Environment as Land: Understanding Anti-displacement Politics in Jharkhand

Introduction

The relationship of indigenous people with their lands and surrounding natural resources has been central to indigenous political claim-making, a growing global trend since the 1980s and 1990s. While environmental claims relate to the culturally harmonious ways of indigenous people of relating with nature, these claims undergird the right of these societies and communities to their ancestral or other lands that they make rightful claims to (Brosius, 1999; Damodaran, 2005; Li, 2000). In other words, environmental claims form the legitimating basis for forging the material demand for their right to land, a claim that is centered on the continued access of cultivating communities to their lands in order to sustain themselves as a people. Scholars have noted the wide prevalence of movements of indigenous people resisting forced land acquisition and projects of extractive capitalism in different parts of the world, all in the name of “development” within a neoliberal framework (Lauderdale, 2010; Rasch, 2012). This process is more acute and widespread in the Global South, where the race to the bottom has deepened the entry of capital, particularly into regions that are home to key resources—minerals, land, water, wind, or labor. Scholars have noted the disproportionate representation of indigenous people within all those displaced as a result (Fernandes, 1991; Whitehead, 2010). A politics of indigeneity has come to be closely related with environmental discursive practices (Conklin & Graham, 1995; Brosius, 1999; Borde & Rasch, 2018; Shah, 2011). Whether it is the movement against bauxite mining by Vedanta in Odisha or the Standing Rock movement in the United States against construction of an oil pipeline dangerously close to the reservation lands of indigenous communities in North Dakota, scholars have pointed to the long-standing relations of indigenous communities with the lands they occupy in a historical context, a relation that cannot be summed up in mere economic terms but which relates to the social reproduction of entire communities (Estes, 2019; Padhi & Sadangi, 2020). Claims of a distinct attachment or relationship of indigenous communities to “nature,” in particular those emphasizing a harmonious relationship with nature, have been critiqued for being romantic, essentializing, and ahistorical (Baviskar, 2006; Kuper, 2003; Shah, 2011). Debates surrounding the use of environmental discursive practices by indigenous communities in struggle are thus marked by discussions on ecological romanticism. In this article, I examine such a typically environmental claim made as part of an adivasi ¹ anti-displacement social movement resisting forced land acquisition, in order to understand the nature of praxis that such discursive practices enable.

Environmental claims, whether in the form of protection or preservation of nature, or through the discourse of sustainability, are centered on the environment as the object in need of protection. The imagery thus invoked includes air, water, forests, soil, rivers, trees, and parks, among other landscapes. The invocation of land, however, locates the claim-making in the realm of agrarian or material discursive practices. In this article, I ask how the meaning of environmental claims may be reconstituted by thinking about environment as land, and how this may serve to reshape our understanding of environmentalism as praxis. While environmental claims place “nature” at the center, the invocation of land in political claim-making places the peasant, the cultivator, or the farmer at the center. In so doing, it lays emphasis on social relations deriving from land, its ownership, what is produced on it, and the nature of labor placed in it, thus moving away from questions of protection of the land itself to the assertion of land rights, or the right to land. The dominant environmental narrative, on the other hand, invokes non-human subjects—elements that are seen to constitute nature—placing them at the center of its discourse, lending it its specific “environmental” character. Humans appear in the narrative to the extent to which they impact these natural elements, based on the particular relationship they establish with this environment. It remains centered on the need to protect and preserve “nature,” and so while rivers may dry out, forests may be depleted, and soil may be eroded, land does not disappear. It may, however, be polluted or contaminated, bringing the discourse right back to soil quality. For this reason, land, as land, and not as soil or forest, serves as a key natural resource that has remained marginal to discussions on environmentalism. Indigenous political discourses that invoke the environment in order to make rightful claims to land make for a productive site to explore the implications of invoking the environment as land for an environmental praxis.

