Amid accelerating climate change, riverine disasters disproportionately impact marginalized communities worldwide, exposing fundamental flaws in disaster governance paradigms. Critical scholarship increasingly frames such events not as ‘natural’ catastrophes but as manifestations of structural violence—where historical inequities, colonial continuities, and technocratic policymaking actively produce vulnerability. While global frameworks like the Sendai Agreement emphasize community participation, their implementation often sidelines Indigenous epistemologies and reinforces caste-based exclusion in Global South contexts. This study intervenes in these debates by centering justice as the missing nexus between disaster recovery and climate resilience. This paper critically examines how floods in India’s riverine regions are not merely natural events but socially produced disasters rooted in historical marginalization, caste hierarchies, and bureaucratic neglect. Focusing on the Mishing community of Majuli, Assam, and the Musahars of West Champaran, Bihar, it employs a political ecology framework and the concept of structural violence to reveal how disaster vulnerability is constructed through colonial-era land regimes, technocratic flood control policies, and exclusionary rehabilitation mechanisms. Drawing on qualitative case analysis, secondary data, and community testimonies, the study interrogates how state-led flood management, far from being neutral, actively reinforces social stratification by prioritizing elite spaces while erasing Indigenous and Dalit claims to land, citizenship, and recovery. Yet, both communities contest this erasure through sophisticated adaptive strategies—such as flood-resilient architecture and agricultural practices in Majuli—and political mobilizations like the Vistapit Mukti Vahini in Champaran, which reframes disaster recovery as a demand for land justice. The paper argues that resilience alone cannot counter structural violence unless accompanied by a fundamental shift in disaster governance—one that centers Indigenous and Dalit epistemologies, dismantles bureaucratic gatekeeping, and recognizes landlessness as a core axis of climate vulnerability. As climate change intensifies, the study urges policymakers to acknowledge that while floods are inevitable, catastrophe is not.