“What difference does it make to them whether Lord Reading is the head of the Indian government or Sir Purshotamdas Thakordas? What difference for a peasant if Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru replaces Lord Irwin!” — Shahid Bhagat Singh, 19311Bhagat Singh, “To Young Political Workers.” February 2, 1931, marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/1931/02/02.htm. Bhagat Singh was an anticolonial revolutionary martyred by the British in 1931 at 23 years of age.
IN DECEMBER 2025, the Union Home Minister of India, on a visit to the Bastar region of the state of Chhattisgarh in Central India proudly proclaimed that Indian security forces had killed 287 left-wing militants and arrested 1,000 people since January 2024.2Ashutosh Sharma, “Chhattisgarh Claims it is Winning against Naxals: But the Victory Comes at the Cost of Tribal Lives and Rights,” Frontline, January 2, 2025. While their region is home to armed insurgency groups, social activists and anti-mining groups have expressed concerns about the increasing number of extrajudicial executions. According to an international solidarity statement, by May 8, 2025, the number of victims of state violence in the region had increased to 450 and included children as young as six months.3Jamhoor, “International Statement Condemning Escalating State Violence on India’s Indigenous Adivasi Communities in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, India,” May 21, 2025, tinyurl.com/2st2zanj.
The region of Bastar hosts 2.7 million people, most of whom belong to Adivasi communities: the Gonds, Halba, and Muriya tribes.4Many Indigenous tribes in India refer to themselves as Adivasis (Original Inhabitants) as a form of asserting their identity and culture. They are categorized by the state as Scheduled Tribes, derived from a colonial classification that criminalized forest dwellers. It hosts seven districts in the state and covers thirty-three thousand square kilometers of biodiverse tropical forests and hill territories rich in coal, iron, tin, and other metals and minerals. On paper, the Adivasis of the region have the right to free, prior, and informed consent for land use change, and the right to self-governance under the Fifth Schedule of India’s Constitution, the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996, and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006.
Yet, despite their consistent opposition to mining in the region, the Indian State has repeatedly granted mining licenses to various companies and encouraged privatization and commercialization of the land and water commons. Rather than receive protection from the Indian State, forest dwellers, who have lived in their forests for generations, are forced to take on the mantle of environmental defenders.
The Bastar example is one of many stories of conflict in India and across the world. According to Global Witness, an organization that documents the links between human rights abuses, environmental destruction and conflict, from 2012 to 2024 at least 2,253 environmental and land defenders were murdered globally.5This may be a gross underestimation as they had recorded only five deaths in India for 2024. Countless others face violence and repression for their traditional ways of life dependent on forests and other natural commons, and for defending their land from colonial and imperialist forms of development and conservation.
Nature may be fundamental to their social reproduction that requires consumption of goods and services, individual and community care, and constitutes cultural and social wellbeing.6C. Naidu, “Overcoming Climate Blah Blah Blah: A (Feminist) Radical Political Economy Assessment of Reproducing Life Under a Climate Crisis,” Review of Radical Political Economics 58, no. 2 (2026): 357–63. The global frontier economy—the search for cheap raw materials, land, labor, and energy—attempts to dispossess under different histories, institutions, and class interests with varied levels of success.7Jason Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation (Berlin: LT Verlag, 204), 285-314. Michael Levien refers to these attempts as “regimes of dispossession,” which fundamentally rely on the power of the state.8Michael Levien, “Reconstructing Regimes of Dispossession,” Globalizations 22, no. 8 (2025): 1473–87.
The attempts at dispossession enabled by imperialist infrastructure represent an acute crisis of social reproduction.
For custodians of land and other commons, the attempts at dispossession enabled by imperialist infrastructure represent an acute crisis of social reproduction—of material wellbeing, community, and ontologies—and fuels their resistance. In this essay I offer India as one example in which the colonial past morphs into a brown version of itself as Bhagat Singh’s quote in the epigraph foretells.
