By Napoleon S Mawphniang
There is a particular kind of violence that does not announce itself with a raised fist. It arrives instead in the sober typography of a government document—dressed in technical jargon, veiled in the language of progress, and perfumed with promises of a “better standard of living.” In Meghalaya, we are witnessing precisely this kind of violence. And we, the people upon whose land this drama is being staged, must learn to read the script before the curtain falls permanently on our inheritance.
Let us begin, as Derrida would insist, with the word itself. The Draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report submitted by Shree Cement Limited for the proposed Lum Syrman Limestone Block-A in East Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya, states with admirable confidence that the project “will prove beneficial in terms of socio-economic development as it will create direct/indirect employment opportunities to locals” and that “the average income level… is expected to increase, which will ultimately result in a better standard of living for the local people. “Read it again. Feel its texture. Notice how the verb “expected”—a whisper of conditionality—does the heaviest lifting in that entire sentence. Not delivered, not guaranteed, but expected. This is bureaucratic semantics at its most sophisticated: a promise that is, by grammatical design, already exculpated from the obligation of its fulfillment.
Ludwig Wittgenstein warned us in Philosophical Investigations that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” What world, then, is being constructed for us by this document—a document prepared by a consultancy firm headquartered not in Meghalaya, not in the Northeast, but in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh? A world where 217.394 hectares of Jaintia Hills land—described, incidentally, as “Barren Land” in the very table that itemizes the lease—is transmuted through bureaucratic alchemy into “limestone production capacity of 6.0 million TPA.” Barren. The word does necessary ideological work here. To call land barren is to strip it of memory, of cultivated relationships, of spiritual covenant. It is to render it terra nullius—a concept the British Empire weaponized across the globe to justify expropriation. One wonders whether the consultants who prepared this report have ever stood on those hills at dawn and understood what the Jaintia people mean when they say “Dai thaw Beaiñ, ngiPyrshah”—”You sell our land illegally; we protest.”
The history of mining on these hills is not neutral. It is, in fact, one of the most instructive allegories of colonial and post-colonial dispossession in all of India. As academic research published in the Journal of North East India Studies (Sharma, 2023) documents, mining activities in the Khasi-Jaintia Hills predate British colonial arrival, when limestone quarrying formed the economic backbone of the Jaintia Kingdom’s trade with the Bengal plains. The East India Company, following its Diwani acquisition after the Battle of Buxar in 1764, immediately identified the strategic mineral wealth of these hills. Robert Lindsay, the company’s first resident collector, moved swiftly to establish monopoly control over the limestone trade—effectively the first corporate land grab in recorded Meghalayan history. This was not development. This was extraction dressed in the suit of administration.
The Constitution of India, in its Sixth Schedule under Articles 244(2) and 275(1), attempted to correct this historical wrong by guaranteeing that land and resources in tribal areas of Meghalaya belong to the indigenous people. Meghalaya remains, to this day, the only state in the Indian Union where the entire territory is governed under the Sixth Schedule. The autonomous district councils (ADCs)—the Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills ADCs—were mandated to guard this indigenous sovereignty. On paper, a nearly utopian arrangement. In practice, something far more sinister has unfolded.
A CMI Working Paper (Karlsen & Shankar, 2016, Tribal Representation & Local Land Governance in India: A Case Study from the Khasi Hills) tells us what happened to this constitutional promise: “Clan elites have been accused of selling community lands to private individual owners… communal lands have been sold without the knowledge, let alone approval, of other weaker/poorer community members, giving rise to a new phenomenon of ‘tribal absentee landlordism.’ In the Jaintia Hills, this process found its most grotesque expression in the coal mining era. A paper by the Journal of North East India Studies (2023) documents the now-infamous Umkyrpong village case of 2009, where villagers discovered their community lands had been sold to a coal baron—and when they filed an RTI with the Jaintia Hills ADC, it emerged that the sale had been approved by the ADC itself, the very institution constitutionally mandated to protect them.
Now comes limestone. Now comes Shree Cement.
