Abstract
Mining in India is a divisive issue. Where mining proponents tout treasured subsoil minerals as a shortcut to jobs, livelihoods, economic growth and accumulation, mining opponents see the mining industry as a harbinger of unmitigated disaster and cultural and ecological destruction on a grand scale (e.g., Padel & Das, 2010). In such a situation, how is a meaningful conversation about mining even possible? This is the conundrum that lies at the heart of Patrik Oskarsson’s Landlock: Paralysing Dispute over Minerals on Adivasi Land in India.
Landlock arrives at a conjuncture when conflicts over land and the uses to which it should be put have become a defining feature of India’s political society. During the heyday of state-led development planning, millions of people were displaced for dams or steels towns designed to power India’s new industrial economy. After economic liberalization gathered momentum in the 1990s, the concerns of the private sector became more important in shaping new forms and processes of dispossession and displacement. The development priorities of the state increasingly shifted towards real estate, infrastructure, special economic zones (SEZ) and extraction, in which the corporate sector was allowed, and even expected, to play a key role. Many such projects were enabled by the colonial land acquisition act which allowed state governments to dispossess people (against their will if need be) with minimal compensation and little, if any, rehabilitation. As is well known, the outcome has been a spate of ‘land wars’ (Levien, 2018; Nielsen, 2018) as dispossessed communities have mobilized in defence of their land.
Landlock constitutes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on these contemporary Indian land conflicts. It focuses on two interlinked mining-related projects in undivided Andhra Pradesh, one for a bauxite mine proper, the other for an alumina refinery. Both projects soon became controversial and pitted what Oskarsson calls ‘the bauxite alliance’ (p. 56)—comprised by political and business interests—against activists and NGOs campaigning against the mine in the name of Adivasis and nature.
As Oskarsson points out, political economy analysis of the crude sort would have us assume that this kind of conflict would easily be won by the bauxite alliance due to its command of vastly superior resources. Yet, what Landlock describes in meticulous detail is how many different forces and processes working to promote or block the two projects rather led to a paralysing stand-off in which neither side could emerge victorious: the bauxite alliance never managed to start the extraction of minerals, whereas the activists were unable to translate their entrenched resistance into positive development alternatives that might have enhanced tribal social justice. This is, in fact, not an outcome unique to Andhra Pradesh. It rather illustrates a deeply ingrained inability to resolve the differences expressed in countless conflicts over Adivasi land and resources across India in recent decades (p. 6). Given that mining is the second biggest source of displacement in India after dams (p. 41), Oskarsson’s findings raise crucial questions about the capacity of India’s democratic institutions to judiciously manage land and nature in ways that are attuned to concerns for social justice and the common good.
Information is at the heart of Oskarsson’s analysis. Or, more to the point, ‘informational problems’ (p. 23). The introduction engages Habermas’ ideas of communicative action and argues that, in India, the nature, quality and timing of the information that reaches the public is likely to be crucial for how public deliberation unfolds (p. 17). Further, meaningful deliberation depends on people’s ability to access information as well as on their capacity to convert information into useful knowledge (p. 19). Against this backdrop, the book details the reluctant, half-hearted, even lackadaisical production of information by governments, commissioned experts and activists alike; the shoddy nature of the data used to legitimize important decisions that shape the lives of thousands of people and vulnerable ecosystems for better or worse; and the outright manipulation of state-authorized knowledge to arrive at desired ends. Not only is the relevant information on the two mining-related projects of poor quality. It is clouded in secrecy and withheld by those who have it to the highest degree possible. While other, recent studies from Adivasi India have argued that the power that corporations and state officials have to control and manipulate the movement and circulation of the documents that contain such information—however faulty it may be—is a key means by which Adivasis are dispossessed and disenfranchised (Choudhury & Aga, 2019), things are more complicated in Oskarsson’s ethnographic setting. Here, information flows in haphazard ways, to the extent that it flows at all, and nobody is in a position to control this flow in its totality in any straightforward way.
