(PDF) Mining normalcy: Lithium and its spectral forms

Original Research Article Mining normalcy: Lithium and its spectral forms EPD: Society and Space 1–8 © The Author(s) 2025 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/02637758251378641 journals.sagepub.com/home/epd Mona Bhan1 Abstract In February 2023, the Geological Survey of India announced the discovery of 5.9 million metric tons of lithium in Kashmir, positioning India as the world’s sixth-largest holder of this critical mineral. In this essay, I analyze how India’s “green transition” under a fascist Hindu regime, is entangled with settler colonial ambitions and extractive politics in Kashmir. Keywords Lithium mining, eco fascism, Kashmir, settler colonialism On February 9, The Geological Survey of India discovered 5.9 million tons of lithium (Times of India, 2023) in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region, which has been under India’s military occupation since 1947. Described in mainstream media as “a shot in the arm for both India and the world’s transition to clean [and green] tech” (FDI Intelligence, 2023), the discovery of lithium reserves in Kashmir could secure, the newspapers claimed, India’s place as the world’s sixth (Mining Technology, 2024) top holder of lithium. Aspirations of making India a global hub for lithium merged with the promise of a new era of “atmanirbhar bharat” (self-reliant India) (The Economic Times, 2023) with the Minister of Mines claiming that, at “9.3 million tons” (Earth Journalism Network, 2023), Kashmir had the largest deposit of lithium in the world.1 Such massive lithium deposits were a cosmic2 gift to India since these were discovered, claimed an Indian minister, under Goddess Mata Vaishnodevi Devi’s “feet” (The Economic Times, 2023) in the Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir. Before 2019, in the Indian imaginary, Kashmir was rarely figured as a hub for green technology. With its history of wars, bloodshed, and “terrorism,” the region was an economic drain on the Indian exchequer, a “begging bowl” that had long relied on the Indian largesse to survive (Bhan 2014). This image changed rapidly after India stripped Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy in 2019 through the Abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, paving the way for India’s settler colonial extraction under the pretext of development and political integration. Since then, India has expanded its extractive control over land, water, meadows, orchards, and farmlands to build military 1 Syracuse University, USA Corresponding author: Mona Bhan, Department of Anthropology, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 327 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. Email:

2 EPD: Society and Space 0(0) Figure 1. A tweet celebrating the power of Mata Vaishno Devi. encampments, roads, railways, tunnels, and highways that dispossess and displace Kashmiri communities of their agricultural land and render them homeless. Mining for lithium, while yet another extractive intervention, allows India to frame the dramatic political shifts in Kashmir as an important part of its mission to safeguard the environment and vitalize India’s green economy. Since lithium is marketed as a key raw material (British Geological Survey, 2021) for the world’s transition to clean energy, and India is presented as a leading actor “driving global action on climate change” (World Economic Forum, 2023), the hype around lithium’s discovery bolsters Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image as an “environmental savior,” while presenting lithium’s presence in Kashmir as a cosmic blessing. Over the years, the Reasi region, where Goddess Mata Vaishnodevi’s shrine is located, has emerged as a popular site for Hinduism’s “holiest pilgrimage”(Chauhan 2011, 106), attracting approximately nine million Hindu pilgrims, a staggering rise since the 1990s when the numbers were roughly one million (Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board, 2025). While the government attributes the increased rush of pilgrims to the efficient management of tourists by the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board which was established in 1996, the political economy of Hindu pilgrimage in the wider Kashmir region is deeply tied to the Indian state’s interventions to claim Kashmir as part of the Hindu sacred geography. According to Hindu beliefs, the Mata herself beckons her followers to visit the shrine, and without her will or agency, it is impossible for the devotees to seek her “darshan or [her] auspicious glimpse” (Chauhan 2011, 103). In sacred visions of the Mata, she represents Shakti or feminine divine power, a benevolent goddess who embodies the force of prakriti (nature) (Singh 2021) and bestows her devotees with “sons [and] bountiful harvests,” while protecting them from “enemies” (Foster and Stoddard 2010: 112). Therefore, the fact that “India’s global lithium dreams” (Business Standard, 2023) would “take shape in Vaishno Devi’s shadow” (Business Standard, 2023) was no coincidence. It was proof that once again Vaishno Devi’s “Shakti had blessed India,” (Tweet, 2023) and her benevolence would now lead India toward greener futures. As lithium inaugurates a new phase of “geological pilgrimage” (Business Standard, 2023) in Reasi, its powers remain sutured to Mata’s divine Shakti, a cosmological force that promises to “Make India Great Again” (Business Insider, 2025). In this context then, energy transition is more than a progression from the carbon-based present to a supposedly greener future. It is the