When officials engage in fraud for mining barons

There is evidence to prove that successive governments headed by the BJD and now the BJP, have fraudulently manufactured consent of tribals for acquiring their land for mining. Bureaucrats, secure in the knowledge that the Government has their back and will never allow them to be prosecuted, have deposed that Gram Sabha (Village Council) meetings were held and consent of the villagers obtained. Tribals contest the claim but bureaucrats deposed in the High Court that they were personally present at the meetings. Not surprisingly, the courts accepted the word of the Babus.  

Two developments on 16 October this year have drawn worldwide attention to the fraudulent and repressive character of the ruling elite in Odisha. The fraudulent nature of the establishment came to light in an explosive investigative report published that day by Al Jazzera, the well-known news portal, about large-scale forgery allegedly undertaken by the Mohan Majhi government of the state to hand over almost 3000 acres of forest land to the Adani/Vedanta Groups for bauxite mining. 

The repressive character of the Majhi administration was borne out by the fact that on the late night of 16 October, the district police knocked on the door of a young doctor named Dr Randall Sequeira at Bhawanipatna in Kalahandi and arrested him along with Laxman Naik, a tribal rights activist, without any warrant: the charge was that these two people had highlighted the brutal crackdown by the district police on the tribal people of the Kantamal village in Rayagada district in an early morning swoop on 7 April this year.

On that fateful morning, a large posse of policemen had entered the area at 3 am, cut off the electricity, broken open doors and attempted to take into custody some tribal and Dalit activists who had opposed the handover of the forest land at Tijimali (for strange reasons, the village is mentioned as Sijimali in government records) for bauxite mining by the Vedanta Resources. When the villagers gathered and put up a stiff resistance, the police used tear-gas shells and pellet guns to disperse the protesters. 70 villagers were injured in the incident, some of them critically.

This incident demonstrated how the state apparatus is so closely aligned with the corporate interests that it’s ready to dispossess, maim and kill the vulnerable sections of the society. Dr Randall Sequeira, a native of Mangaluru, Karnataka, is a professional medical doctor who had set up home in Kalahandi  to render medical services in the interior tribal areas where government health machinery is non-existent and people depend on quackery to treat diseases.

Dr Sequeira’s approach to healthcare went beyond treating diseases; he believed that access to nutritious food, clean water and security of livelihood were closely linked to the community's well-being. His engagement with these issues, especially the issue of indigenous people’s rights, brought him into the crosshairs of the government forces sold to the corporate interests. That explains why the police raided his premises late night on the 16th October and took him and Laxman Naik, who happened to be there, into custody.

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The Al Jazeera report puts the spotlight on how the BJP government in Odisha has acted as the handmaiden of the other corporate house, the Adanis, to defraud the tribal community. As per the forest laws and the laws granting autonomy to the tribal areas, no forest land can be taken away for mining or related purposes without the explicit consent of a majority of the adult population of the villages obtained through the resolution of the duly convened Gram Sabha (Village Council) meetings. This is a mandate reinforced by the Supreme Court of India in its landmark 2013 ruling in the wake of the Niyamgiri anti-mining protest.

The Adanis had been sanctioned bauxite mining rights at Kutrumali in Rayagada district in 2023; clearly, the surrounding tribal villages were in no mood to give up their land and dwellings. They had been collectively raising their voice that they would fight till their last breath rather than accept relocation. How did then in January this year the government triumphantly announce that all the 580 adult villagers had agreed to give up their land for Adani mining? The government was emphatic that it had documents with the relevant signatures/thumb impressions to prove it. 

That raised a whale of protest from the villagers who insisted that they had not attended any Gram Sabha meetings, that they had not consented to any resolution in favour of mining. That’s when a team of Al Jazeera reporters went to the concerned villages to ascertain facts. What they found was an eye-opener: how some signatures/ thumb impressions were simply fake and others were obtained fraudulently. Some in the list were deceased, there were others who were working away from the villages. Theirs were clearly fake signatures.

But there were also villagers who recognised their signatures on the sheets of papers put up by the government; these villagers claimed that they were told to sign the papers by the revenue officials to get ownership deeds of the land they possess. It was clearly a fraudulent trick by the government machinery to obtain the signatures on some other pretext and then append it as consent for the bauxite mining by the Adanis.

The BJD government in Odisha had indulged in similar fraudulent practices to show consent for the Vedanta project in Tijimali in Rayagada. The government had claimed that the Gram Sabhas had unanimously consented to the diversion of the 708 hectares of forest land, on which they were dependent for their livelihoods, for bauxite mining. A team of reporters of The Frontline magazine had then busted the lie; The Frontline report showed how the consent documents mentioned names of people who had died years before the supposed Gram Sabhas were held; there were names of minors and non-residents as well.  

The Gram Sabhas were supposed to have been held in all eight villages on 8 December 2023. But the RTI documents obtained by the Frontline showed that there was no evidence, no witnesses, no documentation, no video recording to substantiate that Gram Sabhas actually took place in these villages.

In both the instances, it was clearly a case of forgery and fraud by the Odisha government to subserve the interest of the corporate houses at the cost of the poor tribal and Dalit community inhabiting the forests. It’s indeed tragic, rather ironic, that it should happen at a time when a tribal leader from Odisha, Draupadi Murmu, adorns the highest constitutional position in the country!

The tribals do not see any end to this cycle of injustice and oppression.