(A Fact Finding Report issued by Nagrik Adhikar Manch and Yuva Samvad.)

(The situation in the Gadarwara Sub Division of District.Narsinghpur (MP) has been in a state of constant flux since last 3-4 months. The Dalits living in the villages adjoining Gadarwara have been condemned to a life of fear and intimidation.Their human rights and dignity are being at stake.

Obviously there is a concrete reason behind this sudden spurt in violence against them.They have refused to remain subservient to the interests of the upper/dominant castes and have decided to speak up.

Instead of taking concrete steps to guarantee the human rights of dalits granted to them under constituion, the administration has preferred to remain silent or at best supportive of the interests of the dominant castes only. One can easily see why Madhya Pradesh happens to be the state which tops the list of atrocities on tribals and stands second when it comes to cases of atrocities against dalits.)

Dist: Narsinghpur(Madhya Pradesh)
Tehsil: Gadarwara
Affected Area: Dalits (Ahirwar community) in Gadarwara and adjoining villages
Villages visited by the Fact Finding Team: Nander, Madgula, Devri and Tekapar

Date: 7th and 9th November 2009
Members of Fact Finding Team

Jai Bhim, Moolchand Ahirwar, Javed, Skand Shukla, Manoj, Satyam, Shivkumar, Nishant Kaushik

Brief Introduction to Narsinghpur District.

District Narsinghpur falls under the Nagpur Commissionorate. It is situated half-way between the capital Bhopal and Jabalpur. The economic mainstay of Narsinghpur is cultivation of sugarcane and pulses(dals). The population predominantly consists of Rajputs, Lodhi , Patels, Kirar and Ahirwar. Gadarwara is the main Tehsil of Narsinghpur.
Gadarwara

The Ahirwars make almost half (38,000-40,000 ) of the total population (70,000-80,000) of Gadarwara.Around 80-85 percent of the people in this tehsil are engaged in agriculture or related work. Agricultural labourers and landless peasants comprise a majority among them. Most of the agricultural labourers belong to the Dalit communities and among them the Ahirwars (Chamars) predominate. This caste falls under Scheduled Caste in the Constitution. They(Ahirwars) also form a major portion of the Scheduled Castes in the country and more so in the Hindi speaking area (where Chamar is used as a derogatory term).There are over 700 surnames in this caste.

The Ahirwars are spread over Gadarwara and nearly in all the adjoining villages. They play a very prominant role in the socio-economic activities of this area.

The Ahirwars Resolution giving rise to the present oppression

Ahirwar Samaj Mahaparishad had been trying to evolve a general consensus since last one year about abandoning the obnoxious practice of carrying of the carcasses of dead beasts ; to rid them of the centuries old practice of being looked down upon by the varna (upper) castes as carriers of the carcasses and consequently untouchables. Ahirwars in many villages actually discontinued this practice from July-August onwards. The Ahirwar Samaj Mahaparishad resolved in October 2009 to abandon this practice by the community en masse at the state level.
The social history of the oppression

It becomes clear from the social history of India that a sort of gradation based on discrimination and un-touchability has been established here. This practice has been fed and confirmed by other social constructions.

In spite of the forceful pleading of social justice in the Constitution, social inequality has persisted and is a sine qua non of our society This division based on differences rooted in inequalities has insulted the self-respect of people and compounded their human rights.

The roots of the exploitation and oppression of the Dalits in Gadarwara are in this practice. The burden of lifting carcasses of the dead animals had been imposed upon the Ahirwars in the course of the division of social labour. For centuries the inhuman work has been done by them. The surprise is that despite the imperative necessity of getting this work done a view of looking down on this work as lowly and insulting work has also been simultaneously developed by the society. This has remained the mainstay of the untouchability and oppression practised vis-a-vis the Ahirwar community.This despite the fact that the Constitutional provision under the ‘Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989′, carrying of carasses has been classified as a form of practising untouchability and nobody can be forced to do this work. However, the reality of Gadarwara is quite the opposite. It need be underlined at this juncture the said act which recently completed 20 years of enactment, carries important provisions to prevent atrocities against the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled tribes, which largely remain unimplemented.

A Detailed Report of the Fact Finding Team and Its observations

Despite repeated complaints against the oppression faced by the dalits at the hands of the dominant castes and demands for action against them the attitude of the administration has remained apathetic. This despite the fact that Dalits in 5-6 villages have filed complaints of physical harassment and oppression.

Even at present the position is that not only had there been no let up in the collective harassment faced by the dalits but it has become more severe. We were receiving reports of the plight of the dalits and their attempts to resist the inhuman treatment meted out to them since last few months. Under the circumstances it was considered necessary that the position may be ascertained and verified by a Fact Finding team.

A detailed report of the visits to four villages in the area is given below :
Village:Deori

The Ahirwar Community at Deori is in a serious predicament. The Upper Castes/Non-Dalit castes have resorted to cruel tactics for harassing them. Since the issue of removing carcacces of dead animal has been raised by them they have declared a virtual blockade of the community.Taking advantage of the confused laying of public road No. 128, the dominant castes have created such a situation that the Ahirwars are not able to come out of their houses. The community has been ‘imprisoned’ in its own native village.

The following facts were revealed before the Fact Finding Team

I- Denial of access to daily utilities

1.There is ban on them on making any purchases from the only provision shop in the village.

2.They are not allowed to get water from a public tap.

3. Ban on travel by public transport

4.Stopping vegetable and food vendors, newspaper boys including dhobis (washermen), nais(barbers) from entering Dalit localities

5.Stopping access to flour mills for grinding corn

6.Ban on entering the Village Panchayat Bhavan

II Atrocities on children and women.

Bablu, Jagdi and Pappu belonging to Upper castes injured Devaki ,an Ahirwar girl, on the head .

Bimla Bai was threatened by non-Dalit Devendra Kumar warning her not to step in their fields failing which they would strip her naked and parade her through the village.

Yogesh Ahirwar studying in the local school told that they are served mid-day meals in separate plates and they had to wash the plates used by them.

III – Intimidation by armed persons and threatening to kill

Hari Singh and Omkar, both Ahirwars told the Fact Finding Team that they are being constantly threatened by Arjun, Nipal and Ghanshyam, all Gurjars (non-Dalit caste) to kill them. They blamed them for always complaint-mongering.

In a meeting organised by the Village head (Sarpanch) in October 2009 to resolve the issue, more than hundred people belonging to non-dalit castes who were carrying different arms, literally pounced upon the Ahirwars and tried to intimidate them. The Ahirwars who had gathered there hoping for a peaceful and respectable solution, literally had to flee the place to save their lives.

IV – Creating obstacles and obstructing schemes meant for the Dalits and other needy rural people.

Attempts are being made to deprive the Ahirwar community from the benefits of the welfare schemes – schems run jointly by center and state governments – such as NREGS, Nirashrit Pension Yojana (Pension for the Shelterless), Indira Awas Yojna, labour welfare schemes and distribution of land for the landless.

We learnt that job cards under NREGS of Vanshilal , Prakash, Vinod, Vishal, Malkham (all Ahirwars) and even of some other Ahirwars have been kept by the Sarpanch with him. The pension of Harkishan Singh Ahirwar aged 70 years has not been paid for the last four months.Similarly, Besides this the amount sanctioned under the Indira Awas Yojna has not been paid to Vanshilal, Karodi Prasad and other 12 persons.

V-On the brink of starvation

The landless Ahirwar peasants cultivate the land of the upper caste people on lease on expence sharing basis (batai). Under it all expenses right from bowing to harvesting is done by the person taking the land on lease and he is given ¼ to 1/10 portion of the harvest by the landlord However, when the crops bowed in June reached the harvesting stage some influential landlords refused to allot any share to the cultivators and in fact harvested the crop with Harvester Combines and took it away. The Ahirwar community which faced drought last season is on the brink of starvation.If the same state of affairs continues, it is feared that there would be starvation deaths in the area.

VI -Economic sanctions

Almost all the Ahirwar families in Deori are landless. They eke out their living working as sharecroppers or labourers When their resolve not to lift the caracces of dead animals was declared virtual economic sanctions have been imposed on them.The locals told the Fact Finding Team that this time not a single crop-sharer has been given his share. Many others have not been paid even their wages. They told us in details about non-giving the shares of the crop. Some of the names are listed below. In some of these cases the harvest has been cut and in other cases the cultivator has been probibited from even entering the field.

Details of persons from Deori not receiving their share in the harvest.

S.No. Sharecropper from Landlord/non-Dalit Area of land cultivated Harvest

Ahirwar Community

1. Vanshilal Ahirwar Purushotam Agrwal 5 acres Soyabean and corn (dhan)

2. Vanshilal Ahirwar Devi Singh Patel 3 acres Corn

3. Vishal Ahirwar Dhansingh Kadkoul 4 acres Soyabin and corn

4. Purushottam Ahirwar Ramkumar Thapar 2 acres Corn

5. Purushottam Ahirwar Aman Patel 2 acres Corn

6. Ajaysingh Ahirwar Ekamsimngh Gujar 6 acres Soyabin and corn

7. Prakash Ahirwar Chander Gurjar 2 acres Corn

8. Gopal Ahirwar Zummak Gurjar 3 acresss Corn

9. Pancham Ahirwar Indrapal Gurjar 5 acres Soyabin,sugarcane,corn

10. Potai Ahirwar Potai Karat 10 acres Soyabin ,Corn

11. Nepal Ahirwar Nepal Gurjar 6 acres Corn

12. Malkham Ahirwar Madan Patel 3 acres Corn

6-Dumping dead cattle in Ahirwar locality

Munna Gurjar forcibly dumped the dead animal in front of the house of Malkham Singh Ahirwar. Similarly dead animals are being dumped in the pokharee (small pond) in front of Vishal Ahirwar’s the house.

People hailing from influential families even dumped the dead carcass in front of the Community Hall. It is needless to say that othe Public works were affected.
Depriving of the Right to Work under NREGS

The NREGS work has been widely affected by this decision not to lift carcasses .The people from the Ahirwar community have been deprived of the works being done under NREGS. Their work is being got executed by employing other persons.
Action by Administration

People from Deori have complained twice to the Sub-Divisional Officer, (Anuvibhagiya Dandadhikari) Gadarwara but the SDM has merely consoled them and has not bothered to take any action against the perpetrators.The matter has been kept hanging till date.
Village-Tekapar

The condition of Tekapar is no different from other villages. Here also the Dalit Ahirwars have to face a virtual boycott and violence at the hands of the dominant castes/non-Dalit castes. Here the Dalit count for more than half the population of the village. Out of them a mere 13 have land in their name-a mere 3 acres in all. The rest all are farm labourers.

In the second week of October some people from the Ahirwars were summoned by the caste people and they were pointblank asked whether they will or will not lift the caracasses of dead animals. The Ahirwars conveyed to them the community decision. The next day a fiat was issued by the caste people warning the Ahirwars that if by any chance the Ahirwars pass through their fields they will have to pay a fine of Rs. 1000/-

The intimidation did not stop here. A strict ban was imposed on availing the village facilities of shop for things of daily use, use of public tap water system, flour mill and other public places.They used to take clay for building from public places but a total ban on such use was imposed.Netram Ahirwar infomed us that the work of digging for clay has always been a community effort but now they threaten us if we take clay.

