Dislocation and Resettlement in Development

Anjan Chakrabarti, Anup Kumar Dhar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135255930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Challenging the more conventional approaches to dislocation and resettlement that are the usual focus of discussion on the topic, this book offers a unique theory of dislocation in the form of primitive accumulation.

Interrogating the 'reformist-managerial' and 'radical-movementist' approaches, it historicizes and politicizes the event of dislocation as a moment to usher in capitalism through the medium of development. Such a framework offers alternative avenues to rethinking dislocation and resettlement, and indeed the very idea of development. Arguing that dislocation should not be seen as a necessary step towards achieving progress - as it is claimed in the development discourse - the authors show that dislocation emerges as a socio-political constituent of constructing capitalism. This book will be of interest to academics working on Development Studies, especially on issues relating to the political economy of development and globalization.

1 Debates on dislocation, compensation and resettlement

What does our approach contribute?

Conflicts and wars among humans and also natural calamities have been the cause of dislocation since time immemorial. However, the advent of ‘development-connected dislocation’ as a global phenomenon is relatively new, having gathered particular force since the advent of the industrial revolution. What is stunning about these forms of dislocation, economic or otherwise, is the momentous scale on which they appear. Because of its disturbing forms and its momentous scale, dislocation had come to occupy a central position in policy debates and in politics by the end of the twentieth century, and threatens to remain so in this century. However, it is also true that ‘while people pushed out of their homes by an earthquake or war may be favorably viewed by the media or international aid agencies, the victims of development-induced dislocation frequently win no such sympathy. This is so despite the fact that the negative effects of development-induced dislocation may be every bit as grave as those faced by people displaced by other forces’ (Robinson 2004).

Why? The answer seems to reside in the positive value that is attached to development-connected dislocation. While the term development started to be deployed in the 1940s, its genealogy can be traced to colonialism/‘the civilizing mission’ (Escobar 1995). From the colonial period to the post-colonial period, a belief has gathered strength that dislocation in the present era is paradoxically contributing to growth and to the ultimate development of society. This understanding of development-as-growth emanating out of initial moments of dislocation has reached the proportion of a consensus among the mainstream community of development thinkers including policy makers. At times, even activists structure their language of resistance over dislocation in terms of this consensus. Against this consensus, there have also been sceptics, who have argued against the positive value attributed to development-connected dislocation; they have also portrayed dislocation and, by default, development that causes dislocation as unethical and unjust. It is to this myriad, contested and divided space of development-connected dislocation that the book is dedicated.

While the book focuses on the sources, forms, policies and solutions of development-connected dislocation, it is worthwhile gauging its importance by briefly recognizing its scale. As is evident from the huge empirical literature that has surfaced, the scale of development-connected dislocation, in both absolute and relative terms, is simply staggering (Fernandes and Ganguly-Thukral 1989; Oliver-Smith 1991; Ganguly-Thukral 1992; McCully 1996; Stein 1998; Dwivedi 1999; Cernea 1999; Parasuraman 1999; Asif 2000). In the era of liberalization and globalization, the expansion of the private sector in a big way has not only increased demand for land, but has also changed somewhat the manner of its expropriation; there has been a further turn towards privatization of property – privatization of land, water bodies, forests, hills and mountains, and minerals deep inside ‘mother earth’. This means more dislocation in the livelihoods of those displaced and also a tectonic shift in the social landscape of affected societies.

Here is a rough estimate. The World Commission on Dams (WCD) has shown that, due to large dams alone:

nearly 40–80 million people have been displaced worldwide. In China alone by the late 1980s some 10.2 million people were officially recognized as ‘reservoir resettlers’. Unofficial estimates by Chinese scholars suggest that the actual number is much higher (China Report 1999). All these figures are at best only careful estimations and include mostly those whose homes and/or lands were flooded by water reservoirs; millions more are likely to have been displaced due to other aspects of dam projects such as canals, powerhouses, and associated compensatory measures such as nature reserves.

