Statement of women's organisations against state repression in Chattisgarh

Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression

Statement of women’s organizations on increasing state violence on people's movements and sexual violence on women by police, paramilitary and army.

Bhopal, 24th and 25th October 2009

We, the undersigned representatives of women’s organizations and individuals, are deeply shocked and disturbed by the Indian government's plans to launch an armed offensive by paramilitary and armyforces in the adivasi-dominant forest areas of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. This attack is ostensibly to “liberate” these areas from the influence of Maoist rebels, and to undertake “development” activities there. There are reports of massive deployment of troops in these parts in preparation for this exercise. For the past half century, the Indian government has used various pretexts of insurgency to stifle the democratic aspirations of the people by giving a free hand to military, para and other security forces and the police. As a consequence, life and liberty has become a distant dream for people in large areas of the country,particularly in the areas of North East and Kashmir. In the recent times, in land acquisition, in privatization of natural resources and water, in clearing the country to suit national and multinational capital, new laws have been introduced to suppress anyresistance, peaceful or otherwise. While this wreaks havoc and misery on the lives of lakhs of the most marginalized and destitute population of the country, as women’s organizations we are enormously concerned about the implications of the presence of large number of paramilitary and military forcesfor the women of these regions. In all this, women are the worst sufferers. In the past 25 years, in all incidences of mass rape by Assam Rifles in Manipur in the early 80s to Kupwara in Jammu and Kashmir, no justice has been accorded to the women and no punishment to the perpetrators. The brutal torture, gang-rape and killing of Manorama in July 2004, by Assam Rifles personnel in Manipur, which has been under the armed forces for several decades now, and the courageous protest of the Manipuri women against their continuous sexual abuse by the armed forces, speaks volumes of the inhuman violence inflicted by the military and the police on women in the name of counter-insurgency operations. While the Manorama case got highlighted, incidents of sexual violence in the daily life ofthe women in states under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act largely go unreported. Recently in the case of gang rape and murder of two women in Shopian in Kashmir, ignoring the strong protests by the local community, the state agencies have blatantly tried to protect the accused. In a case where the atrocity is committed by a state agency, the accountability of the crime has to be broadened to encompass not just the rapist but all the other authorities as well as the state administration and thejudiciary which is duty bound to protect the rights of women as citizens. This makes the functionariesof the administration and the whole state an accused and co-perpetrators in the crimes. And insituations where the state through assuming unlimited powers and limits people's democratic rights, the accountability and its burden of guilt become even stronger. Presently, driven by aggressive corporatisation, sustained state violence in Chhattigarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal and other states has become the single mantra to evict people from their land
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2 and livelihood. While this is also being done in the name of “development” or “maintaining law and order”, the real design is to appropriate resources and dispossess people of the area. Tribal women in Bastar in Chhattisgarh have been subjected to the most extreme forms of violence since 2005, by Salwa Judum, a civil militia created and funded by the state, to counter the Maoists.Villagers here have reported to local activists and NGOs, of incidents of gang rapes, custodial rape, mutilation of private parts, murder and continuous sexual abuse in villages, police stations and therelief camps set up by the state government in the area. The extra-judicial murder in 2006 of a tribalfor being a Maoist, and the subsequent gang-rape of his wife in front of her child for several days inside a police station in Sarguja by police personnel including the SP is one such documented case. We are shocked that there are not even official records and FIRs of the cases of sexual violence in Dantewada district. Despite more than 90 sworn affidavits filed in cases pending before the SupremeCourt, statements made before the