Forests and the Frontier Economy
The British administration passed the Indian Forest Act, 1878 (and its various amendments) and the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, which established eminent domain over the vast swathes of arable, grazing, forest, and common land in India. This was done without fully surveying land; according to the Forest Survey of India these areas made up 66 percent of the country’s total geography in 2003.
Unable to fully comprehend the complex individual and community land and forest rights, community regulations, and use patterns that did not fit into individualist notions of property rights, the British deemed them illegal. These policies enabled the colonial administration to facilitate resource extraction and surplus generation for British firms. It led to de jure dispossession of a significant proportion of forest dwellers whose livelihoods and communities are intertwined with India’s agrarian economy; and it led to numerous rebellions by peasants and forest dwellers.
After 1947, the newly independent Indian state attempted to tackle the devastation of economic stagnation and severe underdevelopment wreaked by the British. Economic policies emphasized the development of a domestic bourgeoisie that would facilitate (capitalist) growth, increase standards of living to alleviate the most immiserating conditions, counter uneven development, and attempt to shed the weight of peripheral dependence on core capitalist economies.
Import-substitution industrialization was further undertaken to protect domestic capital and develop an internal market. This period was characterized by state planning, high levels of state investment (particularly in largescale infrastructure), and state intervention that diverted scarce resources to large private capital.
Mining, dams (described as “temples of the new age”), and largescale industrial development led to land dispossession and displacement of people.9Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Temples of New India (8 July 1954),” The Nehru Archive, July 8, 1954. A stageist understanding of capitalist development viewed the accompanying immiseration as part of the agrarian transition required to fulfill the promise of growth and development and justified it in the interest of the nation—the supposed greater good. The first dam system on the Bhakra and Nangal rivers, the foundation for which was laid in 1954, submerged fertile lands and homes of approximately thirty thousand families in 371 villages. Many of these have yet to be adequately compensated or rehabilitated.
The Indian state could not break free of a colonial capitalist framework for growth and development. Inspired by Euro–American “scientific forest management,” it continued to exclude forest dwellers in the guise of conservation to manage resource extraction for industrial development. In the 1970s, this authority over forests was challenged during the much-celebrated Chipko movement.
Forest dwellers in the Garhwal Himalayas put their bodies on the line to prevent largescale logging over a period of five years. Their demands included community control for more effective conservation and small-scale economic industries. Across the country regular conflicts ensued as forest dwellers continued to exercise their historic rights, customs, and regulations despite harassment as well as legal and economic violence by the state.
In the 1980s, to secure purchase from local communities, the state experimented with various social forestry and joint forest management programs. In many instances they continued to practice exclusionary conservation and promoted monoculture plantations to the detriment of prior conservation practices of forest communities but to the benefit of the domestic bourgeoisie. Building on colonial institutions, the Indian state solidified forests as part of a frontier economy available for domestic surplus accumulation and economic sovereignty.
Exclusions and the Relative Surplus Population
Global conditions associated with oil price shocks in the 1970s, an economic crisis, domestic political conditions and conditionality imposed by an IMF loan eventually led to a gradual structural transformation that limited development and the sparse poverty alleviation and redistribution programs.10Vamsi Vakulabharanam and Rahul De, “Growth and Distribution Regimes in India after Independence,” The Round Table 105, no. 6 (2016): 621–40. This set the stage for the end of the dirigiste regime and ushered a liberalized regime in 1991 with loan conditionalities driving the transition away from developmentalism.11Prabhat Patnaik and C. P. Chandrasekhar, “Indian Economy Under ‘Structural Adjustment’,” Economic and Political Weekly 30 (1995): 3001–13
While the state was content to let markets drive economic growth in the initial decade after neoliberal policies were adopted, this changed in the early 2000s when the Indian state began to play a more active role in the economy. It increased public investment in infrastructure and services in a move that was explicitly focused on creating conditions for surplus accumulation.12Vakulabharanam and De, “Growth and Distribution.”
