International Journal of Pure and Applied Researches; Volume 1(1)/2015
A Comparative Narrative of the Land Acquisitions and Enclosures Dr Mohammad Israr Khan Assistant Professor, Department of Applied and Regional Economics MJP Rohilkhand University, Bareilly. India.
Abstract The paper aims at a comparative narration of the contemporary land acquisition and displacement, on the one hand, and the historically occurred land enclosures and expropriations, on the other. As observed, the forces of accumulation, by means of land acquisition and displacement, are as much let loose now as they were during the periods of the enclosure led expropriations. The Nation States, especially the ones which are hypnotised by the charisma of the neo-liberal political economic ideology, are fanatically exercising the eminent domain instrument for the purpose of large-scale land acquisitions and grabs. It is evidenced by the torrential incidents of forced exoduses of native peoples and folks from their agricultural fields, forests, and the hitherto unclaimed territories and lands etc.; like the mass expropriations experienced in the mercantilist, pre-industrial, and industrial past. The phenomenon, as usual, is resulting into a regressive shift in land relations. Viewed in terms of inter-personal and inter-sectorial effects, the governments are playing a ‘Reverse Robin Hood’ role, in confiscating the resources of the poor, for the purpose of handing the same over to the wealthy and rich capitalist class, in the name of economic growth and development. Assuming that this type of land redistribution is nothing short of a ‘class robbery’, the paper argues that, like the enclosures, the contemporary land grab, both by the governmental and the corporate routes, implies a solemnised conditioning of the social and economic reality for facilitating the primitive accumulation as well as the accumulation proper; the former by means of land expropriation and the latter through the designed exodus of the pauperised folks to the stables of the capitalist appropriators.
Keywords: Economic Exclusion, Eminent Domain, Enclosures, Have-Nots, Land Acquisition, Land Relations, Pauperization, Wage Labour Creation.
1. Introduction The imperatives of the contemporary process of land acquisition and displacement are largely driven by the dictates of the neo-liberal economic ideology. Instead of the doctrine of the public purpose as the sole basis of land acquisition by the State, many novel variants of public interest have been invented by the national governments. The novelties are not only supposed to facilitate natural resource acquisition. These are also aimed at institutionalising the primitive accumulation as well as the rule of the capital. Viewed in this background, it is not very difficult to understand why the phenomena of land acquisitions and displacements, supposedly, for economic growth, development, fiscal revenue, economies of scale, business confidence etc. etc., has become accepted as the most fashionable norm of resource transfer, from the poor to the rich. Likewise, the discourses on land acquisition and displacement go, increasingly, in favour of the conveniently defined variants of public purposes. The dilution of the pure public interest doctrine down to the proposition of facilitation of primitive accumulation and growth, however, replays the historicity of the expropriations, in its essence and accent. It does resemble the phenomena of historically observed European ‘enclosures’ of the common and manorial lands by the landlords and capitalists. The degree of resemblance is remarkable, especially with respect to (a) the primitive accumulation (b) facilitated by the State through (c) the organised exodus of subsistence peasant folks from their land holdings and (d) the creation of Have-Nots as helpless ‘Hands’ in the buyers’ market of labour. The paper is divided into four sections in all. Apart from a brief introduction of the issue here, in this section (1), the other section (2-4) develop, describe, and discuss the theme of the paper. Section two makes a brief perusal of the land relations discourses and research literature. Section three discusses the historical context of land acquisition and expropriation as lying in the European enclosures of the mercantilist and industrial eras. Section four describes the comparative effects of the land acquisitions and enclosures which are found to assume a high degree of convergence with respect to the primitive accumulation, on the one hand, and the creation of the pauperised labour folks, on the other.
