It’s a story hiding in plain sight. A metals and mining giant, drowning in allegations of pollution and human-rights abuse, has quietly funnelled crores into the coffers of India’s ruling class. In return? A deafening silence on many heinous crimes as documented By Amnesty International.

The Money Trail

In its latest annual report, Vedanta owned by british-billionaire Anil Agarwal admitted to donating a staggering ₹157 crore to political parties in FY 2024–25. Nearly ₹97 crore went straight to the BJP and BJP-led Alliances, while Congress — the supposed opposition — received ₹10 crore.

Electoral bonds — India’s now-defunct, once-anonymous donation system — had already revealed Vedanta as one of the biggest corporate buyers of influence, quietly bankrolling both sides of the aisle. Now, with hard disclosures in black and white, the façade is gone: Vedanta’s survival strategy is written into India’s democracy itself.

Blood on the Ground

No episode captures this better than the Sterlite copper smelter in Thoothukudi. In 2018, after years of complaints of toxic emissions and contaminated water, thousands took to the streets. Police opened fire. Thirteen people were killed. The Tamil Nadu government shut the plant; courts and the National Green Tribunal upheld the decision.

Yet Vedanta refused to give up, filing petition after petition to reopen. As recently as February 2024, India’s Supreme Court had to step in, slamming the door shut once again.

How Corporate Cash Meets Anti-Naxalite Might

Vedanta doesn’t just move metals. It moves influence. And nowhere is that influence more tangible — or more violent — than in India’s tribal heartlands.

In Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills, the Dongria Kondh people have been fighting for their land for decades. Their forests aren’t just homes; they are essential carbon-stores in India's immensely polluted landscape. And Vedanta’s bauxite ambitions? A bulldozer across centuries of livelihood and decades of sustainable planning.

Across Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, similar stories repeat: iron ore, bauxite, and other mineral-rich land eyed by Vedanta. And in these same districts, the Indian state has long waged anti-Naxalite campaigns — operations framed as national security but carried out in areas where tribal communities resist displacement. Military-style interventions, curfews, paramilitary presence. The narrative oversimplified is that dissent is insurgency and protest — terrorism.

Here’s the connection: Vedanta’s massive political donations coincide with a state machinery that treats many protests as criminal threats. Corporate lobbying funds political coffers and policies give regulators and security forces the green light to protect industrial projects that pay the bills.

• On one side, corporate-backed development projects destroy livelihoods, water sources, and nature-rich forests.
• On the other, Naxalite operations recruit resistance forces for violent insurgencies, criminalising the very people the courts have recognized as rightful custodians of the land.

And where corporate interests meet tribal resistance, the state’s anti-insurgency apparatus ensures the lines of power remain untapped.