This article takes up the case of an adivasi anti-displacement movement against a proposed steel manufacturing plant in central India. The movement began in 2005 in Potka Block of East Singhbhum, Jharkhand, in opposition to a proposal by Bhushan Power and Steel Limited (BPSL) to set up a 2.6-million-tonne-per-annum (mtpa) steel manufacturing unit (later increased to 3 mtpa) with a 450 MW captive power plant (later increased to 900 MW). This purpose required an area of 3,500 acres. However, from the moment it arrived in Potka, the company met with fierce opposition, beginning in the village Picchli in 2005, the first proposed site of the plant. The proposed site shifted three times, with the final site centering on Potka village, where the company found a few non-adivasi willing sellers of land in 2008. However, as the resistance continued, now centered in Roladih village, at a distance of 3 km from Potka village, led by the local organization Bhumi Raksha Vahini Kisan Morcha, the company remained unsuccessful in setting up its manufacturing plant. In 2017, BPSL found its name on the list of the 12 biggest loan-defaulting firms and, together with its sister company Bhushan Steel, constituted 25% of the gross non-performing assets in India. The company has since been under the process of being acquired by JSW Steel. Together, this has meant that there is now no presence of the company, nor an imminent threat regarding land acquisition for the steel plant.

The movement is home to a region that has a mixed population of adivasis and non-adivasis, with Potka Block made up of 53% Scheduled Tribes (Government of India, 2011), the administrative classification of adivasis in mainland India. ² However, the movement itself has a strong and clear adivasi base and character, observable in the discourse of the movement, the lineage of resistance it draws on, and its leading voices and protagonists. A central claim of the movement is one of “adivasi attachment to land” distinct from the way non-adivasis in the region relate to their lands. This article engages with this claim to explore the possibilities that such an environmental politics presents while invoking the environment as land. It begins by laying out the historical and material context within which the movement forges its discourse and which inflects meaning into such a discourse. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between the discursive and the material, dialectically linked to one another, where “environmentalism” is imbued with a materialist significance as a medium through which the right to land comes to be articulated. It argues that the “environment,” invoked as land within the anti-BPSL movement, places the adivasi peasant and her right to land at the center of environmental praxis. It poses a critique of the mainstream environmental narrative that abstracts nature out of its historical and material context, allowing for its metanarrative character—that different sections with widely divergent and even conflicting interests can all invoke the environment to legitimate their own actions or claims. An invocation of the environment as land challenges such an abstraction and places it within the material complex and in relation to productive processes through which people socially reproduce themselves and forge relations with one another.

Situating the Anti–Bhushan Power and Steel Limited Movement Discourse

Historical and material context gives meaning to the discursive practices of the anti-BPSL movement and remains critical in understanding why and how the central claim of adivasi attachment to land has taken the shape that it has. The East Singhbhum district historically comprised the erstwhile estate of Dhalbhum and a small section of Barabhum estate forming a part of the Jungle Mahals region. The Bhumij were the ruling group and the descendants of the first clearers of land. They made up the ghatwals (military chiefs), pradhans (village headmen), and chiefs. While a degree of Sanskritization is observable among the Bhumij, closely related to their position of political dominance in this region, the large majority of them were made up of peasant cultivators and laborers.

The second predominant community in the region is the Santhals, who are more numerous. Popular oral narratives locate the arrival of Santhalis in the initiative of the Bhumij to find assistance in bringing land under cultivation. Santhalis constituted the ryoti or peasant population of the region and in all probability held little or no political power. Among non-adivasi service castes who inhabited the area were Kurmis or Mahtos (agrarian castes), Bhuiyas, Goalas (cowherds), Kamars and Lohars (ironsmiths), Kumhars (potters), Brahmans (priests), Sundis (wine-makers), Tantis (weavers), and Dhobis (washermen). These communities usually grew in villages, where they were settled by Bhumij pradhans in order to serve the local population. Apart from that, there were a class of moneylenders-cum-traders, officials, and police authorities, brought in by the colonial regime. This section comprised predominantly upper-caste Hindus from the plains of Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha.

Focusing on the village of Roladih that formed the center of the anti-BPSL movement, I present here the structure of the local political economy, and its implications for the shape of the movement discourse. Four communities inhabit village Roladih—Bhumij, Santhals, Patros, and Das. While the two former communities are adivasis, the latter are caste Hindus, both castes falling under the official category of Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Santhals and Bhumij constitute the majority, making up 76% of the total village population. There are other caste Hindu communities, such as Mandals, who own land in Roladih but reside in the neighboring villages of Sarmanda and Bhumbri.

