By framing basic healthcare as corporate charity, the Adani Foundation’s latest advertisement inadvertently delivers a devastating indictment of both BJP and Congress governance in Chhattisgarh.

A recent promotional video on X (formerly Twitter) by the Adani Foundation tries to tap the halo effect of the conglomerate and shift its image from a controversial mining house to the ultimate savior of Hasdeo. The advertisement boldly states that before their help, there was no other choice for the people who were in need of medical help except that of “Duwaon ka sahara tha”. This well-crafted story of corporate charity is not only a cynical public relations ploy, but also a damning assessment of a business-centric corporate agenda and a total failure of state leadership.

In order to comprehend the audacity of this advertisement, one must take a look at the reality of Hasdeo Arand. Its main use of one of India’s most ecologically sensitive and fiercely protected areas is not for public health, it is for coal. The Adani Foundation is trying to cleanse its image by portraying itself as the only one that provides life-saving care, and the very indigenous communities which oppose displacement and deforestation are its props in a corporate marketing campaign. It’s a textbook smokescreen – a form of ‘charity’ that covers up the environmental and social damage of mining.

But this corporate manoeuvre reveals a much darker political truth. The political arithmetic is clear – but devastating. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoyed a continuous 15-year rule over the state of Chhattisgarh before the Indian National Congress took over for five years. Lot of political capital, millions of rupees in budgets were spent for two decades, on rural and tribal development. Where did the tax-payer money go if the people of Hasdeo had nothing but “dua”? How could successive governments over the years not have been able to establish basic health care facilities (primary care centres, district hospitals and mobile clinics) in a resource-rich area?

However, if the Adani Foundation’s statement is an over-optimistic public relations exercise then the government’s absolute silence is even more worrying. It’s a way in which the government is telling everyone that they are complicit in the deaths of citizens who cannot get medical attention because the government refused to provide it. In effect, the state administration is allowing a private company to criticize its own administration record, provided that it’s doing so in the interests of the wider business-state mix.

These were not granted as a charitable gesture to those who could be persuaded to give up their land or forest to the mining conglomerate for a fraction of their land value, but as a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Hasdeo’s citizens don’t have to hand over their forests for basic human rights to corporate saviors. Time the government has to clarify whether it has handed over its administration to the Adani Group in the Hasdeo or it didn’t really care about the indigenous people of the region in the first place.