Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Destitution

Introduction

In recent decades, postcolonial states like India have gone from defining themselves as developmental states committed to egalitarian, self-sufficient, and independent economic growth through interventionism to neoliberal facilitators of growth through foreign and domestic private investment, and a market-led process of globalization. This shift in the self-understanding of the postcolonial state has hinged upon a contested and ongoing redefinition of laws about land, property, expropriation, displacement, and Eminent Domain. Many of these laws originated during the colonial period and that legacy has significantly influenced the politics of dispossession and accumulation in current times.

This article looks at one site in India where a global mining multinational corporation (MNC; Vedanta Inc.) seeking to extract bauxite and produce aluminum in one of India’s poorest states (Odisha) is locked in a struggle against the Dongaria Kondh, a tribal or “Adivasi” (a Sanskrit word meaning “original dwellers”) people numbering about 8,000 who happen to inhabit the mountain (Niyamgiri) which encases the ore. ³ The struggle between Vedanta and the Dongaria Kondh also involves the state government of Odisha, the central government based in New Delhi, various human rights organizations, and environmental and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in India and worldwide. It has played out before an Indian attendant public that is mostly urban and middle class, as well as a more global mediascape. This particular struggle offers a window through which to examine the more general ensemble of forces that is propelling accumulation for some through dispossession of the many at this point in time. In this article, I will focus on discourses of law, race, and nation, as they interweave and constitute the struggle at Niyamgiri.

To put it baldly, development in India has a race–caste dimension that goes relatively unremarked upon in much of the literature, including those coalescing under the sign of the postcolonial. The primary beneficiaries of development have invariably been upper caste, often with some English education, and mostly urban, while to a preponderant degree those who have borne the worst effects of developmental schemes—displacement, destitution, exposure to toxicity, destruction of cultural and material ecosystems—have been tribals, Dalits, landless laborers, and others from the lowermost castes in the Indian hierarchy. Postcolonial studies, in its many variants, have remained perhaps excessively focused on the East–West encounter framed with a nationalist cartography, and inadequately sensitive to the encounter between, on the one hand, upper-caste elites, and, on the other, tribals and Dalits, within the Indian society itself. ⁴

Odisha, Vedanta, and the Dongaria Kondh

If you were to place a map of India’s mineral resources over another map outlining the violent Maoist insurgency that has gripped the nation for over two decades now, you will find an almost complete overlap between the richest mineral districts and those with the highest degree of insurgent violence. ⁵ If you placed a third map, one outlining India’s poorest and most backward districts, it would further deepen the overlap. A swathe running from the southeastern portions of the peninsula all the way through central India to the northeastern foothills of the Himalayas is wracked by insurgency, rampant mining of precious metals, forced displacement of the poor because of these so-called developmental projects, and growing destitution. It belabors the obvious to note that all these developments are intimately intertwined. One of the main claims of the Maoist leadership in these states is that mining, so-called development, and economic growth has come at the expense of tribals and landless laborers.

The state of Odisha in southeastern India is one of the poorest regions of India. Whether measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, degree of industrialization or urbanization, or more holistic yardsticks used by the Human Development Index—life expectancy, infant mortality rates, levels of literacy, nourishment levels of the young, and so on—Odisha is among the least developed states within the Indian union. ⁶ However, in terms of its mineral resources, the state shows up as one of the richest in the country. ⁷

The Niyamgiri Hills are located in the Kalahandi and Rayagada districts of southwestern Odisha. These are among the poorest districts even in this benighted state and in the late 1980s Kalahandi district made headlines in the national media with reports of deaths due to starvation. Niyamgiri happens to house one of the biggest reserves of bauxite—estimated at seventy-three million tons—in the country. In 2003, Vedanta Mining Corporation, a London-based multinational, acting through a fully owned Indian subsidiary Sterilite Industries (India) Ltd., signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the state government of Odisha to establish a refinery and a coal-fired electric power plant in Lanjigarh at the foot of Niyamgiri. The refinery was to produce one million tons per annum (mtpa), which meant it would need about three mtpa of bauxite per annum. The MoU also proposed to begin sourcing the bauxite ore for the refinery from the adjoining Niyamgiri hills. Per the proposal, Vedanta planned to extract about three million tons of ore every year from Niyamgiri (meaning the mine would have a life expectancy of about twenty-four years), crush it, and move it down via a conveyor belt (to be constructed) to the refinery at Lanjigarh at the base of the hill.

Soon thereafter, petitions challenging the proposed mining lease (PML) were filed at both the High Court in Cuttack and with the Supreme Court of India alleging violations of Schedule V of the Indian Constitution (which proscribes alienation of tribal land to non-tribals in demarcated areas of the country) and other forest conservation and environmental laws of the land. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) approved the construction of the refinery, which Vedanta completed by 2006. By early 2007, the refinery was operational using ore mined from approved sites in neighboring states. Barely ten months later, in October 2007, Vedanta requested MoEF for a sixfold expansion of its capacity to six mtpa. Even while the request was pending, over the next year, Vedanta actually expanded the refinery to the new capacity. This was done unilaterally without the necessary environmental and other clearances required by law, and without the authorization of the MoEF.

