from RE services is almost 90% in the hands of private parties’ (Benecke 2010, 9). Close state-business relations are framed by policy makers, international agencies and corporates as ‘good governance’ practices enabling the development of RE (Benecke 2010; Phillips, Newell, and Purohit 2011; Phillips and Newell 2013).

This article focuses on the state of Gujarat, which has often been presented in the literature as a case in point of economic liberalization, business-friendly policies (Sud 2012, 2014a; Jaffrelot 2018, 2019) coupled with a state-wise laboratory for the experiment of Hindu nationalist and Hindu-Gujarati pride ideologies since the early 2000s (Sud 2020b). It has been one of the first and most proactive states in liberalizing land policies for private investments and a leading state in RE development (Phillips, Newell, and Purohit 2011). The district of Kutch is of particular interest in this article, as it shifted from being at the margins of Gujarat towards a ‘new resource frontier’ and a space for capital accumulation (Mehta and Srivastava 2019). Kutch is the largest district in Gujarat, with a land area of 45,612 square kilometres, constituting 23% of the state. It comprises ten talukas or administrative units, as well as nine distinct ecological zones. The main occupations have traditionally been pastoralism, agriculture and fishing in a context of intense droughts. Rehabilitation and resettlement programmes that followed the deadly 2001 earthquake have led to a critical shift regarding the policies for Kutch’s development, as centre and state governments turned these ‘vast drylands’ into an attractive space for private investors (Kohli and Menon 2016, 271). The first private Special Economic Zone (SEZ) port in India was created in Mundra and entrusted to Adani Power. The district has been subsequently identified as a rich windy region by the National Institute of Wind Energy (NIWE) and therefore framed as a major wind corridor, where thousands of windmill projects have been developed by established companies like Adani Power or Suzlon for more than 15 years.

I have conducted critical qualitative research in 2021 for a total period of 7 months in two areas, the mainland taluka of Nakhatrana and the borderland taluka of Lakhpat. In this article, I will mainly focus on the case of Paromi village mentioned in the introduction section and located right on the administrative limit between Nakhatrana and Lakhpat taluka. The two main dominant landowning and farming castes of this village comprise the Patel and the Rajput communities (and their subcastes Jadeja and Sodha); pastoral groups mostly belong to the Rabari caste, while the Dalits form the majority of the village population and work as agricultural or informal wage labourers. The political landscape is dominated by the BJP who have won an overwhelming majority of seats in local body elections for the past 20 years. I have followed the expansion of 2 wind companies towards Nakhatrana and Lakphat taluka and observed different stages of development (land clearance process, civil work, erection and assembly, maintenance, etc.). Besides an analysis of key documents and literature, I have conducted semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with around 60 informants⁴ (mostly in Hindi and English), as well as (non)participant observation on wind sites and contractors’ camps, in companies’ and revenue department offices, police stations, in villages and other socialization places such as tea stalls, weddings and religious ceremonies.

Making a new Kutch: wind extraction frontier and territorialization

This section aims at illuminating the discursive making of ‘green’ energy development and the concomitant violent (un)making of space, land and nature that is underlying the expansion of large-scale land consuming and dispossessing wind power projects in mainland and borderland Kutch. I suggest that the ‘greenness’ and ‘cleanness’ imaginaries unpacked in the making of wind energy combined to its specific materiality and coercive expansion over space constitute new features of colonialization.

Frontier-making: construction of ‘empty’ and ‘waste’ lands

Kutch district possesses a rare ecology and ecosystem biodiversity, hosting within its borders seasonal wetlands, thorn forests, important grasslands, deserts and even mangrove forest along the coastline (Stanley 2004, Srivastava and Mehta 2017). Meanwhile, it is labelled as having the highest concentration of ‘wastelands’⁵ in Gujarat according to figures from the Wasteland Atlas of India for the years 1992 and 2006 (respectively 41.9% of the entire state and 16.7%) (2010; cited Gujarat Ecology Commission 2017). But classifying certain lands as ‘waste’, ‘deserted’, ‘empty’ and ‘unproductive’ doesn’t simply appear like this; it actually complies with a certain political construction. This construction follows the long-standing capitalist expansion over space and nature and aligns with colonial imaginaries (Gidwani 2008; Harms 2014). Waste operates as the ‘political other of capitalist “value”’, it is both encapsulating ‘society’s internal and mobile limit’ and ‘a fiercely contested frontier of surplus value production’ (Gidwani and Reddy 2011, 1625–1626). ‘Wasteland’ has been framed as an untapped potential for capital accumulation, and its ordering and integration into a capitalist discipline of private property constituted a crucial moment of political modernity in Locke’s treatise (Whitehead 2010). In India, the ‘terra nullius’ discourse has been a powerful rhetorical device to justify colonial civilizing-enlightening discourses as well as post-independence hegemonic modernism and development projects (Saigal 2011; Baka 2013).

