What Does Arunachal Police's FIR Against Ebo Mili Tell Us About Indigenous Land Rights?

As the anti-dam protests in Arunachal Pradesh escalate, a chilling new development has added to the tension in the Siang Valley. On May 27, the Siang Deputy Commissioner, P.N. Thungon, filed a formal police complaint against Ebo Mili, a prominent Adi lawyer, legal advisor to the Siang Indigenous Farmers Forum (SIFF), and a vocal critic of the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP).

The complaint, lodged at the Boleng police station, accuses Mili of leading an 바카라�unlawful assembly바카라� of 80 to 90 protestors in violation of prohibitory orders during an anti-dam protest in Beging village on May 23. The charges against him include Sections 135, 191, and 324 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Sections 3 and 4 of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act.

Mili has been at the forefront of the anti-dam movement, challenging the state바카라�s deployment of armed forces for surveys and exposing irregularities in the government바카라�s Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) process with local villages. In his last public post, he denounced a recent MoA as a 바카라�cheap tactic to divide us바카라� and a 바카라�blatant bribe with public money바카라�바카라�allegations that directly questioned the government바카라�s narrative of consent for the project.

Local activists and villagers in Beging, where Mili last provided legal support during protests, have categorically denied the allegations of violence levelled against him. The filing of the complaint has further fueled anxieties among protestors, who see it as part of a broader pattern of criminalising dissent against the dam.

India stands at a peculiar crossroads. Its ambitions are global; its appetite for growth is insatiable. Ports, dams, highways, and industrial corridors are the new temples of the Republic. Yet, quietly, almost invisibly, this relentless march is exacting a price on those whose voices are least heard바카라�the Indigenous peoples of India and the lands they have nurtured for centuries.

Indigenous lands are not empty spaces awaiting development. They are ecological fortresses, rich in biodiversity, sequestering vast amounts of carbon, and serving as the last archives of sustainable living. In every sense, they are civilizational inheritances, repositories of knowledge that modernity, in its impatience, barely understands.

As the Great Nicobar 'Holistic Development Project' unfurls with promises of a Hong Kong-like port in the Andaman Sea, it demands a silent sacrifice from the Shompen and Nicobarese tribes. Simultaneously, in the distant folds of Arunachal Pradesh, the Siang River's mighty flow is sought to be chained by what is now India바카라�s largest proposed hydropower scheme바카라�the 12,500 MW Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP).

Backed by NHPC and the state, the project includes a 300 sq. km reservoir that will submerge over 50 villages and displace more than 100,000 people바카라�predominantly from the Adi, Idu Mishmi, Mising, and Khamba tribes. Despite its branding as a countermeasure to China's YarlungTsangpo dam, the SUMP is seen by local communities as a deeply extractive and colonial endeavor바카라�one that has bypassed Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) and militarized the land under the pretext of national security.

On May 23, the hills of East Siang stirred with protest once again. Villagers from Parong, Beging, and nearby hamlets gathered in the hundreds, raising their voices against the arrival of central armed police forces. The officers were sent to oversee survey work for a dam the people have long resisted, the 12,500 MW Siang Upper Multipurpose Project. This dam is a strategic move for the government, a counter to China바카라�s towering hydropower ambitions upstream on the Yarlung Tsangpo. But for those who call this land home, it threatens everything they have.

The Adi people바카라�s resistance didn바카라�t begin this year. It stretches back to 1980, when the first plans to tame the Siang River were drawn. The river is not just water to them. It is memory, inheritance, and the rhythm of life. Once again, the old chant rises: 바카라�No Survey, No Dam.바카라�

They say they are not against change, only against being erased by it. One elder said quietly, 바카라�We are ready to die protesting this dam. It will drown our land, our culture, and our future.바카라� This is a defence of dignity, place, and the right to be heard before moving. Each survey team that arrives without consent feels like another step toward a future built on the silence of those who were never asked.

Here, the concept of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) arrives as both a shield and a mirror바카라�a shield because it promises Indigenous communities the power to say "No"; a mirror because it reflects the moral question back to the state: Who are we developing for, and at what cost?

The Indian Reality: Projects Without Consent

The Great Nicobar project, billed at ₹80,000 crore, has already moved into preparatory phases without meaningful consent from the Shompen. What was required was not mere consultation but FPIC as mandated by Indian laws like the Forest Rights Act (2006) and international norms under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). That demand바카라�vital to the integrity of democratic governance바카라�has been evaded with alarming ease.

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Siang multipurpose project바카라�a 12,500 MW behemoth바카라�threatens to submerge ancestral lands, sacred groves, and living memories. Here, the fiction of consultation has also been allowed to stand in for the reality of consent. The language of 'national security' has been mobilised바카라�a potent, almost unchallengeable phrase that, in practice, operates as an eraser: erasing rights, erasing cultures, erasing human beings from the map of moral concern.

This tendency, which views Indigenous territories as resource frontiers to be conquered rather than as homelands to be respected, is not just administrative incompetence; it is an act of political imagination. This has been the historical pattern from the Amazon to the Arctic바카라�a global logic of extraction masquerading as public purpose.Yet India's own constitutional vision had once gestured toward another possibility. The Fifth and Sixth Schedules, the Forest Rights Act, and landmark judgments like Niyamgiri recognized Indigenous peoples as subjects to be administered and as sovereign communities with legitimate claims over their lands.

The Niyamgiri Hills, in 2013, became the site of India's first successful environmental referendum. In a luminous assertion of self-rule, Gram Sabhas rejected Vedanta's mining ambitions. Here was democracy in its most elemental form, not merely the counting of votes but the claiming of a way of life. It was a triumph of the spirit over the machinery of the market.

