Indigenous Adivasi Youth-Led Peacebuilding Amidst Escalating State-Corporate Developmental Violence in India

Indigenous Adivasi Youth-Led Peacebuilding Amidst Escalating State-Corporate Developmental Violence in India

Written on 02 April 2026. Posted in News

By InSAF India & Indian Alliance Paris for Indigenous Debates

As part of Indigenous Peoples worldwide, the many Adivasi communities of central-eastern India continue to draw on their traditional knowledge and cultural heritage to protect their lands, livelihoods and environment - jal, jangal, jameen (water, forest, land). Their stewardship is instrumental in maintaining the delicate balance of the region's extensive biodiverse forests, even as they rely on this ecosystem for survival and subsistence.

The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution recognizes and safeguards the rights of Indigenous Peoples/Adivasis, who are described therein as Scheduled Tribes, over their land and resources. This emerged from the governance model adopted by the British regime in the mid-19^th century as it faced numerous uprisings of Indigenous Peoples against dispossession and displacement, when their regions were grudgingly legislated as special legal zones, recognizing Adivasi customary laws and traditional practices.

After independence, India's policymakers continued to ground the country's development, in the colonial logic of extraction and industrialization by claiming eminent domain on Adivasi lands. This understanding of development broadly encompasses state actions such as dam building, road construction and establishment of public health and education services, for the 'greater common good', giving the government the power to take over lands and resources it claims are ultimately vested in the Indian State. Consequently, development as envisioned by the Indian State sanctions exclusion of its Indigenous Peoples, who have largely experienced such development as 'developmental violence'.

Development as Developmental Violence

This form of violence manifests primarily in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, it takes the form of enforced displacement: although Adivasis constitute only 8.6% of India's population, they account for nearly half (approximately 47%) of the estimated 70 million people displaced by industrial and mining projects between 1947 and 2010. Major multipurpose irrigation and electricity generation projects, such as the Damodar Valley project (modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority project in the United States), the Nagarjunasagar dam, and the Narmada Valley project, were all constructed on Adivasi lands, resulting in the submergence of villages.

On the other hand, this violence takes the form of expansive repression. Adivasis who resist the loss of their lands and resources are subjected to everyday repression and brutal forms of violence, including mass killings by police firing, such as the Koel Karo massacre. In addition, the reframing of Adivasi territories as areas posing an 'internal security threat' has enabled a militarized administration that primarily serves the corporate-State nexus and facilitates the operations of extractive companies.

The long Adivasi resistance to this developmental violence has taken many forms, from revolts to armed struggles to mass movements demanding constitutionally guaranteed autonomy, land rights, and rights over natural resources, as enshrined in UNDRIP Articles 3, 4, 7, 10, 18,19, 41 and 42, which India has ratified. Adivasis have consistently foregrounded justice-based peace, which includes social, economic and political justice: accountability of personnel instrumental in developmental violence, as well as just distribution of the resources Adivasis are deprived of while the country's elite enjoys the fruits of 'development'.

As Gajendra Mandavi, an Adivasi youth activist and ex-General Secretary of Bastar's erstwhile Moolwasi Bachao Manch [Save the Indigenous Peoples' Movement], observed in 2022: 'Newly recruited and arrived CRPF and DRG personnel ask us for our identity cards and Aadhaar cards while strutting down the roads. We're living here for generations, we should ask them where they have come from, for their identity and Aadhaar cards. Instead they're asking us, and if we don't provide details, we are beaten and abused…If we saw public transport plying the roads being constructed, we'd concur it's development, but there's nothing like that here.' Similarly, women blocking a road carrying up to 500 lorries a day for mining purposes in the Amdai Hills in north Bastar in early 2025 said: 'we're sitting here for the road we want…only we know how much problem this has created for us. Our little children have to cross this road to go to school, but the mines people don't bother about them, even racing past this area…'

The Naxalite Insurgency as an Excuse for State Violence Against the Adivasis

The Indian State is attempting to create consent for its version of development by focusing the discourse of 'internal security threat' on the Naxalite insurgency based in Adivasi regions, in particular in the Bastar Division of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, which has made the area difficult to access for mining corporations.

The eco-sensitive, biodiverse forested hills and river systems of Bastar - an area of ~39,000 km² - are home to several Adivasi tribes, as well as abundant reserves of minerals. In 2022-2023, just one district of Bastar, Dantewada, contributed 50% of Chhattisgarh's mineral revenue of USD153 million. In contrast, Bastar's human development indicators and living standards remain among India's lowest.

India presents the Naxalite movement as the cause of this impoverishment and its extermination essential for development in Adivasi regions. Given the real intention is to facilitate corporate interests, the State has, since a few years, been consolidating a permanent 'counter-insurgency grid' of militarized police camps for surveillance, restricting movement and freedom of association and assembly, weaponizing welfare and public services, with a pervasive fear of arbitrary detention and incarceration.

