Land Mafias in Liberalizing India

• In Event: 1531 - Sociological Approaches to Corruption

Abstract

In India today, the term “land mafia” is used widely and vaguely to refer to those engaged in various forms of land-related “corruption.” Mafia thus joins a constellation of terms—corruption, crony capitalism, and patronage—that are meant to signal deviations from liberal capitalism and good governance. What remains unclear is the precise sociological phenomenon to which the term “mafia” is so widely applied, and what its prevalence indicates about capitalism, state formation, and violence in contemporary India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Rajasthan, combined with analysis of court cases and newspaper articles, my project seeks to explain the structure, causes, and consequences of India's land mafias. In this paper, I advance three hypotheses: 1) that “land mafia” refers to ad-hoc and informal networks of public and private individuals that collaborate to dispossess land, but do not self-identify as “mafias”; 2) that land mafia activity is enabled not by poor governance and insufficient reform, but by neoliberal policies intended to commodify land in conjunction with a pro-business state and the social capital of diversifying rural elites; and 3) that land mafias facilitate—rather than obstruct—growth while contributing to inequality. In sum, I suggest that land mafias are informal public-private partnerships that harness social capital for economic growth. As such, they are the apotheosis of—rather than deviations from—neoliberal capitalism.

Author

• Michael Levien, Johns Hopkins University