We are sharing the following article by Devanam Piyadassi, originally published in The Partisan, in the interest of publicizing perspectives of Indian activists and progressive forces on contemporary struggles. The Sijimali struggle has been a longstanding issue between the indigenous Adivasi groups in the Sijimali hill region of Odisha, and Vedanta which seeks to open new ground for mining projects in the region. These contradictions broke out in early April in Rayagada, where police forces fired upon protesting villagers. While the topic of Sijimali may have exited the ruling class’ news cycle, it is not at all over. Vedanta is pushing to continue their mining projects in the region, and the attacks on Adivasi villagers by police have not at all stopped. For this reason, we echo the demands of the Forum Against Corporatization And Militarization (FACAM):

1. Immediate halt to all activities related to the Sijimali mining projects.
2. Withdrawal of all police forces from the area and release of all detained villagers and activists.
3. Comprehensive, independent inquiry into violations of forest rights and constitutional provisions in Scheduled Areas.

Vedanta, Odisha and the Ghost of Bauxite: The Specters of a New Resistance in Sijimali?

By Devanam Piyadassi

On 7 April 2026, the Government of Odisha, controlled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, unleashed its police on adivasis in Kanatamal, Rayagada, who have been leading a long and protracted protest against Vedanta’s attempts at land-grab in the hills of Sijimali. In the last three years, Sijimali has been at the centre of struggle against the proposed project of Vedanta Group which intends to extract the bauxite that lies buried underneath the ecologically rich region across the Rayagada and Kalahandi districts in South Odisha. The police brutalities and excess is a culmination of action against a protracted movement in the area that has been ongoing since the initial project sanctions, as well as the forged Gram Sabha documents that Vedanta Group, working through Mythri Infrastructure, produced to acquire land, leading to as many as 21 arrests since 2023, many of whom still languish in prison even today.¹ In this fresh bout of clashes, on the pre-dawn hours on April 7, the police entered the village, broke down the doors, cut off electricity and chased the villagers from their homes, while there are reports of pellet gun firings as well as tear gas shells being thrown at them.² The police later claimed these actions to be in retaliation to the adivasis’ armed action, in which it was alleged that the villagers turned violent against the forces by brandishing sharp objects as well as pelting stones. The face-off, though, occurred during a protest that the villagers had organized to oppose the road-building endeavor in the area, which was being conducted by the Vedanta Group despite repeated grievances of the adivasis and villagers that the consent of such a land acquisition was forged. It was clear that the police action on the villagers and the dwellers of the area was conducted by the State forces against the protestors to secure interest of the Vedanta Group, in order to discourage the people from organizing against the planned land-grab primarily to secure the corporate interest of the private company.

Historical Context of Vedanta Group in Odisha

In Odisha, Vedanta, the company best known for its aluminum refinery, is not a new name. Over the last two decades, particularly in the Niyamgiri mountain range, it has earned quite a reputation. Breaking the set and peaceful life of the native inhabitants of the Southern Odisha region—the Dongria and Kutia Kondhs, formally recognized as “Scheduled Tribes” as well as “Particularly Vulnerable tribal Groups” by the Indian Constitution—it emerged as a disastrous monster, filled with greed and hunger that was invested to destroy the social fabric of the region. Its first steps had already dispossessed hundreds of people from their land, and in its demonic spread it leaves a trail of ashes, yet again, and seems not to retract from such actions even now

When Vedanta, then called Sterlite Industries, first arrived in Odisha following a Memorandum of Understanding with the Odisha Government in 1997, it was set to open an alumina (aluminium oxide) refinery and a bauxite mine to feed the industry. Since its inception Vedanta had no good intentions, instead trickery, deceit and exploitation were its policy: the indigenous population had no knowledge of the alumina refinery’s construction until land acquisition notices were released in 2003, nearly six years since the first treaty with the government.³ In early 2003, Vedanta’s Lanjigarh refinery proposal was not subject to a comprehensive environmental assessment which is mandated by law, but only a “rapid-aid” survey was done, for it was argued by the company that it was not encroaching on any forest land. Additionally, Vedanta had misrepresented its larger plan to law and authorities, as it showed that the bauxite mining at Niyamgiri and the refinery at Lanjigarh are not connected, but are part of separate plans. In this way, well before the 2004 Ministry of Environment Affairs clearance, Vedanta had already started the construction work at Lanjigarh. If this was not enough, it had already coerced the State Government of Odisha (which represents interests of the capitalist, neo-liberal forces) to acquire the Niyamgiri mines for the company, which though structured as a joint ownership, in effect will end up being run by Vedanta. Despite severe resistance from the local masses, the refinery opened in 2006 and was in the grind of its full production scales by 2007, owing largely to the State-Corporate nexus that readily put the concerns of the native people at stake for their own commercial gains. Now that the refinery had been operational, it created additional pressure on the company as well as the State to get the the bauxite mine running, which led to the beginning of a new story of dispossession. One which would perhaps be recognized as the biggest victorious battle against any corporation in the history of Indian republic.

