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ORCHESTRATING ANTI-DISPOSSESSION POLITICS: CASTE AND MOVEMENT
LEADERSHIP IN RURAL WEST BENGAL
Kenneth Bo Nielsen (k.b.nielsen@ikos.uio.no)
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages
University of Oslo
ABSTRACT: This article uses the concepts of orchestration and spectacle to analyse the
work of leaders of an anti-dispossession movement in rural West Bengal. The article
examines what being a movement leader entails, and argues for the importance of connections
and social relations in the production of both movement leadership and movement spectacles.
By introducing a Dalit perspective on a movement that was otherwise lead by the local
middle-caste peasantry, the article shows how local caste-class relations have been important
in defining access to positions of movement leadership; in disconnecting specific Dalit
interests from the movement’s larger political agenda; and in giving rise to certain forms of
internal policing of caste boundaries within the movement. The fact that the ability to
cultivate and ‘connect’ to the new political spaces opened up by the anti-dispossession
movement correlated strongly with historically produced caste-class inequalities calls for
greater attention to the internal caste-class politics of anti-dispossession movements.
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During fieldwork in Singur in rural West Bengal, India, in late 2007 I occasionally had the
chance to sit down and talk with Dipak Koley, one of the most important local leaders of an
anti-dispossession movement that had emerged in 2006 to stop the Indian car manufacturer
Tata Motors from taking control of around 1,000 acres of fertile farmland. I say occasionally
because, as a movement leader, Dipak was almost constantly on the move. On his motorbike
he visited dispossessed villages across the area, went to meetings with supportive civil society
activists and NGOs, spoke at meetings and rallies, liaised with political leaders from different
parties, or strategized with his fellow movement leaders. During this particular conversation
we spoke about our recent visit to the nearby village of Nadipara, where the inhabitants had
almost uniformly rallied behind the anti-dispossession movement that Dipak Koley led.
Unlike Dipak – who belonged to the locally dominant intermediate Mahishya caste who were
traditionally owner-cultivator agriculturalists – the overwhelmingly landless inhabitants of
Nadipara were all Dalits, that is, they belonged to the formerly untouchable castes.
Now, Dipak shared his concerns about the depth of the Dalits’ commitment to the movement:
‘These people are poor. They are not educated,’ he said. If people who supported the Tata
Motors project came to Nadipara and ‘gave them something and told them something’, as he
put it, the Dalits could easily be persuaded by empty promises of immediate material benefits
and lured away from the movement by its detractors, he feared. The movement’s Dalit
supporters were also an unruly lot, he added. They lacked ‘the method’ that any sustained
movement must have, and were prone to carry out their resistance through sporadic attacks or
random stone pelting at the heavily guarded concrete wall that now separated the surrounding
villages from the land that had been acquired for Tata Motors. In this regard, the Dalits had
proven themselves useful as movement foot soldiers. But, such actions would in effect change
nothing on the ground, Dipak lamented – it would only give the guards and the police an
excuse to attack and beat up anti-dispossession activist. These spontaneous actions were thus
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a waste of one’s energy and only risked causing unnecessary bloodshed. What was required to
successfully carry the movement forward was rather ‘method’ and ‘instructions’, and as a
movement leader Dipak was evidently ready to provide both (based on the author’s field
notes).