This period was characterized by high levels of economic growth—consistently above 6 percent even accounting for slowdown between 2012 and 2014—in which corporate and foreign direct investment were high, and the exports and services sectors grew at 15 and 10.5 percent respectively.13Vakulabharanam and De, “Growth and Distribution.” The economy, nevertheless, experienced “jobless growth” between 2004 and 2010 and “job-loss growth” from 2012 to 2018 on account of increased financialization, labor market flexibility, deregulation, abrogation of public sector employment, and loss of employment in the agrarian economy.14Raveendran and K. P. Kannan, “Counting and Profiling the Missing Labour Force,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 6 (2012): 77–80; K. P. Kannan and G. Raveendran, “From Jobless to Job-loss,” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 44 (2016): 38–44, emphasis added.
Samir Amin argued that unequal exchange between the capitalist core and periphery would lead to a higher production of luxuries for the bourgeoisie in both core and periphery countries and stymie consumption goods required for the social reproduction of the working classes.15Samir Amin, “Accumulation and Development: A Theoretical Model,” Review of African Political Economy, no. 1 (1974): 9–26. This played out within the Indian economy. On the one hand this stimulated growth in private luxury consumption. On the other hand, calorie consumption fell in this period due to a calorie squeeze, and women pulled out of the labor market due to a reproductive squeeze.16Basu and A. Basole, “Fuelling Calorie Intake Decline: Household-level Evidence from Rural India,” World Development 68, (2015): 82–95; S. C. Naidu and S. Rao, “Reproductive Work and Women’s Labor Force Participation in Rural India,” in P. Singh and B. Tiwana, ed., Political Economy of Globalized India (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 197–222.
Further, the entry of transnational agribusiness and petrochemicals players benefited large farmers, but small and marginal tenant farmers and landless peasants were negatively impacted by indebtedness brought on by new agricultural technologies. This triggered a massive wave of farmers’ suicides and the increasing nonviability of agrarian livelihoods. High levels of foreign direct and other private investment resolved the agrarian question of capital (that is, funding industrial development, which was previously dependent on surplus generated by the agrarian economy), but it did not address the agrarian labor question (that is, absorption of the low wage underemployed in the agricultural sector).
The economy experienced truncated proletarianization and underdevelopment as Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, and others have argued, however, with class-differentiated impacts. High growth levels benefited the burgeoning middle class and both the rural and urban bourgeoisie; others experienced varying levels of immiseration. The comprador class and the state effectively managed the policy landscape and its narrative on the growth trajectory imposed by the global economic order.
Neoliberal policies pushed the frontier economy looking for cheap raw materials, energy, and land. This set in motion the “neoliberal regime of dispossession.”17Levien, “Reconstructing Regimes.” The state liberalized the mining sector in 1993 which unleashed a rush of private players in central and eastern India. By the year 2000, foreign private equity investments were granted automatic approval.
The state also facilitated dispossession of land from small landholders and farmers for real estate markets and speculation. This marked a shift in the role of the state from facilitating land availability for production to enabling largescale commodification of land itself.18Levien, “Reconstructing Regimes.” Opposition to dispossession was met with physical and legal force as the mineral-rich Bastar example in the introduction indicates. The Indian state launched offensives against underground left-wing armed resistance groups, located in the heavily forested regions of the country in Central and Eastern India, that drew community support by adopting an anti-landlord, anti-corporate stance. Armed resistance groups provided added justification for the violent evictions of forest dwellers and undemocratic processes involved in land transfers to domestic and foreign capital.
The state facilitated dispossession of land from small landholders and farmers for real estate markets and speculation.
Three phenomena converged: agrarian crisis, industrial development, and land dispossession. In conjunction with insufficient jobs that paid living wages, this contributed to a fairly large relative surplus population, that is, surplus relative to the needs of capital. More than 85 percent of the Indian labor force works in the informal economy without a firm foothold in formal wage work.
