Digging in their heels to protect Tij Raja’s abode against Vedanta’s next bauxite mining venture in Odisha

“Our fight, today, is against the same Vedanta that our brothers and sisters from Niyamgiri had rejected, to save the destruction of their jal, jangal, zameen [water, forest and land] and to preserve the way we prefer to live, work, and conduct our affairs,” Lāi Mājhi said. As Lai addressed an impromptu gathering outside his modest home, where we arrived close to sunset, after an exhilarating motorcycle ride through Karlāpāt Wildlife sanctuary, we were soon joined by around forty others—men and women sauntering out from the huts and hamlets nearby. “It is a right we get from the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, and the PESA of 1996. We cannot be displaced until the majority of our individual and community claims to titles over forest lands, under the Forest Rights Act of 2006, are settled.”

Lai is the vice president of Maa, Maati, Maali Surakhya Manch, a front for the local people’s struggle to protect their community, their land and their mountains from rapacious mining activities in one of the hill ranges of Kalahandi and Rayagada, in south Odisha. The front emerged prominently in the anti-mining movement over the past year and a half. The hill is inhabited by Kui Adivasis, and by Dalits, referred to all over the region as Doms. The hills are also protected under the Constitution and the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, which preserve and promote self-governance in tribal areas. But Lai and his companions had arisen in a state of passion because their land was being leased for plunder, in violation of these fundamental statutory protections. The emergence of their Surakhya Manch was not unscathed.

In the midst of a bauxite belt: the abode of Tij Raja

Despite being listed among the poorest regions in the state, if not the country, Kalahandi and Rayagada have been in the eye of a storm, ironically, for the richness of its lands: the Tijmāli hills hold a treasure trove of bauxite, the primary ore for aluminium. Terrestrially, Kal̥ahanḍi and Rayagada form part of a long, contiguous belt of sedimentary rock deposits across the Eastern Ghats, buried beneath an undulating landscape adorned with evergreen and deciduous forests. To the north, the lands of Chhattisgarh, central Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand have already been subject to bauxite mining. The southern extremity stretches into the Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh, where the embers of past resistance to mining have not entirely been doused. Within Odisha too, the state has surrendered many of tracts of land for mines and refineries at significant costs to the forests and its local tribal inhabitants.

The mineral richness of this elongated belt running through the heartland of the subcontinent springs from its reddish-brown deposits, constituting around 85 percent of the country’s bauxite reserves, often mixed with iron ore. Odisha itself, by various estimates, accounts for between 40 to 50 percent of the national reserves, but Tijmali had so far escaped the exploitation of its resources. In March 2023, Vedanta, the multinational mining conglomerate, was granted the lease to mine nine million tonnes of bauxite per annum across 1,549 hectares in the Kalahandi and Rayagada districts.

The mine will feed Vedanta’s aluminium refinery in Kalahandi’s Lanjigarh town, which has been operating under capacity since the conglomerate’s previous attempt at bauxite mining failed. Sterlite, a Vedanta subsidiary, had secured the lease to mine the bauxite reserves of the Niyamgiri hills, without the prior consent of the Adivasis inhabiting those forests. In a landmark verdict delivered in 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the affected villages over Vedanta’s right to mine in the region. The 12 villages of Niyamgiri hills that would be affected by the project unanimously rejected the project. But Vedanta, which had built the Lanjigarh refinery right at the foothills of Niyamgiri, was compelled to source its bauxite from other mines operated by disparate companies, much farther away. The lease over Tijmali hills, once again secured without the knowledge, let alone consent, of the local villages, was originally acquired by Larsen and Toubro, and covers more than twice the area under the now-extinct Niyamgiri lease.

“Leaders from our previous upsurge against bauxite mining used to visit our village, from the time L&T was prospecting. They used to motivate us to join the movement, even after that company’s mining lease had been cancelled,” Lai narrated. “We were only supporters of the upsurge they had led then. The upsurge had arisen, more than a decade ago, from just two villages, Kantamal and Serambai, on the other side of Tijmāli. Even after the prospecting and exploration activities of  L&T had been repelled, our leaders used to exhort us to continue the anti-displacement fight, on a broader scale, saying that our victory was only a temporary reprieve. We did not take them too seriously then; let ourselves relax after our success.”

‘Then, from March last year, men from a company named Mythri began their forays, trying to befriend us at first, offering money, with the additional lure of jobs and mobility, while taking a look around the village and the hill above, as if they were up to something sinister,” Lai continued. “That is when we started awakening to our bleak future. Before long, we realised that Mythri was just a façade; it’s an Oḍiya-looking outfit contracted to liaison with the villagers of the area, on behalf of the real, big company, Vedanta, which was out to seize our life-blood, Tijmali.”

For over a year now, Lai and fellow members of the Maa, Maati, Maali Surakhya Manch have led a growing resistance against the project, demanding the cancellation of the lease awarded to Vedanta. Since August 2023, the protests have led to the arrest of numerous villagers, including the widely condemned, September 19 arrest of Kartik Naik, one of the leading activists from the Manch. While more than a score have been released on bail, the multi-talented activist, Naik’s is the only appeal against the rejection of bail that remains pending before the Cuttack High Court since October. It remains to be seen whether the Tijmali resistance movement will become as resilient and successful as that of Niyamgiri, especially in the changed political scenario amid the unrestrained crackdown on dissent seen in the country since 2014, and following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in the state elections this year.