Sahebsingh Ahirwar informed that he is a crop-sharer in the field of a caste man but he has not received his share of the harvest till this date. Swaraj Suria (upper caste) even prohibited Aman Ahirwar to walk on the concrete road and in case he resisted threatened to kill him. When Netram Ahirwar took his farm instruments to the the local blacksmith for repairs he was told that there was a ban on extending any service to the Ahirwars. Mohanlal Ahirwar is not receiving funds for a safe delivery under the state scheme meant for the poorer sections of society.
An oppressive condition for crop sharing

Thereafter for fear of violent response in the village and bowing before the pressure of the dominant castes 70 year old Fullu Ahirwar had to accept removing a dead animal.It was only then that he and other members of the Ahirwar community were granted a marginal share in the crops harvested by them.
The Community does not have the Antyodaya Yojana Card

There is a big scandal in the distribution of Antyodaya cards to the poor.This card intended for farm labourers and poor Dalits in the village has been distributed to upper/dominant caste people. A large number of theAhirwars have been kept outside the purview of this scheme.
No work in NREGS

There pressure tactics also obtain in the field of the constitjutional rights of 100 days employment.The Dalit Ahirwars receive hardly 10 to 15 days of work and that too with difficulty.
The Reaction of the Administration

The people of Tekapar have been kept under threat by the influential castes. They are threatened that should they dare to complain they will have to face the music.In spite of this the Ahirwar people had made representations against the injustice to them in writing to the Sub Divisional Magistrate on 8th October 2009. Despite this the status quo remains and no action has been taken to ameliorate the situation.
Village-Nander

People from the Dalit cimmunity of Nander told the Fact Finding Team that we decided to stick to the decision of the Ahirwar Community not to lift dead animals both in letter and spirit. The Ahirwar Community has conveyed this decision to all the villagers. However, the caste people in the village did not like this. On the 10th October 2009 the villagers carried a caracass of a dead animal in a bullock cart at the center of the Dalit Basti and threw it down in front of the house of Rameshsingh Ahirwar. Mukesh Upadhyay (a Upper case member) even got some earth sprinkled on the carcass through some people. Ramesh Singh Ahirwar requested them not to do so. On this Mukesh threatened to cut down the hands of anybody who dared to touch his dead animal. Ramesh Ahirwar told that the following day Pralhad Yadav dumped a dead calf at the same place. The caste people deliberately selected this place for dumping the carcasses to teach them a lesson . This was an exhibition of ‘dadagiri’ to break the minds of the community.

That there would be serious consequences of such dumping of carcasses was a foregone conclusion. A 70 year old woman —Birya Bai – who lived in an adjoining hut was pushed towards a serious breathing trouble due to the obnoxious malodour of putryfing flesh. She had to be removed to the Gadarwara Hospital. Ramesh Ahirwar’s mother Ayudhi Bai(Age 65 years) also suffered on the same count,. Evidently this deed was more than sufficient to spread pestilence in the village.

In the second phase , to increase the pressure on the Ahirwar community the non-Dalit caste people .imposed a total ban on the Ahirwars. That meant that no member of the Dalit community could use any facility , not even touch, the properties such as the farms and fields belonging to the Upper caste and non-Dalit caste people. Use of ingress and ingress paths , farm compounds and even use of land for relieving themselves was totally banned. for them.

Pohapsingh Ahirwar told the Team that the caste people are subjecting them to abuse, beatings and social boycott in public places like common water taps, schools, panchayat and flour mills. Lalji Singh says that he is Assistant Teacher in the school but they were forcing even me to lift the carcasses. They threatened me not to divulge this fact to others and allege that I was causing much harassment to the student and they would see him for that.

Seventy five year old Nanhu said that the washermen and barbers have been discriminating against them for years. They have to attend to these works themselves or go to other places.

One more tale of the harassment of the atrocities of the influential castes is Pohapsingh Ahirwar. He had purchased a land from one Takat Singh Gurjar and also paid an advance of fifty thousand rupees but now Vinod Rajauriya is refusing to get this sale deed registered.

From the time the group decision against lifting of carcasses has been implemented the extension of all welfare schemes such as NREGS, Nirashrit Pension Yojana (Pension scheme for the Deprived people) ,Indira Awas Yojna, Labour Safety Scheme etc; have been totally suspended.
NREGS

Job Cards for all the eligible persons have been filled up but very few people get any work. After this incident giving any work to any member of the Ahirwar community has been totally banned.
Administrative Inaction

The villagers have represented to the SDM Gadarwara and demanded immediate cessation of these atrocities and a solution found for these problems. On this the Tehsildar just visited the Village Gram Panchayat and only advised the Sarpancfh Vinod Tiwari (A caste man) that nobody could be forced to lift an animal carcass and advised to fix one place for dumping the dead animals. The Sarpanch did issue orders appointing one man from the opposition group for this purpose.However, the formalities of fixing one single place for dumping the carcasses has not been completed as yet. But since then no further action has been taken by the Administration in this regard. This despite the fact that there has been an increase in the atrocities committed against the community since then.

Village –Madgula

After the Ahirwar Community’s decision against lifting of animal carcasses and their social boycott by the caste people, the situation has worsened. Here the Dalit basti is situated beside the Main Road outside the village. The caste people have banned their entry to the village or the fields .Here most of the agricultural land is owned by the caste people.There is no community lavatory or public road in the place.This has resulted in a virtual ban on the Ahirwars to relieve themselves.Obviously, under these circumstances the Ahirwars have beem forced to use the roadside to relieve themselves. The atrocities of the caste people have forced the people from the Ahirwar community to abandoning the village or even commit suicide.

1.Reduction in wages

On 31st July 2009 it was declared by a public announcement that members of the Ahirwar Community who work as crop sharer on the lands of caste people would have to agree with the wage-structure approved by the landlords or else leave the village. The wages for other works were also reduced to half from the normal rate of Rs. 70-80.This is not even a living wage for the workers and is even against the provisions of law.

2.Ban against necessities of life

There is a stringent ban on the Dalit Community against access to public utilities like common water tap, provision shops,flour mill etc.

3.Maltreatment of women and Threats

As there is no public road in the village the people from Ahirwar Dalit Community are banned even from relieving themselves. Consequently the women from the community are compelled to use the roadsides for this purpose.Anant Ahirwar told that when they do not find men for harassment the caste people target the women.If they protest they are threatened that if they do not follow their orders some day they will all be hanged by trees on the roadside
Complaints against the Atrocities

Harrassed by such dealings of the caste people lodged complaints against Dileep Rajput, Rajkumar, Narendra, Inder, Gutpal and five others. On this the Police Officer from Saikheda visited the village and advise the people.to avoid conflicts.
The Conclusion and The Way Out

MP has always remained at the top in atrocities against the Dalits. Even sixty years after gaining Independence the roots of social atrocities have still remained deep.For centuries the inhuman work of removing carcasses of animals and separating the hides from them has been got done from the Dalit communities. Even after virulent defence of human rights in the Constitution of the Independent India this inhuman and unconstitutional work is being got done forcibly from the Dalit communities.The irony is that this year sees the completion of twenty years from the promulgation of the law (SC and ST [Prevention of Atrocities] Act 1989) against Dalit exploitation.

After meeting hundreds of people from the four villages in MP the Fact Finding Team has observed how the Collective Decision of the Ahirwar Community (Dalit) of not undertaking the inhuman and unconstitutional work has become a question of prestige. The caste people are endeavouring for the reversal of this decision through social, economic sanctions.The caste people desire that the Dalits should abandon their struggle for self-respect and continue to undergo the social and cultural slavery .

The Fact Finding Team observed the following phenomena during their observation of the Gadarwara Region

- This decision of the Ahirwar Community to preserve their self respect is considered by the caste people as a challenge to the communal superiority.

- By displaying their social and economic superiority the caste/non-Dalit castes are trying to keep the Ahirwar under constant pressure.

- The roots of these atrocities lie in an attempt to seek approval of the socio-cultural dogma that this work is the duty of a specific community.

- The Administration instead of standing by the Dalit community in support of their constitutional right is acting as a silent partner of the caste people to maintain the status quo.

On the basis of its observations of the prevailing circumstances the Gadarwara Region the Fact Finding Team feels that the following steps need to be urgently taken

1.Institute an independent and impartial judicial enquiry of the things happening in Gadarwara Tehsil

2.Appropriate action against the people who are forcing the lifting the carcasses by some people

3.Immediate action against the people on the basis of the Fact Finding Report and and names mentioned in complaints received by government.

4.Take stringent steps to dispel the fear psychosis prevailing in the minds of the Ahirwars

5.The reestablishment of the participation of the Ahirwar community in the social welfare schemes from which it has been kept awat,

6.Restoration of the crop share to the Ahirwar crop-sharers deprived of theie legitimate dues and also paymentg of adequate compensation for the deprival.

7.Restoration of claims of those falling Below Poverty Line but have been deprived of the benefits .

8.Take abiding steps for an abiding solution of the problems.
(Fact Finding Report issued by Nagrik Adhikar Manch and Yuva Samvad,Madhya Pradesh)

Contact Person:
Jay Bhim
Nagrik Adhikar Manch,H.No.900, Durganagar, Near WaterTank No.2, Bhopal
E-mail id: nambhopal@gmail.com

MEDIA RELEASE
24 November 2009
New Delhi

MANIPUR:
UNION HOME MINISTRY REVOKES DETENTION ORDERS ON TEN PEOPLE

MAJOR EMBARASSMENT FOR IBOBI GOVERNMENT

New Delhi: Less than a day after the release of a citizen’s report in the city on the civil unrest in Manipur, Union Home Secretary G K Pillai stated that his ministry had revoked the detention orders of ten people, including Jiten Yumnam, a well-known environmental activist. Pillai informed his ministry’s decision to Dr. K.S Subramanian, a member of the Independent Citizens’ Fact Finding Team that released the report ‘Democracy ‘Encountered’: Rights’ Violations in Manipur’ on the 23rd November at the India International Centre. The report was released by Randhir Singh, former Professor of Political Theory at Delhi University.

The report had come out with a strong indictment of the Ibobi Singh Government and squarely blamed his administration for the deteriorating law and order situation in the state. Jiten and several others were arrested following the spate of spontaneous protests demanding justice and action by the Manipur Government on those involved in the fake encounter of Chungkham Sanjit in Imphal’s Khwairamband market on July 23 2009 which also resulted in the death of 5-month pregnant Rabina Devi and injuries to five others.

The fact-finding team reached Imphal earlier this month at a time of heightened tensions. Along with KS Subramanian, a former IPS officer and currently Visiting Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, the team included Sumit Chakravartty, Editor of Mainstream Magazine, Kavita Srivastava, National Secretary of the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and Vasundhara Jairath representing the Delhi Solidarity Group.

At the report release function, Dr. Subramanian drew attention to the need for reforms within the police and stated that today’s police, instead of being law-enforcers are making the society ‘law-less’. Sumit Chakravartty spoke of the culture of impunity that had pervaded all security forces irrespective of whether or not they came under the Armed Forces Special Power Act, 1958. Kavita Srivastava also noted the extent to which the Rule of Law was completely absent in the State with security forces killing alleged ‘militants’ without following the due process of law. Vasundhara Jairath illustrated with cases, the government’s attempt at crushing all democratic space for protest by using preventive detention laws like the NSA and UAPA consistently against activists to silence all democratic opposition. The report noted that close to three hundred people have been killed by the armed forces in 2009 itself. The report also mentions that out of the 600 odd people languishing in Manipur jails, close to 140 people have been charged under the National Security Act (NSA).

The report, first of its kind since the situation in Manipur valley grew volatile since July 23rd killings, pointed out the militarization of the Manipuri life with the civilian and armed personnel ratio being 1:40. “The most shocking aspect about the ‘police encounters’ is the fact that majority of the killings are not followed by any Enquiry and in any case, no enquiry report has been made public so far by the Ibobi Singh Government” noted Sumit Chakravartty.

