Temple conflicts

Over centuries, temples have given Hindu elites a way to further their interests. As Parobo writes, in the 18th century, the Gowda Saraswat Brahmins¹³ (GSBs) invested profits in temple construction, striving for social respect and control (2015, 75-81). As their Brahmin identity was threatened, they used the temple’s Mahajan¹⁴ rights and privileges to further their power and position in society. With temples changing status and becoming private institutions (Parobo 2015, 78), the temple was made according to dominant Hindu elites, registered as Mahajans. Thereafter, the power relations of the temple changed and management was tilted in the favour of the Hindu elite. The temple

13 GSBs are a sub-group of the Brahmin community in India and a part of the larger Saraswat Brahmin community. Saraswats are a sub-group who trace their ancestry to the banks of the Sarasvati River.

14 Mahajan refers to the highest person in the temple.

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has allowed certain castes to control lower castes and their access to the deity. As the deity is so religiously significant, it continues to draw people to the temple (ibid., 80).

As such, the temple is a powerful way of influencing a community.

In a similar way, the anti-mining discourse argues that mining companies have, over the years, invested in temple construction or temple donations in order to gain respect and control. Anjan said “they [the mining industry] build a new temple, every mine owner breaks the old one and builds a new one and forces everyone to move the god into the new temple”. As a custodian of the temple, Anjan said the mining company becomes

“the benefactor, beyond and above questioning”. Ryan echoed this, saying that by funding the temple committee, tensions were created in communities over the

involvement of mining companies. In the face of resistance, Ryan said villagers would turn on each other and ask, “they are building the temple, are you building the temple?”

Sushil, an adivasis activist, said the same, “it is pacifying because people say he has given us God, how can we do anything?”. As a result, the temple gift was represented as a form of social control, rather than a bribe.

Activists described the industry as using the religious thinking of people to their own benefit. On a trip into Bicholim, North of Goa, an activist took me to see a large temple, constructed by a mining company near to a mining lease. It dwarfed the little village it sat within, making it a very large gift, and I wondered whether the village could ever have funded such a project.

Figure 9: photos show temple in village and mining pit nearby, North Goa

This CSR practice of temple building triggered some reactions ‘from below’. Activist Anjan described a case in the village of Cauvrem, South Goa, a particularly active anti-mining community where a anti-mining company had built a new temple. When a new

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temple is built, it is the rule that the community have to move their deity. But, as Anjan said, “God is refusing to move [laughs] so the new temple is empty. That is resistance, divine resistance”. Whilst many forms of CSR are difficult to resist, temple building gave the community an opportunity to oppose change. The example of temple building shows that temples have an important social and political function in Goa¹⁵. Because of their social function, they are useful for mining companies, who can then benefit from Mahajan privileges. In summary, CSR such as temple building can reinforce unequal power relations through the sense of obligation recipients feel. In attempting to achieve a ‘social license’ CSR as temple building creates tensions within villages that partially silence critical voices.

I have shown how the pro-mining and anti-mining discourses view CSR very differently and how the latter perceive CSR, cynically, as a social management tool. However, although CSR was critiqued, activists and communities did not actively respond to CSR most of the time. An example of this came from Rashid, an activist from Cauvrem. He described a legal situation where the village was given the choice of CSR or financial compensation and they chose compensation. This story suggests that despite mistrust for CSR, communities can be encouraged to seek short term material benefits from companies. These gifts together shape a “minimally acceptable” situation for companies to work (Gamu and Dauvergne 2018, 13).

