Following the recent arrest of key Niyamgiri leaders, Lada Sikaka and Lingaraj Azad, among others, Vedanta’s chairman Anil Agarwal held a meeting with Odisha’s chief minister on September 26, in which he promised an investment of Rs 1,00,000 crore into the state, a new hospital and “hundreds of thousands of jobs”, in exchange for fast-tracked clearances for bauxite mining on Niyamgiri, which was saved from mining in 2013 after a Supreme Court-mandated referendum.Several things are very strange about Agarwal’s announcement.For one, it appears deeply sinister following Lada and Lingaraj’s arrests. Hundreds of Adivasi and Dalit citizens protesting against mining the neighbouring Khandualmali, Kutrumali and Sijimali mountains, especially members of Maa Mati Mali Suraksha Manch (‘Mother Earth Mountain Protection Platform’), including Hiramal Naik, have been arrested or beaten up by police and goondas since August 2023. Several public hearings have been held under systematic coercion, and the villages of Kantamal and Talaampadar have been under violent attack and occupation. The announcement makes no mention of these developments. Two other people active in the defence of the mountains and communities have been arrested: Randall Sequeira and Laxman Naik, a community doctor and a Dalit leader in Maa Mati Mali Suraksha Manch. Activists close to the ground have said that both appear to have been imprisoned under blatantly false charges.After the Supreme Court’s 2013 order, it will be difficult to give clearances for mining Niyamgiri without another referendum. The 2013 one should have been decisive and, as diverse voices have emphasised, none of these mountains should be mined without local communities’ Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). The 2013 order had noted that Niyamgiri’s inhabitants’ religion, based around Niyam Raja (Lord of Law), would be violated by mining their mountain without their consent. In fact, the huge, bauxite-capped mountains of the region are considered sacred by their inhabitants, who understand better, it seems, than mining company scientists or politicians their role in giving life to the region and as sources of perennial streams that will inevitably dry up if their bauxite cappings are mined.Agarwal appears to offer a new alumina refinery in Rayagada district. Where? There’s already Utkal Aluminium’s plant in Kashipur (Rayagada district) as well as Vedanta’s Lanjigarh refinery (just over the border in Kalahandi) and Nalco’s older one at Damanjodi in Koraput. He offers yet another aluminium smelter: in Dhenkanal district, north Odisha, far from the bauxite mountains, but close to the chief minister’s home district, Keonjhar. As if Vedanta’s own smelter at Jharsaguda, complementing Hindalco’s in Sambalpur and Nalco’s in Angul, were not enough. This is supposedly aimed at supplying “high quality hot metal to Vedanta’s downstream aluminium parks in Odisha.” What are these? An October 2025 meeting between Agarwal and Mohan Charan Majhi, first mentioned this plan for one of the world’s ‘largest smelters’, aimed at supplying defence-grade metal alloys processed in new aluminium parks in north Odisha. The vast investment on offer was the same, though on this first mention there was no controversially revived plan for mining on Niyamgiri.The offer to create what they describe as “employment opportunities for the tribals” threatens the ecosystems and livelihood the Adivasis are protecting. This is masked by Agarwal’s offer to develop “a larger aluminium-based industrial ecosystem” in the state.Also read: The Sijimali Conflict: Extractivism Versus Rights of Nature In India’s Sacred MountainsThe plan is framed as an enticement for Adivasi youth, tens of thousands of whom have lost their land and livelihoods due to their communities’ displacement and marginalisation by ‘development projects’ such as dams, mines and factories. The sum on offer is unprecedentedly vast – irresistable, it seems, to Odisha’s first Adivasi chief minister, whose state is already in unrepayable debt, created by decades of loans to pay for mining infrastructure.Mohan Charan Majhi’s apparent offer to cut short the legal impediments is chilling. The militarisation and arrests in and around Niyamgiri have been horrendous since the 2013 referendum; but the opposition won’t be easily cowed. As an Adivasi leader was overheard saying outside the Supreme Court in October 2007, when judge Arijit Pasayat facilitated the selling of Niyamgiri to Sterlite/Vedanta in exchange for tree-planting to offset the net present value of the huge stands of indigenous forest to be cut: “Taro Karma, Amoro Dharma (his karma/sin, our dharma/duty).” ‘Mining Grabs’, Illustration: Aastha Prasad.Also, in September 2026, just before meeting Agarwal, Majhi visited the UAE, where he signed supply deals linked to Adani’s plans for bauxite mines at Ballada and Kutrumali (first announced in 2023) and another refinery in Rayagada district, plus another smelter in Sundargarh, bringing $25 billion in further investment to Odisha. The September deals Majhi signed promised $880 million in investment to boost “sustainable industrialisation”. These deals were partly predicated on Odisha’s designation as a Rare-Earth Corridor in February, when India signed up to the ‘Pax