Of dusty hydraulics and resonating selves
by: Ritaban Ghosh
The mine is quarrying into the lives, forests, airs, and everydays around it at Deucha Pachami. An extensive project encompassing two coal blocks – Deucha-Pachami (9.7 sq. kms) and Dewanganj-Harinsinga (2.6 sq. kms), in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, India. These 12.28 kilometres of refuse remember wager as cadent of misgiving, dust as dividend of development and violence as grammar of the polis. Geologically, the area is unique due to the unusually high thickness of the coal seam, occurring between difficult layers of noncoal rock partings, which include hard basaltic rocks of volcanic origin ranging from 90 to 245 metres. The 2,102 million tonnes coal deposit (second largest block in the world) has the potential to draw public-private investment to the tune of USD 3 billion. The extensive excavation of the open-cast mine requires the removal of everything above the coal seam, from houses to histories. Its travel 1 kilometre deep, will have far-reaching and disruptive consequences on ecosystems, agriculture, water bodies, and the climate within the region. The relocation of more than 21,000 people is expected to bring about social upheaval and potentially criminality, mirroring the experiences of other coal mining regions in proximity like Khayrashol and Raniganj. These issues carry profound implications for the affected communities’ social fabric and economic stability. A pivotal point of contention is the eviction and land destruction that would affect indigenous communities, notably the Santhal community. This echoes a broader pattern of indigenous communities bearing the brunt of corporate exploitation churning electoral velocities of economy and export. Their historical struggles for land rights and cultural preservation make them central figures in the resistance against the project. The environmental footprint of the Deucha-Pachami project is another cause for alarm. The removal of 1,400 million cubic metres of basalt deposit to access the coal through constant blasting poses an additional risk, potentially leading the land and its surroundings to quake and crumble. While the government has pledged a sum of Rs 10,000 crore in compensation and rehabilitation measures, the local population harbours deep reservations about the consequences of eviction and the subsequent upheaval in their lives and livelihoods. The government’s adherence to the provisions of the Forest Rights Act, which safeguards the rights of forest-dwelling communities, has also come under scrutiny. Opening the cast to extract coal is an act to generate toxicity. The translation from toxic to energy generates more waste that requires more land to dispose. This banishment of claims creates a metabolic rift from known ways of living to forced ways of aspiring. The register shifts from symbiotic to exploitative, from communal to nuclear, from sustainable to consumable.
Google. (n.d.). [Location of Deucha Pachami]. Retrieved 9th Nov, 2023, from https://optimizeias.com/deucha-pachami-coal-block/.
Often, those embedded in the relational subjectivities of social movements question what decides a mobilisation’s success or failure. Social movements are often assessed through different lenses. The ‘WUNC display’ model highlights worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment as crucial elements. For a movement to emerge, the cause must be deemed worthy, demonstrated through unified actions, substantial participation, and unwavering dedication.1 Successful movements achieve multiple indicators of success. They extend democratic rights through multicultural constitutional frameworks, gain political leverage, and foster collective identities for collective action. These movements aim to reshape societal structures and reward distribution. Effective movements cultivate a ‘conscience constituency’ including support from influential entities like government organisations, mass media, and corporations.2 Six crucial elements underpin such victories: recognising societal deprivation, proposing solutions, diffusing ideologies, initiating events, maintaining societal openness to change, and mobilising resources. The dissemination of ideas in society is vital for success. 3 Movements are more likely to thrive if they are led by indigenous organisations aligned with non-indigenous groups on a global scale. This alignment is achieved by ‘externalisation-internalisation’4 through the global ‘valorisation of indigeneity’),5 which results from indigenous people effectively employing a ‘politics of morality’6 against ecological failures in modern civilisation. This may encompass acts of solidarity extended to the most marginalised individuals by external agents, including scholars, activists, artists, and students. These acts bridge the profound epistemological gaps between dominant and specific identities through the presence of these ‘differential subaltern’ voices, inhabiting a mythopoeic perspective and an ethical relationship with the communities impacted.7 It is essential to acknowledge that these movements exist within a context marked by events, and they are not just active participants or passive reactions but dynamic social actors influencing the interpretation and evolution of events.8 Certainly, it is significant whether coming-togethers measurably transform policy and ensure follow-through, measured by constitutional shifts, government representation, and law enactment. However, a more entwined, hermeneutic perspective might also consider the fact that the success of the movement is in the mere fact that they materialised, that they occurred, that they are social actors playing and negotiating countervailing vectors of dissent in themselves within their timescape.