In the wake of increasing reports of a vexed resistance struggle and state repression, I chose the 68th anniversary of the mass conversion by the Mahars of Maharashtra from Hinduism to Buddhism, led by BR Ambeḍkar, to visit Vedanta’s next lease holding in mid October this year. Over three days and nights, I joined three members of a solidarity collective in Kalahandi to conduct a non-stop tour of villages in Tijmali. I travelled through the land of mālis: Sasubaumāli, Bātingamāli, Mājingamāli, Kutrumāli, Khanduālmāli, and the most special, in the mythical sense, Tijmāli. (The word “mali in Kui—the language spoken by the dominant Kui tribal community of south Oḍisha—means “mountain,” whereas “giri” and also “Niyāmgiri” are Brahminised versions of the original Kui name for that venerated mountain.) Of these mountains, only the first two are yet to be surrendered to the corporate-state nexus, sacrificed for their minerals.

Shoulder to shoulder with Niyamgiri

Meandering our way through the Karlapat Wildlife Sanctuary, en route Lai Majhi’s village, it was subliminal to realise that we were almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the Niyamgiri range. We emerged from the dense woods into Talāmpadar, a quiet village with eight hamlets at the base of a huge, flat-topped mountain. It was only when we lifted our gaze along the slopes above, towards the top of the mountain overlooking us, in the village, that I was informed that this was Tijmali. At 900 metres above mean sea level, Tijmali was widely believed in those parts to be the abode of Tij Raja, the supreme supernatural entity of the Kui Adivasis, considered the elder brother of Niyam Raja, whose spirit pervaded Niyamgiri.

One of those who I had sought out before leaving the city, Lingaraj Azad, a veteran political activist and Dalit leader from the Samajwadi Jan Parishad, told me about a shibir—an activists’ brain-storming camp—convened recently on the slopes of Niyamgiri. Selected participants from both Niyamgiri and Tijmali ranges had deliberated over a protest agenda, drawing lessons from the successful struggle in Niyamgiri. Over the course of my reporting, I discovered how some of the more politically advanced locals believed  they had let their guard down after the Niyamgiri resistance, and how the resurging movement in Tijmali over the past year seeks to learn from the past and bring back that fervour. The shibir could not, however, have been just a fleeting romance with vociferous radicalism. Along with dogged resistance, it was also the severest forms of repression that had to be negotiated with fortitude. Even after the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Niyamgiri gram sabhas’ right to self-determination more than a decade ago, state repression had continued, in and around the hill, reaching greater heights until very recently. But that is another story.

More pertinently, the story of Tijmali shows that it is not just the Adivasi locals, but even Vedanta officialdom that has been learning its lessons. As the Vedanta conglomerate used  Mythri, a contractor going by a name unknown to the district’s residents,  to grab land, the conglomerate now stands accused of trying to deceive the tribals into giving up their forest rights for a pittance. After cancelling Larsen and Toubro’s mining lease years ago, Vedanta was ushered in. When the new BJP chief minister was sworn in this year, Anil Agarwal, the chairman of the Vedanta Group, lost no time in flying in to celebrate their growing partnership. The developments raised the question: had the gram sabhas of Tijmali lost the primacy accorded by law to its neighbour Niyamgiri just a decade ago? “Mythri” stands in as a colloquial term meaning friendship, but the company, that officially goes by full the name Mythri Infrastructure India Private Limited, is a Vedanta contractor that does all the dirty work for the multinational conglomerate, including the subversion of mandatory legal protections of securing the free, prior and informed consent of the affected stakeholders.

“All the hardships that befell us last year was an outcome of our past lethargy, which our former leaders had cautioned against,” Lai said. “We lost many of our villagers over to Mythri because of that. We woke up only after that loss, and the frauds committed by Mythri and Vedanta, with the full connivance of the police and revenue officials, to fulfil the legal formalities in favour of the mining project.” The spirited resistance witnessed in recent months demonstrates that the locals have indeed risen, and that it will be well-nigh impossible to lay them to rest again.

Tijmali Odiyanised into Sijimali

Tijmali was how the locals invariably referred to the mountain, though it is identified in official government records as Sijimali. “The first instance I came across the use of the word Sijimali for Tijmali—the latter undoubtedly being the name used by the Kuis and Doms in their mutual conversations—was in an official document I found in a government institution, which was dated around 1985,” said Randall Sequeira, a researcher, medical doctor and social activist working in the interiors of Niyamgiri and many malis beyond. When I raised the issue with Ranjana Paḍhi and Nigamananda Saḍangi, the authors of Resisting Dispossession: The Odisha Story, they explained it as “an outcome of Oḍiyanisation.” It is a process that has occurred with a host of dialects, languages, rituals and customs practised in the principalities before their colonial and bureaucratic merger into Odisha, and subsequent transformation under an Indian state government, to assimilate them into a distinct Oḍiya identity.

