Abstract

Low-carbon mega-infrastructures constitute one of the main institutional responses to climate change in India's agrarian settings, as they are imagined around features of 'greenness' and 'cleanness.' But this story entails a problematic construction of land, the reconfiguration of space for extractive development, and a complete disruption of agrarian social structures around features of exclusion and dispossession. This research adopts perspectives from political ecology to understand the persistence of class-caste relations, the legacy of coloniality, and the new citizenship regime underlying 'green' extractivism in India's low-carbon infrastructures. Wind turbines align with broad ethno-religious conceptions of Indian citizenship and space as Hindu, and their expansion over new border areas serves nationalist projects of territorial reconfiguration, cultural identity revivalism, border-making, and Muslim populations' surveillance.

Keywords: Green extractivism, border-making, state-making, citizenship regime, Hindu nationalism

How to Cite:

Singh, D., (2023) “When 'green' becomes 'saffron': Wind extraction, border surveillance, and citizenship regime at the edge of the Indian state”, Journal of Political Ecology 30(1), 765–789. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5490