Silica’, a United States policy aimed at ensuring supply lines for critical minerals. An Indian-US supply deal for critical and rare earth minerals was signed in May and is linked to a Quad Critical Minerals Initiative Framework (involving India with the USA, Australia and Japan). Odisha contains nearly a quarter of India’s estimated deposits of monazite – a mineral of key importance to arms manufacturing, among other Rare Earth Elements (REEs). The Odisha Sands mining complex at Chatrapur was already polluting a large coastal area in 2019, with serious health impacts. So while aluminium is Odisha’s biggest selling point, REEs, steel, petrochemicals, data centres and port development are all to be boosted. This proliferation of extractive projects on the promise of ‘development’ needs to be understood in context.The pastC.S. Fox’s books on bauxite in India, published in the 1920s-30s, outlined a blueprint of mines, factories and dams in Odisha to supply aluminium factories with water and hydropower, and railways to take the finished product to the coast for export. A hundred years ago, the power of aluminium for war was well understood. It had become important in arms production in the First World War and was becoming crucial in the build up to the Second World War. Starting just before Independence, and causing intense controversy for Odisha’s first two chief ministers, the Hirakud Dam was built to supply Indal’s Canadian-funded smelter. Fox’s blueprint for Odisha’s aluminium industry is a precursor to “export-led growth”, to the World Bank’s funding of the state’s mining infrastructure, and to the Saudi Fund for Development’s $80 million loan in the 1980s to finance the Koraput-Damanjodi-Rayagada railway bringing alumina to the coast for export to West Asia. Long before this, the geologist T.L. Walker linked his discovery of bauxite cappings on Odisha’s great mountains in 1900 with an understanding that the region’s exceptional fertility came from this bauxite, naming the mountains’ base-rock Khondalite after “those fine hillmen the Khonds”, who actually live around nearly all the bauxite Malis. Even around the bauxite-capped mountains in northern Andhra Pradesh, Khonda Reddis are one of the main Scheduled Tribes.The mountains are right at the heart of Kond religion, with their own myths and sacred caves. Hence, the willingness of so many people and villages to put their lives on the line to protect the mountains, articulating this as their dharma. The name Niyamgiri is usually understood as derived from nigam (‘rule’, ‘law’). There is a supreme irony in a company calling itself Vedanta amassing billions through countless unscrupulous transactions, and attacking the “Mountain of Law” in the teeth of a Supreme Court judgement and local people’s determination to safeguard their mountains.Konds’ own name for themselves is Kuwinga. There is strong evidence that they are basically one and the same as the Kalinga people, who resisted Ashoka’s invasion of Odisha at massive cost in the 3rd century BC before retreating to the remote mountain areas where most now live. The irony of ‘Kalinganagar’ as the name for a complex of steel factories based on stealing Adivasi lands, and in the naming of Adani’s subsidiaries ‘Kalinga Alumina Ltd’ (registered in 2021) and ‘Adani Kalinga Resources Ltd’ (registered September 2026), obviously in relation to Adani’s plans to acquire bauxite deposits in Odisha, is obvious. Every ‘development project’ in India starts by dividing communities between those with land deeds and those without, those who take up compensation in the form of job offers and rehabilitation colonies, swiftly becoming dependent on the company, versus those who resist the takeovers. Majhi’s immediate acceptance of Agarwal’s offer epitomises this divide-and-rule tactic, with an Adivasi chief minister seriously alienated from his people. B.D. Sharma, former commissioner for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribess, termed what is happening in Adivasi lands as “internal colonialism”, “the state waging a war on its own people”. Nothing characterises this more than the present drive by Vedanta and Adani to take control of the life-giving resources of Niyamgiri and the other bauxite-capped Malis.The futureAgarwal’s talk of Odisha’s glorious future around an “aluminium-based industrial ecosystem” involves a twisting of language and fundamental misrepresentation of what the aluminium and mining industries have ever given or can give. The future of Odisha is bleak if more of the Malis are mined and even more aluminium factories are built, polluting water, air and soil over a vast region. The systemic injustice Adivasis have faced since Independence is not so much their ‘underdevelopment’ as the cultural genocide imposed on them as they are dispossessed by big-bucks investment projects masquerading as ‘development’, especially the big dams and mining complexes.Thousands of ashrams and other boarding schools for Adivasi children are recognised as causing a deep alienation as well as linguistic genocide of India’s tribal languages. Agarwal’s offer is a huge incentive to Adivasi youth, already alienated from their parents’ communities and ecologically sustainable economies.Also read: At Niyamgiri, Policing is Paving the Way for