Fwd: Once more a beautiful piece from Arundathi Roy on Maoists
Melanie Kumar
"The media has taken to calling it the Red corridor or the Maoist
corridor. It could just as accurately be called the MoUist
corridor."
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262519
<http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262519>
Forsaken god: Will someone tell Copenhagen, leave the
bauxite in the mountain essay Mr
Chidambaram’s War A math question: How many soldiers
will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions
of people? Arundhati Roy
<http://www.outlookindia.com/peoplefnl.aspx?pid=4112&author=Arund\
hati+Roy>
Also In This Story
cover story Ten Years Ago...
<http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262531>
From "The Greater Common Good", Outlook, May 24, 1999
The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the
Dongria Kondh 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. For the
Kondh it’s as though god has been sold. They ask how much god
would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ?
Red terror?: A tribal woman
with her children in Dantewada
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.
In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, “So what?
Someone has to pay the price of progress.” Some even say,
“Let’s face it, these are people whose time has come.
Look at any developed country, Europe, the US, Australia—they
all have a ‘past’.” Indeed they do. So why
shouldn’t “we”?
The Niyamgiri hills have been sold for their bauxite. For the
Kondhs, their god’s been sold. How much, they ask, would god
go for if he was Ram, Allah or Christ?
In keeping with this line of thought, 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 that people are engaged in—the landless, the Dalits,
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. This will probably
go down as the most popular and often-repeated thing he ever
said. For some reason, the comment he made on January 6, 2009, at
a meeting of state chief ministers, when he described the Maoists
as having only “modest capabilities” doesn’t seem to
have had the same raw appeal. He revealed his government’s
real concern on June 18, 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.”
Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist
Party of India (Maoist)—CPI (Maoist)—one of the several
descendants of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising and
was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The Maoists
believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society
can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian
State. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre
(MCC) in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People’s War Group
(PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular
support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004,
one-and-a-half million people attended their rally in Warangal.)
But eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly.
They left a violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest
supporters into harsh critics. After a paroxysm of killing and
counter-killing by the Andhra police as well as the Maoists, the
PWG was decimated. Those who managed to survive fled Andhra
Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in the heart
of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been
working there for decades.
A concerted campaign has been orchestrated to shoehorn myriad
resistances into a simple George Bush binary: if you’re not
with us, you’re with the Maoists.
Not many ‘outsiders’ have any first-hand experience of
the real nature of the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent
interview
<http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/we-shall-certainly\
-defeat-the-government> with one of its top leaders, Comrade
Ganapathy, in Open magazine didn’t do much to change the
minds of those who view the Maoists as a party with an
unforgiving, totalitarian vision, which countenances no dissent
whatsoever. Comrade Ganapathy said nothing that would persuade
people that, were the Maoists ever to come to power, they would
be equipped to properly address the almost insane diversity of
India’s caste-ridden society. His casual approval of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka was enough
to send a shiver down even the most sympathetic of spines, not
just because of the brutal ways in which the LTTE chose to wage
its war, but also because of the cataclysmic tragedy that has
befallen the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, who it claimed to
represent, and for whom it surely must take some responsibility.
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.
Elections ’09: Ask not where the two billion dollars came
from
If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a
government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect
now wants to snatch away the last thing they have—their land.
Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only
wants to “develop” their region. Clearly, they do not
believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that
are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the
National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them
to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do
not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why
they have taken up arms.
Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to
eventually overthrow the Indian State, right now even they know
that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose
soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town,
are fighting only for survival.
Schedule V of the Constitution, which provides adivasis
protection & disallows alienation of their land, now seems just
window-dressing, a bit of make-up.
In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission
submitted a report called ‘Development Challenges in
Extremist-Affected Areas’
<http://planningcommission.gov.in/reports/publications/rep_dce.pd\
f> . It said, “the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be
recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the
landless and poor peasantry and adivasis. Its emergence and
growth need to be contextualised in the social conditions and
experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between
state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions.
Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power
by force, in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked
upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality,
protection, security and local development.” A very far cry
from the “single-largest internal security threat”. Since
the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody, from
the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most
sold-out newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to
concede that it is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at
the root of the problem. But instead of addressing that problem,
which would mean putting the brakes on this 21st century gold
rush, they are trying to head the debate off in a completely
different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious outrage about
Maoist “terrorism”. But they’re only speaking to
themselves.
The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time
watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or
conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day:
Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to.... They’re out
there. They’re fighting. They believe they have the right to
defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve
justice.
VT, 26/11: Odd that the Centre was ready to talk to Pakistan even
after this, but is playing hard when it comes to the poor
In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe from
these dangerous people, the government has declared war on them.
A war, which it tells us, may take between three and five years
to win. Odd, isn’t it, that even after the Mumbai attacks of
26/11, the government was prepared to talk with Pakistan?
It’s prepared to talk to China. But when it comes to waging
war against the poor, it’s playing hard. It’s not enough
that Special Police—with totemic names like Greyhounds,
Cobras and Scorpions—are scouring the forests with a licence
to kill. 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.
Surveys have been done, sites chosen. Interesting. 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.
Fire at whom? How in god’s name will the security forces be
able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is
running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the
bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as
Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist sympathisers valid targets?
When I was in Dantewada, the Superintendent of Police showed me
pictures of 19 “Maoists” who “his boys” had
killed. I asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists.
He said, “See Ma’am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol
bottles, all these things from outside.”
Licence to kill: Greyhounds, Scorpions, Cobras.... Now the IAF
can fire in self-defence, a right the poor are denied.
What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we
ever know? 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.
Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent
weapon. Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its
steady supply of planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories
about ‘Islamist Terrorism’ with planted, unsubstantiated,
hysterical stories about ‘Red Terrorism’. In the midst of
this racket, at Ground Zero, the cordon of silence is being
inexorably tightened. 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.
The next time you see a news anchor haranguing a guest, ‘Why
don’t Maoists stand for elections?’, do SMS this reply,
‘Because they can’t afford your rates.’
The first move in that direction is the concerted campaign that
has been orchestrated to shoehorn the myriad forms of resistance
taking place in this country into a simple George Bush binary: If
you are not with us, you are with the Maoists. The deliberate
exaggeration of the Maoist ‘threat’ helps the State to
justify militarisation. (And surely does no harm to the Maoists.
Which political party would be unhappy to be singled out for such
attention?) While all the oxygen is being used up by this new
doppelganger of the War on Terror, the State will use the
opportunity to mop up the hundreds of other resistance movements
in the sweep of its military operation, calling them all Maoist
sympathisers. I use the future tense, but this process is well
under way. The West Bengal government tried to do this in
Nandigram and Singur but failed. Right now in Lalgarh, the
Pulishi Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee or the
People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities—which is a
people’s movement that is separate from, though sympathetic
to, the Maoists—is routinely referred to as an overground
wing of the CPI (Maoist). Its leader, Chhatradhar Mahato, now
arrested and being held without bail, is always called a
“Maoist leader”. We all know the story of Dr Binayak Sen,
a medical doctor and a civil liberties activist, who spent two
years in jail on the absolutely facile charge of being a courier
for the Maoists. While the light shines brightly on Operation
Green Hunt, in other parts of India, away from the theatre of
war, the assault on the rights of the poor, of workers, of the
landless, of those whose lands the government wishes to acquire
for “public purpose”, will pick up pace. Their suffering
will deepen and it will be that much harder for them to get a
hearing. Once the war begins, like all wars, it will develop a
momentum, a logic and an economics of its own. It will become a
way of life, almost impossible to reverse. The police will be
expected to behave like an army, a ruthless killing machine. The
paramilitary will be expected to become like the police, a
corrupt, bloated administrative force. We’ve seen it happen
in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. The only difference in the
‘heartland’ will be that it’ll become obvious very
quickly to the security forces that they’re only a little
less wretched than the people they’re fighting. In time, the
divide between the people and the law enforcers will become
porous. Guns and ammunition will be bought and sold. In fact,
it’s already happening. Whether it’s the security forces
or the Maoists or non-combatant civilians, the poorest people
will die in this Rich People’s War. However, if anybody
believes that this war will leave them unaffected, they should
think again. The resources it’ll consume will cripple the
economy of this country.
