Speakers:
Rinchin, Human Rights and Environmental Activist working in Chhattisgarh, India
Prasant Paikray, Spokesperson, Anti-Jindal & Anti-POSCO Movement (JPPSS), Odisha, India
In our first session, “Understanding the Current Level of State Violence in the Lead-Up to the ‘Deadline’,” we examined the rapidly escalating crisis in Bastar, where the Indian state has intensified militarised operations under the pretext of achieving a “Maoist-free” India by March 31, 2026. That session asked what is happening. In this next session — “Behind the Deadline: Resource Extractivism, the State-Corporate Nexus, and Strategies of Resistance” — we ask why.
The answer lies beneath the lands being militarised — which the state is determined to transform into industrial corridors and profit zones — whatever the human cost. The violence being unleashed is inseparable from the state’s aggressive push to accelerate resource extraction and impose industrial and transport infrastructure across Adivasi territories — remaking these homelands into sacrifice zones for capital, with military force masquerading as governance.
The intensifying militarisation of Bastar is not an unfortunate byproduct of conflict; it is a deliberate strategy. Camps are not merely security installations — they are instruments of occupation, designed to crush resistance and clear the ground for corporate plunder.
It is crucial to recognise that the Indian state has never operated as a neutral guarantor of rights. Instead, it has functioned historically as a facilitator of corporate and foreign capital, often in direct opposition to the democratic aspirations — and very survival — of its most marginalised citizens. To secure the passive consent of the non-Indigenous majority, it advances a hegemonic development discourse that justifies the dispossession of a few as a necessary sacrifice for the supposed greater good. Within Adivasi territories, this discourse is rebranded as a promise of inclusion and prosperity — a promise that has proved utterly hollow.
The extractivist logic driving this violence is neocolonial at its core. It is not merely about occupying land; it is about erasing people’s claims to that land. Law itself becomes a weapon — constitutional protections like the Fifth Schedule, the Forest Rights Act, and PESA are routinely bypassed, suspended, or subverted. It is a project of annihilation — rendering Indigenous lives, knowledge systems, and futures expendable in the name of national development and economic growth.
In this session, we will also place the domestic crisis within the wider global architecture of resource imperialism. Across continents — from Latin America to Africa — Indigenous communities are confronting similar formations of state-corporate collusion.
Yet this is not a story of passive victimhood. Indigenous struggles are asserting sovereignty, defending territory, and refusing erasure — imagining futures beyond extraction and occupation.