National Human Rights Commission, and letters to the Superintendent of Police, the police in Bastar refuse to register cases of rape by Salwa Judum goons. Finally when six women dared to file private complaints and make their statements before a Magistrate in Konta, there is inexplicable and inordinate delay of months together in registering the cases. In the meanwhile these women and their entire villages are being threatened and intimidated by the accused and other Salwa Judum leaders and SPOs that the entire village would be burnt down and the villagers implicated in Naxalite cases – a threat which they know is not an exaggeration. Sexual violence comes handy to those in power to quell women's increasing participation in resistance movements and struggles. Rape and sexual violence are being systematically used as a repressive measure by the police in all forms of opposition and resistance to state policies. The security forces, a law unto themselves in many remote areas, operate with impunity, as if they have a “license” to rapewomen, especially those belonging to the tribal and dalit communities. It is also seen that if the policeare not themselves inflicting violence, they are abetting in it, either by being mute spectators, or ignoring these incidents, or simply refusing to register the FIRs. While this is the situation in areas where there are so-called “insurgency” movements, there is violence against women even in cases of non-violent mass movements. Since the neo-liberal turn of the1990s there has been an increased onslaught by the state on the lives and livelihoods of large sections of theour population in the name of “development” projects such as mining and special economic zones, and large communities are being deprived of their lands, rivers, forests, and other common property resources. Pushed to desperation people are organizing in several ways to resist this large-scale displacement and dispossession. In several cases women have been at the forefront of these struggles. It has been seen that women are specifically targeted in such cases, and such political participation isbeing repressed by use of rape and other kinds of violence on women in mass movements. We have no trust in police personnel and find police stations most unsafe for women. Growing incidences of custodial rape is evidence of the police attitude to women, especially when it pertains todalit, adivasi and working class women, not even sparing the mentally challenged women. In June2009, a tribal woman from Betul, MP was arrested along with her husband and son in a dowry case. Later she was gang-raped in police custody. This incident followed an earlier one, where a dalit woman along with several others had protested against continuous sexual harassment (“eve-teasing”) by private security guards of the MP Electricity Board, who resorted to firing in which one youth was killed.
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3 It is a matter of great concern to see the state's attempts to label all forms of opposition and resistance to its policies as 'Maoist' and “Naxalite’, and suppress any form of dissent. People’s movements, protests by democratic rights and other activists, reporting by journalists, are all being labeled as Maoist and Maoist sympathizers, and being subjected to repression. In the current context, we demand the Indian government to immediately take action against all actorsincluding governance and judiciary, besides the actual perpetrators of sexual assaults, already registered in these Special Act zones. We demand an immediate repeal of AFSPA . We further demand an immediate withdrawal of its armed offensive against a largely tribal population. Instead, as expected of a democratic government, the government should move towards addressing politically the long-standing grievances of the tribal population, which have been explicitly pointed out by the government’s own report. We strongly urge all other democratic minded women’s groups and organizations to join us in this urgent appeal to the Indian government. AIPWA, AISA (Delhi), Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan, Chhatisgarh Mukti Morcha(Chhatisgarh), Dalit Stree Shakti (Hyderabad), HRLN (MP), Human Rights Alert (Manipur), IRMA (Manipur), IWID, Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (Badwani, M.P.), Kashipur Solidarity (Delhi), M.P. Mahila Manch (M.P.), Nari Mukti Sanstha (Delhi), Navsarjan (Ahemdabad Gujarat), NBA (MP),Pratidhwani (Delhi), PUCL (karnataka), Saheli (Delhi), Sahmet (Kesla, M.P.), Samajwadi Jan Parishad(M.P.), Sangini (Bhopal), Stree Adhikar Sanghatan (UP), Vanangana (Chitrakut, U.P.), Vidyarthi Yuvjan Sabha, Women’s Right Resource Center (MP), Yuva Samvaad (Bhopal). Contact : Madhya Pradesh Mahila Manch 9425377349

