Transition : an empty proposition?

Resistance to land grabs and accelerated urban expansion has been a hallmark of recent peasant struggles in West Bengal. One thinks of the confl icts that unfolded at Singur and Nandigram in 2006-2007 when peasant movements successfully blocked the West Bengal government’s acquisition of village and agricultural lands for the ‘public purpose’ of establishing an automobile factory in the fi rst instance and a Special Economic Zone in the second. These struggles resounded loudly in Indian and West Bengali public life, igniting debates about primitive accumulation among Kolkata’s intellectual class and eventually contributing to the fall of the state’s longstanding Left Front government in May 2011. Elsewhere on Kolkata’s fringes, resistance to land acquisition has not been so successful. The huge area of land known as Rajarhat or New Town which sits to the city’s northeast is a barren monument to stalled peasant movements. Dotted by empty housing estates, shopping malls, special IT zones, ‘service villages’ inhabited by populations left without livelihoods, and vast stretches of arid land, Rajarhat is a site that has much to teach us about mobile styles of governing, transmutations of capital and labor, and the violent production of space that accompanies informational strategies of accumulation.