By Michael Levien

The conflict between farmers and industry over land has become the greatest contradiction for capitalism in India today. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become the epicenters of “land wars,” as farmers across the country have resisted the state?s use of eminent domain to transfer their land to private companies for developing these hyper-liberalized enclaves. Based on 16 months of fieldwork researching a functioning SEZ in Rajasthan and interviews with business and government officials, this article illuminates the role of “accumulation by dispossession” (ABD) in Indian capitalism today and its political-economic consequences for rural India. While David Harvey sees ABD as a means of absorbing over-accumulated capital in the global economy, I argue that it is an extra-economic process through which states act as land brokers for capital, using eminent domain to overcome the barriers to accumulation posed by insufficiently capitalist rural land markets. In the case of SEZs, the accumulation generated by dispossession occurs through the creation of capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for IT companies and luxury real estate and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development only minimally and precariously absorbs the labor of dispossessed farmers, it creates a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that absorbs fractions of rural elite, drastically amplifies existing inequalities, and fuels non-productive and pre-capitalist economic activity. Given the minimal benefits for rural India in this model of development, farmer resistance to land dispossession is likely to continue.