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. The absence of Dr
Balagopal
<http://blogs.outlookindia.com/default.aspx?ddm=10&pid=2100&eid=5\
> , one of the best-known civil rights activists of Andhra
Pradesh, who died two weeks ago, closed around us like a physical
pain. He was one of the bravest, wisest political thinkers of our
time and left us just when we needed him most. Still, I’m
sure he would have been reassured to hear speaker after speaker
displaying the vision, the depth, the experience, the wisdom, the
political acuity and, above all, the real humanity of the
community of activists, academics, lawyers, judges and a range of
other people who make up the civil liberties community in India.
Their presence in the capital signalled that outside the
arclights of our TV studios and beyond the drumbeat of media
hysteria, even among India’s middle classes, a humane heart
still beats. Small wonder then that these are the people who the
Union 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.
There’s an MoU on every mountain, river, forest glade. What
the media calls the Maoist Corridor—the
Dandakaranya—could well be called the MoUist Corridor.
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. Everybody had graduated long ago from equating the
structural violence of the State with the violence of the armed
resistance. In fact, retired Justice P.B. Sawant went so far as
to thank the Maoists for forcing the establishment of this
country to pay attention to the egregious injustice of the
system. Hargopal from Andhra Pradesh spoke of his experience as a
civil rights activist through the years of the Maoist interlude
in his state. He mentioned in passing the fact that in a few days
in Gujarat in 2002, Hindu mobs led by the Bajrang Dal and the VHP
had killed more people than the Maoists ever had even in their
bloodiest days in Andhra Pradesh.
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 people—anyone who
was seen to be a dissenter—were 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
1,40,000 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 police—anything that
would make people’s lives a little easier. They asked why the
‘Writ of the State’ could never be taken to mean justice.
There was a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when in meetings like
these, people were still debating the model of
“development” that was being thrust on them by the New
Economic Policy. Now the rejection of that model is complete. It
is absolute. Everyone from the Gandhians to the Maoists agree on
that. The only question now is, what is the most effective way to
dismantle it?
An old college friend of a friend, a big noise in the corporate
world, had come along for one of the meetings out of morbid
curiosity about a world he knew very little about. Even though he
had disguised himself in a Fabindia kurta, he couldn’t help
looking (and smelling) expensive. At one point, he leaned across
to me and said, “Someone should tell them not to bother. They
won’t win this one. They have no idea what they’re up
against. With the kind of money that’s involved here, these
companies can buy ministers and media barons and policy wonks,
they can run their own NGOs, their own militias, they can buy
whole governments. They’ll even buy the Maoists. These good
people here should save their breath and find something better to
do.”
When people are being brutalised, what ‘better’ thing is
there for them to do than to fight back? It’s not as though
anyone’s offering them a choice, unless it’s to commit
suicide, like the 1,80,000 farmers caught in a spiral of debt
have done. (Am I the only one who gets the distinct feeling that
the Indian establishment and its representatives in the media are
far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing
themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?)
For several years, people in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and
West Bengal—some of them Maoists, many not—have managed
to hold off the big corporations. The question now is—how
will Operation Green Hunt change the nature of their struggle?
What exactly are the fighting people up against?
SEZ who: Is it development?
