Representative photo
For nearly two months after he walked out of jail, 26-year-old Kumeswar Naik had to travel 20 kilometres every morning to sweep and mop the Kashipur Police Station – the very station where he had once been detained.
Naik, a Dalit grocery store owner from Kantamal village in Odisha’s Rayagada district, had spent five months in jail for protesting against a bauxite mining project by Vedanta Ltd in the Tijimali hills. When the Orissa High Court granted him bail in May 2025, it came with a condition that he was to clean the police station premises every morning between 6 am and 9 am.
“Walking to the police station knowing we would have to do this insulting job, I told my heart that the cause is bigger than this mere order,” Naik told Article 14, which investigated the matter. “However, I do want to point out that the judiciary itself gave this casteist order, which makes me wonder where we stand.”
His case, it turns out, is not an isolated one.
According to Article 14‘s investigation, at least eight such bail orders were issued between May 2025 and January 2026. One was by Justice SK Panigrahi of the Orissa High Court and seven by two judges of the Rayagada district court. Of the eight protesters who received bail under such conditions, six are Dalits and two are Adivasis. Five of the eight orders were enforced.
Civil society organisations and lawyers have described the conditions as casteist, arguing they effectively compel individuals to perform labour that is historically imposed on oppressed caste communities.
Such conditions exceed judicial authority because they are unrelated to the legitimate purpose of bail and instead replicate historically stigmatised caste roles.
Sharanya Nair, an activist supporting the anti-mining movement, told Article 14, “The bail condition reeks of the caste prejudices of the High Court and Rayagada sessions court judges against Dalit and Adivasi communities.”
“I am absolutely sure that an upper caste leader arrested in this or any similar case would never have been served this kind of bail condition,” she added.
In July 2025, over 86 citizens, lawyers and activists wrote to the Supreme Court asking it to take up the matter suo motu and recall the bail conditions, describing them as “not free from the prejudice against the weaker sections of our society.” The court did not intervene, according to Nair.
The protests stem from a bauxite mining contract awarded to Vedanta Ltd by the then Biju Janata Dal (BJD) government in 2023. The project, spread over roughly 1,560 hectare in the Tijimali hills – nearly half of which is forest land – will require the displacement of two villages and over 140 families who farm the land or herd cattle in the region.
Under Indian laws, including the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayati Raj Extension Act (PESA), mining in scheduled areas requires the free, prior and informed consent of gram sabhas. Villagers allege that not only was this process bypassed, but that consent records were forged, with the names of minors, deceased persons and non-residents appearing in the documents.
“Consent was forged or obtained under pressure, with gram sabha meetings conducted in the presence of police or without meaningful participation from the community,” Umakant Naik, a 24-year-old Dalit farmer and activist who was arrested in 2023, told Article 14.
Since 2023, at least 50 people have been arrested in connection with the protests, according to Nair and lawyer Mangal Murti Beuria, who represents several of the accused. The first information reports (FIR) invoke serious sections, including rioting, criminal intimidation and attempt to murder.
“The Adivasis traditionally carry axes and bows for hunting and ceremonial purposes,” he told Article 14. “This is used against them by company representatives and police, who claim that villagers tried to attack them. None of it is true, but that’s how they build a criminal case to make an example of them.”
The arrests have not spared women either. Naring Dei Majhi, a tribal woman in her early 50s, was the first woman arrested for participating in the protests. Her family alleges she was detained at the Rayagada district hospital, where she had gone to care for her daughter-in-law who had just given birth. She is currently facing seven criminal cases and was released in February 2026, with the same bail condition.
“I will not stop fighting,” Majhi said quietly.
In one family, six of seven members are facing criminal charges related to the protests. Villagers told Article 14 that the arrests have created a climate of fear, and that many have stopped travelling outside their villages for fear of detention.
For Kumeswar Naik’s wife Tulanti, who was pregnant when her husband was jailed, those months were defined by anxiety and loneliness. “But we are not giving up,” she told Article 14.
This post was last modified on April 30, 2026 3:07 pm