This juncture in the life of the tribal peoples came in the following years, particularly in 2007 when Vedanta proposed a large-scale expansion of its refinery in the area. The plan, for Vedanta, lay in its desire to fully utilize the productive capacity of the refinery plant, and for that it needed a stable, cheap and in-house supply of Bauxite. Bauxite is a critical mineral that is indispensable for the process of making aluminum from the ore alumina. The hunger for this Bauxite was insatiable, as the Niyamgiri ranges held 73 million tons of bauxite, which was the key mineral resource for the company. Vedanta had spent a whopping 5000 crore (50,000,000,000) rupees in developing the Lanjigarh refinery, but its inability to obtain raw material at a cheaper cost would prevent it from making the most of its production capacity. In a bid to increase capacity, and only for its motives of profits and surplus, it came in heavy on the local Dongria Kondhs yet again.

In the early 2008 the Supreme Court had given an “in-principle” permission to Vedanta to start the mining project. The conditional clearance granted by the Supreme Court of India in 2008 did not resolve the question of mining in the Niyamgiri Hills; rather, it shifted the terrain of struggle into a prolonged legal and political battle. Mounting evidence of environmental violations, procedural irregularities, and the systematic bypassing of forest-dwelling communities’ rights led to renewed scrutiny by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in the following years. By 2010, the project faced significant setbacks when statutory clearances were withdrawn, citing violations of the Forest Conservation Act 1980 and the Forest Rights Act 2006, as well as the failure to obtain informed consent from affected communities that came into open view after the submission of the N.C. Saxena Committee Report.⁴ The decisive turning point came in 2013, when, in a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court of India directed that the question of mining be referred to the Gram Sabhas of the affected villages.⁵ In an unprecedented exercise of local self-determination, twelve Gram Sabhas comprising primarily Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities unanimously rejected the proposed mining project. Their decision was grounded not only in concerns over displacement and ecological destruction but also in the defense of their religious and cultural rights, particularly the sanctity of Niyam Raja, the presiding deity of the hills. This moment has since been widely regarded as one of the most significant assertions of indigenous sovereignty within the constitutional framework of the Indian republic, effectively halting Vedanta’s mining ambitions in Niyamgiri.

After the historic judgment of the Supreme Court of India that effectively shut down the proposed bauxite mining project in Niyamgiri ranges in Odisha in 2013, the Lanjigarh refinery of the Vedanta Group faced significant raw-material challenges, leading to either intermittent shut downs or production levels way below capacity. While its maximum capacity of production was to be a 2 mtpa (million tonnes per annum) refinery, it operated at a considerably low scale of only 1.2 mtpa. It was during this time that the company faced acute shortage of ready notified the closure of the refinery, owing to mandatory declarations, but it also resuscitated with many different sources of mining and stopgap measures.⁶ The main source of bauxite for Vedanta, at this point, precisely between 2013 to 2018 was from the Boké region in Guinea, and Brazil.⁷ The conglomerates mining in these areas have also, much like Niyamgiri, caused loss of livelihoods, extensive pollution as well as encroached on traditional lands of the indigenous pollution which has given rise to large-scale dispossession of peoples’ ancestral lands.⁸ Though this arrangement also had significant proportions also being met by domestic mines in Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat as well as Jharkhand. However, the falling profit-ratios, increased costs of raw materials, and inability to produce aluminum at a competitive price for the world had made such stop-gap measures only more burdensome for the company.

