Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

234 I Ramnath
Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada movement)
was established in 1985, and grew to be an international
cause celebre, catalyzing an unprecedented alliance of en vironmental,
peasant, human rights, and other organizations.
But this target was still a remnant of the Nehruvian state
model; dams were his great "temples" of modernity and the
modern nation-state. In the more recent mobilizations, the
enemy is more directly transnational capital.
In 2006, the villages ofSingur and Nandigram in
West Bengal, respective sites of a proposed Tata car t;lCtory
and an Indonesian-owned (Selim Group) chemical
plant, became volatile flash points fo r resistance and
violent repression as well as widespread solidarity action,
as did the Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO), a
Korean corporation, in the Indian state of Orissa in 2011.
Such contestation is simultaneously an intervention in the
logic of commerce and profit, and a primary defense of the
lives and livelihoods of the people affected-thus addressing
both aspects of "postcolonial" colonialism at once:
global and internal. Yet the two are closely tied. Grassroots
mobilizations that fo cus on !nanifestations of transrLltional
corporate capitalism, engaged in the unmasked act
of accumulation by dispossession, also function as implicit
indictments of the neoliberalized state. So land acquisition
struggles can easily be seen as continuing resistance
to colonization, or at any rate to the economic processes
included historically within the colonial package. This is
what enclosure of the commons looks like.
Similarly, the Indian state utilizes the logic of insurgency
and counterinsurgency to guarantee the security of