2. Land Relations Historically, the land has been a fundamental source of the accrual and manifestation of the social, economic, and political powers, well apart from its life supporting propensity. The primitive nomad communities struggled fiercely with one another to get control over the land as their only means of subsistence. The feudal societies, more than any other system of economic organisation, drew their existence, culture, and the modes and relations of production from the land and owed to the same. In every sense, the land occupied a pivotal
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International Journal of Pure and Applied Researches; Volume 1(1)/2015 position in the long history of feudalism the world over. In the wake of the emergence of the Nation-States and the predominantly commercial and industrial socio-economic organisation, the land relations borne the most of the brunt of the transition … from feudalism to capitalism. The entire history of land occupations, controls, and holding-patterns indicate only in the direction of the land relations being managed, modified, manipulated, and maintained by the balance of power, on the one end, and the social institutions, on the other. Earlier dominated by more of the muscle and man powers, the land relations, later on, increasingly became subject to the powers of the institutional instruments like the State and its organs, the law, the economic order etc. However, it being an ideological construct, the State usually tends to keep the land relations in an easily manipulative state of fluidity. Inheriting from the feudal polity, the modern State has also preserved the same primitive rights over the entire geographical territories under its sovereignty. These rights of the State, with respect to land, are taken as the natural privileges of the State over the individuals. The precept of the eminence of the State has been summed up as the doctrine of the ‘eminent domain’. The eminent domain, in turn, authorises the State to dispossess the individual land-holders and land-owners of the possessive and use entitlements, supposedly, on any pretext of public interest and common cause. The eminent domain assumes the main instrumental authority of land acquisition and expropriation and displacement of the individuals holding or residing on the concerned lands. However, the dispossessing leg of the doctrine of the eminent domain is confronted by another counterbalancing leg named as the compensatory entitlements of the expropriated folks. With a given land-holding and distribution pattern, at a certain point of time, the eminent domain of land acquisition becomes an eminent instrument of the articulated changes in land relations both amongst the persons and amidst the sectors. The mechanism can work in many ways. For example, if the State has a policy goal of an egalitarian distribution of land she would initiate a land reform program like the one that was, for instance, introduced by India during her second decade of independence from an egalitarian colonial subjugation which kept the land relations strictly fashioned according to the imperatives of the rule, raj, and revenue maximisation. Contrastingly, when the ideology of the government is the reliance on the powers of the market and capital, the land relations would be mandated in favour of capital accumulation and surplus value or profit appropriation. The contemporary scenario of the exercise of the eminent domain for land acquisition and displacement derives its basic imperatives from the same i.e. the global agenda of accumulation and appropriation. The phenomenon of the historically changing land relations has been perceived differently by different scholars. It has, accordingly, attracted both the intellectual support and criticism. In terms of the historical enclosures and contemporary acquisitions, the two prominent and representative forms of the revolutionary changes in land relations, the intellectual and academic discourses and interpretations take the most nonconverging an ideological divide. Most of the believers in natural materialism, i.e. the naturalist and materialist blends of the politico-economic philosophy of Adam Smith (1776) and other classicists, hold the changing land relations both as a necessary and an embodied feature of economic growth, development, and prosperity. To them, any resistance and obstacles in land acquisition are akin to the same in the path of economic progress (Bardhan, 2011). The conclusion is reached for a very simple logic that treats land as a factor of production in the aggregate production function of an economy (Solow, 1956). The land factor is required both to substitute for the competitive and to accompany the complementary factors of production in requisite proportions. Hence, a demand and production function ordained supply of land is a must for economic growth to occur. Any constraints on the availability of land are, therefore, the constraints on the frontiers of growth. Most of the classical and neo-classical mainstream economics ascribes to the same view. However, given the distributive, welfare, and existential implications of the enclosures and acquisitions and the like changes in land relations, there are those who adjudicate these processes simply as the acts of the ‘class robbery’ (Thompson, 1963) and the instruments of the ‘primitive accumulation’ (Marx, 1867). There are the others who, , supposedly, try to see both ways and maintain a middle path. They aspire to devise modifications and