Meanwhile, the PML approved by the Supreme Court in August 2008 (subject to certain conditions involving sustainable development of communities, conservation and protection of wildlife) ran into problems. In early 2010, the Forest Advisory Committee of the MoEF found during its on-site inspection the PML to be in violation of the newly passed Forest Rights Act of 2006. The MoEF then constituted a four-member committee led by an ex-civil servant N. C. Saxena in June–July 2010 that was “mandated to examine, in detail, the proposal submitted by the Orissa Mining Corporation Limited, under the provisions of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, for diversion of 660.749 ha of forest land for the Lanjigarh bauxite mines in the Kalahandi and Rayagada Districts of the State of Orissa.” ⁸

The Saxena Committee looked into the environmental impact of the proposed refinery and mine; its impact on the people who lived in the areas that would now be affected; the impact on flora and fauna as well as on the rivers that originate in these hills; and the effects already visible due to the refinery’s operations. It also looked at the degree to which the process of securing the PML, the permission to construct the refinery, the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), and other steps were in conformity with the laws of the land, specifically the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, the Forest Rights Act of 2006, and the Panchayat-extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) of 1996.

The Saxena Committee’s Report was a damning indictment of Vedanta, its Indian subsidiary Sterilite, the state-owned Odisha Mining Corporation Ltd., and bureaucrats who worked for the state and central governments. The Committee found that (a) Vedanta had lied initially when it said that no forest lands would be enclosed by the refinery (about twenty-seven hectares of land had already been enclosed by the refinery operating currently); (b) the process of securing the informed assent of each of the village councils (Gram Sabhas) as required by the Forest Act of 2006 had not been followed; (c) securing the consent of the village Panchayats as required by PESA had not been followed; (d) the sixfold expansion of the refinery was illegal, as MoEF had not cleared the expansion and the required EIAs had not been secured; (e) the EIAs had been fast-tracked, making it impossible to assess the actual environmental impact of the refinery and the mine over a few years and in seasons of both drought and normal rainfall; and (f) during one of the few hearings that were held, public opposition to the project was overwhelming—and yet, in its report, the state government averred that the project had the support of people in the affected area.

The Company and the state bureaucrats simply asserted that the Gram Sabhas had either not filed their complaints as required by the law or had given their informed assent. The Committee found these claims to be untrue. The Committee, in its interviews with the inhabitants of the area, found a familiar and depressing story unfolding. The refinery had polluted the groundwater; there had been leaks from its “red pond” into surrounding lands; the effluents from the factory into the neighboring river had unacceptable pH values; and people in the area had begun contracting diseases hitherto unknown in the area. The displaced people from the construction of the refinery had either not been compensated to the extent mandated by the law or had been diddled out of their money by dubious practices. Promises to employ a certain percentage of the displaced people had not been kept, and those who protested or engaged in campaigns against the mine/refinery have been arrested on trumped up charges, including that of being Maoist insurgents, and some of them tortured in prison. Typically, these charges are never dropped but serve as a deterrent to political activism because they can be brought up as required. ⁹

The Niyamgiri hills are home to about 8,000 members of the Dongaria Kondh, people that are classified as an endangered tribal community. Besides worshipping the Niyamgiri (a word that translates into “hill of justice”), the customs, rituals, lifestyle, and cosmology of the Dongaria Kondh are centered on the hill. Its herbal, plant, and other resources are an important part of the Dongaria Kondh’s medicinal and nutritional practices. The community speaks a unique dialect that will disappear with their urbanization or modernization, or more likely, their dispersal as the mine/refinery makes life on the hillside impossible. The proposed mine—open-cast and at the very top of the hill—would amount to a virtual beheading of their central deity. Open-cast mines elsewhere, even those in areas with strict environmental regulations and enforcement, have resulted in serious poisoning of the land and the leaching of the chemicals used into the rivers and groundwater cause irreversible damage. The production of aluminum anywhere in the world has left a devastating trail of human and environmental destruction—and with its extremely weak infrastructure and lax application of such laws as exist on the books, Odisha would be no exception. ¹⁰ Indeed, it is precisely this lack of environmental regulations and the possibility that many of the costs of producing the aluminum can be “externalized” onto the local community that probably makes Niyamgiri an attractive investment for Vedanta in the first place.

