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Social Justice


POLLUTION AND PATRIARCHY IN TRIBAL INDIA

In tribal India, violence against the environment and women are connected and
part of the country’s dispossession-driven capitalism.
The capitalist extractivist logic, embodied by development projects in tribal
India, highlights how patriarchal and environmental violence are intertwined.
The struggles against them must also be joined: no feminism without
environmentalism, no environmentalism without feminism.

The capitalist extractivist logic, embodied by development projects in tribal
India, highlights how patriarchal and environmental violence are intertwined.
The struggles against them must also be joined: no feminism without
environmentalism, no environmentalism without feminism.

Mining projects in India are worth many millions of dollars, and the
industrialists that benefit from them are some of the wealthiest people in the
world. These projects are responsible for rapid environmental degradation and
are built on violence against millions of lives – many of them women. This
combination of crises – the environmental and the patriarchal – are neither
coincidental nor mutually exclusive in the “development” agenda.

Indian capitalism depends on fossil fuels to run the national economy, and both
the public and the private sectors have coalesced to exploit lands, forests,
rivers and people. Since the country’s independence in 1947, more than sixty
million people have been displaced from 25 million hectares of land, including 7
million hectares of forests.

A lot of this displacement has happened in Chhattisgarh, a densely forested
state in central-eastern India. The state has high deposits of iron ore, coal,
limestone, diamond and tin ore, and is also home to about 10 million Adivasis,
one of the largest indigenous communities in the world. Once an agricultural
region, the state is now a hub of large-scale mining projects. Several case
studies have demonstrated that, because of these projects, many parts of the
state have seen excessive forest depletion, wildlife destruction and an alarming
rise in the pollution index. On the other hand, annual reports by the National
Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and petitions by the Women Against Sexual Violence
and State Repression show that incidents of violence against Adivasi women – be
it in the form of bodily violence, unjust compensation for land, repression of
female activists and moral policing of women’s mobility and labour – have also
increased in the region.

In this context, the logic of dispossession-driven capitalism has created an
environmental crisis and exacerbated the patriarchal crisis. This is a logic
that derives and accumulates capital from the combined commodification of land
and women’s bodies — a capitalist logic sustained, in other words, by patriarchy
and environmental destruction.


COMMODIFYING LAND AND WOMEN

Historically, Adivasis collectively owned the land and forests. Caring for the
commons had symbolic and material significance and was woven into the livelihood
of these populations. Silvia Federici’s phenomenal work on the role of women in
maintaining and organizing commons is remarkably applicable to Adivasi lives.
Similar to her findings, Adivasi women played an important part in life-making
activities in these commons, including caring for land, rivers, animals and
forests.

Mining projects, however, have turned land into a commodity, denying the way
Adivasis have historically used the land or the symbolic meaning they’ve
attached to it. Drilling and extracting from the earth requires delegitimizing
it as a provider and nourisher of livelihoods. Like other commodities under
capitalism, land is objectified and governed by the market logics of open trade,
private ownership and profit-making.

Supported by neoliberal policies, several partnerships between industries and
the government have ensured that trading of resources is open, legal and
justified as a necessary part of development. Hundreds of Memorandums of
Understanding (MOUs) worth billions of dollars, alongside additional subsidies
to private companies, has ensured that regions like Chhattisgarh attract several
investors and industries.

The predatory dispossession of the Adivasis from their land requires private
ownership of these lands and forests. Since the Constitution of India mandates
states to consider the “protection” of Adivasi lands and forests, several
post-independence Acts have been enacted that effectively force the local
population to claim individual ownership over this otherwise collectively-held
land as the only way of staying on it. For instance, when the Forest Regulation
Act of 2007 first came into force, an extraordinary 4.2 million people were
forced to claim 14 million acres of forest land nationwide, as per the Ministry
of Tribal Affairs Report (2018). Worst still, those submitting individual claims
aren’t guaranteed titles. The same report, for instance, shows that only 1.8
million have actually been given the land. Chhattisgarh topped the list among
these claims and, though nearly 1 million claims were made in the state, only
less than half were actually granted. The rest of the claims were rejected, and
the population was effectively evicted.

Scholars like James Ferguson and Tania Li have argued that, contrary to the
claims of the “development” narrative, those dispossessed from the land are not
absorbed into wage-labor. Without land or work, the dispossessed have a hard
time finding a source of livelihood. Though this may be partly true for Adivasi
women, it is also the case that many are able to find work, albeit precarious
and underpaid work, in India’s major cities.

Chhattisgarh, which tops the list for land title claims, also contributes to the
highest share of rural to urban migrants in the country. After their family’s
dispossession, women, who seldom own property and experience violence at various
levels, are forced into migrating to urban areas to secure a livelihood. Their
desperate search for work also often leads them into oppressive gender
relations. Unsurprisingly, Chhattisgarh is one of the largest “suppliers” of
Adivasi women’s labour in the form of caregivers, domestic workers and sex
workers to cities like Delhi and Mumbai, as well as neighbouring towns within
the state. Most of this work is carried out in precarious and unsafe work
conditions.

