Chapter 1 Introduction

This thesis is about KHEP. But not how this HEP would generate electricity in Kashmir，or not just focused on who will get that electricity and who will not; rather, it explains theunpleasant side of KHEP in particular and HEPs construction in Kashmir in general. Itfocuses on the question of land for water grabs. The dispossession and displacementcaused by the HEPs; and the power dynamics and struggles against the land grabs. It talksabout the meanings, relations and connections of the peasants with the land, water andnatural habitat. It is about the actions, reactions to the political and elite power from thebelow. It also explains the intricacies of owning and losing the material and non-materialresources. And it does so, by understanding the people's narratives. As the narratives, lifehistories and stories are powerful tools to understand a social phenomenon. Narratives inthe village or rural context are more useful; as most of the people are illiterate and writtenrecords are often absent. Thus oral narratives provide grassroots information about thevillage happening, history，culture, change, people's actions and reactions to the changes.Therefore this thesis is about storytelling. While acknowledging that the narratives havetheir short comings, such as, "narratives are always immersed in history and neverinnocent， (Escobar 1995: 20). Nevertheless, life stories reflect the culture where they arecreated or told (McAdams, 2006). Eventhough, people's memory fade with the passage oftime, therefore people may not accurately remember the events which happened in the past,yet it is the narrative which defines, explains the embedded power relation of thedevelopment and underdevelopment, the power to decide and control and the power to ownand disown.

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Chapter 2 Land Grabs Around the World: A TheoreticalDebate

2.1 Introduction

In this chapter of the thesis，three major dimensions of the contemporary “global landgrabbing" literature are being analyzed. The section I，discusses the question of land. Thedominant assumptions about the current wave of land grabbing...its features, impacts andnarratives. The section II discusses the property rights, Actors and Power relationssurrounding land grabs and development led dispossession and displacement? Section IIIinterrogates literatures on resistance to the land and water grabs. Section IV specificallydiscusses land and water grabs grabbing literature in India. And finally the section Vprovides the concluding remarks about the existing literature on global land grabs, the gapin the existing literature and the conceptual framework of this thesis.

2.2 Global Land Grabs: A Conceptual Debate

Without any doubt, land is the most complex topic to understand. There are resourcesattached to it，(for example, water, minerals, steel, gold etc.), people attached to it, lawsattached to it，and emotions and identities attached to it. That is what is echoed in DerekHall's recent book，‘Land’（2012)，which provides an ideal entry in setting the stage inunderstanding this complex topic 'land' and struggles over it, which Hall describes arebased on three principles: land as territory, the emotions and cultural and historicalrelations associated with it; land as a property, the ownership and access to land; and the‘Regulation，，the ways in which land use is regulated.The phrase ‘global land grabbing’ has been used to describe large-scale transnationalland acquisitions and deals that have been taking place, since the 2007-2008 food pricehike, for 'large scale-production, export of food and bio-fuels, increasing urbanizationrates' by the companies or state-backed companies of the South, mainly China, India，Gulfcountries, and South Korea, that grab lands mainly in the African continent to secure foodfor their own nations (Borras Jr. and Franco, 2010; Cotula，2009). Numerous scholars havesince then examined the issue of land grabbing from different perspectives. For example,De Shutter (2011) from a human rights perspective, Li (2011) from a labour perspective，Fairhead et al. (2012) from a political ecology perspective, White et al. (2012) from apolitical economy perspective, Borras, et al. (2013) from a role of the State perspective,Mehta, et al. (2012) from a water grabbing perspective, and Margulis et al. (2013) from aglobalization perspective. Besides the above mentioned studies there are several otherstudies, such as Borras and Franco (2010) World Bank, (2010) Feldman and Geisler (2011), Michael Levien, (2012), Rulli et al.，(2012), which focus on the land and resource grabbingissue from different angles.