The construction of ‘wastelands’ in Kutch follows a long history of frontier-making that started in the early 1960s when large tracts of (common) lands were opened up by the government for their agricultural added value and given to refugees of the partition. These lands were subsequently re-allocated to industrialization projects (SEZ) in the 2000s and more recently converted to ‘green’ energy production (Ibrahim 2008, Sud 2020a). According to policy makers in Gandhinagar (the state capital of Gujarat) who have been constantly devaluating and under valuating lands in Kutch, these lands

do not hold any value, do not produce enough. We have a lot of baren lands, a lot of empty lands which don’t produce any agricultural value, and even if they do some agriculture it is rainfed crop which production is really low, so we can put them in a much better use⁶

The frontier-making dynamic, and its more recent wind and ‘green’ extraction phase, targets different categories of land such as revenue and state ‘wastelands’, but also village common grazing-lands (gauchar) which are crucial for cattle-breeding and pastoral livelihoods. The legal category of state lands encompasses highly contested lands and uses; this category of land is instrumental to the state’s authority and control over territories and to the production of market society as ‘formalized state lands constitute today’s frontiers for capitalist expansion’(Kelly and Peluso 2015, 473). State lands are imagined by wind companies’ representatives as the same single, fixed, disposable and uniform piece of ‘waste’. It can be easily ‘roll [..] up’ like a ‘mat’ and ‘tak[en] away’ (Li 2014, 489) as ‘nobody’ uses land, or at least not in the productive ways as they define it hence justifying and enforcing the process of emptying Kutch’s lands. The construction of certain lands as ‘waste’ leads therefore to the construction of certain lives, livelihoods and practices as ‘wasted’ in line with colonial imaginaries (Gidwani and Reddy 2011; Harms 2014; Kelly and Peluso 2015): traditional pastoral practices in Kutch and the use of common lands for cattle grazing have been imagined since colonial times as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, ‘corrupted’ and even blamed for environmental degradations (Mehta and Srivastava 2019); since post-independence pasture lands have been constantly re-allocated to afforestation and industrialization programmes, furthering the marginalization of pastorals as they lose pasture, lose their sense of identity and move towards semi-proletarization (Mehta and Srivastava 2019). Local state officials I interviewed still depict Pamori pastoral populations in very colonial ways:

they are uneducated and backward people, the thumb-type who doesn’t even know how to write his name, they just move around the jungle all day with their cattle without any true purpose or goal⁷

If only Rabari of Pamori practice full-time pastoralism for generations, almost every household in the village (Rajput, Patel or Dalit) possesses at least one or two cattle for personal use, providing milk to the family, and for this reason everyone relies at some point on gauchar and government-owned ‘wastelands’.

Mapping and survey procedures

A powerful instrument in the artificial making of ‘empty’ and ‘wastelands’ is the mapping and survey procedures deployed by companies at early phases of wind extraction and land acquisition. Maps are never neutral representations of an objective reality, they are political choices aimed at legitimizing certain resource uses and claims while marginalizing or simply erasing others, and therefore they can be easily changed or modified to reflect new territorial rules and land control (McCarthy and Thatcher 2019). Wind resource assessment mappings, as they rely heavily on satellite images and remote sensing technologies, landscape and enforce a uniform and fixed interpretation of land, to a large extent in favour of ‘wasteness’ and ‘emptiness’ (Robbins 2016). Engineers and dedicated companies’ land teams collect the available data on land titles and land records from tax officers and land revenue services (district collector, tehsildar, talati, etc.), but they also conduct their own surveys and micro-sittings on the ground, visiting villages to identify available lands and potential ‘good’ locations. During these surveys, land team staff rely on mapping and zoning software, smartphone applications, GPS and maps, and therefore simply do not see nor value the ecosystem surrounding them in the same way local villagers might. They have a purely material and organizational way of looking at this nature and space, what engineers see are only obstacles, costs to reduce or roads to develop:

when we survey a location, we have to look for possible roads, where can we bring them and what will be the cost of it. We have to identify areas where we will put the machines and cranes, the assembly platform and the boom-up area, see what additional amount of land will be needed, and what other alternatives do we have if it is too costly to clear everything, particularly when the location is situated in a hilly area⁸

By doing so, not only do these engineers erase and silence the existing uses and appropriations of space, but they also impose a single, rationalized and ordered perception of space, where everything is organized for the purpose of wind extraction.

