Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 233
On the other hand, the contemporary Adivasi narrative
of resistance dearly evokes the dynamics of colonization.
This is particularly true in the regions ofJharkhand and
Chhattisgarh-the mineral-rich, heavily forested areas in the
center ofIndia, carved out of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh in
2000-where Adivasis are the bulk of the population.
In these as in many other regions ofIndia today, the
issue ofland acquisition is possibly the most urgent frontier
of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, with the Indian
state seen as its agent. And the major legal instrument by
which the Indian state commandeers land from agrarian
and forest-based communities to give to mining and
manufacturing corporations is still the Land Acquisition
Act of 1894, put in place by the British colonial administration.
The law was ostensibly a way to transfer private
land to "public use"; in practice in the liberalized economy,
it is quite the opposite. Nowadays, "private" can mean the
commons of a village or tribal community, while "public"
can mean a multinational corporation's mining concession
or designated Special Economic Zone. These zones are
tax-free, duty-free areas that in effect function as foreign
territory, exempt from compliance with domestic labor
and environmental laws.r This arrangement sounds uncannily
like the colonial-era concessions and extraterritoriality
agreements by which the East India Company was able to
set up shop even prior to formal sovereignty.
Resistance to land acquisition became big news with the
Narmada Valley Development Plan, which sparked a massive
mobilization against the submersion of villages that threatened
the displacement of over a quarter million people. The