Although Kui speakers did not overtly oppose the official usage of Sijimali, which even solidarity activists have adopted for convenience, there is a consensus among academics that their language is very distinct from Odiya. In fact, the Kuis themselves have been focused for two decades on the struggle to save the very existence in their beloved, venerated mountains, with little time for linguistic debates over their names. For some, such as Rajaraman, one of the solidarity activists with whom I was travelling, the Kui name ought to prevail, as any standardisation ought to be done by themselves, not on their behalf by Oḍiya speakers, who may not empathise with tribal linguistics.

Rajaraman Sundaresan, who was more commonly known as Rajan, believed that an insistence of the name Tijmali was a necessity at the present juncture. “In the case of Niyamgiri, the apex court had ruled in favour of the Kondhs, citing precisely their distinct culture and religious beliefs,” he argued. “The use of Tijmali augurs well with a direct association between the mountain and its people, and their Tij Raja.” Rajan continued, “And besides, there’s also a village on the mountain top whose name is precisely Tijmali, and it appears as such among the official records, too.” Given this context, this story will use the Kui word, despite the official state records.

Glimpses of a paradise not to be lost

Among the various reasons for the local reverence for Tijmali is the uniquely wide range of crops that grow on it. More than half a dozen species of millets, multiple varieties of paddy, numerous vegetables, tubers and oilseeds, and several fruits including mango, guava, jackfruit, bananas, berries and cashew, all grow on the fields of Tijmali. Grown on hill slopes, the fruits have flourishing markets in Odisha and across neighbouring states as well. All the farming activity is based on a specialised knowledge system for organic farming at various heights, from the lowlands to the mountain top, and with varying supplies of water. The net product is a set of nutritionally diverse crops. The villagers rely on the forests for their medicinal purposes as well, foraging herbs for mild illnesses and general daily use.

The natural flora and fauna of the forest includes a range of trees, plants, insects, serpents, and many animals, big and small. Many of these are unique to Tijmali and endangered, requiring the care and protection that the local inhabitants can and do provide. Within the communities, even their specific ways and customs of living, loving, setting up families, socialising, grieving, revelling, are all in union with the ecology and geology of the terrain. Their worldview is shaped by their integral relationship with the environment.

The people here have so organic a relationship with their natural surroundings, that it directly impinges on their cultural and religious practices and beliefs. Every part of nature is sacred to them. So, they cannot allow the destruction of any hill, cave, tree, or the streams that flow down into the valleys on either side. They believe that their ancestors have become part of the nature that nourishes them. At the very top of the mountain lies the abode of Tij Raja, their foremost ancestor, considered the elder brother of Niyām Raja, whose sanctity the Supreme Court recognised when upholding the rights of the tribal communities in its 2013 judgment.

All of that now stands threatened.

The deprivation of the deprived: a story of resistance without respite

In Odisha Story, Padhi and Sadangi detail a chronological account of the deprivation of the already deprived, in a state cavalierly called backward. The book begins with the very first, merciless and engineered displacement of villages around Hirakud, in the 1950s, to dam up Odisha’s singular river, Mahanadi. While the dam did not even serve its professed purposes of flood control, irrigation, and power generation in Sambalpur, it eventually provided cheap water and electricity for an aluminium smelting plant, and the Aditya Birla Group’s mining corporation, Hindalco Industries.

The first resistance against bauxite mining in Odisha developed as a massive campaign through the 1980s, at Gandhamardan, a western mountain in the state, known for its medicinal plants. Thereafter, the flash points moved to the southern districts—Korāpuṭ, Rāyagaḍa, and Kal̥āhanḍi—across the various hills of Koḍingāmāli, Panchpāṭmāli and Bāphlimāli, to Niyāmgiri, Khanḍuālmāli, and now, Tijmāli. Of the seven, mining could only begin in three where the state government and corporate nexus guilefully managed to subdue the people’s resistance. Koḍingāmāli is mined by Odisha Mining Corporation, Panchpāṭmāli by National Aluminium or Nalco, and Bāphlimāli by Utkal Aluminium, a subsidiary of Hindalco.

During the anti-mining movement in Niyamgiri, local activists would mobilise widespread support from village after village across the Tijmali and Karlapat ranges, taking along scores, even hundreds, of people to participate in meetings, sometimes on the slopes and other times, high on the Niyamgiri mountain top. The meetings would include discussions on ways to carry out the resistance, as well as on alternative, and sustainable paths of development. The activists of today still spoke of how festivities held in indigenous grandeur were also regular aspects of some of those meetings conducted 1,500 metres above sea level. The discussions were interspersed with songs, plays, and speeches, in support of the then ongoing anti-displacement struggle. “Our Adivasi customs and rituals helped us all to develop strong bonds of unity and fraternity, across tribes and castes, in those days,” Lai reminisced.

In the wake of the Tijmali lease, similar interactions had begun taking place on varying scales in other villages. While reporting on this movement, we stopped at numerous villages across the Kalahandi and Rayagada districts, including Kanṭamal, Banteji, Kalagaon, Sagobari, and Chulbari, among other affected villages en-route. In fact, the trip to Kalagaon arose from an unforeseen Oḍia newspaper report claiming that Majingāmāli, the hill where the village was located, had just been leased out secretly to the Adanis for bauxite mining.