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While anti-dispossession movements have been a near-ubiquitous feature of India’s new land
wars (Levien 2018) there is still a limited literature on the modalities and practices of
leadership that go into the making of such movements at the local level. To address this gap,
this article offering an ethnographic analysis of the grassroots work of anti-dispossession
activists and leaders in a land conflict in Singur in rural West Bengal, one of India’s earliest
and most talked-about new land wars. To foreground the question of movement leadership,
the article addresses the following questions: How and why do certain people emerge as
movement leaders? What do they do when they lead, and how are their actions and repertoires
geared towards energising anti-dispossession politics? While these questions are significant in
their own right, they also serve as an important point of entry for analysing how caste is – as
alluded to in the opening vignette – crucially implicated in anti-dispossession politics. As will
be shown later, in Singur locally dominant owner-cultivators from intermediate caste
backgrounds occupied positions as movement leaders, whereas the overwhelmingly landless
Dalit labourers were largely absent from the leadership and relegated to the role of ‘foot
soldiers’. The fact that the movement’s organisational set-up thus came to correlate strongly
with local inter-caste relations, however, did not go uncontested. This article thus aims to
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bring out how caste both shapes anti-dispossession politics and movement leadership, while
also being politicised through collective mobilisation.
The twin issues of movement leadership and caste are pursued by zooming in on two aspects
of the work of Dipak Koley. The article first illustrates how he, as a member of the locally
dominant Mahishya caste, emerged as a local leader who could take charge of orchestrating
the movement. While much of this orchestration was directed at public spectacles and events
that sought to erase caste from the movement’s vocabulary, it also had a more hidden side that
involved the construction of an internal core-periphery structure along caste lines, a structure
that pushed specific Dalit agendas to the margins of the movement’s discursive field.
Below the discussion is situated in the broader context of India’s new land wars; we then
historicise the relationship between caste, power and leadership in rural India, with particular
reference to West Bengal; lastly, we engage the above questions more directly through two
extended ethnographic cases drawn from my fieldwork in Singur carried out periodically
between 2007 and 2009.
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The ethnography that is presented is based on participant
observation in and of movement activities and meetings, as well as unstructured and semi-
structured interviews and household surveys in two villages.
India’s New Land Wars
The liberalisation of the Indian economy over the past three decades has increased the
pressure on land. Today there is considerable pressure to transform land into a commodity to
be bought and sold in the market for non-agricultural purposes (D’Costa and Chakraborty
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While shorter follow-up visits were carried out between 2014 and 2017, the account is mostly based on data
produced during 2007 to 2009.
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2017). This process is driven by India’s contemporary economic development concerns that
centre on industrialisation (Nielsen and Oskarsson 2017), infrastructure, special economic
zones (Jenkins et al. 2014) and real estate expansion so that, rather than acting as a dynamic
source of agrarian accumulation, land is increasingly commodified and directed towards non-
agricultural development. The increased potential for rents, profit and accumulation in the
fields of urbanisation, real estate, industrialisation and mining in turn drives the demand for
land and pushes up prices (Chakravorty 2013; Sampat 2014).
The aggregate outcome has arguably been one of accelerating land dispossession and land
commodification that has seen the control of considerable areas of land pass into the hands of
the private sector.
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This process has, however, been an extremely contentious one that has
triggered widespread resistance from dispossessed communities in many parts of India. As
Kennedy (2014, 83) writes with reference to India’s troubled Special Economic Zones (SEZ)
policy that has seen upwards of 50,000 hectares of land pass into the hands of SEZ developers,
there has been some form of protest in nearly every part of the country where SEZ projects
have been proposed, and in many cases prolonged mobilisation. Contestations over land and
its uses have thus multiplied (Bedi and Tillin 2015), as evidenced in a steadily growing
literature on what is now often referred to as India’s new land wars (Levien 2013a; Steur 2015;
Nielsen 2016a; 2018; Nielsen and Bedi 2017). This literature has provided crucial insights
into the making and operations of a new regime of dispossession in which the Indian state can
increasingly been seen to facilitate the dispossession of smallholder farmers and indigenous
groups to enable large-scale investments driven by private capital (Levien 2013b; 2018). It
has also mounted a critique of the legal regime underpinning the state’s exercise of eminent
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While ‘the great Indian land grab’ (Sud 2009; see also Basu 2007) may not appear quite as great, quantitatively
speaking, when compared to the vast land transfers that have taken place in parts of Latin America and Africa
(Borras Jr et al. 2012), the general tendency is clear enough.