The story of environmental resistance in India is also a story of women who refused to bow to the postcolonial conception of development. From the forests of central India to the valleys of Arunachal, women have repeatedly placed themselves between their communities and the machinery of imperial exploitation. They hugged trees, occupied administrative offices, confronted state forces, organized village mobilizations, and resisted the flooding of their ancestral lands. However, they are often portrayed as passive actors in environmental movements and their political agency is reduced to sentimental images of rural women protecting forests on which they depend.
Such representations are not only politically restrictive but also epistemologically dangerous. Women don’t just defend nature because they happen to be more dependent on it than men; Rather, they do so because they understand and challenge the political-economic arrangements that have commodified nature, turned it into a commercial asset to be appropriated and exploited, and transformed their inhabited territories into disposable spaces in the pursuit of “national development.” Their resistance is therefore at the same time ecological, feminist and political.
The coloniality of development
This contradiction is deeply rooted in India’s postcolonial development. Actions to dispossess colonial forests merely found a nationalist vocabulary when the earlier anti-colonial nationalist vocabulary of indigenous and tribal resistance to colonial exploitation was no longer viable. The two most notorious colonial laws affecting indigenous communities, the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, were absorbed into nationalist discourse in the postcolonial era through the Habitual Offenders Act of 1952 and the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013. In reality, these legislations were based on a similar colonial development logic and obscured the fundamental question: whose “development” is being promoted?
Therefore, when the postcolonial state faces environmental resistance, it is not an isolated case of indigenous communities fighting over their livelihoods and ability to survive; Rather, they challenge the exclusions and silences embedded in the postcolonial state’s conceptualization of “development.”
And this often leads to collective action; The women protested against it on April 8, 2026 Ken Betwa River Link Project in Madhya Pradesh organized the “Chita movement‘ and ‘Jal Satyagraha’ with symbolic pyres that transform their bodies into active sites of ecological resistance. Their resistance reveals the inadequacy of treating displacement as a matter of financial compensation. What does compensation mean for these women when their entire social world, sustained by land, water, forests, and generations of collective memory and community belonging, is available?
From the bosom of the forest
When commercial contractors threatened the forests of the Garhwal Himalayas in the 1970s, Gaura Devi and the women of Reni village stood up to them hugging the trees They wanted to reduce the number and make the Chipko movement a symbol of ecological feminist resistance to imperial expropriation. The women of Reni didn’t wait for someone to come along as a savior and grant them environmental protection; Rather, they asserted their historic claim to the country by taking action themselves. The current struggles across India carry on this political legacy, albeit under very different economic and institutional conditions.
For decades, Dandakaranya, and particularly the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, had been a stronghold of Maoist rebels, who had received considerable local support due to the state-sponsored vigilantism that the region had to endure in the mining of the minerals in its possession. For locals, siding with the Maoists became a form of armed resistance against the region’s increasing militarization and uncompromising mineral extraction through the state-corporate nexus. The 2021 Silger mobilizationwhich followed the establishment of a security camp and the subsequent killing of four Adivasis during protests – including a pregnant woman who later died from gunshot wounds – highlighted the precarious conditions under which indigenous communities assert their rights to their ancestral territories. With the emergence of the Mulwasi Bachao Manch came demands for accountability, local rights and the defense of community autonomy.
Activists like Hidme Markam have also drawn attention to the connection between mineral extraction, displacement and the criminalization of indigenous resistance. In 2016, two women in Bastar had filed a complaint Sexual assaults by security forces during counter-insurgency operations while police filed FIRs against security forces and resisted them. According to a National Human Rights Commission Report 2017In Bastar, eight women were raped, six women were sexually assaulted and two women were physically assaulted by men in uniform.
The case of Hasdeo It becomes particularly revealing when it comes to women’s resistance to extractivism. Hasdeo covers a region of about 1,800 square kilometers and has become a contested landscape where tribal women have resisted coal mining. The women here not only joined an existing ecological movement, but also supported it with their commitment. Tribal women from Salhi, Ghatbarra, Hariharpur and Fatehpur took part in a mobilization that lasted for years until May 2024. In April 2022, women in Janardanpur hugged trees to prevent their felling, recalling the political symbolism of Chipko. When news of trees being cut down spread in August 2023, women quickly mobilized through village networks, leading to the preventive detention of hundreds.
