From Corporate Land Grab To Land Sovereignty (Bhu Swaraj)
By Vandana Shiva, 10 February, 2007

“There is a sacred tie between the tiller and the land. Any attempt to snap the relationship is bound to face opposition”.

P. Chidambaram Finance Minsiter

India’s Finance Minister Mr. Chidambaram is not a friend of farmers or a friend of the earth. He is committed to the neoliberal ideology. Yet even he has had to speak out against the corporate land grab of India’s small farms through the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ’s) and FDI in real estate. Every place where land is being acquired to create islands of luxury and lawlessness, land wars have erupted. From Kalinganagar to Dadri, from Singur to Nandigarm the force of arms and ammunition in the hands of the police force is being used to assault and kill innocent farmers and tribals defending their land rights, guaranteed by the Constitution, through democratic means, also guaranteed by the Constitution.

The land wars are testing every aspect of India - as a culture based on the earth as a sacred mother - Dharti - who supports us all, - an agrarian economy based on small farmers and peasants, a decentralized democracy which through the 73rd and 74th Amendments has made local communities the competent bodies to make decisions on natural resources.

The large scale uprooting of millions of farmers in U.P, West Bengal, Maharasthra is breaking the sacred bond between peasants and the land, which supports them. But it is also breaking the contract between citizens and the state which is based on the state being bound by the Constitution, and the fundamental rights of citizens that the Constitution guarantees.

The Union Government, after prolonged deliberations, notified the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Rules in February, 2006 operationalising the SEZ Act 2005. The Government has cleared hundreds of SEZs and applications of several other developers are pending.

SEZs are specially demarcated zones where units operate under a set of rules and regulations different from those applicable to other units in the country. The emphasis is on enhancing exports and creating an environment for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) by offering taxsops. While units in the zone have to be net foreign - exhange earners, they are not subjected to any pre-determined value addition or minimum export performance requirements.

Any private, public, joint sector or state government or its agencies can set up SEZs. Foregin companies, too, are eligible.

SEZ units will be eligible for 100 percent tax exemption for the first five years, 50 percent for the next two and 50 percent of the ploughed back export profits for the next five years. Losses will be allowed to be carried forward. The Finance Ministry has stated this will lead to losses of nearly Rs. 2 trillion.

Developers may import / procure goods without payment of duty for the development, operation and maintenance of SEZs. They will enjoy income tax exemption for 10 years, with a block period of 15 years. The developers will also have the freedom to allocate developed plots to approved SEZ units on a purely commercial basis. They will also have the full authority to provide services like water, electricity, security, restaurants, recreation centers etc. on commercial lines. Moreover, they will be exempt from paying service tax.

Within a year of the Central Act and less than six months of the enactment of the Act State legislation, Haryana started to set up the country’s largest multi-product SEZ, stretching over 25000 acres between Gurgaon and Jhajjar off the Delhi-Jaipur highway. It is being set up jointly by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and the Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC). RIL alone will invest Rs. 25000 crores, while Rs. 15000 crores will be put in by companies interested in investing in the SEZ.

It is claimed that the SEZ has provisions for a cargo airport and a 2000 megawatt power plant, and would generate 500,000 jobs and that the State Government would earn revenues up to Rs. 10,000 crores. Reliance is the major stakeholder with 90 percent stake in the joint venture company while the remaining 10 percent rests with HSIIDC. On 31st December, 22 Panchayats organised a strategy to fight Reliance’s Land Grab.

Reliance has also grabbed about 10,000 hectares of land for SEZ in Pen Tehsil of Raigad district in Maharasthra. The villagers now know fully well they are pitted against the formidable adversary - the giant Reliance, which has claimed 25,000 hectares land for its own SEZ in Haryana. It is spreading its wings in textiles, power, contract farming, medicinal herbs, sugar industries and retail stores. They realize that the Company has enormous sway over the political, bureaucratic establishment and the media. Yet in Raigad too farmers have declared that they will not allow their land to be taken away.

This land grab will totally pauperize our peasantry and create a new generation of corporate zamindars. Average land holdings in India are two acres and less. To rob the small peasants of what little they have and put in the hands of giants like Reliance with Rs. 100,000 crore wealth is to create a country of disposed paupers. Land grab for SEZ’s will also aggravate the agrarian crisis by robbing farmers of their main resource - land.

The use of the outmated colonial Land Acqusition Act of 1894 to forcefully evict peasants and grab their lands for coproations violates the Constitution and the Human Rights of farmers. It also contradicts the rhetoric of trade liberalization - of getting the Government out of the market and the economy.