It’s true that, historically, mining companies have almost
always won their battles against local people. Of all
corporations, leaving aside the ones that make weapons, they
probably have the most merciless past. They are cynical,
battle-hardened campaigners and when people say ‘Jaan denge
par jameen nahin denge (We’ll give away our lives, but never
our land)’, it probably bounces off them like a light drizzle
on a bomb shelter. They’ve heard it before, in a thousand
different languages, in a hundred different countries.
Right now in India, many of them are still in the First Class
Arrivals lounge, ordering cocktails, blinking slowly like lazy
predators, waiting for the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs)
they have signed—some as far back as 2005—to materialise
into real money. But four years in a First Class lounge is enough
to test the patience of even the truly tolerant. There’s only
that much space they’re willing to make for the elaborate, if
increasingly empty, rituals of democratic practice: the (rigged)
public hearings, the (fake) Environmental Impact Assessments, the
(purchased) clearances from various ministries, the
long-drawn-out court cases. Even phony democracy is
time-consuming. And time, for industrialists, is money.
So what kind of money are we talking about? In their seminal,
soon-to-be-published work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis
and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that
the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is
2.27 trillion dollars. (More than twice India’s Gross
Domestic Product). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices
it would be about 4 trillion dollars. A trillion has 12 zeroes.
Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7
per cent. Quite often, if the mining company is a known and
recognised one, the chances are that, even though the ore is
still in the mountain, it will have already been traded on the
futures market. So, while for the adivasis the mountain is still
a living deity, the fountainhead of life and faith, the keystone
of the ecological health of the region, for the corporation,
it’s just a cheap storage facility. Goods in storage have to
be accessible. From the corporation’s point of view, the
bauxite will have to come out of the mountain. If it can’t be
done peacefully, then it will have to be done violently. Such are
the pressures and the exigencies of the free market.
For the adivasis, the mountain is still a living deity, but for
the corporation, it’s just a cheap storage facility. The
bauxite will have to come out of the mountain.
That’s just the story of the bauxite in Orissa. Expand the
four trillion dollars to include the value of the millions of
tonnes of high-quality iron ore in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and
the 28 other precious mineral resources, including uranium,
limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble, copper, diamond,
gold, quartzite, corundum, beryl, alexandrite, silica, fluorite
and garnet. Add to that the power plants, the dams, the highways,
the steel and cement factories, the aluminium smelters, and all
the other infrastructure projects that are part of the hundreds
of MoUs (more than 90 in Jharkhand alone) that have been signed.
That gives us a rough outline of the scale of the operation and
the desperation of the stakeholders. 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. It
doesn’t seem to matter at all that the Fifth Schedule of the
Constitution provides protection to adivasi people and disallows
the alienation of their land. It looks as though the clause is
there only to make the Constitution look good—a bit of
window-dressing, a slash of make-up. 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 homelands—the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco,
Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and, of course, Vedanta.
There’s an MoU on every mountain, river and forest glade.
We’re talking about social and environmental engineering on
an unimaginable scale. And most of this is secret. It’s not
in the public domain. 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.
Our 24-hour news channels that are so busy hunting for macabre
stories of Maoist violence—and making them up when they run
out of the real thing—seem to have no interest at all in this
side of the story. I wonder why?
Perhaps it’s because the development lobby to which they are
so much in thrall says the mining industry will ratchet up the
rate of GDP growth dramatically and provide employment to the
people it displaces. This does not take into account the
catastrophic costs of environmental damage. But even on its own
narrow terms, it is simply untrue. Most of the money goes into
the bank accounts of the mining corporations. Less than 10 per
cent comes to the public exchequer. A very tiny percentage of the
displaced people get jobs, and those who do, earn slave-wages to
do humiliating, backbreaking work. By caving in to this paroxysm
of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with
our ecology.
To get the bauxite out of the mountain, the iron ore from the
forest, India needs to militarise. To militarise, it needs an
enemy. The Maoists are that enemy.
