In contrast to the relentless expansion of capital-intensive developments in China over the past decades, many similar projects in India have been stalled by peasant resistance. As Michael Levien writes in an important new study, attempts by India’s state governments to transfer large tracts of rural land to private developers for hundreds of sezs, following China’s model, have detonated militant protests across the country, making land dispossession a central political issue. Sustained local protests forced Reliance Industries to abandon two mega-sez projects in Maharashtra and Haryana. Farmers took up arms against a real-estate project in western Uttar Pradesh. In coastal Odisha, villagers blocked a massive Pohang Steel development. sezs have faced stiff resistance in West Bengal, Telangana, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Debates about these land struggles, Levien argues, have been trapped in a binary framework: modernization versus peasant romanticism—the defiance of rural communities against the predations of capital and state. Yet there has been little research in India into the actual development outcomes produced by ‘successful’ sezs, cordoned-off zones where labour laws do not apply.

Dispossession without Development focuses on the case of the Mahindra World City (mwc), one of the first and largest private sezs in North India, situated in Rajasthan, not far from Jaipur. Marketed as the biggest Informational Technology sez in India, the mwc consists of an assortment of businesses, including campuses for Infosys and Deutsche Bank, as well as a salubrious residential colony for a well-to-do urban clientele. However, the focus of Levien’s story is not the mwc itself, but the process of expropriating the huge amount of land that now comprises it, and the impact this large-scale expropriation has had on the affected villages and their dispossessed inhabitants. The book is an account of the experience of the residents of one village in particular, ‘Rajpura’, where Levien, a graduate of the sociology department at Berkeley who now teaches at Johns Hopkins, lived for thirteen months beginning in January 2010, by which time the mwc, the development of which began in 2005, was already operational. Levien’s book is the result of the fieldwork he conducted during his time living in Rajpura, plus shorter revisits spanning seven years.

Levien frames his detailed and excellent case study with a discussion of the prevailing theoretical understandings of land dispossession, which, he suggests, view the expropriation of the holdings of agrarian populations as either uniformly progressive and developmental (whether capitalist or socialist), or uniformly predatory. Against these alternative schools of thought, Levien advances the hypothesis of different ‘regimes of dispossession’—a concept designed to better account for the different purposes and variegated consequences of expropriation, particularly depending on how it collides and interacts with specific agrarian milieux. Levien’s principal contention is that India’s shift from state-controlled capitalism to free-market neoliberalism in the early 1990s ushered in a new and dramatically different regime of dispossession. Broadly speaking, from Independence to the final decade of the twentieth century, the major projects driving dispossession in India took the shape of infrastructural works, all of them managed and funded by the public sector, and involving a commitment to labour-intensive growth and balanced regional development. Large amounts of arable land were routinely expropriated for constructing roads or railways, building dams in river valleys, modernizing agriculture, mining minerals, and expanding heavy industry. Following economic liberalization, these developmentalist priorities were replaced by the willingness of states to confiscate farmers’ land on behalf of big corporations for any private purpose whatsoever alleged to contribute to economic growth, including for real-estate development. Though this coercive redistribution continued to be promoted as an intervention to generate employment by upgrading the value and productivity of the land, the projects were increasingly speculative, rent-heavy and non-labour absorbing.