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taken; oppression of nature because of the environmental damage mining causes;
oppression of future generations because of the theft of minerals; and oppression of communities by ignoring the right to self-govern. Anjan, on behalf of the FRW,
articulated an explicitly anti-mining discourse. This position led the FRW to work with communities mainly in South Goa to help them “build up the capacity” “to be
empowered” in their struggle to stop mining. The FRW again articulated a very different way of seeing mining and mode of action. Despite alliances between them, more often than not, anti-mining groups did not have readily reconcilable points of view. Therefore I argue that a high degree of fragmentation marks the anti-mining discourse.
Looking across this fragmentation there was one unifying event; the 2012 suspension.
The suspension and subsequent Shah Commission shifted the terms of the public debate. Instead of opposing mining, groups started to ask, if mining is to be regulated, what kind of regulations do we want? For the GMM this was an opportunity for egalitarian governance and for the SMCS it was an opportunity for involvement and self-governance, both articulating issues of inequality, justice and ethics. The suspension clearly drew oppositional groups onto the domain of market-logic
arguments, albeit only partially. This is striking because a governance intervention has encouraged activists to come to accept commercial mining and negotiate the term.
7.2 Discursive disagreements and difficulties in
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to various cases, it did not lead to activists working together. Activists in Goa tend to work regionally, cooperate incidentally and only with those who express a similar position on iron ore mining. Whilst they are good at sharing materials and are proud of the diversity in the anti-mining discourse, they struggle to cooperate. For example, Anjan from the FRW said, “we are against GMM because the moment you say put money in a fund and use for the people, even if that is so, you are legitimising something we believe is illegitimate”. Anjan also said, “we face opposition from our own” by which he meant that the Goa Foundation did not support the Cauvrem people in realising their SMCS project. This illustrates that rather than see a collective project between organisations, each organisation worked in silo, challenging each other. The limited capacities of organisations also added to difficulties in cooperating. Most activists and organisations were overstretched and spread out too thin, with activists having to juggle cases in order to fulfill their broad missions. They also struggled at crunch points with financial and human resources, as work increased episodically around certain campaigns or issues. Activists addressed issues as they emerged because they cared about them but this meant that iron ore mining frequently dropped off the agenda. One activist Reboni described the movement as “bursts of activism” and then people work “on their own threads”.
Issues of mistrust and egotism obviously come up between groups when there are various agendas as a result of discursive differences. Mistrust led to stories and rumors about activists that worked to de-legitimise individuals22. These stories encouraged difficulties in cooperation within the anti-mining movement. There was also a competitive atmosphere between leaders of different groups as they tussled for
recognition and to protect their reputation. In order to promote their own work, activists in interviews undermined the work of others by highlighting inconsistencies in what people used to do before activism, what they currently do and what they claim they stand for. Activists used inconsistencies in other activists’ behaviour to de-legitimise them. As a local academic stated about accusations against the leader of BMM,
“everyone is trying to outshine one another, we are more serious about this than you, or you did something in 2001, yea people change, why am I [the activist] supposed to be so consistent that I don’t think?” Activists were inconsistent in their claims and therefore in discourse and in action, as they tried to adopt more strategic positions or follow
22 This was exacerbated by reactions ‘from above’, which will be explored later in the chapter.
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alternative interests. For example, Rashid, the leader of SMCS was an ex-truck owner turned tribal activist and rumours were widespread about his ‘real’ interests. Some activists also tried to discredit those activists who were not Goan, who had corporate backgrounds or were of a certain caste or class.
The biggest organisations, the Goa Foundation and the GMM, were protective of their work and delegated poorly and this further reduced their organisational capacity. In turn they were also particularly discredited by other activists. They were blamed for being disconnected from the mining affected and for excluding the mining affected from their own battle. As activist Hadden stated about the GMM, “they have taken the struggle away from civil society… they are not grassroots, not real, not down to earth, they don’t talk about the real issues on the ground”. Clearly disillusioned with progress, activists were highly critical of one another.
Regional identity politics also contributed to the fragmentation of the movement (Nielsen and Bedi 2017). It was claimed, by some activists, not all, that Goan identity was under threat, ‘being lost’ or ‘falling apart’ because of the current development model. One reason for this was the influx of Indian migrants who were seen as taking Goan jobs from Goan people. This brought to light the popular anxieties around Goa’s development path and its unique identity politics (Nielsen and Bedi 2017, 11). Goan identity was used, by some, to organise political action but did not help to create a united mobilising force. This was because many liberal activists would not participate in activism that could be interpreted as xenophobic. Goan identity as a cause for action worked for some activists but created additional difficulties in cooperation.
These issues, internal to the anti-mining movement, were exacerbated by political factors affecting the capacities of organisations, as well as broader national trends mentioned in chapter 2. Following the renewal of 88 mineral leases in 2015 to lessees that were ruled by the Supreme Court to have been illegally mining, heavy distrust for the state level BJP government evolved. As a result, mistrust was reinforced amongst activists and in civil society, compounded by the salience of patronage-based politics in Goa (Parobo forthcoming) and the relative degree of freedom of expression for political groups (Nielsen and Nilsen 2016).
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In summary, resistance to mining was hampered by discursive differences which turned into very real practical challenges between different reactions ‘from below’. As Samrat stated, the resistance was “splintered” and “fighting each other” due to discursive differences and therefore was marked by fragmentation. I argue this contributed to each organisation working with less capacity and in competition, the outcome being a variant of ‘involuted pluralism’ defined as a process of “the excessive multiplication of less effective units” (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 257). This leads to the weakening of the activity as a whole, explaining in part, why the anti-mining discourse is less effective than one might expect.