Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study compares two indigenous anti-mining movements in India by analysing their cosmologies, discourses, movement outcomes and explains the various degrees of successes that they achieved through the lens of New Social Movement theory and Political Process theory.

Paper long abstract:

The Indian postcolonial state’s developmentalist and modernizing political economy aims to forge internal colonial and extractive relations with indigenous communities and realms, dispossess them of their natural resources and destroy their rights.

These communities have organised themselves to fight the state-facilitated threat of extractive capital forming social movements to resist and challenge social institutions, governments, and mining companies.

In the provincial state of Odisha lies the Niyamgiri hill range, home to the adivasi (indigenous) Dongria Kondh tribe. In 2004, Vedanta Resources, a London-based Indian mining corporation, planned a project in Niyamgiri to mine for bauxite. The Dongria Kondh resisted the project, and the Supreme Court of India scrapped it in 2013. In 2015, Vedanta Resources planned a gold mining project in Sonakhan, in the provincial state of Chhattisgarh. The adivasi Binjhal tribe resisted the project, and the provincial chief minister promised to stop it.

This ethnographic study compares these two indigenous movements against projects commissioned by Vedanta. We analyze how the movements deployed indigenous cosmologies and discourses, ideas of sacred geography and religiosity, and heterodox cultural idioms in mobilizing history, memory, and folk imaginaries, for staging an organised resilience.

We analyse the similarities and differences to understand the varying degrees of success. We argue that while factors related to the movements shaped the nature of the success, the successful outcome itself was related to the structures of “political opportunities” available at the provincial and national levels; it depended on electoral competition and party politics between the ruling and opposition parties.