These words are lamented by 35 year old Anar Singh Bandole, who traveled 18 hours from his village in Burhanpur district, Madhya Pradesh, to attend the Forest Rights Rally in New Delhi on November 21, 2019.

A member of the Barela Adivasi community, Bandole is responding to the ruse employed by Madhya Pradesh Forest Department officials — that Indigenous communities harm the environment — to justify evictions from their ancestral homelands. Forced to eke out a meagre living as an agricultural laborer, Bandole is denied any rights over his community forestlands, where the Forest Department repeatedly bulldozes the rich bounty of biodiverse crops he attempts to grow. Instead, his land is claimed by forest bureaucrats to set up state — owned monocultural plantations. Revenue from these plantations fills the coffers of the Forest Department, while the Indigenous, like Bandole, are turned into landless agricultural laborers who are paid little to toil on their own ancestral lands. The vulnerability of Bandole’s community is further compounded by the Forest Department’s threats to displace the Barela Adivasis in order to set up tiger reserves across 12 villages in Burhanpur.

At the November 21, 2019 rally for forest rights, organized by the Bhumi Adhikar Andolan — an umbrella group of land rights organizations and people’s collectives across India — Bandole’s testimony is as common as it is moving. In this rally of over 5,000 people — that saw representation from almost every state in India — each community had a story to tell about their coercive encounters with the forest bureaucracy.

These confrontations vary from manufacturing consent under duress to unlawful detentions, burning of crops, and mass evictions under the shadow of a gun. The justifications for forcibly displacing Indigenous communities — big dams, cash crop plantations, extractive mining — bear the despairingly familiar contours of a rapacious capitalism that masquerades as “development” across the world.