improvements in both the content and the modus operandi of the expropriation processes so that the interpersonal derogations can be minimised along with the maximised accruals of accumulation. In other words, the reconciliatory narrations, like those of Pranab et al. (2009); Cotula & Leonard (2010); Chiaravalli (2012); Ghatak & Mookherjee (2014); Khan (2013) etc., aim at the provisioning of cushion instruments both to provide the most pacifying entitlements to the affected subjects and to evade the land question. The phenomenon of the land acquisition takes a specific connotation of the process of takeover of land, in the name of bona fide national interest and public cause, from the erstwhile holders like the peasantry, forest dwellers, and other native people, by the State or State institutions, either on behalf of, or for the purpose of transfer to, public, public institutions, private individuals, associations of individuals, companies, corporations
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International Journal of Pure and Applied Researches; Volume 1(1)/2015 etc., through a procedure established by law. The underlying philosophy of land acquisition is twofold: (a) Public interest in land is greater than the private interest; and (b) Land-losers deserve compensation (GoI, 1958). The process of land acquisition, however, involves an irreversible dislocation and displacement of the land-loser people and communities in various ways (Boche & Anseeuw, 2013) and the more the area acquired the more the sum of displacement. Land acquisition and displacement have multiple debilitating effects on the land-loser people (Cernea M. M., 1999) and, therefore, an inbuilt mechanism for proper compensation and rehabilitation is necessary (Cernea M. M., 2007). P. Sainath minutely observed the working of land acquisition and displacement and its effects on affected persons and expressed dissatisfaction with the process which is unilaterally growth-oriented only at the cost of the land-loser and displaced persons (Sainath, 1996). Khan (2013, 14) studied micro and macroeconomic effects of land acquisition and also tried to look into the relationship between economic growth and land acquisition, and between the capital base depreciation of affected persons and land acquisition, per se. Khan & Alam (2015) argued for an inclusive and participative approach of land acquisition. Khan (2015 a; 2015 b) looked into the process of land acquisition, peasants’ dispossession, and compensation and found that the roles of the public servants and project authorities were more like those of the rent-seekers and opportunists throughout. It was only with their overtly unilateral help that the PPP concessionaire were able to dispossess the land-owners without payment of compensation. Johnson & Chakravarty (2013) studied land acquisition in the West Bengal and observed that the political and bureaucratic compensation matters more than the compensatory justice to the land-losers. They also evidenced a quite unbelievable but generalised observation that the judiciary’s role in the disposal of the lawsuits related to the land acquisition was not efficacious, and not always above the board. As a matter of fact, the growth process has affected, i.e. dispossessed or displaced or both, around 600 million people in India since 1947 (Sainath: 1996). Not all of them have been provided compensation or been rehabilitated in any way, leave apart the adequacy dimensions of the compensatory variables of basic value to the land-losers. In the post-economic-reforms period, there is a flood of land acquisition incidents. The land is needed for infrastructure, industry, smart cities, SEZs, luxury resorts etc. etc. The land is required by the public sector. It is demanded by the private wealthy class and multinational corporations. Real estate sector has been the most promising business since 1991. All said, the land business has become a promising enterprise capable of making the billionaires overnight.
3. Historical Context of Land Relations: The Enclosures The industrial revolution, accompanied by the increasing level of economic control over social means of production through the institutions of private property and market, is a phase of historical progression which has yet to come to terms with an order of stability and equilibrium or to attain a stage of, to say in the terminology of dialecticism, the synthesis beyond the turbulence of the antithesis to the erstwhile social stability of the feudalist superstructures. The historically inevitable link between the extreme ends of the transitional evolution is, no doubt, the accomplishment of land expropriations on the levels near to perfection. The rise of merchandise capital, colonial finance, and nascent capitalism would not have attained the adolescence and the seeming maturity but for the powers of the imperialism, economic exploitation, and transformation of property relationship, especially the labour and natural resource ownership. To rise as an institutional mode of production, capitalism demanded a sort of social organization where productive powers belonged to one group of persons, say, the enterprising ventures or, in the later stage, the capitalists, and the process of appropriation and accumulation of the means of production in their hands, and to the exclusion of the others the majority of whom would be collectively known as the hands or the labour. It was a sort of long-term transition which was advocated in the interest of the society but taken to the