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This article uses Bourdieu and Giddens' perspective of agency to investigate an antipoverty programme of the Indian government that relies on self-help groups for the disbursal of microcredit. Multiple actors impact and refract away from the official agenda of the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) scheme in Gujarat. Instead of working towards entrepreneurialism through self-help, actors use the SGSY as a vehicle for populism, rent-seeking and as a saving scheme for children's weddings. Through the agency of these actors, practised within a specific historical, structural and dispositional context, the structures of patriarchy and neo-liberalism are reproduced in everyday socio-economic and political life. However, hints of structural change, for example in women's control over earnings via access to banks, are also evident. Evidence from the SGSY scheme is used to highlight the ways in which microcredit can simultaneously empower and restrict the lives of female beneficiaries. © 2013 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.

Through a case study of Hindu nationalism in India, this paper explores how development programmes serve as the site of construction of, as well as contestation over, religious identity. The participation of low-caste Dalits and tribal Adivasis in the mass violence perpetrated against Muslims in the Indian province of Gujarat in 2002 conveyed the impression that Hindu nationalists had achieved one of their key objectives of creating "Hindu unity". Cutting across social and status divisions in the local Hindu population, the Hindu nationalist party's constituency today includes its traditional upper-caste supporters, as well as lower castes. While "the other" in the Hindu nationalist conception of community included Dalits and Adivasis as well as Muslims and Christians until the mid-1980s, the recent "Hindu unity" agenda has seen the boundaries of "the other" closing in around Muslims and Christians only. Despite these developments, this paper argues, continuing attempts at the construction of a unified ethno-religious identity are circumscribed and complicated by processes of contestation. Through village-level research, it shows how government actors are involved in simultaneous processes of construction as well as contestation over a Gujarati-Hindu identity through development programmes.

Land is a metaphor for power, wealth and status. Independent Gujarat's initial mass-development strategy centered on agriculture but the emphasis was on productivity and efficiency rather than land redistribution or social justice. A state apparatus and socio-political set-up dominated by elite landed upper and middle castes and classes ensured this. Primary fieldwork-based research shows that by the mid-1980s, with a growing acceptance of ideas of liberalisation at the national and international level, the elite consensus on land began to shift. This shift must also be placed within local socio-economic developments that had propelled dominant landed groups into agro-industry and small scale industry in the last third of the twentieth century. Gujarat's elite still wanted to control land, but they did not want the state to regulate land use or continue emphasising the diluted but powerful rhetoric of land to the tiller. The rightward shift of all political formations in Gujarat after 1985 and the growing importance of the upper caste-middle class merchant-trader-builder-small businessman dominated Bharatiya Janata Party further facilitated the moves towards a shift in land policy. Continuing changes in Gujarat's land policy are determinedly moving towards the complete liberalisation of land.

Under conditions of market-orientation and globalization, land is being transferred from agriculture and common property uses, to corporate farming, private industry, and the service sector. How are intra- and international land transactions governed? Using the case of India, this paper emphasizes the sub-national scale. Fieldwork in Gujarat, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu reveals States to be competing with each other to attract private investment. Yet, given institutional and political variation, their land provision ranges from attempted market-friendly policy change, to narrower state–business alliances. It is time for scholarship and resultant policy recommendations to look beyond the national and global scales.

Middlemen are largely absent from the literature and policymaking on land deals. Based on qualitative evidence from India, this paper shows a highly organised field of aggregators, brokers, touts, musclemen and others permeating the land economy. Biographical accounts provide glimpses of everyday work, career and aspirations. A high-definition narrative of middlemen as middlemen allows a shift away from instrumental analyses of bridges in global capitalist accumulation. Even as they reproduce larger structures, middlemen can be rule-makers who personalise, localise and actively shape the land economy. Global debates cannot afford to ignore these hitherto missing dimensions in land deals.

Sub-national regions are at the center of the global, neo-liberal economy. In India, the broadening of democracy has shifted the onus from centralized, national parties, to regional and identity-based ones, with implications for governance. Further, sub-national states have become drivers of development, and compete within and outside national boundaries to attract investment. In the era of regions, the state is varyingly understood as undergoing 'rescaling', 'reinvention' and 'restructuring'. This entity is key to understanding the regionalization of the new economy. Taking land as the infrastructural base of liberalising India, this paper explores the evolution of the ideas, policies and politics of the sub-national state in Gujarat, in the field of land. Gujarat is one of India's foremost liberalizers. Dominant classes that shaped partial land reform, and subsequent land liberalization, and a bureaucracy and political machinery that has worked closely with international, national and regional capital, are critical to Gujarat's land economy. These conditions have not been replicated across India. The era of the regions has deep roots in history, institutions and politics, and it is generating winners and losers. Meta-narratives of change in the nature of the state are attractive theoretically, but they need to be tested against empirical contexts. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.