While it is a well-known fact that Majingamali is already listed under the provisions of Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957, for bauxite mining, residents of the area said that prospective exploration was already being attempted. A group of women narrated how they saw a suspicious cavalcade of vehicles from a distance, slowly climbing up the winding, hilly road, and immediately set off to catch up with it. The women then ran through the hills, across various short cuts, to catch up to the vehicles on a sharp hair-pin bend at Kalagaon. They caught up with the cavalcade at that bend, and lay down on the road before them, to stop the vehicles in their tracks, and successfully prevented the official exploration team and their mobile excavator. “Come run us over!” the women belted out. “Never in your dreams should you think of blasting our mali!” their leader warned, even as she lay prostrate, along with her comrades, close to the shovel of the bulldozer at the head of the exploration cavalcade.

Meanwhile, as the accompanying posse of policewomen took positions to nab the protestors, physical scuffles ensued, making it impossible for the officers to arrest even a single woman. A group of them sat around me in a verandah at Kalagaon, narrating their precious experience, their resolve to lay their lives to protect their revered mountain slopes and peaks.

They had just attended an impromptu public meeting, under the shade of a large tree, urgently summoned by my companions who had sped up to this contiguous range of hills from a Tijmali village, where we had spent our second night after the first at Talampadar. A WhatsApp message from the district headquarters, about an Odiya newspaper report of Majingamali being leased out to the Adani group, had got them moving in a rush. Without waiting for a confirmation, they decided to apprise the people in one of the neighbouring ranges to be on the alert henceforth. Nearly a hundred villagers, mostly women from the fields and their hearths, had turned up mid-day, at short notice, already avowing not to allow any exploration for bauxite rocks, whether by the Adanis or any other company.

In August 2022, the Adani Group announced that the state government had cleared a proposal to set up an aluminium refinery, with a capacity of four million tonnes per annum, based on the Kashipur bauxite reserves, in Rayagada. The following March, it was declared lease holder for the bauxite reserves in Kutrumali, across the Kalahandi and Rayagada districts, and another for the Ballada mine, in Koraput district. In November this year, amid reports that the conglomerate had also secured rights to the Gandhamardhan hills, the state government rushed to clarify that there were no plans for bauxite mining in those hills, by Adani or any other group. Adani acquisitions in Odisha still remain as opaque as ever.

The destruction of Odisha’s ecology for its bauxite is sought to be justified by the growing demand for aluminium. A recent study by the International Aluminium Institute has estimated that the global demand for the metal will increase by almost 40 percent, to 119.5 million metric tonnes, by 2030. This requires the industry to produce an additional 33.3 metric tonnes more to meet the demand. Climate change activists have raised concerns about the extreme impact this would have on the environment, not only thorough the destruction of forest and water resources, but also the greenhouse gases released in the process. Many have pointed to the huge potential of recycling secondary aluminium to meet the growing demand, but mining conglomerates continue to exploit new mines at grave cost to the surrounding areas and indigenous communities who inhabit them.

If the Adani leases are presumed, Ballada and Kutrumali would be among three unexploited reserves that the Odisha government has, of late, brought on the block all at once—Tijmali is the third. Vedanta was formally granted the lease to mine Tijmali for bauxite on 1 March 2023. The law formally recognises that the acquisition of land, forests, and water—jal, jangal, zameen of the Adivasis—for the mining, transportation, and processing of ore, and the distribution of the metal extracted, amounts to exploitation of the resources that are a lifeline for agrarian and forest-dependent societies. It is with such a recognition that the law clearly mandates that any such extractive or mining, transportation and processing project requires the “free, prior and informed consent” of those who live amid the natural resources, and depend on them crucially for their subsistence, for their present needs, and for the future generations.

On the ground, however, the law of the land had little impact.

Now carrot, now stick

Soon after Vedanta was awarded the mining license, employees of its contractor, Mythri, began visiting Tijmali’s villages. By May 2023, the women residing in some of these villages, such as Banteji, Kantamal and Talampadar, began questioning the Mythri staff about their presence in the region. The women told me that at first, it was a privacy issue. The Mythri officials would ask the men from the villages to show their Aadhaar cards and other personal documents, claiming that money would be deposited into their bank accounts, and some unsuspecting villagers would not object.

Things came to a head when the Mythri men started climbing up the hills and operating drones. The indigenous women could not abide by that, as they considered the hills and its forests as a paradise, where they were free to live, toil and frolick, with no peeping toms around. They would go up there to fetch various herbs, leaves, tubers, stems, seeds, barks, and also to raise crops and fruit trees; bathe in the streams; and answer nature’s calls, all in full abandon, as a part of their daily life.

The staffers, however, refused to relent. Suspicions of various kinds took root, one of which was that Mythri Infrastructure might also be doubling as a hired, private, surveillance agency, on the lookout for Maoist cadres, purportedly operating from the forest cover and mingling with the villagers, away from the villages. Every now and then, a villager, usually a woman, would boldly challenge, oppose, or obstruct the increasingly unrelenting Mythri staff, with raised voices or by shutting the door of their house on their faces. In response, they would be accused and threatened of being a Maoist.

One such woman, Reena Majhi, who was a native from a distant tribal district and residing in one of the Tijmali villages after her marriage, recounted how she was accosted by the Mythri men and accused of being a Maoist herself. During our interview, I asked her about Maoists, with the desire to inquire whether she was among their cadre. “What do Maoists look like? Can you tell me yourself?” she shot back at me. “If ever I had seen a Maoist, then I could have told them, yes, I have seen one!”