larger advantage of the social classes and people who were capable and entitled to take and execute decisions overruling the voiceless others. A large-scale social transformation, as it was propelled by the capital oriented economic impulse of the time, occurred across England and other European nations in the years of industrial revolution and imperial expansion. The era is, often, also referred to as the ‘enclosure era’. This was a long transition. The times were increasingly characterized, firstly, by mercantilist controls and imperial trade manipulation and, secondly, by the advocacy of natural liberalism culminating into the well-knit parable of an auto-guided and self-regulated mechanism, called the invisible hand and supposed to work benevolently in the interest of the whole society. The parable of the invisible hand, however, proved to be a hoax when it was examined against the increasingly experienced sufferings of the poor and working class people, especially amidst the portraits of a rising prosperity. The enclosure mechanism worked in two different but complementary ways. On the one end, the rising demand for an exchange value oriented production system required increasing occupation over land for market determined uses. The neo-capitalists and the old landlords, in unison, had got an opportunity for grab and
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International Journal of Pure and Applied Researches; Volume 1(1)/2015 both of them pressed hard for the enclosure of the erstwhile manors, including the demesne and the serf-lands, to create an exclusive private property in land. With every enclosure, a lot of the peasantry added to the number of those ousted from the manor lands. Earlier the serfs had to pay a hefty penalty to migrate from a manor. Now, they were encouraged to leave. At the same time, when the numbers of the land-ousted ones were soaring, the government of England, collaboratively, made many a rules stipulating that wanderers and beggars will be punished with. Their body organs and limbs might be dissected as a criminal penalty. Those found stealing would also lose their limbs say, the hands. An action causing inconvenience to the pleasures of the His Highness’ dominant and privileged social sections would have, for all royal favours, attracted the summary execution of the alleged miscreants. Simultaneously, on the other extreme, there was the trader-sailor-capitalist-manufacturer peremptorily waiting to offer wage employment at subsistence terms. It does not require any ingenuity to deduce that the land-ousted had either to join the army of the wanderers and get their limbs cut in reward. Or they had to unite as bandits and get solemnly executed when caught. Alternatively, they had to work, in lieu of wages, as directed by the capitalist producers who could extract surplus value in multiples of the impugned wage payments. The system was increasingly believed to have been coordinated by the invisible hand. The grand edifice of the intellectual support was deftly chiselled and eulogized, especially, among many others, by Adam Smith (1776), the father of economics. It was rooted in the doctrines of the individual liberty and self-interest. It was acclaimed to be guided by competition among the economic agents. Practically, however, it worked wonders without caring a bit about the actual distribution of the liberty and capacity entitlements. The enclosures were a drastic phenomenon serving as the basic instrument and outcome of change in the technology as well as the mode and relations of production. It was through the means of large-scale enclosures that the feudalism in Europe receded and gave way to capitalism. Nay, the enclosures were the booty of capitalism! Enclosures were facilitated by other institutions as well. It is a matter of fact that the transition, spanned over several centuries, was immensely crucial for a progressive transformation increasingly leading to political-economic liberalism and creation of what is now known as the capitalism. In between the beginning and obliteration of this phase of transition in Europe, the social and economic scenario was conspicuously characterized by: a. The presence of segregated (social and economic) classes say, the heads and the hands. b. The support of the State (policy support and flagship power) to the earners of exchange value and treasure i.e. the traders and capitalists. c. Institutional creation of business environment whereby the manufacturers and traders could get every assistance from the State and the ‘hands’ in their own interest could never remain idle. Wanderers, beggars, and bandits were declared legal offenders in the fashion the Roman Slaves were proclaimed fugitives of the State if they dared to abscond from their masters. The enclosures had definite consequences with durable irreversibility. It was the institutionalization of utilitarian materialism. It was an economic change towards the rule of capital and capitalism. It was a political change for the imperialism to expand globally. It was a kind of social transformation for the creation of human classes on the basis of private ownership of the means of production and property. The descendants of the land-ousted had to serve the greatly sacrosanct duty of the nation building and national pride in competing with the mechanical power and, as well, in obeying the commandments of the nationalist wealth creator and accumulator. Their needs had been enumerated by the wise men of the time and the same were to be provided to