The meeting had been set for the night in a small house hidden behind lush vegetation. Seven men and women waited seated behind a wooden table. "You can't mention any names or provide any identifying details. We're walking on thin ice that threatens to break at any moment!" We were warned that those who had previously spoken openly had immediately paid the price for it, losing their visas and being forced to leave the country.

This secret location houses the HQ of Auroville's resistance in southern India. For the past three years, they have been battling an administration determined to take back control of this utopian town. Located in Tamil Nadu, less than 10 kilometers from the former French trading post of Pondicherry, the project, launched on February 28, 1968, by the French woman Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973) and conceived as "a place of peace, concord and harmony," now looks like a battlefield. The community – with a population of a few thousand – is divided, several lawsuits are underway and its most pessimistic members have already packed up and left. A toxic atmosphere of anger and fear, conspiracy and authoritarianism hangs in the air under the incredible canopy. Auroville may have reached its twilight years.

"Our dream is being broken. 99% of what you'll see here was built by Aurovillians and this heritage is being destroyed before our very eyes. It's extremely traumatic," said one host, who was born on this land to parents in search of meaning and came in the project's early days to create an ideal world based on egalitarianism and sharing. At the time, Auroville was a semi-desert plateau battered by winds and cyclones. No Indian wanted to live in such a resource-poor land without water or electricity. The first task of the 50 or so pioneers was to halt the soil erosion, which each monsoon turned into a spongy mass of mud. They built dams and water retention mounds and planted thousands of banyan, palm, neem, Australian acacia, bamboo and eucalyptus trees.

An ideological struggle

In the early morning hours after our meeting, we discovered the "corpses" mentioned in the previous day's secret meeting. Hundreds of the three million trees patiently planted over more than half a century have been felled for the construction of the Crown Road, a wide thoroughfare adorned with kitschy lampposts and extended by 12 radial roads. Huge gashes tear through the green oasis, which until now had been criss-crossed by bucolic red laterite paths. The first tree-cutting happened three years ago, on the night of December 4, 2021, on the orders of the secretary of the Auroville Foundation, Jayanti Ravi, despite protests from residents.

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