Arundhati Roy: "Sri Lanka solution" threatened for Maoist-led uprising in India
Richard Moore
government and corporate investors] on every mountain, river and
forest glade: social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable
scale. And most of this is secret. Somehow I don't think that the
plans that are afoot to destroy one of the world's most pristine
forests and ecosystems, as well as the people who live in it, will
be discussed at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen
http://www.revcom.us/a/184/AWTWNS-A_Roy-en.html
"Sri Lanka solution" threatened for Maoist-led uprising in IndiaExcerpts
from Arundhati Roy
November 16, 2009. A World to Win News Service. The Indian government
is preparing "Operation Green Hunt," a counter-insurgency operation
on an unprecedented scale. As many as a hundred thousand soldiers
and other security forces are to be sent into the forested hills
of eastern and central India to crush the rebellion of adivasi
(tribal peoples) led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). This
is no short-term incursion: the authorities have announced that
they plan to station massive numbers of troops in the tribal areas
for years to come.
Several commentators have warned of the danger that the Indian
government plans to seek a "Sri Lanka solution," modeled on the
recent protracted government offensive there. Massive ground forces
and air assaults were used to defeat the Tamil Tigers, and then
hundreds of thousands of the region's civilian population were
imprisoned in detention camps, where most still languish. Now what
may be permanent military bases are being built in the Tamil
heartland. The Indian government no doubt noted the implicit U.S.
approval for that operation. At the U.S.'s behest, the International
Monetary Fund [IMF] granted the Sri Lankan government a huge financial
package almost immediately after the massacre.
Following are excerpts from an article by Indian writer and activist
Arundhati Roy that appeared in the October 31 issue of the Sri Lanka
Guardian (srilankaguardian.org). The full article online gives much
more detail for her arguments and a more all-around representation
of her views. The November 2009 issue of People's
March(peoplesmarch.googlepages.com or bannedthought.net) has two
recent statements by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and other
material on this offensive. A statement by the Revolutionary
Democratic Front is also included in the AWTWNS packet dated November
16, 2009.
The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the
Dongria Kondh [one of several tribal peoples in the region] long
before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa.
The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills
and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been
sold for the bauxite they contain...
Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri
hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold
to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy
that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It's one of the
biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil
Aggarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion
that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the
many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.
If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe
them will be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that
flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria
Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live
in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly
under attack...
The government has announced Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly
against the "Maoist" rebels headquartered in the jungles of central
India. Of course, the Maoists are by no means the only ones rebelling.
There is a whole spectrum of struggles all over the country where
people are engaged in rebellionthe landless, the Dalits [so-called
"untouchables"], the homeless, workers, peasants, weavers. They're
pitted against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that
allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people's land and resources.
However, it is the Maoists who the government has singled out as
being the biggest threat.
Two years ago, when things were nowhere near as bad as they are
now, the prime minister described the Maoists as the "single-largest
internal security threat" to the country. He revealed his government's
real concern on 18 June 2009, when he told Parliament: "If left-wing
extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources
of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected."...
Right now in central India, the Maoists' guerrilla army is made up
almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions
of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only
associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after
60 years of India's so-called Independence, have not had access to
education, healthcare or legal redress. They are people who have
been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by
small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of
right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back
to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre
who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.
It's not enough that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the
Border Security Force (BSF) and the notorious Naga Battalion have
already wreaked havoc and committed unconscionable atrocities in
remote forest villages. It's not enough that the government supports
and arms the Salwa Judum, the "people's militia" that has killed
and raped and burned its way through the forests of Dantewada leaving
three hundred thousand people homeless, or on the run. Now the
government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and
tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to set up a
brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages)
and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven). Obviously,
these decisions were taken a while ago. War has been in the offing
for a while. And now the helicopters of the Indian air force have
been given the right to fire in "self-defence", the very right that
the government denies its poorest citizens...
What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Not much news
comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been cordoned
off. Those who try to go in are being beaten and arrested. And
called Maoists of course. In Dantewada, the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram,
a Gandhian ashram run by Himanshu Kumar, was bulldozed in a few
hours. It was the last neutral outpost before the war zone begins,
a place where journalists, activists, researchers and fact-finding
teams could stay while they worked in the area...
The "Sri Lanka Solution" could very well be on the cards. It's not
for nothing that the Indian government blocked a European move in
the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes committed
by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the
Tamil Tigers...
Last week, civil liberties groups from all over the country organised
a series of meetings in Delhi to discuss what could be done to turn
the tide and stop the war.
These are the people who the Union [All-India] home minister recently
accused of creating an "intellectual climate" that was conducive
to "terrorism". If that charge was meant to frighten people, to cow
them down, it had the opposite effect. The speakers represented a
range of opinion from the liberal to the radical Left. Though none
of those who spoke would describe themselves as Maoist, few were
opposed in principle to the idea that people have a right to defend
themselves against State violence. Many were uncomfortable about
Maoist violence, about the "people's courts" that delivered summary
justice, about the authoritarianism that was bound to permeate an
armed struggle and marginalise those who did not have arms. But
even as they expressed their discomfort, they knew that people's
courts only existed because India's courts are out of the reach of
ordinary people and that the armed struggle that has broken out in
the heartland is not the first, but the very last option of a
desperate people pushed to the very brink of existence. The speakers
were aware of the dangers of trying to extract a simple morality
out of individual incidents of heinous violence, in a situation
that had already begun to look very much like war.
People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand,
Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the police repression, the
arrests, the torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact
that in places like Orissa, they seemed to take orders directly
from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People
described the dubious, malign role being played by certain NGOs
funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate
prospects.
Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh
activists as well as ordinary peopleanyone who was seen to be a
dissenterwere being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that
this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms
and join the Maoists. They asked how a government that professed
its inability to resettle even a fraction of the fifty million
people who had been displaced by "development" projects was suddenly
able to identify 140,000 hectares of prime land to give to
industrialists for more than 300 Special Economic Zones, India's
onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what brand of justice
the Supreme Court was practising when it refused to review the
meaning of "public purpose" in the Land Acquisition Act even when
it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name
of "public purpose" to give to private corporations. They asked why
when the government says that "the Writ of the State must run", it
seems to only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not
schools or clinics or housing, or clean water, or a fair price for
forest produce, or even being left alone and free from the fear of
the policeanything that would make people's lives a little easier.
They asked why the "Writ of the State" could never be taken to mean
justice
The forest once known as the Dandakaranya, which stretches from
West Bengal through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, parts of Andhra
Pradesh and Maharashtra, is home to millions of India's tribal
people. The media has taken to calling it the Red corridor or the
Maoist corridor. It could just as accurately be called the MoUist
corridor. Scores of corporations, from relatively unknown ones to
the biggest mining companies and steel manufacturers in the world,
are in the fray to appropriate adivasi homelandsthe Mittals, Jindals,
Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and, of course, Vedanta.
There's an MoU [Memorandum of Understandingan agreement between
government and corporate investors] on every mountain, river and
forest glade: social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable
scale. And most of this is secret. Somehow I don't think that the
plans that are afoot to destroy one of the world's most pristine
forests and ecosystems, as well as the people who live in it, will
be discussed at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen...
A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine
(aworldtowin.org<http://www.aworldtowin.org/>), a political and
theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary
Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the worlds
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.
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