Wind territorialization: ‘We have been completely surrounded by windmills’

That is precisely where the wind frontier-making dynamic is further completed by territorialization, the parallel imposition of new rules, norms, uses and claims. Traditional energy extraction projects like mining, industries, SEZ or even solar plants are usually situated at one single and delimited location, with apparent boundaries. Windfarms on the other hand do not have any visible or physical boundaries, walls or limits. Typically, a single windfarm project of 300 MW is dispersed around large tracts of land, usually scattered around hundreds of locations in a 20 km radius, grouped in little clusters of 15–20 windmills covering up to dozens of villages. The windfarm’s general shape gets physically extended by a whole network of roads, transmission lines and towers, pole stations, storage areas, contractors and workers camp. The private appropriation of mostly revenue lands does not happen at a go, at one single time, but follows different temporal and spatial lines. Indeed, wind companies acquire land on a cluster basis, once they have overcome the land clearance process and started construction, they move on to the next cluster and start again acquiring land until the whole project is completed. This specificity leads to an on-going, continuous, and cumulative process of landgrab, stretched around space and time (Oskarsson, Lahiri-Dutt, and Wennström 2019): one company establishing windmills in a certain village at a certain time doesn’t prevent any other companies or the same one from coming later on and starting the construction of new locations. This specific materiality and space appropriation of large-scale wind power plants in Kutch represents an extremely (neo)colonial dynamic: windmills operate as ‘territorial weapons that […] “roll out” an apparatus of spatial, economic and psychosocial management’ (Dunlap and Arce 2021, 7) and sustain a ‘modality of conquest’, or ‘infrastructural colonization’, that ‘normalizes socio-ecological plunder’ (Dunlap 2021, 6). Wind infrastructural colonization in Kutch resonates with more general forms of ‘energy colonialism’, whereby dispossessive and destructive resource material extraction in margins and frontiers of the State are organized to sustain a continuous consumption of ‘green’ and ‘clean’ energy and a race for capitalist unlimited ‘green’ growth in urban centres (Batel and Devine-Wright 2017).

Pamori doesn’t have any access to reliable and continuous provision of electricity. As night falls, villagers rely on battery torch lights to navigate between fields and find their way using the windmills’ sounds and lights. Indeed, Pamori has been completely invaded by four different wind energy companies in less than 3 years. A first cluster of 5 windmills was initially implemented in 2018 by an Indian energy company. Since then, the villagers recount ‘[they] have been completely surrounded by windmills’⁹ as 55 more locations were constructed from three different companies, mostly foreigners this time. When I last visited the village in December 2021, 15 new windmills were under way from the first initial Indian company. In the same colonial and invasive logic as the rest of the wind farm, the windmill location site operates as a boundaryless and ever-changing zone whose delimitation and shape gets distorted and stretched depending on the different construction stages. Wind companies never restrict themselves to the one-hectare land allotment per location they are given by the revenue department and therefore an important dimension of wind power land appropriation is situated in a grey zone, between legality and illegality. As explained by a villager from Pamori whose land was partially encroached by companies

Revenue department gives them one hectare per location, but they clear everything in a four hectares radius for their roads, to store their material, all the machines, cranes and trucks, to create their assembly platforms and boom-up areas during erection stage. At the end for one cluster of 25 locations, it is not 25 hectares of land that have been cleared, but a hundred¹⁰

Physical clearing, cleaning and (un/re)making of land

The most visible and tangible element of territorialization, where new rules, norms and uses are shaped and moulded, takes place during the physical clearing, cleaning and (un/re)making of space and nature at early construction stages. As Kutch’s lands are imagined as ‘wild’, ‘savage’, ‘underdeveloped’ and even ‘nothing’, they need to be physically modified, ordered, reorganized and even domesticated in order to transition from ‘waste’ to value (Tsing 2003). This domestication involves a profound physical and material process: in Pamori, since windmills have arrived, the grassland-rich areas situated on hilly points have been cut, the paths used by villagers with their cattle have been flattened and gravelled, watercourses used for farming irrigation have been diverted for the sake of road development, groundwater sources have been completely depleted when they were situated on companies’ location, while massive tree species, plants and vegetation used for different religious or medicinal purposes have been simply destroyed. This physical (un/re)making of nature and space generates the opportunity for renewed territorial control, hegemony and omnipresence: wind actors as a whole occupy and cover the field 24/7 with endless back and forths of SUVs, trucks transporting raw and wind materials, JCBs, cranes, water tanks and tractors who move constantly in and around space, from location to location, from village to village as construction work never stops and goes on day and night.

