On May 12th, Abhijeet Swami and Sam Brown stopped construction on Adani’s rail corridor for seven hours by locking themselves to machinery. Abhijeet wrote this to explain why this acion was necessary.
The Adani Group is a source of oppression from Adivasi to Aboriginal lands. The function of it, and other global corporations, is similar to that of colonial enterprises like the British East India Company – whose plunder of wealth in the last three centuries has nearly destabilised the earth itself. This unending colonialism and racial capitalism has continued in the form of war, occupation, ethnic cleansing, slavery, indenture, and gendered violence. It is legitimised by the systematic dehumanisation of people; and prolonged by Adani destroying Wangan and Jagalingou Country and expropriating the land, labour and livelihoods of Adivasi and working poor people on the Indian subcontinent.
Though the world is borderless for the corporations and the rich, the majority of people are confined to places that continue to be devastated by capitalists and colonisers. Palestine has already been partitioned to a bantustan, and West Papua and Kashmir are in the process. Apartheid is now globalised, with the militarisation of borders and proliferation of detention camps into which people are disappeared and segregated. The restriction imposed on people’s ability to move and freedom to stay, in addition to the accelerating collapse of the environmental life-support system, is making the minimal resources needed to outlast the extremism of capitalists and colonisers inaccessible to most people. This creates harrowing circumstances for people around the world whose lives have already been deeply undermined by centuries of theft and exploitation.
Justice for those who are denied it the most will never come from the polite and inadequate solutions proposed by the corporations, nation-states, and people who aspire to unity without the full truth. It is only a mockery of justice that exists outside of justice for First Nations and those around the world who live in conditions of permanent economic and political persecution created by extractivism.
We drawing inspiration from the commitment of Adrian Burragubba and Hidme Markam who have both organised resistance to Adani’s transnational projects of devastation from Aboriginal to Adivasi lands. It is for these reasons that we are taking this action in solidarity, stopping the construction of Adani’s rail line. Because in this racist and colonial world, neither the Wangan and Jagalingou Nation nor the Adivasi people in Godda are permitted to say no to the destruction of their own sacred Country and livelihoods. The ongoing First Nations’ story on this continent is a significant part of the human story and it will remain so for the time still to come.
-Abhijeet Swami
Hidme Markam, who has been organising to free Adivasi people who have become political prisoners for resisting the violence of extractivism, has herself been in custody on false charges since March 9th. Read this story here: https://thewire.in/rights/hidme-markam-chhattisgarh-arrest-adivasi-rights
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