Shelza Jalan, The Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Dam and the shifting grounds of resistance, Social Sciences & Humanities Open, Volume 12, 2025,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.102118
Abstract:
The Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project (LSHEP), India’s largest hydropower initiative in Northeast India, exemplifies the tensions between state-led developmentalism and civil society resistance in ecologically fragile regions. While envisioned as a cornerstone of modernization and regional integration, the project has triggered decades of contestation over ecological risks, cultural disruption, and political exclusion. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Gerukamukh, Lakhimpur, and Dhemaji in 2024, supplemented with secondary sources, this article examines the evolving dynamics between the Indian state, civil society organizations (CSOs), and local communities.
Using Arturo Escobar’s critique of development discourse, Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and passive revolution, the analysis demonstrates how the state’s strategies have shifted from coercion to persuasion, employing livelihood schemes, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, and infrastructural “gifts” to cultivate manufactured consent. At the same time, CSOs have navigated a trajectory from conditional engagement to open dissent, while communities oscillated between symbolic resistance and gradual accommodation. The findings highlight how persuasive politics and fragmented resistance reconfigure the politics of legitimacy in large dam projects, producing uneven consent while leaving core ecological and social contradictions unresolved. This case contributes to broader debates on development, power, and resistance in South Asia’s borderlands, underscoring both the resilience of democratic protest and the subtle recalibration of statecraft in contested ecologies.
Keywords:
Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project (LSHEP); Civil Society Organizations (CSOs); Anti-dam movement; Hydropower development; Northeast India; Development Politics
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