When the scale of money involved is what it is, the stakeholders
are not always easy to identify. Between the CEOs in their
private jets and the wretched tribal Special Police Officers in
the “people’s” militias—who for a couple of
thousand rupees a month fight their own people, rape, kill and
burn down whole villages in an effort to clear the ground for
mining to begin—there is an entire universe of primary,
secondary and tertiary stakeholders. These people don’t have
to declare their interests, but they’re allowed to use their
positions and good offices to further them. How will we ever know
which political party, which ministers, which MPs, which
politicians, which judges, which NGOs, which expert consultants,
which police officers, have a direct or indirect stake in the
booty? How will we know which newspapers reporting the latest
Maoist “atrocity”, which TV channels “reporting
directly from Ground Zero”—or, more accurately, making it a
point not to report from Ground Zero, or even more accurately,
lying blatantly from Ground Zero—are stakeholders?
What is the provenance of the billions of dollars (several times
more than India’s GDP) secretly stashed away by Indian
citizens in Swiss bank accounts? Where did the two billion
dollars spent on the last general elections come from? Where do
the hundreds of millions of rupees that political parties and
politicians pay the media for the ‘high-end’,
‘low-end’ and ‘live’ pre-election ‘coverage
packages’ that P. Sainath recently wrote about come from?
(The next time you see a TV anchor haranguing a numb studio
guest, shouting, “Why don’t the Maoists stand for
elections? Why don’t they come in to the mainstream?”, do
SMS the channel saying, “Because they can’t afford your
rates.”)
Not Quite PC: CEO, Op Green
Hunt
What are we to make of the fact that the Union home minister, P.
Chidambaram, the CEO of Operation Green Hunt, has, in his career
as a corporate lawyer, represented several mining corporations?
What are we to make of the fact that he was a non-executive
director of Vedanta—a position from which he resigned the day
he became finance minister in 2004? What are we to make of the
fact that, when he became finance minister, one of the first
clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a
Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the
Vedanta group?
What are we to make of the fact that, when activists from Orissa
filed a case against Vedanta in the Supreme Court, citing its
violations of government guidelines and pointing out that the
Norwegian Pension Fund had withdrawn its investment from the
company alleging gross environmental damage and human rights
violations committed by the company, Justice Kapadia suggested
that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite, a sister company of
the same group? He then blithely announced in an open court that
he too had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to
Sterlite to go ahead with the mining despite the fact that the
Supreme Court’s own expert committee had explicitly said that
permission should be denied and that mining would ruin the
forests, water sources, environment and the lives and livelihoods
of the thousands of tribals living there. Justice Kapadia gave
this clearance without rebutting the report of the Supreme
Court’s own committee.
Salwa Judum: Inaugurated just days after an MoU with Tatas
What are we to make of the fact that the Salwa Judum, the brutal
ground-clearing operation disguised as a “spontaneous”
people’s militia in Dantewada, was formally inaugurated in
2005, just days after the MoU with the Tatas was signed? And that
the Jungle Warfare Training School in Bastar was set up just
around then?
What are we to make of the fact that two weeks ago, on October
12, the mandatory public hearing for Tata Steel’s Rs
10,000-crore steel project in Lohandiguda, Dantewada, was held in
a small hall inside the collectorate, cordoned off with massive
security, with a hired audience of 50 tribal people brought in
from two Bastar villages in a convoy of government jeeps? (The
public hearing was declared a success and the district collector
congratulated the people of Bastar for their cooperation.)
What are we to make of the fact that just around the time the
prime minister began to call the Maoists the “single-largest
internal security threat” (which was a signal that the
government was getting ready to go after them), the share prices
of many of the mining companies in the region skyrocketed?
The mining companies desperately need this “war”.
It’s an old technique. They hope the impact of the violence
will drive out the people who have so far managed to resist the
attempts that have been made to evict them. Whether this will
indeed be the outcome, or whether it’ll simply swell the
ranks of the Maoists remains to be seen.