MiningOdisha hosts one of the world’s largest boarding school, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), whose collusion with mining companies presents a ‘brave new world’ based on brainwashing the youth into combined belief in industrialism and Hindutva, while excluding all intrinsically Adivasi knowledge, skills and values.In April 2026, Agarwal spoke of India’s need to allow the private sector to develop arms factories to profit from wars in West Asia. This is clearly aligned with his mention of Vedanta’s “downstream manufacturing parks”, since the arms industry depends on a plentiful supply of aluminium alloys.As Dewey Anderson, a top US official who helped the US aluminium industry win the Second World War, wrote in 1951, “No war can be brought to a successful conclusion without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum.” This is just as true 75 years later, which is why India’s arms scientist president Abdul Kalam spent several pages of his book India 2020 advocating more production of the aluminium alloys used for armaments. Already India is becoming a major arms producer and supplies drones and other weapon systems to Israel. Aluminium’s links with genocide run deep, spreading a ‘double death’ at both ends – extraction and end-use in wars. Khajuri village in the Niyamgiri hills in Rayagada district, Odisha. According to the villagers, Khajuri has been settled for about 400 years. Photo: Indigenous Uncultivated Forest Foods/Susanta Kumar Dalai.Today’s “green energy transition“ is in many ways a con, and it seriously misdirects concern about anthropogenic climate change through an intensification of mining and dependency on metals and electricity. For one thing, no country is actually leaving the oil in the soil (or under the sea) and India is extracting all known coal deposits at a terrifying pace.For another, ‘carbon accounting’ to ‘net carbon zero’ is basically an accounting trick, counting even big dams and ‘cleaner’ technology in metals factories as deserving carbon credits: the scandal of ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ projects. Almost no CDM application is refused, and nearly all India’s controversial big dams – each of which devastates highly developed riverine ecosystems and livelihoods – are funded using CDM credits on the basis of being counted as ‘clean’ or ‘renewable energy’, since they are not actually burning fossil fuels.“Critical” and “transition minerals” include some of the most destructive of all mining, especially lithium, cobalt, nickel and ‘REEs, but aluminium is also counted as a critical mineral. Alloyed with lithium, it is a key metal used in arms, aerospace and drones, as is gallium, a byproduct of alumina refineries.Across the worldSo how can Adivasis resist ever-intense pressures to mine the bauxite from their mountains, to feed the world’s wars?At one level, understanding the centrality of mountains in Konds’ spiritual and practical life means: How can they not resist? As Lada Sikaka put this, at a public hearing about Vedanta’s Lanjigarh refinery’s expansion in April 2009, it is not crores of money on top of Niyamgiri, it is their maa-baap (mother-father), and they have to resist the extraction. The demons of ancient mythology have resurfaced in the form of demonic corporations.In Latin American countries, the push for mining is no less than in India, and the tactic of dividing communities is equally rife. Yet indigenous peoples’ movements there hold many clues for Adivasi movements, especially their conceptualisation of extractivism. Ecuador and Bolivia brought ‘Rights of Nature’ into their constitutions and made this famous; but it is not so well known how this comes out of indigenous conceptions of a plurinationalism and interculturality society for all, going beyond the multicultural liberal state.Merely emphasising rights of nature without a change in political structures and diversification of the economic matrix is meaningless. This goes beyond the view of only protecting indigenous rights, emerging from struggles where indigenous peoples are political actors and who, in alliance with diverse marginalised sectors, reconfigure the political and economic architecture of the state and the society.For example, referenda in Ecuador have said no to extractive projects, and CONAIE, the country’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities and Peoples, has managed to create solidarity between groups as diverse as Kichwa highlanders and Amazonians, Christians, Marxists and practitioners of indigenous religion, on a common platform of defending indigenous territories and opposing all extractivism.This is in distinction to policies of Ecuador’s socialist president Correa, who reneged on his promise to leave the oil in the ground and developed an initiative to fund ‘millenium schools’ and other development projects directly out of extractive revenues – a scheme similar to the District Mineral Fund started in India in 2015 and just as divorced from local aspirations, homogenising and undermining local bilingual education initiatives. Evo Morales also, though belonging to the indigenous Aymara group, allowed foreign oil corporations to penetrate Bolivia’s Amazon region, causing the intense TIPNIS confrontation with Amazonian communities