As the escalations ensued, men and women adopted the tactic of confronting the Mythri officials when they entered their villages, demanding written permissions from the respective gram sabhas to enter the area. On 4 August 2023, in Lakri village, a crowd got together and accused the Mythri officials of bribing their neighbours to obtain consent for the mining project. Still, the outsiders continued their uphill treks through the villages in their bid to reach the mountain top, the the abode of their ancestor of ancestors, Tij Raja, and the most sacred of all places, the breath-taking terrain around Tijmali village. Enraged by this, on 12 August, a contingent of women allegedly accosted the intruding men, on a desolate hill tract between two villages, Sagabar̥i and Malipadar, and let them go only after they gave a written assurance that they would never again enter their villages.

Turning point towards a dark phase: a time to rise

That became a turning point, leading to the registration of five FIRs against the villagers at the at Kashipur police station in Rayagaḍa district. The police reports accused around hundreds of unnamed persons of rioting, attempt to murder, and other trumped-up charges. By the end of the month, the police arrested 24 tribals from six different villages. Many villagers went into hiding, deep into the forest, as if secure in the lap of their ancestors. Lai Majhi was one of them. At the time, he was no leader, nor was the Maa, Maati, Maali Surakhya Manch yet formed. It was a phase of steel-tempering for the emergent leadership.

Amid these arrests, on 14 August, Vedanta submitted a draft Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) report to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) for clearances. The EIA report is a mandatory process for an environmental clearance, necessary for a mining project. Following the publication of the draft report, the mining company must conduct public consultations with the affected population, and address their concerns in the final report. Open, free and consultative public hearings were a crucial aspect of the mandatory environmental clearance process. While at least a hundred men, all presumed the most active resistors, were incarcerated or forced into the forests, Vedanta’s draft EIA report became available online, and the Oḍisha State Pollution Control Board announced one month’s notice for two public hearings.

The public hearings were scheduled for 16 and 18 October, in Sunger and Kerpai villages, one each in the Kashipur block of Rayagaḍa and the Thuamal Rampur block of Kal̥ahanḍi, respectively. The resistance forces of Tijmali were eager to be represented faithfully. However, the administrations of both districts went whole hog to conduct an all-out farce, in the name of public hearings, Both the venues were barricaded with hundreds of police and paramilitary personnel posted to stand guard against locals who tried to participate in the hearings. To make a show of civilians participating in the hearings, hired men from towns of other districts were brought and stationed in heavily guarded sheds for the hearings. Local villagers, not to be trusted, were not allowed to enter anywhere in the nearby surrounding areas.

But the men and women from Tijmali were not to be defeated as easily. Determined to foil the corporate-state nexus’ plan to turn the hearings into an orchestrated claptrap, they set out on foot, in the middle of the night, from near and far, to the first of the two venues on the appointed date. They carried their children along with their indispensable items—their traditional weapons, in their arms, on their shoulders, and fastened to their waistbands. Those at the foothills climbed up the hill, and walked through the forest paths all night, while those at the top descended and headed for their venue. Taking every precaution not to alert the adversary, around 2,000 Kuis and Doms, men and women, though predominantly the latter, reached a high vantage point above the Sunger meeting venue, well before daybreak on 16 October. There, they finally caught their breath.

And then, in one fell swoop, they ran down the hill, towards the ground prepared for the public hearing, before the security personnel could even realise what was happening. On the ground, the anticipated scuffle ensued, the legitimate participants of the hearing enduring the brutalities inflicted by the unlawfully instructed security forces, the former, mostly women, successfully pushing back columns of the armed personnel, overwhelmingly male in composition. Victory in the battle smiled in the side of morality. Reena Majhi and her team of women narrated their feat aimed at claiming their right to be heard on my first night, in Talampadar, with Lāi Mājhi chiming in occasionally.

Lai Majhi was a fugitive at the time, but because his presence was necessary for the hearings, he was asked by his comrades to come out in the open. So he walked into the meeting venue with his plebeian army, without bothering to conceal himself. The state, and the companies bent upon mining the mountain, had lost the ground, morally and physically. The villagers seized the dais erected for the hearing, and vent their fury, denouncing the attempt to obstruct their entry and hold a fake public hearing, before proceeding to articulate their opposition to the mining proposal.

At Kerpai, it was less difficult for the villagers to reach the venue, because the word had spread about the victory at the previous hearing. The administration had nonetheless made the same preparations to hijack the hearing, but when the villagers reached the venue, after a night-long march, at around 6 in the morning, the security officials called the Kalahandi district collector over the phone to seek fresh instructions. The villagers were allowed to file past the barricades and enter the pandal unimpeded. The Kal̥ahanḍi collector, who had been hard-pressed to facilitate a hearing in favour of the mining proposal, allowed the villagers to speak and heard them out patiently.

What the two Collectors reported to the environment ministry, through the State Pollution Control Board, is another contentious matter though.