the ‘hands’ in such a generous amount that the family of the labour class, say the husband, wife and their children, had, as the call of nature, to walk along the earthen roads to the workplace leaving the birds chirping in the trees before sunrise. They were supposed to enjoy the task of working with the tools for the whole day. Resultantly, they could return to their earthen beds only after the silence of birds and beasts in their nests and restive places. Anybody could afford the luxury of not to avail such a beautiful routine and deft style of living, however, at a fortune that was comparable, to repeat, only to the fugitive Roman Slave: stand, alone, before the hungry lion of the burning belly! The enclosures brought value, treasure, power, repute, and a whole empire to the British and other European nations. The land-ousted ones gave them a system of production and appropriation. After a couple of centuries, the land-ousted were no more required. Though they were the reminiscent of a system of economic justice and virtue that was magnificently dear to the State but necessarily denied to the ‘hands’. The blot was destined to be effaced only through the flying fighters in the armed theatrics which was orchestrated by the economic and political interests of the then imperial powers and which is awfully remembered as the World Wars. The enclosures proved crucial for economic progress, industrial and commercial expansion and social transformation. The process established a precedence and an exemplary towards the new frontiers of development. It determined the future course of action on a trajectory of the market led, capitalist-profit guided,
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International Journal of Pure and Applied Researches; Volume 1(1)/2015 and institutionally imposed economic order warranting a massive scale transformation of land-use and ownership patterns in favour of the rich as a pre-requisite for capital accumulation and, thereby, creating capitalist superstructures of production and distribution. No doubt, the economic wealth increased massively. The empires flourished superbly. The technology became a buzzword. Affluence flowed around. The comforts abound. Alas and however, everything concentrated only around the wealthy ones i.e. those who could rise to bequeath themselves of the coveted status of the ‘Haves’. Those who could not afford to have were, naturally, to form a social class of the ‘Have-Nots’. The fate accompli of the ‘Have-Nots’ was to work as labouring and toiling ‘hands’ at wage rates equivalent to bare subsistence. In order to survive, the labour had to learn and to adapt to the new ways of social organization which were, ironically, the very antitheses of their survival. The dominant class had had to pacify the anger of the suffering people who formed a numerical majority, but an existential minority. The amount of solatium paid to the impoverished people in exchange for economic peace was appropriated from the other colonized people across the globe. So the perceived affluence and glitter of the historically developed nations, which were also the colonizers of the world, mostly came from the occupation of land and other natural resources as well as from the rampant exploitation of the labour power. There arises a valid concern. Why did not the enclosures occur elsewhere in the colonies? The comfort may be that once the whole of a nation of the colonized people was occupied what was the need for enclosures on Zamindari parishes in other parts of the world? The stronghold of the Zamindars on behalf of the British, for instance in India, was, by every standard and in every respect, itself serving the very purposes of enclosures i.e. the appropriation of the exchange value and treasure by means of an excessive burden on the peasantry. Be it the Ryotwari, Mahalwari, or the permanent settlement system of revenue administration the British capitalist empire was never in loss anywhere. Yet, there was a strong possibility of enclosure type occupations at the time of the end of colonial controls. But the rise of the socialist and communist ideology and States came across. However, the situation changed, with the changed reality of the global political economy. When the socialist block stumbled the ‘Washington Consensus’ opened a whole new vista of neo-liberal economic ideology. The neo-liberalism, it being vehemently dominated by the trans-border and multinational corporations, giant business houses, crony capital, and primitive accumulators, goes well beyond the lessons of competition taught by the classical and neoclassical forefathers. Now, the Biblical commandment of the capital and capitalism is not the competition. Rather, their Mantra is the efficiency and affluence. Their logic is the removal of poverty from the globe; though the richness is achieved in the rich societies only at the cost of exploitation of the poor people. They know once the poor people stop serving them their richness will shatter! But they, instead, say: the developing block or the impugned Third World is impoverished. It needs glitter. Giant MNC capital knows how to produce glitter. So, the trans-border capital deserves invitation and red carpet welcome. The enclosures did not occur sizable elsewhere when they were occurring in Europe. But when the process is no more alive there, it has majestically become prevalent in India, the prized colony of the Great Britain, and everywhere across the erstwhile colonised territories now known as the developing world.
