Mining and Movements - Causes of Tribal Militancy - Indian Social ...

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230SOCIAL ACTION VOL. 60 JULY – SEPTEMBER 2010The split between economics and ecology is a sign of a fundamentalimbalance in the western-imported model of development being imposed,based on models of growth and extraction of resources that are insanelyshort-term. “Sustainable Development” is supposed to be based onpractices that do not jeopardise future generations, but there aresupposed to be three criteria: ecology, society and economics, and byprioritising economics instead of ecology, the term has becomemeaningless and is often used of projects that can make an economicprofit for a few years.What about the next thousand years? The very tribal societies threatenedwith displacement by mining projects are based on long-termsustainability. How has an insane system that sacrifices these peopleand this principle of long-term sustainability managed to appear sonormal?The Roots and Funding of IndustrialisationBelief in “development”, defined around material constructs and economicgrowth, is basically a missionary concept. The East India Company hada complex relationship with Christian missionaries, basically forbiddingand then encouraging them to “civilise the natives” through schools andhospitals, but the administrative role – as in other colonial systems –basically internalised the missionary impulse, transforming the missionaryidea that there is only one “God” or “truth” or path to salvation, into theidea that social evolution follows a single line of development. This“social evolutionism” dates back to Herbert Spencer’s application ofDarwin’s theory of evolution of species to society: a theory that societyevolves in set stages. This theory has been extremely influential, notleast on Marxist theory. But the idea that societies evolve from “primitivecommunism” through feudalism to capitalism (and on to ‘advancedcommunism’ or not, as the case may be) ignores many levels.If the multitude of natural species have all evolved along thousands ofindividual paths, always in relation to each other, why should humansocieties evolve along a single path? If no such law exists, then howhas the World Bank (not to mention Marxist and many other regimes)assumed a kind of “divine right” to impose such uniformity, based onversions of this theory, onto “developing countries”? Even theclassification of countries into “developed” and “developing” begs thisquestion.
MINING AND MOVEMENTS – CAUSES OF TRIBAL MILITANCY 231To put this another way, the system of beliefs and values drivingindustrialisation, being imposed in India’s tribal areas has foreign roots– basically, the history of industrialisation from Europe and the RobberBarons in the USA, through Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, to WorldBank/IMF ‘moneylender colonialism’, enmeshing the world’s ‘developingcountries’ in unrepayable debt to pay for a process of industrialisationthat has caused one environmental and social catastrophe after another.In the early days of social anthropology, anthropologists invariably sawtribal societies as “primitive”, and colonial anthropology defined tribalpeoples as “primitive” in every domain – a perception that persists inIndia, on the left as well as right. This idea is at the root of imposing“development” on Adivasis and displacing them from their land.Modern anthropologists recognise that tribal societies are as highlydeveloped as mainstream societies – but in different ways. In terms oftheir knowledge of the environment, skills of living off it without damagingit, sophistication of social relations around a principle of sharing, subtletyof rearing children and so on, they are often far in advance of mainstreamsociety. Hence the enormity of what is sacrificed and destroyed whena tribal community’s land is invaded or taken away by a mining company:cultural genocide.But mining/metals projects are mostly funded from abroad, and foreigncities play an important role in their highly dispersed social structure.Several studies have been made of the foreign and Indian banks thathave invested in Vedanta and financed their projects in Orissa andChhattisgarh, and each of the world’s ‘Big Four’ accountancy firmshas given ‘Assurance Statements’ validating the annual reports ofVedanta Resources plc. Traders at the London Metals Exchange, whosedeals in future contracts fix the price of aluminium five days a week,gain huge salaries. Prime investors in mining projects and Indian portconstruction projects include secretive hedge funds and private equityfunds, while overall finance to mining projects has increased enormouslysince 2000, along with risk insurance and export credit guarantees.Orissa is one of India’s most highly indebted states precisely because itis one of the richest in minerals. The loans paid for a long line of dam,coal and other infrastrusture-for-mining projects, and built up unrepayabledebts, make the state dependent on further loans from the World Bankand other entities, have given leverage that allowed the WB and DFID
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