A brilliant article on our English News channels

Your Mama! Or The Blitzerization Of Indian TV

By Trevor Selvam

29 October, 2009 - > Countercurrents.org

In the past two weeks, I have viewed three shows on NDTV 24/7 and one
on CNN-IBN live. On one NDTV show, the moderator was Mr. Vikram
Chandra and the other one had the ubiquitous Ms. Barkha Dutt. The CNN-
IBN show was moderated by Ms Sagarika Ghose. All three of the shows
had to do with Naxalites or Maoists. The NDTV shows had the
emblematic war-drum like sound effects and graphic interplay that
aped the “War on Terror” style of the Fox/CNN networks. The lead
caption of the “Maoist Muddle”, the talk show hosted by Ms. Dutt, had
an old Western badlands style letter font in use, which would swish
back and forth, when Ms. Dutt took a break. (No! they did not play
the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Appaloosa).


Ms. Ghosh’s moderation was subdued in comparison and I would say,
more interested in extracting a minimum possible new thought process
in this discussion. However, the two guests on this show, Mr. Gautam
Navlakha of the EPW and Mr. Swapan Dasgupta of trash-the-left-any-
which-way-you-can fame, took off their gloves in no time and while
Mr. Navlakha could have restrained himself a wee bit, I could
understand the anger he felt with the asinine, Rush Limbaugh-esque
harangue of Mr. Dasgupta. A third guest, Mr. Sudipta Chackravarti,
writer of the book Red Sun, attempted to steer a safer line between
the absurdly nonsensical right wing cant of Dasgupta and the enraged
decency of Navlakha and got nowhere in terms of contributing to the
discussion. While this particular show did make an attempt at clean
lines and decency in terms of format, the NDTV show, as usual, was
like a Vegas-style slot machine/ video game box circus with Ms. Dutt
rushing around town-hall style, impatient as hell, and making shallow
summaries from time to time. Mr Vikram Chandra used his stationary
command centre approach to parse everyone’s unfinished thoughts,
by interrupting them and making sweeping summaries and essentially
telling off those who wanted to raise larger issues. Barkha Dutt’s
pancake makeup and potty-designer clothes added further vacuous glitter
and frenzy to the otherwise polyvinyl theatre that she now stages frequently.
I think Ms. Dutt has run out of the chutzpah that characterized her initial
foray into cable news and live reporting. She has bought into the
ethos that employs her i.e be true to the status quo definition of
the nation, no matter what, uphold some sanctimonious interpretations
of “terror, violence and democracy” and mendaciously ignore the
institutionalized violence that characterizes the Indian state and
all its institutions, especially the police. I am sure the fact that
there are at least one hundred criminals sitting in the Indian Parliament,
does not seem to have any impact whatsoever on all these apologists in her show,regarding the greatness of “the world’s largest democracy.” One of
the goofy guests in the show, named Tavleen Singh, gave an “Arey
Baba!” style shpeel on how great it is to be part of Indian democracy
and not be part of Pakistan or China. No jingoism there! And these
are experts on “the greatest threat to Indian democracy”?
What is wrong with these shows?


They all pander to a sensationalist, alarmist and finally a
fabricated version of the facts on the ground to start with. In their
rush to compete with each other they also use melodramatic
terminology to describe events. During a Chukka Bundh or a Rail Roko
(stopping trains during a general strike in an area, for example West
Mednipur) , some channels in no time started referring to it as a
“Train Hijack”. Chukka Bandh has been going on for ages. In fact in
India it happens almost every day. People vent their anger by
stopping trains. A hijack is something else and as a result in no
time people are talking about the Taleban and prisoner swaps etc.
Arnab Goswami’s Foxy network (Times Now) goes over the deep edge with
Goswami almost leaking sputum from the sides of his mouth, calling
the Lalgarh PCPA, a “ terrorist” outfit repeatedly during his so-
called moderation of events. He invites people to speak and then
trashes them continuously, hogging the limelight himself and repeatedly
changing his “one basic question” several times. Santhals and tribals with traditional weaponry are called “armed Maoists and terrorists.” Even the CNN
and BBC prefer to use words like militants, referring to these same
incidents. Goswami, of course, is universally recognized in India as
the yellowest of all TV moderators.

The primary problem, as I had stated elsewhere in a previous essay,
is that these Indian TV channels have not gone through the stage of
development that American radio and TV shows had gone through—of
nuanced, thoughtful interdictions---that preceded the Wolf-
Blitzerization of Cable news. The Bill Moyers and the Amy Goodmans of
PBS, NPR and Democracy Now! have for a long period of time upheld
decent, selfless, incisive, conclusive interviews and glamour, glitz
and circus acts have not been their bag. A tradition exists in
American radio and to a certain extent in Public TV that preceded
Time-Warner’s onslaught on the mind waves.