4. Land Acquisition and Displacement Relive the ‘Enclosures’ A comparative narration of the land enclosures and acquisitions is bound to reveal the startling similarities of substance and nonchalant differences of forms. Apparently, the nomenclatures sound incongruent and so do the laymen conception of the two. Thus, enclosures were the specific acts of enclosing or fencing of their estates by the manor lords to ascertain improved productivity, safety, and security. Enclosures removed the serfs who did not master but cultivated the lords’ lands and remained tied to them, like in a semi-autonomous slave status. The enclosures occurred many centuries ago when the economic organization and technology were relatively not so complex. The enclosures were allowed by the monarchies while the land acquisition is done herself by the State. The absolute number of affected persons was lesser compared to the acquisitions and displacements. These are a few differences between enclosures and acquisitions. However, alas, these facial dissimilarities fail to affect both the substantial outcomes and the substance of the two processes in any meaningful way. We will try parsimony of words and show the process and effects of land enclosures through a step-down analogy. Assuming that the enclosure effects flow from the enclosures of estates, the sequential outcomes go through the expropriation of the serfs down to their conversion into a pauperized wage labour forcibly destined to the social and existential oblivion. The step-down analogy is shown ahead as figure 1. The enclosure of a manor estate, as shown in the diagram, removes the cultivator-peasants called the serfs from the place they were tied to. They do, now, no more, belong to the land as settlers and cultivators. They are expropriated of the land. Their umbilical cord has been dissected. Land expropriation leaves nothing in their possession to depend upon for subsistence. Bereft of any means to engage themselves productively the ousted people start wandering
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International Journal of Pure and Applied Researches; Volume 1(1)/2015 in vain or searching and seeking a productive engagement. They are, as expelled, homeless and means less. What are the alternatives before them? Set upon a business? Start begging? Join the bandits? Let themselves annihilate? Let the family annihilate itself? Let the children die of hunger, illness, and direct exposure to the extreme weathers of the Northern Hemisphere? Whom to go? Whom to reach? The Jesus of Heavens! Or the good lords of the Kingdom!
Figure 1: Enclosure Effects on the Expropriated People Yes, they have a great but the only fortune to avail themselves of. This is the only opportunity and the only option to keep their flesh alive. And what is it, the treasure of Sindbad? This is … to let their hands work for the angels of prosperity … who are peremptorily waiting since long … to welcome the Hands- the labouring and toiling persona. The angels of prosperity are also known as the mill owners, traders, sailors, financiers, capitalists, the old and new estate lords, and what not. They have machines, implements, and tools. They hope to complement them with the ‘Hands’. The bare Hands! The ideal ‘Hands’ that are perfectly unable to fall back on anything dependable. So that the cycle of progress, affluence, and wealth is never disturbed. Richness ever pours itself on those who know how to make it rain torrentially. What a marvellous combination. Hunters make the prey tiredly vulnerable to fall into the lap of the predators. An emptied belly does not choose. It does not know how to differentiate one eatable from the other. It only knows that flesh needs flesh! No matter green or grey. No concern red or rot. Cultural luxuries are not the business of any destitute. Hands cannot choose, likewise, the machines. But the machines and implements know how to choose the Hands, and how long. So, the erstwhile cultivators have, now, no alternative other than joining the battalions of the wage labour required by the business units like wool factories, textiles, shipbuilding, coal mining etc. They have, by definition, no control over the wage levels, nor any over the work because the servile and menial skills do not gather the power of bargain, circumstantially and intellectually. By adding themselves to the pool of toiling hands they further add to a fall in the wage sacks. The wages at the equivalents of a bare subsistence superbly kill any chances of material improvement in their status and keep them constantly as paupers ever squeezing the space of existence for their lot! Till then, to now, the toilers’ wages are exceptionally rigid at lower ends! The pauperization, in turn, is not accustomed to any floors downward. The family- all adults and minors, husbands and wives, and kids and teens - struggles from dawn to dusk, relentlessly, to meet both ends of the ever emptied belly to keep it going. Having left their society and social chores long back, they now stand to have no society at all. Factory slums are not living spaces, they are the recess pavilions where human limbs can be put at some rest so as to energise courage for tomorrows’ work. The industrial routine of strict subordination expropriates them of the social space, one day or the other. What is the natural direction of such a downward journey? Is not it the valley of vanishing? When everything is lost. When society is gone. Culture has entered the belly. Life is ruined. The present is a blot. The future is blank. When nothing is worth treasure. The existence is torn apart, then …! This is a journey receding inward and leading to the expropriation of the existence itself. Let us, a little, see the winners’ fortunes also. A cursory look at figure 2 reveals that the enclosures created a regressive resource, especially land resource, redistribution from the poor to the rich. Thus, the crowds after crowds of the Have-Nots are produced in the process. The conversion of the expropriated folks into wage labour reserves, in its effects, becomes, on the one hand, a prized source of surplus value appropriation for the accumulative class and, on the other, a curse of pauperization. Pauperization, in turn, gives more powers of manipulation to the producers. Resultantly, Have-Nots stand to lose their social space while the wealth of the rich concentrates intensively. The state of poverty, when it turns into destitution, results into an existential loss and triviality for the losers and a dominate space for the winners. In the case of rebellion by the Have-Nots, it is a matter of strategic co-opting and damage control by the wealthy to protect their position till they fail to do so. And they rarely fail to do so.
