Land is a metaphor for power, wealth and status. Independent Gujarat's initial mass-development strategy centered on agriculture but the emphasis was on productivity and efficiency rather than land redistribution or social justice. A state apparatus and socio-political set-up dominated by elite landed upper and middle castes and classes ensured this. Primary fieldwork-based research shows that by the mid-198os, with a growing acceptance of ideas of liberalisation at the national and international level, the elite consensus on land began to shift. This shift must also be placed within local socio-economic developments that had propelled dominant landed groups into agro-industry and small scale industry in the last third of the twentieth century. Gujarat's elite still wanted to control land, but they did not want the state to regulate land use or continue emphasising the diluted but powerful rhetoric of land to the tiller. The rightward shift of all political formations in Gujarat after 1985 and the growing importance of the upper caste-middle class merchant-trader-builder-small businessman dominated BharatiyaJanata Party further facilitated the moves towards a shift in land policy. Continuing changes in Gujarat's land policy are determinedly moving towards the complete liberalisation of land. Land is an important metaphor for power, wealth and status in Gujarat, as indeed it is all over South Asia. One's being a jamin maalik (owner of land) is crucial currency not just in economic transactions involving, say, security for bank loans, but also in social ones of marriage, assertion of standing in ones caste, etc. Obviously, an individual's social, political and economic relationships, crucially

background

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Caste and land reforms in Gujarat.

From Land to the Tiller to Land Liberalisation: The Political Economy of Gujarat's Shifting Land Policy

Adivasis(aboriginal peoples) in southeastern Gujarat, India, have been subjected to an accelerated process of accumulation by dispossession through the construction of large dams, as well as through the privatization of common property resources. Neo-Gandhian social movements, such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), have used transnational activism to gain exposure for these issues but in the process have lost local support in the state, particularly after a negative court judgment in 2000. This article identifies three major reasons for the declining support for NBA in Gujarat. The first arises from the repressive nature of agrarian relations that have emerged through the capitalization of agriculture in the state. The second is the NBA's failure to link their opposition to displacement by large dams with similar examples of accumulation by dispossession in other regions of rural Gujarat, hence precluding any unity between poor peasants and adivasis elsewhere in the state. Finally, neo-Gandhia...

Submerged and submerging voices: hegomony and the decline of the Narmada Bachao Andolan in Gujarat, 1998-2001

This paper considers the participation and initiation of communities once classified as criminal tribes in the violence in Gujarat in 2002. Given that their descendants continue to suffer politically and economically in post-colonial India, it is necessary to examine the role of the marginalised and subordinate communities in the making of Hindutva in the twenty-first century. Building upon debates on violence in post-colonial societies, the paper examines the historical contexts for why victims often become killers in genocide. More specifically, it provides an analysis of one specific community of poor, low-caste peasants, the Dharalas, who participated in the violence against Muslims in Gujarat. The paper also examines the limits of historical methodology for the writing of histories of violence from ‘below’.

Caste and land reforms in Gujarat.

Citations

From Land to the Tiller to Land Liberalisation: The Political Economy of Gujarat's Shifting Land Policy

Submerged and submerging voices: hegomony and the decline of the Narmada Bachao Andolan in Gujarat, 1998-2001

From Peasant Pasts to Hindutva Futures? Some Reflections on History, Politics, and Methodology

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