WCD (2000: 1)

Taking off from a number of reports and works,¹ an ActionAid paper suggests that planned development in India immediately after independence, especially the growth of core sectors such as power, mining, heavy industry and irrigation, displaced at least 30 to 50 million people; only about 25 per cent of this number was resettled and the rest either died or took the road to poverty. If urban dislocation is included, the figure would increase further (Fernandes and Paranjpye 1997: 6); and all this took place in the name of the national interest and ‘for the ultimate good of all’ –

If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country …

Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking to villagers who were to be displaced by the Hirakud dam, 1948, in Roy (2001: 47, 263)²

Moreover, enough evidence exists to suggest that government figures across countries greatly underestimate the number of dislocated people (Ganguly-Thukral 1992; Cernea 1996; McCully 1996). Whether due to the setting up of dams, industrial platforms or industrial enterprises, the main losers in development projects are those existing far away from the urban hub with forms of life that are quite different. To highlight the relative effects of dislocation, Arundhuti Roy shows that, following dam-related development projects, a:

huge percentage of the displaced are Adivasis (57.6 per cent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar dam). Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it’s about sixty per cent. If you consider that Adivasis account for only eight per cent and Dalits another fifteen per cent of India’s population, it [is as if] India’s poorest people are subsidizing the lifestyle of the richest.

Roy (2001: 62); see also Fernandes and Paranjpye (1997: 18–19)

Other than affecting the disadvantaged in the ethno-racial and caste hierarchy, effects of dislocation have affected gender relations too, resulting in the ‘relative deprivation of women’. Following dislocation, women more often than not lose informal or customary rights and control over resources. They are also subjected to male bias in the design and implementation of any rehabilitation package and that includes differential treatment in the determination of compensation packages (compensation packages tend to favour male losers and landowners who are usually male) (Colson 1999; Mehta and Srinivasan 1999; Mehta and Gupte 2003). Consequently, resulting from dislocation and the andro-centric bias associated with the compensation/rehabilitation package, the disempowerment and subordination of women tends to deepen; also resulting from the andro-centric bias, the qualitative specificity of the loss that women suffer due to dislocation is usually missed by policy makers. Thus, the importance of development-connected dislocation can be gauged not simply from the absolute scale of its staggering effect (epitomizing violence, disempowerment and marginalization). One must also account for the differential impacts within the groups of dislocated (keeping differentials of gender, caste, etc. in mind) and also between the dislocated as a whole (the losers) and the developers (the gainers).

Across the globe, from Asia to Africa to Latin America and at times even in the heartland of the so-called North, the absolute and relative scale and effects of development-connected dislocation have catapulted dislocation to a vexed contemporary issue. It has forced a debate on its causal origin (whether development should be held responsible for dislocation or not) and the remedy/solution (whether overcoming the effects of dislocation require a socio-political movement or is a policy-based solution enough).

In order to understand the approach of nation-states to development-connected dislocation, it would be revealing to peruse the response of the Indian state. Two features stand out in this response: (i) the domain of policy remains bureaucratized in a top-down manner that works by, comprehensively or partially, excluding the targeted populace from the varied instances of policy making: and (ii) (capitalist) development is accepted as inevitable and, hence, by default, dislocation as a side-effect of that particular form of development is considered inevitable; dislocation is to be tolerated; at most, its ill-effects are to be tempered through compensation–resettlement, but the pursuit of the calendar of development must continue unabated.

While there is no national resettlement policy, land acquisition in India is covered by a national law, the 1894 Land Acquisition Act (LAA) and its subsequent amendments.³ The LAA allows land acquisition in the national interest for water reservoirs, canals, plants, fly-ash ponds, transmission lines and highways to be carried out by the individual states, in accordance with its provisions. In post-independence India, it was also used by the state to deliver land to developers and enterprises (state and private) to set up industrial enterprises. Under the LAA, compensation is in cash for the loss of land, and also for other productive assets (such as standing crops, fruit and fodder trees), house plots and residences. Thus, within the ambit of the LAA, development (and by default dislocation) remains unquestioned. In the meantime, many organizations in India have lobbied for a national rehabilitation policy. Through these movements against dislocation, various issues such as the right to livelihood, the right to housing, the right to education as well as customary rights of communities have resurfaced. The Ministry of Rural Areas and Employment formulated the National Policy for the Resettlement and Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons and drafted the Land Acquisition Bill in 1998. The policy recognized the need to rehabilitate people. Unfortunately, the bill locates rehabilitation in the statute book by mentioning that, where a law exists, those eligible for rehabilitation should make a claim for it. In the process, no fully fledged law came into existence. The National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation for Project Affected Families, 2003, was gazetted on 17 February 2004. The Union Cabinet gave its approval for the National Policy on Rehabilitation and Resettlement, 2007, to replace the National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation for Project Affected Families, 2003. Only three states, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab, had state-wide resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) policies. Other states have issued government orders or resolutions, sometimes sector-wide but more often for specific projects. Two national companies, the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) and Coal India Limited (CIL), have also completed and issued R&R policies consistent with World Bank recommendations. In all these sketchily drawn policy turns, two aspects stand out: (i) (capitalist) development remains legitimate and, by default, development-connected dislocation remains unquestioned; (ii) the targeted populace remains outside the domain of policy making.

