Aheli Moitra
The land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement bill in India is now closer to becoming an act than it ever was. The bill struggled its way through six years of deliberations around the single most valuable prize today: land. The state needs land, industry needs land and the people need land. The attempt, thus, for the past years since industry giants like South Korea’s POSCO tried to devour land in Odisha for its $ 1.2 billion steel project, has been to keep justice at the core of the bill. Justice for the people, that is.
And one of the points this justice seeks to achieve is to set up a process that allows for a direct contract between a company that needs the land to make its investment and the land owner. People could now be in a position to negotiate their entitlements directly, ideally gaining a right to economic self-determination. The business community, no doubt, is unhappy about the proposition to be taken off the government life-support it received up until now. Big capital and industry throughout much of capitalism’s history has been able to keep the government on its side, thereby weakening rights for people giving rise to vast inequality and injustice.
Take the case of African nation Mozambique, for instance. Like the rest of Africa, this country is agriculturalist. Its land rights as per customary law were communal in nature, land believed to ultimately belong to the community, not the individual. And then, European colonization (Portuguese in this case) happened to Mozambique, expropriating land rights to the “sovereign authority” of the Crown. Shrewdly, precious land was allocated for colonial investments, while some was left for people to “freely” practice “indigenous land rights” on. When Mozambique gained independence, all land was taken over by the State (not to be construed as a ‘community’), all farmlands nationalized.
For Mozambique, this system did not, and could not, work, finally giving way to the Land Law of 1997. Though incorporating ideas of customary right to land, the Law ultimately bestows upon the State the power to decide what use the land in the country will be put to. Privatization becomes the prerogative of the State. Today, the resource rich Mozambique’s people are drowning in poverty and malaria while American companies have their hands deep in their cookie jar. As the companies make profit worth billions of dollars, Mozambique will get couple of those billions as royalty which will find its way into individual pockets. This is Mozambique’s development.
The Naga people of Nagaland could smile smug at both India’s bill on land acquisition and Mozambique’s case. While the former struggles to create a sustainable model of land rights that is just to the people, the latter has not been able to frame them in a way that prioritizes people over State. For the Nagas, both are taken care of, at least in Nagaland. People have the ultimate right over land, and unlike in Mozambique, privatization and poverty have not run havoc.
For the State of Nagaland, however, the Naga sense of rights is nothing to be smug about. According to political and bureaucratic authority, it has left the Naga people underdeveloped. People have now become the “selfish” party in the dynamic between State and people, and the ultimate model of rights that the world seeks is apparently a hindrance to “progress”. What progress when existing infrastructure that has nothing to do with land ownership continues to rot? What progress when the same principle that guarantees land rights is used as a tool to hold back women’s participation in politics?
By making land ownership out to be a “hindrance to development”, the State has shown clear lack of imagination and will. Naga people, on the other hand, have continually asked for abnormal land rates because land here cannot be understood in terms of the rural-urban principles that apply to land in, say, Maharashtra. Rates do not inflate as per the same norms, and solutions of compensation or rehabilitation cannot be the same. To avoid becoming a Mozambique, the State needs to look up principles of justice and reparation in cases of land expropriation in the Naga areas where land is more than a piece of personal property—it is attached to the individual’s sense of being in the community and society.
For feedback and ideas, write to the author at moitramail@yahoo.com