Kalahandi is a dry and drought-prone district and at least one major river, the Vamsadhara, originates in the Niyamgiri hills. Bauxite ore within a mountainside works as nature’s way of retaining water in such dry climate zones, and may be crucial to human survival in the area. The water resources needed for a bauxite mine and refinery on this scale are simply not there in Niyamgiri and surrounding areas. It is likely the mine will prove an environmental disaster for the Dongaria Kondh and their way of life. Most importantly, with the unauthorized sixfold increase in the capacity of the refinery, the seventy-three million tons of bauxite in Niyamgiri will be exhausted in about four years’ time (it takes three tons of bauxite to produce a ton of aluminum—so Vedanta’s plans to produce six mtpa will require eighteen million tons of bauxite a year and 18 × 4 = 72). It seems unconscionable to destroy people and their centuries-long civilization and culture for the sake of four-year-long aluminum production venture, to put it mildly. ¹¹ As a multibillion dollar corporation, Vedanta will possibly simply leave Niyamgiri after the mine is exhausted.

An important mainstay of Vedanta’s defense has been that the Forest Rights Act of 2006 is not retroactive and that since the mining lease and the refinery were authorized or begun before the law was given any teeth, they are not subject to its writ. The Saxena Committee has pointed out that the Forest Rights Act of 2006 clearly spells out that it is meant to redress historical grievances and restore rights taken away from forest dwellers and that its ambit is absolutely retroactive. The Act’s distinguishing feature is that it regarded indigenous people as integral to the forest and its survival. In other words, it did not sustain a distinction between the forest (as consisting exclusively of plants, animals, land, and nonhuman living and inanimate resources) and humans, but rather saw forest dwellers as integral to any definition or understanding of the forest itself.

This is a definite advance on prior notions that saw land as an inert and alienable entity and people as mobile and transferable to other spaces after being adequately compensated. The deeper appreciation of a relationship between human habitation and place reflected in the Forest Act of 2006 may reflect the confluence of domestic activism, as well as a global environmental and indigenous politics movement that is ascendant in many such struggles. Based on this emerging understanding, the Committee held Vedanta to be in violation of the letter of the law and requested the MoEF to withdraw prior permissions given to the mining lease and the refinery, as they were based on information and processes that were not legally sustainable.

On April 18, 2013, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the village councils (Gram Sabhas) of the affected areas had to approve of any mining or refining in the area. In the months thereafter, twelve Gram Sabhas held public hearings and in each and every one of them the proposal to construct the mine and refinery was resoundingly defeated. It was an extraordinary display of political resolve and unanimity by the Dongaria Kondh despite intimidation, misinformation, bribery, and multiple other obstacles placed in their way by Vedanta, its security forces, the local police, and by the Odisha State Mining Corporation. (Although over a 150 villages are affected, only 12 were chosen to hold the referendum.)

By the time the parliamentary elections of April–May 2014 came around, high-profile cases like Vedanta had saddled the incumbent United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime of Manmohan Singh with the image of being soft on the environment and too cozy with NGOs while being inadequately committed to the “tough” choices needed in order to maintain high growth rates. A hard-line commitment to corporate-based development served as the electoral platform of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which portrayed its leader, Narendra Modi, as a technocratic and efficient manager, a decision maker who “gets things done” by cutting red tape and other obstacles thrown in the way of development by recalcitrant social forces like tribals and environmental NGOs opposed to mining, hydroelectric dams, and the like. Buoyed by financial support from such corporations (both domestic and transnational) and by a media campaign that outspent President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, Modi and the BJP secured a clear majority in the elections, winning in 282 of the 543 parliamentary constituencies, although they garnered only about 31 percent of the popular vote in India’s first-past-the-post parliamentary system. It was seen as a victory for the prioritization of high economic growth rates and the job creation that supposedly goes with it.

While the rhetoric has carried the BJP to power and Modi to the Prime Ministership, the path ahead is tricky. Acceding to Vedanta’s demands for the construction of a mine and refinery in the face of such united and vehement opposition as outlined earlier would underline the regime’s anti-poor character and likely have to be accompanied by egregious violence. Opposing Vedanta would send the message to investors everywhere that the BJP regime despite its promises is unable to provide them with a stable and reliable climate for their ventures. An activist Supreme Court, citizens’ rights to information, segments of the State committed to environmental and social justice, and a highly politicized attendant public interact to make for an unpredictable future. India is an electoral democracy and as the ousted UPA regime discovered, the degrees of freedom are not many. The BJP, notwithstanding an impressive parliamentary majority, cannot throw all its weight behind a corporate-based, growth-at-any-cost strategy without rapidly eroding its political and electoral capital.

In the next section, I examine the larger backdrop against which to understand the faceoff between Vedanta and the groups opposed to its mine/refinery in Odisha. I will look at the colonial origins of this moment in postcolonial neoliberalism with a focus on the laws enabling the state to assert ownership of land and thereby dispossess those who live off the land. I will also look at the discursive constructions of key categories such as nation and tribe, adivasi and middle class Indian, and land and property, in the debates swirling around this issue.