The context, objective and framework of this book

There has been an explosion of empirical literature on dislocation, almost akin to an ‘incitement to discourse’ (Foucault 1990). Without cutting in any way into their importance, we want to state clearly that it is not our area of concern in this book. Of course, we do remain informed by such studies. However, in this book, we look more into the conceptual framework that underlines such studies. In fact, as we understand, many of these empirical studies operate with(in) a particular framework, a framework that serves as the background of such studies; each study is coloured by a perspective. As of now, the dominant framework remains that of ‘economics of compensation’ and the World Bank-led discourse on dislocation pioneered primarily by Michael Cernea. Nevertheless, such discourses seem to be so much in fashion that it threatens to fix beforehand the way we learn to talk about dislocation and to seek remedies. Overwhelmingly, these studies take either of these two approaches as the point of reference and departure in their empirical expedition. Our critical engagement in this book is thus with underlying frameworks: the frameworks of such studies; it is with frameworks concerning dislocation, particularly the World Bank’s à la Cernea’s approach; it is also with hidden perspectives. Such an engagement also has practical significance as dislocation has come to occupy one of the crucial nodes of development policy. With policy framing ultimately based on a particular understanding of dislocation, the perspective and framework adopted for viewing dislocation matters; it matters regarding the manner in which the policy makers will seek remedies. For us, certain perspectives and frameworks make certain things apparent; certain other frameworks make certain things obvious; certain frameworks miss certain things; and most importantly, certain frameworks tend to occult– occlude certain other things. Hence, the question of perspective and framework is crucial, even more crucial because new-fangled perspectives – perspectives ‘that could help describe the dominant in terms different than its own’–can make room for radically different standpoints (Achuthan 2005).

For us, critical reflection on the framework of dislocation stems from a Marxian perspective. From the adopted Marxian perspective, we try to rethink dislocation and resettlement in the context of development and offer an alternative route to contemplate the somewhat vexed issues concerning these. Because our Marxian perspective tries to think of the relation of dislocation with the logic of development and rethink resettlement in that context, it ends up queering (‘making strange the familiar’) the concept of development itself. Far from detaching the logic of development from the logic of dislocation, as is the case with the dominant approaches, we make their inalienable association the focus and locus of our discussion. More specifically, our Marxian critique of development-connected dislocation takes off ‘from the perspective of the excluded as resource’, where ‘class understood as surplus labour’ and ‘world of the third’ are the excluded resources. In the process, it helps ‘describe the dominant in terms different than its own, and also point to other possibi-lities’. Such a Marxian perspective is, for us, an ‘act of interpretation’ that puts to work a radically different standpoint (Achuthan et al. 2007: vii).

The Marxian perspective on development-connected dislocation builds on four sources: (i) the class-focused Marxian theory of economy, transition, development and hegemony that, unlike and in opposition to the determinism and historicism of the modes of production approach (an approach that is paradigmatic of historical materialism or of classical Marx-ism), inaugurates a non-determinist and non-historicist discursive terrain; (ii) Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation which, in our view, put forward the first methodical theory of dislocation even though it has since remained remarkably absent from the mainstream discussion on dislocation; (iii) the post-developmentalist approach that helped turn our attention to the ‘cognitive enslavement’ that is peculiar to colonialism, an enslavement marked by ‘orientalism’, an enslavement that is not only a feature of the ‘civilizing mission’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but of the development discourse of post-independence societies such as India as well; and (iv) the empirical literature on dislocation, mentioned earlier, that has offered us valuable insights into what emerges as the ‘observable phenomenon’ in a study of dislocation, what is internalized into any explanation of causes and forms of dislocation, and also what is missed and what is occulted–occluded within any proposed theory of dislocation and resettlement. While none of these sources is sufficient for explaining dislocation, they are combined in our work through their expansions and their displacements, and also through the introduction of new concepts; such a move helps to shape an altogether different theory of development-connected dislocation and of resettlement.

