One of the fundamental roles of the state is to ensure the
security of property rights of its citizenry. But we have often seen government sponsored
acts of property rights violation. The case of abolishing Privy Purse in India
is a classical case, so is the nationalization of commercial banks and acts
like land for the tiller, which grabbed land from erstwhile landlords and
redistributed them to the actual farmers... In some cases the so called
"land lords" were government retirees who invested their whole
pension savings on agricultural land... In all these cases the government grabs
private property to supposedly serve the public at large. Interestingly, we
have only celebrated, and in some cases demanded, such acts… we see them as
symbols of egalitarian governance. But more recently, when the ex-CM of West
Bengal proposed to use eminent domain act to acquire land from farmers and redistribute
it to corporate India (i.e., TATA, whose airline, Air India, was nationalized
in 1953 to benefit the Indian populace), there was a furor that resulted in the
down fall of the communists’ empire, if you will, in West Bengal. Security of
property rights has always been weak in India but as we live in a populist
democracy, whenever there is a state-sponsored violation of property rights of
the poor there is a lot of noise, whereas any such violation of property rights
of the rich (at least seemingly so) is portrayed as a just act, winning votes
for the incumbents.
No comments:
Post a Comment