A survey of land distribution of 154 households in Roladih, nearly the entire village, showed that almost three-fourths of the Santhali and Bhumij adivasis were small and marginal farmers. The Bhumij, the historical landowning community, retain the status of khuntkattidars, or the original clearers of land, although there is no such formal administrative recognition. Changes introduced by the colonial regime brought with them large-scale land alienation, but a section of the erstwhile ruling class has been able to find a place in the new and changing economy, making use of their positions of power and hold over land. However, the large majority are subsistence peasants. The Santhalis in Roladih are a smaller community but gradually growing. Out of 24 Santhali households in the village, only three were big landowners (5 acres or more). It may be noted that agriculture alone did not sustain any household; cultivation was combined in various ways with a range of contract work increasingly available due to proximity to the sprawling industrial city of Jamshedpur.

Patros make up the poorer section of the OBCs, with more than 50% being landless and no big landowners. Further, half of them cultivate land and engage in daily wage work, similar to adivasi peasants. A quarter subsist entirely on contract work. Unlike Patros, the majority of whom have livelihoods similar to adivasis, the Das population of Roladih is affluent. A quarter of the households are engaged in businesses or running kirana (grocery) stores in the village.

Finally, an important community vis-à-vis land is the Mandals. Traditionally brewers of alcohol, according to their caste occupation, the Mandals of Potka are said to hail from Bengal. Popular history dates the arrival of the Mandals to this region to a great famine, probably the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. In Jharkhand, they are classified as OBCs. On arriving in Potka, the Mandals are said to have gradually acquired large amounts of land in exchange for as little as alcohol or mudi (puffed rice), making them a significant landowning community in present times. Times of drought were particularly beneficial to them, as many sold lands in desperation. ³ The exact time period of this migration remains uncertain, but the accumulation of land in times like droughts is something that is recollected as having occurred till as recently as the 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere, I have examined the juxtaposition of Bhumij and Santhali history of laboring on land to make it cultivable in the first place, with that of the Mandals’ acquisition of land through trickery or deceit, so as to forge a notion of attachment which invokes these distinct histories of labor, or the lack of it (Jairath, 2020). Further, their mode of cultivation is oriented towards commercial farming, based on capital-intensive agricultural inputs and dependent on hired labor. This stands in contrast to the relations of production in subsistence cultivation of adivasi peasants with low inputs, family labor, exchange of labor, and hired labor only during labor-intensive periods of the agricultural cycle.

In the early 1980s, a zamin vaapasi (land reclamation) movement took place, led by locals who were members of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini (CYSV), the youth organization that formed the core of the JP movement. ⁴ This movement fought to reclaim lands wrongfully taken, either as a result of high usurious rates or by simple land grab. A former CYSV activist and key leading figure of the anti-BPSL movement, Harish Sardar, remembers the return of land in about 80 cases in the villages of Pichhli, Roladih, Potka, Bhumbri, Chhota Bhumbri, Bara Sigdi, and Sarmanda. All these villages fall within the area of the anti-BPSL movement. An elderly Bhumij resident of Sarmanda and CPI member who participated in this movement recollects the particular landowning communities that were targeted for land reclamation: “mostly the zamindars in this area are Mandals, and some Telis. Mandals here bought land with very little money, with mudi chana [puffed rice], paan [betel leaf], cigarette, and acquired lots of land like that. We filed several cases against Mandals and Kumhars” (personal communication, April 4, 2012). The land reclamation movement is indicative of a broader phenomenon of continuing adivasi land alienation, most often through debt. The continuing accumulation of lands by Mandals, and their emergence as a significant landowning community, is central to how adivasis articulate their relationship to land, often in opposition to the Mandals.

With the majority of adivasis owning under 5 acres of land and constituting a peasant class engaged in a combination of agricultural and non-agricultural labor, two elements of their subsistence pattern are worth noting. The first is their dependence on paddy cultivation for meeting their food requirements. The second is their integration into the growing and changing economy of contract work, be it in the mining, steel, or construction sector. While this growing economy has reduced the need to migrate, their absorption at the lowest rung of unskilled work does not offer an assured route toward upward mobility, creating a dependence on agriculture that is supplemented by, but not replaced with, contract work (Jairath, 2020). The adivasi dependence on land, therefore, continues to be high, as it offers basic food security and is distinct from the nature of relationship of Mandal farmers to their lands.