From third world to world of the third

One concept that plays a particularly crucial role in our examination of development-connected dislocation is that of world of the third. World of the third as conceptually different and distinct from the given of third world; world of the third as invoked to differentiate the ‘space of dislocation’ from the space marked by the category ‘third world’. World of the third as produced out of a Marxian theorization of (global) capitalism, where world of the third is that which is outside the ‘circuits of (global) capital’;⁴ whereas third world as produced out of an orientalist understanding of the South is that which is the lacking underside of Western modern industrial capitalism. One is the outside; the other is the lacking underside. What is this space, this form of life that is getting dislocated? Is it the outside of (global) capitalism? Or is it the lacking underside? If it is the outside, perhaps it needs to be valued; why not – even taken care of. If it is the lacking underside – retrograde, backward and definitionally poverty ridden – it is perhaps not too unfair to displace–dislocate it, and also dispense of it for the larger cause of development–progress.

In the hegemonic discourse of development, third world comes to stand in for the category of the retrograde Southern ‘local’; and the hegemonic can then define development in terms of a certain transition of third world, a transition bordering on its ultimate dissolution. Once hemmed in by the category third world, once incarcerated within its infinite reiteration, one loses sight of an outside; one loses sight of the world of the third. Enslaved cognitively within the category third world, one does not get to appreciate the possibility of an outside to the circuits of global capital, where the world of the third is such an outside. Instead, what awaits us as third world is a devalued space, a lacking underside that needs to be transgressed–transformed–mutilated in the name of development. Contained cognitively by the category third world, there is no escape from the ‘truth’ perpetuated by the hegemonic that devel-opment-induced dislocation is inevitable. Tragically, even those who oppose the hegemonic discourse of development remain incarcerated by the category of third world; the only difference is that they would want to hold onto it in a somewhat sympathetic mould rather than see it wither away as part of a developmentalist imperative.

Building on our earlier work (Chakrabarti et al. 2008a, 2008b, 2009; Chakrabarti and Dhar 2008b, 2008c), we seek to contest this ‘truth’ and do so through the invocation of the concept ‘world of the third’, which is, in turn, irreducible to the experience-occluding concept ‘third world’. Third world is that category through which the worldview of the world of the third is occlu-ded–occulted from the discursive terrain so that the development logic can function unabated. The secreting out, the repudiation, the foreclosure of world of the third is achieved through the paradoxical foregrounding of the third world, such that world of the third is talked about as the third world.

For us, the phenomenon of dislocation visualized from the perspective of the world of the third appears very different from that visualized from the perspective of the third world. From the perspective of the world of the third, from the perspective of this resilient, this conceptually immutable space, this ‘state of exception’, this exception to the ‘camp of global capital’,⁵ dislocation is evil; dislocation is a problem; it is a process of dismantling and eroding forms of life and possibilities of living that thrive outside and beyond the circuits of global capital, that throw up principles different from capitalism’s internal principles and its associated bio-political social life. While from the perspective of the third world, dislocation is a necessity, at most a necessary evil.

In tandem with the four sources mentioned earlier, distinguishing the world of the third from the third world is crucial for de-familiarizing the given ideal of development and also for taking the imagination of development–dislocation– resettlement to an altogether different terrain, an alternative terrain. While even the non-determinist and the non-historicist Marxian methodology does not allow a claim to a theory of dislocation as being singularly ‘true’, nevertheless, its quite unique perspective sensitizes us to effects and possibilities that remain purloined in the existing literature on dislocation, and which hopefully would help to further enrich the already growing understanding of the topic, both epistemologically and ethico-politically.

Before putting down the contour and the crux of the rethinking of development– dislocation to be discussed in the book, it would be ...