ABSTRACT
Studies on agrarian transition in India of recent times show that it is not following the classical form of transition as envisaged. The distortion or deviation in terms of classical notion of agrarian transition, sometimes termed as ‘arrested capitalist development’, needs to be explicated in a different environment. The process need not be wholly Marxist or wholly non-Marxist. It is also important to discern the different politico-economic environment through which post-Independent India has traversed. Studies on agrarian transition in the 1970s and 1980s to the early 1990s explicate the dynamics of the indigenous development of capitalism in a government-supported environment. With the advent of neoliberalism in the 1990s we perceived a different economic environment controlled by capital, global in nature and state slowly withdrawing from the productive support to agriculture. These induced changes were mostly irreversible in nature. Therefore, the closed circuit with limited external intervention in agriculture transformed it into an open circuit with limited or zero government intervention. Indian agriculture started to be included in the capital’s global sphere. The global linkages and intervention of neoliberal capital started transforming the agrarian structure, initially through forced exchange. The latter became the medium through which transfer and accumulation of surplus in the form of money from the agrarian sphere to global circuit took place. This started inducing permanent changes in the agrarian relations and structure. Most important is the change in the accumulation process – erstwhile government-supported indigenous capitalist accumulation, that is state-led capitalism transformed into primitive accumulation (observable as mercantile accumulation in agrarian sector) of capital and/or both. Nevertheless, primitive accumulation is the dominant source of surplus appropriation. The process of primitive accumulation started expanding the non-capitalist sector in agriculture, which was apparently in a diminishing condition under closed circuit with government support. Primitive accumulation of capital in this non-capitalist sector also entailed another burgeoning sector, that of the ‘excluded’. Wherein the direct producers after getting dissociated from their means of production are transformed into free labourers. However, they remain excluded because of the lack of productive sectors to get absorbed. This is an expanding sector excluded from productive activities – termed ‘Limbo-space’ or ‘MOM’. 1 Therefore, we find three sectors in agriculture:
