Suchergebnisse

This is a comprehensive account of the post-independence history and politics of Gujarat, using a macro, long-term perspective. It examines the co-existence of economic liberalism and political illiberalism in the state and analyses its relevance to India's growth story.

ABSTRACTLand is unfixed. Qualitative research in India shows humans physically reconfiguring, legally redefining, politically relabelling and discursively re‐imagining land in growth‐ and investment‐led policies. The state is a key actor in the material and conceptual unfixing of land, and its re‐fixing to emerging developmental imaginations. But land is not just a territorial container for the implementation of policy. Rather, it routinely stretches the boundaries of state authority. In the fieldwork on which this article is based, unfixed, multi‐dimensional land emerges as contested access, social and political territory making, possession that goes beyond the legality of property, and more. As unfixed land extends beyond the boundaries and authority of the state, the state too is stretched in projects of land's unfixing and re‐fixing. This state is revealed as porous, and with a criss‐crossing of social relationships that draw out its institutional bounds into a world of moonlighting officials, revolving doors, and shadowy actors and transactions over unfixed land. The result of this co‐productive interaction is the unfixed state of unfixed land.

As states concentrate their developmental capacities in space, the sub-national scale has emerged as a focal point of policy-making in India. The rescaled spatiality of the state is being inscribed on land. Land is the primary resource available to sub-national states to attract private investment in post-reform contexts. Yet, the promulgation of innovative policies is only the start of the space-state relationship. This paper follows rescaled state policy through to its reception and appropriation by business, community and family networks that operate in the real estate industry, which is a major land user. Dynamic multi-dimensional spatial relations involving scales and networks do not engage with a staid, centralised, formal state. Instead, real estate firms work with a state that is itself networked, and that straddles formality and informality, as well as shadows. India's land economy is animated in this teeming space of state, scale and networks.