The following is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of ‘After Messiah: What Comes When a Great Leader Goes’ by Aakar Patel, published by Penguin.The mood inside was defiant, and though many of the team, including those who had led it, were in custody, those who remained had begun working on the legal defence. There was anger at the fact that this had happened in the way it had, and even this set, which worked on injustices perpetrated by the state, was outraged.The pattern of the case that had been filed against them was from a familiar playbook that had been used by the government for decades. At the core of the issue was land, which was owned and inhabited by indigenous communities and required by large companies—required to build giant plants and the attendant mines to feed them ore. Still more land was then required to store—dump, really—the toxic waste products of the industrial process.‘After Messiah: What Comes When a Great Leader Goes’, Aakar Patel, Penguin, 2023.The state had laws under which it could arbitrarily seize private property, but this capture was couched as being fair and in the interest of all. The first step of the acquisition was that those who owned the fields and mountains and streams were informed through gazettes in government offices that their property was in the process of being taken over.They had thirty days to file their objections, assuming they had knowledge of what was put on government noticeboards, any more than any other citizen has. After the objections had been filed, a meeting—called a ‘public consultation’ but actually nothing of the sort—was held with those who did not consent. The company investing in the project also sent its own people there, and in the noisy and often violent chaos that ensued, not much was resolved. Local middlemen were hired to lure or bully those who objected or were refusing to sell.A simultaneous process of taking over some land and then pressuring the rest to give more would begin. In time, the owners of adjoining lands would have less incentive to resist because the borders of their property would be encroached on—not just physically but also through the noise and the emissions and the waste, the poisoned waters and the ash settling on their fields.Their ability to negotiate the terms of their fate, and that of their children and of their ancestral inheritance, began to diminish from the moment someone somewhere circled their property on a map. The state here was an opponent, even an adversary, when it felt that its interests clashed with those of the communities. The agents of the state, the lower bureaucracy, the police, the district magistrates, had no incentive to protect the rights of the communities and of individuals. They had their orders and targets to achieve, and it was the other side, the corporate firms and their owners, that had leverage over them, far more than the protesting individuals who were seen merely as obstacles.The mineral wealth lay not under the cities but in the deep heart of the country. The things that went on and concerned the people of these parts did not occupy the minds of those in the cities. They did not have to vacate their flats so that the ground below could be dug up for coal or bauxite. They often had the power to veto what could and could not happen outside their homes.How would they have dealt with the knowledge that in parts of their own country, schools were closed for much of the day because dynamite was used to open up mines, shaking the lands around? Most of them, of course, wouldn’t have known that such year-round seismic Diwalis existed. They wouldn’t have seen an ‘ash pond’, a salubrious-sounding space that was actually mounds and hillocks of black waste as far as the eye could see. This Mordor, so alien and unreal, terrifying to those who encountered it for the first time, the city dwellers were unfamiliar with it in reality, though perhaps not in fiction.Also read: In State-Level Changes to Land Laws, a Return to Land Grabbing in Development’s NameHowever, the lawyers knew. Particularly those, like Mira, who had chosen to work outside the cities. The state had laws that gave them just enough space to engage with it, laws that gave the people who owned those jungles and hills and valleys the notional right to safeguards. What was on paper, however, was subject to interpretation, and what was subjective was determined by those who held authority.Though the law required the state to act when these safeguards were violated, it ignored, avoided, shirked and refused. What it was focused on was ‘development’– the development of roads on which to ferry the wealth to the cities, and of paramilitary camps to pacify the locals. The business press reported the rising volumes of mine ore, as if it represented progress. The state and its ministries put out data on extraction, as if plundering someone else’s property and devastating the countryside was some signal achievement.The wealth of those fattened on extractives was legitimized on billionaires’ lists. Those in elected office held up these numbers, in millions of tonnes and billions of dollars, as an indicator of their leadership. The locals, on the other hand, were accused of holding up development, and those standing with them in support were called enemies of the nation.This slandering didn’t mean that those affected would stop trying, and they didn’t. The abusive words were not the problem; the problem was the injustice of what was happening and would happen.It was in the cause of such people that the collective had thrown itself. Having taken themselves to the areas where this kind of land-grab was happening, they knew where the interventions were required: when responding to the gazette, at the public consultation, at the point of helping organize the communities and putting them in touch with one another, at the point of informing them of their legal rights and safeguards, and at the police station to file complaints. This was the work the lawyers at the collective did. The firm could not, and did not, pay itself and its lawyers what they might have been able to make in another place or working for another cause. But it was work that they wanted to do, and it easily and continually attracted outstanding talent in the numbers required.Aakar Patel is a senior journalist and columnist.