Colonial Laws and Postcolonial Dispossession

The backdrop to the contemporary struggle over land in Odisha is the 1894 Land Acquisition Act (LAA) passed when India was a British colony. Befitting an alien regime primarily interested in economic exploitation and political pacification of its colonial subjects, the LAA was skewed heavily in favor of the State over society. The LAA (and the case history that emerged in its wake in the postcolonial era) essentially authorized the colonial state to expropriate land if it deemed it to be for a “public purpose”; the state’s decision in this regard was nonjusticiable; the consent of those whose land was appropriated was unnecessary; the state’s determination of compensation for the expropriation of the land was to be based on its market value and not its replacement value; and in cases where the state deemed the acquisition of land to be a matter of urgency, it could proceed to do so in just fifteen days after notifying the concerned parties—and again, the land owner had no legal or other recourse against such action. ¹²

One of the consequences of the colonial backdrop was a reigning notion of Eminent Domain that essentially made the state the owner of all the land within its realm. This equation of Eminent Domain with state ownership of all land carried over into the postcolonial period after Indian independence in 1947 and the promulgation of the Constitution in 1950. At least two important checks on Eminent Domain as it evolved historically in other, western, contexts seemed to get brushed off to the side as a result of the colonial context. First, Eminent Domain does not mean that the state owns all of the land but merely means that as a sovereign power, the state has authority over such lands. Authority is not the same thing as ownership in a modern, capitalist sense of private property and the right to alienate the same through sale or transfer of ownership. Second, in most contexts, the State can use the power inhering in Eminent Domain to expropriate lands already privately owned by others if it can demonstrate that this is necessary for the public good and after compensating the legal owners of the land for expropriation.

One of the most important aspects of this is that Eminent Domain says nothing about lands that are not already privately owned—common property resources, land communally used by tribal groups, fallow lands that are uncultivated by anyone, forests, uninhabited lands, coastlines, beach fronts, river banks, and so on. All such varieties of what one might call the Commons are not, strictly speaking, subject to Eminent Domain, which operates only in interactions between the State and lands that have a clear title as being owned by a specific individual or body. This equation of Eminent Domain with ownership of all land within the realm, the nonjusticiable nature of the state’s decision to acquire land for “public good,” the state’s monopoly over deciding what was the right level of compensation, and the urgency clause for expropriating the land were all important legacies that carried over from the colonial to the postcolonial period in the case of India. And in the long run, the reversal of the LAA of 1894 has to be the centerpiece of any successful political resistance to land alienation and the destitution that follows in its wake. ¹³

This legacy of state-as-owner-of-land was further buttressed in the first decades after independence because of two additional factors. The first of these was the postcolonial State’s commitment to zamindari (landlord) abolition and the redistribution of such lands concentrated under (usually absentee) landlords to the actual tiller. While the actual land redistributed to the poor was possibly negligible, the legal precedents and court decisions in its wake reinforced the understanding of Eminent Domain in the Indian case as one that made the State the legal owner of all the land within the country, as distinct from having authority over such land. A second factor was that from its inception the newly independent state was one that defined itself as an economically interventionist developmental state, one that would through its active role in the economy, industrialize and develop India into modernity. ¹⁴

Befitting such a developmental vision, the State’s acquisition or appropriation of lands—whether private, communally owned, or unoccupied—was invariably understood as being in the “public interest.” While case law from the various levels of courts in India upheld the property rights of private owners and, after amendments to the Constitution, recognized the eminent domain of the State in dispossession, in broad terms the outcomes have underlined the fallacious equation of Eminent Domain with State ownership of all land. Land was acquired by the State for typically “developmental” purposes—hydroelectric dams, steel mills, power plants, mining industries, highways and railways, and other such infrastructural purposes—and met with little overt resistance on the part of those whose lands were appropriated and whose lives were impacted by such development.

Looking back at the decades of dirigiste development (1950s through 1980s), it is difficult to know whether there was no resistance on the part of the millions of displaced tribals, Dalits, landless laborers, poorer sections of rural society, and so on, or whether such resistance was simply invisible and inaudible to urban upper-caste middle-class Indians who equated the nation exclusively with their own partial and provincial vision of development and modernization. It is only now in later decades that a true audit of India’s developmental efforts in terms of their impact on the poor, the landless, the tribals, and the others displaced as a consequence of developmental projects is beginning to emerge. Ensnared by a vision of industrial modernization, upper-caste/middle-class India was oblivious to its genocidal consequences on tribals and others. In the next section, I speculate on the racial and caste underpinnings of such blindness.

In patriarchal societies such as India, women rarely, if ever, can demonstrate ownership of property in their name in a de jure sense even if they may control property in a de facto sense. The gender bias inherent in such a view of compensation after appropriation of land under Eminent Domain should be obvious. Moreover, state appropriation of various forms of common and communal lands affects tens of thousands of landless laborers, small peasants, “tribals,” and others to whom use of such lands may be critical for survival. When the State appropriates such lands under Eminent Domain, such groups are not entitled to any compensation or redress, as they are not owners but users of the common lands. The strong correlation between many developmental projects that have thrown millions of people off the land that they have customarily relied on and the spread of destitution and forced urbanization in India is worth underlining here.