Environmentalist Claims and the Anti–Bhushan Power and Steel Limited Movement

The central environmental claim of the anti-BPSL movement takes the shape of the distinct nature of relationship of adivasis with their lands, one that moves away from a commodified notion of land as property. Their being predominantly subsistence peasant cultivators, an adivasi discourse of attachment to land is rooted in this material context. The very practice of growing food, in contrast to a steel manufacturing plant, leads to a frequently posed rhetorical question—“When the factory comes, what will we eat? Iron?”—a question that points to the productive use of the land itself which feeds the adivasi peasants, unlikely to serve that purpose in the form of a steel plant. An engagement with the land through an activity that serves to feed is posited in opposition to the extractive, destructive, and polluting character of a steel plant that is likely to have little benefit for the people that live around it. A small-scale sponge iron plant in the neighboring village to Roladih comes to be invoked repeatedly to demonstrate the polluting character of factories, through pointing to a layer of black dust that local residents often find on their crops.

The nature of agriculture itself is predominantly for subsistence, and hence, the scale of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used is minimal. This practice is contrasted with the Mandal farmers’, those who have sold land to the company, who engage in commercial cultivation. The village headman of Roladih, one of the few affluent adivasi farmers of the village, explains:

We cultivate desi dhan [local variety of paddy]. Ever since the entry of videshi dhan [non local paddy] ⁵ , the use of saar [chemical fertilizer] has increased. It was mostly the Mandals and Bengalis who started using it. They were educated, they knew how to use it and had an idea of how to increase the produce. We still don’t use saar for the rice that we eat. We only put it in the crop that we sell so that we get a higher yield. (AR, personal communication, March 7, 2012)

The pradhan here points to the role of commercial agriculture in using contaminants in food production, evident from his separation of the crop grown for consumption, utilizing minimal chemical fertilizers, from that which he grows to sell. Given the large majority of adivasis are subsistence peasants, the use of chemical fertilizers remains minimal. This can be located in the capital-intensive character of commercial farming from purchase of high-yielding variety seeds to the nature of inputs required to ensure a high yield leads to adivasi peasants being excluded from and remaining outside of the dynamic of commercial paddy cultivation to a large extent—a context that reinforces the image of the environmentalist adivasi engaging in better ecological practices.

In forging the claim around the distinct nature of adivasi attachment to land, the movement constructs this claim through inscribing the adivasi identity with notions of labor and struggle against land alienation, two key elements that build into the claim of attachment. Non-adivasis, particularly those who sold their lands to BPSL in Potka village, are counterposed with the laboring and struggling adivasis in order to forge a discourse of special attachment, embodied in the opposition to BPSL and to the acquisition of their lands. Literature produced by the anti-BPSL movement comprises pamphlets, most of which are written as part of joint campaigns or campaigns around particular issues that may reflect the political positioning of the anti-BPSL movement, writings of K. C. Mardi, the main leader of the movement, and most significantly, the first issue of a magazine called Hul Sengel, a Santhali phrase meaning “fire of rebellion,” which was entirely on the anti-BPSL movement. ⁶ The editorial of this issue of Hul Sengel, titled Vikas ka aatank ke khilaaf (Against the terror of development), places the struggle against BPSL within a struggle for Potka’s existence (astitva) in the following manner:

The fight for existence being fought for the last five years in Potka will decide who will possess the land in Jharkhand. Will the land remain with those who understand it not as property but as their very being, or will the land go to those who trade in land as it is seen as property and only property. But the biggest question is will Potka be able to save its being? Or will it too, like Kalimati and Sakchi ⁷ , lose its identity and go from being Potka to Bhushan Nagar? (Dungdung, 2010, p. 3, translation mine)

The struggle around land in Potka comes to be framed as a struggle of those who do not see land as wealth or property but as a source of existence, or of being able to exist—implicitly adivasis—thus establishing the connection between adivasis and a non-commodified conception of land, crystallized in the rejection of land as merely property. The articulation with an environmental ethic comes to be constituted in this notion of conceptualizing land as a productive resource on which entire communities subsist, and in its rejection as a tradable commodity.