Why has the spirit of Niyamgiri become so difficult to summon today? Despite the presence of law and precedents, why does the State prefer the silence of exclusion to the messy affirmation of consent? The answer lies in the uncomfortable truth that acknowledging Indigenous agency would mean placing limits on the State's developmental fantasies바카라�an act of humility that modern power finds almost impossible to undertake.

What FPIC Demands

FPIC is not mere bureaucratic box-ticking. It is not an administrative hurdle to be cleared with the deftness of a signature. It is a substantive, living process, an insistence that power be negotiated, that development be dialogic, and that those most affected by a decision be recognised as its co-authors. It demands that consent be free: obtained without coercion, manipulation, or intimidation; prior: sought before the initiation of any project or plan, and not after its momentum renders opposition futile, premised on complete, accessible, and culturally appropriate disclosure of all potential impacts; and collective: emanating from the customary decision-making institutions of the community, not from atomised or fabricated consultations.

FPIC is essentially an invitation to treat Indigenous peoples as sovereigns to be respected rather than stakeholders to be managed. It demands the unsettling acknowledgement that some projects may be modified, delayed, or abandoned altogether when there is a lack of collective will. In short, the State must regard Indigenous peoples as co-sovereigns of their lands rather than obstacles to development. It calls for a reorientation of political imagination from a model of extraction to one of coexistence, from conquest to collaboration. It is, fundamentally, a recognition that development must not be an alibi for dispossession; that democracy, if it is to mean anything at all, must begin at the margins.

The Feasibility and the Failure

India, in theory, is equipped to honour FPIC. Laws such as PESA (1996) and FRA (2006) provide for community control over forests and customary territories. The Niyamgiri precedent demonstrates operational feasibility. Yet, theory often wilts before the practice of power. The architecture of consent is dismantled in the actual decision-making corridors by deliberate strategic ambiguity rather than ignorance through the bureaucratic sleight of hand that reclassifies lands, manipulates Gram Sabhas, or cloaks projects in the unassailable language of 'national interest.' Development becomes a foregone conclusion, its path cleared by the quiet violence of procedure.

Beneath this machinery lies a deeper resistance: a bureaucratic culture that finds the idea of genuine consent an intolerable inconvenience. To ask, to listen, and to be bound by the answers received is antithetical to an administrative ethos founded on control and predictability. Consent, if taken seriously, introduces an element of uncertainty and democratisation of decision-making that those in power find unsettling.

Moreover, the Indian state has internalised a deeply paternalistic view of its Indigenous citizens, seeing them less as agents capable of articulating their aspirations and more as wards to be managed for their "own good." This mentality, cloaked in developmental benevolence, strips communities of voice while claiming to speak on their behalf. Is it feasible to implement FPIC in India? Technically, indisputably so. Politically, it demands a revolution of imagination: to abandon the conceit that the state knows what is best and accept that Indigenous peoples are not relics of the past but partners in shaping the future. It demands humility in governance and a radical reordering of the relationship between state and citizen. In short, the question is not whether India can implement FPIC. It is whether it has the courage to.

The Climate Paradox

The paradox at the heart of India's development strategy is this: the very communities and landscapes that must be preserved for climate resilience are the ones most readily sacrificed at the altar of progress. If FPIC were truly enforced, Indigenous territories rich in biodiversity, carbon sinks, and traditional ecological knowledge would emerge not as obstacles to national ambition but as its greatest allies. Scientific studies emphasise this truth: Indigenous-managed lands globally account for nearly 17% of all forest carbon storage, often exhibiting lower deforestation rates and ecological integrity rates than state-managed reserves.

It goes beyond simple cultural observance to preserve the forests of the Niyamgiri Hills, the Siang basin, and Great Nicobar. It is essential for the planet. These landscapes are natural carbon vaults; their destruction releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and a profound moral failure into our political conscience. Yet, India's current trajectory threatens to sever this vital link. In the name of 'green energy' and 'strategic infrastructure,' projects that displace Indigenous communities and raze old-growth forests are paradoxically branded as contributions to climate goals. It is a tragic irony: in attempting to mitigate future climate risks, we are exacerbating present injustices.

The truth is more straightforward and more unsettling: there can be no genuine climate resilience without Indigenous resilience. Environmental stewardship is a social and cultural endeavour rooted in lifestyles that modernity frequently aims to eradicate; it is not a technocratic accomplishment.

Ignoring FPIC, therefore, is not just a betrayal of democratic norms but rather a self-defeating act, undermining India's own commitments under the Paris Agreement and jeopardising its aspiration to be a moral leader in the global climate discourse. Ultimately, the climate paradox is a human paradox: our unwillingness to recognize that the futures we claim to secure will be built not through the conquest of nature and communities but through their careful, patient, and consensual preservation.

A Tipping Point For The Republic

India faces not isolated skirmishes over development projects in Great Nicobar, Arunachal, and beyond but a deeper civilizational choice. Will it treat its Indigenous peoples as relics to be displaced mute witnesses to a modernity that demands their erasure or as co-authors of a sustainable, plural, and truly democratic future? FPIC is a gauge of whether the Republic still upholds the moral imagination upon which it was established, not merely an administrative formality. At a time when India seeks to project itself as a global leader바카라�whether at G20 summits, climate negotiations, or international forums바카라�its treatment of Indigenous communities will define whether its leadership is seen as principled or performative. A Republic that fails to uphold the rights of its most vulnerable cannot, in any meaningful sense, claim to safeguard the planet.

The choice is stark: India can either script a future where Indigenous voices, lands, and wisdom are respected as indispensable to the national fabric, or it can continue down a path where development is indistinguishable from dispossession. In an age teetering on the brink of ecological and moral collapse, the question is not simply whether we will act but whether we can still hear the voices we have long silenced.

(Sangmuan Hangsing is a researcher and alumnus of the Kautilya School of Public Policy.)