Then again, activists tended not to scrutinise CSR because they saw it as a sideline issue. They were more interested in mobilising around issues that would directly make a difference to decision making such as the law, regulations, and the EIA process. This was logical – activists need to prioritise certain issues over others – but it had certain implications. The first was that by disregarding CSR, activists became more

disconnected from the experiences of the mining affected. The second implication was that CSR as it is, was allowed to continue, with all its consequences. In being

overlooked, CSR could create all kinds of social divisions and diversions. This facilitated mining companies, creating operational conditions whilst building their corporate reputation. As Lukes states, three dimensional power can put “constraints upon interests” and “speak of interests imputed to and unrecognized by actors” (Lukes

15 Although I also met with an expert in caste in India who said that temple building had a small positive effect on segregation at the individual level, but at the community and state level, reinforced corporate power.

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2005, 146). Therefore, CSR discourse puts constraints on resistance and encourages actors to focus elsewhere, keeping itself as a potential issue, just ‘out of politics’ (2005, 28). CSR discourse works in this way, just well enough, to legitimise mining.

Conclusion

In summary, I have shown that regulations allow companies to do CSR as they like and that they support the CSR discourse of corporate citizenship. The CSR discourse works to promote certain actors as the most moral and socially invested, and to de-couple CSR from the impacts of business. The CSR discourse also works to shape businesses as responsible decision makers which means that when it goes wrong, responsibility can be withdrawn. Claims to progress development work to legitimise the mining industry as a co-facilitator of development and as filling in for the state. This silences legal

requirements and the reality on the ground, as shown by the Vedanta case study. The CSR discourse was highly critiqued by activists however in practice it was not an appealing avenue for contestation. They could not accuse companies of non-compliance or hold businesses accountable. It makes sense for activists to overlook CSR but this subtly enables mining companies. In an ad-hoc way, despite competing claims, CSR works to legitimise mining by defending a particular kind of neoliberal resource-led growth.

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7 Dealing with resistance: the anti-mining discourse and reactions

‘from above’

As the previous chapters have shown, there has been resistance to iron ore mining, and sometimes, strong opposition. In this chapter, I look at how the mining industry seeks to manage the anti-mining movement, as one way in which mining is legitimised. The first part of the chapter illustrates the fragmentation of the anti-mining discourse. Then I explore how this contributes to practical challenges for activists, namely, difficulties in cooperation. The outcome of these difficulties is an anti-mining movement consisting of many organisations espousing broadly similar causes but weakened individually and collectively. This is a variant of the kind of ‘involuted pluralism’ analysed by Rudolph and Rudolph (1987). The final section of the chapter addresses how opposition to mining is undermined through reactions ‘from above’ both in discursive and extra-discursive ways. This suggests that three-dimensional power alone is not enough to legitimise the mining industry.

In Goa, organisations and activists have very different views of mining and ways of mobilizing, based on their articulation of the anti-mining discourse. Opposition to mining came from many organisations including: The Goa Foundation, The Goenchi Mati Movement (GMM), The Federation of Rainbow Warriors (FRW), The United Goans Foundation (UGF), Mines Minerals and People (MMP), The Revolutionary Goans, MAND - an adivasi-rights research and resource centre, The Sadhana Multi-purpose Cooperative Society (SMCS) and Bharat Mukti Morcha (BMM). As Sampat also found with the anti- SEZ¹⁶ movement (2015, 19), these reactions ‘from below’ vary considerably from issue-based campaigns and social movements with explicit agendas, to broader anti-capitalist attitudes and actions. This means that activists emphasise different aspects of the anti-mining discourse. Divergent claims rest on an ideological and discursive split between two camps in the anti-mining movement; those who accept mining with certain conditions and those who stand against it explicitly. This shows that

16 Also mentioned in chapter 2.The anti-SEZ movement was resistance to the new policy measures around Special Economic Zones passed in 2005. In 2007, all approved SEZ’s were scrapped in Goa but a series of events have led to a number of SEZs and lands allotted to them, unresolved (Bedi 2013, Nielsen 2017, Sampat 2015)

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not all reactions ‘from below’ are for or against land deals but that they also work to

“renegotiate the terms of their incorporation” (Hall et al. 2015, 472). These discursive differences are best illustrated with a few case studies of the anti-mining discourse.