When Dr. Subramanian handed over the report to Home Secretary Pillai, the latter shared the concerns of the team on the prevailing condition in Manipur and informed Subramanian on the evening of November 23 that detention orders of ten people, including Jiten Yumnam, Choudharimayum Singh, Phurailatpam Deban Sharma, Dayananda Chirgtham, Karam Sunil Singh, Haobam (N) Kshetrimayum, Thounaojam Sujit Singh, Irom Brojen Singh, Taorem Ramananda Khuman and Amom Soken Singh, had been revoked by the Central Government, overriding the State Government’s detention orders. This follows the recent summoning of Manipur Chief Minister Ibobi Singh to Delhi by the Home Ministry on November 18 to explain the declining state of affairs in Manipur.

The report of fact-finding team, along with key findings and recommendations to Union Government can be accessed from http://delhisolidaritygroup.wordpress.com/

This is a guest post by ISHWAR DOST

ध्रुवीकरण की खासियत यह होती है कि वह बीच की जगह तेजी से खत्म करता जाता है। चाहे वह सांप्रदायिक ध्रुवीकरण हो या अस्मिता पर आधारित या किसी और मुद्दे पर। राज्य की दमनकारी हिंसा बनाम माओवादी हिंसा एक ऐसा ही ध्रुवीकरण है। इस सरलीकरण में छिपी राजनीति पर सवाल उठाना जरूरी हो गया है। युद्ध की भाषा बोलती और बंदूक को महिमामंडित करती इस राजनीति के निशाने पर क्या जनसंघर्षों की लोकतांत्रिक जगह नहीं है? माओवादियों के सबसे बड़े दल पीडब्ल्यूजी के नाम के साथ ही जनयुद्ध शब्द लगा हुआ है। छत्तीसगढ़ सरकार ने एक सरकारी जनयुद्ध को सलवा जुडूम के नाम से प्रायोजित किया हुआ है। केंद्र सरकार ने पहली बार माओवाद के खिलाफ युद्ध की शब्दावली का इस्तेमाल किया है, फिर उस पर सफाई भी दी है। अगर माओवाद लोकतंत्र के प्रति अपनी नफरत नहीं छिपाता तो उत्तर-पूर्व से लेकर गरीब आदिवासी इलाकों तक कई सरकारें भी राजनीतिक-सामाजिक गुत्थियों को महज सुरक्षा के सवाल में तब्दील कर बंदूक की नली पर टंगे विशेष सुरक्षा कानूनों के जरिए सुलझाना चाहती हैं।

अन्याय के खिलाफ जनलामबंदी, संघर्ष और प्रतिरोध की सुदीर्घ परंपरा को युद्ध के अतिरेक में ढांपने की कोशिश की जा रही है। युद्ध सीधा सवाल करता है कि तय करो किस ओर हो तुम? यह सवाल एक-दूसरे से युद्ध करता या उसके लिए पर तौलता कोई भी पक्ष किसी से भी पूछ सकता है।
जो लोग दोनों पक्षों से असहमत या किसी से कम किसी से ज्यादा असहमत होना चाहते हैं, वे स्वयं को दो पाटों के बीच पाते हैं। हरिशंकर परसाई ने लिखा था कि आज के जमाने में दोस्ती के लिए दिल मिलना जरूरी नहीं, दुश्मन का दुश्मन दोस्त हो जाता है। आज परसाई होते तो एक और नजारा देखते। जो हमारे साथ नहीं है वह दुश्मनों के साथ है! सरकारें घोषणा करती हैं कि जो आदिवासियों पर सलवा जुडूम जैसे अर्द्ध-कानूनी गिरोहों के दमन का विरोध करते हैं, वे माओवाद के हमदर्द हैं। माओवादी फरमाते हैं कि जो उनके साथ नहीं हैं वे बुर्जुआ वर्ग के दलाल, वर्ग-शत्रु और घृणित उदारवादी हैं। अहिंसा, मानवता, उदारता, सहिष्णुता जैसे शब्द सुन माओवादी को हंसी आ सकती है। इन्हें बोलने वालों को वह मूर्ख या सत्ता का एजेंट या दोनों एक साथ मान सकता है।

‘बीच का रास्ता नहीं होता’! यह किसी क्रांतिकारी कविता का पोस्टर भर नहीं है। यही बात पूरे आत्मविश्वास से अमेरिका के पूर्व राष्ट्रपति जॉर्ज बुश कह रहे थे। यह पंक्ति रोमांचित करती है और दुस्साहस के लिए तैयार करती है। इस पंक्ति पर बुश और अतिवाम विचार, दोनों मोहित हैं। क्योंकि यह पंक्ति सरलीकरण भी करती है, जो नवउदारवाद और माओवाद दोनों की राजनीतिक परियोजना के माफिक है। यह उसी तरह की अंतर्निर्भरता है, जो एक-दूसरे से टकराती दो कट्टरताओं में एक-दूसरे के लिए होती है। माओवाद को फैलने के लिए एक निरंकुश राजसत्ता चाहिए। राजसत्ताओं को नागरिक अधिकारों के अपहरण के लिए, जनविरोधी कानून बनाने के लिए माओवाद जैसे दुश्मन चाहिए। एक दमनकारी सरकार माओवाद की हिंसा को आकर्षक बनाती है। एक हिंसक छापामार युद्ध राजसत्ता की हिंसा की वैधता बन जाता है। एक के पास संविधान की मनचाही व्याख्या और औपनिवेशिक कानूनों की विरासत है तो दूसरे के पास समाजवाद के उस अधिनायकवादी और सर्वसत्तावादी संस्करण की फंतासी है, जो चीन में सचमुच में नवउदारवाद में ही तब्दील हो गया है।

कांग्रेस और भाजपा में से किसका पक्ष लेंगे? इस प्रश्न पर वामपंथियों का काफी समय और ऊर्जा जाती है। जो दोनों को ही नहीं चुनना चाहते, वे क्या करें? जो वाम दलों का समर्थन करते हुए भी उनकी आलोचना करते रहना चाहते हैं, वे क्या करें? जो आदिवासियों के प्रति हो रहे अन्याय और माओवाद, दोनों के विरोध में हैं, वे क्या करें?  ऐसे लोगों के लिए भी कोई राजनीतिक वक्त ऐसा आ सकता है जब दो बड़े पक्षों में से किसी एक के खिलाफ ज्यादा बोलना पड़े। आपातकाल में इंदिरा गांधी की तानाशाही का विरोध करते हुए समाजवादियों के एक हिस्से ने संघ वालों को अपने साथ खड़ा होने दिया। राजीव गांधी के खिलाफ आंदोलन करते हुए वाम ने इस बात को नजरअंदाज कर दिया कि भाजपा भी इसी मुद्दे पर आंदोलन कर रही है। बाबरी मस्जिद गिरने या गुजरात दंगों के बाद उन सेकुलरवादियों को भी कांग्रेस से राहत मिली जो उसे सख्त नापसंद करते थे।

इसी तरह जब केंद्र सरकार ने आदिवासी इलाकों में माओवादियों के खिलाफ युद्ध करने की घोषणा की तो आदिवासी प्रश्न पर सोचने वालों के लिए यह साफ था कि इससे छापामारों की सेहत पर कोई असर नहीं पड़ेगा, मगर आदिवासी इलाके तबाह हो जाएंगे। आंकड़े बताते हैं कि सलवा जुडूम के बाद से माओवादियों की ताकत और हिंसा बस्तर में कई गुना बढ़ गई है। कई हजार आदिवासी शिविरों में ले आए गए। कई हजार डर कर और बच कर पड़ोसी राज्यों की तरफ भाग खड़े हुए। कई हजार माओवादियों के तर्क या बंदूक के असर में आ गए या ले आए गए।
जिन लोगों ने सरकार के युद्ध के एलान का पुरजोर विरोध किया उनमें कई गांधीवादी, समाजवादी, सर्वोदयवादी हैं। ये देख चुके हैं कि कैसे उत्तर पूर्व में सेना की कार्रवाई और आतंकवाद एक दुश्चक्र बन चुका है। युद्ध के विरोध में भाकपा जैसे वे दल भी हैं जो माओवादियों का निशाना रहे हैं। जो किसी जंगल में कभी सिर्फ इसी कारण माओवादियों की गोली का शिकार हो सकते हैं कि वे भाकपा जैसी ‘संशोधनवादी’   कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी के सदस्य हैं।
हाल में गृहमंत्री पी चिदंबरम ने कहा कि हमने कभी युद्ध की बात नहीं की, यह मीडिया की उपज थी। उनका यह स्पष्टीकरण नागरिक समाज के दबाव का नतीजा है या झारखंड में आसन्न चुनावों की मजबूरी का? यह चिदंबरम की सदाशयता है या अधूरे बंगाल मिशन के चलते तृणमूल कांग्रेस का दबाव? इसका पता चलना फिलहाल मुश्किल है। तब तक बुद्धिजीवी चाहें तो खुशफहमी में रह सकते हैं।
सरकार के युद्ध-एलान के विरोध के दौरान ही कथित ‘जनयुद्ध’ के पक्ष में मिथक गढ़ने की कोशिश भी हुई। कहा गया आदिवासियों ने बंदूक उठा ली है। यह नहीं पूछा गया कि तो क्या आंध्र के आदिवासियों ने बंदूकें रख दी हैं। आदिवासियों के साथ हुआ अन्याय और पीडब्ल्यूजी की हिंसा आधारित राजनीतिक विचारधारा दो अलग बातें हैं। माओवादियों के कब्जे और दखल का जितना इलाका है, उससे कहीं ज्यादा बड़े इलाके में आदिवासियों के लोकतांत्रिक आंदोलन चल रहे हैं, जो न सिर्फ उनके शोषण और दमन बल्कि विरोध के हिंसावादी रास्ते के भी खिलाफ हैं, जिन्होंने कई बार बहादुरी से सरकारी गोलीबारी झेली है, जिन्होंने कई बार राजसत्ता की बंदूक को जन आंदोलन की ताकत से झुकाया है।