Since January 2024, there has been an exponential increase in extrajudicial killings, in order to reach a government-declared 'deadline' of eradicating Naxalism by 31 March, 2026. At the time of writing, over 560 people have been killed, the majority being Naxalite insurgents, who are also Adivasis, as well as ordinary villagers including children. Between 2021 and 2024, villagers also reported five drone attacks and women reported drone surveillance while bathing.

Adivasi Youth Reimagining Peacebuilding Against Developmental Violence

In 2021, an innovative peacebuilding method emerged following police firing on a sit-in protest in Silger village in south Bastar against the setting up of a security camp on Adivasi lands without their knowledge or consent. Four people were killed. The protest grew into a movement led by Adivasi youth. Many of these young men and women had as children witnessed members of their family or village being killed or raped by the state-sponsored Salwa Judum militia in 2005-2011, and experienced the endless cycles of repression that followed. At Silger, they drew on communitarian Indigenous praxis to build Moolwasi Bachao Manch (MBM) as a platform organizing decentralized grassroots Adivasi mass movements against the militarization and corporatization of their ancestral lands. Similarly others such as Maad Bachao Andolan [Save Mount Maad Struggle] in north Bastar also emerged.

In 2023, Raghu Midiyami, ex-President MBM Bastar Division, described how their advocacy was rooted in Indigenous stewardship, sustainable livelihoods and democratic participation, and sought to safeguard Indigenous land and forest rights through demanding an end to the state's developmental violence: 'we have organised our structure from village to panchayat to block to district committees [who] coordinate with each other for common actions. Our focus is to raise our issues and voices against all forms of injustice happening to our people, such as fake encounters, drone attacks, laying of wide roads, felling innumerable valuable trees, setting up camps illegally and sexual violence on our women and girls. … Whenever a camp is planned or set up, the people of that area inform us and then we take stock of our strength and presence there and plan for a protest.'

The State, however, cast such Adivasi rights-based mobilization and peacebuilding as a threat to its corporate agenda, in blatant violation of UNDRIP Articles 3, 4, 10, 18 and 19, and also in violation of the Adivasis' rights to freedom of association and expression as per the ICCPR and UDHR, reiterated in a Special Rapporteurs' joint statement in September 2025. The authorities repeatedly humiliated, intimidated, detained and arrested youth leaders to dismantle the movements, but they only grew.

Finally, on 30 October 2024, the Chhattisgarh Government quietly declared MBM an 'unlawful organization' under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 (CSPSA), deeming that its justice-based peacebuilding constituted 'instigation of the general public' against the state's 'vision of development'. MBM pursued every available legal remedy, including representation to the government, petitioning the Chhattisgarh High Court and appealing to the Supreme Court of India, without getting any relief. While the ban lapsed on 30 October 2025, it remains in force de facto: ~40 Adivasi youth linked to MBM have been undergoing imprisonment for varying periods. WHRD Suneeta Pottam, Raghu Midiyami, Gajendra Mandavi and many others are still in prison.

Why Spotlight Bastar in Solidarity Building with Indigenous Peoples?

In this context, as the Indian State attempts to weaken the Naxalites through indiscriminate killings and forced surrenders, it is also dismantling the mass justice-based peacebuilding movements, incarcerating and discrediting its youth leaders. This simultaneous approach is speeding up the State's violent redesign of Bastar to clear the region for mining interests. Officially, the state's military policy has been declared as 'clear, build, hold'.

MBM's experience of engagement with state representatives for its advocacy work and its unlawful proscription exemplifies the relationship of the Indian State with its Indigenous communities. Whenever the Adivasis have demanded participatory parity and their constitutionally guaranteed autonomy and right to customary self-governance, including respecting their right to Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC), the State that privileges private capital over its own citizens, has betrayed their faith and its own obligations to human rights.

The key legislations that operationalize the Fifth Schedule constitutional protections in Adivasi regions, mandating the authority of Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) in local decision-making, securing individual and collective rights over forest lands and resources, including FPIC in planning of mining, industrial, infrastructure or militarization project on Adivasi lands, have never been implemented in letter or spirit. Rather, in Bastar, since the Salwa Judum, the Constitution remains in a state of suspension due to the complicity of the legislature, judiciary and the executive in the developmental violence in the region.

MBM consistently stood in solidarity with international Indigenous and other struggles through, for example, observing International Indigenous Peoples' Day and International Women's Day. Their public statements also appealed for global solidarity for Bastar. While those calls have been silenced right now, the continued existential threat to Adivasi communities from state militarization in Bastar and neighbouring regions necessitates they must echo alongside other Indigenous movements across Latin America, Asia and Africa.

InSAF India is an Indian diaspora led collective that advocates for collective academic freedoms through building global solidarities with Indian and international peoples' movements, with a focus on Indigenous movements for radical social, economic and ecological justice.

Indian Alliance Paris is an organization of diasporic Indians and their French colleagues striving for a democratic and inclusive India.

Cover photo: MBM youth facing armed police. Photo: Sakhi

Tags: Human rights