This relative surplus population may serve a useful role as the reserve army of labor in disciplining existing workers and providing the flexibility needed under varying degrees of capitalist investment and production, but it is much broader than the reserve army of labor. Workers may engage in wage labor to satisfy social reproductive needs but may also need to engage in a combination of petty commodity production, peasant and subsistence production, and care work.
They toggle between employment and unemployment and are subject to hyperexploitation and wage suppression. A large proportion shuttle between urban and rural spaces seasonally in search of employment.19Şahan Savaş Karataşlı, “Surplus Populations, Working-Class Struggles and Crises of Capitalism: A World-Historical Materialist Reconceptualization,” in Adrián Piva and Agustín Santella, eds., Marxism, Social Movements and Collective Action (New York: Springer International, 2022); S. C. Naidu, “Circuits of Social Reproduction: Nature, Labor, and Capitalism,” Review of Radical Political Economics 55, no. 1 (2022): 93–111. For them land, whether private marginal land, forestland, or other commons, are important means of social reproduction.
With social movements at the forefront, the state passed two historic laws: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) 2005 that guaranteed one hundred days of employment at minimum wages to all rural households, and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA), a historic legislation that aimed to reverse the historic injustice meted out to the one hundred and fifty million Adivasis and other forest dwellers (living in one hundred and seventy thousand villages covering ninety-nine million acres) whose land and forest rights had not been settled since the British-era Indian Forest Act of 1878.
The provisions for community forest rights and governance in the FRA were immediately employed by forest dwellers to thwart two large projects in forested region of Orissa in Eastern India: the British-owned Vedanta bauxite mining project in the Niyamgiri Hills and the South Korean-owned POSCO steel and mining project, which at $12 billion is touted as the largest FDI at the time.
Thus, from the outset, the Indian State sought to undermine provisions of the FRA and minimize the perceived impingement on the ability to extract resources for surplus accumulation. Opposition to such diversion of land through provisions within and outside the FRA have been met with legal and extralegal violence as in the Bastar region as well as in the Niyamgiri hills and surrounding areas, though some space for dissent was still maintained.20Abhimanyu, “The Last Stand: Niyamgiri Villagers Boycott Election to Oppose ‘Arbitrary’ Arrests, Bauxite Mining,” Outlook India, May 24, 2024.
The employment guarantee played its intended role, along with others such as the right to education and the right to information about the activities of public agencies and authorities. With the large relative surplus population these were widely perceived as necessary by the political and social movement left—as “reverse transfers” from capital to the nonproletarianized working people.21
Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007). However, these were short-lived as democratic accountability started to fray, and the country sank into authoritarian extractivism and monopoly capitalism.
Authoritarian Extractivism Meets Monopoly Capitalism
The neoliberal turn of the 1990s laid the foundation for the Indian state’s active participation in the creation of markets, socialization of risk, and mediation of land and resource acquisition for the benefit of capital. However, 2014 marked the start of a more aggressive, rapacious form of intervention by the Indian state with the election of a right-wing Hindu nationalist party that pays ideological homage to the German and Italian fascists.
Land is central to understanding India’s political economy, giving rise to multiple peasant and Adivasi uprisings, social movements, and revolutionary and reactionary armed resistance movements. In the current moment of the “regime of dispossession,” the Indian state has refashioned the neoliberal politics of the previous two decades into an intense national project that can brook little dissent or debate.
Rohith Jyothish describes this as a “political configuration in which infrastructures, regulatory reforms, investment pipelines, and public narratives are aligned to expand state–corporate control over land and resources, while simultaneously contracting the space for democratic negotiation. Extractivism supplies the material project; authoritarianism supplies the enabling political environment; and each deepens the other.”22Rohith Jyothish, “Authoritarian Extractivism in India,” Transnational Institute, February 3, 2026, tni.org/en/article/authoritarian-extractivism-in-india.
