Defense of PhD thesis “The Politics of Place and the Place of Politics. Large hydropower dam contestations in Sikkim, India”

Rinchu Doma Dukpa, from Darjeeling, India defended her PhD thesis titled “The Politics of Place and the Place of Politics. Large hydropower dam contestations in Sikkim, India” on the 8^th of October 2024 at Omnia Auditorium, Wageningen University. Her thesis is based on the local conflicts, contestations and social movements arising from the development of large dams on the headwaters of River Teesta in Sikkim. The PhD thesis was supervised by Riverhood / River Commons researchers Prof. Rutgerd Boelens, Dr. Jaime Hoogesteger and Dr. Gert Jan Veldwisch. The thesis elaborates on many of the core political ecology conceptualizations of the two river projects.

Hydropower development in India is highly contested, conflicted and controversial, though often framed as bringing prosperity and wealth. India’s water abundant states in the Eastern Himalaya, of which Sikkim is one, have experienced a burgeoning of large dam development after the economic liberalization of the country in 1991-92. Large dam constructions in the Sikkim Himalaya are solely for electricity generation to be transferred to power-deficit states across India. The thesis investigated the ‘politics of place’ and the ‘place of politics’ arising out of the conundrum of variegated local responses to government-driven large hydropower development in the headwaters of Teesta River in Sikkim. Through qualitative, multi-sited ethnographic research, the thesis examined local actions and mobilizations around dams, ranging from a persistently strong opposition to a perceived willingness to negotiate with the government and complete silence by individuals and communities in the North District of Sikkim. It shows how spatial contradiction invoked by large dams resulted in unique place-based struggles for identity and power that (re)shape territories, protest movements and contestations. The thesis has argued that the responses to dams are influenced by the diverse socio-cultural, politico-economic and historical contexts of the place, the people and the place-people relationships that are traversed in and with power.