Tenuous land access contributes to food and livelihood insecurity, and fuels conflicts in many rural societies. In such cases, the ability of government legal institutions to structure and ultimately transform the conflict depends not just on the adoption of laws favorable to progressive land redistribution, but also the effective implementation of those laws in the face of elite influence in local government. This paper presents a case study of an identity-based social movement for Outcastes in India (the Navsarjan Trust) struggling to bring about the successful implementation of land redistribution laws in Gujarat, India. I contend the Dalit land movement recognizes outcomes of state policy as products of caste struggles within a nested hierarchy of local government institutions. I argue Navsarjan’s strategy is to modify the strength of links between levels in this hierarchy in order to produce favorable results for the Dalit land rights movement. This strategy explodes the myth of human rights movements as necessarily antagonistic to government function, portraying government rather as a framework that structures social struggle.
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RESEARCH ETHICS: Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
Caste analysis could be done within the framework of the "property" inquiry, as the land and caste are intertwined themes in Indian culture. The way that the dominant caste communities allocate their resources-land and caste-allows them to directly control the systems of political, social, cultural, and economic dominance. In the Indian context, the discourse surrounding property must be understood in conjunction with the two crucially important but interrelated concepts of land and caste. In actuality, land is both a sociological phenomenon and merely a spatial category. Indian society's hierarchical structure reflects the uneven distribution of land among the various caste groups. Having land as a resource puts a caste member in a position of easy power over others. As a result, the caste of landless people suffers more from society's lack of property ownership.
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In an era of globalization land becomes one of the most important livelihood means for the Dalits. Increasingly the Dalits are deprived and removed off from land. This article makes an attempt towards the issue of land and how the Dalits are deprived.
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
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CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion
Dalits are the lowest social group in the Indian caste hierarchy, formerly known as 'untouchables'. They have been subjected to centuries of discrimination, violence and continue to face widespread social exclusion and economic deprivation. In rural areas, Dalits are often forced to live in segregated quarters and are denied access to common resources such as wells, temples, schools and land. They are often forced to do the most menial and degrading work, such as manual scavenging and cleaning toilets. This exclusion and humiliation are rooted in their lack of access to socioeconomic capital, namely, land. As the world's primary source of wealth, land plays a significant role in the life of rural communities, transforming into a socioeconomic reality. Dalits are historically landless; in this outbreak, they participated in various land movements to access land. Landless Dalits and other agricultural labourers fought alongside peasants for better wages, land ownership and to end the practice of forced labour. However, Dalit struggles always remain subordinate to peasant struggles. In this context, this study examines Haryana's rarely documented and majorly unknown Dalit land movement that took place in 1973 at Bir Sunarwala village of Jhajjar district of Haryana. Additionally, this study seeks to highlight the significance of the Bir Sunarwala land movement within the broader framework of the Dalit movements in India.
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Development and Change
The pressing need to manage the spiralling number of landless people around the world has compelled several states to experiment with scattered land distribution programmes in combination with welfare transfers, instead of comprehensive land reform. This article examines the chasm between land demands and state responses in such contexts. Focusing on the Aralam resettlement site for the landless Adivasis in Kerala, India, it argues that management of the landless could take the form of 'state life'-a life envisaged by the state rather than the life the people wish to lead. Three interlinked processes are shown to shape state life in Kerala: the reduction of land to welfare, amplified welfare transfers and the mobilization of assumptions about the target population. State life enables states to extinguish simmering land struggles in the short term, but ultimately it reproduces landlessness.
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JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL WORK