Another article of the same issue, titled Bhushan company ko jamin kisne di? (Who gave the land to Bhushan company?), goes on to speak of the migrants who came from present-day Burdwan district of West Bengal in the late eighteenth century and narrates the manner in which they wrongfully acquired large amounts of land through trickery and deceit to become the landowners in these parts. It is this population, comprised predominantly of Mandals, besides Banias and Medinas, who are identified as those who gave in to company “greed.” While there is a clear reference to the company and its impending attempt to acquire land in Potka, similar tropes of the lack of attachment to land is adopted to speak of the “outsider” landlords:

The main leader of the movement against Bhushan company Kumar Chandra Mardi says that they [Mandals, Banias and Medinas] never gave their blood and sweat in making their fields and never paid any money to acquire them either. That is why they are not attached in any way to their lands. These people think of their fields as property. That is why they got greedy for money and sold their lands to Bhushan company. Because they are not attached to their land, these people can sell all their land and can move to any faraway place. (Dungdung, 2010, p. 11, translation mine)

The anti-BPSL movement draws on already existing discourses of adivasi distinction in inscribing the adivasi as the laboring cultivator, men and women alike, discourses that emerged in the 1970s as part of the movement for statehood (Roy, 1981). At the same time, these existing discourses are made relevant and given meaning in Potka through the particularities of the anti-BPSL movement. The notion of the adivasi as the laboring cultivator with a distinct relationship to land (as a means of existence and not as property) is given meaning by the conditions of conflict that gives rise to claims of distinction. The sale of land by a section of the Mandal population of Potka village to BPSL and the constitution of the anti-BPSL movement by predominantly peasant adivasis together serve as the context that allows for the adoption of existing discourses of adivasi distinction to be employed in Potka.

There exists a rich historical resource not only of the experience of dispossession but that of struggle as well, all of which is viewed by those within the movement as adivasi history. The following quote of Charan Murmu reflects this role of the history of struggle in building an adivasi-community identity that comes together to oppose land acquisition by BPSL:

Our ancestors struggled to protect water, forests and land. They sacrificed their lives for this cause. We have a proud history. Our people have never begged for anything. Our ancestors have given us our lands. We will fight a battle against those who try to loot our lands and we will win. (Dungdung, 2010, p. 2, translation mine)

By invoking the environment thus, and making the fight against BPSL synonymous with a fight of those who are attached to their lands, the movement further inscribes an adivasi identity with struggle and resistance. An adivasi culture of resistance that is simultaneously a sedimentation of historical processes and material conditions and a conscious discursive positioning is reproduced through the course of the anti-BPSL movement. It inscribes adivasis as environmentalists, and a community that labors on land, is therefore attached to it, and is therefore committed to struggling against BPSL in its attempt to acquire agricultural lands in Potka.

The claim of special adivasi attachment to land is pegged on a generalized association of indigenous communities with living in harmony with nature, engaging in ecologically sustainable livelihood practices, whether in the form of an innate understanding of the forests they live in or depend on or the nature of crops cultivated which are in tune with soil and climatic conditions, or patterns of consumption and ideologies of adapting to natural elements as opposed to modern notions of dominating them (see Hames, 2007). While these ideas have now been sufficiently critiqued for romanticizing and essentializing indigenous communities in deeply ahistorical ways (Diamond, 1992; Prasad, 2003; Redford, 1990), others have pointed to the historically and materially situated character of better ecological practices among indigenous communities that engage in subsistence cultivation (Bodley, 1997). Placing indigenous practices in opposition to extractive capitalism, the appropriation of an environmental discourse to serve indigenous political claim-making has been observed the world over (Brosius, 1999; Conklin & Graham, 1995). When adivasis in Potka fighting against forceful land acquisition for the proposed BPSL plant assert a special attachment to their lands, they articulate with this broader phenomenon that wields moral force ensuring support and legitimacy to the struggles of indigenous communities. Simultaneously, they imbue this claim with material significance that points to the political economy of land and labor in Potka across communities to name a history of land alienation, the nature of relations of production, and its implications for the precarity of adivasi peasants under the threat of further loss of their lands.