जो लोग ‘चिदंबरम के युद्ध’ का या किसी ऑपरेशन ग्रीनहंट का विरोध कर रहे हैं और एकदम सही विरोध कर रहे हैं, वे ऐसा राजसत्ता की गोद में बैठ कर तो शायद नहीं कर रहे होंगे! वे किसी युद्धक्षेत्र में नहीं, बल्कि लोकतंत्र की उसी जगह पर बैठ कर विरोध कर रहे हैं, जो जनता ने अनवरत संघर्षों के बाद हासिल की है, जिसकी आजादी के बाद से लगातार हिफाजत की है और जो व्यवस्था परिवर्तन के उनके संघर्ष की बुनियाद है।
लोकतंत्र और असहमति की जगह जितनी आज है उससे बड़ी होनी चाहिए। यह है कानून का रस्सा तुड़ा कर भागती राजकीय हिंसा और न्याय के नाम पर की जा रही दुस्साहसवादी हिंसा के बीच की जगह। दोनों तरह की हिंसाएं जनवाद, न्याय, शांति जैसे मूल्यों को उनसे जुड़ी विडंबनाओं का हवाला देकर अपने अस्त्रागार में शामिल करती चलती हैं। जिस तरह आदिवासियों ने भारतीय राजसत्ता के बांध, खदान, कारखाने और अभयारण्य के लिए ‘जरूरी’ विस्थापन वाले उस विकास को नहीं चुना, जो निरंतर उनकी जमीन और जंगलों पर कब्जा करता गया, उसी तरह उन्होंने माओवादियों और उनकी बंदूक को नहीं चुना। क्या बंदूक चुनने का मौका देती है?
केंद्र सरकार कहती है कि माओवादी न हों तो आदिवासियों का विकास कर दें। ऐसा है, तो पहले बुंदेलखंड में और तमाम शहरों की गंदी बस्तियों में क्यों नहीं विकास कर देते? सरकार कहती है कि हम जमीन, जंगल के सवाल पर माओवादियों से बात करने को तैयार हैं। सरकार को आज बस्तर में सरकार के खिलाफ निहत्थे खड़े मनीष कुंजाम और रामनाथ सरफे से, ओडीशा, नर्मदा घाटी, विदर्भ के शांतिपूर्ण जन आंदोलनों से बात करने से किसने रोका है? चंबल में रह रहे और सरकारी आंकड़ों के मुताबिक भुखमरी का सामना कर रहे सहरिया आदिवासियों के साथ क्या तब बात करेंगे जब कोई जागरूक डकैत उनके मुद्दे को उठाएगा? सरकार आज तक मेधा पाटकर, बीडी शर्मा, सुनील या बिजय भाई से आदिवासियों की स्थिति की समझ क्यों नहीं ले पाई। क्या बातचीत की मेज तक एकमात्र रास्ता हथियारों से होकर जाता है?
बंगाल में माओवादियों के हाथों मरते माकपा के कार्यकर्ता मानव अधिकार के विमर्श से बाहर हैं। उनके परिवारों के आर्तनाद मीडिया से, ‘क्रांतिकारी’ बहसों से बाहर हैं। उनकी चीखें ‘बुद्धि’-जीवियों के हृदय को नहीं जगातीं। वे बंगाल के सत्ता परिवर्तन की जरूरी कीमत चुकाने के लिए पैदा हुए थे। वे एक हारती हुई, पिटती हुई पार्टी के सदस्य हैं। यह सही है कि माकपा अपनी नवउदारवादी फिसलन के चलते बंगाल में लगातार चुनाव हार रही है। मगर क्या किसी हारती हुई पार्टी के कार्यकर्ताओं को इस तरह खत्म किया जाना चाहिए? लोकतंत्र में कौन नहीं हारता? और हाशिए के आंदोलन तो चुनावी राजनीति में जगह ही नहीं बना पाते।
बंगाल में कार्यकर्ता कांग्रेस या तृणमूल के नहीं, माकपा के मारे जा रहे हैं। पर चिदंबरम उलटे माकपा पर बरसते हैं। अजीब नजारा है। माओवादी ममता के बाएं बाजू खड़े हैं। मनमोहन और चिदंबरम दाएं बाजू खड़े हैं। मीडिया लगातार बेचैनी के साथ पुलिस की बंदूक और माओवादी के कंधे पर टंगी बंदूक के बीच पैन शॉट निकाल रहा है। अतिरेक बिकता है। भाकपा, नर्मदा बचाओ आंदोलन, आदिवासी मुक्ति मोर्चा, समाजवादी जनपरिषद, माले (दीपंकर) आदि के पक्षों से टीआरपी नहीं बनेगी।
बुर्जुआ लोकतंत्र को ठीक करने के दो तरीके हो सकते हैं। एक तो यह कि इसे ज्यादा जनवादी और पुख्ता बनाया जाए। दूसरा यह कि इसे खत्म कर, इस पर कब्जा कर तानाशाही के रास्ते पर जाया जाए, जो रास्ता अनवरत कुर्बानियों को किसी सेना या किसी गुट के हवाले कर देता है। मगर समाजवादी लोकतंत्र का रास्ता कहां है? इक्कीसवीं सदी के समाजवाद का यह प्रश्न मुंह बाए खड़ा है, जिसका मुकाबला वाम विचार को करना है। माकपा को यह सोचना होगा कि वह स्तालिनवादी तानाशाही के खिलाफ नहीं बोलेगी तो माओवाद से विचारधारा का संघर्ष कैसे कर पाएगी? जैसे स्टालिन ने समाजवाद के लिए हजारों ‘संदिग्ध’ कम्युनिस्टों को मरवा दिया, माओवादी क्या ठीक वैसे ही संशोधनवादी माकपा कार्यकर्ता को मरवा रहे हैं? वाम मोर्चे के दल समाजवादी लोकतंत्र के सवाल को रणनीति के सवाल के रूप में छोड़ नहीं सकते। उन्हें ‘समाजवाद में मानवाधिकार’ को लेकर अपना रुख साफ करना होगा। वरना उनके लिए भी ‘बुर्जुआ’ मानवाधिकार रणनीति का एक औजार मात्र रहेगा, जिस वैचारिक स्थिति के चलते बहुत से मानवाधिकारवादी माकपा के मरते लोगों से मुंह फेर लेते हैं।

Responding to the call by the Home Minister and prime Minister of India to halt violence to facilitate talks, Maoist leaders ridiculed them and asked them to get their history right. According to them it was wrong to say that the ‘war’ that is now being played out in the theatre of the jungles of  Chhatisgarh, Jangalmahal of Bengal, Jharkhand , Orissa and other states is of recent origin. This is only the latest   phase of the “people’s war” that is being waged since 1967 and would not stop until the ultimate objective of establishing Communism is achieved.  The Constitution of the CPI(Maoist) is very unambiguous, “The ultimate aim or maximum programme of the party is the establishment of communist society. This New Democratic Revolution will be carried out and completed through armed agrarian revolutionary war i.e. the Protracted People’s War with area wise seizure of power remaining as its central task.”

Area wise seizure of power is what the Maoists are busy with. They have succeeded, partially or fully in many areas of different states. What needs to be understood is that it is not development they are opposed to as is evident from the statements of their leaders.  They are ready to let development activities take place, provided it is under their supervision. They are interested more in making themselves the lone political voice of the people. One should ask why do they keep abducting, harassing, threatening or killing the members and leaders of other political parties in the areas where they rule using the strength of their guns? Why do they force people to resign from other political parties? Their answer is very simple: whoever is seen to interrupt or impede the armed people’s war is either a class enemy or an agent of the class enemy represented by the state and is therefore on the other side of the war.
The metaphor of war which is being used describe the state led operations is in fact not even a metaphor for the Maoists. To them it is not something, which is to be dreaded and shunned, for them it is already on and it is the naivety of the liberal political class to think that it would start with the state assault on them. The Maoists  would rather love to draw the state in a protracted war. The lives lost are sacrifices on the altar of the impending revolution. The  constitution of the CPI( Maoist) incidentally states that the road to communism is long, “The struggle between socialist road and capitalist road will also continue to exist. Only depending on and carrying forward the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat can correctly resolve all these contradictions.” (Author’s emphasis)

There would always remain peoples’ enemies and it would be the revolutionary duty of the party to keep identifying them and eliminating them to safeguard the gains of the revolution.

We who are opposed to laws which rob us of our democratic rights like the AFSPA, UAPA and Public Security Acts in various garbs and want them repealed and very rightly so, how do we react to the Constitution of the CPI( Maoist)? Is it permissible to allow armed political formations to operate in a democratic framework, which works on the principle of contestation between ideas and ideologies and mobilizing public opinion around them? When the fear of the gun paralyzes this process, democracy suffocates.  Since Maoists have already established their “Areas” which are small states in themselves, it would useful and educative to study the status of democratic freedom there.

How is it that we who stand up and fight for every inch of our democratic space remain silent on this methodical, ideological assault on the very idea of democracy? Let us realize before it is too late that those who regard armed struggle as ‘the main form of struggle’ and the people’s army as ‘the main form of organization’   would only tactically tolerate civil liberty action or other mass political actions as “their purpose is to serve the war.” Once they outlive this purpose they will become dispensable items on the agenda of revolution!

An open discussion on the relevance and implications of Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill  and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2009
Saturday, November 21, Gandhi Peace Foundation, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, New Delhi 2 – 6 pm.

Friends,

The current economic model of growth prevalent in India , with strong neo-liberal leanings, needs to be re-assessed in the wake of increasing alienation and dispossession of vast populations from their land and the wave of resistance, both violent and non-violent, against such activities that are being played out in many parts of the country.

In the wake of an armed operation against escalating Maoist insurgency; adivasis, particularly in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra are stiffly resisting the industrial development that threaten their traditional way of life; farmers around the country raging against acquisition of their lands in the name of growth and development – the importance of revisiting the proposed Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill, 2009 (LAA) and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2009 (R&R) is paramount, if not imperative.

We the struggling communities from different regions of the country have resisted the government’s machinations of enacting a faulty Resettlement and Rehabilitation Act and introducing amendments to the Land Acquisition Act, promoting private and corporate interests over public good. We gathered recently in Delhi in July 2009 and our struggle gained a significant boost when the Acts could not be passed in the Budget session of the Parliament. We have been in Delhi since 18th November and held meetings at Kanjhawala, Jantar Mantar and JNU and explained our concerns on these two Bills but also on the fires raging in the country and the path of growth on which the country is being pushed today.

It is in this context that we invite you to discuss the relevance and implications of these half hearted measures for the millions of people who are struggling to retain their means of livelihood and seek meaningful rehabilitation from a system in which they no longer seem to have faith.

The panelists for this meeting are :

K B Saxena, Former Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development and Agriculture, Union of India now at Council for Social Development, New Delhi

Ramaswamy Iyer, Former Secretary, Ministry of Water resources, Union of India and Government’s nominee on the Sardar Sarovar review Committee now at Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

Sanjay Parikh, Senior Counsel, Supreme Court of India.

Roma, Kaimur Kshetra Mahila Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, NFFPFW  (Sonbhadra)

Gautam Bandopadhyay, Nadi Ghati Morcha , Chattisgarh

Dayamani Barla, Adivasi Mulnivasi Astitva Raksha Manch, Jharkhand, INSAF [to be confirmed]

Sandhya Devi, Kalahandi Mahila Mahasangh, Orissa

Praffula Samantray, NAPM Orissa

Medha Patkar, Narmada Bachao Andolan & NAPM

MODERATOR : Anand Mazgaonkar, Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, NAPM Gujarat

An Appeal to join this  Padayatra November 29 to December 5, 2009

(Mail sent by Mamata Dash)

Dear Comrades/Friends,

Coastal Orissa and hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants who have been living for generations on its precious resources such as agriculture, beetle-vines, fisheries and village art and craft industry are facing today a great crisis of existence imposed on them all over the coast by capitalist investors with the active patronage of the state at the centre and in Orissa.  Be it POSCO or Vedanta or any other name, the most favorite investment destination for everyone is our natural resources and our rich coast line. No iron and steel factory can manufacture sustainable livelihood systems and life centric ecology. No world class university can take care of education of economically deprived who can’t even afford minimum primary education. The Nabin Pattnaik government knows this truth. But they also know another truth-the amount of black money these corporations can pump in for the benefit of the ruling elites no other work in the state can ensure that much for them.  The farmers, the peasants, the workers protest and they take the shape of powerful people’s movements in the form of Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti or Vedanta Viswavidyalaya Virodhi Sangharash Samiti. The people threatened by a project resolve not to give in, but they take the pledge to fight back even if they have to pay a price. Many fighters have been killed but the fight continues in Kalinganagar, Kashipur, Keonjhar, Sundergarh, Lanjigarh, Hirakud, Dhinkia and Beladal. Hundreds of false cases have been filed against the people resisting destruction. But it has only added their resolve to fight with determination. In order to spread the messages of continuing the fight against unjust capitalist aggression on our resources the PPSS has initiated along with the help of Vedanta Viswavidyalaya Virodhi Sanghrash Samiti and several other mass movements, a Padyatra which will start on 29th November 2009 from Dhinkia and culminate on the 5th of December 2009 at Beladal.

