Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork to explore the outcomes of the unique forms of land grabs in the indigenous region of Kashmir, and particularly how the settler colonial states have used resource grabbing as a key mechanism to protect their economic and political interests.

Paper long abstract:

Most scholarship on land grabs in Latin America, Africa, and Asia situates them in the context of contemporary global capitalist development carried out by domestic/transnational capital, often in alliance with the state. However, the impacts of land grabs in the context of settler colonialism have received little attention in critical agrarian studies. The paper builds on the literature that shows how settler colonial states have used resource grabbing as a key mechanism to protect their economic and political interests. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork between 2021 and 2023, this paper focuses on documenting the impact of land grabs in the indigenous and disputed region of Indian-administered Kashmir. The abrupt removal of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status in 2019 by the right-wing government of India ushered in large-scale land acquisition for the development of military infrastructure, industrial parks, and conservation projects. This paper therefore asks: How does the militarization of natural resources interact with broader processes of agrarian change? What are the implications for the lives and livelihoods of rural communities? The paper argues that the Indian state uses these new forms of land grabs as a key strategy for progressing its settler colonial project. We also argue that the accumulation of capital is not central to this transformation; rather, the settler colonial project uses the garb of neoliberal development as a tool to dispossess and erase the indigenous Kashmiri population. The paper contributes to the understanding of complex state strategies deployed to grab land in a settler-colonial context and has relevance beyond Kashmir.