Land, a sacred trust is being commodified by using state muscle to deny farmers their rights and then establish corporate monopoly on land ownership. It also contradicts the purpose of the land acquisition act which was supposed to be used for acquiring land for public purpose, not for private gain and monopoly ownership rights. Worst of all, it undoes India’s land reforms. Zamindari was the colonial mode of maximizing revenue from the land. Once India’s land was usurped, the collection of public revenue became a prime concern of the colonizing powers. Someone needed to be taxed. Before the British came to India produce was taxed but the land itself was not. To collect the tax, the British needed proprietors of land who would collect rents from the cultivators and pass it on to them. How could this be done?

The answer was extremely simple - create landlords. The task of finding the landlords was not too difficult - who better than those who already were used to collect money from the peasants for the state? The Zamindars formed the majority of the new landlords.

A motley collection of rural overlords in late 18th century Bengal conveniently and misleadingly went under the single name of zamindar. To compound the confusion, these varied elements in the Bengal countryside bore no resemblance to the village zamindars. The Bengal zamindars encompassed at least four separately identifiable categories; the old territorial heads of principalities, such as the rajas of Tippera and Cooch Behar; the great landholdeing families who paid a fixed land tax and behaved like feudatory chiefs, such as the Rajas of Burdwan, Dinajpur, Rajshahi, Jessore, and Nadia; the numerous families and who held offices for collecting land revenue over a number of generations; and revenue farmers established by the grant of Diwani in 1765.

In a bad “case of mistaken identify”’ Lord Cornwallis, the governor general, by a grand proclamation on March 22, 1793, followed up by a barrage of regulations, conferred the prized private property right in land to this diverse group of rural overlords unified only in name. And it was the unjust extraction of revenue that led to the great Bengal Famine. Zamindari abolition got rid of the conditions of famine of 1942 in Bengal by getting rid of concentration of land ownership and the inhuman diversion of the produce of the land to pay revenues. Besides the Zamindari Abolition Act, independent India also enacted land Ceiling Acts in rural and urban areas. By putting a ceiling on ownership of land, land was distributed among larger numbers of farmers, making India a land of small peasants, not rich landlords controlling thousands of acres.

These land reforms are now being undone by the anti-reform of the neo-liberal paradigm. The assets of the small farmers are being transferred to giant corporations. Zamindari is now being institutionalized through SEZ’s. Like Lord Cornwallis’ grand proclamation, hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farming land are being made the property of corporations.

West Bengal which distributed land to the tiller through operation Barga is today using police force to rob land from the tiller and create a police state. When people fight back land acquisition for Tata Motors in Singur through the Krishi Jan Raksha Committee, a plantform of nine political parties and groups, led by Trinamul Congress of Mamta Banerjee and including CPI (ML), the Party for Democratic Socialism, CUI (ML) Janmat-ul-Ulena.

In Nandigram, six farmers were killed when Bhoomi Uiched Pratirodh (Resistance to Land Acquisition) Committee resisted Land Acquisition for the Salim group in Indonesia. The Communist regime of West Bengal is fighting not just farmers but its own philosophy of land reforms based on land for the tiller. Its current philosophy has become land for corporations. In a country where 60% people depend on land, protests against land grab are inevitable.

The protests against land grab for SEZ’s have spread like wildlife. On 17.1.2002 the Government was forced to suspend new clearances worried that protests would affect its fate in the upcoming elections. The proposal of the Prime Minister to give dispossessed farmers “stock options”, is no solution. It is based on two false assumption - one that the Government has the right to violently appropriate the land of small farmers and peasants for its corporate friends wherever and whenever it wants. This is not democracy, it is corporate feudalism.

Secondly, the Prime Minister’s assumption of “stock option” in place of farmers land rights suggests that he has a world view that small farmers can be fully dispossessed and uprooted from farming, and the real wealth of farmers in their land can be replaced by crumbs in the speculative finance economy bubble. We merely have to remember how the financial bubble burst in South East. The Prime Minister has also invited Edward de Soto who promotes commodification of land to the 10th centennial celebrations of Gandhi’s satyagraha on 30th January, the day of Gandhi’s martyrdom . Soto is not just for removed from Gandhi’s ideas of Swaraj and satyagraha, his proposals infact total undermine Swaraj.

Now that the Government has blinked on the SEZ issue, it is important to return to first principles, and decide democratically, from the grassroots what does land mean to us? Who will own the land? What will it used for? Who will decide?

The future of the Indian people and Indian democracy rests on the land question. While the Government is forced to pause in its inhuman project of land grab, let the farmers and the democratic forces of the country join in evolving charter and an agenda for land sovereignty - Bhu Swaraj.





The Guide to Special Economy Zone 2008 suggest that you are not obliged to address environmental issues; “(V) freedom from environment impact assessment (EIA)”, however water harvesting is mandatory, though recycling fabric is prohibited. Waste materials must be exported from the SEZ. However, as of November 2008 new rules for the environment and production from renewable energy are under discussion.
The government is focusing on non-conventional energy sources, including wind and solar power. Various tax benefits have been given for investments in the renewable energy area.