inauguration of a sustainable Hindutva or Hindu fascism that relies on discourses of clean and green energy to hide its dark histories and even darker visions for the future. And, more importantly, it is about deploying cosmic signs and symbols, as well as the material transformations wrought by mining, to indelibly stamp Kashmir as a quintessential Hindu territory in line with India’s settler Bhan 3 imaginaries. Mining for India’s cosmic material in a region known hitherto for its Islamic jihad against Hindu forces is considered a sanction from the gods to “rediscover” Kashmir in its resource-rich avatar and leave its past—deprived and desiccated under dominant Islamic influences—behind (Figure 1). But this worlding, in which atomic minerals become cosmic elements, is disrupted by a warring present that reveals the limits of utopic Hindu futures. For in the same sites where lithium was discovered (such as Reasi), it is not just the Indian state’s desire for a glistening metal but also a “new” militancy (The Guardian, 2024) that the Indian state encounters. Despite the goddess’s blessings, the war rages on precisely in the parts where India discovered its cosmic mineral. While “Pakistan-backed” (The Hindu, 2024) Islamic terror was stamped out in the Kashmir Valley after 2019, it has, news reports claim, mushroomed in other parts of Kashmir. The frequent ambush of Army convoys and bus attacks on Hindu pilgrims’ signal for many Indians a troubling resurgence of Muslim Jihad in the region. “Rajouri and Kandi attacks: Kashmir Militancy is bouncing back with New Tactics,” (Usanas Foundation, 2023) claims an Indian journalist. Despite being tamed in 2003 by “Operation Sarp Vinash” [destruction of the snake] (Swarajya, 2024), the “snake” has resurfaced, and the incidents, Indian analysts speculate, could lead to a wider cycle of violence and spark a more extensive rebellion. Indeed, according to them, backward Jihadis were yet again trampling India’s vision for a developed Kashmir, as this warning from the people’s Anti-Fascist (PAFF) front shows (India Today, 2023b): . The PAFF was designated a terrorist group by the Indian state in 2023, a designation that criminalizes their actions and statements as instances of anti-India Jihadi violence. But it is also local villagers in the Salal-Haimana area, both Hindu and Muslim, who will be most impacted by India’s mining interventions (Upadhyay, 2025). Villagers are anxious and deeply angered by lithium-induced mass displacements, which will leave them homeless, and without access to their land, water, forests, and cattle (Figure 2).3 Behind the carefully manufactured image of normalcy in the post-abrogation period, then, hides a dystopian present for Kashmir’s Hindu and Muslim residents and a deeply felt Indian anxiety about the region’s “insurgent” futures. While state-organized cricket matches, Bollywood films, and food and literature festivals promote Narendra Modi’s brand of “Naya Kashmir” [New Kashmir], metals like lithium become material markers of this newness, as Kashmir is used to conjure India’s green and sustainable futures. Anticipating its discovery, the Indian parliament passed a law (Reuters, 2023) on August 2, 2023, removing lithium from the list of atomic minerals and opening it to exploration by private companies. The trouble, however, is that no lithium has been found yet. Despite the media and political celebrations, analysts question the “composition of the deposit[s] (Reuters, 2024) in Jammu and Kashmir.” The government’s attempts to invite bids to auction mining rights for lithium have already failed twice. Indeed, after the initial buzz died down, India claimed that there was a “considerable period of time before these deposits” (Fastmarkets, 2023) might produce lithium. Moreover, the “discovery was classified as “inferred” (Mining Technology, 2024), one of the three categories that is used to classify mineral resources. The classification meant that there was low confidence in the actual quantity, grade, and mineral content of the mines. It turned out that India’s lithium discovery was “significantly” smaller (Mine, 2024) than reserves in Bolivia, Argentina, and Australia. Scholars in anthropology and related fields have foregrounded the dual, often conflicting, role of speculation in crafting alternative futures. Speculative finance exacerbates people’s experiences of social, political, and economic precarity (Bear, 2020). Extraction often relies on speculative or spectacular accumulation, or on what scholars describe as the “generation of hype in order to raise funds before the promise of a putative mineral deposit” is known (Gilbert 2020, 17). Speculative imaginations, however, open new resource frontiers and have real material effects, particularly in contexts of prolonged political violence. Through these speculative acts, imperial states can stretch their sovereignty into otherwise unmapped domains—in this case, for instance, into Kashmir’s subterranean 4 EPD: Society and Space 0(0) Figure 2. PAFF’S press release issuing a warning to India. worlds. In Turkey, as Zeynep Oguz (2023) shows us, oil’s speculated futures are deeply linked with Turkey’s desire for territorial and geopolitical expansion. Oil’s “speculative undergrounds” in Turkey, she argues, both build on the country’s “territorial anxieties” and incite a desire for expansionary geopolitics that is predicated on regaining Turkey’s lost imperial mastery. The uncertainty of what lies under the ground thus corresponds with the political unease around unsettled borders showing how the geological and political intersect to shape