It is at this point that the Vedanta Group actively pursued its accumulative interests, pressuring the State of Odisha to operationalize the earlier proposal involving the Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC), through which the state would facilitate access to bauxite necessary for sustaining the Lanjigarh refinery. Following the collapse of the proposed captive mining project in the Niyamgiri Hills after sustained legal and community resistance, Vedanta’s vertically integrated “mine-to-refinery” model was effectively broken. This forced a restructuring of its supply chain, as reliance on international imports remained economically burdensome and domestically fragmented procurement from other states proved insufficient for stable long-term operations.

Within this context, OMC emerged as a crucial institutional intermediary through which the state could, in principle, aggregate and allocate bauxite resources from alternative deposits. However, this arrangement did not constitute a single formalized contract immediately after 2013; rather, it developed gradually through state-facilitated linkages, with operational supply becoming partially viable only from around 2018 onward, particularly after the commissioning of mines such as Kodingamali.⁹ In this sense, the state-owned OMC functioned less as an independent actor and more as a mediating structure within which industrial demand and state resource governance were aligned to stabilize Vedanta’s raw material requirements.

Even when such an arrangement was crucial for the functioning of the Vedanta Group’s Lanjigarh refinery, the production capacity of the project was not met with the supplies provided by OMC. Moreover, the arrangement came into head when the OMC-Vedanta deal came under litigations. The legal dispute between Vedanta Limited and the Odisha Mining Corporation centers on a 2019 long-term supply agreement where Vedanta initially obtained bauxite at a fixed rate of ₹673 per tonne, subject to a clause that required it to pay any price difference discovered in future auctions. When a subsequent auction in August 2020 failed to attract bidders for its higher floor price of ₹1,707 per tonne, OMC issued a demand for ₹280 crore (USD 31 million) to cover the price differential. The Odisha High Court intervened by setting a provisional price of ₹1,000 per tonne to ensure supply continuity for Vedanta’s Lanjigarh refinery while the litigation remains pending. However, the financial stakes are high; since the dispute began, auction prices for bauxite have surged as high as ₹2,957 per tonne.¹⁰ If the final court ruling favors OMC, Vedanta could be forced to pay massive retrospective dues to match these higher auction-linked prices, significantly impacting the margins of its aluminum business.

The ‘Ponzi-Scheme’ Vedanta: A Corporate in Desperate State

To characterize the contemporary condition of the Vedanta Group as merely “crisis-ridden” would be insufficient. What is at stake is not a temporary downturn, but a deeper structural contradiction within its accumulation model—one that increasingly resembles a Ponzi-like dependence on continuous inflows of capital and resources to sustain prior commitments.

Recent scrutiny, particularly by Viceroy Research, has pointed to precisely this fragility.¹¹ Their analysis of Vedanta Resources—the London-based parent entity—highlights a debt-laden structure sustained through intra-group financing, dividend extraction from operating subsidiaries, and repeated refinancing cycles. The implication is stark: rather than profits organically sustaining expansion, financial engineering and external capital infusions are required to keep the system solvent.

Yet, to reduce this to a question of balance sheets alone would be to miss the broader logic at work. Vedanta’s crisis is simultaneously financial and material. The breakdown of its captive bauxite supply after the 2013 defeat in the Niyamgiri Hills disrupted the very foundation of its aluminum operations. The Lanjigarh refinery, conceived as part of a vertically integrated chain, became instead a fixed asset in search of raw material, forcing the company into expensive imports and unstable domestic sourcing arrangements mediated through institutions such as the Odisha Mining Corporation. The fallout of the OMC stable linkage and the court cases further deepened their crises, leading to a grave urgency in sorting out the demand-supply issues in India.

It is in response to this dual crisis that Vedanta’s contemporary strategy must be understood not as incoherent, but as a two-track operation spanning global finance and local extraction.

On one hand, the company has actively sought alignment with global capital markets, particularly in the United States.¹² Moves toward restructuring, deleveraging narratives, and the exploration of listings as well as deeper engagement with U.S. investors are tied to a broader repositioning within the global metals economy, especially in sectors like copper, which has acquired renewed strategic significance amid energy transition discourses.¹³ By foregrounding its copper and critical minerals portfolio, Vedanta attempts to rebrand itself as a key player in the future-facing global commodities market, thereby attracting fresh capital and improving its valuation.

On the other hand, this outward-facing financial strategy is inseparable from an inward intensification of resource extraction within India. The search for bauxite in regions such as Sijimali is not incidental, it is structurally necessary. If global markets are expected to provide capital, then domestic territories must provide cheap, controllable raw material to restore profitability. The two movements—financial expansion outward and extractive consolidation inward—are thus mutually reinforcing.

