Dispossession in the Name of Development: Dhubri and the Making of a Land Broker State

More than 2,500 families in Dhubri district of Assam are either being evicted or living under the looming shadow of forced displacement as the state clears over 3,500 bighas of land for a proposed Adani thermal power project. The official justification is predictable — development, energy security, and investment. But the human cost behind these bureaucratic terms remains largely unspoken.

As houses are razed and farmlands erased, it becomes imperative to question: Who benefits from this development, and who pays for it? Are we witnessing yet another chapter in India’s evolving but increasingly unjust land politics?

The Land Broker State and Neoliberal Dispossession

Sociologist Michael Levien, in his groundbreaking work Dispossession Without Development, introduces the concept of the Land Broker State — a state that no longer acquires land for public infrastructure or welfare but rather acts as a broker for private capital, acquiring land from the poor to transfer it to corporations.

In Dhubri, this theory finds a textbook illustration.

Unlike the Nehruvian era when land was taken (often unjustly) for dams, highways, or public sector industries, today the state intervenes not to build for the people but to sell to capital. The Adani thermal power plant is not a public utility. It’s a private venture with profit as its core logic. Yet the state uses its legal machinery and police power to displace entire communities — often without adequate rehabilitation or livelihood alternatives.

This is not development. This is accumulation by dispossession, a process by which wealth is generated for a few by dispossessing the many.

Development as Mass Hysteria and Intellectual Slavery

What makes this process even more insidious is the chorus of elite support it gathers. Local notables, bureaucrats, and even segments of the intellectual class champion these projects in the name of “bringing Assam into the modern age”.

This reflects what could be termed “developmental mass hysteria” — a collective psychological state where any project labeled as “development” is accepted unquestioningly, no matter how many lives it disrupts. Behind it lies a deeper illness: intellectual slavery to capital and state narratives.

In Assam, where conversations around identity and land have historically run deep, the silence of many so-called thought leaders on this eviction is telling. By aligning with the state-corporate agenda or remaining complicit through silence, they legitimize violent dispossession as progress.

Many of these families are now pushed into precarity, without guarantees of compensation or jobs. The much-promised "rehabilitation" is often delayed or diluted into tokenism.

Meanwhile, large corporations gain access to cheap, state-sanctioned land, often reaping profits through subsidies, tax breaks, and speculative land rents.

The Myth of “Win-Win” Development

The narrative that such projects uplift the region is dangerously simplistic. As Levien shows, the benefits of neoliberal land grabs are narrowly concentrated, while the costs are widely socialized. There are no “win-win” outcomes here — only winners and losers, and the lines are clearly drawn along class and caste.

A Call for Just Development

Dhubri’s eviction is not an isolated incident. It is part of a larger pattern of how neoliberal India treats its rural poor: as expendable obstacles to investment, rather than stakeholders in the nation’s future.

If development means dispossession without dignity, then we must ask — what is being developed, and for whom?

It is time to rethink what “progress” means, and whether the cost of glowing power plants and corporate profits should be the lives and lands of Assam’s most vulnerable.