We request you to please join this Padyatra to raise your voice against the powerful corporations who are eying shamelessly on our resources. The coast is to protect our livelihood and also to protect the environment. Let us not allow any private investment in the coast of Orissa. Let us make Padayatra a great success. We meet at Dhinkia in the evening of 28 November 2009. The Dhinkia villagers have arranged for food and stay for every pad Yatri. On 29th, the Yatra starts from Dhinkia (Centre of anti POSCO struggle) which ultimately will end on the 5 December 2009 at Beladal (Centre of anti Vedanta University struggle) where everything will be taken care of by the Beladal villagers.

Yours Sincerely

Abhaya Sahu, Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti, Dhinkia, Jagasingpur-( Mobile 9437571547)

Pitambar Das, Jatadhar Bacao Andolan, Ersema

Babuli Behera, Devi Muhan Surakhya Samiti

Benudhara Pradhan, Vedanta Viswavidyalaya Virodhi Sangharsa Samiti,

Bhagaban Majhi, Prakrutika Sampada Surakhya Parishad, Kucheipadar

Lingaraj Azad, Niyamgiri Surakhya Samiti

Rabindra Jarika, Vistapan Virodhi Janmanch, Sukinda

Ashok Pradhan, Paschima Odisha Krushak Sangathan Samanwaya Samiti

Muralidhar Sardar, Mittal Virodhi Manch

Khirod Singh Deo, Hirakud-Rengali Budi Anchal Sangram Samiti

Akhaya Das, Jala Surakhya Jan Manch

Prafulla Samantra, Lok Shakti Abhiyan

Budha Gamango, Lok Sangram Manch

Sibaram, Jiban Jibika Surakhya Samiti

Natabar Sarangi, Prachi Chasi Meli

Narayan Redy, Gana Sangram Samiti, Ganjam

Jogendra Gadanayak, Sidheswar Anchalika Surakhya Committee, Naraj

Nikunja Bhutia, Odisha Jana Adhikar Mancha

Dandapani Mohanty, Odisha Forest Majdoor Union

Jayadeb Nayak, Basi Surakhya Manch

Nitu Chakhia, Rajdhani Basti Unayan Parishad

I.
Hemant Karkare’s family – his wife Kavita, his son and daughters and other near and dear ones – have slowly albeit silently come to terms with the fact that he is no more. Yes, there are occasions when his son takes out the laptop and scans the family album icon to see his father in various moods. There are a few photographs he really loves to watch again and again, where his dad looks a different person and not the usual policewallah.There are times when his mother also joins him and every photograph reminds her of the beautiful days they spent together.
It is known that born and brought up in Madhya Pradesh, Karkare did his engineering (mechanical) in Nagpur and worked at the National Productivity Council and Hindustan Lever before making it to the IPS in 1982. An avid reader of books Hemant during his stint in the Chandrapur forests near Nagpur in 1991 took an interest in driftwood, discovered artistic shapes in them and converted them into wooden sculptures, making about 150 of them over a two-year period.
She still remembers how Hemant was contemplating leaving this job and joining some MNC, as he had slowly realised that he is not a fit person in the department. Of course, it had taken too long for him to realise this fact. Perhaps the twin pressures of undertaking an investigation in a professional manner and simultaneously bearing all those pressures from seniors and politicians had reached a limit. It was only in January (2008) that he had returned from a seven year stint outside the country working with Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and on his return was handed over the responsibility of Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) in Maharashtra, which had earned lot of disrepute – especially in the eyes of the minority communities – for its functioning. The manner in which it had handled the Nanded bomb blasts ( April 2006) or Malegaon bomb blasts and also the bomb blasts in local trains (2007) had come under scanner. Perhaps the powers-that-be were keen that someone with a professional approach takes up the mantle and Hemant Karkare was found to be the ideal person for it. One can presume that there were strong political considerations behind this choice as the ‘secular’ image of the parties in power – at the state and the centre – had taken a lot of hit because of these mishandlings.
And Karkare demonstrated in a short span of time that he means business.
It was evident in the manner in which he led the investigations into the bomb blasts in Gadkari Rangayatan, Thane and Panvel (June 2008) and ultimately nabbed the Hindutva terrorists belonging to the Sanatan Sanstha and filed a few hundered page chargesheet against the accused in the stipulated time. Looking back it is clear that if the ATS would have been led by any other person who was less professional, it would have been impossible to expose the machinations of this ‘spiritual cult’ for whom ‘destruction of evildoers’ was part of ‘spiritual practice’. Although the main chargesheet against the accused did not contain names of the Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Janjagruti Samity to which they belonged, he had promised in an interview that in a supplementary chargesheet this ommission would be corrected. It is a different matter that the day did not arrive.
Successful investigations into the Sanatan Sanstha affairs were followed by his meticulous work after the Malegaon bomb blasts (September 2008) wherein an explosive laden two wheeler was parked below the (now abandoned) office of SIMI, Bhikhu Chowk, Malegaon. Deaths of innocents in the bomb blasts that followed was routinely blamed on the Lashkar-e-Toiba and other ‘Jihadi’ organisations, without going into the details of the case. But once the case reached his office, he tried to look beyond stereotypes and saw to it that real culprits are apprehended.

Initially it appeared unbelievable but his untiring efforts exposed the sprawling network of Hindutva terrorists in the country which had saffron robed sadhus/sanyasins on the one hand and army personnel on the other. Ranging from professionals to politicians owing allegiance to the Hindutva brigade, it had under its ambit a few well-known faces of the brigade. It could be said to be one of the biggest operations undertaken by the Indian state against Hindutva extremism in the post-independence period and once its impact became known it infuriated many among them.
Kavita – Hemant Karkare’s wife – had learnt from newspapers that leaders of RSS,BJP, VHP and Shiv Sena were trying all possible means to decelerate the pace of investigations and were exerting lot of direct-indirect pressure on Karkare to go slow with the investigations. A few amongst them had even accused ATS of being on a witch-hunt and some had even demanded that ATS officers should be subjected to narco-analysis to establish their motives. L.K.Advani, BJPs Prime Ministerial candidate had even demanded a change in the ATS and an enquirty into the torture accusations made by the accused. All the top leaders of the BJP-Shiv Sena – who swore by the Indian constitution – had no qualms in declaring full support to the perpetrators and even arranging legal support for them.
It was evident that Hemant was not the usual self. He seemed to be under tremendous pressure from all quarters. Some thirty six hours before his death, a few channels had even reported about death threats received by him from some anonymous caller. The caller had threatened him with dire consequences for his ‘witch hunt’ and had said that they would finish him within next two-three days.  When she expressed concern over this news he had just smiled and tried to distract her attention from this topic.
How could anybody could have premonition that death was waiting for him in the wings ?

II.
Would it be correct to say that only his family members and other near and dear ones still bear the pain of his untimely demise ? Definitely not.
There are hundreds or should one say thousands of people for whom it is still difficult to come to terms with his loss. Not a day passes when people do not mention his name and remember him for the task he had undertaken as part of his official duty. Not a day passes when people wish he was still alive and could complete the work which had nearly shaken the rightwing polity in the country and helped save a community from further criminalisation and terrorisation.
Streets of Malegaon, a Muslim majority town in Maharashtra, had witnessed an unusal spectacle last year when a big public meeting was organised there to rename one of the busy streets in the city to commemorate his memory. The whole gathering was emotional when speaker after speaker explained how Karkaresaab – a noble Hindu by birth – singlehandedly and with a sense of purpose unearthed the conspiracy hatched by the top guns of the Hindutva brigade to organise bomb blasts in different parts of the country to stigmatise the community.  People remembered how the same department had adopted a very cavalier attitude about the bomb blasts in the city on Shab-e-Barat (Sept 2006) and despite enough evidence at hand did not go after the Hindutva links in the blasts. It is known that although the powers-that-be were compelled to order a CBI investigation into the whole case after tremendous pressure was put on them by different sections of people but that enquiry has not made much headway. Interestingly this fresh investigation was ordered only after the local police had already filed a chargesheet in the case.
Naturally till date some people from the city and adjoining areas – belonging to the minority community – were still languishing in jails, who have been accused of engineering the blasts they did not committ. A few of the accused like Nurul Huda were subjected to repeated narco tests – supposedly to extract confession from him. His moving appeal in Urdu about his plight was carried by few publications in the area.
Looking at the fact that Karkaresaab, as head of the ATS, was conducting a thorough professional probe into a  terror network centred on Hindu extremist organisations,  which tremendously helped the biggest minority in the country in challenging its stigmatisation, it does not appear surprising then that well meaning people are still not ready to believe the ‘official version’ of Hemant Karkare’s death. There is a strong feeling that there is something fishy in the whole matter, which the government does not want to divulge to the people.
In fact the probe, which was happening for the first time in sixty plus year history of independent India, had  huge ramifications, some leading into military and bomb-making training camps and politicised elements in the army, others into organisations and political leaders affiliated to the RSS-BJP.

Reports about the incident which detailed the circumstances which ultimately led to his death, have further complicated the matter. In a writeup  (The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Need For A Thorough Investigation by R.H., 08 December) the author provides details of the inconsistencies in the reports about the incident.

“..The earliest reports, presumably relayed from the police via the media, said that Karkare had been killed at the Taj, and Salaskar and Kamte at Metro. If this was not true, why were we told this? And why was the story later changed? Was it because it conflicted with eye-witness accounts? Indeed, under the heading ‘ATS Chief Hemant Karkare Killed: His Last Pics’, IBNlive showed footage first of Karkare putting on a helmet and bullet-proof vest, and then a shootout at Metro, where an unconscious man who looks like Karkare and wearing the same light blue shirt and dark trousers (but without any blood on his shirt or the terrible wounds we saw on his face at his funeral) is being pulled into a car by two youths in saffron shirts..
Later we were given two accounts of the killings where the venue is shifted to a deserted lane without cameras or eye-witnesses. The first account is by the lone terrorist captured alive, claiming to be A.A.Kasab from Faridkot in Pakistan and a member of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba… According to the police, Kasab claimed he and Ismail had killed Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte.
The other account is by police constable Arun Jadhav. According to him, Karkare, Salaskar, Kamte, a driver and four police constables including himself were driving down the alley from VT to the back entrance of Cama (barely a ten-minute drive) in their Toyota Qualis to check on injured police officer Sadanand Date when two gunmen emerged from behind trees by the left side of the road and sprayed the vehicle with bullets, killing all its inmates except Jadhav.
These accounts raise more questions than they answer…”

And now it is learnt that the bulletproof jacket worn by Hemant Karkare at the time of the terrorist attack has gone missing. This has raised serious questions on the manner in which evidentially materials were preserved.

