Search

Why do regimes that have been traditionally and ideologically opposed to liberal policies adopt neoliberal policies of industrialization? Why do these regimes not abandon courting the big private investors to set up industries, in spite of popular protests in the villages against acquisition of land for these industries? This dissertation tries to answer the above questions with respect to recent developments in the Indian province of West Bengal, which has been ruled by a democratically elected Marxist government for the last thirty years. These questions have been addressed in the context of China and other Asian economies, which are ruled by authoritarian regimes. The significance of looking at the West Bengal case is that it has a democratically elected regime with a considerable populist credential, especially in terms of undertaking redistributive land reforms in the villages. Thus external pressures of a global and national economy and elitist urge to industrialize are important but inadequate explanations for a parliamentary Marxist regime's adoption of neoliberal industrialization policies. Hence, this dissertation explores citizenship and moral claims on the state based on the self-understanding of the villagers formed within a social field structured as much by democracy, development and land reforms as by transnational influences and forces. I argue that the government’s drive for industrialization and the protests against land acquisition have to be understood within the context of this complex field of social relations and distinctions in the villages that crucially depend upon both land and non-farm employment. By looking at this social field, the dissertation complicates the images of protests and "peasants" which, viewed from afar, appear to be anti-neoliberal, anti-developmental, anti-industrial or anti-globalization. Therefore, this dissertation is also a critical reflection on the "distance" that pervades the urban activists' and state's perceptions and representation of the "rural" and the "peasant".