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print versionIntroductory excerpt:
India’s present investment boom, as it opens its markets and "resources" to foreign companies, has a shadow side too few are aware of. Essentially, the boom is at the expense of uprooting indigenous communities all over central India, and at the cost of permanent damage to India’s environment. The “mineral wealth†lying in the mountains of Orissa, Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand States – a non-renewable resource - is being opened up to an unprecedented scale of mining and metal manufacture by Indian as well as foreign companies. Extracting vast quantities of iron-ore, bauxite, chromite, coal etc from these mountains not only affects the immediate and long-term well-being of India’s environment. It also leads to mass dispossession. Even more so the huge factories which process this ore into metal, and the huge dams being constructed. It is a little-known fact that supplying electricty and water to metal factories has always been one of the main reasons for big dams.
Adivasis show an increasing determination to stand up and refuse to be displaced. Even the most generous "R & R packages" offer only cash and promises of jobs (which in practice are rarely kept): not land for land (as required by international standards set by the International Labour Organisation etc). This means Adivasis inevitably lose their traditional lifestyle of cultivating their own food as their own masters. This is what lies behind the police killing of 14 Adivasis at Kalinganagar on 2nd January, who were protesting against a steel plant about to be constructed on their land - the most high-profile of a long train of similar events.
This situation is also connected to the spread of Naxalite and Maoist influence in these areas, and the recent escalation to a state of war and mass displacement in the Bastar region of Chattisgarh, famous as India’s "tribal heartland", where at least 60,000 Adivasis have been displaced within the last one year (June 2005-June 2006), as part of a military policy to starve the Maoists of their support base. An estimated 670 villages of exceptional beauty lie burnt and abandoned. Here too, the driving force is the State’s plans for more mines and metal factories.
What should be or could be our role as anthropologists in relation to these swiftly unfolding events?
One need is for anthropologists to speak out about what is at stake here: the qualities of tribal society, the reasons why displacement and loss of their land and self-sufficiency lead to a cultural genocide, and consequently, the validity of Adivasis’ struggle to keep their land and culture intact. As I suggest in this paper, this needs to start off through a questioning of popular and semi-official concepts about the nature of tribal society and development.
- Anthropology of a Genocide: Tribal Movements in Central India Against Over Industrialisation
- SAAG, 2006