III.
The normalised sounding atmophere in and around the small family of Kavita Karkare does not stop the mind from hovering over questions related to his sudden death allegedly at the hands of the terrorists.Why was he instructed to handle the terrorists merely with two senior officers – another Indian Police Service officer Ashok Kamte and Vijay Salaskar  – and without any back-up for him. It appears incredible to her that her husband – who was then head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad at the time of his death and received few death threats because of his exposure of the Hindutva terrorist network- had asked for a back up and had to wait for 40 minutes but no one was sent.
In one of the most publicised photographs of Hemant Karkare, which captured some of the last moments of his life, he was shown wearing the bulletproof jacket at CST ( Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus), Bombay and leaving the van and when his body was found, the bulletproof jacket was missing. In fact, Karkare’s wife Kavita had to file an application under RTI to know the status of the jacket. Despite wearing a bulletproof jacket, (as it was reported ) Karkare received three fatal bullet-injuries ‘in chest’ which put a question mark over the efficacy of these jackets to provide safety in the wake of such terror attacks.
“When his body was found, the bulletproof jacket was missing…even at the hospital…I filed RTI application a few months ago asking where the jacket was but the reply I got was that it is missing..,” Kavita Karkare told PTI in an interview. She had also added “If a back-up had been sent as soon as Hemant had asked for it, then Kasab and the other terrorist could have been nabbed at Cama lane itself…,”.When asked what her next course of action would be, if any, she said it was for the people to take the matter further.
Slain officer Ashok Kamte’s wife Vinita , too, had complained of reluctance to share details of wireless transcripts when she had filed an RTI in the matter. She had alleged that there was discrepancy in records maintained by the police which led to suspicion that the records could have been tampered with.
A layperson can understand that the revelations regarding the RTI query about the ‘missing bulletproof jacket’ would further strengthen the petition over the efficacy of bulletproof vests filed by Mr Santosh Daundkar and which is coming up in the High Court.An examination of Karkare’s vest would have revealed if the jackets were indeed of inferior quality as suggested by the petitioner.
The said petition before the high court mentions the point that there were 16 violations of Store Purchase Manual and Maharashtra Public Records Act while procurring those 110 bulletproof jackets in 2002. And during the hearing of the case, the government said that the file had gone missing.
There is no doubt that the missing bullet proof vest gives further credence to the argument that there was something amiss with Karkare’s death and without reinvestigating the case it would be difficult to reach the kernel of truth.
It would also clear the doubt how Karkare died? Whether he died because of bullets fired on the chest or bullet injuries on his neck.It is worth noting that Dr Bhalchandra Chikhlikar of the Grant Medical College had testified during 26/11 trial that Karkare had sustained five bullet injuries, but had not specified the location of wounds. As reported in the Times of India ( 13 Nov 2009, ‘Karkare’s bulletproof Jacket picked from rejected lot, Anil Singh) the said PIL filed by Mr Santhosh Daundkar “..[c]ontains excerpts of Chief Minister Ashok Chavan’s interview with an English TV news channel in which he said Karkare died because of bullet wounds to the head and neck and not to his torso.”
While the alleged acts of omission and commission in the purchase of bulletproof jackets – as claimed by the PIL – demand separate enquiry, at face valued it demonstrates the callousness of the higher ups in the department towards lives of their own people. Video clippings of Karkare donning the jacket on 26/11 clearly showed that it left a substantial part of his upper chest uncovered. Nobody bothered to note this design of the bulletproof jackets violated the specifications of the Defence Research and Development Organisation that they should stretch from the neck to the groin.
The PIL also makes a disturbing claim that the jacket worn by Karkare “..[w]as among a lot of 110 rejected first as sub-standard and bought later from same supplier without tests….. The petition says that the police commissioner’s office broke the rule by not testing the jackets before the purchase. In fact, the rule says that for very important and expensive goods, 100 percent inspection should be done from independent organisations.” (Times of India, 13 Nov 2009).
As the petitioner has been told – in response to his RTI query – the file pertaining to purchase of these jackets was not traceable and hence it was not possible to give any information, it would be further difficult to apportion blame to concerned officials who supervised the purchase of the jackets.
It is a different matter their callousness, indifference or connivance in procuring ‘substandard’ jackets. might have proved to be the main factor in the deaths of many of their own colleagues during the terrorist attack. ATS chief Hemant Karkare happened to be one amongst them.

IV.
It is being rightly said that bulletproof jacket worn by Karkare – which stands missing ‘officially’ – would be able to throw light on the circumstances which led to his death.  But one also needs to look at the other related aspects of the case – which pertains to the the people/formations who were behind him forcing him to scuttle the probe and which had caused him lot of agony. Police officers who knew him well have reported how he “[w]as a disturbed man in the days leading to his death because of endless attacks on him over the Malegaon bombing probe.
Former Mumbai police chief Julio Ribeiro and retired police officer  Sudhakar Suradkar both said that Karkare was not his usual self near the Cama hospital while going to take on terrorists on Wednesday night.
Calling Karkare a “rare officer”, Ribeiro said that in the brief period he had known him, he could see that Karkare was “troubled with attacks on him by political parties”.
..Hindu activists blasted Karkare for arresting an army officer and a Hindu ascetic, accusing the officer of anti-Hindu bias.
Added Sudhakar: “During the morning walks I often met Hemant. He seemed quite disturbed and hurt. Perhaps he was under mental stress. Unfounded and false implications had rattled him leaving him disillusioned.”(DNA,  IANS, Sunday, November 30, 2008  15:19 IST)
The Express Reporter who did a story the very next day of his death (Karkare’s response to a death threat: A ‘smiley’, Y.P. Rajesh, Posted: Thursday , Nov 27, 2008 at 1637 hrs, Indian Express) also provides the details of the pressure brought on him for cracking the Malegaon bomb blast case.
…That Karkare was affected by this was apparent when we met at his office on Tuesday to get an update on the probe, less than 36 hours before he was killed. The Indian Express has decided to break the confidence of what was an off-the-record conversation in an attempt to highlight the anguish of the investigators over the currents in which the Malegaon probe was getting caught as well as the larger debate over the politics of terror.
“I don’t know why this case has become so political,” was one of Karkare’s first comments. “The pressure is tremendous and I am wondering how to extricate it from all the politics.”
Was the pressure telling on the investigation, what with someone who could be the next prime minister of the country questioning the credibility of the ATS?
“Of course,” was the answer. “We are being very very careful. In fact, when we want to question a suspect and if he or she has any Hindutvawadi connections, we make sure once, twice, thrice, that we have enough reason and evidence to even question. Normally it is not like that. We are able to freely question anyone we suspect.”
It did not forget to share the spirit with which Karkare faced all these pressures
The previous evening, hours after our meeting, TV channels had ‘breaking news’ that he had received a fresh death threat from some unidentified caller, apparently in connection with the Malegaon probe. An Indian Express reporter SMSed him asking him if this was true or if he had anything to say. His reply: just a smiley.
It was worth noting that reporter from ‘Tehelka’ also discussed the last days of Karkare emphasising the pressures brought on him by the ring leaders of the Hindutva brigade.
‘Saamna’ the mouthpiece of Shiv Sena and other Hindutva publications had been carrying on a vilification campaign against him since it became known that he would not yield to any pressure. These organisations had even called for a Bombay bandh supposedly to expose the ‘witch hunt’ against the Hindus at the hands of ATS. And the terrorist attack and death of Hemant Karkare immediately changed the situation. If Karkare was villain for them the previous day, he became a ‘martyr’ the very next day for sacrificing his life during the terrorist attack.
Narendra Modi, who had accused Hemant Karkare of being a ‘desh drohi’ a traitor – a few days back , which can carry a death penalty in India- had no qualms in going to visit the bereaved family with an offer of financial assistance.
It was a different matter that Kavita, the indomitable life partner of Hemant Karkare, who was witness to the turmoil in her husband’s life for pursuing call of his duty without prejudice towards anyone, not only refused to meet ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ Mr Modi but also declined to take any financial assistance from him.

V.
The missing bullet proof jacket, the ‘officially missing’ file pertaining to the purchase of the jackets, the non-availability of back-up van to a senior officer of his rank -at the time of emergency-, the contradictory reports which emanated about the incident and the pressures wrought on him from all sides and ‘lack of clarity’ about his actual cause of death – bullets in the torso or in the neck – even one year after the death, all these aspects of the case definitely add to the confusion about the case. And it becomes clear that for the powers that be it would be further difficult to brush aside all those people who have the audacity to still question, challenge the official version of the case.
Does not people have a right to know how a senior officer of his rank died ? Whether he died because of bullets fired from an AK 47 or 9 mm bullets fired from a revolver/carbine? In fact, his post mortem report needs to be made public..
Mystery behind his ‘missing jacket’ also needs to be revisited. Fact of the matter is that he was wearing the jacket and it ‘disappeared by the time that the corpse got to Sion hospital.’
Can it be said that this aspect it is inconsequential in this case as is claimed by a section among police fraternity? Definitely not.
It is also being said that some hospital staff might have removed it by mistake. Imagine any high profile death, the body reaching the hospital and the hospital staff engaging in removing/disposing things of the victims body. Definitely sounds unbelievable. In any such police case, the staff knows that crucial evidence can be lost if proper care is not taken.
Lest truth becomes a first casuality while investigating the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks it is of utmost importance that a separate commission of inquiry is instituted to investigate the death of Hemant Karkare and his colleagues.
Interestingly there have been groups/individuals who have raised similar demands earlier itself. Ex-servicemens’ association of Mumbai demanded a thorough probe by a special investigation team under the supervision of the High court into the suspicious death of Hemant Karkare and to bring to book the real culprits and the brain behind the conspiracy. (Pudhari, Kolhapur, 17 Dec 2008). A public interest litigation was also filed by an advocate in the Mumbai high court claiming that since as head of ATS he had arrested workers of some Hinduist organisations, they might have had a hand in the killing. The high court also while disposing of the petition directed the investigating agency to investigate into the death of Karkare taking into consideration the concerns of the petitioner (Pudhari, Kolhapur, 19 Dec 2008) [Quoted in ‘Who Killed Karkare ?’ - S.M. Mushrif ]
Unless and until a thorough investigation is done doubts will linger on.
Not only people from Malegaon but from rest of the country – who yearn for secularism and democracy – would continue to look at the official version with scepticism. People would continue to believe that his death was part of a grand conspiracy hatched at higher level where he was eliminated taking advantage of the terrorist attack in the city.
They would continue to think that he was eliminated for investigating the terror network led by the Hindutva brigade which spanned the RSS, the IB and its affiliates within the military and security apparatus. His exposure of the fact that Samjhauta Express blast was the handiwork of Abhinav Bharat, his attempts to expose the links of Pravin Togadia to the Samjhauta Express blast and other blasts in the country in recent times and deciphering the connecting links between different terror attacks in the country, proved costly to him.
It is possible that all these ‘post facto rationale’ are rubbish and Karkare was killed by the terrorists themselves. But it would be necessary to prove it.
The powers that be cannot just hide behind empty slogans of patriotism.
When people demand answers it is definitely not a wise move to target them as traitors.

Sanatan Sanstha’s link to Margao blast conspiracy just got thicker with all five accused arrested in the case having allegiance to the Hindu right wing organisation operating from Goa police said.

The latest arrest of 20-year old Dhananjay Ashtekar, an engineering student from Khed in Ratnagiri is also associated with Sanatan Sanstha’s activities. Ashtekar was arrested on Wednesday evening by state police’s Special Investigation Team, which is mandated to probe the blast. “He is related to Sanstha and has made it clear during his interrogation,” Superintendent of Police and spokesperson for Goa police department Atmaram Deshpande told PTI on Thursday.

Ashtekar was studying in an engineering college at Ichalkaranji, a town in  western Maharashtra. Deshpande said that the youth was being interrogated over blast case and only when there was sufficient material on record to prove his involvement, he was placed under arrest. Ashtekar is the fifth Sanatan Sanstha activist found to be linked with the blast conspiracy which went awry on the eve of Diwali.

Earlier two accused, Malgonda Patil and Yogesh Naik, who died in the Margao blast and two arrested persons, Vinayak Patil and Vinay Talekar, have confessed their links to Sanstha, which operates through its Ashram at Ramnathi. Deshpande had earlier said that the Sanstha is under scanner as its activists are part of the blast conspiracy. The police have, however, refused to move for a ban against Sanstha as there are no enough evidence to rope in it for the conspiracy. The Margao blast took place on October 16 killing two persons.
© Copy 2009 PTI. www.rediff.com, November 12, 2009 15:49 IST)

I.

