Hindu–Muslim antagonism is one of the main, if not the main, features of the Sangh Parivar's politics. For a long time, this antagonism was considered merely in religious terms. Despite the presence of extensive literature on the economic features and implications of contemporary Hindutva (Bobbio 2017; Chacko 2019; Desai 2011; Gopalakrishnan 2009, 2006; Iwanek 2014; Karat 2014; Kaul 2017; Kumar 2018; Nanda 2011; Patnaik 2019; Saxena and Sharma 1998; Siddiqui 2017; Sinha and Nayak 2021; Spodek 2010), there is a widespread tendency among scholars to consider the Hindu–Muslim rivalry as connected to identity, religious, or communal factors. This chapter aims to prove that an intimate connection between communal and economic factors existed from the colonial period and that communal strife was not determined by religious but by economic causes. It adds to Gyanendra Pandey's (1999) masterly demonstration of how the British constructed communalism by leveraging economic forces. However, Pandey examines only the economic and social transformations brought about by colonization, but does not consider the interrelation between economic and identity factors as part of the colonial game that I foreground in this chapter.

The chapter explains how the British colonizers deliberately targeted Muslim rulers, who throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the main political and economic competitors of the East India Company (EIC), and that, in order to undermine the powers of the Muslim rulers, they implemented both economic and cultural devices, as well as military and political ones.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.

That the decade of untrammelled power Narendra Modi enjoyed before losing his majority in his 2024 victory so humiliatingly represented a new phase in the ruinous advance of Hindutva is clear. What is less clear is where the novelty lies. For some, it lies in the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) parliamentary majority, the first for any party since 1984; the centrality of Modi's personality; and the combination of populism, nationalism, majoritarianism, and authoritarianism (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019, p. 1). For others, it lies in the Modi regime being a ‘governmental formation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance’ (Hansen and Roy 2022, p. 1).

These assessments appear staggeringly placid. Under the Modi regime, minorities—Muslims throughout India, Christians in the north-east and Adivasi lands—and dissident intellectuals are systematically persecuted, often to death; working people are assailed by wilfully brutish experiments—demonetization and draconian COVID-19 lockdowns to take the most egregious—leaving lasting damage. Meanwhile, the topmost corporate capitalist class rejoices in sympathetic legislation, light oversight (if any), and aid in foreign operations. To get power and keep it, the government displays ‘unprecedented’ and ‘sweeping disregard for the constitution’, particularly its federalism (Savera 2019), and razes political institutions—the Supreme Court, the Central Vigilance Commission, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)—with the bulldozer of its parliamentary majority.

Introduction

In an essay written some twenty-five years ago, Indian thinker Ashis Nandy describes popular Indian cinema as ‘the slum's point of view of Indian politics and society and, for that matter, the world’ (Nandy 1998, p. 2). The slum, a term for the urban lower-class settlements that constitute a significant portion of the landscape of every major Indian city, embodies the complexities of Indian society. It both aspires to and contrasts with the genteel urbanity of the upper-middle classes who are physically proximate to but separate from their slum-dwelling compatriots. The slum carries in it something of the rural and village worlds of migrants who make their home in it. It represents the profound social dislocation and alienation wrought by Indian modernity upon large sections of its population as well as new kinds of social relations that emerge as a result of these shifts and disruption. A physical space inhabited by Indian lower-middle classes and emerging middle classes but also a symbol of their aspirations, the slum is the beating heart of Indian political life. Nandy argues that the ‘passions of, and the self-expressions identified with, the lower-middle class—for that matter, the middle class as a whole—now constitute the ideological locus of Indian politics’ (ibid., p. 6). Inasmuch as it is a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the universe of the slum, Indian popular cinema, then, far from being an escapist fantasy or irrelevant lowbrow art, is an essential cultural form encapsulating the central concerns of Indian political and social life.

Writing over a century ago, Vladimir Lenin had talked of finance capital as the ‘coalescence of bank and industrial capital’ and of a financial oligarchy presiding over this capital that sat on the boards of directors of both banks and industrial establishments. But Lenin's concepts were located in the context of an inter-imperialist rivalry, where the finance capitals and financial oligarchies of different advanced capitalist countries were both country-based and engaged in conflict with their counterparts in other advanced capitalist countries over the acquisition of ‘economic territory’ (Lenin 1976).

Contemporary capitalism, however, is characterized by a muting of inter-imperialist rivalry. This muting is rooted, not in any agreement among capitalist powers to divide the world peacefully (as Karl Kautsky had visualized in what is called ‘ultra-imperialism’) but in the formation of an international finance capital, which is not essentially country-based and which, far from wanting to divide the world into different spheres of influence, actually wants to remove all such divisions so that it can move freely across the globe. Contemporary finance capital, therefore, is globalized (that is, international); it is not part of any national imperialist strategy, as it had been in Lenin's time; and it is employed not just in industrial production but also in rampant speculation that has given rise to several asset-price bubbles.