Environment as Land and Environmental Praxis

Together, the historical and material contexts lend meaning to the claim of adivasi attachment to land. The food security that small holdings provide to adivasi peasants creates a dependence on land that is brought to the fore through the discourse of “attachment,” as is the history of putting in labor, the blood and sweat of their ancestors, in order to make these lands cultivable and productive, along with the labor of struggle that has served to protect adivasi lands from further alienation. The notion of labor and putting land to productive use as a legitimating force for marginalized communities to make claims over land has been noted in different contexts (Li, 2014; Wright & Wolford, 2003). Combining together an environmental ethic with laboring on land, we are met with an environmental praxis that places the producer at the center of its politics.

The immediate context of an imminent threat of the loss of land remains central to the particular articulation of the movement’s central demands and claims. A complete denial to sell land, in opposition to movements centered on negotiation over the price of compensation for land or terms of rehabilitation and resettlement, emerges from a combination of historical experience across Jharkhand, along with an analysis of the political economy of the region and the place of the adivasi subsistence peasant within it. Adivasis part of the anti-BPSL movement constantly remind of the experiences of dispossession of land in their close vicinity—the city of Jamshedpur built around Tata Steel’s historic steel plant TISCO, the uranium mines at Jadugoda, Dimna dam and lake as an artificial reservoir to feed the requirements of TISCO and Jamshedpur, and Chandil dam in the neighboring district—to point specifically to the experience of adivasis in this process, who are pushed into the wage labor market, depending exclusively on it for their daily survival. In resisting land acquisition itself, and not the terms of the acquisition, Santhali and Bhumij adivasis come to assert their attachment to land, distinct from and in opposition to Mandal detachment. While a distinct relationship of indigenous people to their land constitutes an archetypical environmental assertion that lays emphasis on how indigenous people treat their natural surroundings, the anti-BPSL movement, through its assertion of adivasi attachment to land, places the adivasi peasant and her labor at the center. An environmental discourse is, thus, invoked to protect continued access to land, not land itself, thereby acting back on such a discursive politics to inflect it with a material praxis that places the producer at the center.

Environmental assertions within indigenous political discourse have often been critiqued in the Indian context for being ahistorical (Guha, 1999), contradicting existing practices (Baviskar, 1995; Shah, 2011), or being instrumental and non-material (Baviskar, 2006; Kuper, 2003). However, situating the environmental discourse of the adivasi movement within the historical, material, and political matrix from where such a claim emerges and which lends it its particular meaning leads us to discern a claim that names a history of land alienation, different lineages of labor vis-à-vis land across community, and highlight how these histories are brought to life in the contemporary conflict over land.

The adivasi claim of attachment to land in Potka is part of the discursive practice of an anti-displacement movement that is engaged in the political work of resisting land acquisition—work that is carried out principally by adivasis—by drawing on the cultural and historical particularities of their lifeworld, undergirded by the material ordering of social relations centrally around land. Such a constructivist and materialist analysis of the way in which indigenous communities assert their identities in particular ways and at particular moments has been undertaken by scholars in other contexts as well, as the work of Steur (2011) on Kerala shows (see also Hernández Castillo, 2001, 2010). A close look at why adivasi peasants make the claims that they do, through the discursive practices that they do, allows us to discern a more radical praxis of environmentalism, one that places the producer, the cultivator, at the center of the story. Such an environmental praxis, through an invocation of land, challenges an abstracted notion of the environment as “nature” divorced from its historical and material context within which communities live and reproduce themselves as a people in interaction with “nature.” By placing this context at the center, it emphasizes the nature of relations communities weave with their surroundings through productive processes and through labor, knitting together social relations between themselves and with other communities, actors, and institutions that intersect with their lives. It challenges a dominant environmental narrative that places nature in isolation as the object in need of protection. Instead, it points to the matrix of relations within which human–nature interactions take place, forging a material praxis and relating ecological concerns with broader structures of political economy and the place of the cultivator within it.