Archive Text: Counter Narrative Material

Dadri Forecast

Dadri Forecast is a collective research initiative that examines the transformation of the Dadri locality in Gautam Buddha Nagar, Uttar Pradesh. It focuses on the region’s pressing concerns related to land, environmental degradation, caste and communal conflict, and capitalist expansion and extractivism. Instead of aligning with the narrative of developmental modernity or with primitivistic responses to the same, the initiative seeks to forecast the consequences of extractivist and exploitative growth in the region. As the existing developmental models prioritise elite and corporate interests over the lives and resources of subaltern and working-class communities, Dadri Forecast aims to shape and shelter a counter-space: the space of ‘militant researchers’.

The locality now known as Dadri lies within Gautam Buddha Nagar, a district formed in 1997. However, the area has a much longer history. It is characterised by its once-rich wetland ecosystems, agricultural commons, and village settlements, some of which are believed to date back to the Harappan period. Once a vibrant habitat teeming with wetland biodiversity, Dadri’s landscape has been irreversibly altered today. The destruction of its ecological fabric and the loss of species—such as numerous amphibians and aquatic flora and fauna—reflect the simultaneous dispossession of human communities. These communities have been rendered what might be called ‘surplus populations’, demarcated and excluded on the basis of caste, class, and religious differences.

Dadri Forecast has emerged from the community networks built around Khandera Art Space, a weekly platform for the children of Khandera village which has been active for more than two years.

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DADRI FORECAST: A MANIFESTO FOR MILITANT RESEARCH

We declare: Dadri is not a blank slate.
It is not a “backward” locality in need of rescue through glossy schemes of “development.”
It is not an empty zone waiting to be filled with cement, concrete, or capital.

Dadri is a palimpsest—a terrain where forgotten histories, submerged ecologies, stolen futures, and communities committed to a radical future meet each other.

It is precisely here, beneath the ash and asphalt, that Dadri Forecast takes its flight.

Dadri Forecast is not a fantasy.
It is an uprising of thought.
A rupture in the sanitized narratives of the Bourgeois-Brahminical state.
A site of insurgent research.

We are the Dadri Forecast—
the lightning before the cloudburst,
peafowls’ warning before the dust storm.

We speak from Dadri, but not only for it.

We speak against the violence of extractive capitalism that swallows soil, homes, and people alike.
We speak against the idea that only malls, highways, factories, and gated enclaves count as progress.

We seek to demolish the architecture of communalism that lynches in the name of gods and cows, that fractures lives and communities through the poison of hatred.

We dream of a future forecasted not by corporate boardrooms or bureaucratic blueprints, but by the wisdom of wetlands, the memory of water, the dignity of labourers, and the laughter of children at Khandera.

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WHY DADRI?

Because Dadri is a microcosm of ‘India unmade.’
Because Akhlaq was lynched and murdered here.
Because the larks don’t sing the way they used to.
Because the water tables are falling and the smoke stacks rise.
Because prehistoric ruins still breathe beneath the ground where bulldozers roam.
Because the commons have been seized, and the people are declared surplus.
Because this is not just a site of loss — it is also a place of novel possibilities.

Dadri Forecast is our response.

Urgent. Unapologetic. Undisciplined.

We align with villagers resisting land grabs, with children imagining otherwise,
with marshes gasping for survival, with forgotten archives of revolt.

We do not offer easy solutions. We pose difficult questions.
We do not represent. We assert presence.
We do not build consensus or seek permission.
We provoke dissensus and make space for the impermissible.

Refusing to be passive witnesses to disaster.
Refusing nostalgia that traps us in a mythical past.
Refusing developmentalism that erases the people.
Refusing liberalism that masks complicity with power.
Refusing the ivory tower of academia, corporate charity, and the “NGO-isation of resistance.”

We envision a militant research practice rooted in community, grounded in care, and fierce in its approach.
We aim to build an ecology of being and thinking that bridges artists, activists, students, children, workers, and elders.

We do not want to merely document Dadri — we want a space where the place can be seen, known, felt, and fought for.

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OUR OBJECTIVES:

• Zines, Booklets, Reports: as weapons of counter-knowledge.
• Residencies: for cultivating durational and embedded solidarities.
• Cinema School: as a way of seeing, remembering, reimagining.
• Libraries: as sanctuaries of learning and unlearning.
• Public Dialogues: as acts of insurgent pedagogy and polemics.
• Playgrounds, Picnics, Workshops: as spaces where resistance germinates in joy.

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This is not an art project with a deadline.

This is a call to arm the imagination and to commit to the future.

This is not a drizzle. It is the coming monsoon.

Join us, to build a place where children, workers, artists, and students co-author a collective future.

To cultivate a weather of resistance — forecasting thunderstorms not of destruction, but of awakening.

We invite you to join us in shaping a future rooted in collective care, quest for justice, and unalloyed hope.