Because wind power extraction is dispersed in space and time, is shattered around so many locations, and covering very different tasks (from land clearance to construction, security, or maintenance), companies cannot carry out their projects on their own. They need to rely on local fixers, mediators, contractors and state officials who mobilize their networks, connections and already established (economic-social-political) power and status to ‘get things done’.

Clean energy, dirty business: mediating and fixing wind power extraction and related land politics

The material nature and spatial organization of a windfarm generate an entrenched dependency of wind companies on local brokers, contractors and fixers but also on local state officials and party representatives and their related caste power and networks as companies cannot materially and physically cover every single space and location of their project. For these reasons, they structurally need strong men, they need ‘eyes and muscles in every village during all phases of development’¹¹ to quote a company’s representative, and most importantly they need people who will undertake the heavy, difficult and ‘dirty’ business of enforcing dispossession. This entrenched dependency has given brokers and fixers a renewed and reinforced relevance in land transactions, as well as more room for bargaining, autonomy and for authority consolidation. As they manipulate resistance and engineer local consent, they literally translate, fit and blend windmills into the local social and political landscapes of power.

This section aims therefore at analysing the overall structure and organization of the fixing alliance that emerged in mainland and borderland Kutch to (re)work issues around land and consent-making in wind extraction projects and impose an almost complete monopoly of BJP-affiliated upper-caste landowners.

Nature and levels of the fixing alliance

Camaraderie, social background, and political connexions

Mediating wind and land is not limited or restricted to the traditional categories of land broker and political mediator, it actually applies to a diverse range of other actors who are highly involved in the making and the fixing of windfarm land politics in Kutch: contractors, village-head (sarpanch) and other gram panchayat members, political mediators affiliated to parties, powerful caste leaders or hired thugs, land brokers, local state representatives (revenue and land record, police, forest departments, etc.) and of course companies’ local land teams. Together they form a complex regime of mediation organized at different levels from the village up to the district. They enjoy strong socio-political connections and follow certain hierarchies, rules and codes. The brokers I describe below are predominantly recruited among the dominant landowning upper-caste Rajput communities and via the BJP party networks.¹² They interact physically within specific offices (wind companies’ offices and hotels, revenue department offices, party offices, land broker printing and stationery shops, police stations, etc.) and spaces (village’s tea stall, location site, contractors’ camp) where mutual services are exchanged, gifts and counter-gifts are common (such as whiskey bottles, chai, cigarettes and tobacco). They build and shape friendly and interpersonal ties, (inter)dependence as well as reciprocity relations that will be mobilized in due time. In these spaces of exchange and camaraderie, they circulate shared representations about local resistance to wind projects (described as theft and extortion), shared beliefs and values about development, land and livelihood practices in Kutch (described as waste and unproductive). My first encounter with this brokers’ and contractors’ community was initiated by an influential BJP leader from Nakhatrana taluka and took place at a local tea stall where both brokering and BJP political networks regularly connect and meet in the evenings to share the latest news about upcoming contracts, land transactions and companies’ needs. Because of this common socio-political background, fixers all share a mutual affiliation to Hindutva and Gujarati sub-nationalist theories that oppose them to the ‘other’, either the Muslim imagined as an infiltrator and potential enemy, or the non-Gujarati, referring to all the migrant workers coming from U.P and Bihar to work on wind construction sites (Sud 2020b).

From the village up to the district

Wind mediation is organized in different group coalitions, different fixing alliances that operate at multiple levels. At the centrality of all levels, strata and types of brokering activities lies the companies’ local land team: recruited locally from Kutch or Gujarat, it plays a crucial role, comparable to a task force, with restricted staff belonging mostly to local dominant castes and working ‘in the shadow, out of sight’¹³. They intervene, first, at the moment of identifying, mapping and surveying potential locations and land. They usually conduct this process with professional land brokers or village-level, nonprofessional and one-time brokers who have some knowledge about land ownership (who owns what?), paperwork and procedures. These individuals are selected because they already enjoy some authority and power in the village, as village-heads (sarpanch), caste, religious or small-scale political leaders. They become the principal interlocutor of the company in the village as their principal task is to convince fellow villagers to sell their land, collect signatures and documents for land transactions, take care of any agreement from panchayat when gauchar lands are involved and manage conflict or contestation that might arise at latter stages. Together, these village-level fixers form an extensive network of faithful and loyal supporters in every village, as the land team recruits them mostly among former contestants via money, commission in land transactions or awarding security and transport contracts. This network of village-level and low-profile fixers is further completed by a fixing alliance emerging at the subdistrict and district levels and composed of high-profile politicians (Members of Legislative Assembly-MLAs, Members of Parliament-MPs, party’s president and vice president), state representatives (District Magistrates-DM, Sub-District Magistrates-SDM, revenue officers and police inspectors) as well as already established businessmen and big landowners engaged in sand mining and other extraction projects.

