Natural Resources Matters: Capitalism and People’s Resistance Against Developmentalism in Adivasi Region of India

Abstract

Capitalist development and its fallout dispossession have been contested in various place-based struggles in India. It has intensified capital accumulation, enforcing the vast majority of population, particularly the Adivasis (tribal people) in resource-rich territories, to displace and has affected their livelihoods by accumulating their cultural rights to land, water, and forests. The prerequisite capitalist logic of investment-induced dispossession has been contested in various place-based local struggles raising important questions about mass mobilization, resistance, politics of protest, identity, and solidarity. The study provides theoretical and empirical insight of the interrelationship between culture, power, and politics of corporate state developmentalism and the way it works in Adivasi resource-rich region. By discussing how different ploys and tactics employed by corporate to establish clientelist relation with nature, backed by the state through policy, have led to poverty and dispossession of the commons, this article argues that accumulation of the growth and national development subsume various discourses facilitated by different players involving populist belief and intentions which gradually develop a class character that corresponds with dialectic of the capitalism under the rubric and politics of imperial stage of capitalism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies, the article explores the process of how the Adivasis as a class encounter neoliberal capitalist development in Kalinga Nagar Industrial Complex and West Singhbhum. Initiatives like everyday resistance ‘from below’ in response to corporate land accumulation for developmental projects have further enhanced the ecological politics and class politics that will also be discussed in shadow of different theories of political economy and critical agrarian studies.