Charter for Land Sovereignty (Bhu Swaraj) - From Corporate Hijak of Land

1. Land is the basis of our sustenance. It is a sacred trust for human sustenance and long term survival.

2. Land is not a commodity, which can be bought and sold at will in a market driven by speculative finance, which allows corporate capital to dispossess small peasants of their land and become the new zamindars (landlords).

3. Land must belong to those who till it, tend it and nurse it and for whom it is a source of sustenance. And not to those for whom it is a means of accumulating wealth and speculative gain or object of luxury resort and idle pastime.

4. Ensuring Livelihood Security and Food Security must receive over-riding priority in determing land use pattern. Diversion and destruction of fertile agricultural land for industry, housing or entertainment of the affluent must be banned.

5. Legal Ceilings on ownership and holding of agricultural land, urban land, land for mining must be restored to the original levels and enforced strictly so as to prevent the land grab by corporate capital and dispossession of peasantry inrural areas and displacement of the poor in urban areas.

6. Where private companies are allowed, in exceptional cirumstances, to have access to land beyond prescribed ceiling, farming must retain the ownership of the land and projects must be evolved in full transparency, with full democratic participation at the level of the Gram Sabha and with informed consent of the affected people in regard to the terms of such arrangement including compensation and benefit sharing.

7. The Land Acquisition Act of 1894 has become the instrument of corporate land-grab and commodification of land. The Land Acquistion Act must be amended to ensure that:

- Government does not acquire land for private companies;

- Land Acquistion serves the public purpose which should be defined to mean those purposes by which government will bring into effect the Directive Principles of State Policy under the Constitution;

- Land Acquisition:
is based on transparent, informed, democratic process;
is carried out with the contentt of the representative bodies such as
Gram Sabha;
is preceded by statutorily established procedure which will ensur open and thorough examination by independent experts and peoples’ representatives of all aspects including:

a. the availability of least displacing alternatives;

b. the minimal area requirement for a given purpose;

c. the assessment of the economic and social on all the affected categories of persons including landless labourers and cattle grazers besides the owners of the land; and

d. the environmental impact;
- Where land is acquired through public consent for public purpose, the pre- condition of such acquisition should be that dispossessed must be given land for land or failing that a compensatory package which should fully take into account the replacement value of land acquired, the compensation for the loss of livelihood and economic security, and trauma of displacement.

- Where forest or government land is acquired for industrial or mining purposes, all those traditionally dependent on such lands including especially the adivasis and dalits must be compensated for their loss of livelihood, economic security and habitat and the trauma of displacement. Determination and implementation of such compensation must be a precondition of such displacement.

8. There is no justification for the SEZ Act. Western European countries, USA, Japan and many other developing countries achieved growth without such a draconian, thoughtless and pro- corporate capital legislation. In China where it is considered to have unleashed growth, the land is not transferred to the corporates and continues to vest in the state of development without it. The SEZ Act is anti-peasantry, anti-rural poor, anti-labour and anti-environment. It will also be a huge drain on the public exchequer.
It is pro-big companies, pro-rich and pro-speculative finance capital. At best, it is intended to create islands of affluence for the benefit of a handful of rich, with no social, financial and legal accountability. At worst, it would end up in unprecedented speculation in land and real estate, only benefiting indigenous and foreign speculative capital. The SEZ Act must be scrapped lock, stock and barrel.

9. The use of violence by the state to forcefully appropriate the land of farmers has no place in a democracy and is violative of the fundamental rights of citizens guarenteed in the Constitution.

The Guide to Special Economy Zone 2008 suggest that you are not obliged to address environmental issues; “(V) freedom from environment impact assessment (EIA)”, however water harvesting is mandatory, though recycling fabric is prohibited. Waste materials must be exported from the SEZ. However, as of November 2008 new rules for the environment and production from renewable energy are under discussion. The government is focusing on non-conventional energy sources, including wind and solar power. Various tax benefits have been given for investments in the renewable energy area.

INDIA DIVIDED Vs INDIVISIBLE INDIA:
DEFENDING DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY IN TIMES OF
VIOLENCE, FEAR AND TERROR

(A.J. K. Ansari Memorial Lecture, Jamia Millia University, 3 November 2008)

- Vandana Shiva

India, the land of diversity and pluralism, the land of peace and compassion, the land of Buddha, Mahavir and Gandhi is fracturing along its diversities, and erupting into conflicts in unpredictable places.

And what is happening in India is happening worldwide – from Indonesia to Iraq, from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia, from Sudan to Nigeria.

Samuel Huntington addressed the issue in a simplistic, artificial and a historic paradigm of clash of civilizations – as if what was happening today in terms of divisions around lines of cultural diversity was a mere repetition of the crusades.