The colonial legacy (the LAA of 1894) and the decades of the developmental state (1947–1991) set the stage for a new round of land appropriation that has begun after the liberalization of the Indian economy from 1991. The contemporary struggle between, on the one hand, global mining corporations like Vedanta, allied with regional states (Odisha in this instance) and local capital (Sterilite Industries India Ltd.) against, on the other, tribals affected by the mines, NGOs, and other national and transnational activists, is the latest round in an ongoing redefinition of Eminent Domain. Before we examine the developments over the last three decades on these issues, it might be relevant to summarize the effects of the period of dirigisme on India’s tribal populations and Dalits as a result of various developmental schemes.

With its focus on appropriation of land and (an inadequate) measure of compensation to the legally titled owner of the property, the LAA of 1894 was hopelessly inadequate to address issues of resettling and rehabilitating the hundreds of thousands who were affected by the post-independent developmental schemes. In fact, neither the central nor the various state governments have actually collected data about the people displaced by development—this has largely come about in recent years because of the efforts of independent researchers and think tanks. This absence of data actually reflects the profound presence of casteism and racism in Indian society. The overwhelming percentage of those displaced, dispossessed, and simply overrun by the various developmental schemes were either tribal or Dalit or the landless poor. Their destitution in the name of a nation that most of them barely knew is something that has gone undocumented and largely unremembered. While I discuss this issue elsewhere, the fact that India’s self-understanding of its history, democracy, and development has been so largely the work of its upper-caste and middle-class fractions has meant that it has been, until recently, completely oblivious to those that are outside that privileged circle. ¹⁵

One of the few who has worked for a long time in this domain of estimating the human costs of Indian development, Walter Fernandes, estimates that between 1947 and 2000, about sixty million people have been deprived of their livelihood as a result of displacement (displaced persons [DPs]) or the economic impact of projects on their lives (project affected persons [PAPs]). Of the DPs, as few as one-third were resettled by the State—with two-thirds being left to fend for themselves after having lost their habitation as a consequence of the State’s developmental efforts. While tribals constituted about 8percent of India’s overall population, they were as much as 40 percent of those who were either DP or PAP as of 1991. Dalits are similarly overrepresented among these categories (constituting 20 percent of DPs and PAPs) as a vast majority of them work as landless laborers to begin with as they have no access to land in many cases. The numbers and percentages could have increased only further to their detriment in the decades since then. Compounding the horrific violence visited upon these tribal populations is the fact that many of them have been displaced multiple times in the course of a single generation. Ousted from their primary abode, they often settle (or “squat”) on other lands, or move to urban slums—which are then razed or “relocated” as part of urban “beautification” programs. ¹⁶

Fernandes’s work further describes how “thin” understandings of both resettlement and rehabilitation govern the actions of the State. Efforts to bring the LAA of 1894 in consonance with the needs of the displaced, and to address its biases against women, tribals, Dalits, and the landless, have not gone very far. In large part, this is because of a pronounced shift in the nature of the Indian State after 1991. While this is often termed liberalization or a pro-market dispensation, following the work of Atul Kohli, it is more accurately described as a shift to a pro-business orientation. ¹⁷

The key change in terms of the concerns of this article is that the Indian State has gone from being a developmental entity that once had socialistic ambitions to occupy the “commanding heights of the economy” to one that regards itself primarily as the facilitator of economic growth largely dependent on private capitalist initiative. Hailed as an “emerging economy” and part of the dynamic Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) group of countries, the country’s developmental strategies have emphasized the generation of high GDP growth rates every year over the distributive consequences of such growth or the human and environmental fallout of such a strategy. The growth rate has become a fetish object, revered and respected as if by itself it would somehow transform the nation and elevate India to the status of an affluent and developed nation. The GDP growth rate number has served as means to discipline policy choices in favor of private capitalist investment and profit and against redistribution or welfare schemes. ¹⁸

In the specific area of land acquisition (LA), it has gone from a State that expropriated land for its own industries, mines, dams, power plants, and other public sector enterprises to one that expropriates land at the behest or on behalf of private corporations—both Indian and multinational. Surging economic activity since the early 1990s has created enormous pressure on acquiring land in India. High-profile violent clashes such as Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal, the controversies over Pohang Steel Corporation (POSCO) and Vedanta in Odisha, and rampant illegal mining in Goa are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to conflicts over land.

