Economic dispossession is usually assumed to be a process that originates from global capital and flows down to the national level, but little is known about how subnational actors facilitate and benefit from this process. By developing a bottom-up perspective on dispossession, this article argues that the synergy between subnational political and economic elites resulted in the dispossession of farmers in the south Indian state of Andra Pradesh. It illustrates that subnational elites had their own motives to establish a Special Economic Zone in Polepally, and that this episode of dispossession sparked a high degree of resistance.