In the current political and
economic practice, the so-called free market plays a hegemonic role over all
other institutions. In Harvey’s view, the three most important features of
contemporary neoliberal capitalism are “deregulation,
privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision”
(Harvey,
2005, p. 3).
Neoliberalism rose to
predominance in the United States of America and Europe during the mid-1970s,
but a fundamental transition in Indian economic policies toward neoliberalism
did not take place until the early 1990s (Ahluwalia
& Little, 1998; Kannan,
2014; Kurian,
1994; Patnaik, 1997; The World
Bank, 1995).
The proponents of neoliberal
economic policies argued that India needed to embrace this approach to overcome
the macro and microeconomic conditions responsible for the crisis the country
encountered in the late 1980s. These conditions were conceived as a great
impediment to the economic growth and “development logic of industrialization
through capital accumulation” (Chakrabarti
& Cullenberg, 2003, pp. 239–240), and the transition of India from a
country where the economy was regulated by the state to an economy with free
market supremacy.
Scholars like Kurian (1994)
and Kannan (2014)
discussed the ramifications of the neoliberal reforms on the poor in India and
highlighted the rise in rural poverty in the post-reform period. In India, the
post-economic liberalization period denotes an unprecedented seizure of land
from the poor by the state for establishing “development” projects such as
special economic zones (SEZ), IT parks, mines, dams, infrastructure, highways,
power plants etc.
As a result, India witnessed
various forms of collective action against the state during this period, and
especially against its efforts to
protect the interests of the global capitalism. A conventional reading of
the capitalist accumulation is inadequate to understand the complex ways in
which capital is operating in the neoliberal global capitalist as well as the
postcolonial Indian capitalist contexts. In an attempt to understand this
complexity, this article focuses on the Anti-Coca-Cola
movement (popularly known as the “Plachimada movement”) in Kerala, India.
Initially, it was centered on the issue of the local pollution and the
scarcity of water that resulted from the establishment of the Coca-Cola
Company’s bottling plant in 2000. The movement was initiated by an
amalgamation of various organizations and social actors. The establishment of
this plant also dispossessed the local adivasis in Plachimada from their
agricultural land and deprived them of their livelihood. Like elsewhere in the
country, the destruction of the common people’s livelihood (predominantly based
on agriculture) in Plachimada is another instance of development-induced
dispossession that negatively affected the lives of marginalized communities in
India since the beginning of 1990 (Kothari,
1996; Mathur
& Marsden, 1998; Mehta,
2009; Oliver-Smith,
2010).
This movement has particular
features in the configuration as a contemporary social movement, which have
been discussed in previous studies (Berglund
& Helander, 2015; Bijoy,
2006; Mooney
2012; Raman,
2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2010a, 2010b).
For example, an article published in this journal by Berglund and Helander (2015)
focused on the significance of civil society and analyzed the effects of the
movement’s campaign on the political participation of its members.
Unlike this, the present article
goes beyond the existing social movement theories to analyze the complex
interface between the “local” and the “global” in the Plachimada movement.
Plachimada is a “local” space located within the regional space of the state of
Kerala, which is known widely for its people-centered approach to development
and the so-called “Kerala model of development.”
The article examines the
reassemblage of the “local” in the context of a contemporary social movement
and the relational contexts framed by the theoretical conceptualizations of
neoliberalism, global corporate capitalism, and postcolonial capitalist
development.
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