Clearances under process: contentions outweighing the prospects for mining

The speakers at the two government-sponsored public hearings primarily focussed on their historic dependence as a community on the fertile land, the biodiverse forests, and the perennial streams of Tijmali. They spoke of how all of it guaranteed their future sustenance for the generations ahead, and ensured them both dignity and livelihood, against the bleak backdrop of an unemployment crisis in the country. They discussed how their land, forests and water also allowed them to live, as their ancestors have done, in conformity with their collective beliefs, faith, cultural norms, and social practices. They cautioned how the mining project would, suddenly and unilaterally, deprive them of the very source of their existence and hardiness, especially if they were to be displaced, but also if any mining activities were allowed in the vicinity of their villages.

There was thus no question of the people’s consent to the mining project. Following the public hearings, Vedanta is yet to submit a final EIA report. And a scrutiny of the draft report reveals much to be desired—the social and environmental impacts of the proposed project have been assessed both incorrectly and insufficiently.

As many villagers noted, perhaps the most important factor is the impact the mining project would have on Tijmali’s water resources, the very life and blood of its thriving ecology and civilisation. Once the rocks containing bauxite are removed, all the streams would dry up, according to the locals, pointing to what happened in the wake of mining at Baphlimali. A comprehensive report on the environmental and social impact of the mining project prepared by the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, titled “Under the Surface,” also highlights that Vedanta’s draft EIA report failed to address the potential impact on nine water bodies within a ten-kilometre radius of the project site. It also highlighted that contrary to Vedanta’s claims, that only one stream passes through the mine area, four different speakers during the public hearings highlighted that over 20 streams pass through it.

According to Rajan, about a dozen more villages would lose their streams when the ground water sources dry up due to blasting and the displacement of rocks at the mountain top, besides suffering extreme pollution from the resulting dust and fumes. He added that the EIA report does not account for the impact of blasting, drilling and transport activities, which would severely impact at least 30 villages in and around Tijmali.

The NLSIU report also noted numerous other environmental consequences unaddressed by the draft EIA report. “Based on a scrutiny of diverse sources originating in the project proponent, official authorities, media and civil society, and secondary research,” the report stated, “the proposed project has the potential to cause permanent, irreversible and irreparable harm to land, forest, wildlife and water, not only at the site of the mine, but for a radius of at least a dozen kilometre around it.” It added, “This irreversible and irreparable harm includes the extinction or serious loss of habitat for diverse plant and wildlife species, water depletion and pollution, and permanent loss of soil fertility preventing the natural regeneration of the ecology once the mine is exhausted.”

Moreover, the draft EIA report grossly underestimates the number of villages and households that will be displaced by the project. While Vedanta has officially identified only 18 villages within the project area, speakers at the public hearings noted that at least 50 villages would be affected. The EIA report also suffered fundamental internal inconsistencies, given that it claimed only 600 people would be affected—and only 100 displaced—whereas even the 18 villages identified by Vedanta have nearly double that population.

The NLSIU report further observes how “the most egregious finding in the draft EIA report pertains to the potential health impacts of the mine.” Ignoring the consequences of the mining and its contaminants, the report claims that the project would create a positive health impact due to its intended investment in health infrastructure in these villages. “Bauxite mining generally is considered to lead to chronic respiratory issues, liver and spleen damage, exposure to communicable diseases like malaria and dengue,” the report warned. Moreover, the destruction of Tijmali’s forests will deprive the indigenous population of its herbs and their traditional medical knowledge and practices.

Given these grave social and environmental consequences, it is no surprise that there was no question of the villagers consenting to the mining project. Vedanta had learnt from its stint in Niyamgiri the power of the village gram sabhas to come together and shut down their projects. So this time, the multinational conglomerate chose deception.

Bauxite rocks at Tijmali have an incredible water retention capacity

Tijmāli is a landscape where bauxite sediments abound on hilltops, with thick foliage and dense forests descending along the slopes. The perennial nature of a number of springs at the top is known to be the cause of the abundance of ground water, with hundreds of streams flowing by the slopes and into the valleys, irrigating large stretches, in their natural course, all along.

The renowned anthropologist Felix Padel refers to the vital issue of water retention, in a case study, The Bauxite-Aluminium Industry and India’s Adivasis. Advocating on behalf of the Adivasis threatened with, and already suffering, displacement, he talks about bauxite rocks having a sponge-like quality. A scientific synthesis to substantiate such an amazing figurative perception may seem lacking, but geologists such as N Subba Rao, a professor at Andhra University, have probed the issue in the Eastern Ghats. The relationship between the abundance of bauxite within sedimentary rock deposits and the perennial springs, often found in such geological conditions, has been seen along with the structural configuration of the rocks. Therefore, there is ample scope to further enrich the geological analysis of bauxite rocks, or to simply probe the rock formations at Tijmali itself, as a validation of Padel’s prescient observations on the extraordinary water retention capacity of bauxite-rich rock formations.

The allegory of a sponge in empirical and intuitive terms does seem to fit the bill. Negative evidence supports such a perception, which is what Padel bases his perception on. No sooner does bauxite mining commence, as in Bāphlimāli, than the streams along the slopes begin to dry up—and this is known to happen quite rapidly. It certainly suggests a scientific co-relation between the constituents of bauxite rocks and the ability of the rock formations to absorb water, like a sponge. The seemingly metaphysical belief among the villagers around Tijmāli, about such a co-relation, may be an intuitive reflection of a probable physicality. Not for no reason would the local inhabitants tend to be so passionate in the articulation of their strong affinity towards their environs—their very own, jal, jangal, zameen.

