Accompanying the announcement of the largest-ever round of auctioning of coal blocks in India in June 2020 were stories of resistance from a relatively nondescript region of central India: the Hasdeo Aranya forests. The media outlets – regional, national, and even global – were replete with news of letters from sarpanchs (Alam, 2020; Kaiser, 2020), petitions from the gram sabhas (Mishra, 2020b), reports of organized community resistance (Dasgupta, 2020; MS, 2020), and even interventions from the state government of Chhattisgarh (Drolia and John, 2020; P. Singh, 2020) and the political elites like the former Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (The Wire, 2020). The community resistance of 20 villages of one of the most impoverished states of India threatened to put a spanner into the prime minister's plans of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (a self-reliant India) and dreams of becoming the world's largest exporter of coal (Gupta and Regan, 2020; PTI, 2020). The Guardian characterized Hasdeo Aranya as the ‘battleground’ where the ‘war’ for coal pitted ‘indigenous people, ancient trees, elephants and sloth bears against the might of bulldozers, trucks and hydraulic jacks’ (Ellis-Petersen, 2020).
However, descriptors such as war, battleground, and conflict are perhaps the least likely to be associated with the area based on traveller accounts. As one travels on NH130 around 300 kilometres from the state capital of Raipur, one is greeted by the relative calm and the resplendent beauty of the expansive Hasdeo-Bango reservoir (one of the longest, widest, and oldest multipurpose irrigation projects in Chhattisgarh, irrigating approximately 300,000 hectares of agricultural farms downstream) at the beginning of Hasdeo Aranya forests. For another ∼40 kilometres on the highway that skirts the Hasdeo Aranya forests’ periphery, the dense forest canopy that almost entirely blocks sunlight appears as a welcome relief to weary travellers. However, regular signboards indicating the need to be careful of ‘elephants’ and ‘sloth bears’ discourage casual tourists from stepping out to bask in the beauty of the surroundings. It is almost entirely possible to miss any signs of habitation at the first visit beyond the occasional wooden huts by the roadside, a couple of teashops, and the forest range office with its green signboards camouflaged with the surroundings.