Responding to the neoliberal impetus of the state as guarantor for the conditions of private accumulation, the Indian government outlined two sets of policies to bring up to date the colonial LAA of 1894: first, the LA (Amendment) Bill of 2009, and second, the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill (2009). Michael Levien, who has studied this issue in depth, concludes that though both Bills are cloaked in the rhetoric of peoples’ needs, fairness, and just compensation, the reality is otherwise. The LA (Amendment) Bill serves primarily to make the Indian state a land broker who facilitates the access of private capital to land; and the main purpose of the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill is to rationalize such dispossession by its very selective definition of the meaning of those terms. While the full details of both these bills will take us too far afield, a couple of salient examples of their operation will be useful. ¹⁹

There isn’t much elasticity in land supply in India, with most of it being cultivated by small farmers. Land records are in very poor shape, and ownership is cloudy at best. This makes for an uncertain investment climate, especially when some of the players are foreign and unfamiliar with India’s byzantine bureaucracy and land records that are anything but standardized. Yet, a whole host of public–private partnerships (PPPs) rests upon the ability to acquire land in an economical and speedy manner. The Land Act (Amended) of 2009 tries to reduce the uncertainty, and to convey an impression of fairness, by stating that once a private corporation has acquired 70 percent of the land it needs for a specific venture by buying it on the open market, the State undertakes to deliver the remaining 30 percent by using Eminent Domain if needed.

The assumption here is that the market purchase of the bulk of the land made by the private parties will ensure fairness to the seller. This is where problems abound. First, as Levien points out, the Amended Act refers to 70 percent of the needed land—not owners. In a situation where the bulk of the land is owned by one or two individuals or corporations or even the State, a company or investor could rapidly reach the 70 percent mark—and then require the State to dispossess a large number of smallholders of their lands in order to get to the 100 percent mark. The State will end up using Eminent Domain to insulate the investors from having to deal with smallholders; to wade their way through the land records and messy details of multiple ownerships and liens; and against large numbers of its own citizenry and for a private (and often foreign) investor.

Second, the expropriation of land is supposed to be justified when it is “useful to the general public” and in “strategic” or “infrastructural” sectors. None of these terms is well defined in the Amended Bill, and what it ends up authorizing in terms of justified expropriation is alarmingly large. Thus, “infrastructure” includes,

… power generation and transmission; construction of roads, highways, bridges, airports, ports, or rail systems; mining activities, educational, sports, healthcare, tourism, transportation, space programme, and housing ‘for such income groups as may be specified from time to time by the appropriate government’, and water supply projects, irrigation projects, sanitation and sewerage systems. ²⁰

Third, given the sorry track record of the Indian State going back to independence in the areas of resettlement, rehabilitation, and compensation, many a smallholder would prefer to take his chances in selling to the private corporation in quest of its 70 percent target than being forced to sell to the State under Eminent Domain once the corporation has achieved that target. This creates a pressure on owners of small parcels of land to settle fast and with private buyers instead of risking having to deal with the State. Thus, paradoxically and perniciously, the past callousness and inefficiency of the Indian State makes it a more efficient expropriator of the smallholders today by impelling them to sell early and to private investors.

To summarize, following Levien, one can aver that the Amended Land Act has served to shift one of the most crucial resources, land, from one set of players (smallholders and other poor sections) to another (large, economically, and politically well-connected investing classes)—under the auspices of a State committed to rapid growth and creating a stable and attractive climate for investment.

A crucial part of the hegemony of the postcolonial Indian state rested upon the perception that bumbling, inefficient, bureaucratic, and slow as it may be, it was still an entity that acted in the general interests of the nation as a whole rather than at the behest of any particular class or segment of society. The post-1947 dirigiste developmental model may have been rightly criticized for being a license-permit-quota Raj, but it was less often critiqued for being in the pocket of either India’s bourgeoisie or its landed classes. Even allegations that it was run by and for the corrupt bureaucrats were tempered by the realization that the “babus” weren’t exactly millionaires either, and a slow and torpid economy meant opportunities for graft were equally petty in many ways. ²¹

This has changed dramatically under the neoliberal dispensation. The activities of the State as land broker for large, hugely rich, and successful private corporations are difficult to legitimize as the actions of a developmental state or one that acts on behalf of all classes. And yet, the State has little choice but to act as land broker if it has to sustain an international image as an “emerging economy” and one that is hospitable to foreign and domestic private investors in infrastructural areas. ²² The Indian state is literally caught between maintaining an external image as an attractive investment site for global capital and the need to seem accountable to domestic constituencies that cannot withstand any more displacement in the name of development. Especially in an electoral democracy, this disjuncture in its political project (growth that benefits everybody) and its economic actions (acting primarily at the behest of private capital) in areas such as LA cannot be sustained for long and we will be seeing more and more reversals for the State in such encounters.

