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Paper short abstract

Unpacking the connections between counterinsurgency and infrastructures, the paper discusses the duplicitous developmental claims of infrastructure and polarization within Adivasi communities enduring armed violence. The paper theorizes on militarisation of infrastructure, conflict and indigeneity.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic explorations on changes in state-society relationship in the case of the Maoist conflict in Central India, the paper expands on the securitisation and militarization of infrastructure and the resistances to such actions of state-led discourse on development and complicity. Local and regional disputes on control of land, access to natural resources and the dispossession of indigenous communities- form the everyday reality in the forested region of Bastar in Central India. Against the backdrop of seventy year armed Maoist resistance and India's counterinsurgency campaign, the logic of development through infrastructure such as roads and bridges is complicit in further exacerbating oppression and dispossession of the forest-dwelling Adivasis residing in the region. The paper problematizes the neutral nature of infrastructure and highlights the polarizing nature of it through piecing the complexities of a securitised development discourse that is rooted in a racial logic. Recounting vignettes from the fieldwork conducted in August 2019 and December 2022, the paper elaborates on narratives of Adivasis enduring long-term violence and counter violence and the overall complicity of both state and the non-state in inadvertent marginalisation of the Adivasi through loss of their lifeworld. This work contributes to understanding how infrastructure becomes a terrain of struggle where development, security collide with indigenous rights and their resistance to militarised state-formation.