This dual operation reveals the deeper logic of what may be termed a Ponzi-like structure. The company must continuously secure new streams of revenue, whether through capital markets or mineral frontiers, to stabilize earlier investments and service existing obligations. The instability of one domain (cheap bauxite supply) intensifies pressure on the other (financial restructuring), and vice versa.

The consequences of this are not abstract. In places like Sijimali, the urgency of securing land and resources is directly linked to these broader pressures. Delays in extraction translate into financial strain; resistance on the ground threatens not only a single project, but the viability of an already stressed industrial model. It is in this sense that state intervention—whether through the facilitation of land acquisition or the repression of protest—becomes integral to the functioning of the corporation. What emerges is not simply a case of corporate greed, but one of systemic compulsion produced by the imperialist structure of the world. Vedanta’s present trajectory reflects a form of accumulation that can no longer stabilize itself through internal means. Instead, it must oscillate between global circuits of finance and localized regimes of dispossession, drawing sustenance from both while resolving the contradictions of neither, but functioning in a mode of deferred crisis where the burden of sustaining capital is displaced onto those who stand most vulnerable to it.

The Reprisal of Protests in Sijimali: Vedanta’s Return to Odisha?

The unfolding events in Sijimali must be understood not as an isolated eruption of conflict, but as the return of a deferred history. Today the Sijimali hill, and its adivasis, are in direct opposition to the imperialist Raisina hill (Indian government) which wishes to dispossess them from their traditional lands. And what is even more dangerous and insiduous— Raisina Hill is occupied by an adivasi woman from Odisha, Draupadi Murmu, who has been silent about the matter even while she tours the state this month. This moment reveals a serious flaw in the parliamentary democracy of India in which working within the representative model tramples upon any sense of economic and social justice for its most vulnerable populations. In that sense, what was decisively halted in the Niyamgiri Hills in 2013 has not disappeared, but has been displaced, reconfigured, and now resurfaces in a new terrain.

For the Vedanta Group, this return is not optional. As the preceding analysis has shown, the pressures generated by financial restructuring and unstable raw material supply have converged to produce an acute compulsion: the need to secure a proximate and controllable source of bauxite within Odisha.

Yet, if the geography has shifted, the structure of conflict remains strikingly familiar. The resistance led by Adivasi communities in Sijimali echoes the earlier struggles of the Dongria and Kutia Kondhs—not only in its opposition to land acquisition, but in its insistence on consent, autonomy, and the non-commodifiability of land. The allegations of forged Gram Sabha documents, the rejection of imposed development, and the collective mobilization against infrastructural encroachment all signal a continuity of political form.¹⁴ Except, the newer and more evolved forms of deception are being used at the moment, namely the operation of frontal companies like Mythri Infrastructures which form the cover for Vedanta and implement the fake and arbitrary Gram Sabha resolutions, ensure building of roads, and other such aspects of the project development. What returns, therefore, is not only the corporation, but also the memory and method of resistance.

However, the response of the state reveals a crucial shift. Whereas the Niyamgiri struggle unfolded over years through legal contestation, environmental review, and eventual judicial intervention, the developments in Sijimali suggest a far more compressed and coercive trajectory.¹⁵ The events of April 7, including pre-dawn police incursions, destruction of homes, the use of pellet guns and tear gas, all indicate an attempt to stop the possibility of resistance consolidating into a prolonged political movement. The objective appears not merely to disperse protest, but to preempt its transformation into a legal and national question, so thereby curtailing the limited agency that the adivasis could mobilize to win their cause.

This shift is not incidental. It reflects a lesson drawn from the earlier defeat: that delay is dangerous, public visibility is costly, and procedural openings can be weaponized by resisting communities. In Sijimali, therefore, the strategy is one of acceleration—to secure land, establish infrastructural footholds, and normalize extraction before opposition can gather the force that once halted operations in Niyamgiri. At the same time, this very urgency betrays a deeper vulnerability. The need to move swiftly, to suppress dissent, and to bypass or manipulate consent mechanisms points to the fragility of the project’s legitimacy. Unlike purely speculative ventures, extractive projects require territorial control and social acquiescence. Where these cannot be secured through consent, they must be imposed, revealing the limits of both corporate strategy and state authority.

