Dungdung is a member of one of India's "adivasi" or "tribal" communities, which make up about 8 percent of the national population, and are widely thought to be indigenous to the subcontinent. That population is concentrated in central and eastern India, in tracts that are or were formerly forested. Those regions are also home to India's most intensive mining and some of its largest dams, which are essential to fulfilling the government's vision of providing electricity to over 300 million Indians who don't yet have access. Adivasi communities have close spiritual ties to the land, often relying on it for their livelihoods, and they have produced some of the staunchest opponents of India's resource-extraction economy. Some have joined a half-century-old Maoist guerrilla insurgency, which Indian armed forces have failed to fully quash over the decades.

Adivasi activists, as well as others who work in the human and environmental rights spheres in eastern and central India, are often conflated with Maoists -- and being a Maoist, or working with them in any way, is against the law, and would certainly lead to a travel ban. But Dungdung has written that he couldn't possibly be a Maoist in a piece that directly asks the question in the title: "Am I a Maoist?"

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"I have never read about Maoism. I deliberately do not read about any ideology because I know that Maoists teach the Adivasis about Maoism, Gandhians preach them about Gandhism and Marxists ask them to walk on Marxism," he wrote. "But no one bothers about Adivasism, which is the best ‘ism’ among these, which perhaps leads to a just and equitable society."

Rather, since Dungdung had traveled abroad in the recent past, he believes that something he just did must have led to his name ending up on a blacklist: publishing Mission Saranda: A War for Natural Resources in India, which follows his first book, Whose Country Is It Anyway: Untold Stories of the Indigenous Peoples of India. Many have accused him, as they did with Priya Pillai, of being an "anti-national," and standing in the way of India's development.

Dungdung's personal story follows the contours of displacement and harassment that haunt adivasi communities around India. "When I was just one year old, my family was displaced. Our 20 acres of fertile land was taken away from us in the name of development," he wrote. "Our ancestral land was submerged in a Dam, which came up at Chinda River near Simdega town in 1980."

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He said his family of six was given a pittance in compensation, and those in his community who protested were jailed. Later, his family settled in a nearby forest, but were constantly hounded out of their home by forestry officials who accused them of illegal encroachment and woodcutting. When he was still a boy, both of his parents were murdered, and the culprits were never apprehended. He believes that most of this is because of discrimination. "Why there is no electricity in my village even today? Why my people do not get water for their field whose lands were taken for the irrigation projects? Why there is no electricity in those houses, who have given their land for the power project? And why people are still living in small mud houses whose lands were taken for the steel plants? It seems that the Adivasis are only born to suffer and other to enjoy over our graves."