India’s Doordarshan, staid and unexciting as it often may seem, does
not follow this bombastic TV style that Barkha Dutt and Vikram
Chandra espouse. But, Indian TV has missed out on the tradition of
the thoughtful radio show. It has taken a leap into the nightmare
Vegas style, as far as intellectual cadence goes. Pretty much like
the fact that India also skipped over (for the most part) the laying
down of optical fibre-glass high speed lines and jumped into the wi-
fi data card and satellite disc technology, at least in some regions.
Convenient, but unnatural, in some respects. There is thus a missing
link in India’s media development. It is not a matter of quickly leap-
frogging into the newest technology; it is very simply a question of
missing out on a stage of incipient intellectual development. And
that stage requires some genuflection on what it is to be a real
democracy. Having elections every five years or having law courts and
elected officials (even without criminal records) amounts to drawing
lane markers on Indian city roads. Nobody takes it seriously or
avails of it with pride. It is like an attempt at showcasing the
trappings of democracy. As simple as that. When Mr. Chidambaran
cajoles the country’s intellectuals and so does the West Bengal
government officials, suggesting that any sympathy for the Naxalites
amounts to seditious behaviour, it is the beginning of a McCarthyite
era of “Un-Indian” activities. In that sense the Americanization of
the Indian polity has been seamless since the fall of the Berlin wall
and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is no wonder that the Indian
state, once a champion of non-alignment and independent post-colonial
political direction, has done a fantastic somersault into the lap of
the United States. It is unthinkable that the same forces that have
just decided to “phase out ”of Iraq, have now arrived in India and
are engaging in what a US commander described, only a few hours ago
on NDTV, “the most advanced counter-insurgency operations” with
Stryker tanks and various elements of the US Army, Airborne and
Cavalry divisions and paratrooper wings, right next to New Delhi!
Does Barkha Dutt care? Does Vikram Chandra give two hoots that
American boots that were kicked out of Vietnam and are being kicked
out elsewhere and especially out of Latin America, are now stomping
around in this country? When Barkha Dutt and Vikram Chandra and
others invite Indian intellectuals, historians, economists and
political scientists who wish to raise some fundamental issues about
Indian democracy, they are swept away by the undignified hollerings
of the loafers they also invite. So first rule: Do not invite more
than three people, at a time. Let them speak to a very specific and
elevated concept about the actual workings of Indian democracy. Let
them conclude and do not bust them up, half way, with your own
impatient and argumentative vox populi style journalism. If you need
to invite other people, arrange for a Part 2 of the same debate, with
others.

What are some other reasons?
Aside from the two or three people at a time that PBS and National
Public Radio invite, the calibre of the people invited also happen to
be those with extraordinary historical acumen and analytical skills.
Mr. Chandra, amongst the hordes he invites, brings in loafer-type MPs
from the BJP and CPM to trot out their standard rhetoric on behalf of
“Indian parliamentary democracy, law and order, national security and
non-violence”. The BJP fellow keeps ranting hysterically about how
“criminal” the Maoists are with their barrel of the gun power
politics and the wily CPI(M) fellow (typical of the Bengal CPIM)
snidely jibes away, with a crooked smile on his lips, at the Maoists
for not “following the example of the Nepali Maoists.” Also invited
are a Maoist sympathizing poet, a Gandhian activist, another EPW
editor, a retired police officer (who turns out to be quite sane,
decent and at least logical, despite his law and order leanings).
Surprisingly, there is also a young Congress MP from Andhra, who is
quite lucid that the Naxalite problem cannot be a resolved by guns
and choppers, when for sixty two years the State has been absent in
the lives of the Adivasis. Anyone who is decent (and the Congress MP
who seems very much like one) and waits his turn, does not get the chance
to lay down the facts. He or she is either shouted down or stopped short
by Chandra or Dutt. Such a procession of flag bearers and party hacks
and straight laced law and order folks can never provide education to
the masses, who expect to imbibe something from these shows. It ends
up being a five-a-side indoor football mêlée and opinions, ideas are
never developed. People go home, convinced that India is a
flourishing but troubled democracy, Naxalites are violent idealists
backed by foreigners and terrorists, that wealth will trickle down
someday to the poor if law and order is maintained and the ultimate
profanity ---that if Maoists participated in the democratic process
(as some other Naxalites seem to be) then they could also have their
day under the sun! All these sacred Indian cows are then chewed
vociferously and thenspat out like pan-masala on the walls of Indian
media, for the next half hour in rapid-fire mode. By the time we are
two minutes into these so-called forums, not a single assertion is
made about the actual facts. There is no discussion on what
constitutes “development”, no discussion on institutionalized
violence, no discussion the existing statutes of the Indian
constitution and how they remain unfulfilled after 60 years, no
discussion on the role of the Indian Police force, dubbed as the
world’s worst law-breaking and human rights violating outfit, no
discussion on the charter rights of the aboriginal people of India,
no discussion on the megalomaniac plans of P. Chidambaran to relocate
85% of India’s population into urban centres, no discussion on the
devastating and stultifying environmental impact of damming India’s
rivers and attempting to join them up (another Chidambaran hair-
brained plan) and no discussion on the twenty five years of
systematic development work in the Dandakaranya, which the Naxalites
have engaged in from using shifting crop agriculture, innovative
irrigation, land distribution, mobile educational projects, health
clinics, where for 62 years the GOI has done zip. Mr. Chandra
demonstrates clearly that he is not a moderator, not a listener, that
he has come made up his mind and injects silly conclusions each time
the bell rings for an ad and Barkha Dutt does the same with a proto
yank mannerism-- “Don’t go away.” In reality, it is time to switch
off. But I keep my patience till the end and until the swishing
militarist/western sound effects that keep happening every few
seconds, come to a final end.


