Presentation short abstract

Resistance in Kinnaur, articulated through the language of indigeneity, emerges as agrarian capitalism clashes with fast-moving extractivist hydroelectric dam projects, exposing the deepening contradictions of the dominant neoliberal growth paradigm.

Presentation long abstract

Hydropower expansion in neoliberal India exposes the deepening contradictions of the dominant growth-development paradigm. In Himalayan border regions like Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, the state considers large dams as “green” infrastructures—asserting territorial sovereignty, delivering economic progress, and bolstering environmental legitimacy in the ‘Anthropocene’. Along the Sutlej River alone, more than fifty projects have been planned or operationalised via state-corporate collusion, rendering the region a frontier. These initiatives, however, have encountered sustained grassroots opposition; the vocabulary of resistance filigreed by the language of indigenous rights to land and livelihood.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews and secondary literature, the paper examines what contemporary mobilisation in Kinnaur reveals about the entanglement of identity, ecology, and political agency in India’s borderlands and its implications for environmental politics more broadly. It locates this resistance within long-term shifts, rooted in British colonialism and consolidated in the postcolonial period, from common-property agro-pastoral systems to private landholding and capitalist agriculture, which have produced an agrarian petty bourgeoisie whose aspirations and vulnerabilities shape contemporary contention. While ‘indigeneity’ is invoked, the struggle cannot be characterised as a classical case of environmentalism of the poor. Instead, resistance embodies a contradiction between agrarian capitalism and a fast-moving extractivist project—two economic-environmental regimes whose incompatible temporalities expose a crisis-ridden growth logic. By tapping into historical practises of commoning and associated relationships with nature, however, the movement attempts to actively reconstruct community consciousness beyond an essentialist identity politics. It challenges the state–corporate nexus in abject rejection and, in that, opens space for different ecological and political futures.