The seductive power of Vedanta's development programmes in India is replacing centuries of self-sufficient, egalitarian society
Eric Randolph, guardian.co.uk 20 Mar 10;
An attack on Vedanta staff near its aluminium refinery in India shows us that the clash of capitalism and remote tribes is more complex than James Cameron would have us believe.
The incident happened last month in the state of Orissa. Exact details are unclear but a senior member of Vedanta Aluminium Ltd, the Indian subsidiary of the UK-based Vedanta Resources Plc, confirmed that members of its corporate social responsibility team were attacked by unidentified individuals who set their jeep on fire and hospitalised two employees. As a measure of how well your public relations team is doing, this is not a good sign.
Tensions are growing in the region. The Dongria Kondh tribe strongly oppose Vedanta's plan to mine for bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills, which is home to their deity. A few days after the attack, they held a puja (religious ceremony) on Niyam Dongar hill in which they vowed to resist the project at all costs.
The initial reaction was therefore to blame the Dongria Kondh for the attack on the PR team. The truth, however, may be less straightforward. Mukesh Kumar, Vedanta's chief operating officer in the region, claims the attackers were men who had moved into the area looking for work, quarrelled with locals and been forced to leave. Evidently, they blamed Vedanta.
If true, this account suggests it is not just the mining itself that can generate anger – it also generates resentment among those who feel excluded from its perceived benefits.
The caricature of Vedanta is of a ruthless conglomerate driving a bulldozer through village communities in its ravenous search for valuable minerals. This caricature was given the three-dimensional technicolour treatment in James Cameron's Avatar, in which the unspoilt purity of the blue-skinned Na'vi tribe faces the rapacious greed of a US mining corporation.
Art seemed so closely to mirror reality that a campaigning group, Survival International, used the film's success to publicise the cause of the Dongria Kondh, with the tribe apparently writing a letter to Cameron asking for his assistance.
If the Dongria Kondh actually made it to their local Imax to watch the movie, one wonders how perturbed they would be at the solution it proposes: that local tribes should band together and have a gigantic, bloody battle against robot-suited humans and helicopter gunships. Perhaps if they believed the lesson of the film – that the fight could be over in a single afternoon after which the mining corporation would skulk off with its tail between its legs – then they might mount their flying dragons and have a go.
Sadly, the reality of capitalism's advance is far more insidious and much harder to resist. The fact is that many villagers in Orissa welcomed Vedanta's refinery when it was built in 2004, taking lucrative compensation packages in exchange for their land. Since then, Vedanta has poured huge amounts of money into a hearts-and-minds campaign, providing schools, medical care and infrastructure in its attempt to win over locals. Many of those who saw little value in free televisions and scooters nonetheless found it difficult to turn down the promise of better education and job opportunities for their children.
This is the true power of capitalism – not the muscle it can flex, but its ability to play on an individual's hopes and fears, often at the expense of the community as a whole.
One of the dangers is that there is no going back. Amnesty International claims many of those compensated in the refinery scheme did not fully understand the terms of the deal, for example thinking they would all get employment rather than just one member from each family. Few seemed to realise they would lose common farming land, forcing them to buy a lot of the food they once produced collectively. Nor did they realise the ecological impact that would result. But the deals are done, and the land is sold. Its findings received strong backing from the government this week, whose investigators decided Vedanta had violated human rights and forestry laws in its Orissa operations.
The subtler but more fundamental danger is what this model of development does to traditional social structures. Vedanta cannot provide development to the whole state. Somewhere the boundary has to end, somewhere a fence has to be erected, and with that comes a new existence of haves and have-nots, replacing centuries of basically self-sufficient and egalitarian society. Last month's attack on Vedanta's PR staff seems to reflect this danger, showing us the tensions that can accompany rapid, top-down development.
Through all this, it is important to remember that the villagers still have the right to choose Vedanta's model of development, as many did in 2004. We might hope they reject it, but we do so having already enjoyed many of the benefits of modern civilisation. It is certainly not wrong to want better opportunities for one's family.
But the key question is whether they make their decision fully appreciating the impact it will have on their community. We should also seriously question whether a mining company is really the best institution to lead people through such profound changes.
Corporate social responsibility couches itself in the positive-sounding watchwords of "progress" and "development", but ultimately it is the art of justifying capitalism's advance, putting a legitimate face on the destruction of older forms of social existence.
In the past fortnight, in another corner of India, a different tribe is winning its battle to shield its culture and society from the outside world. The Jarawa, who live on one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, won a supreme court ruling to have tourism operations around their land shut down.
The Jarawa saw what development meant and rejected it. They fought a powerful tourism lobby without resorting to war. The Dongria Kondh appear to be making the same choice on the hills of Niyamgiri, but faced with the mining industry and the seductive power of its million-dollar development programmes, their final decision may not be their own.