Brokering on, in and around land

Transitioning from ‘waste’ towards value

Transitioning land from ‘waste’ towards value involves an important aspect of bureaucratic processes performed by companies’ land team staff, land brokers, village fixers and revenue department operators. When private land is involved, these papers include the 7/12 document (commonly referred to as sat baran) registering land title and property ownership; a complex set of sale deeds, lease deeds, road agreements and a summary of negotiations signed with private landowners, as well as collectorate permission (number 89) to buy private land from a farmer for non-Gujarati companies or individuals; and permission (number 65) to convert agricultural land to non-agricultural (NA) purposes. When public or so-called government ‘wasteland’ is involved, companies’ land team staff approach the local revenue department officials, mobilize their past experience (a lot of professional land brokers and land team staff have worked in revenue department before joining wind companies) and personal connections with those who have the power to clear, sign, stamp and legalize the precious Non-Objection Certificate (NOC) and other papers (Sud 2017). These simplified and softened procedures of (private and government) land clearances for industrial projects like windmills largely comply with the liberalization dynamic undertaken by the Gujarat State in the 1990s of relaxing and lifting most of the restrictions on NA conversion and transferring massive amounts of state controlled ‘wastelands’ to the corporate sector (Sud 2021, 2014c). This dynamic follows what has been described as the rise of the ‘broker state’ (Levien 2013), namely the transfer of land from one class to another organized and facilitated by the State for purely private, commercial and increasingly less industrial purposes. As states compete with each other to attract investments, they entertain selective relationships with certain designated private groups, here Indian energy companies like Adani, that are considered close to the party in power in Gujarat the BJP (Jaffrelot 2018, 2019; Chatterjee 2020).

The last stage of land transition is finally carried out by contractors and civil construction. If skilled work like foundation, windmill assembly and erection is predominantly awarded to outsider companies, all the non-skilled work, from security and transport to road development, is monopolized by BJP-affiliated political leaders and upper-caste Rajput communities from small-scale contracts (for one or two locations usually awarded to a village-level fixer) to large-scale contracts (covering a cluster of 15–20 locations or a whole windfarm project usually awarded to high-profile politicians). These contractors take care of the physical and material clearing, cleaning and transitioning of land that I described in the previous section. But the different levels and types of brokering activities around land are actually highly cumulative, intertwined and overlapped, and the boundaries between the figures of the land broker, the (village/district level) fixer or supporter, the revenue operator and the contractor are largely blurred. The broker I call B., who presents himself as a ‘social worker’, represents a perfect case in point of this phenomenon. B. is a wealthy Rajput Jadeja farmer owning 50 acres of land near the area of Pamori. Locally, at the taluka level, he occupies an important position within the BJP. He has been elected several times as sarpanch of his village and before siding with wind companies he opposed some windmills and transmission lines projects:

I first opposed some projects of windmills and transmission lines five or six years ago. I didn’t know anything at that time. Since then, I have gained a lot of experience and knowledge about land, property documents and procedures for transactions, about contracts and non-skilled work in wind business, about managing opposition of villagers, so now I am helping the companies, looking for land, negotiating with landowners, taking care of non-skilled work like roads and security and managing any opposition in villages from my area.¹⁴

From this discussion, I quickly understood that B. was occupying more than the one function of a land broker. If he helps companies finding land as a temporary land broker, he also operates as a local fixer and supporter, managing dissent and opposition in villages that fall within his prerogative, and a local contractor. Village-level fixers like B. are present daily on the windmill sites. At night they don’t go back to their hotels or camps several kilometres away like companies’ staff and (external) contractors do. They go back home to the villages where they live. With this peculiar position, B. ensures and embodies companies’ continuous, uninterrupted and 24/7 presence, while reinforcing at the same time his power and authority over reconfigured territories.