There are two major reasons why Huntington’s thesis is inadequate.

Firstly, religion was the organizing principle of society at the time of the crusades.

Economic globalization and corporate greed is the organizing principle of the contemporary world Secondly, the divisions today are not just along religious lines. They are also along lines of ethnicity, caste, sexual orientation – in fact along every diversity imaginable. To understand the phenomena of division of society today, we need to connect it to other divisions and see the common pattern and identify underlying forces and causes.

In India, 2008 saw the “Gujjar” uprising in Rajasthan, hate campaign against the North Indians led by Raj Thackeray in Mumbai, the Hindu-Christian clashes in Khandmal in Orissa and the countless bombings in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Assam. To make sense of these ever increasing conflicts and ruptures, it is futile to merely look within the space defined by narrow fragmented identities. Fragmentation identity is a consequence, not a cause.

So what is the cause of cracking up and disintegration of society? What is fuelling the culture of fear and insecurity that is erupting into social fires everywhere?

In my reading, corporate led economic globalization is at the root of the contemporary social and cultural conflicts. Globalization has created scarcity in real economy, even for a while it created fictitious financial growth.

The financial bubble bust on Wall Street and has its tremors spread across the world. But even while countries like India were having 9% growth, tirbals, peasants and the working class were loosing their land and livelihoods. The economic security of the poor has been severely eroded in the two decades of globalization policies. Besides the absolute scarcity and insecurity is the relative scarcity and insecurity due to growing inequalities and conspicuous consumption by the elite.

Insecurity breeds fear, fear fosters violence. And the violence expresses itself in multiple ways.

There is the violence of farmers’ suicides (200,000 in one decade) and the violence of terrorist attacks. And then there is the violence of multiple mutant conflicts which express themselves in terms of fragmented identities in conflict with each other, even though they are at the root conflicts over resources and livelihoods.

The Gujjars, a pastoral community have lost their grazing lands. The most recent assault on their resources and livelihood is the law enacted in Rajasthan to hand over village pastures, the village commons, to industry for growing Jatropha for biofuel. The apparent conflict was a “caste” conflict between the Gujjar and the Meena – the material basis was the loss of resources and livelihoods, and the class conflict between industry and pastoralists.

The redevelopment of Mumbai has meant the closure of mills, the sale of mill land and slums for luxury housing and shopping malls. The real conflict is between the developers and the poor who loose their homes and work. The appar ent conflict is between the Marathi Manoos” and the North Indians.Class conflicts over resources, livelihoods and jobs are mutating into cultural conflicts over identity under two simultaneous pressures – one from the bottom, the other from the top.

From the bottom, a “prionisation” of society is taking place. Prions were the deformed, self-infecting proteins that were responsible for the mad cow disease which was caused by cows being fed with feed made from dead and infected cows. Like the perverse Mad Cow feed, the perversions of a distorted greed driven globalization, is causing intolerable stresses on society. Under the stress of globalization positive, composite identities

Like the “prion”, cultural diversity is getting deformed into mutant negative identities. This is the self infection of violence we witness in community after community.

To this “prionisation” is being added the “polarization” from the top. With democratic decision making closed at the local, regional and national levels, political democracy becomes empty of content, of its core of economic democracy becomes empty of content, of its core of economic democracy. Politicians take on the politics of identity, of culture, of divide and rule, to win votes. This is what Raj Thackeray is doing in Mumbai this is what every party is doing across India.

The identity flag they carry might vary. But it is a flag that divides society, and diverts citizens from the real struggles for rights to resources and livelihoods. In this it consolidates vote banks while also protecting the class interests of these who rule and control the economy.

The struggle in Mumbai could have been about land and housing. It was diverted against North Indians. The struggle in Orissa could have been about tribal rights. It was diverted against Christians. The struggle in Rajasthan could have been about the rights of pastoralists to see grazing lands on the village commons. It was reduced to a competition for reservation of jobs between the Gujjars and the Meena.

Behind every pseudo conflict based on identity, is a real conflict based on resources and livelihoods. And under globalization such conflicts are bound to increase because globalization is predatory on ecosystems, resources and livelihoods.

The collapse of the financial bubble which globalization created gives us an opportunity not just to correct the flaws of a globalization based on greed it provides us an opportunity to create peace by defending diversity and democracy.

“Culture Wars” are not about culture. They are about the loss of economic security and erosion of economic democracy. The ‘Seeds of Peace’ lie in economic justice and economic democracy just as much as the seeds of violence conflict lie in economic inequality and economic dictatorship.

Two signs; one in New York 1929 and one in London 2008



PDF for Learning Book #003, [Poster Dwelling; Land, Market and Economy], Delhi, 2008

Text: Start Here including some drawings

Text: Delhi’s Urban Dilemma by Arunava Dasgupta



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