How to keep Procrastinating When It Comes To Hindutva Terror ?
With every passing day it is becoming apparent that Indian state has different yardsticks to treat terrorism of the  Hindutva kind and that of the ‘Jihadi’ kind. It is not for nothing that more than four weeks after the bomb blasts in Goa – which saw deaths of two activists of Sanatan Sanstha, a emergent fanatic group cloaked in spiritual clothing – there has not been any significant move on part of the Goan government.
Apart from arrests of three people – Vinay Talekar, 30, and Vinayak Patil, 27, originally from Karnataka and Dhananjay Ashtekar, a student of engineering from Ratnagiri- we have seen merely empty statements emanating from the powers that be, which at times were even found to be contradictory to each other. And all those claims by the home minister Mr Ravi Naik that the government is contemplating ban on the organisation have similarly proved empty promises merely made for public consumption.
In fact a leading police officer from Goa Superintendent of Police Atmaram Deshpande- who is incharge of the investigations into the Goa bomb blasts – had made the intentions clear while talking to the media about the “..difference between jihadi terrorism and right wing Hindu terrorism” ( 2 nd Nov 2009).
Despite the danger the conspiracy posed to the atmosphere of fragile peace in Margao – which happens to be a communally sensitive city – the Superintendent of Police had no qualms in sharing his weird understanding vis-a-vis terrorim.
“The aims and goals of both groups differ. Jihadi elements have threatened Goa’s coastline in the past. We have also received threats of places frequented by tourists being targeted in the past. But this is different,”
“The recent attack shows that the target was a public function frequented by many people. Chaos was perhaps their intended objective,” he added.
Perhaps the police officer did not want to look at the revealations that the dead activists and the accused were hoping to fan communal tensions by misleading the police through items they wanted to leave behind at the site: a shopping bag from a shop at “Khan Market” Delhi, a bottle of traditional perfume popular among Muslims and an empty bag of basmati rice on which all the words were in Urdu.
As a recap of the whole incident it may be told that how two people, both members of the Sanatan Sanstha, died in the Diwali eve blast when detonator-rigged gelatine sticks they were ferrying on a scooter exploded. Malgonda Patil, a Sangli-based high ranking member of the SS died of injuries a few hours after the blast; the other scooter rider Yogesh Naik succumbed to his injuries a few days later. It is learnt both Patil and Naik, who have been accused in the blast case, were parking their scooter near a festive gathering 100 metres from the district administration headquarters building when the gelatine sticks exploded.Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat was in close proximity when the incident occurred.
They were also involved in planting another bomb at Sancaole town 20 km away , near the port town of Vasco, which could not explode because of the alertness shown by the people around.in The alert occupants of a truck flung a bag into a nearby field when they heard a clock ticking inside.The zipped bag contained a timer device and a few sticks of gelatine, which was diffused by the police bomb disposal squad late in the night.
The truck was carrying nearly 40 people and was headed for a narakasura competition, where thousands of people were gathered to see several giant effigies being judged for prizes and then set on fire, as part of a popular Diwali tradition in Goa.
In a writeup in Indian Express ( 8 th Nov 2009) ‘ Goa Bombers Tried To Leave Muslim Imprint’ the reporter even quotes another police officer on the condition of anonymity ” The material was enough to spark communal trouble in Margao and extremist elements from outside would have found it easy to aggravate it.” A close look at the plan to ‘leave Muslim imprint’ had echoes of earlier attempts by Hindutva terrorists of different hues to spark communal tension.  The Malegaon bomb blast in 2008 which saw the exposure of the wide Hindutva terrorist network – thanks to the efforts of a committed officer like Hemant Karkare – had also seen similar actions by the fanatics. In fact the members of Abhinav Bharat had parked their explosive laden motorcycle below the defunct office of the SIMI in Bhikhu Chowk, Malegaon. The Nanded bomb blast in 2006 had also seen fake beards and dresses normally worn by Muslims at the house of the terrorists who had died in the bomb blasts.

II.

Did the Goan government partially foot the bill for the blasts ?
Investigation into the Goa bomb blasts has exposed a another dangerous dimension of the sprawling network of Sanatan Sanstha within the administration. Whether it has to do with the presence of Sudhin Dhavalikar, a minister in the Digambar Kamat government whose wife Jyoti happens to be part of the leading team of Sanatan Sanstha needs to be further probed ?
And thus despite the fact that Maharashtra Anti Terrorist Squad had forwarded a proposal to the Maharashtra government to ban the organisation after the infamous blast at Gadkari Rangayatan (theatre) in Thane in June 2008, and Panvel and when investigations had pointed fingers at the Sanatan Sanstha, the Goan government continued with its policy of advertising in the newspaper brought out by the Sanstha.
…Menino Peres, director of the department of information and publicity (DIP) that controls state government advertising, said several advertisements had been released to the propaganda arm of the SS, a multilingual broadsheet named Sanatan Prabhat, over the years.
“We released advertisements to them like we issue ads to other papers too. We are not going out of our way doing it,” Peres told IANS.
Peres was unable to immediately mention the amount of money that was spent by the DIP on advertisements released to the SS annually.
When asked if the state government would stop releasing advertisements to the newspaper in view of the new found infamy gained by the SS, Peres said such a decision would have to be taken by the state government.
…Vishnu Wagh, advisor to the DIP, told reporters Thursday that the daily Sanatan Prabhat had the potential to “breed terrorists”.
Wagh also said that the newspaper had been abusing the liberties granted under the freedom of media for a long time now. “Dainik Sanatan Prabhat has abused freedom of press for long now. They have consistently derided the system of democracy in the country. Their literature can easily breed terrorists,” Wagh said. “The literature published in the newspaper is socially divisive and acts like poison in society,” he added. (Oct 30, 2009, IANS)
Interestingly much on the lines of involvement of Lt Col Purohit, who was one of the mastermind of the Malegaon bomb blasts, one also finds that the Sanatan Sanstha could have also established links within some sections of the military to further its divisive agenda. A report carried by ‘Deccan Herald’(31.10.2009) makes a disturbing revelations about an ex-Navy officer’s Sanatan links going unprobed. (Devika Sequeira, Panaji, Oct 30, DHNS)
Former Indian Navy officer Sean Michael Clarke, the son of retired Commodore Richard Clarke, has been an active member of the Sanatan Sanstha in Goa for over three years. Internal police documents in the possession of this newspaper show that Sean Clarke, lived in the Sanatan Ramnathi ashram in Ponda from December 2006, the very year he acquired Australian nationality.
On May 5, 2009, Sean Clarke, 39, made a formal application to the CID for a year’s extension of his visa, “to render ‘seva’ (service)” to the Sanatan Ramnathi ashram as a full time voluntary worker. Though the former navy officer styles himself as a spiritual guru, claiming to run the Sanatan’s Spiritual Research Foundation website, police documents show he shared the dais publicly with militant saffron groups like the Bajran Dal, VHP and the RSS on two occasions here in Goa. The public meetings were suffused with provocative rhetoric directed at the government and the minorities. But the police cleared Sean for visa extensions several times saying there was nothing “adverse” in his record.
The Sanatan says Sean is no longer in the ashram. “He left some three or four months ago,” SS trustee Virendra Marathe told this newspaper.
His sister, the once well-known model Sharon Clarke Sequeira, 42, however, still lives in the ashram. Marathe says she has been associated with them from 1990…
He took premature retirement, his documents say, for medical reasons. His father Richard Clarke served as the CO of the navy’s Hansa base in Goa in the 90s.

III.

SANATAN in Serbia ?
As it always happens the most convenient way of shirking one’s responsibility in any particular case is blaming ’systemic failure’. Ravi Naik, the home minister of Goa, who has recently been in news after his statements after the Goa blasts  recently admitted that the Margao blast, indicated an intelligence failure. “State intelligence agencies had no knowledge of the blast in the commercial town, which clearly indicates their failure,” Naik told a local media channel during a television show on Monday night. “Sanatan Saunstha was under the police scanner after the Thane and Panvel blasts in Maharashtra, but despite this they (intelligence agencies) had no inkling of what is being conspired by its members,” he said. (Margao blast indicates intelligence failure, admits Goa minister, November 03, 2009 13:46 IST, www.rediff.com)
Perhaps he should have replaced ‘intelligence failure’ with ‘absence of political will’.
It is also being discussed that the foreign links of this fanatic group are being probed to know its wide network. In fact it would be in the larger interest of humanity if Mr Ravi Naik looks into this report prepared by a group of experts about Sanatan’s operations in Serbia and the manner in which it was ultimately banned there calling it an “..[e]xceptionally harmful cult that threatens human rights, freedom of choice, freedom of opinion, of belief as well as mental and social balance, and the safety of the individual as well as that of the State. Under a humanitarian disguise, Sanatan champions terrorism” (http://griess.st1.at/gsk/fecris/ 85%20conf%20engl%20PETROVIC.htm,  for its reference go through the below links, http://www.icsahome.cominfoserv_enews/affnb_2005_01.htm and also http://www.google.com cse?cx=001799989780590661597%3A5b8gyda5z5a&ie=UTF-8&q=sanatan&sa=Search)
The report (“SANATAN”: spiritual science or a mentally and socially exceptionally dangerous cult ?) prepared in 2004 discusses how “..[t]he social situation in Serbia enabled the rise of a cult that is relatively unknown in our country, and is probably little known in other European Union countries, too.”
It talks about the “Sanatan/Eternally New” cult, which promotes itself to the outside world as: “A Society for Scientific Spirituality” and its gurus are Dr. Djajant Baladie Atavle and Dr. Kunda Djajant Atavle whose publications includes “Hypnotherapy”, “Pakistani Psychology”, “The Science of Hypnosis”, “Kschatadarma – Protection of Sadaques and the destruction of criminals”.
The said cult was listed in Serbia as a humanitarian organisation, thanks to ten people’s signature, under the usual statement of “without political, religious or lucrative aims”.
Discussing the operations of the cult it present the following facts :
“Sadaques are “truth seekers”. According to Spiritual Science, the Sadaque is willing to give up “his body, his mind, his material means and his life” to his spiritual guru, with the ultimate goal of sacrificing his life for the guru. The destruction of his enemies is the only spiritual practice of the Sadaques/truth seekers. .. Criminal are tradespeople, politicians, lawyers, doctors, the police, etc. – people who in actual fact trouble very few people. They must be destroyed while praising God and respecting “subjective emotions” and following “subtle signs”. They must be killed even through the use of weapons. This is, in fact, a very simple spiritual practice.”
After briefly describing the Santan indoctrination the report provides details of how the group is led by a female guru who started by ‘renting an apartment and then buying a large house on the edge of Belgrade, at the foot of Mount Avala’ where this guru and her followers and sympathisers live. Interestingly the manner in which great deal of noise was made by people gathering there every day at the house led compelled the local people to approach the police for an inquiry into what was happening at the yellow house.
The night following this request, an unknown person or group threw stones at this house and police and firemen quickly arrived at the scene and opened an inquest.
It was worth noting that the media, the television, the radio and even the Human Rights Committee in Helsinki immediately reacted, which defended the rights of the “Sanatan humanitarian organisation – an organisation for human spirituality”. It was claimed that this humanitarian and spiritual organisation was being harassed by a mob of xenophobes, chauvinists and criminals from “reactionary groups”.
The report prepared by a group of experts explains how their intervention ultimately forced the government to ban this ‘anti-social pseudo religious cult.” According to the report :
“At this time of unrest, we gave two interviews to the media, explaining calmly in simple terms that not only was Sanatan a pseudo-psychological spiritual cult, but that it was also engaged in highly damaging mental manipulation, presenting grave danger for people’s mental health, their dignity and their fundamental rights, exploiting people’s weaknesses and ignorance. Sanatan lies dangerously through its mask of the promise of spiritual and mental development. With its “spiritual practices”, this cult in fact prepares its victim followers for antisocial and terrorist acts. While praising the Lord, they train themselves up for assassinating “criminals” chosen through “their inner feelings and subtle signs” under the guidance of the guru. This is an exceptionally dangerous doctrine for the individuals, their lives, the human rights in general and fundamental social balance.
Our public conclusion was to officially call upon the State Prosecutor to give an indictment after a serious and thorough investigation.
Some time later, for the first time in Serbia, an obviously anti-social pseudo-psychological cult was banned. The Minister for Human and Minority Rights banned Sanatan, Spiritual Science.”(Marseilles, March 27-28 2004)

IV.

