From Colonial to Neoliberal Regime: Understanding the Paradigms of Land Dispossession in India

Abstract

The article attempts to understand and illustrate why state-mediated land dispossession in India on a large-scale under the colonial, post-colonial and neoliberal regimes became inevitably necessary, and how dispossession under these politico-economic regimes broadly metamorphosed the structure of dispossessed labour force. It, however, argues that the colonial regime dispossessed peasants and tribals from their means of subsistence primarily to exploit and extract resources in order to expand its unabated political power and retain its industrial growth trajectory in England while the post-colonial regime embarked on massive dispossession to obviate acute indigence of the Indian citizenries by building state-controlled dams and industries for production, and institutions for developing knowledge. The neoliberal regime contrarily aimed to accelerate economic growth largely on capitalist lines. Both colonial and post-colonial regimes partly absorbed the dispossessed labour force in the production processes, whereas neoliberal regime deprioritized its absorption, exemplifying therefore an ‘exclusionary’, non-labour intensive growth model.