The Political Economy of Land Acquisition in India: How a Village Stops Being One by Dhanmanjiri Sathe, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan (Imprint by Springer Nature), 2017; pp xvi + 204, price not indicated.
Kaala embodies the confusion and contradictions of the contemporary subaltern politics. It is conscious of the need for solidarity between the Dalit–Bahujan and the left, yet it cannot imagine what form it will take.
If the State holds on to the market logic and sees the challenge in land acquisition as a problem of individual will of the "affected families" whose consent has to be taken (even when it is of a high order, i e, 80%), then it can be expected that the State and its apparatus will create political conditions (read repress people, as has been the experience in the Fifth Schedule Areas) to receive the consent of individual families.
