Paper short abstract:

This paper advances our understanding of the phenomenon of land mafia and its sovereignty practices within India’s Hindu nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Paper long abstract:

This paper advances our understanding of the phenomenon of land mafia and its sovereignty practices within India’s Hindu nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It has been argued that criminal networks represent an attack to neoliberal policies and the capacity of the State to enact good governance practices. Yet, anthropological studies of crime have moved away from narrow definitions of criminal organizations as autonomous, internally cohesive, and bounded systems. However, the question of how criminal networks establish their sovereignty on the ground is still open and deserves further attention. Without an adequate analysis of how land mafias - criminal groups active in coercive land grabbing and real estate markets - actually permeate the formal realms of state and capital, we overlook the exacerbating social inequalities that make these entwined coalitions possible. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the newly-built Green City in the periphery of Kolkata, this paper considers the social embeddedness of land mafia, to illuminate the sovereignty practices among the actors who occupy the intertwined realms of crime, state, and business. I argue that the Hindu upper-caste leaders of land mafia achieve their territorial sovereignty and control over land through interlocked forms of exploitation. I trace how land mafia works through forms of land reclamation and landowning practices that exacerbate inequalities for, and criminalize lower-class, lower-caste Muslim communities. Ultimately, I argue that who calls whom a mafioso, and the sovereignty that this term carries with it, is based on religion, class and caste privilege, and legitimation.