Join us for the sixth session in the InSAF India and London Mining Network 12-part webinar series, Deadline or Death Sentence: State Violence and Indigenous (Adivasi) Peoples’ Resistance in India. Watch previous sessions here.
Session 6 | Scripting State Violence and Criminalisation of Resistance in India
Date and time: Tuesday 21 October 2025 at 2:30pm UTC (8pm India / 3:30pm London / 10.30am EST)
This series critically interrogates the Indian state’s 2026 “Maoist-free” deadline and its violent consequences for Indigenous peoples’ survival and self-determination. The first five sessions examined the intensifying state militarisation and counter-insurgency operations, and courts as instruments of state power, to displace and dispossess Adivasis from their ancestral resource-rich lands; the neoliberal shift in national economic and development policies more broadly since the 1990s that underpins the exploitation and oppression of not just Adivasis but also peasants, farmers and labourers; and the use of lawfare through weaponisation of land and forest legal regimes that enables extending Indigenous dispossession more widely through the resource rich regions.
Session 6 returns to the state militarisation, violence and criminalisation of resistance in Adivasi regions to understand its broader implications. We will do this by discussing the continuities in patterns of violence and repression scripted by the Indian state against all forms of people’s resistance in India and Indian Occupied Kashmir: anti-displacement movements resisting the extractive state-corporate nexus; movements resisting the increasing institutionalisation of authoritarianism in India and persecution of India’s marginalised communities; and the struggles for self-determination of Kashmiri people in Indian Occupied Kashmir.
Speakers:
Mohamed Junaid, Kashmiri writer and Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, USA
Suchitra Vijayan, The Polis Project
Watch the recording of the session below