Political Geography 80 (2020) 102175 Available online 30 March 2020 0962-6298/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Disastrous hydropower, uneven regional development, and decolonization in India’s Eastern Himalayan borderlands Mabel Denzin Gergan * Department of Geography, Florida State University, USA ABSTRACT Sikkim, a small Eastern Himalayan state in India has twenty-seven hydropower projects proposed under the Indian Power Ministry’s hydropower initiative that envisions the Himalayan region as the country’s "future powerhouse" (Dharamadhikary 2008; Kohli, 2011). In 2011, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked Sikkim, the epicenter of which was located eerily close to two under construction dams and the Dzongu reserve, revered as sacred by Sikkim’s Indigenous minority Lepchas. Drawing on interviews with Lepcha residents of Dzongu, and state geologists and disaster management offcials, I center my analysis on their encounters with di- sasters and hydropower infrastructure. Building on decolonial theorizations and scholarship on Himalayan borderlands, I argue that disastrous hydropower forms on historical terrains shaped not only by geophysical conditions but also generations of uneven regional development, and the racialized colonial and postcolonial governance of the Eastern Himalayan frontier. In placing ‘disastrous’ as a prefx to hydropower, I follow my interlocutors who implicate state and private developers in producing disaster conditions in Sikkim even as they evade culpability by discursively shifting blame onto the region’s “inhospitable terrain” (GoI 2008: 27). I demonstrate that despite key differences in their relation to state power both Dzongu Lepchas and Sikkimese technocrats, forward a materialist, place-based un- derstanding of precarity, differential vulnerability, and uneven regional development. Centering Indigenous and regionalist critiques, I argue that the recent entry of hydropower development in the Eastern Himalayas, conceptualized by colonial authorities as India’s “Mongolian Fringe” (Baruah, 2013), requires a closer attention to the entanglements of frontier-making and racialization in India. More broadly, I demonstrate how disastrous hydropower development in a racialized frontier region offers a productive entry into decolonial theorizing in the Indian context. 1. Introduction On September 18th 2011, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked Sik- kim, an Eastern Himalayan state in India. Coupled with heavy rains, the earthquake triggered catastrophic landslides blocking NH-31, the only highway connecting the borderland state to ‘mainland’ India. The earthquake’s epicenter was located in North Sikkim, nearby the Teesta Stage V and Stage III hydropower projects and the Dzongu reserve. Located seventy kilometers north-east of the state capital, Gangtok, Dzongu is revered as sacred by Sikkim’s Indigenous minority Lepchas. Since 2007, Dzongu has been the site of a vibrant anti-dam movement. For Tsering, 1 a young anti-dam activist the earthquake was divine intervention, “They (local deities) are very angry” she explained, “these hydropower developers have disturbed them because of that they come out to give a lesson to the people”. Exactly a year later, as crowds gathered in Gangtok, to mark the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, a smaller earthquake shook the place, dispersing the panic-stricken crowds. This uncanny event alongside recurring landslides and fash- foods near project sites, has led to a growing public association between hydropower infrastructure and heightened precarity within Sikkim. As developers soon discover, hydropower projects do not fow uninter- rupted into inert, empty spaces (Tsing, 2005) instead their encounters with ‘unruly’ Himalayan geographies – seismic instability, crumbling hillsides and fashfoods, lay bare the limits of capital accumulation at geographic and resource frontiers (Harvey, 2005; Peluso & Lund, 2011; Karlsson, 2011; Vandergeest & Peluso, 1995). Sikkim, a formerly independent Buddhist kingdom sandwiched be- tween Nepal, China, and Bhutan, was annexed to India in 1975. I offer disastrous hydropower in Sikkim as a case study of the Indian state’s imperialist tendencies in its Himalayan borderlands. The use of ‘disas- trous’ as a prefx to hydropower makes explicit that the disasters in question here, are not a ‘natural’ outcome of Sikkim’s geophysciality but actively produced by power asymmetries at multiple scales (Huber et al., 2016). This analysis builds on the longstanding critiques of India’s * Department of Geography, Bellamy Building, Room 323, 113 Collegiate Loop, PO Box 3062190, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-2190, USA E-mail address: mgergan@fsu.edu. 1 All names in this paper are pseudonyms. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102175 Received 18 November 2018; Received in revised form 18 February 2020; Accepted 21 February 2020