contemporary politics in Turkey. As in Turkey, where 5 Bhan oil’s absence-presence produces both affective and geopolitical outcomes, lithium futures intersect with questions of energy transition, environmental stewardship, and India’s settler theft in Kashmir. India’s spectral and affective economies of expansion are built around the government’s settler claims to Kashmir’s past and its futures. But speculation also carries with it an “inchoate sense of potentiality” (Uncertain Commons, 2013: 8). While lithium’s cosmicity might be insufficient to fully materialize its spectral form, limited as it is by its “inferred” potential, the Kashmiri desire for freedom lives on beyond lithium’s spectral forms. Despite images of normalcy in Indian media outlets that erase Kashmiri voices, stories of hope and dignity persist as Kashmiris figure out ways to survive and resist the Indian onslaught. As scholars of speculation argue, there is “no telling where a new emergence—the unpredictable event, cousin of the emergency, will mushroom” (Uncertain Commons, 2013, 7). And “there is no telling how actions against social and economic inequality might mutate elsewhere. There is no telling when or where insurgencies against political repression might flare up, fade to embers or be extinguished” (Uncertain Commons, 2013, 7). The presence of lithium as inferred, as potentially present, or as fully absent, does not mean that India is not pretending as if it already exists, and powering its dreams for a renewable future which will culminate in the ruination of local ecologies and ecosystems. A region where land sinks and mountains collapse cannot offer a stable home to lithium, environmentalists (Wired, 2023) claim. Whether or not it will be eventually found, its overbearing yet spectral presence is indicative of the multiple “pathologies of the present” in which Hindu fascism is strengthened by neoliberalism’s speculative imaginaries that work concertedly to normalize the politics of extraction, expansion, and control in Kashmir (Uncertain Commons, 2013, 7). At the same time, lithium’s spectral presence foretells a future of absence and exile for many Kashmiris, including me, who are unable to return home amidst India’s fascist political turn. Thinking with lithium and its phantom presence reveals the settler colonial ambitions of a state committed to obliterating material traces of a prolonged and violent occupation. As Lithium is remade into a divinely ordained Indian substance to power India’s aspirations for self-reliance (atma nirbhar Bharat), its very presence is predicated on erasing Kashmir’s contested histories and its futures outside of Indian colonial territoriality. A part of this erasure includes the criminalization and attempted silencing of scholars, lawyers, journalists, and activists whose work is deemed seditious (The Hindu, 2022) and then disappeared (AlJazeera, 2022) from news archives, and who remain incarcerated in Indian prisons under draconian anti-terror laws, or those in exile whose ties with their homes and research communities have been violently severed. In such a context, how might we rally the “productive powers of the speculative” (Oguz 2023) to reimagine action amidst the crippling effects of fascist violence? What might it mean to cultivate a vision and sensibility that can exceed the optic of presence to conjure alternative worlds of liberation predicated on radical hope and a “refusal to labor within the limits of history” (Goffe 2022,110)? While mineral imaginations transform Kashmir’s imagined and literal landscapes, and lithium’s “presence” intersects with my “absence” and inability to return home, I am compelled to live with a persistent dread as well as an inexplicable hope for our collective futures. Acknowledgments I want to thank the editors and the co-contributors of this special issue as well as the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments. ORCID iD Mona Bhan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8698-7779 6 EPD: Society and Space 0(0) Ethical approval This essay is based on information I have gathered via publicly available media resources. No human subjects were involved in the research. Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Declaration of conflicting interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Notes 1. There were several conflicting reports about the actual quantity of lithium “discovered” in Kashmir. 2. Analysts claim that “lithium did not naturally form on the planet” (India Today 2023a). It is often described as a cosmic element that formed from the bright stellar explosions called novae (India Today 2023a). 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Author biography Mona Bhan is a professor of Anthropology ahnd the Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies at Syracuse University. She is a political and environmental anthropologist whose work on Indian-occupied Kashmir explores the role of economic and infrastructural development in counterinsurgency operations and people’s resistance movements to protracted wars and settler occupation. She is the author of Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? (2014), Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (2018, With Andrew Bauer). She has co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies (2022), and the Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies (2023). Her current manuscript entitled Hydropower(ed) Nation: Clean Energy and India’s Dirty Wars in Kashmir examines the intersections between India’s environmental and territorial violence in Kashmir.