It is here that the “ghost of bauxite” acquires its full significance. The specter that haunts Sijimali is not only that of an unextracted resource, but of an unresolved contradiction. For the corporation and the state, it is the ghost of Niyamgiri, a reminder of a moment when accumulation was halted by collective refusal. For the people of Sijimali, however, it is something else entirely: the persistence of a historical possibility, the knowledge that even entrenched structures of power can be challenged and, at times, overturned. Thus, what is at stake in Sijimali exceeds the immediate conflict over land or mining. It is a struggle over whether the trajectory of extraction, driven by the intertwined demands of global finance and domestic accumulation, can proceed unimpeded, or whether it will once again encounter limits imposed from below. In this confrontation, the past returns, insistently, as both warning and promise.

Securitization, “Internal Security,” and the Criminalization of Dissent

The events in Sijimali must also be situated within a broader transformation in the way the Indian state interprets and governs conflict. Over the past decade, struggles over land, resources, and livelihood—particularly in Adivasi regions have increasingly been reframed within the language of “internal security.” What begins as a political confrontation over dispossession is rendered legible to the state as a question of insurgency, extremism, or law and order. Frameworks such as Operation SAMADHAN, advanced by the Union Home Ministry, formalize this shift, so does the Operation KAGAAR. Designed ostensibly to combat Maoist insurgency, such doctrines operate through a combination of surveillance, militarization, and administrative control over regions marked as “disturbed.” Yet, in practice, the boundaries between armed insurgency and democratic dissent often become blurred, allowing the state to extend exceptional measures into spaces of civilian protest.

It is within this expanding logic of securitization that movements like Sijimali risk being misrecognized. A struggle rooted in questions of land, consent, and ecological survival is subtly recoded as a potential site of extremist influence. This is not merely a mischaracterization, rather it is a calculated political translation, one that transforms a conflict over accumulation into a problem of “terrorism”, thereby justifying coercive intervention while delegitimizing the claims of the people.

It must be stated with clarity: the movement in Sijimali, as it has emerged, is a mass-based, democratic assertion of rights, grounded in constitutional provisions and local self-governance. It cannot be reduced to, nor conflated with, Maoist insurgency. The state does it only to instrumentalize “national security” and erase the specificity of its demands and to foreclose the possibility of engaging with it politically.

But this conflation is also a part of the larger designs of capitalist accumulation process, in which the right to control land, resources and livelihood of the adivasis are made out to be problems of “internal security”, which are then tackled not with democratic and constitutional means, but with brazen violence, extrajudicial killings and the infamous “encounters,” or as the new lingua franca has established in a different context, i.e. “Bulldozer Justice”.¹⁶ It is the conscious non-application of the guaranteed demands of the indigenous people, whose rights are secured within the Schedule V of the Constitution of India, used to forcefully empty the land out of the possession of the people, so it could be handed out to the corporates. The issue becomes even more significant when viewed in light of the normative commitments embedded within the Indian constitutional framework. The Directive Principles of State Policy—particularly provisions such as Article 39(b)—envision a social order in which the ownership and control of material resources are distributed so as to subserve the common good. While non-justiciable, these principles articulate a constitutional horizon that recognizes the need to prevent the concentration of wealth and to ensure equitable access to resources, and demonstrate a clearly socialist principle that intends to envision a society that is economically equal.

In this sense, the demands articulated in Sijimali do not stand outside the Constitution, they resonate with some of its most radical and unrealized promises, precisely because the structure of the Indian constitution remains an eclectic blend of capitalist, socialist as well as democratic ideals. The contradiction is stark: a movement that implicitly invokes the egalitarian spirit of the Constitution is met not with dialogue, but with repression justified in the language of security. Scholars such as G. Haragopal have repeatedly pointed to this specific tension. In a recent interview, he observes that the persistence of such conflicts reflects the failure of democratic institutions to adequately address questions of justice and equality.¹⁷ When avenues of redress are narrowed, and when dissent is systematically delegitimized, the space for democratic politics itself begins to contract.