When I sat down to write this essay, I was reminded of a time, in the
early seventies when I was in the US and the Watergate scandal had
broken out and Nixon was about to be indicted. I was sitting in a
room with African American friends, when one of the TV commentators,
mostly white at that time, declared that American Democracy would
weather this storm and the rebels in US campuses were nothing but
agents of foreign left-wing governments. My buddy, who sat next to
me, spat out two words-- “Your mama”!



Trevor Selvam is a free lance journalist

Arundhati Roy's article in The Guardian

The heart of India is under attack
To justify enforcing a corporate land grab, the state needs an enemy – and it has chosen the Maoists


Arundhati Roy
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 October 2009 22.00 GMT

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 had been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ.

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 Agarwal, 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"?

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 that 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 6 January, 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 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."

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, 1.5 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.

Not many "outsiders" have any first-hand experience of the real nature of the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent interview 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.

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.

In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a report called "Development Challenges in Extremist-Affected Areas". 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.

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 300,000 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 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" that "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."

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 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 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 noncombatant 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, 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, 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. Everybody had graduated long ago from equating the structural violence of the state with the violence of the armed resistance. In fact, retired Justice PB 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 they sometimes seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People described the often 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 50 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 some of the farmers caught in a spiral of debt have done. (Am I the only one who gets the 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?

It's true that, historically, mining companies have often 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: the elaborate, if increasingly empty, rituals of democratic practice: the (sometimes rigged) public hearings, the (sometimes fake) environmental impact assessments, the (often purchased) clearances from various ministries, the long drawn-out court cases. Even phony democracy is time-consuming. And time 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 (more than twice India's GDP). That was at 2004 prices. At today's prices it would be about $4 trillion.

Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7%. 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. Such are the pressures and the exigencies of the free market.

That's just the story of the bauxite in Orissa. Expand the $4 trillion 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 afoot that would 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% 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.

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 $2bn spent on the last general elections come from? Where do the hundreds of millions of rupees that politicians and parties 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.")

Too many questions about conflicts of interest and cronyism remain unanswered. What are we to make of the fact that the Union home minister, P Chidambaram, the chief 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.

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 12 October, the mandatory public hearing for Tata Steel's steel project in Lohandiguda, Dantewada, was held in a small hall inside the collectorate, cordoned off with massive security, with an 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 co-operation.)

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". They will be the beneficiaries if the impact of the violence drives 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 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% 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% of India's people off their land and into the cities (which is what 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 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 Chidambaram goes ahead and "presses the button", I detect the kernel of a coming state of emergency. (Here's a maths question: If it takes 600,000 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, 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 leave the bauxite in the mountain?

Operation Green Hunt

For more than a month now, the central government has gone on the offensive terming 'Maoists' as the greatest threat to internal security. As Arundhati Roy puts it quite succinctly, the Indian State needs an enemy to move away attention from it policies of selling out to the Corporatocracy. And has chosen the defenseless, voiceless, powerless tribals as the pawns in this monstrous game of power play.

The electronic media for its part has gone on a hysterical frenzy in creating an 'enemy' to suit the state. It is 'manufacturing consent' as Naom Chomsky calls it for the actions of the State and refuses to show an ounce of responsibility or accountability.

What is the Operation Green Hunt all about? This blog will take a look at the proverbial other side of the coin by focusing on the alternative points of views of people's organisations, social movements and socially conscious people.