InSAF India and London Mining Network invite you to join session 3 of our 12-part global webinar series, Deadline or Death Sentence: State Violence and Indigenous (Adivasi) People’s Resistance in India.
Session 3 | Courts as Instruments of State Power – Judicial Complicity in Indigenous Dispossession and Criminalisation in Adivasi Regions in India
Date and time: 19 June 2025 | 2:30pm UTC (8pm India / 3:30pm London / 10:30am New York)
This series critically interrogates the Indian state’s 2026 “Maoist-free” deadline and its violent consequences for Indigenous survival and self-determination. We examine how this counterinsurgency goal intensifies militarisation, forced displacement, and the repression of democratic dissent – particularly in the Adivasi-majority Bastar region of central India.
The series situates diverse forms of resistance – from non-violent, youth-led mass movements to the long-standing armed struggle – within a broader global context of Indigenous and anti-extractive resistance, connecting Bastar to Palestine, the Philippines, and Latin America.
In earlier sessions, we examined the architecture of state violence and its links with extractive development models that seek to erase Indigenous lifeworlds. We now turn to examining the judiciary, which, in the context of the ongoing war in the region, functions not as a site of redress but as a pivotal cog in the machinery of dispossession, through two interlinked modalities of judicial complicity: the politics of inaction and judicial processes as tools of subjugation.
Speakers:
Nandini Sundar, Professor of Sociology, Delhi University, India
Megha Bahl, Lawyer and Researcher working on Indigenous people’s concerns in Jharkhand; Doctoral Student, Department of Anthropology, Rice University, USA
Watch the recording of the session below