Education and the Politics of Domination and Resistance in Rural India

March 22, 2011

Dip Kapoor (Associate Professor, Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education) has been engaged in a Popular Participatory Action Research (PPAR) project in Orissa, India first initiated in 1995 by Adivasis (original dwellers) and Dalits (downtrodden or “untouchable out-castes”) now residing in 125 villages in the eastern ghats (hill ranges).

Eastern Ghats Hill Range

The research aims, “to expose Adivasi and Dalit land, forest and ecological alienation and dispossession (in Scheduled or Constitutionally “protected areas”) primarily caused by resource extraction (e.g.mining) and capitalist development (post 1991 economic liberalization in India) promoted  by state-corporate-casteist  interests in the region”.

Dip states that, “Adivasi-Dalit analysis of their situation has also meant undertaking research and indigenous popular education that unearths and exposes processes of cultural assimilation encouraged by state-corporate-civil society-led calls for what is interpreted as being an assimilationist-education wedded to a project of compulsory cultural modernization”. This process he says,” is often justified or aided by rhetorical and confusing or obfuscating (by design or otherwise) appeals to the moral high-ground of human/educational rights, citizenship, empowerment, entitlements, participation and inclusive-justice” or what he refers to as “a mis-placed or strategically-deployed neo-colonial humanism attached to good governance agendas hitched to the global project of capital or imperialism”.

Damadua Women Head Out to a Land Rights Rally

According to Dip, the research, while producing knowledge about these experiences “with contemporary colonization, has also encouraged processes of decolonial engagement (actions) through an organized Adivasi-Dalit-landless peasant (political society) social movement politics, direct action (protest and agitations), indigenous popular education and selective cooperation  with the state and certain elements of “civil society” in attempts to enforce Constitutional guarantees and provisions under the recent Forest Rights Act (2006)”.

Some 15 years in the making, an Adivasi-Dalit-landless peasant social movement constituency of some 21,000 people has emerged in South Orissa (a process being scaled-up through a nascent inter-movement collaboration between 14 other similar movements in the region); a movement that has re-possessed over 18,000 acres of land (rolling back what Dip refers to as “the de-tribalization and de-dalitization of Scheduled Areas”) while steadfastly promoting Community Forestry and the revitalization of indigenous agro-forestry in the region, despite agro-industrial encroachments by the state and trans/national corporations.

He points out that Rice Intensive farming (SRI) based on an Adivasi-Dalit “people’s organic science”, for instance, has produced four fold increases in yield with methodical spacing, better timing, organic fertilizer, local seeds (farmer seed banks/local varieties being encouraged) and biological pesticide usage. Indigenous methods of storage (full proof) secure harvests from wastage. According to Dip, “Starvation and hunger are now uncommon in what is officially designated as a Drought Prone Area  (DRAP zone) where Dalits and Adivasis have experienced starvation deaths finally acknowledged by the state at the turn of this century”.

System of Rice Intensification (SRI)/Organic High Yield Production at Govindpur

Dip and his Adivasi-Dalit colleagues were encouraged by a SSHRC grant secured in 2006 to explore “Learning in Adivasi Social Movements” (a significant moment in this long term PPAR process) which has helped to establish an Adivasi-Dalit Center for Research and Development Solidarity (CRDS) to utilize research and dissemination pertaining to Adivasi-Dalit-landless peasant concerns; “research with potential import for political mobilization and popular advocacy (e.g. through publication of the community journal,  Amakatha/Our Voice)”. Dip has also been publishing material from this research for academic purposes and continues to visit and work with CRDS each year. (Dip Kapoor)

Adivasis and Dalits account for about 30% of the Indian population or some 350 million people. While constituting 8% of the Indian population, Adivasis alone account for 40% of Development-Displaced Persons; “a process of dispossession that has been exacerbated in the state of Orissa by state and trans/national corporate mining interests and the rapid establishment of Special Economic Zones”, according to Dip, who also points out that Orissa accounts for (as but one example) 70% of the country’s bauxite reserves (second largest in Asia). He refers to the Indian People’s Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights report in 2006 which states that the government of India has leased 1 billion tones of an estimated 1.6 billion tone bauxite reserve to trans/national corporations through MOUs.

These developments, says Dip, should interest all Canadians given that Canadian mining companies alone account for 60% or more of global mining capacity—he shares  an example of a transnational Canadian Aluminum company that was recently compelled (in large part due to Adivasi-Dalit agitations spanning over almost two decades) to re-think it’s investment (divest) in Southern Orissa [For more info see McGill Journal of Education, www.mmpindia.org (Mines, Minerals and People) and www.miningwatch.ca]

According to Dip, these situations can’t continue to be ignored and social and educational research has a part to play in aiming the spot light on such “contemporary colonial dispossessions and related assertions or resistances”. In closing, he points to the recent UN Report on the State of the World’s Indigenous People (2009) and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) which states that, “Problems faced by indigenous peoples of Asia (with considerable overlap in other regions as well) include: plundering of resources; forced relocation; cultural genocide; militarization; forced integration in to market economies; and bigotry and discrimination”.

The PPAR project continues to document and publicize this process while sharing Adivasi-Dalit analysis/critique concerning capitalist development and compulsory modernization and related movement responses and democratic resistance.

This Educational Policy Studies news item is based on an email interview/exchange with Dip Kapoor about his research in India. Dip Kapoor can be reached at dkapoor@ualberta.ca.