Search results

This book derives from research and fieldwork in the rural and tribal hinterland of India, particularly in the mineral rich states. It looks at the nuances of land and resource politics and summarizes the long-standing land acquisition and mining debate. It discusses the relevant theoretical arguments from inter-disciplinary perspectives and develops an argument through the case study of Singrauli, a region in Madhya Pradesh in India, that has seen various 'regimes of dispossession' in the last six decades in India. It looks at the legal and policy arguments around right to property, 'fair' compensation, public purpose and the resource curse debate, and at contested 'spaces' (left wing extremism) and resource-capital relationships.

The public sphere as conceptualised by Habermas is a bourgeois institution that had emerged in European countries as a "discursive platform " to engage in critical discussion and deliberations with the idea of delivering "common good". The institution has been replicated in many countries including India. But the institution as a whole has inherent assumptions that of the social structures of a bourgeois society. The platform that is supposed to generate "common good" is transforming into the one which almost bringing together socially unequal cultures, whereby the language of the dominant overrules the subordinate. There is no socio-political safeguard to the pluralism of the masses and hence the "common good" is decided by the motivations of private interest in place of public interest. Therefore it becomes crucially important to take a re-look at the present structure of "public sphere" in the Indian context as to how far the institution itself is democratic to deliver "common good" to the society.