Engineering and manufacturing consent: money power, muscle power and manipulation

Managing and engineering consent, discontent and opposition to windmill projects and related dispossession is a central aspect of land mediation and brokering. I have mentioned earlier the role played by village-level and low-profile fixers as the kingpin of local wind mediation in (forcefully) convincing fellow villagers to sell part of their land or lease part of their roads to companies, in managing and even buying local consent and passive acquiescence from the community. They are supported on the ground by dedicated staff among the land team and private hired ‘problem-solvers’ – in other words, hired goons and thugs – who are specifically responsible for dealing with and fixing any type of opposition and contestation to windmills in a given area, from a villager claiming that the windmill is impinging (part of) his land, to physically blocking the construction site and the machine until he gets compensation, or the project is withdrawn. The strategy openly deployed by fixers to manufacture consent consists of a subtle balance between money power and muscle power. As companies fall back on large amounts of money to reach a compromise, they voluntarily instigate competition, anxiety and jealousy between villagers – between those who received money or were awarded contracts and those who didn’t. The power of money alters villagers’ expectations and behaviour as money infiltrates every aspect of social life, every chatting and discussion at the village’s tea stall, encouraging people to compete with each other to fix companies’ projects and obtain compensations: as a sarpanch bluntly told the representative of a company’s land team, ‘give me one lakh and I will fix your problems; I will get things done and settle your location in the village’.¹⁵ By doing so, companies secure and expand their network of fixers and supporters in every village, they incorporate upper-caste troubling and contesting elements at privileged positions of responsibility, and on the same occasion they undermine the potential for unity and collective action (Levien 2015). Money is disseminated via the classic ‘divide and rule’ logic, where villagers and contestants are divided and segregated along caste, religion and village lines.

But when money and reason don’t work, then only we use fear and force, either with the help of the local sarpanch or a powerful goon, or either with the help of police.¹⁶

The company representative here openly acknowledges relying on muscle power, force and threat as the last way to forcefully compel villagers to accept companies’ decisions. I have observed a complete privatization of the police force where its monopoly of legitimate violence is deployed for the sole benefit of wind companies, sanctioning their private orders and decisions regarding land acquisition. The companies have dedicated police teams stationed permanently at their camps and deployed on the ground, on sites and locations via private companies’ vehicles to deal with non-cooperating villagers who refuse to vacate lands. Then a large part of activities and methods deployed to settle disputes, to fix and coerce consent are situated in the shadows, on the terrain of illegality, manipulation and fraud. Village-level fixers and hired ‘problem solvers’ heavily use their caste power and domination over subordinates (particularly Dalits), and mobilize their networks and connections within the BJP and affiliated organizations to frighten and threaten recalcitrant villagers:

when it involves Dalits lands, the companies try to frighten them, using the upper-caste communities and their local power in villages, they approach local goons from Rajput community and give them full power.¹⁷

What this Dalit rights activist meant by ‘full power’ is of course intimidation, humiliation and caste atrocities, in the same way that they happen in other parts of Kutch or India. Coercion also involves the detention of information, lies, manipulation and exploiting villagers’ ignorance to achieve their own ends as summarized by a company’s representative, ‘my job is to fool villagers so that the work goes on, so that the work never stops. This implies to do bad things’.¹⁸ Among these ‘bad things’ is the exploitation of illiterate villagers’ ignorance to change the terms of contracts, road agreements or sale deeds in ways that fit companies’ interests, the detention of information and lies about upcoming surveys, the location of windmills and compensation rates. These coercion strategies, based on manipulation and forced compromise, are not incompatible with the existence of alternative voices and agencies. In fact, they coexist and cohabit with each other. More vulnerable and subordinate groups do navigate and negotiate these complex financial and semi-legal incentives. Their political (re)actions constitute a nuanced terrain that oscillates between organized and collective resistance movements, individual and everyday insubordination acts, but also compromises, negotiation and bargaining depending on time, space, feasibility and social configurations.

‘Knowledge’, ‘information’ and ‘experience’¹⁹

The coercion strategies discussed above illustrate how much the control of information and knowledge about windmills, land and contracts is central to the domination and hegemony of upper-caste communities in brokering activities. Whoever has ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ about land ownership, potential contracts and future windmill locations, has access to village-elite and powerful castes, belongs to those groups and has ‘experience’ of the internal and bureaucratic functioning of local revenue administrations, is best positioned to occupy a privileged rank in the reorganization of value regimes and production relations induced by wind extraction. In that sense, the fixing alliance I describe in this section doesn’t constitute a class of emerging new entrants’ brokers, it represents a class of already well-established and well-positioned brokers and fixers, who had been working on, in and around land before the arrival of windmills and have mobilized and (re)activated their existing socio-political connections and networks to capture the best positions and increase their personal capital.

