(Editor’s note: On Peakoilindia.org, we usually carry relatively abstract, ‘big picture’ articles or technical pieces on energy and the related topics of climate change, development and sustainability. In contrast, this hard hitting, extensively researched piece by Madhusree Mukherjee brings out the human cost involved in these issues. It’s essential reading if you want to understand the true extent of the price that is being paid by adivasis – and specifically adivasi women – for what the rest of us call ‘development’)
By Madhusree Mukerjee | Grist Media – Mon 28 Jul, 2014
Earlier this year, media across the world reported how a ‘primitive’ tribal council in West Bengal had ordered the gang rape of a woman as punishment. Except that almost no one got the story right. Our writer parses the conflicting accounts to tell a complicated tale of assault not only on that one woman but on Adivasis across the country. Violence, sexual assault, consumer culture, alcohol, pornography, land-grabbing – Adivasi society is being destroyed by these classic tools of colonial development, and it is all being done in the name of its fellow Indians.