Tribal women of Hasdeo like Bijayanti Khusro, Rattu Porte and Sambai Khusro have spoken about this in detail Violence and fear associated with the destruction of forests. Their reports reveal the dissonance between corporate and national development and people’s realities. In addition to the disproportionate burden of environmental degradation on women, displacement increases their unpaid work and livelihood insecurity, while compensation and rehabilitation exclude them from meaningful choices.
A Study 2025 published in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism entitled Water, Forest, and Land Is Ours! “Moral Atmospheres of Subaltern and Gendered Collective Action in Central India” further examined how Gond women sustain resistance through collective memory, cultural practices, and emotional ties to their land.
Whose valley, whose nation?
The contemporary expression of such ecological resistance can be found in the Siang Valley of Arunachal Pradesh. A suggestion Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP) to counter “strategic threats” posed by China’s major hydropower project upstream of the Yarlung Tsangpo (the headwaters of the Brahmaputra River) in Tibet has been met with resistance from communities in Arunachal Pradesh who fear displacement and inundation of their ancestral lands. But what began as opposition to the dam has seemingly morphed into the language of investigations, police investigations, public order and national security.
On October 23, 2026, protesters at Dite-Dime confronted military personnel and reported documented injuries to protesters Tear gas was used to disperse the protesters. The entire incident was documented by the regional newspaper The Arunachal Times, which expressed solidarity with the protesters. In response, police applied for permission for one on October 27 Arrest warrant against 47-year-old Tongam Rima, deputy editor of the Arunachal Times, over allegations that the newspaper had incited the violence in Pashigat four days earlier. The entire episode surrounding the Siang project has turned into a witch hunt against journalists and protesters.
Fur activists from the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum – Adum Tayom, Olut Paroh, Oson Paron and Omak Paron – were there imprisoned under the draconian Arunachal Pradesh Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (AP-UAPA), 2014, which under Section 2 (XII) allows for the detention of persons associated with “unlawful activities” – the definitions of which are completely vague and can easily be used to justify state coercion and unwarranted securitization.
These communities existed long before the creation of modern nation-states, and the state’s use of laws like the UAPA shows how easily the state can exploit its machinery against indigenous communities and place them under a vague anti-terrorism law simply for opposing state forces that have come to confiscate their ancestral lands and destroy their way of life.
What connects Ken-Betwa, Dandakaraya, Hasdeo and Siang is not just the presence of women in these environmental protests; It is their confrontation with a political order that not only views indigenous territories as disposable, but also treats indigenous women’s bodies in the same way. From hugging trees to leading the way in confronting security forces, indigenous women have themselves made their presence at these protest sites an instrument of dissent.
Their number is never very high. Sometimes there are only fifty, sometimes there are only about two hundred or so. However, the success of political dissent cannot be measured by quantifying resistance. Insurrections are not won because a majority suddenly begins to support a cause, but because a minority continues its resistance. Indigenous women are the minority who have refused to back down, bow down and surrender in the face of increasing state violence.
A war for freedom
As a new class of elites takes over the machinery of the postcolonial state, the social status of the marginalized – Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis and women – has remained stubbornly unchanged. The constant circulation of elites, disguised as political transformation, has rarely led to meaningful emancipation from the margins. The face of political power may change, regimes may rise and fall, and the promises of freedom may be renewed, but the structures of oppression endure. For those historically dispossessed, liberation remains a distant dream whose horizon continues to shift.
Under the relentless power of capitalism, institutionalized discrimination, and state-sponsored violence, freedom is not an inheritance bestowed upon the marginalized. It is a battle they have to wage every day – against dispossession, humiliation, exploitation and the constant denial of their humanity. The fight for freedom does not end with one regime or the arrival of another; It must be fought every day if we want to build a fairer world.