Stepping back a bit to negotiate the back and forth

During my reporting among the tribals, I heard the name of one former leader often—Ramdhari Nayak, of Serabai village. He seemed to be a living legend of his time, dreaded by the state officials despite his advancing years. Though he is no longer alive, I was fortunate to cross paths with his wife, and the daughter of his close comrade. The leaders of the movement today spoke of how his absence left the door wide open for Mythri to enter, set up a base in Serabai, and start its operations. It seemed like a strategy of “area domination,” the movement leaders said. But the Mythri base area did not last long. At the time of our visit, Serabai had become virtually Mythri-free, with one or two isolated exceptions.

Reminiscing upon the agitation against L&T, one admirer of Ramdhari narrated how when the company was engaged in explorations on the upper reaches of Tijmali, the resistance leaders laid an ambush and interrupted the series of vehicles coming downhill after a day of digging. The drivers and passengers were caught unaware, and with no succour forthcoming, all of them were forced to alight and return to their camp site on foot. When they came back for their vehicles, two days later, there were only disjointed metal parts and burnt left-overs for them to recover. News of the silent ambush spread like wildfire and fuelled an enthusiasm that became an upsurge commemorated for years to come. As many as 161 alleged arsonists, assailants, and accused individuals, were arrested, and subsequently released on bail. The net result was the beginning of L&T’s exit from Tijmali.

But in ensuing years, the movement lost steam, and the Maa, Maati, Maali Surakhya Manch is yet to evoke that same passion for resistance. The Manch was founded in mid-2023, and acquired its present shape between six and twelve months ago. Apart from vice president Lai Majhi, the office bearers include Suba Singh Majhi, the organisation’s president; Hiramal Nayak, the secretary; and Lakhan Majhi, the treasurer. Nayak is a family man with adult children, and a devout Hindu. For years, he has been engaged in evangelical and spiritual activity among the locals, on behalf of his particular Hindu sect, but committed himself to the resistance upon realising the urgent necessity to save the very material basis of the existence of the community in and around Tijmali, and the animistic faith which he never ascribed to.

Despite the mass participation of women in the Tijmali resistance movement, not a single office bearer of the Maa, Maati, Maali Surakhya Manch is a woman. In fact, Paḍhi and Nigam discuss in Odisha Story how across the anti-displacement movements through the state’s history, the women have consistently been the most ebullient and militant; steps ahead of the men. Kallahandi and Rayagada even had a sex ratio tilted towards the women, reported as 1042 and 1046 women per 1000 men, respectively. The non-inclusion and lack of affirmative discrimination in favour of the women, at the leading level in the ongoing movement, indicates the continuing, male parochialism among India’s indigenous communities, whether Adivasi or Dalit. In Odisha Story, Paḍhi and Nigam quote one female activist, Amba Majhi, while discussing the failure of the anti-mining movement against NALCO in Kashipur, Rāyagaḍā:

When a man drinks, he stops thinking. It is only him who matters. Leave alone wife and children, even God ceases to exist when they are drunk. And then they fight. Some cry like children. They become beasts and begin hitting their wives. If we were in the forefront of the struggle, this would not have happened. The compensation came in because it is the men who became weak. They fail to understand that compensation is bribery.

In fact, it is a similar nature of compensation that led to Mythri’s initial success in winning over the villagers when the company started setting up operations. Mythri officials offered the villagers a monthly payment of Rs 1,500, as a token advance payment, and offering them an assurance of a job, too, once the mining began, on the condition that the individual verbally commit to handing over his land deed upon request. Many villagers accepted the unenforceable deal. “Quite a few of them have come back and now stood united with us, through persistent persuasion,” Lai Majhi said. “Losing and winning over those who succumbed to the influences of Mythri has become an unending process.”

The see-saw of losing and winning men, at times within a family, went on while Vedanta sought the necessary clearances from the various state departments and the environment ministry. For the undecided middle-roaders, the Mythri token money worked like a dead weight, dimming the ability to fight consistently for a common cause. Many deep fissures arose within the community, as a consequence, which used to be a collective entity before. The urban tendency of self-promotion trickled into the interiors of these remote villages, and consequently, the resistance movement needed more novel solutions than the usual protest demonstrations aimed at officials. Within months of Mythri swinging into action, they had won over two large villages with around 350 households each: Sagabari, in Rayagada’s Sunger panchayat, and Chulbari, in Kalahandi’s Thuamal Rampur panchayat.

The latter happens to be the only village in the entire Tijmali belt where the company-state nexus actually held a gram sabha meeting, and succeeded in eliciting real signatures of the villagers. However, the villagers were not told that it was a gram sabha meeting to pass resolutions in relation to the mining project. Instead, they were told it was about amenities to be provided to the village. When the villagers got to know the truth, eventually, they collectively turned against the mining project. In Sagabari, too, the resistance leaders approached each villager who had accepted the monthly payments, one by one, to bring them back to their fold. During an impromptu meeting held there on the last day of my reporting, the individuals narrated how they had gone over to the other side and then when the tide turned, of late, they returned to the anti-mining fold, and regretted succumbing to petty greed.

But winning them back happened only after their consent had been manipulated.

