Hydropower development and the meaning of place. Multi-ethnic hydropower struggles in Sikkim, India (original) (raw)
Related papers
Water, 2019
In India's Eastern Himalayan State of Sikkim, the indigenous Bhutia communities, Lachungpas and Lachenpas, successfully contested all proposed hydropower projects and have managed to sustain an anti-dam opposition in their home regions, Lachung and Lachen. In this paper, we discuss this remarkable, un-researched, effective collective action against hydropower development, examining how identity and territory influence collective action through production, creation and application of vernacular knowledge systems. The role of the Dzumsa, a prevailing traditional system of self-governance among the Lachungpas and Lachenpas, has been central in their collective resistance against large dams in Lachung and Lachen. Our findings show that contrary to popular imageries, the Dzumsa is neither an egalitarian nor a democratic institution-rather, it is an exercise of an "agonistic unity". The Dzumsas operate as complex collectives, which serve to politicize identity, decision-making and place-based territoriality in their struggle against internal and external threats. Principles of a "vernacular statecraft" helped bringing the local communities together in imperfect unions to oppose modernist designs of hydropower development. However, while such vernacular institutions were able to construct a powerful local adversary to neoliberal agendas, they also pose high social, political and emotional risks to the few within the community, who chose not to align with the normative principles of the collective.
Journal Progress in Development Studies 13 (3) ,2013, :195-208, SAGE UK
In recent years, there has been a surge in hydropower projects in the North-east part of India, constructed under the aegis of the national state. Foregrounding this fact, our article conceptualizes North-east India as a 'region' that is not only physiographic in nature but also discursively constructed by history, culture and politics, in the colonial and postcolonial times. We argue that when large developmental projects such as hydropower projects are commissioned in this messy context of the North-eastern region in India, it gives rise to myriad problems of ethnic strife, cultural identity and indigenous rights that reflect a 'regional pattern'. In tandem with these various dispossessions brought about by such developmental projects, there is a slowly emerging political consciousness at the regional level to counter these developmental projects. This is still in a very burgeoning stage. In this article, we have envisioned such a regional level collaboration among various ethnic identity based mobilizations, as a counterpart of civil society. Such an ethnic alliance is an imperative, to balance the 'excesses' of the 'sovereign nation state' and its notion of 'development'.
Hydropower, Anti-Politics, and the Opening of New Political Spaces in the Eastern Himalayas
— Hydropower has lately been advocated by a multi-scalar public–private policy nexus for marrying objectives of green growth and climate mitigation. Such discursive constructions are reminiscent of a consensual development politics, which contradicts and overlooks long-standing socio-environmental controversies surrounding large dams. Here we argue that anti-political hydropower governance also risks fueling inherent societal antagonisms, with unexpected outcomes. Drawing on qualitative empirical research in Sikkim, Northeast India, we illustrate how attempts by state and private actors to restrict contestation of hydropower projects were countered with unprecedented voice and agency of affected communities, indicating nascent processes of politicization and democratization " from below " .
Hydro-nation, Discourse and Discontent in Northeast India, Society and Culture in South Asia
Hydropower is now emerging as an important economic driver in Northeast India. A rapid drive for damming the rivers of the region is underway which is speeding up at a rapid pace after the post-reform period in particular. This article uses the framework of securitisation to analyse the broader development politics in Northeast India. It does so by taking the case of hydropower projects with a specific focus on Tipaimukh Dam in Manipur. Developmental efforts, the article argues, in the Northeast are embedded within the securitised discourse exacerbating conflicts between the state and the people over rights and resources. This article will emphasise on the continuing imposition of securitised discourse in the region and explicates the people's response to it.
Economic Anthropology, 2016
This article interrogates Nepal’s ongoing and intensifying attempt to become a “hydropower nation” by focusing ethnographic attention on new kinds of subjectivity, identity, and agency emerging at the frontiers of hydropower development in the Upper Trishuli and Upper Tamakoshi watersheds of central Nepal. Drawing on 13 months of field study and ethnographic observation, this article makes a series of arguments about the coevolutionary relationship between the production of an imagined hydropower future and the diverse positions of Nepali citizens living and working along this expanding hydropower frontier. Thematically, my analysis focuses on (a) the scale and velocity of hydropower development in Nepal, (b) the polyvalent role of the hydropower sector within Nepal’s recent history of political volatility and vacuums of local governance, (c) an increasingly complex politics of recognition based on “project-affected” identities, and (d) emerging trends of financialization and mobilization sparked by the proliferation of shareholder-based models of benefit sharing that affect the discourse on risk sharing and stakeholder rights in crucial ways. Building on other critical scholarship on Himalayan hydropower development, this article seeks to disaggregate the technical and discursive abstractions of the Nepalese hydroscape by providing an ethnographic account of the micropolitics and praxis that shape the lived experience of hydropower development in Nepal. Keywords Energy Politics; Finance; Corporate Social Responsibility; State Making; Himalayan Studies
Dams have become political symbols of conquest of nature and representative of development in India. Impervious to the widespread critique of development through hydraulic gigantism, the planners in Sikkim have identified cascade development of the perennial river waters of Rangit and Teesta as the channel for modernising and developing its economy. This rhetoric has become questionable after three Lepcha youth affiliated to the Affected Citizens of the Teesta and the Concerned Lepchas of Sikkim, with the support of the Sangha of Dzongu, began an indefinite relay hungerstrike on 20 June 2007 in Gangtok to pressurise the government into revoking the power projects planned on the Teesta. The Lepcha activists' banner proclaiming, 'In the name of development, do not make us refugees in our own homeland', challenges the rhetoric of dams and democratic development in Sikkim. This paper presents an analysis of the contested formulations and perceptions of public interest and participatory development in Sikkim in order to reiterate the need of not ignoring but integrating culture in any project planning.