CHAPTER 3 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION OF INDIA'S POLITICAL AND ECONOMICHISTORY......... 30

3.1 Introduction ..........30

CHAPTER 4 LAND TENURE CHANGES: FROM 5? CENTURY AD TO KHEP........ 47

4.1 Introduction ........47

4.2 Hadven and Hopri.......... 48

CHAPTER 5 DEVELOPMENT INDUCED DISPOSSESSION, DISPLACEMENT ANDEMBEDDED POWER RELATIONS.......... 67 5.1 Introduction ..........67

5.2 Class Dynamics, Elite influence and Land Control ..........68

5.3 The Micro Picture of Who Gets What and How? From Haves to Have nots.......... 71

Chapter 6 Power, Politics and Struggles over Land

6.1 Introduction

It may be important to see the struggles over land and water on KHEP through the largerpolitical problem of Kashmir conflict, yet doing so here, will, however, not do justice tothe power asymmetry and agency of the poor at the grassroots level. Therefore, what isbeing stressed and mainly discussed in this chapter is the peasant's struggle against theland grabs. This is equally important due to the fact that these struggles are mundane,advocacy and lately open but non-violent in nature, which differentiates this struggle fromthe larger Kashmiri struggle. However, while putting major focus on the peasant resistance,here an attempt is made to understand the resistance provided by the external actors as well.This is done to understand how that resistance influences, shapes, affects, and strengths orweakness peasants resistance against the land grabs.Examining the literature on peasant resistance tells us right from the times of Marxuntil the Chinese revolution, peasantry was seen as passive class. Marx famously describedpeasants as ‘sack of potatoes', as he was convinced that they are incapable of galvanizingthemselves as a collective force as an agents of political change. He therefore, wasagainst passive resistance, specifically in the context of Prussia, by insisting passiveresistance as counter-revolutionary strategy of bourgeois (Hardiman, 2013). However, asHannah Arendt (1969) argues that even though Marx was aware about the role of violencein the history, but this role was to him secondary; not violence as such. He regarded theState as an instrument of violence at the command of the ruling class; but the actual powerof the ruling class did not consist of nor rely on violence. It was defined by the role theruling class played in society, or more exactly, by its role in the process of production. Itwas Frantz Fanon，and more importantly Jean Paul Sartre in preface of Fanon's book TheWretched of the Earth, who stretched further than Fanon, stating, "Irrepressibleviolence.. .is man recreating himself," that it is “mad fury" through which “the wretched ofthe earth” can “become men.’’ (Arendt, 1970: 11-12)Fanon, Sartre and other western leftist intellectuals' arguments got an arm with Chineserevolution in 1948 whereby Mao proclaimed “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun，，andthe rise of Vietnam and Cuban resistance, peasant movement, whereby peasants' demandswere taken seriously, so as to avoid peasant revolutions, and collective ‘heroic’ resistancemovements were celebrated (see, Wolf, 1969).

