India Indigenous People Coal
Police gunshots as rowdy villagers protest against coal-mine plans in Jharkhand
The controversial allocation of the Gondalpura coal deposit to Adani in north-east India has been accompanied by allocations of coal blocks to other coal-mining companies in neighbouring towns. This large community, comprising 76 villages and tens of thousands of people, is now engaged in an existential struggle for survival. All of these coal-mining projects have been fiercely opposed by the local people, with a recent protest leading to destruction of property and gunshots by local police. The affected villagers have called for solidarity in opposing all of these coal ventures.
Video of the mêlée in which gunfire can be heard can be viewed here:
Direct action and police gunfire (youtube.com)
Key facts:
Coal projects: BGR's coal project at Badam and Adani's 'Gondulpara' coal project at Gondalpura
Locations: Badam and Gondalpura, Jharkhand, India
Villages impacted by these two plus other proposed coal mines: 76
On 21 September 2024, a meeting was held at the football field in the village of Badam in protest against plans to obliterate local fields, forests, farms and villages for a giant coal mine. The meeting was held by the villagers of Gondalpura, Balodar, Galli, Badam, Babupara, Napo, Mogai, Ambajit, Harli, Chandol and others opposed to the recent allotments of coal deposits to Rungta Mines and other companies. In total, 76 villages in the region will be affected. Not a single house in many villages will remain standing.
It was a hot day, a small tent was erected, and a jittery sound system was set up. Most people sheltered from the sun beneath trees. Short, stirring speeches were made; maps of the proposed development were shared; and towards the end, the microphone was given to the women of the villages, who were in a very feisty mood.
From the most learned of experts to the simplest villager, everybody knew that when coal-mining begins, it will soon engulf the whole economy, and the village way of life will fall apart. If mining starts in Babupara and begins to dry up the rivers of Gondalpura, then mining will start for Adani as well. This was what happened in North Karanpura with the Pakri-Barwadih mines, where almost everyone was against the project, but slowly the natural landscape disappeared, illegal dumping of mine waste occurred on farmland, rivers dried up, rainfall became inconsistent, and then whole villages disappeared from the map.
The demonstration ended with plans to establish committees at the ‘tola’ (hamlet) in every affected village, to speak to every person who thinks ‘mining is okay’, and to have a ‘juloos’ (rally) on 4 October. A decision was made to protest at the formal public hearing that was to be held on Badam on that date.
However, the public hearing in Badam was cancelled. No journalist, including this correspondent, was invited to the ‘juloos’ (rally) as the protesters knew that there might be illegal, but ‘morally justifiable’, direct action near the villages of Ambajit and Motra.
Plans for coal mines provoke villagers’ anger (youtube.com)
Videos of the action that occurred on 4 October that have been accessed by this correspondent show women barging into the site office of the BGR company, men smashing the metal fence, and men breaking the windows of the vehicles of police and mining-company officials. At one stage, police can be heard firing their weapons.
Villagers fight against proposed coal mine, Jharkhand, India (youtube.com)
Local media reported inconsistently. One said that villagers became angry when one of them was injured by security personnel. Another described the destruction as ‘vandalism.’
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The meeting of 21 September 2024
The meeting on 21 September articulated the reasons for the villagers’ anger. The nearby city of Barkagaon has been beset by communal violence in the recent past. Badam has a significant Muslim population, and speaker after speaker, including party workers for the Hindu-majority BJP, spoke of the need for communal harmony, saying that Hindus and Muslims must work together to defeat the mining companies. Greetings alternated between Johar, Namaskaar, Salaam and Adaab. There were constant appeals for unity and solidarity, and that no one should give up their land to the companies. Everyone was vociferously against mining.
In the description below, the identities of the speakers will be withheld to protect their identities.
A speaker from Badam described every protester as a glowworm, and ‘when all the glowworms come together in their millions, they can outshine the moon.’
An octogenarian said it doesn’t matter how many attendees there were, (about 500 people turned up to a meeting that was organised at short notice), ‘we need to be courageous.’
The meeting was also a history lesson, as a man spoke about how the government is giving away forest lands and that the community had to remember that these are common lands owned by the community: ‘gairmazurva (common) land, doesn’t belong to the government, it belongs to our ancestors, our purvakhs. And why has the government put all this land into landbanks? Because they are not meant for you but for the companies.’
‘This land is not just yours; this land is your ancestors’.’
The meeting convenor allowed all kinds of views to be expressed, even inviting anyone in favour of the company to speak (no one did). There were constant appeals for the removal of party politics from the area, that the fight is for ‘jal, jungle, jameen.’ (rivers, jungles, land).
Another man spoke about the condition of North Karanpura and Churchu, an area beset by mining. ‘Churchu ka dharti waha roh rahi hai hai, (the soil of Churchu is crying over there) and there aren’t even any people left.’
‘…if a person from Churchu dies’ he said, ‘he will wonder, where are his people? Some will be in Ranchi [the state capital, where displaced villagers go in search of menial work], some in Barkagaon [another large town], and if you want this kind of situation, give your land to the companies.’
