This was how Joydeep Das, one of Shantipara's unwilling farmers, responded when I asked him back in 2008 about how their movement to save the farmland differed from ‘politics as usual’, that is, from the ‘continuous and daily process of consensus making’ that characterizes the exercise of power in rural society through the institution of political parties (Chatterjee 2009, 43). Joydeep Das's answer shows that these two forms of politics – the ‘popular’ or movement based and the ‘institutionalized’ or party based – were in principle conceptually distinct: while the latter was an integral and routine part of everyday rural life – played out on a day- to- day basis by political parties, their leaders and their followers – the former was a temporary, even spontaneous, response to extraordinary, massive and sudden changes that demanded an immediate reaction. In this sense, Joydeep Das's views of the political echoes some of the key distinctions that also underpin the work of Chatterjee on popular politics in general, and of Levien on anti- dispossession politics in particular. In practice, however, Joydeep Das had gradually had to confront the fact that this distinction had progressively collapsed as the movement to save the farmland dragged on. At the time I interviewed him, the Tata Motors factory appeared to have left an indelible mark on the rural landscape in the guise of concrete walls and abandoned factory sheds and buildings scattered across the erstwhile farmland. The unwilling farmers’ urgent mass struggle to reclaim their land similarly appeared to have metamorphosed into a protracted and prosaic form of anti- dispossession politics with more than a faint air of permanence. Even the Supreme Court verdict ordering the return of the acquired land with which I opened this book did not restore things to the way in which they had once been. Over the past decade a new generation had grown up with little direct involvement in and attachment to the land.