Screen grab from Jitkour [Video]. Oddjoint Production (2023). Retrieved on 9th Nov, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMvz1x70UBE
Words are deeds.9 They are purposive endeavours not only to state or describe but to manifest realities. When linguistic reproductions are denied through abjurations of the agency of production, exchange and dissemination, and authority of subjectivity, particular realities and the inherent right of self-representation are denied with it. When extractive industrial tendencies intervene into an indigenous space, they must represent it as unproductive, arid, or discarded, rendering it fertile for abstraction. This disregards the rich local indigenous knowledge, practices, and cultural heritage that have evolved over generations, emphasising the interlacedness of all living beings with the environment.10 It also overlooks indigenous economies, which follow their own self-determined routes of development, law, and education, in finely tuned, non-monetary systems on principles of reciprocity, balance, and alignment with the local ecology.11 To sustain this narrative, they must thus, utilise epistemic violence to deny the realities of the peoples through purposive gaps in cognitive processes, born in a structural prioritisation of a particular system of knowledge (possessed by dominant groups) over another system of knowledge (of the oppressed groups) as accurate, valuable, superior, and certain.12 It must systematically draw the contours and boundaries of imagination and perception, annulling, erasing, discarding, and exterminating valuable marginalised epistemes and those who carry them. These injustices are often denied, creating a ‘counterfeit universe’ where displacement is often rationalised as a means of poverty reduction, despite benefiting the wealthy while exacerbating the impoverishment of the poor. 13This is inseparable from the intricate interplay of caste, purity, and pollution concepts in India.14 These elements imbue land, forest, and water with intricate social hierarchies, affirming specific cultural portrayals and validating or invalidating spaces, individuals, and communities. This dynamic also perpetuates social stratification, sparking conflicts and violence, yet it also provides platforms for resisting oppression.
Shubhankar Sengupta, Untitled (2021). Courtesy of the Artist.
I argue that a fundamental indicator of the success of resistance and mobilisation is whether it has created alternative epistemic structures that offset the suffocation of those imposed by government and capital. In the context of indigenous settings in West Bengal, marginalised agency is exemplified through social movement education and the decolonisation of physical spaces like forests and rivers. This is why movement-based learning methods are crucial.15
They foster a shared appreciation for the historical and contextual dimensions of land and forest dispossession through learning from expressions of grief, traditional songs, communal gatherings, and common experiences that scrutinise and contextualise the history of dispossession and unzip tacit discursivities in plural ways. These connect contemporary struggles to historical ones, ensuring that the movement’s significance is comprehended and spills beyond the boundaries of the time-space into the immensity of conjunct histories. This is especially important because surveys reveal that among the 21,000 people to be evicted, around 9,034 from the Scheduled Tribe and 3,601 from the Scheduled Caste communities reside in the coal block area. Indigenous peoples constitute only 8.6 per cent of the total population in India, and yet, more than half of all displaced populations since independence were these populations.16 This is also important because both manifest and concealed forms of silencing, suppression, and distortion of protester intentions are prevalent in the Deucha Pachami context even as factions of the media and government construct interpellations of popular support. When a protest march was organised in Dewanganj on 20th February 2022, the local police, citing pandemic regulations, filed a case against nine protesters. A few days later, a substantial police force, led by an influential tribal leader, descended upon the area, rallying in favour of coal mining and distributing cheques to the apparently ‘willing farmers’. The grassroots resistance obstructing the rally, primarily spearheaded by the Santhal community, encountered brutal repression, with the police force wielding batons against them, and leading to grave injuries sustained by at least twenty-five Santhal women. These physical assaults are further indicative of a broader, psychological anguish. The thick basalt that forms the substratum of this area rhizomatically informs those adjacent, and their summation in the ancient Chota Nagpur plateau constellates possibilities of desperations. These dynamics give rise to potentials for upheavals – disruptions of established lineages, desperations of derangements, and suspensions of legacy and agency of inherited knowledge systems. Protesters are routinely branded as ‘anti-development,’ ‘anti-government,’ and even ‘Naxals,’ and subjected to false legal charges, as serious as attempted murder and kidnapping. Beneath the cultural obliteration lies a profound disrespect for tribal traditions and their profound connection to the land. Prejudiced narratives portraying tribal communities and their regions as ‘backward’ and ‘underdeveloped’ are perpetuated. These conditions become a subspace naming expression as protest. Protest is a pulse that engenders circuits of invitation and spills over other discursive continuums. Affordance of will and relational binds sublimate the lacuna that the state deliberates to perforate. There is no quiet resignation.
Wall writing organised by CPI-ML (2022). Photograph by Tanmay Das.