‘For when you give your land away, there will be no one to take your corpse.’
There was applause when one man gave a twist to the well-known slogan, ‘jaan dedenge, lekin zamin nahi,’ which translates to we will give our lives, but not our land, to ‘Jaan bhi nahi denge, jameen bhi nahi denge.’ ‘No, we won’t give our land, nor our lives.’
‘What kind of situation is it, that you give your land to the government and beg for a job from a private company? You must realise it is ‘ghulami’ (slavery). They will give jobs to people from outside, from Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Andhra, and you will be greeting them again and again, ‘namaskaar sir’ or ‘adaab sir.’
Another man asked, ‘that every government department is with the companies, so who do we go to?’
‘…those Gondalpura people, who for two years have been agitating [against an Adani coal-mining project], we should look at them, and give them our support, all of us, from Harli, Badam, we should all be together. We should first stop them [Adani]; among say five hundred of us, there are only two or five of them who dominate us. We need to stop them.’
Another speaker asked for a total boycott of the handouts issued by the companies. ‘People should stop taking gifts from the companies, their blankets, their dishes, their charity. We should all stop that, uska virodh kar’ [boycott all of that].
‘Not a single girl from Gondalpura took even an umbrella! [from the Adani company]’.
‘It is important to show our strength,’ said one man, ‘Wohi mera bhai hai, jo wohi hamare saath de.’ (He is my brother, who comes by my side.)
A well-known local intellectual spoke at length about the details of the coal blocks, about global warming, about the laws, and placed everything in context.
‘Babupara East is the biggest coal block, where you are sitting now,’ he said. ‘This block, on 2 September 2019, was transferred to NTPC [a public-sector coal company]. It was a law that if a mine doesn’t start in seven years, it should be returned back to the people. And since nothing started, they transferred it.
‘There are 14 billion tonnes of coal in just three blocks here, which is around 9% of the country’s reserves. We have two choices. We can go with the mine, but the project will run only for 30 years.
‘No village is 20 or 30 years old – a village is hundreds, even thousands of years old. We have a history that is even longer than that. Our villages have statues of Buddha in there.’
‘Do you want to trade thousands of years of history for thirty years of coal mining?’
The speaker then denigrated the amount provided to villagers in return for the takeover of their lands for coal mining.
He held up a copy of the constitution of India and quoted ‘Article 39(b) of the Indian Constitution states that the ownership and control of the community's material resources should be distributed in a way that best serves the common good. It also states that the distribution should prevent the concentration of wealth.’
He also quoted a Supreme Court judgment of 2013 on ‘who is the owner of the resources under the land?’ He said that the in case CIVIL APPEAL NO. 4549 OF 2000, Threesiamma Jacob & Ors. Versus Geologist, Dptt. of Mining & Geology & Ors, the court had determined ‘that the owner of the land is the owner of the minerals.’
‘So whatever the government is doing, is ‘naajayaz’ (illegal).’
He then spoke about the Paris climate accords, arguing that all the coal blocks had to be shut down, about the amount of water needed to run a thermal power plant, and ‘kitni barbaadi hoti hai’ (how much destruction) and CO2 are created for 1 kilowatt hour. Referring to global warming he said, ‘even now it is September, we should be getting our blankets out, but it is still warm. Why is this?’
‘We have to see this in the context of all of Jharkhand. In all of Jharkhand there were once seventy coal blocks, now there are over eight hundred. Where will we go?’
An elected representative of the local panchayat said ‘we need to applaud those who have fought to protect these lands for twenty years, who went to jail, who put their money into this, along with you. The constitution of India is also suffering an injustice’.
‘So where did these company people come from? These Adani, Ambani, Mittal, Dalmia? If the government actually implemented the constitution, these companies could never come here.
‘Without going to jail, there is no movement… Jo darrega woh marega, whoever is afraid of going to jail, you won’t be saved.’
‘Zameen dena bandh ho jayge (stop giving your land away),’ he continued. ‘All of you people who take money, and then we do all the work to chase away the companies, and now you still have your land and money. Now just stop doing all that. We go to jail, and your land gets saved.
‘The day the people prepare themselves, the government doesn’t have enough of an army. Just look at what happened in Bangladesh.’ He asked the attendees to clap for the Bangladeshi protesters who chased a dictatorial leader out of the country, and the people clapped. ‘Look at what happened in Sri Lanka.’
‘What I want to say is… that there must be unity…ladne walla ladega, dekhnewalla dekhenga (those who fight will fight, those who watch, will just watch.)’
‘The people’s strength lies in their vote and their (virodh) their boycott. But that will not be enough for us to win. We were saved earlier because of the Coalgate scam, but this time we need to make barricades like we did before, or at least put up boards everywhere.’
As the meeting continued, the mood became more and more energetic; the women’s exhortations to ‘direct action’ brought cheers from the men. There was a rush towards the end to sign and pay for the tent and the sound system. People broke into groups; everyone - men, women, young people - formed action committees.
There were five hundred or so people on 21 September, but there were thousands on 4 October. There was almost no reportage nationally about the incident and most local newspapers barely spoke to the villagers.