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Figure 2: Enclosure Effects for the Losers and Gainers This is not a parable. It is the historical travesty lived by innumerable people. The unfortunate ones who fell prey to the traps of the organized predators’ designs like the enclosures, industrialization, liberalism, capitalism, and so on. Those who sold the dreams of prosperity devoured their clients. The factory slums that were the prized products of a proud and progressive civilization and that were crowded by the enclosure ousted families remained like blots on the face of Europe for hundreds of years. These slum blots were effaced by the aerial bombards of the World War II. Modern land acquisitions are not the centuries old enclosures. No doubt, they are not. They are, nonetheless, the able progenies and, thereby, the heir apparent of the enclosures’ clan. The legacy goes on literally; as far as the abovementioned description of the enclosure consequences bears an astonishing congruence with the consequential outcomes, for the displaced folks, of the contemporary land acquisitions. Put a developing country e.g. India in place of Europe of the enclosure era. Substitute land acquisitions for enclosures. Liberalism for liberalism. Capitalism for capitalism. The land acquisition acts for enclosure acts. And the State for the State! The differences are only of magnitudes and absolute numbers. Otherwise, the normalised description is an equally applicable and equally true outcome in India or any other poor country amazed by the dreams of economic growth and all out prosperity by means of the forces of primitive accumulation set at large. Does, for example, India care about the present or the future of the displace peoples and folks? Does India compensate them in character equivalence terms? Does it restore their social and economic capital and productive base? Does she look back upon them after acquiring their lands? Does she make them partners in progress? Or the partners in the value added on the land that once belonged to them? Is not India effacing wage labour rights and enforcing a capitalist regime? Is not India helping the poor’s vulnerability? Is not India using her armed constabularies against the non-acquiescing land-losers? The very process of the land acquisition, inevitably, expropriates and displaces a large number of people who, invariably, happen to be the people in the lowest economic rungs. The majority of them becomes permanently resource-less, vulnerable, and helpless to join the ranks of destitute and manual labour. The economic gains, in bulk, from the acquisition, go to the people in echelons. Productive structure and output composition undergo an elitist flavour. The mode of production changes and so do the relations of production. Various stakeholders sprout up all at the cost of the land-losers. Social justice becomes a great casualty. Distributive concerns creep deep down into the soil. Not only have the numbers of the poor but also the nature of poverty worsened. The State which poses itself as the sole repository of wisdom and takes away the natural reserves, forests, lands, residences, common resources etc., in the name of development and national interest forgets, in its developmental expediency, the true interest of the land-losers, ousted ones, and displaces lots. Naturally, there is a danger of rebuttal and dissatisfaction. So, the need for the enforcement agencies like the police and paramilitary forces, on the one end, and for the politico-administrative intermediaries, on the other, goes on to increase manifold. Everything mentioned herein is observable in the land acquisition process as witnessed contemporarily. As far as the manor lords and capitalists were concerned, land enclosures multiplied their prosperity outward. So is doing the land acquisition for the present capitalists and emerging neo-estate lords. Also, the distance between the Haves and Have-Nots is going out of any antecedent proportions.