From 2014 to 2025, .44 million acres of forest land were diverted to non-forest use, and in the past five years, .24 million acres were diverted. Eighty-four percent of the latter were diverted to largescale infrastructure and energy generation.23“SOE in Figures 2026: Forest & Biodiversity,” Down To Earth, June 3, 2026, org.in/wildlife-biodiversity/soe-in-figures-2026-forest-biodiversity. A large proportion of the diverted land belongs to the Adivasis and is protected by multiple laws and constitutional provisions—but to no avail.
The state has instead employed a moral and cultural justification for extraction (purportedly for the Hindu nation), employed legal and extralegal violence by othering Adivasis, and delegitimized dissent by any social movement or political group by labeling them as anti-nationals.24Jyothish, “Authoritarian Extractivism.” The state also actively discourages the expectation that these projects will create well-paying jobs and has exhorted self-employment vending tea and samosa (fried snacks).
Extractivism supplies the material project; authoritarianism supplies the enabling political environment; and each deepens the other.
Land dispossession is supported with an abrogation of environmental and labor regulations despite the opposition of those affected and their allies. This ability to implement policies unencumbered by democratic processes has found favor among the domestic and foreign bourgeoisie. Recent data on electoral bonds, monetary instruments used to anonymously fund political parties, indicate that of the $471 million in electoral bonds between 2019 and 2024, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, received the most—nearly 55 percent of the donations; the party with the second highest donations received only 9 percent of the donations, and the rest was distributed across national and regional political parties.25“Electoral Bond Data Released: Here’s a Complete List of Donors Who Contributed Rs 10 Crore or More,” The Economic Times, March 22, 2024.
Energy, steel, and power companies were prominent buyers featured in this list.26Electoral bonds were introduced as an instrument by the ruling BJP in 2018 and withdrawn after India’s Supreme Court banned them in 2024. The list of contributors was made public after the ban. Another avenue for donations to the ruling party is the PM–CARES (Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations) Fund, which was initially introduced by the ruling party and then declared a charitable trust, thus effectively excluding it from public audit or scrutiny.
An analysis by Marxist historian Jairus Banaji of the relationship between the Indian state and capital in the 2000s reveals a story of cronyism that includes tailoring public policy and offering innumerous concessions.27The active intervention by the Indian state includes handpicking businesses and tailoring public policy to suit them. Under the BJP administration, the state has cultivated close ties with a handful of capitalists by lowering environmental and labor standards and making land acquisition easier, provided subsidies and tax breaks and guaranteed reduced scrutiny on official books.28Aaron Magunna, “India Rising? Private Capital in the Infrastructure–Geoeconomics Nexus in South Asia.” Globalizations (2026): 1–20.
In one example, the Adani Group procured state-funded infrastructure and benefited from the privatization of ports and airports. Its market capitalization grew 8,615 percent between 2002 and 2012 (when the current Prime Minister Modi was the Chief Minister of the State of Gujarat).29Christophe Jaffrelot, Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). Reportedly the Adani Group, as other crony capitalists, also influences India’s foreign policy.
Underlying these political developments is a growing concentration of market power. For instance, the share of assets of five large businesses—Adani Group, Reliance Industries, Aditya Birla, Bharti Telecom, and Tata—increased from 10 to nearly 20 percent in the period 2000 to 2024, and their combined share of profits increased from 11 to 19 percent in the same period.30Rahul A. Sirohi and Samyukta Bhupatiraju, “Monopoly Capital and Stagnation: The Case of India,” Review of Radical Political Economics, February 8, 2026.
The monopoly–stagnation thesis suggests monopoly capitalism restricts competition, leading to a downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on prices, and causes economic stagnation even if surplus is high, thus contributing to an organization of society that disadvantages working people.31Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: New York University Press, 1996). The surplus afforded by monopoly capitalism and the strong support by the current administration means that large Indian corporations also have overseas concerns in retail, luxury cars, mining, ports, manufacturing, and power.