For the displaced indigenous populations, their community-based resource management systems and physical commons operate according to norms and institutions rooted in generational knowledge of historical continuity within their natural environment. This knowledge is reinforced through daily practice, showcasing the sustainability inherent in their way of life. Even amid protest, these sustainabilities offer valuable insights for comprehensive ecological practices. The tribal communities demonstrate a strong commitment to safeguarding their long-standing interlacedness and symbiosis with nature. Prioritising community well-being over individual progress, they have remained relatively insulated from the consumerist, exploitative tendencies prevalent in mainstream society. For instance, they opt for cloth banners over printed flex during rallies, gather dry leaves from nearby sal forests for cooking fuel, exercise extreme caution in managing water systems to avoid depleting the groundwater table even as the local populace increases due to the protest. Their primary objection to the project stems from the disruption of their traditionally sustainable village lives and livelihoods, intricately tied to the forest and land, which cannot be restored regardless of any compensation offered. The movement operates within a larger discursive process wherein struggles assimilate global norms and values pertinent to their objectives, particularly ecological conservation and discursive justice in this temporal context. These ‘frame-bridgings’17 become evident in 1) the slogans reiterated in the resistance – “Koyla khoni hote debo na” (we will not let the coal mine project go ahead), “Koylakhadan nahi chalega” (coal mining will not happen), “Vidhan Sabha Na Lok Sabha, shob theke boro amader Gram Sabha (neither Vidhan Sabha nor Lok Sabha, above all our Gram Sabha),18 and “Aboa Disham, Aboa Raj” (our country, our rule), 2) the rhythms and melodies that are modifications of common traditional songs sung by the indigenous population for the purposes of the protest, and 3) various grassroots organisations – Birbhum Jomi, Jibon, Jibika o Prakriti Banchao Mahasabha (Birbhum Mahasabha for Saving Land, Life, Livelihood, and Nature), Deocha-Pachami Jami Raksha (Land Protection) Committee, Deucha Pachami Adibasi Janajati Bhumi Raksha (Protection of Land Claimed by Tribal Populations) Committee, Save Democracy, Jai Kisan Andolan (Hail Farmer Movement), and Project Affected People’s Association, which have come together with tribals, non-tribal local leaders, students, and activists, artists, and scholars from urban and other spaces. For instance, in the case of Samirul Islam, president of Bangla Sanskriti Mancha (Bengal Cultural Platform), a significant presence in the Birbhum district, his commitment to standing by the indigenous population’s decisions regarding compensation underscores a crucial aspect of the movement. Similarly, the week-long detention of T. Khan, S. Sengupta, Imam, R. Mohammad, Malek Mollah, and S. Nanda, Mohon Mardi and Kalicharan Baske, along with Kolkata-based economist and political activist Prasenjit Bose after the protest of February ‘22, under Sections 307 (attempt to murder) and 364 (kidnapping or abduction of a person in order to murder) of the Indian Penal Code, highlights the intensity of the struggle. The protest meeting organised by the Birbhum Mahasabha, which saw the detention of intellectuals and activists from Kolkata and Delhi, sheds light on the broader implications of the movement and governmentality. Solidarity for the indigenous populations primarily came from economically and socially marginalised non-indigenous individuals, whose material circumstances and interests are often closely aligned with those of the local protestors. They too experience some forms of spatial marginalisation, often coupled with economic hardship. Their support is anchored in a longstanding sense of powerlessness, a perception of widespread oppression, and frustration with the prevailing political regime. Many local activists participating in the movement lacked prior activism experience and were not professionals; they engaged in the movement for tangible reasons directly impacting their daily lives, such as employment, environmental concerns, criminalisation, and land loss. While many decisions within the resistance are made through consensus through local self-government (Gram Sabha), often in contrast to the decisions of distant state or central governments, the movement has not remained untouched by political factionalisation. This division extends beyond the ruling All India Trinamool Congress and the opposing Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (Liberation) to local organisations. For instance, the organisation driving the anti-pollution movement, Birbhum Adibasi Gaonta, has experienced a schism. One faction, led by Sunil Soren, actively opposes the project, while the other, under Rabin Soren’s leadership, is engaged in dialogues with the government regarding the concerns of the local indigenous population. This internal divergence mirrors the broader political complexities at play.
The movement in Deucha Pachami, though modest and relatively obscure, holds profound implications. Akin to other underfunded grassroots movements, it may fade into the linear flow of historical time, amidst resource scarcity, state harassment, and political fragmentation. The mine will thrive, the land will wither, rivers will run dry, and communities will forfeit their legacies and cultures. However, if time is perceived as a luminous constellation of events and spontaneity that transcends the confines of clocks, then the triumph of this movement lies in its very occurrence. Democracy must embrace noise, disagreement, and dissent, otherwise, politics exhales futilities. Newer ways and imaginaries are stimulated when each person is empowered to tell their stories. People converged in liquid participation through acts of care, solidarity, empathy, and dissent, generating an incandescent moment of genuine societal transformation. Rumbles of hope is a mightier terrain than the one carved by explosive tremors.