In his powerful poem titled ‘Shema’, Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, urges the world to pay attention to the victims of the Holocaust and to never lose sight of the human monstrosity that unfolded under fascism. Despite Levi's warning, there is a global resurgence of fascism (Mason 2021; Patnaik 2024; Stanley 2020). India seems to be in a similar situation with its embrace of fascism in the form of Hindutva. Fascism is a state of capitalism that arises because of a crisis or its possibility in which the traditional elite cannot dominate the political sphere and serve the interests of large corporations through liberal institutions (Poulantzas 2018). It is an authoritarian reaction (Desai 2016; Patnaik 2024) and a capitalist counter-revolution wearing a popular mask (Parenti 1997; Rosenberg 2016).

The ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014 marked a significant transformation in India's sociopolitical landscape. The BJP, as the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu supremacist organizations, strategically utilized the full spectrum of politico-legal systems and socio-economic institutions in its attempt to shape India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). This effort has gained remarkable momentum, particularly following the BJP and its alliances’ successive electoral victories and firm control over the Indian parliament. For building Hindutva (Hindu nationhood) politics, the BJP adopts a primordial perspective, defining a nation through socio-biological links or socially constructed cultural connectivity, such as language, religion, territory, and kinship (de Souza 2022; Kumbamu 2020; Shani 2021). Deeply immersed in such primordialism, the Sangh Parivar defines the nation based on the idea of oneness (one law, one culture, one religion, and one language), which aims to promote Hindu supremacy, stigmatizing and labelling those who diverge from its definition as ‘enemies’ or ‘anti-nationals’ (Banaji 2018; Chacko 2023; Frykenberg 2008; Siddiqui 2017). As a result, there is an increasing criminalization of various forms of political dissent. This includes actions ranging from targeted ‘legal’ assaults on opposition political parties and ideologies to overt threats and ‘conspiracy’ cases against activists, academics, journalists, writers, and artists.

In this political context, deep-seated concerns have emerged regarding the state of democracy, civil liberties, and the functioning of constitutional institutions.

Chapter 2 uses official data and primary documents to examine land as a factor of production and the legal status of land in China’s political economy. It highlights how insecure property rights and incomplete markets for land diverge from the liberal economic model. As codified in law, the state generates rents through its ability to take land from the rural sector at below-market prices to sell into the urban real estate and industrial sectors at higher and lower prices, respectively. This pattern is reminiscent of the planned economy and enacts urban bias. Local governments rely on land for revenue, as a tool of industry policy, and for capital mobilization through local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Informality persists in the form of illegal land conversion and “small property rights” in urban villages and elsewhere. Beyond the analysis of land law at the rural-urban interface, the chapter also analyzes land rights within the rural and urban sectors, respectively. Within the agricultural sector, reforms have improved the property rights of rural households to arable land, but limits on rights and sources of insecurity remain. Urban households have been the beneficiaries of housing reforms, giving them a vested interest in resisting property taxes.

This concluding chapter puts land at the heart of the “China model,” linking legal, fiscal, financial, and political features of the system to explain the roots of China’s contemporary economic challenges, including the real estate crisis, land-backed debt, and abortive property tax initiative. It also extends the theory beyond the Chinese case in three ways. First, it revisits the paradigmatic case of post–Glorious Revolution England in light of China’s experience, suggesting that, in the context of technological change, property rights over land were less secure and governance less democratic in the early eighteenth century than presented in some of the development literature. Second, it examines the relationship between the ease or difficulty of using law to reassign land rights and promotion of transformative economic growth in the case of contemporary India. These comparisons point to the significance of regime type—authoritarian vs. democratic. Regime type shapes the ease with which the state can reassign land rights and how the state manages the conflict that results from the redefinition of property rights. Third, the chapter examines the redefinition of property rights over personal data as a driver of growth in the new information economy as well as a new source of conflict.

This chapter begins by exploring the concept of legitimacy, which the CCP regime seeks to achieve in part through its project of legal construction. It employs official data and primary documents to present multiple aspects of access to justice nominally afforded by the legal system: training of a cadre of legal professionals, provision of institutions for dispute resolution—including mediation, petition, and litigation, establishment of state-sponsored legal aid, and implementation of an official campaign to imbue Chinese citizens with legal consciousness. It concludes with an assessment of China’s model of legal development, reviewing arguments about law and order, order maintenance, pure legality, normative and prerogative aspects of the dual state, and legal dualism. The illiberal system of law is a powerful tool in the hands of the party-state.

Chapter 4 uses original survey data to test the book’s theoretical claims. The first set of findings focuses on property rights. Disputes over state land takings are concentrated where land values are greatest: close to urban centers. The second set of results focuses on how the legal system channels conflict; grievances of rural residents over state land takings often go unresolved. In the wake of state land takings, rural residents use law to fight village leaders and neighbors in order to get a bigger share of limited state compensation for lost land. The data also reveal which villagers are more likely to take action in the face of land grievances. Possible actions include mediating, petitioning, litigating, protesting, and contacting media or a local People’s Congress deputy. Personal connections to the party-state are key, while legal knowledge and party membership have no effect. The third set of results focuses on the official project of legal construction. Data analysis shows that state legal programming changes citizens’ legal consciousness and increases regime legitimacy, as measured by trust in the party-state, for the majority of citizens. Fourth, for the minority of the population that directly experiences grievances over land, trust in the state declines.