Everyday Bureaucratic Resistance and the Defense of Adivasi Commons under Digitized Land Governance in Jharkhand

Adivasi (Indigenous) communities in India have historically governed land, forests, and water as shared commons through collective decision-making, customary rules, and community institutions (Jodha, 1990; Ambagudia, 2025). These arrangements resonate with common property theories that emphasize locally crafted institutions, shared norms, and collective management of common-pool resources as viable alternatives to privatization and centralized state control (Ostrom, 1990; Bromley, 1992; Jodha, 1990). Yet such systems are increasingly undermined by state land regimes that privilege individualized ownership, bureaucratic legibility, and technocratic governance, marginalizing collective tenure (Partelow et al., 2019; Sarmiento-Barletti et al., 2021). In Jharkhand, these dynamics have been intensified through digitized land-record systems, where procedural loopholes, administrative opacity, and the misrecognition of customary authority enable customary commons to be illegally recorded as individualized digital titles, producing new forms of bureaucratic dispossession. This paper examines how a Scheduled Area village in Khunti district resists such dispossession by mobilizing legally recognized rights and institutions under the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025, including participant observation, interviews, archival research, and legal analysis, the study traces villagers’ responses to the digital recording of common land under the name of a non-Adivasi outsider. Rather than relying primarily on overt protest, community members activated Gram Sabha deliberations constitutionally recognized village assemblies under PESA, alongside Maha Gram Sabha meetings, collective petitions, boundary verification claims, and sustained engagement with administrative and legal procedures to contest the land record and reassert collective ownership. The findings demonstrate that resistance operates not only through visible mobilization but also through everyday practices of vigilance, documentation, and institutional participation. These practices constitute a repertoire of resistance that combines quiet, routine forms of monitoring with organized engagement in formal political and administrative arenas (Scott, 1985; Cornwall, 2004). Institutional engagement here does not signal compliance; it becomes resistance insofar as villagers strategically mobilize violated procedural rights to challenge bureaucratic dispossession and assert collective autonomy. The paper conceptualizes these practices as everyday bureaucratic resistance: a form of struggle in which law and bureaucracy become contested terrains through which collective rights are enacted, defended, and operationalized in everyday governance. The recent operationalization of the Jharkhand PESA Rules (2025) provides a critical context for understanding how subaltern procedural mobilization reshapes governance practices and contributes to processes of state formation from below understood, following Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), as the production of political authority through routine legal and administrative struggle. By linking everyday collective action with institutional and legal engagement embedded in regimes of regulation and legitimation, the study contributes to Resistance Studies by expanding analytical understandings of resistance beyond protest and disruption to include collective, rights-based, and bureaucratic struggles under conditions of neoliberal land governance.