References [1] Bardhan, P. 2011, April; Land Acquisition: Currently a Major Stumbling Block for Development Policy. Development Outreach, World Bank. Retrieved March 04, 2015, from http://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/bardhan/papers/WBILand%20Acquisition.pdf
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International Journal of Pure and Applied Researches; Volume 1(1)/2015 [2] Boche, M., & Anseeuw, W. 2013, August; Unravelling "Land Grab": Different Models of Large-Scale Land Acquisition in Southern Africa. Cape Town: Land Deal Politics Initiative, www.iss.nl/ldpi. [3] Cernea, M. M. 1999; Why Economic Analysis is Essential to Resettlement: A Sociologist's View. In M. Cernea, (ed). The Economics of Involuntary Resettlement: Questions and Challenges (pp. 5-49). Washington: The World Bank. [4] Cernea, M. M. 2007; Financing for Development: Benefit-Sharing Mechanism in Population Resettlement. Economic & Political Weekly, March 24, 1033-46. [5] Chiaravalli, L. 2012; Exploring Alternatives to Land Acquisition. Cochi: CPPR. Retrieved March 09, 2015, from http://www.cppr.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/ [6] Cotula, L., & Leonard, R. (Eds.) 2010; Alternatives to Land Acquisition: Agricultural Investment and Collaborative Business Models. London/Bern/Rome/Maputo: IIED/SDC/AFAD/CTV. Retrieved March 09, 2015, from http://www.ifad.org/pub/land/alternatives.pdf [7] Ghatak, M., & Mookherjee, D. 2014; Land Acquisition for Industrialization and Compensation of Displaced Farmers. Journal of Development Economics, 110, 303-312. Retrieved March 04, 2015, from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387813000047 [8] GoI. 1958; "Report on the Law of Acquisition and Requisitioning of Land": Tenth Report of The Law Commission of India. New Delhi: Govt. of India. [9] Johnson, C., & Chakravarty, A. 2013, June 13; Re-Thinking the Role of Compensation in Urban Land Acquisition: Empirical Evidence from South Asia. Land, 2, 278-303. Retrieved February 6, 2015, from www.mdpi.com/journal/land/ [10] Khan, M. I. 2013, 30 Marh-1 April; Land Acquisition, Dispossession and Alternatives for Inclusion: A case Study of NH24 Bareilly Bypass Land Acquisition. Paper presented at the National Seminar on Inclusive Growth, Department of Economics, Muslim University, Aligarh. [11] Khan, M. I. 2014; The Bypass and the Bypassed: A Critique of Land Acquisition and Development. AVSAR Socio-Economic Journal, 1(2). [12] Khan, M. I. 2015a; Land Acquisition Compensation in India: A Thumb Rule. International Journal of Law and Legal Jurisprudence Studies, 2(1), 1-21. Retrieved February 7, 2015, from http://ijlljs.in/landacquisition-compensation-in-india-a-thumb-rule [13] Khan, M. I. 2015b; Land Acquisition Effects on Capital Base of Affected Persons. International Journal of Innovative Research & Development, 4(1), 188-196. Retrieved February 4, 2015, from Http://www.ijird.com [14] Khan, M. I., & Alam, D. 2015; Inclusive Policy Options to Highway Land Acquisitions in India. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, 2(1 H), 373-377. [15] Marx, K. 1887; Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1). (F. Engels, Ed.) Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers. [16] Pranab, D., Kousik, G., & Shatadru, G. 2009; Modelling for Industrial Land Acquisition for SEZ. Nordicum-Mediterraneum, 4(1), 17-24. Retrieved February 7, 2015, from http://hdl.handle.net/1946/5969 [17] Sainath, P. 1996; Everybody Loves A Good Drought. New Delhi: Penguin. [18] Smith, A. 1776; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (ed.) Campbell, Rh; AS Skinner and WB Todd. Oxford: Clarendon. [19] Solow, R. 1956; A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 70, 6594. In Sen, A. K. (ed). Growth Economics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 161-192. [20] Thompson, E. A. 1963; The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz.
Paper ID: C15102, A Comparative Narrative of the Land Acquisitions and Enclosures by Dr. Mohammad Israr Khan, email:
[email protected], pp. 83-90.
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