This would explain why Vedanta finds itself stymied in Niyamgiri. Sections of the State such as the MoEF in the Central government, and the Odisha State bureaucracy responsible for environmental affairs have coalesced behind an increasingly activist court system (including the Supreme court) to thwart other sections of the State that are committed to rapid growth at any price. All this is happening before a 24/7 liberalized media that is itself torn between its enthusiasm for India as an emerging economic giant and its growing recognition of environmental sustainability and the rights of indigenous groups such as the Dongaria Kondh. ²³ In India, the same social base of upper-caste, middle-class, English-educated sections produces civil servants, engineers in the mining companies, NGO groups opposed to the mining, and the media that covers the encounter.

The struggle between Vedanta and the Dongaria Kondh has received an enormous amount of attention in the Indian and international media. Vedanta’s predatory mining practices elsewhere have led to divestment from its stock by the Norwegian government, the Church of England, and other prominent institutions. The annual meetings of the company’s board based in London have become sites of creative and dramatic protest, drawing in the likes of Bianca Jagger. Activists dressed like the Navi from the movie Avatar have created media spectacles that have gone viral on social media. Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and human rights and environmental rights groups have weighed in on the side of the Dongaria Kondh and against the mining MNC. The British government was forced to withdraw an award for environmental safety that it had announced for Vedanta when over thirty workers in a plant of that company were killed in an accident in a different operation within India.

Late last year, Vedanta tried to force the issue by stating that its refinery operations had been contingent on the mining lease for Niyamgiri and if immediate approval of the latter were not forthcoming, it would have to shut down its refinery. It then proceeded to shut down the refinery. It also averred that the economic climate created by what it called draconian environmental regulations and excessive litigation would force it to reconsider all investment in Kalahandi and to possibly pull out of the area completely. Vedanta has repeatedly cited the backwardness of Kalahandi and touted its investment in the area as a way of bringing modernity to this region left behind in time. This was accompanied by a full-on public relations campaign seducing middle-class urban Indian in novel ways. ²⁴ Besides a nationwide advertising campaign centering on a video of a tribal girl (Creating Happiness) ²⁵ whose life had been ostensibly transformed by the school that Vedanta had built in Kalahandi, the company also sponsored a nationwide contest for the best short film on Vedanta’s sense of corporate social responsibility. This contest was presided over by an executive in one of India’s (indeed the world’s) leading advertising agencies and drew entries from students in the hundreds of media, advertising/communications, and film schools that have mushroomed all across India’s universities and urban spaces.

The struggle between Vedanta and the Dongaria Kondh has placed the issue of neoliberal development squarely on the front burner. In other words, the human and environmental costs of development have become politicized in an unprecedented way in India. Armed with new laws that empower citizens through the Right to Information, the need to secure the consent of the governed before their land is expropriated, lengthy environmental and social impact assessments, and a watchful media and civil libertarian groups, the task of companies like Vedanta is not going to be easy. On the other side, extensive corruption, the rising influence of large mining and other corporations as donors and financiers of all leading political parties, the use of police and security forces (under cover of battling the Maoist insurgency) to intimidate activists, and the need to maintain high rates of economic growth in order to sustain the image of an emerging power propel a process of accumulation by dispossession. This confrontation has now received a further fillip as the BJP has won the Parliamentary elections and emerged as a regime committed to high growth rates even at the cost of riding rough shod over societal opposition. The battle lines, as they say, have been drawn and the next few years should prove interesting to say the least. As the concluding section will argue, the outcome is by no means foregone, but the interim promises to be both deeply contested and violent.

Race, Nation, and the Indian Middle Class

Rob Nixon’s elegant and spare description of the contemporary neoliberal global order captures its essence:

(F)irst, the widening chasm—within and between nations—that separates the mega-rich from the destitute; second, the attendant burden of unsustainable ecological degradation that impacts the health and livelihood of the poor most directly; and third, the way, under cover of a free market ideology, powerful transnational corporations exploit the lopsided universe of deregulation, whereby laws and loopholes are selectively applied in a marketplace a lot freer for some societies and classes than for others. ²⁶

From a certain perspective, one might argue that India’s disposable populations—tribals, Dalits, and the landless poor—have moved from one regime of slow violence (the era of the developmental state inaugurated by Nehru symbolized by the hydroelectric dam) to another regime, of a more accelerated violence, in the era of neoliberalism. Both regimes of accumulation have been sutured by nationalism. If the era of Nehruvian dirigisme was embodied by a form of self-reliant industrial modernization that of today is shaped by discourses of India as an emergent power with a liberalized economy ready to unleash its entrepreneurial energies.

