In Eastern India, Adivasis are protecting the future of humanity
Samarendra Das & Felix Patel on the conflict behind the aluminium trade
To look into the heart of the extractive industries, from our position in the UK, is truly to look into the belly of the beast. So much of global inequality, not to mention unimaginable ecological damage, flows from the largely hidden practices of mining companies, often with HQs in London. For people of faith in the UK, this is a huge frontier to face.
Here, Samarendra Das and Felix Patel — who the Passionists have been proud to support in their roles at Foil Vedanta — explain just a part of the destruction behind the aluminium industry. This is an extract from their far more thorough book, ‘Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel’.
Read the fuller article in Passio Magazine #12, here.
Odisha, in Eastern India, is famous for its wildlife and ancient cultures. The mountains of south-west Odisha reach up to 5,000 feet above sea level. Their massive bulk is all of a piece, with flat summits—high altitude plains that stretch for miles.
Odisha is defined in economic terms as one of India’s poorest states, yet it is one of the richest in ‘mineral resources’. And these minerals are also objects of desire for the world’s mining companies and financial investors. Coal, iron, manganese, chromite and other minerals to feed power stations are abundant in the area.
Bauxite—the ore for aluminium—formed here millions of years ago through an annual cycle, alternating monsoon rains with intense summer heat. Below the hollow crust on the summits, the layer of bauxite is like clay, holding moisture, letting it seep out gently throughout the year through streams which form all around the mountain’s flank. Nowhere is this fertility more apparent than in and around the Niyamgiri mountain range, where the mountains nourish the region’s magnificent forests and fertile fields.
Areas like these, where mineral wealth is concentrated, are where the Adivasis—India’s indigenous or tribal people—developed a lifestyle and social structure close to the earth, many centuries ago. Most still live by cultivating the soil and gathering food from the forest. Adivasi social values are centred on their relationship with their land and natural environment, and with each other. They take pride in being self-sufficient for most of their needs by their own labour.
They also experience the costs of mining most acutely, and understand its consequences better than most. Adivasis, facing the invasion of aluminium companies, have evolved some of India’s strongest people’s movements, attempting—and managing—to stall projects in Kashipur, Lanjigarh and other places.
We all use aluminium in our daily lives. It is a conductor in our mobile phones and kettles. Foil wraps and cartons, drink cans, saucepans, laptops: aluminium is in hundreds of the objects we use every day, in every room of our houses and offices. Health-food shops are full of it. Fruit juice is usually packaged in a compound fusion of aluminium and plastic—an unrecyclable hi-tech mix that has made a fortune for Tetra Pak.
What the Adivasis understand, and what we are often not taught, is that mining and manufacturing this familiar metal are among the dirtiest and most ruthlessly exploitative interactions of the developed West with the Third World.
For mining companies, as for others, the whole administration of tribal people is couched in terms of ‘development’. Worldwide, countries are defined as ‘developed’ or ‘developing’. Development has become a cover-word for unasked-for changes imposed from the outside, rather than evolving from within—a process managed by official agencies, with specific theories and techniques of change along a uniform path.
What is masked by this misuse of ‘development’ is, essentially, power. Tribal communities’ own power to decide how they wish to develop is undermined by the imposition of standardised changes by an entrenched power structure. Change is a key value in modern society. In a tribal society, until recent times, continuity with tradition has been a prime value, which is why these societies have sustained so long.
As Bhagaban Majhi, a Kondh spokesman for the resistance to the Utkal alumina project, put it: “is it development to destroy these billions of years old mountains for the profit of a few officials? Is it development to displace us from our land?”
When Adivasis are displaced and turned into industrial labourers, or their sacred mountains are mined, the ‘company man’ cannot comprehend the enormity of what is lost, or people’s outrage at this wanton destruction. Cultural genocide is accompanied by a permanent destruction of the environment and its life-giving fertility.
Mountains are the foundation of Kondh religion and mythology, which is rooted in an awareness that all life depends on water, sourced from the mountains in countless perennial streams. The image of triangles that they paint on their temples in clay colours expresses the balance, in nature, of mountain and valley, water and sun. Gopinath Mohanty—one of Odisha’s most famous writers, who wrote extensively on Odisha’s tribal peoples and the exploitation they face—recorded an exchange he had with a Census official in 1941. Asked the standard question, What is your religion? Kondhs answered: Mountains. The official found this reply hilarious. His categories allowed for ‘Animist’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘Christian’. ‘Mountains’ was not a religious category.
Meanwhile, in the literature of mining projects, ‘experts’ are called on to study the psychology and work habits of displaced people, but the people themselves have no voice; their views are not recorded. The implication of this silence is that these people have nothing to say, or are too uneducated to say anything of value. In reality, people in Odisha are often articulate about their situation and the actions of mining companies:
“You take us to be poor. But we’re not. We live in harmony and cooperation with each other… You people live in separate houses in your towns. You don’t bother about the joy or suffering of each other. But we live on the support of our kith and kin. We all work together… in the spirit of Laha (communal labour) we construct a house in just one day… How does such fellow feeling prevail in our villages? For we help each other. We enjoy equal standing. We’ve been born in our village. Our nara (umbilical cord) is buried here.”
What is the real cost of mining, to our earth and to ourselves? Who really benefits from the extraction and processing of huge quantities of minerals and oil from its depths? If ‘sustainable development’ is supposed to be the way forward, it must mean satisfying the needs of the present without sacrificing the needs of future generations. To plan responsibly, we should be thinking in terms of 1,000 years or more, and in terms of preserving nature without polluting it.
The Adivasi viewpoint is still rarely taken seriously; but they are standing up to protect our future as a species. In standing up for their rights and refusing to be displaced, they are not just protecting themselves, nor even just their offspring and future generations. They are protecting the earth for all of us, and preserving our natural environment at a time when it is mightily challenged by global warming and other man-made horrors.
Mining and metal consumption have not yet assumed the key place they deserve in climate change debates; although it is now well understood that richer nations are outsourcing their most polluting industries to India and other Third World countries, where the environment is lower on the political agenda and legislation to protect it is enforced weakly, if at all. Within this picture, metal production is one of the biggest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, and tops the list of industries being outsourced to India.
Mining companies act as if they were discrete entities, but in fact they work hand-in-glove with political, financial, and legal entities. On the surface, all-out competition flourishes between the aluminium companies. Yet individual executives move comfortably from one company to another, as well as between companies and governments. Beneath the rivalry, aluminium companies work closely together. This is especially clear in east India, where intertwining interests link private corporations with members of the government and the administration. One company makes a deal or a statement, while others lie low. They use complex strategies of promises, threats, and rewards, working together as a team. Together and separately, through contacts and deals, they are experts at exploiting people, even as they promise them the earth.
From Odisha’s Adivasis, who live close to the earth and place the earth at the centre of their spiritual values, come glimpses of how we could turn around the suicidal course our species is taking towards extinction. For the companies, banks, and politicians used to getting their own way, this is a resistance that rises out of the earth to confront them, and to confront us all with questions about the real meaning and cost of mining and metal consumption.
Out of this earth we rip a ceaseless supply of minerals. Out of this earth rise tribal movements against this mindless mining. And out of this earth is where our own grandchildren will be, if we do not decolonise our relationship with materiality very soon.
Get involved with our Passionist Partners, London Mining Network, here.