The People under an Imperialist Regime
The global frontier economy has been successful in its quest for cheap nature, labor, raw materials, and land. Yet, the specific impacts on the working people have differed based on the “regime of accumulation,” and as Levien argues, this requires attention to the role of the state. The development regime, a reaction to India’s position in the periphery, attempted to alleviate the economic conditions of the working people.
Dispossession was accompanied by mixed impacts on employment and redistribution. Under the neoliberal regime, economic growth was strong. Loan conditionality was the trigger for liberalizing the economy, and the bourgeoisie and the political elites were able to establish the need for adhering to the world economic order imposed by the WTO and other institutions.
However, the correlation between growth and employment weakened, and the state responded to the vociferous demands of social movements by passing legislation that could have built a foundation for a social safety net. The neoliberal project thus veered away from a textbook understanding of neoliberalism due to democratic pressures.
Frequent invocations of anti-sedition laws against students, poets, civil rights lawyers, social movement activists, and regular people have had a chilling effect.
It is this inability to push through neo-liberal policies in their purest form that allowed for conditions to develop for the regime of authoritative extraction, which leaves little room for opposition to economic policies through parliamentary process or through dissent on the streets. Frequent invocations of anti-sedition laws against students, poets, civil rights lawyers, social movement activists, and regular people have had a chilling effect on the democratic participation of common people.
Meanwhile the state has been active in ensuring conditions of surplus accumulation by lowering environmental and labor standards and facilitating largescale land and forest giveaways. This satisfies its role in ensuring cheap nature is available to domestic and foreign capital. In doing so, it has abrogated its responsibilities to the wellbeing of the people, exhorting atman nirbharta (self-reliance) even during the height of the COVID pandemic and thus jeopardizing the ability of the large proportion of the labor force who belong to the relative surplus population to engage in social reproduction.
Moreover, global policy changes consequent to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration as well as the recent US aggression in Iran has had significant impact on the cost of living in India. India has been the worst affected by reduced oil supply due to the war.
The BRICS bloc also has not yet lived up to its promise to build a parallel system that would challenge Euro–American imperialism. In light of its subordinate position, the regime of authoritarian extractivism is even more concerning and makes Bhagat Singh’s quote in the epigraph very relevant to the present moment.
Yet, these attacks on livelihoods and social reproduction continue to offer the impetus for resisting the repressive political climate in India. Despite the brutality of the state, there are an estimated eleven hundred documented ongoing land and environmental conflicts which impact an estimated 14.2 million people and involve 14.55 million acres of land.32See Land Conflict Watch “National Database of Renewable-Energy Land Conflicts,” n.d., landconflictwatch.org/.
These do not include more recent protests in southern and western India against data centers proposed by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. While these may seem like isolated instances of mobilization, they also hold the potential with the framework for long-term political organizing against the acute crises of social reproduction, or the acute degradation of the conditions of life. ×
Notes & References
- Bhagat Singh, “To Young Political Workers.” February 2, 1931, marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/1931/02/02.htm. Bhagat Singh was an anticolonial revolutionary martyred by the British in 1931 at 23 years of age.
- Ashutosh Sharma, “Chhattisgarh Claims it is Winning against Naxals: But the Victory Comes at the Cost of Tribal Lives and Rights,” Frontline, January 2, 2025.
- Jamhoor, “International Statement Condemning Escalating State Violence on India’s Indigenous Adivasi Communities in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, India,” May 21, 2025, tinyurl.com/2st2zanj.
- Many Indigenous tribes in India refer to themselves as Adivasis (Original Inhabitants) as a form of asserting their identity and culture. They are categorized by the state as Scheduled Tribes, derived from a colonial classification that criminalized forest dwellers.