Asserting caste power and growing political patronage

As land and consent-making fixers become companies’ ‘eyes and muscles’ at every corner of a wind project, they consolidate their control, authority and domination over the space and people they supervise and therefore constitute active agents of territorialization and resource governance serving their own personal interests.

Village-level fixers like B. who are performing multiple and overlapping brokering activities of both the contractor, land broker and ‘problem-solver’, exercise a considerable amount of control and authority. Within the cluster of the three villages B. has been awarded by the wind company, he knows every single location, the precise number of windmills in each village, the different stages of advancement, every security guard and driver he has placed himself, and every private landowner whose road or land has been granted to companies. With the help of his brother and two loyal henchmen, he constantly scans the horizon to control every single movement of trucks, vehicles and machines between locations, and companies’ staff even need his permission before conducting any work in ‘his area’. In a context of decreasing dominant caste power, the loosening of dependency ties on poorer Dalits and increasing economic and class fragmentation among Rajputs, partly due to the impact of capitalist agricultural development (Harriss 2013; Mendelsohn 1993; Jeffrey 2001). Rajputs like B. have been more inclined to invest and reorient their capital surplus in activities related to the wind business. Becoming the companies’ de facto gatekeepers, or even better, windmill keepers, diverting the small profits in terms of contracts and commissions to their fellow Rajput villagers and controlling who gets a job and who doesn’t, Rajputs like B. have secured new ways to accumulate capital outside traditional agrarian or pastoral activities and they have extended their exploitation and domination over Dalits outside traditional relations of production (Pattenden 2011). In that sense, the wind business and its myriad of brokerage activities have played an instrumental role for rural upper-castes well-off classes of landowners to fulfil their capitalist aspirations in a time of profound agrarian transformation. These aspirations encompassed ‘various forms and combinations of complicity, compliance, manoeuvring and speculation’ with the wind business (Bennike, Rasmussen, and Nielsen 2020, 41). Successful Rajput brokers have recycled the wind-related money in new forms of social capital: since B. completed his cluster of 15 windmills and got a new one, he has been able to buy a new SUV car to his son, built a new mansion that overlooks the whole Pamori village and married his daughter to a rich Rajput family in Rajasthan.

Similarly, B. also saw his brokering activities as a powerful political platform to broaden his vote bank, grow new patronage relations with fellow villagers and secure votes for the BJP for the forthcoming elections:

It is all about vote bank and politics. Imagine someone from my village come to me, wants to sell his land, get some money from the company, or a job, or wants to put his tractor or water tank on contract, if I help him, if I connect him with the company, with the Sir in the land team and manage to find him a driver job, some money in exchange of land brokering or help him to get good compensation from land sale, then he will definitely vote for me and BJP at the next election.²⁰

This quotation precisely encapsulates how manipulating, clearing, cleaning and (re)working land in the wind extraction frontier easily breaks into the realm of politics, domination and power. As brokers and fixers take over the ‘dirty’ business of enforcing dispossession and emptying land for ‘clean’ energy projects, they become more than simple companies’ henchmen – they literally translate wind infrastructures into the local political landscape. They fit windmills into the existing social structure and fill the gaps in this complex web of hierarchies, norms, and values that compose the rural Kutchi society.

Conclusion

But if not this type of dispossessive, destructive, industrial and extractive energy regime, then what? Indeed, there are still some important perspectives and alternatives to the current RE regime. None of them will ensure ‘socially just’ energy transition on their own, but together they might take a further step towards the rebalancing of the climate burden between North and South, the centre and the margins. First, this involves completely reconsidering the (neo)colonial discourse of ‘emptiness’, ‘wastelands’ and ‘wasted’ populations, which has been justifying and sanctioning legal enclosure, dispossession and exclusion for centuries. This discourse is now linked to more recent notions of ‘greenness’ and ‘cleanness’ in the context of RE development. The assumptions that wind or solar power plants are by nature socially and environmentally sustainable need to be firmly questioned, particularly since issues around rare earth metals extraction, biodiversity and social impacts have been raised (Avila 2018; Dunlap 2018b; Sanchez-Lopez 2019). It is therefore essential that RE infrastructures clear traditional Social and Environmental Impact Assessment (S/EIA) procedures, as they are still now exempt from social and environmental clearances in the Indian legislation. We need to think of and develop alternatives to the existing models of industrial and extractive RE expansion, and privilege bottom-up approaches where impacted communities are included in the decision process via participative and democratic procedures. If free, prior and informed consent procedures have been certainly criticized for legitimizing land acquisitions, strengthening the role of local elites and pacifying resistance (Dunlap 2018a), they constitute a first and non-exhaustive step in Kutch, where villagers are still not informed or consulted when wind projects start on villages’ ‘wastelands’. This raises the final important point of community ownership and small-scale initiatives: ensuring that the villages targeted by windmills have access to electricity and get a fair share in the value produced, that new land uses and claims are not enforced at the expense of the existing ones but are rather made compatible with them. These constitute basic and elementary steps towards more ‘socially just’ energy transitions.