defending their land. This represents a vital divergence over extractivism on the left, little understood by socialists worldwide, though bridged by eco-socialist initiatives.In Aoteaora (New Zealand), the rights-of-nature framework was famously used to defend the Whanganui River in 2017, drawing on indigenous law and ontology. The legal controversy awakened the Maori psyche and was repeated in granting legal rights to Mount Taranaki the next year. In India, the alienation runs deeper. Adivasis are being expelled from wildlife sanctuaries in parallel with their dispossession by industrial projects, despite their symbiosis with nature. The decentralised power structure “brings the voices of nature directly into decision-making,” without conceptualising ‘rights of nature’ in a way that could aid the financialisation of a mountain or river. What is at stake is not just intact ecosystems and communities, but also their fusion in indigenous ontologies, and distinctive ways of being or ‘lifeworlds’.There are many other examples of legal ‘rights of nature’ being upheld in courts around the world; but no better example of indigenous communities risking all to uphold such a right than the Niyamgiri and Sijimali movements.The Indian political contextAs Adivasi and Dalit citizens struggle to uphold their basic, constitutional rights in the face of police-backed corporate land-and-resource grabs, India is witnessing an unprecedented movement in the form of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP). Supported by Congress leaders Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi and a united all-India alliance of opposition parties, the protest seeks to uphold India’s democracy against corruption in the Electoral Commission and the undermining of constitutional rights.In a recent visit to Gujarat, Rahul castigated the use of the term ‘vanvasi’ (‘forest dwellers’) by the BJP and RSS, as against ‘Adivasi’ (‘original inhabitants’), for undermining land-rights. On World Indigenous Day this year, he called Adivasis the ‘original owners of this country’; and on receiving an Adivasi delegation at Nashik in Maharashtra, he reiterated Adivasi rights to development on their own terms, in education and healthcare and upholding their intrinsic identity. All are indications of greater sensitivity to Adivasi and tribal issues at many sections of society, even as repression worsens.Extractivism in India could be said to have started under colonial rule, though mining and metal factories really took off in Nehru’s India (in unspoken conflict with his pro-tribal ‘panchsheel principles’). Free-for-all expansion of private as well as public sector mining projects expanded rapidly after the New Economic and Mining policies of 1991-1993. But a new phase of naked extractivism started after the BJP came to power in 2014, with Adani, Vedanta and other Indian conglomerates rapidly spreading their tentacles into tribal areas, seeking their resources with heavy-handed collusion from the police. Trucks carrying bauxite race on the top of Kodingamali, a hill revered by local Adivasis in Koraput and a source of perennial streams that was cleared for mining by state-owned Odisha Mining Corporation. Ore from here has been making its way to Vedanta’s refinery in Lanjigarh at the base of the Niyamgiri hills, March 2018. Photo: File.Misuse of legal apparatus throughout the country has deepened under BJP-led governments, such as the planting of Netwire malware onto the ‘Bhima Koragaon’ detainees, including Stan Swami who died in jail, and other prominent defenders of Adivasi and Dalit rights. Misuse of police coercion to push through controversial projects and policies connects Adivasi-led protests against mining in Odisha, and other states with present protests in Delhi and other urban centres. Lada Sikoka’s arrest was marked by irregularities: detention of innocent people, fabricated evidence and police impunity remain core problems all over India. Odisha’s new governor, Braj Mohan Ram, flouted all norms of impartiality when he promised to spread support for the BJP in the state in his inaugural speech on October 14.India’s democracy, enshrined in its electoral system and constitution, is under attack as never before, and so are Adivasi ontologies or ‘life-worlds’ currently being repressed and obliterated.Also read: As Odisha’s Adivasis Resist Mining Despite Arrests and Coercion, We Must Listen to What They SayIs the country colluding in double-genocide by exporting weapons systems made from extracting life-giving minerals from Adivasi lands? Under the guise of ‘development’, short-term profits from war-profiteering threaten to leave some of India’s richest ecosystems as wastelands for future generations. Now is the time for mining to become an issue of national political debate. Adani and Vedanta have become two new embodiments of the East India Company, looting Eastern India for selfish, violent aims. This situation holds a mirror to world events: How uncontrollably must humans extract the earth’s life-sources before people come together to end the mindless extraction? Felix Padel is an anthropologist who has worked extensively on Adivasi rights.Malvika Gupta is an anthropologist whose research focuses on Adivasi and indigenous issues in India and Ecuador.