Bare Life and the State of Exception: Displacement of Tribals in India’s Hasdeo Arand

The Hasdeo Arand region of Chhattisgarh in India, a predominantly tribal area, is characterized by vast coal reserves and extraordinary biodiversity, including many rare species of flora and fauna, such as medicinal plants and herbs. Despite its designation as a Restricted Area due to its ecological sensitivity, coal mining projects are in operation, leading to widespread ecological devastation. The resulting damage not only disrupted the forest ecosystem but also led to significant losses in terms of livelihood, culture, and identity for the indigenous tribal communities.

This paper critically examines the forced displacement of the tribals in Hasdeo Arand through the lens of Michael Cernea’s (1990) Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction (IRR) Model, and identifies how various risks manifest in the lives of displaced tribal communities. Even worse, the subaltern groups are not given a voice, and the official record of their impoverishment is a “raw” representation that lacks depth and nuance.

Through qualitative methodologies, including participant observation and in-depth interviews with displaced tribals, government officials, and NGO representatives from the villages of Mohanpur, Hariharpur, Fatehpur, and Ghatbarra, the research offers a nuanced understanding of the multilayered processes of impoverishment and marginalization. The idea was to engage in ‘affective value-coding’ to get a glimpse of their narratives, emotions, and struggles of the subalterns.

This study reveals how these communities face not only economic deprivation but also cultural erasure, as their displacement disrupts deeply rooted ties to land, identity, and tradition, all against the backdrop of neoliberal development imperatives. This paper thus offers an ‘emic’ perspective on how displaced subalterns are reduced to ‘bare life,’ a condition theorized by Giorgio Agamben, where their rights and humanity are systematically disregarded.