6.2 Lonely Battle: The Fight Against the Land Grabs

In 1994 the government of India envisioned to build Kishangaga HEP and officiallyinformed Pakistan about its plan. The initial design of the HEP about 75 meters height on962.50 acres of land was to displace 25 villages constituting 961 families, however, faced astrong resentment from some environmental groups and more importantly externalresistance from Pakistan, claiming that the HEP construction violates the IWT (see furtherdetails in the section four of this chapter). While the deliberations about the HEPconstruction were going on between the two countries, in 2000； MOU was signed betweenthe State government of Kashmir and central government for the construction of KHEP,However, as noted in the chapter four, those who were to be most affected~peasants—were not consulted or even informed. They came to know about the HEP construction in2002, when the then chief minister of Kashmir, while addressing a rally in Gurezannounced the decision. A local peasant recalls what chief minister said;He (the then chief minister of Kashmir) told us that he will give adequatecompensation for our land and houses. While addressing people here，he said: "Weneed to build a dam here to generate electricity. The HEP is for the nationaldevelopment. India will benefit from it, Kashmir will benefit from it and you thepeople will benefit from it. If you resist, we can use force to take the possession of theland and your house, better is we sort-out the issue amicably.，，(Author interview,peasant Asad lone, Hadven 2011)As the chief minister finished his talk, people in one voice raised objections about theHEP construction and stressed that they were completely against the KHEP. Reacting topeasants objection, while leaving from the venue, the chief minister reiterated thatcorporation would provide them enough compensation, but the people would be displacedand dispossessed— a cost people have to pay for the ‘national development'. The chiefminister's statement made it clear that the State was determined not only to facilitate theland grabs for capital but was ready to walk an extra mile and control the land and housesarbitrarily，with the use of extra-economic force. However, as Pakistan exerted its pressureto change the HEP design, coincided with resentment from the locals, it forced India tomodify the design of the HEP. As a result, in June 2006 India reduced the height of the HEP from 75-meters to 37-meters, which to a large extent addressed Pakistan's concerns.At the same time, now displacement of only two villages and dispossession of further threevillages from their lands was envisioned. With the design modification leading from theinitial proposal of displacement of 25 villages to the displacement of two villages, thepressure on the State and corporation against the land grabs started decreasing. Whatfollows in this section is the process of resistance of villages Hedwen and Hopri against theland grabs.

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Chapter 7 Winners, Losers and Decision Makers

7.1 Land Grabbing From the Political Economy Perspective

In the field of agrarian political economy，Bernstein (2010) puts forward four importantquestions concerning social relations of production and reproduction: (1) who owns what,(2) who does what?, (3) who gets what?, and (4) what do they do with it? Henry arguesthese four questions can be applied in different sites and scales of economic activity. Thefirst question, ‘who owns what' can be applied to understand how the means of productionand reproduction are distributed. The second question, ‘who does what' is aimed tounderstand the social divisions of labor. The third question, ‘who gets what’ inquires thedistribution of “fruits of labor，，. And finally, the fourth question, ‘what do they do with it'looks at how the distribution and uses of social product is determined by different socialrelations of production and reproduction.These four questions have become bases for the analysis of this work, however, tounderstand the power dynamics of the land politics one more critical question，'who gets todecide' was added in this work to analyze the land for water grabs in Kashmir. The reasonfor adding this question was to keep in mind the political structure of the place, which Iargue plays a crucial part in understanding the whole dynamics of land politics. In thewhole research process these five questions guided us to understand the micro picture ofland for water grabbing and the underlying narratives about the power and politicssurrounding these land grabs. Here in this concluding chapter of the thesis I come back tothese five questions, to link the micro picture of the land politics with the macro picture ofland politics.

7.2 Concluding Remarks

This study was conducted to understand the political processes surrounding land forwater grabbing by the Indian National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, and how thebenefits and costs are distributed among the actors. Besides examining the strategies andnarratives adopted by the State, corporation and the elite's to justify or facilitate land grabsthe purpose of the study was also to underline the strategies and motivations of differentactors to support or resist the land grabs. No less an objective of this study was to describepeasant strategies and responses to land grabs, and how they galvanized support from civilsociety and media.. During the course of study it came to the fore that although most of the literatureproduced so far on global land grab gave too much emphasis to quantification of the landgrabs and/or focused on land grabs in specific regions —Africa- however, it did elaborateupon the role of different actors，especially the State, corporate and other power houses-including institutions and elites. What was revealed, even though the existing researchfocus on the power dynamics of land deals，however, most of these literatures miss the linkbetween the political structure and resistance. In the mainland India scholarship on landgrabs has been mostly confined on special economic zones, ignoring the land grabs lead bythe State agencies/corporations. In the context of Kashmir it is established with asubstantial degree of certainty that the peasantry in Kashmir negates the casual framing oftreating peasants as monolithic community indifferent to and isolated from other identities.The peasants here not only collectively exert their rights and fight to get their land specificproblems addressed like a 'community,- 'peasant community'- but they also associatethemselves as core members of the larger Kashmiri community, who take part in the"larger struggle"—Independence from India.

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