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India: an Empire in Denial
"No word ever dies. What we are saying today may not be accepted by the
people at this moment. But our propaganda is not in vain. Our words remain
embedded among the people... One who doesn't dream and can't make others dream, can
never become a revolutionary." Ideologue
of Maoist movement,
Charu Mazumdar quoted in
Sumanta Banerjee - India's Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising,
1984
Maoist fighters training in Chattisgarh state in central India in 2006
India's Counter Insurgency: A Civil War
[see also India in new anti-Maoist tactic
, 9 October 2009]
[TamilNet, Thursday, 8 October 2009]
�Instead of addressing the source of the problem, the Indian state has decided
to launch a military offensive: kill the poor and not
the poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government... The millionaire population in India grew in 2007 by 22.6 per cent from the
previous year, which is higher than in any other country in the world... (but) 80 percent of households have no access to safe drinking water. 77 percent spend
less than 20 rupees a day. Only 42 percent houses have electricity. 93 percent
of the work force (58 percent in agricultural sector) is of informal workers,
lacking any employment security, work security and social security. Close to 60
percent of rural households are effectively landless. Between 1997 and 2007,
182,936 farmers committed suicide.�
 India, in consultation with US counter-insurgency forces, is
planning an unprecedented military offensive against ultra-Marxist rebels that
is going to hit mainly the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples of India in the states
of Andra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Maharashtra,
warns a protest document drafted by Arundhati Roy and a group of progressive
intellectuals. India plans to deploy its paramilitary forces, anti-rebel
militias organized and funded by government agencies and possibly Indian Armed
Forces including the Air Force in this war, the stated objective of which is to
�liberate� areas under the influence of Maoist rebels, but the real aim is to
exploit land and resources of the deprived people, the document points out. In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister of India, the group of eminent
persons said, �Such a military campaign will endanger the lives and livelihoods
of millions of the poorest people living in those areas, resulting in massive
displacement, destitution and human rights violation of ordinary citizens.�
�The geographical terrain, where the government's military offensive is planned
to be carried out, is very rich in natural resources like minerals, forest
wealth and water, and has been the target of large scale appropriation by
several corporations.�
The government's offensive is an attempt to crush popular resistances in order
to facilitate the entry and operation of these corporations and to pave the way
for unbridled exploitation of the natural resources and the people of these
regions, the letter pointed out.
�Instead of addressing the source of the problem, the Indian state has decided
to launch a military offensive to deal with this problem: kill the poor and not
the poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government,� accuses
the letter, adding that �it would deliver a crippling blow to Indian democracy
if the government tries to subjugate its own people militarily without
addressing their grievances.�
Alleging that the government responses have already created civil war like
situation in parts of Chhattisgargh and West Bengal, the group of intellectuals
asked the government to immediately withdraw military operations as it has the
�potential for triggering a civil war.� In a separate background note, the document emphasized three dimensions of the
crisis: (a) the development failure of the post-colonial Indian state, (b) the
continued existence and often exacerbation of the structural violence faced by
the poor and marginalized, and (c) the full-scale assault on the meagre resource
base of the peasantry and the tribal (indigenous people) in the name of
"development". The document brought out some of the statistics of development failure:
80 percent of households have no access to safe drinking water. 77 percent spend
less than 20 rupees a day. Only 42 percent houses have electricity. 93 percent
of the work force (58 percent in agricultural sector) is of informal workers,
lacking any employment security, work security and social security. Close to 60
percent of rural households are effectively landless. Between 1997 and 2007,
182,936 farmers committed suicide. "Poor and vulnerable" increased from 811 million in 1999-00 to 836 million in
2004-05.
The millionaire population in India grew in 2007 by 22.6 per cent from the
previous year, which is higher than in any other country in the world.
Further analysis culled out from the document: In this sea of poverty and misery, there are two sections of the population that
are much worse off than the rest: the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes
(ST) population. There are two dimensions of structural violence against them: (a) oppression,
humiliation and discrimination along the lines of caste and ethnicity and (b)
regular harassment, violence and torture by arms of the State. For the SC and ST population, therefore, the violence of poverty, hunger and
abysmal living conditions has been complemented and worsened by the structural
violence that they encounter daily. While the SC and ST population together account for close to a quarter of the
Indian population, they are the overwhelming majority in the areas where the
Indian government proposes to carry out its military offensive against alleged
Maoist rebels. This, then, is the social background of the current conflict. Third comes the unprecedented attack on the access of the marginalized and poor
to common property resources. Whatever little access the poor had to forests, land, rivers, common pastures,
village tanks and other common property resources to cushion their inevitable
slide into poverty and immiserization has come under increasing attack by the
Indian state in the guise of so-called development projects. Despite numerous protests from people and warnings from academics, the Indian
State has gone ahead with the establishment of 531 Special Economic Zones
(SEZs). They require a large and compact tract of land, and thus inevitably mean the
loss of land, and thus livelihood, by the peasantry. Around 60 million people have faced displacement between 1947 and 2004; this
process of displacement has involved about 25 million hectares of land, which
includes 7 million hectares of forests and 6 million hectares of other common
property resources. How many of these displaced people have been resettled? Only
one in every three. Thus, there is every reason for people not to believe the government's claims
that those displaced from their land will be, in any meaningful sense,
resettled. This is one of the most basic reasons for the opposition to
displacement and dispossession. In almost all cases the affected people try to ventilate their grievances using
peaceful means of protest; they take our processions, they sit on
demonstrations, they submit petitions. The response of the State is remarkably
consistent in all these cases: it cracks down on the peaceful protestors, sends
in armed goons to attack the people, slaps false charges against the leaders and
arrests them and often also resorts to police firing and violence to terrorize
the people. It is, thus, the action of the State that blocks-off all forms of democratic
protest and forces the poor and dispossessed to take up arms to defend their
rights, the document said. |