Beyond being in “high demand” for care-work and pushed into a deeply gendered
labor market, these women also end up trading their own bodies. Trafficking of
Adivasi women’s bodies and gaining capital by subjecting their bodies to “flesh
trade” is another way these women are commodified. “Black diamond brothels”, a
name which reflects the deeply intertwined connections between women’s bodies
and the land they’re evicted from, are prevalent sites of exploitative sexual
labor in India’s cities.

As women’s bodies are commodified and objectified, it also normalizes the
violence meted out against their bodies in the larger agenda of development. By
delegitimizing land as a source of livelihood, the state is able to justify the
erasure of associated natural resources such as plants, animals and water. Such
violence against nature and women is central to dispossessory capitalism.


VIOLENCE AGAINST NATURE AND WOMEN’S BODIES

Several mining projects have been built on lush forests and wildlife. One recent
case of environmental violence is a project involving approximately 30 coal
blocks, jointly owned by the government and private industries, which were set
to replace 170,000 hectares of the Hasdeo Arand forest region in Chhattisgarh.
Associated with this was the loss of habitat for wild elephants and the
consequent human-animal conflicts.

Adivasi women and allies in Chhattisgarh have, for decades, constantly resisted
these forms of state and corporate-led dispossession. Adivasi women and men
have, time and time again, shown to be obstacles to the desired commodification
of land and associated private accumulation of capital. Thus, their resistance
is almost always met with state repression.

Although all Adivasis, including Adivasi men, are the target of this repression,
Adivasi women have it particularly bad. Cases of brutal violence against Adivasi
women have been rising, and which include collective and repeated attacks on
their bodies. This brutality is a tool to silence women and undermine their
resistance to dispossession.

Statistics from the recent NCRB reports show that violence against Adivasi women
in Chhattisgarh is particularly prominent in the region’s mining districts.
These reports indicate that between 2016-2018, about a 1000 reported cases have
come forth where Adivasi women have been raped, sexually assaulted and murdered.
In particular, the districts of Korba, Sarguja, Jashpur, Raigarh, Sukma and
Koriya account for most of this violence. These are the districts where major
mining projects are located – districts that are also sites of
anti-dispossession movements. Although the same NCRB reports does not provide
any details on the perpetrators of this violence, reports by local legal-aid
groups and the media do. They reveal that the armed forces, the police and the
“company goons” safeguarding the mines are the primary perpetrators of this
violence.

This “handbook violence”, as Federici terms it, is not superfluous to India’s
dispossession-driven capitalism, but a necessary part of it — carefully planned
to silence women and hinder any resistance.

This process has also been facilitated by a supportive legal regime.


LEGALIZING VIOLENCE AGAINST LAND AND WOMEN

Despite the fact that corporations have inflicted immeasurable damage to land
and livelihoods, their activities go unchecked – and are even facilitated by – a
legal regime that has existed in India since the colonial era.

The Land Acquisition Act of 1857 and the Indian Forest Act of 1927 were the
brainchild of the British Empire to legitimize the displacement of Adivasis and
grab lands and forests for capitalist development. Even after independence,
these legal provisions were not abolished. Instead, these Acts were amended
several times to suit the democratic, liberal and now neoliberal garb of the
state.

Similarly, violence against women has often gone unpunished. Daily violence
against women – be it in the form of street harassment, custodial violence by
the police, assaults on anti-dispossession female activists and witch-hunting to
deny women property ownership – all conveniently escape the judicial claws and
the otherwise high surveillance capacities of the state in this region.

Movements against this legal regime – be it struggles against Forest Rights Act
of 2006 or against the recent Land Acquisition and Resettlement Act of 2015 –
have all been met with a heavily militarized repression.


RELATIONAL SOLIDARITY

For all this to change, what needs to be challenged, at the outset, is
capitalism’s dependence on fossil fuels. Environmental violence in mining
regions can be reduced if we look for alternative, and more sustainable, sources
of energy. As extraordinary as the challenge may seem, it is certainly possible.

However, the violence inherent in this project against both nature and women has
deeper roots and connections that needs to be exposed and become part of the
larger discourse on development.

Feminists like Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies have long emphasized the mutual
relationship between the outbreaks of patriarchal and environmental violence.
Repeatedly extracting the life out of the land until it is dead and repeated
violence against women’s bodies until their resistance is dead are both
processes that coexist in the “highly productive” mining regions of India.
Dispossession in Chhattisgarh, as we have seen, is dependent on the destruction
of both the commons and the women who overwhelmingly maintain these commons.

Since patriarchal and environmental violence are intertwined, the struggles
against them too must be conjoined. Popular discourse has conventionally
segregated the environmental struggle against climate change from the feminist
struggles against patriarchal violence. But we need to articulate their mutual
imbrication: no feminism without environmentalism, no environmentalism without
feminism. What we need to forge, in other words, is a relational solidarity,
without which our struggles will remain fragmented and ineffective.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons


Available in
EnglishHindiSpanishFrenchPortuguese (Brazil)Italian (Standard)GermanPortuguese
(Portugal)
Author
Asmita Bhutani
Date
08.03.2021
Source
Original article🔗



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