- This may be a gross underestimation as they had recorded only five deaths in India for 2024.
- C. Naidu, “Overcoming Climate Blah Blah Blah: A (Feminist) Radical Political Economy Assessment of Reproducing Life Under a Climate Crisis,” Review of Radical Political Economics 58, no. 2 (2026): 357–63.
- Jason Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation (Berlin: LT Verlag, 204), 285-314.
- Michael Levien, “Reconstructing Regimes of Dispossession,” Globalizations 22, no. 8 (2025): 1473–87.
- Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Temples of New India (8 July 1954),” The Nehru Archive, July 8, 1954.
- Vamsi Vakulabharanam and Rahul De, “Growth and Distribution Regimes in India after Independence,” The Round Table 105, no. 6 (2016): 621–40.
- Prabhat Patnaik and C. P. Chandrasekhar, “Indian Economy Under ‘Structural Adjustment’,” Economic and Political Weekly 30 (1995): 3001–13
- Vakulabharanam and De, “Growth and Distribution.”
- Vakulabharanam and De, “Growth and Distribution.”
- Raveendran and K. P. Kannan, “Counting and Profiling the Missing Labour Force,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 6 (2012): 77–80; K. P. Kannan and G. Raveendran, “From Jobless to Job-loss,” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 44 (2016): 38–44, emphasis added.
- Samir Amin, “Accumulation and Development: A Theoretical Model,” Review of African Political Economy, no. 1 (1974): 9–26.
- Basu and A. Basole, “Fuelling Calorie Intake Decline: Household-level Evidence from Rural India,” World Development 68, (2015): 82–95; S. C. Naidu and S. Rao, “Reproductive Work and Women’s Labor Force Participation in Rural India,” in P. Singh and B. Tiwana, ed., Political Economy of Globalized India (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 197–222.
- Levien, “Reconstructing Regimes.”
- Levien, “Reconstructing Regimes.”
- Şahan Savaş Karataşlı, “Surplus Populations, Working-Class Struggles and Crises of Capitalism: A World-Historical Materialist Reconceptualization,” in Adrián Piva and Agustín Santella, eds., Marxism, Social Movements and Collective Action (New York: Springer International, 2022); S. C. Naidu, “Circuits of Social Reproduction: Nature, Labor, and Capitalism,” Review of Radical Political Economics 55, no. 1 (2022): 93–111.
- Abhimanyu, “The Last Stand: Niyamgiri Villagers Boycott Election to Oppose ‘Arbitrary’ Arrests, Bauxite Mining,” Outlook India, May 24, 2024.
- Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007).
- Rohith Jyothish, “Authoritarian Extractivism in India,” Transnational Institute, February 3, 2026, tni.org/en/article/authoritarian-extractivism-in-india.
- “SOE in Figures 2026: Forest & Biodiversity,” Down To Earth, June 3, 2026, org.in/wildlife-biodiversity/soe-in-figures-2026-forest-biodiversity.
- Jyothish, “Authoritarian Extractivism.”
- “Electoral Bond Data Released: Here’s a Complete List of Donors Who Contributed Rs 10 Crore or More,” The Economic Times, March 22, 2024.
- Electoral bonds were introduced as an instrument by the ruling BJP in 2018 and withdrawn after India’s Supreme Court banned them in 2024. The list of contributors was made public after the ban.
- The active intervention by the Indian state includes handpicking businesses and tailoring public policy to suit them.
- Aaron Magunna, “India Rising? Private Capital in the Infrastructure–Geoeconomics Nexus in South Asia.” Globalizations (2026): 1–20.
- Christophe Jaffrelot, Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
- Rahul A. Sirohi and Samyukta Bhupatiraju, “Monopoly Capital and Stagnation: The Case of India,” Review of Radical Political Economics, February 8, 2026.
- Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
- See Land Conflict Watch “National Database of Renewable-Energy Land Conflicts,” n.d., landconflictwatch.org/.