Most in India’s urban middle classes reflect long-standing beliefs that Adivasis are “backward,” uncivilized, and ultimately should either be assimilated into the rest of a putatively normal society or, at minimum, be relocated out of sight as natural resources are too precious, and economic growth too important, to allow their objections and their presence to detain us. Essentially, a national discursive apparatus is mobilized to argue that their disappearance is a necessary price for development. ²⁷

In a recent interview, the Indian-born Executive Chairman of Vedanta, Anil Agarwal, observed that his company had invested millions of dollars into one of the most backward districts in India. As he noted, “We have set up that unit spending Rs. 50,000 crore in Odisha (1 crore = 10 million—S.K.). When I went there 10 years back it was worse than Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Today if you go, there’s prosperity and the only industry there is our industry. It’s a development model.” ²⁸ The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are home to some of the oldest tribes and parts of them are completely insulated from contact with the rest of the world, comparable only to aboriginal groups once resident in Tasmania. Despite a decade of schooling in political correctness thanks to the environmental and human rights protests against Vedanta, and the public exercises in corporate social responsibility forced on the firm, its CEO is unable to think outside an evolutionary metric that positions tribal society at the bottom of human hierarchy, and progress defined as movement away from that bottom. The “developmental model” he touts has been resoundingly disproven by Amnesty International reports from the area and by the defeat in all twelve Gram Sabha referenda conducted there. Yet, Agarwal persists in presenting himself and his company as developmental saviors of a benighted region and its people.

Anna Tsing in the epigraph to this essay captures the way in which the nation as an enclosed and enclosured place invalidates the tribal and the poor, and deterritorializes the land from under them: they, after all, use land for mere habitation while national development and growth mean that lands need to be improved. The racial underpinnings of such a belief in the dispensability of tribals and the poor, and the obvious centrality of the urban middle class which stands for the nation, is not something that is remarked upon much in contemporary India: it’s a truth that “goes without saying because it came without saying,” as Bourdieu might put it.

A crucial element in the elevation of such an urban middle class to the historical center and the reduction of the tribal to a historical relic on the way to either annihilation or assimilation is the category of the nation. The nation emerges as the raison d’etre for the elimination of all contestations to land and the state consolidates itself as the sole owner of all land within the realm. Amita Baviskar notes that nation is pitted against tribe in a battle in which the latter is destined to lose as it does not have history on its side:

However, processes of dispossession are enabled by another, overriding contradiction that pits two different forms of communal identity against each other, that is, the tribe versus the nation. Land alienation is effected by the state through its power of “eminent domain” exercised in the name of the community that supersedes all others—the nation. National development legitimizes projects that displace as “public purpose,” superimposing on the rights of the “tribe” a more powerful communal identity with interests that supersede those of the “little community.” The discourse of the nation enfolds all citizens into its rubric even as some citizens are regarded as more equal than others. This misrecognition of a differentiated public with conflicting interests and identities obscures the deeper cleavage and contradiction between tribe and nation. ²⁹

In a report emblematic of this prioritizing of economic growth relevant to the urban middle class and at the expense of those outside it, the leading newsmagazine India Today observed that

Over the past three years, the ‘J’ factor has jinxed development in India. Jayanthi Natarajan and Jairam Ramesh [who were successively Central Ministers for Environment and Forests in the UPA regime—S.K.], her predecessor between 2009 and July 2011, have succeeded in making MoEF the single biggest stumbling block to India’s growth story. Finally free of policy paralysis, the Government now faces an even bigger threat from within: Green terror. All in the name of preserving the environment. According to Coal India’s annual report for the year 2011–12, as many as 179 coal blocks were awaiting clearances. Forestry clearances for diverting 28,771 hectares of land were yet to be granted, upsetting the Government’s power generation plans. The story is the same across roads, steel and defence, making it impossible for India to achieve its target of attracting an investment of $1 trillion in infrastructure between 2012 and 2017. Good politics is thwarted, big business is frustrated, and the UPA Government looks unlikely to achieve its much-needed, election-required growth rate of 8 per cent. The red tape has become a green noose and it is strangling development. ³⁰

In a far-ranging and insightful essay that draws upon a genealogy going back to the Enclosure movement in England, its role in authorizing the settling of the New World at the expense of the indigenous and in colonizing Asia and Africa, Robert Marzec argues that a “new world picture” is emerging at this point in time:

(W)e have come to accept the essence of land, and the generalized representation of land constructed since the beginning of the enclosure movement, as self-evident. An ontological understanding of land must therefore be retrieved. Awakening such an understanding has become increasingly difficult, for the dominance of global technology is founded on the necessity for people and information to metaphysically transcend geographical barriers: the supplementation once again of Defoe’s idealized prospect view of an immense espalier of English enclosures that turn uncultivated land into a utility for the market—only now on a global level. Legitimated by the logic that an increased technologization of the planet enables cultures to break down territorial land barriers and reduce differences for the installation of a “common ground,” arguments in favor of these and other supposedly neutral innovations abound. Only with the establishment of such a metaphysical ground, this logic continues, can an egalitarian and democratic community be made manifest. The idea of a singular, uncommodified territory of land stands on the stage of modernity as an outlaw. Land—its material heterogeneity, its geographical and geopolitical variations, its embedded historical relation to tribes, clans, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and nations—has become, in the conceptualized ‘‘world picture’’ of a global order, a phenomenon to be erased. ³¹