It is critical to note that that Sijimali’s protests, seen in a continuum with the struggles in Niyamgiri, as well many other peoples’ movements in the history of Indian republic, as well as the Naxalite movements from the late 1960s are significant and pivotal in understanding the rise to the voice of the landless poor, the indigenous and tribal populations who speak in different tones, discursive voices as well follow variant grammars, yet enunciate the same demand—the right to determine their lands, resources and livelihood without interference by global capital and its insatiable greed. What Sijimali demonstrates clearly is not simply a “ghost” of Vedanta returning, but the structures of discontent that underlies the Indian democratic framework which has failed to deal with the issue of the tribal assertion over agrarian land in any fruitful and political terms. Even when the military and police action of the State boasts of “eradication” of the “armed militants,” it chooses to gloss over the central contradiction between feudals and bureaucrat capitalists on the one hand, and indigenous peasants on the other, that lies at the heart of Indian indigenous people and their rights over the country’s resources.

It is imperative here to highlight that the history of tribal resistance to this form of land-loot predates the Naxalite, Maoist and even the current democratic pursuit— i.e. it reformulates the resistance in a tone that best hears it, and that best suits it with each passing time, showing that it is a conscious and living demand that finds its expression within many different syntax. In Sijimali, today, thus, despite arrests, violence, and attempts at criminalization, the movement continues to assert itself through collective mobilization, through the language of rights, and through the refusal to concede land and livelihood to extractive capital; and with democratic means, it undercuts the State’s claims of an artificial conflict resolution that is being carried out by extra-judicial means. In a sense, Sijimali is resisting the monopoly of governance that is entrenched in primitive accumulation facilitated by the semi-feudal and semi-colonial Indian state. In doing so, it reveals something fundamental about the democratic fabric of the country: that popular sovereignty does not reside solely in institutions, but in the persistent capacity of people to organize, resist, and reassert their claims which have a realization beyond the measures of the State as it is now.

If anything, the attempt to subsume such struggles under the rubric of “terrorism” only underscores their urgent political significance. For it is precisely when alternative visions of social and economic organization emerge—visions that challenge the concentration of resources and the primacy of profit—that they are most likely to be rendered illegible, and therefore suppressible, within the dominant framework of the Indian State. Sijimali, in this sense, is not an exception. It is a reminder that beneath the surface of formal democracy, there continues to exist a contested terrain of rights, resources, and recognition—one in which the line between governance and repression is constantly being redrawn.

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References

1 https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/odisha-clashes-adivasis-vedanta-rayada-bauxite-aluminium-mining-10628042/

2 https://countercurrents.org/2026/04/pre-dawn-police-crackdown-in-sijimali-leaves-several-injured-kills-cow-sparks-human-rights-concerns-in-rayagada-odisha/#:~:text=On the night of 10,serious violation of human rights.

3 https://sanhati.com/articles/2960/

4 https://cdn.cseindia.org/userfiles/Report_Vedanta.pdf

5 https://indiankanoon.org/doc/153831190/

6 https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/vedanta-may-close-its-lanjigarh-alumina-refinery-by-dec-112090500067_1.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com

7 https://www.aluminium-journal.com/ega-to-supply-vedanta-with-guinean-bauxite

8 https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/10/04/what-do-we-get-out-it/human-rights-impact-bauxite-mining-guinea

9 https://india.mongabay.com/2019/06/photos-mining-in-kodingamali-impacts-indigenous-community/

10 https://www.alcircle.com/news/odisha-india-state-cabinet-permits-omc-to-sell-entire-bauxite-62688?

11 https://viceroyresearch.org/publications/vedanta-limited-resources

12 https://www.globalminingreview.com/mining/10112025/vedanta-resources-launches-coppertech-metals-to-bolster-us-copper-security-and-advance-technology-and-infrastructure-transformation/

13 ibid.

14 https://sanhati.com/articles/2960/

15 Though not for once should be believed that the previous government, either in the state (Biju Janata Dal) or the centre (United Progressive Alliance— led by Congress) were empathetic to the cause of the adivasis. It is common knowledge that the then Minister of Home affairs, P. Chidambaram, was in the Board of Directors of the Vedanta Group until one day before his taking of the constitutional office. However, it must be agreed that the possibility of positive action and advocacy on the behalf of the adivasis were possible within the means of statecraft, which led to the decisive victory of the people in Supreme Court.

16 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09584935.2026.2656215

17 https://frontline.thehindu.com/interviews/naxalite-movement-maoist-adivasi-haragopal-interview-democracy-challenges/article70811036.ece