Distribution, Acquisition and Reclamation of Land and Sustained People’s Protests and New Alliances in Rural West Bengal, India

Distribution, Acquisition and Reclamation of Land and

Sustained People’s Protests and New Alliances in Rural West Bengal, India

Since late colonial period the agrarian society of West Bengal, India has been replete with sustained people’s protests against land alienation, land concentration, and land acquisition on the one hand and for land reforms and distribution and land reclamation on the other. In the process it has borne witness to the outburst of several radical and reformative peasant movements over the decades. Significantly a vast segment of these people’s movements have got transformed and now has developed alliances with state machineries, political parties, and civil society organizations having interface with caste, religion, regionalism, and linguistic etc identities. With the increasing migration of rural labour force to the nonagricultural sector and in urban areas, fast expansion of education, road, transport, mass and social media, ICTs, etc in the rural areas the need and possibilities of new alliances both at the grass roots and with the wider society have emerged to be very explicit. These altogether have brought a new variety of emancipatory and transformative politics at grass roots. Hence against the backdrop this paper will examine the 1) roles of the populist politics in shaping new alliances for political movements in contemporary West Bengal, 2) the emerging nature of intersectionality between caste, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality etc identities in the process of realignment of rural forces, 3) emergence of new discourses, issues and practices generated out of new patterns of resistance, interactionality and alliances in this society, 4) forms of connectivity of these rural movements with the related local, regional, global movements.