Oskarsson (p. 185) concludes that these poor information flows are the result of the widespread recognition that information is a valuable resource that needs to be protected and only released if something can be gained by doing so. This logic works across the state–civil society divide: government offices on the whole do not willingly share information with each other, much less with civil society groups (or with foreign researchers, as chapter seven that details Oskarsson’s own search for information in various offices vividly documents). On their part, civil society groups distrust not only government, but also each other. They are divided ideologically and compete to attract new supporters and (sometimes) more funding (p. 181). Therefore, they rarely coordinate efforts even though they are essentially fighting the same battle, namely to stop the mine. The result is a situation where most parties to the conflict have only fragmented bits of information about the larger picture. They guard this information carefully and accordingly confine themselves to working on a single specific issue, usually in a rather narrowly demarcated geographical locality. This, Oskarsson argues, makes efficient mediation of competing demands in the domain of land use virtually impossible: to the extent that people talk to each other at all, they talk past each other; and they retreat into their own well-entrenched positions in oppositional discourses (p. 167). The first casualty of this kind of discursive trench warfare is an informed debate about how to actually go about improving the lives of desperately poor Adivasi communities.
Oskarsson is clear that he does not believe that there is such a thing as perfect information, much less a perfectly transparent mode of organizing society (p. 186). This is undoubtedly correct, but these ideal-typical constructs nonetheless constitute the ground upon which his argument about ‘information problems’ gains traction. In spite of the disclaimer, one is easily given to believe that, if only these information problems did not exist, different actors would have been able to better understand what the project was all about and could have taken ‘appropriate action’ (p. 167) in relation to the mining projects. They might even have arrived at ‘a larger, common understanding’ (pp. 28, 178). A spirit of collaboration and dialogue underpins such hopeful statements, but also makes one wonder to what extent our current post-fact society will in fact be conducive to such forms of information-enriched and evidence-based mediation. And, of course, what constitutes appropriate action is, in any given context, as much a political question as a question of information.
Given that the research setting was marked by conflict and stark inequalities in power, the vexed issue of positionality is worth considering. Anthropologists, like Stuart Kirsch (2018), have made the case for an engaged anthropology where the researcher self-consciously plays a role in public debate and political struggle, with all the perils and pitfalls this entails. Other have argued that development research should not merely ‘do no harm’ but must actively seek to ‘do good’ (Scheyvens & Storey, 2003). Oskarsson briefly discusses the politicized nature of his research topic and the difficulty of occupying a ‘neutral position’ (p. 25), but generally refrains from explicitly committing to any particular party to the conflict. The book, however, has a tangible undercurrent of implicit commitment to the cause of India’s Adivasis. The way I read it, Oskarsson’s ‘doing good’ consists in his careful mapping of why hotly contested mining projects play out the way they do; in his efforts at combining ‘the results of fragmented and time-consuming information-gathering activities by different members of the opposition’ so as to overcome the identified information problems (p. 182); and in championing the idea that meaningful mediation may in fact be possible. Not simply because meaningful mediation is valuable in its own right, but more importantly because it would enable more productive outcomes in the poverty-stricken parts of central India, where poor Adivasis are still threatened with the loss of their lands while investors waste their money in endless controversies (p. 189).
The author generally applies a light theoretical touch and could have engaged a larger literature on, for example, Indian popular politics and its diverse repertoires, forms and expressions. His description of the dynamics of contestation and mobilization, the importance of informal pressure tactics, and the contingent and intensely mediated nature of actual political struggles seems to resonate rather strongly with Partha Chatterjee’s (2004, 2008) work on the politics of the governed. It would have been interesting to know how Oskarsson would relate his own work to Chatterjee’s influential framework that has spawned so much debate in India studies over the past decade and a half.
The merit of Landlock is that it refuses neat but ultimately misleading binaries that reduce mining conflicts to a question of ‘evil corporations’ versus ‘poor Adivasis’. Instead, it invites the reader on a carefully guided tour that shows just how messy, confused, unsavoury and contradictory mining projects in India really are. The tour is full of farce, irony, paradox and, ultimately, tragedy. It is elegantly written, and Oskarsson’s dry wit and subdued formulations effectively assist in driving home the argument. For example, while the story told in Landlock in more than one way invites the reader to jump to the conclusion that Andhra Pradesh’s leading politicians are a corrupt lot who only want mining to move ahead so that they can line their own pockets, Oskarsson merely suggests that, based on the evidence presented, we might conclude that ‘an increase in government revenues has not been a high priority for leading politicians in the Andhra Pradesh government’ (p. 69). The book is full of formulations akin to this one. They neither dramatize nor trivialize, but very effectively pinpoint the implications of the different strategies adopted by different parties to the conflict. In addition, Landlock is richly illustrated and written in an accessible language. The fact that it is also available through open access should ensure that it gets the large readership that it deserves.