Over to Gram Sabhas: the deep fakes and the ubiquitous real

While in Chulbari, a gram sabha was held without informing the villagers of its purpose, Vedanta also claimed to have secured the consent of nine other village gram sabhas. District officials certified that all ten gram sabhas, which covered two gram panchayats—one in each district, Rayagada and Kalahandi—as having been conducted on the same day: 8 December 2023. In reality, however, apart from Chulbari, not a single village assembly was held; there was no prior or belated discussion with the villagers about any purported gram sabha resolutions; and there was no information shared about any mining project. All my conversations, and the factual reports I accessed, clearly indicated that numerous signatures were forged, including those of deceased individuals, to validate the resolutions as passed unanimously. Not once, and in no village, were the contents of the resolutions passed by the gram sabhas discussed, read out, revealed, or even disclosed, in any manner, to the villagers.

Although there were reports of fake gram sabha resolutions circulating since then, the cat was let out of the bag only when information could be obtained, in January, 2024, under the Right to Information Act. One of the RTI replies stated that all necessary processes under the Forest Rights Act had been completed only for the diversion of forest land in two villages: Tijmali (at the mountain top) and Chulbari (on the foothills), both of which fall within the Talampadar gram panchayat of Kal̥ahanḍi. Another claimed that consent had been granted for the proposed diversion of forest land through gram sabha resolutions from eight villages within the Sunger gram panchayat of Rayagaḍa.

In response to these fraudulent resolutions, the villagers held real gram sabhas in the same ten villages between 30 August and 4 September 2024. Among the points in the resolutions discussed, put to vote, and passed unanimously was the decision to set aside the fake resolutions of 8 December 2023. Other resolutions passed in the gram sabhas demanded compliance with the provisions of the Forest Rights Act and the state government’s schemes intended to protect the land rights of the forest communities. This is a mandatory statutory process that must be completed, prior to any diversion of forest land. Yet, till date, the concerned forest department has not even initiated the process for settling claims over the forest land titles in and around Tijmali.

The gram sabhas’ categorical refusal to consent to the Tijmali mining project, which was earlier misreported as a consent to the project, was also announced at a press conference held at Bhawanipatna, on 25 October, and reported in the local media. The press release issued at the conference further stated that the Maa, Maati Maali Surakhya Manch initiated steps to apprise the environment ministry about the resolutions adopted by the legitimately held gram sabhas.

Kartik Naik was among the Manch leaders at the forefront of organising the real gram sabhas. On 19 September, two weeks after the resolutions were passed, Kartik was arrested in a nine-month-old case. In January, around the time when the information under the RTI Act became available, a small group of individuals assaulted a single individual, who, it was believed, had to be an agent of the mining company, in a market within the Sunger panchayat. Though the victim of the attack was unable to identify the assailants, the Kashipur police had registered an FIR against 11 named persons, most of whom are widely-known activists in the anti-mining movement. Kartik was just one of them.

Prisoners of the Resistance

On 29 August, the day before the real gram sabhas were to be held, a Kashipur magistrate issued non-bailable warrants against all 11 persons, in the same ten villages. The expedient cause of the arrest warrants was not hard to perceive: the state perhaps hoped that arrests of the known activists might foil the credible gram sabhas, and what would follow. Though they could not prevent the resolutions, Kartik remains in jail. His bail application was rejected by the sessions court, and is currently being heard before the Odisha High Court.

Among those arrested on account of their participation in the Tijmali anti-mining movement, two others, both prominent activists have spent about 7-8 months each, before their release on bail February this year. One of them is Upendra Bag-Dravid, who accompanied me during my reporting, and the other, Umakant Naik, is younger brother of Kartik. Kartik, who has completed over two months in prison, is known to have played a major role in aiding the public hearings of 16 and 18 October, despite great odds and adversities, where he testified against the mining proposal.

Spirit talks by the fire

During the last night of my reporting, as we sat around a bonfire in the Kantamal village, a question came to me about the spiritual associations of Tijmali. I wondered whether the animistic deities of Tij Raja and his younger brother, Niyām Raja, were pantheistic interpretations of the spirits of the respective ancestor of ancestors of the many tribal communities of the forest. I asked one individual seated around the fire, who was considered among the villagers as a prodigal wiseman-priest, about my query. He believed that the animistic power—of what we mortals sometimes tended to refer to as spirits—was actually associated with stones, rocks, trees, forests, streams, springs, thunder, rain, clouds, sunlight, and everything that is part of verdant nature. Such mythical power could easily be mistaken for the other one associated with deities.

Masku Majhi, the 45-year-old son and interpreter of the 85-year-old performer of rituals, Dukki Majhi, who led the discourse, took pains to explain the legend of Tij Raja to me, in terms of what he thought an urbanite like me might understand. After patient prodding and probing, he revealed that according to Kui belief, essentially, Tij Raja was inseparable from Tijmali. “He is the mountain itself, not a separate entity,” Masku said.

In that context, to think of Tij Raja as just another deity would be imprecise, to say the least. So, who could be so uncivil as to imagine that the Kuis and the Doms of Tijmali would possibly allow the blasting, drilling, and tossing around of not just the stones and earth and trees of the mountain, but the senior-most of the ancestors of all the tribes of the region, Tij Raja, himself?