On June 9, 2020, a colossal fire engulfed Baghjan – a village in the oil belt of Upper Assam in Northeast India – following the explosion of one of the operational oil and gas wells located in the area. Thousands of people shifted to relief camps, while two firefighters and an engineer lost their lives. As the fire continued to rage for an astonishingly long time– six months– Baghjan attained unprecedented media visibility and governmental attention, not least because of a string of demonstrations led by villagers and local activists. Yet, these demonstrations demanded not the termination of extractive operations, but “just compensation” for the damages and more local control over the oil and gas industry. This paper examines how landscapes blighted by industrial disasters could become new grounds for the demands of responsibility and recompense from corporations and the government, as well as for the articulation of new visions and local strategies for the future. How do villagers dwelling in the broken worlds of the Anthropocene, at the margins of the nation-state, encounter oil and money, and plug them into a transforming resource politics? In taking the analysis beyond the focus on resistance – that is often used to characterize the encounter between oil and marginalized communities – this paper seeks to shed light on the emergent politics that have, on the one hand, helped perpetuate extractive operations, and on the other, embedded the extractive industries in the social life of Upper Assam. In this way, the paper presents an ethnography of the interlaced themes of environment, infrastructure and development in contemporary Northeast India, and aims to reveal the values, sentiments and affiliations at work over the struggles over resources, territory and justice in the region today.
