Contesting resources, contesting the nation?

ABSTRACT

This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah’s book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.

KEYWORDS:

• Sovereignty
• kinship
• resource frontier
• indigeneity and hybrid regimes

My intervention in this book forum is focused on the third chapter of Sanjib Baruah’s In the Name of the Nation (2020). This chapter portrays the complex political lineaments of Northeast India as simultaneously a settlement frontier and a resource frontier. My point of entry into this chapter and the argument it makes is its affinity with my own work on Adivasi movements and Adivasi struggles over resource control and self-determination elsewhere in India – more specifically, in the Narmada Valley and in western Madhya Pradesh, or what I call the Bhil heartland (Nilsen 2010, 2018). Baruah’s analysis in this chapter destabilizes some of the certainties that tend to mold and shape critical intellectual engagements with resource struggles and their relationship to indigeneity.

The certainties I am thinking about here are anchored in the assumption that indigenous claims to natural resources are always already and inherently progressive and emancipatory. To be more specific, the assumption is that indigenous claims to natural resources are articulated from below – that is, by subaltern groups, in opposition to dispossession and environmental destruction by the accumulation strategies of dominant groups – and that they herald alternative and, for lack of a better term, more sustainable nature-society relations, different from the destructive extraction from and commodification of nature that takes place under capitalism.

There are good reasons for this. Indigenous struggles are, more often than not, struggles against dispossession by groups that have been at the losing end of capitalist development and modern state formation. And these struggles in turn often carry within them the kernel of alternatives to the extractivism that has made a ‘planetary mine’ (Arboleda 2020) out of the earth. My early work on the struggle against dam-building in the Narmada Valley engaged with a particularly important example of this. In opposing the displacement wrought by the Sardar Sarovar Project and other dams, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) articulated a project of alternative development, centered on claims for participatory democracy, environmental sustainability, and social justice. Crucially, this project was framed as a reclaiming and reinvention of the postcolonial nation by Adivasi communities who had quite literally been drowned out by built environments of production that have claimed the land of at least 60–65 million people since independence – some 40% of whom are Adivasis (Nilsen 2010).

Fault lines such as these are of course also central to the political landscape of Northeast India, where communities forge their lives ‘against the backdrop of a militarized extractive economy regime’ (Kikon 2019, 7). However,Baruah’s (2020) analysis unsettles assumptions that equate indigeneity and indigenous claimsmaking around natural resources with progressive politics and emancipatory alternatives in two ways. Firstly, he points out how some states in Northeast India has witnessed the emergence of indigenous elites who are strongly in favor of extractive development, who profit from extractivism, and who exploit precarious working classes. Secondly, he shows how claims to ownership and control of natural resources by these elites are often grounded in conceptions of indigeneity that have a strongly exclusionary dimension, as they tend to define migrants and migrant communities as illegitimate outsiders. ‘Politics entrapped in these binaries,’ Baruah writes, ‘risk legitimizing new patterns of exploitation, dispossession, subordination, and citizenship’ (ibid: 78).

What is more, the risks associated with exclusionary discourses of indigeneity at a regional level come to be amplified in lethal ways when they converge with religious majoritarianism at the national level. In saying this, I’m thinking, of course, about current events in Assam, where an entrenched opposition to so-called foreigners has come to be entangled with Hindu nationalism – a process that Baruah discusses in his book (see also Murshid 2016). The resultant violence is writ large in the current murderous eviction drives in the state, as well as in the evisceration of Muslim citizenship under the provisions of the Citizenship Amendment Act (Baruah 2021).

This leads me to the tentative suggestion that it is imperative for us to reflect critically on just what it is that render some claims to indigeneity reactionary and exclusionary. The motivation for doing so would be to achieve what we can call insurgent epistemic gain – that is, to be better able to know how it might be possible, through collective action, to bring about social change that is, in fact, progressive and emancipatory.

Baruah (2020:, 83–84) of course puts his finger on what is arguably the root cause of the problem when he discusses what he refers to as ‘the institutional legacies of indirect rule in the excluded areas’. This legacy is one in which certain Scheduled Tribes are legitimized by postcolonial authorities as being indigenous to a certain area ‘in accordance with the colonial ethnoterritorial frame’ (ibid: 89). This is an expression of how the colonial politics of indirect rule were structured around a binary between what Sharma (2020) refers to as ‘Indigenous-Natives’ and ‘Migrant-Natives’ – the former being groups thought to be autochthonous to a specific region, and the latter being intrusive outsiders who pose a threat to the integrity of the indigenous community.

I draw on Sharma’s discussion of the separation between Natives and Migrants here because it might offer us some tools that we need for further deepening the insights that Baruah’s book offers about the exclusionary dimensions of forms of indigenous politics. According to Sharma, the Native is a category of the colonial state that is moored in the assumption of autochthony – the assumption, as Sharma puts it, that ‘an original and essential link exists between people identified as autochthons, specific territories, and political power’ (ibid: 395). In these discourses, she points out, it is ‘the autochthonous link to territory’ that stands as ‘the only rightful basis for power in and over a place (and the people in it) – in the past, today, and into the future’ (ibid: 395).

This imperial binary has been subsumed into the political grammar of ‘the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states’ where it manifests as a form of exclusion that aims ‘to delegitimize the presence of those people constituted as Migrants’ (ibid: 400). In Sharma’s account, a key example of the violence that flows from this exclusion can be found in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. However, it seems to me that the same logic is at play both in the current eviction and disenfranchisement drive in Assam and in the wider politics of Northeast India’s resource frontier that Baruah illuminates.

This begs the question, of course, of what ethical grounding we might locate for oppositional, progressive, and emancipatory claims to resource control and self-determination? In other words, how might it be possible to make such claims without further victimizing the dispossessed and the disenfranchized and their right to livelihood, belonging, and political voice?

I do not pretend in any way to have a fully satisfactory answer to this question. However, I do want to offer some reflections drawn from my most recent book, Adivasis and the State (2018). Here, I explored how Adivasi movements in western Madhya Pradesh developed a politics of insurgent citizenship around claims for forest rights and self-governance. These were claims for a restructuring of sovereignty – for what Castree (2004) calls ‘differential geographies’ – in order to reverse past injustices of dispossession and disenfranchisement. But rather than being grounded in claims of autochthony, these claims were justified with reference to histories of place-making. It is Adivasi communities, activists would argue, who have made the forest – both materially and symbolically – as a place to live and to labor in over time. Therefore, these movements held, they also have a legitimate claim to be the owners of its resources in the present, and to govern the territory that they have made livable.

I wonder, therefore, whether place-making and the rights that Adivasi movements in the Bhil heartland saw as arising from place-making could serve as an alternative foundation for progressive struggles over resources. Place-making, after all, is something that subaltern migrant communities are also deeply engaged in – the communities currently under attack in Assam being a case in point of precisely this. Hence, I end with a question: Can the centering of place-making rather than autochthony as the basis for rightful belonging provide us with an antidote to exclusionary conceptions of indigeneity?

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is a professor of sociology at the University of Pretoria. His research focuses on the political economy of democracy and development in India and the global South. He is the author, most recently, of Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland (2018).