When armed forces roll into your village not during a conflict, but during a survey — you have to ask whose development this really is.
That’s essentially the question the Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) is raising after the state government deployed a heavy presence of central armed police forces and other security personnel in Siang and Upper Siang districts. The deployment, officials say, is meant to facilitate survey work, drilling, and the preparation of a preliminary feasibility report (PFR) for the proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP) — a massive hydropower venture with an estimated capacity of 11,000 to 11,200 MW.
But Congress isn’t buying the explanation. Not even close.
APCC spokesperson Johny Yangfo put it bluntly: if the project truly has the trust and acceptance of local communities, why does a survey need armed escorts? It’s a fair question. “Consent cannot be manufactured under the shadow of guns, administrative pressure or financial inducement,” Yangfo said in a statement that quickly made its way across the region’s political circles.
The party’s position is clear — security forces may be deployed to prevent incidents, but they cannot be used as tools to build public trust. That’s just not how trust works.
To be fair, Siang Deputy Commissioner Tayi Taggu did offer an explanation. He said the security deployment was specifically aimed at preventing any untoward incident during the PFR work. Attempts to reach Upper Siang Deputy Commissioner Talo Jerang were unsuccessful. So one side of this story remains officially unheard — but the imagery of armed forces accompanying surveyors into indigenous villages is hard to explain away with bureaucratic language.
The concerns from affected communities run deep and aren’t just about the guns. Congress says people in the Siang region understand development — they’re not against it. What they’re against is being bulldozed into it. The party flagged a long list of unresolved fears: displacement, loss of livelihoods, destruction of forests, threats to biodiversity, damage to cultural heritage, river ecology, and the region’s significant seismic vulnerability. The Siang valley sits in one of the most earthquake-prone zones in the country. That’s not a minor footnote when you’re talking about a multi-thousand megawatt dam.
“The Siang region is the ancestral homeland of indigenous communities and should not be treated merely as a resource zone for power generation,” the party said. That line deserves a moment’s pause. It cuts right to the heart of how large infrastructure projects have historically treated tribal land in Northeast India — as empty space waiting to be useful, rather than living landscapes tied to the identity of its people.
The APCC is now demanding the immediate withdrawal of what it calls the “excessive deployment” of security forces from villages and survey areas. It also wants all coercive project-related activities suspended until a proper, transparent consultation process takes place. The party is calling for structured dialogue with affected communities, village institutions, kebangs, civil society organisations, and other stakeholders — a time-bound process, not an open-ended one.
An independent, comprehensive assessment of the project’s environmental, social, cultural, geological, and seismic impacts by credible experts is also on their list of demands.
Congress was careful to clarify that it is not opposing development or responsible hydropower generation outright. The distinction it draws is important: it is opposing a development model that tramples people’s rights, ecology, and cultural heritage in the name of progress.
The party’s closing words may well define how this standoff is remembered: “Siang is not a battlefield. Its people are not adversaries. They are citizens, not subjects.”
That statement alone tells you everything about what’s at stake here — and why no amount of megawatts justifies silencing the people who call this land home.
