I don't know where to begin to summarize this it has so much intrigue where the stake runs into the multi-billions. And Pierre Omidyar is right in the middle of it. This land scheme is right out of the playbook of ultra-neoliberal economist Hernando De Soto who contends that land titling is the magic wand to lift poor nations out of poverty through legal systems establishing (private) property rights. It's another iteration of enclosure.
The deadly land policies planned by Modi’s advisers and the links to Ukraine and Honduras
Aditya Velivelli
4 comments:
Rule of the oligarchs.
I don't know anything about the land issues in India but gathered from some of Pavlina's articles that rural villages may have some sort of communal farming activities? (I say that because some of the Indian JG projects involved farm projects and why would a JG do work on a farm unless it was communal?)
Sounds similar to the English and European movement to take away the peasant's right to use common land for his personal crops & livestock. At that time it was about reducing the ability of peasants to grow their own food so the peasants would be forced to work for wages instead.
Like yourself, Dan, I know nothing about land issues in India. In fact, I know nothing about India. Period.
But when Indian PM Modi visited Australia this month he made a splash among the local free-marketeer mob. He was also given a rock-star reception by (allegedly) the local Indian community, which was object of extensive media coverage. You know, the same kind of over-the-top reaction teenage girls have to a boys band visiting town.
If you ask me, I couldn't tell why the whole thing seemed so fake to me. But, god knows, the thing was definitely fishy.
Arundhati Roy has written on Indian land issues; she considered him the most militaristic and aggressive candidate, whose nomination even was a tragedy.
This reminds me of the scariest website I ever saw, more than 10 years ago.
Have no idea why I was looking deep in the website of a title insurance company. The page mildly observed that most of the land in the world was owned and farmed by people like Indian peasants, who did not have modern style titles, if they even existed in their country.
It went on to talk about practices like those in many O. Henry stories about bad guys who stole widders & orfans land by corrupt shenanigans at Texan land registries. So the company then said, rather baldly, something like 'If you're a bazillionaire, who wants to steal large parts of whole countries, we want to be your Title Insurance Company!'
The big problem is that the bad guys still think big and plan ahead, and the restofus don't any more.
This is just a different and somewhat more sophisticated form of conquest.
It's justified by "growth," that is, GDP per capita that is assumed to show that the society is growing wealthier overall (trickle down).
This is only the case if the informal economy is assumed not to exist and not to produce anything of actual value, since in the neoliberal paradigm actual value is only that which shows up on income statements and balance sheets, as if recording something actualizes it.
It's just BS to rationalize land grabs.
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