Reversing this argument, Dr Ashok Mitra, former finance minister
of West Bengal, in an article called ‘The Phantom Enemy’,
argues that the “grisly serial murders” that the Maoists
are committing are a classic tactic, learned from guerrilla
warfare textbooks. He suggests that they have built and trained a
guerrilla army that is now ready to take on the Indian State, and
that the Maoist ‘rampage’ is a deliberate attempt on
their part to invite the wrath of a blundering, angry Indian
State which the Maoists hope will commit acts of cruelty that
will enrage the adivasis. That rage, Dr Mitra says, is what the
Maoists hope can be harvested and transformed into an
insurrection. This, of course, is the charge of
‘adventurism’ that several currents of the Left have
always levelled at the Maoists. It suggests that Maoist
ideologues are not above inviting destruction on the very people
they claim to represent in order to bring about a revolution that
will bring them to power. Ashok Mitra is an old Communist who had
a ringside seat during the Naxalite uprising of the ’60s and
’70s in West Bengal. His views cannot be summarily dismissed.
But it’s worth keeping in mind that the adivasi people have a
long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth
of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being
manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them
something of a disservice.
Presumably Dr Mitra is talking about the situation in Lalgarh
where, up to now, there has been no talk of mineral wealth. (Lest
we forget—the current uprising in Lalgarh was sparked off
over the chief minister’s visit to inaugurate a Jindal Steel
factory. And where there’s a steel factory, can the iron ore
be very far away?) The people’s anger has to do with their
desperate poverty, and the decades of suffering at the hands of
the police and the ‘Harmads’, the armed militia of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist) that has ruled West Bengal for
more than 30 years.
Even if, for argument’s sake, we don’t ask what tens of
thousands of police and paramilitary troops are doing in Lalgarh,
and we accept the theory of Maoist ‘adventurism’, it
would still be only a very small part of the picture.
The real problem is that the flagship of India’s miraculous
‘growth’ story has run aground. It came at a huge social
and environmental cost. And now, as the rivers dry up and forests
disappear, as the water table recedes and as people realise what
is being done to them, the chickens are coming home to roost. All
over the country, there’s unrest, there are protests by
people refusing to give up their land and their access to
resources, refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly,
it’s beginning to look as though the 10 per cent growth rate
and democracy are mutually incompatible. To get the bauxite out
of the flat-topped hills, to get iron ore out from under the
forest floor, to get 85 per cent of India’s people off their
land and into the cities (which is what Mr Chidambaram says
he’d like to see), India has to become a police state. The
government has to militarise. To justify that militarisation, it
needs an enemy. The Maoists are that enemy. They are to corporate
fundamentalists what the Muslims are to Hindu fundamentalists.
(Is there a fraternity of fundamentalists? Is that why the RSS
has expressed open admiration for Mr Chidambaram?)
It would be a grave mistake to imagine that the paramilitary
troops, the Rajnandgaon air base, the Bilaspur brigade
headquarters, the Unlawful Activities Act, the Chhattisgarh
Special Public Security Act and Operation Green Hunt are all
being put in place just to flush out a few thousand Maoists from
the forests. In all the talk of Operation Green Hunt, whether or
not Mr Chidambaram goes ahead and “presses the button”, I
detect the kernel of a coming state of Emergency. (Here’s a
math question: If it takes 6,00,000 soldiers to hold down the
tiny valley of Kashmir, how many will it take to contain the
mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?)
Instead of narco-analysing Kobad Ghandy
<http://blogs.outlookindia.com/default.aspx?ddm=10&pid=2083&eid=5\
> , the recently arrested Maoist leader, it might be a better
idea to talk to him.
In the meanwhile, will someone who’s going to the Climate
Change Conference in Copenhagen later this year please ask the
only question worth asking: Can we please leave the bauxite in
the mountain?
RpSingh
while reading newspapers. Why don't the people in power who can make
the difference read it and do something good for the society.
r.p.singh