This article was concerned with the question of emptying, clearing and cleaning land in the context of energy transition, from the perspective of frontier spaces and frontier communities who face erasure, dispossession and destruction from so-called ‘green’ and ‘clean’ projects. As the Northern-imposed consensus around climate change and ‘green growth’ is becoming hegemonic in policymaking and finance, once can expect RE projects and related infrastructures to flourish and proliferate in the coming decades, particularly in marginal and peripheral areas of the global South where land politics are less contentious. It therefore becomes indispensable to develop a critical analysis of RE projects from the lens of political geography and critical agrarian studies: these perspectives shed light on the territorial and destructive processes at stake, the legacy of extractive and colonial logics in RE projects and their strong capacities to integrate within their matrix and internal functioning of the local social power hierarchies of class and caste. By drawing on the interrelated concept of frontier-making and territorialization in resource governance as well as mediation and brokering activities in the micropolitics of land transitioning for wind power projects, this paper hopes to make a novel contribution to the growing fields of energy dispossession and green extraction, particularly by emphasizing the unique dialectics between RE-led-dispossession, land politics and its mediation. Beyond the case study examined in this article, RE interventions offer a wide range of possibilities for crucial qualitative research, for example on the resistance practices and political (re)actions that emerge to counter green infrastructure narratives, but also geographical comparison (North–South or South-South) or extractive regimes comparison (the coal-RE nexus for example).

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of East Anglia & University of Copenhagen.

Notes on contributors

David Singh

David Singh is enrolled in a joint Ph.D. programme at the University of East Anglia (UK) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) since 2019. His research interests focus largely on territorialization and land, resource extraction and green energy infrastructures. David’s Ph.D. dissertation analyses the territorial expansion of wind infrastructures in borderland Gujarat, and the underlying extraction, dispossession and destruction dynamics. He also discusses the issue of mediation and caste power in fixing large-scale wind power projects, the (un/re)making of space by identity politics and the emergence of diverse resistance practices.

Notes

1 Wind company staff member, 22.02.2021.

2 The term ‘green’ refers to the political construction of renewables as environmentally sustainable, quotation marks are used in the whole paper to dissociate with that construction.

3 I define colonial or colonization for the rest of this paper as a project of conquest, emanating from the State or private actors, to politically and economically exploit, conquer and control resources, populations and spaces situated outside the direct range or at the edge of the State. The prefix neo points to the revival of this project in contemporary times.

4 Villagers (farmers, pastorals and labourers), village-heads (sarpanch), political and caste leaders, NGO or civil-right activists, state officials, brokers, contractors, companies’ representatives, etc.

5 ‘Wasteland’ is a legal category and classification of land uses, referring to land not exploited or cultivated and owned by state governments. Quotation marks are used here as a reminder of the political construction underlying that land classification.

6 Interview, 24.03.21.

7 Interview, 13.02.21.

8 Ibid.

9 Discussion, 25.09.21.

10 Villager, discussion, 31.03.21.

11 Interview, 27.01.21.

12 Among the 24 informants that I labelled in the category of either fixer, land broker, contractor or companies’ staff, 13 are Rajput and 8 hold official position or mandate within the BJP (tehsil President, Vice President, sarpanch, taluka panchayat president or member, MLA, MP), 5 of them being both Rajput and affiliated to BJP.

13 Land team staff, interview, 27.01.21.

14 Interview with B. 12.07.2021.

15 Visiting a village-head (sarpanch) with company land team, interview, 27.02.21.

16 Company’s representative, discussion, 27.01.21.

17 Interview, 15.01.21.

18 Interview, 25.06.21.

19 ‘Experience’, ‘knowledge’, ‘information’ are words regularly mentioned by informants when talking about mediation, wind and land.

20 Interview, 12.06.21.