In December 2025, hundreds of residents of Daistong and surrounding villages in East Jaintia Hills gathered outside the Deputy Commissioner’s office in Khliehriat, carrying placards that read “Shree Cement Go Back” and “Daistong Land Not a Factory Land” (The Shillong Times, December 11, 2025). The Jaintia National Council (JNC), under its president, Sambormi Lyngdoh, alleged that tribal land had been illegally transferred to one Bharat Sharma, reportedly representing Shree Cement Limited, in direct violation of Section 2 of the Meghalaya Transfer of Land (Regulation) Act, 1971—which categorically prohibits the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals without written permission from the Deputy Commissioner. The government, by the JNC’s own account, remained silent. The Meghalaya State Pollution Control Board pressed forward with its public hearing on December 19, 2025, with its member secretary, stating, with the perfect disengagement of institutional neutrality, “Our responsibility is only to organize the hearing” (The Shillong Times, December 13, 2025). One is reminded of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of “evil”—the chilling ordinariness with which institutions process their own injustices.
And this is where the EIA document we have before us must be subjected to what Derrida called “deconstruction”—not as a literary exercise, but as an act of political survival. The document speaks of a “public hearing yet to be conducted” and assures that community concerns “will beincorporated after conducting the public hearing.” But the protests in Daistong had already occurred months before this document was filed. The villagers had already cried out. The JNC had already presented evidence. The government had already remained silent. The public hearing, then, is not consultation—it is choreography. It is the performance of a democratic process without its substance, what Wittgenstein might call a “language game” whose rules have been written by only one player.
Consider further that the Terms of Reference (ToR) for this mining project’s EIA study—a document supposedly anchored in Meghalayan environmental law—were processed through the Gujarat SEAC, the State Expert Appraisal Committee of Gujarat (EIA Report, Chapter 1, Table 1.6). Gujarat. A state approximately 3,000 kilometers away from Lum Syrman village. What does it mean for a Jaintia village’s fate to be deliberated by a committee sitting in Gandhinagar? It means that the grammar of governance has already relocated the locus of authority away from the people most affected. This is what scholars of the CMI Institute identify as “decentralization creating a gap in land and resources governance”—a gap through which extraction flows freely, while accountability remains upstream, in distant bureaucracies, unreachable by those whose crops, water sources, and ancestral caves are at stake.
The document notes, almost in passing, that the proposed mine area is located approximately 10 kilometers from the Saipong Reserve Forest, a vital wildlife corridor. Villagers who protested in November 2025 pointed out that their elaka (jurisdiction) is home to extensive cave systems and intricate subterranean water networks (East Jaintia Hills Villagers Protest, YouTube, November 29, 2025). The EIA’s study period — a mere three months, from March 2025 to May 2025 — raises profound questions about whether three months of data collection can capture seasonal biodiversity, monsoon hydrology, or the long-term soil chemistry of a landscape shaped over millennia. O.P. Singh, writing on Meghalaya’s coal mining economy, observed that “the livelihood of a large population is at stake due to degradation of water and soil quality and reduction in agricultural productivity.” Traditional crafts and artisanal skills are also fast disappearing.” These are not projections. These are precedents. And the Lum Syrman project inherits this entire history.
We, the people of this abode of clouds, must name what is happening here. When the EIA says the land is “barren,” we must ask: barren to whom? When it promises “employment to locals,” we must ask: which locals, and for how long? When it assures a “better standard of living,” we must ask: better than the farming life our grandmothers knew, or better than the dispossession that will follow if we do not resist? Language, Wittgenstein reminded us, is not a mirror of reality—it is a tool that constructs reality. And the tools in this document have been calibrated for extraction, not emancipation.
The Sixth Schedule was meant to be our shield. It has, in too many cases, become the mechanism of our sophisticated dispossession. The constitutional contract between the Indian state and the indigenous peoples of Meghalaya is being renegotiated—not in parliament, not in our Dorbars, not with our elders’ consent—but in the fine print of EIA reports filed with committees sitting in Gujarat, by a company headquartered in Rajasthan, to mine 217 hectares of Jaintia land for the next fifty years.
We own this land. The constitution says so. Customary law says so. Our ancestors’ bones buried beneath these hills say so. The question is whether we will still own it by the time the limestone runs out—or whether we will be standing amid the rubble of our dispossession, holding a government pamphlet that promised us “a better standard of living,” wondering what language game was played and what we failed to read between its lines.
The time for contemplation is short. The machines are not waiting.
(The author is an advocate, trade unionist ethicist and humanist architect)