Pussyfooting in Dealing With Hindutva Extremists ?
In his recent writeup in Economic and Political Weekly, (which talks about recent arrest of Kobad Ghandy recently,) Sumanta Banerjee discusses “..[I]ndian state’s dual policy of pussyfooting in dealing with Hindu religious extremists on the one hand and trampling down on the dissenters upholding the cause of the poorer classes on the other.” (‘Two Parallel Narratives’, October 31, 2009)
Discussing the “..deliberate design in this lopsided reversal of priorities of the Indian state” it tells us that “it is surely not mere oversight that the political ideologues of the Sangh Parivar – leaders like Pramod Muthalik, Bal Thackeray, Vinay Katiyar, Praveen Togadia, who openly preach violence against relgious minorities and secular forces – are seldom touched by the police.The Indian state winks at them – since they pose a threat only to the minority community section of the population, whose interestes have already been sacrificed by the politicians at the altar of majoritarian nationalism.”
As things stand today, it is just a matter of time when the Goa blasts would be forgotten much on the lines of Nanded blasts or Kanpur blasts (August 2008) and similar other blasts involving Hindutva terrorists.Perhaps a much bigger tragedy would awaken us from our selective amnesia vis-a-vis terrorism of the Hindutva kind.

This is a Guest Post by SATYA SAGAR.

Satya Sagar is a writer, journalist and videomaker based in New Delhi. sagarnama at gmail dot com

Is Maoism in India really the only response to poverty and lack of development? Is an armed rebellion the only way to change the way the Indian State operates? Will such a movement lead to a better future for underprivileged people in this country? Are other forms of mass democratic struggles an alternative option at all?  These are the questions that haunted me as I sat through a public hearing on drought at Daltonganj in Jharkhand’s Palamu district late October this year. Questions that are not new and have been debated repeatedly within the various strands of the Indian left movement for several decades now, with no clear answers as yet.

While I mused, there was this young woman standing on the stage, slowly edging towards the mike, patiently waiting for her turn to speak. She need not have said anything at all. Her emaciated, frail frame, the harassed look on her face and the tears silently welling up in her sunken eyes had already conveyed to us this was another tale of unmitigated tragedy. Barely in her early twenties, she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis a few months ago. Her husband was already on his deathbed due to the same affliction as there was no public health center near her village. Treatment in town was obviously unaffordable. The drought raging in the district, reported to be the worst in over half a century, would end up wiping out her entire family she explained in a quiet, matter of fact tone.

As we sat there, the small ‘jury’ of three or four of us who had come from Delhi and Ranchi to listen to the woes of Palamu’s villagers felt much, much smaller. For her horror story was only one out of some 3000 similar ones of neglect, deprivation and outright desperation that tensely waited to be recalled that early winter afternoon.
The old man who never got his old age pension, the abandoned widow on the verge of starvation, the landless worker who slogged for wages that never arrived, the child born with a deformed hip a decade ago and still hobbling his way through childhood. This contrasted with the fact that thousands of crores of rupees had been allocated for employment guarantee schemes, subsidised rations, public health and infrastructure schemes – all siphoned off somewhere between the Indian capital New Delhi and the state capital Ranchi. Stolen by a kleptocracy that dares to call itself the ‘elected’ representatives of the Indian people.

And yet, poverty and lack of development are not the only reasons why the Naxals or Maoists, the MCC or whatever you want to call them thrive in Palamu. It is also the lack of respect and dignity that the dalits and adivasis of these parts have suffered for centuries, their abject humiliation by the ‘upper castes’ continuing without redress in Independent India.  Many, many moons ago when the first movements for justice started in this district they were led by the Communist Party of India, the Socialists, the Gandhians. Struggles against feudal practices like the ‘right to the first night’, which forced the brides of Dalit men to spend the first fortnight after marriage as concubines of upper-caste landlords – a ‘custom’ enforced at gun-point. Or against the practice of bonded labour whereby generations of families slaved for their ‘creditors’, the interest on their loans accumulating faster than the rivers of sweat they were able to shed.

In the seventies, when these popular struggles died down due to changing priorities or exhaustion or corruption or whatever of these organisations the Naxals had moved into this vaccum- with their guns. So somehow it is not just the failure of the Indian state to deliver the basic needs of the people we are talking about here but the inability of our mass, democratic movements to maintain a consistent long-term presence too.
Do the Maoists have popular support? Among the landless, the poor, the ‘lower castes’, the adivasis the answer obviously would be yes as in the initial years their interventions did help wipe out the worst of feudal excesses. Most of their cadres come from these oppressed sections of society though the occasional ‘upper caste’ youth too have joined.  Have their actions led to an overall improvement in the lives of the people? Well, yes and no. Yes, because as mentioned their activities have boosted the morale of the poor and the oppressed. No, because a high morale is all very well but a highly nutritious meal or a functioning high school would be still better and these are still elusive.

The Maoists with simple Newtonian logic had achieved the first step of doing away with the fear of feudal oppression. Greater the inertia of an object, greater the force required to move it. Shoot a few really bad, ‘upper-caste’ warlords in the area and this has the force-multiplier effect of, at least for a short while, moving mountains of unaccounted power.  The next several steps of organising people, winning all the basic things they crave for – food, water, healthcare, escape from poverty and so on has proved far more difficult for the Maoists. In other words, the details of day-to-day life are missing from their strategy. There is only so much martyrdom and bloodshed any population can take.

It is also true though, once the gun has been taken up by the oppressed, the State weighs in heavily on the side of the local oppressors. The latter themselves escalate the levels of violence and it becomes impossible to do anything in the open. No more public meetings, no rallies, no discussions and debates among the people, no mass organisations. In other words none of those basic ingredients required to build a future, participative people’s democracy.
At the same time, the underground – that dark and dangerous space so tantalising from a safe distance to angst-ridden, urban radicals – is fraught with enough problems of its own. The constant hiding, the secrecy and suspicion bordering on paranoia, the inability to communicate with comrades or carry out political education of cadre, the costly lapses and subsequent losses – all leading to the near negation of the movement’s original objectives.

Every now and then a creative Maoist cadre somewhere will try to do something different at the local level like run schools, crackdown on social evils, mobilise people for militant struggles that don’t involve the use of arms These struggles, wherever they have occurred, have always been hugely popular with the people. Those in power, who had complained about the violence of the Maoists, would now worry about their non-violent methods and at some point of time step in with their jackboots to crush the experiment.  Unfortunately, I suspect, the Maoist leadership too sees these experiments as ideologically soft, reformist or even worse as too ‘Gandhian’ and doesn’t really believe in them in any way. It occasionally allows them to happen with the idea that ‘deviants’ within their fold can always be brought back to the ‘correct path’ one way or the other. The lives of the people, after all, can really change for the better only when the ‘New Democratic Revolution’ happens.

In the worldview of the Maoist ideologues the physics of the armed struggle will some day square the grand mathematical equation of social injustice on one side with the predations of capitalism and imperialism on the other. Their solutions are alarmingly final ones, all derived from the dead abstractions of physics and mathematics, whether they correspond with the living biological needs of the faceless ‘people’ and ‘masses’ or not.  Nobody knows what this ‘New Democratic Revolution’ really means, how many hands and feet it has or whether it prefers sugar and milk with its coffee or not. Or for that matter, why the Dalits and Adivasis of India should fight for this particular model of the future and not something else. The indigenous people of the Indian subcontinent for example may be better off fighting for complete autonomy from the rest of India instead of taking on the burden of carrying out the entire ‘Indian revolution’. And if the Dalits and Adivasis should take up the gun why not poor Muslims, many of whose social and economic indicators are even worse? Also if this Revolution does happen some day, why should it be confined to the borders of India – why not South Asia as a whole or even beyond?

Again, nobody even knows when this Revolution is supposed to happen or be finally declared ‘successful’ but it is believed passionately that nothing but the gun can lead the people of India to this utopia. As one of the Maoist ideologues caught by the police recently in Jharkhand reportedly told the media with frightening clarity, ‘the bloodshed will stop only when the Revolution is over”. He did not bother to set a timeframe- they could be fighting for the next 200 years for all we know- all their martyrs looking nice on wall posters in the meanwhile. Will there be anyone out there left to recognise the ‘victory’ when it finally comes?

I personally do believe in the right of the masses to wield the gun if need be. When faced with a violent ruling class, it is an ugly but understandable premise. Mao was right when he said ‘power flows from the barrel of a gun’. The problem is about all the things he did not mention and that do not flow from guns – like water, food, medicines, peace or ultimately for that matter, even guarantees of justice and democracy. Making a fetish of armed struggle to the neglect of every other way of operating is not serious politics at all and rather indicative of the nihilist mindset behind such strategies- ‘jalaa do, mitaa do, yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye tho kya hei’.

The Indian State too on its part is appropriately barbaric in everything it does, making each wild accusation and conspiracy theory of the Maoists seem like a profound, well-studied thesis. Rs. 470 crores is the sum given by the Central Government for Jharkhand’s anti-Naxalite operations- to be spent on more arms for the police and more uniforms for the unemployed youth who go on to become the Indian police. If that sum were spent sincerely on the kind of people queuing up to complain at the Daltonganj public hearing there may have been no need for either the Naxal or the noxious cop.

Instead the State builds schools in the Naxal dominated areas and fills them with policemen – there are 3000 schools right now in Jharkhand full of Cobras and Scorpions or similar species lower down the evolutionary order. It is clueless about who is really a Maoist and who is not so it ends up blindly lashing out at some innocent folk within the reach of its very short and clumsy arms.  Again, the State, for all its prattle about ‘rule of law’, also does nothing to encourage any form of peaceful resistance either. Mahendra Singh of the CPI(ML) Liberation, the brave and only MLA in the Jharkhand Assembly exposing corruption in high places, was gunned down in broad daylight in early 2005. An investigation by an official committee has implicated a senior police officer, who continues to rise up the hierarchy instead of being booked for murder!

Just a year and half ago Lalit Mehta, a bright young engineer and certainly no Maoist, was shot dead in Palamu district as he exposed corruption and organised social audits of the NREGA or employment guarantee scheme. His killers, local politically connected mafia, have not yet been apprehended and may never be. All this obviously sends out a chilling message to anyone who wants to follow Lalit’s path of ‘unarmed’ activism.

The truth is that those who run the Indian State and sections of the Indian population who benefit from its policies really don’t give a damn for the people the Naxals or other left forces are trying to mobilise. The Dalits, Adivasis and the poor in general can all shrivel up and die for all they care. Whether these folks want it or not they will be subjected to a perverse development process that involves driving nails through their flesh and laying rail lines across their bones so that a small minority of Indians can have their ‘infrastructure’ and feel like a ‘superpower’. If they choose to fight back they will be crushed like flies – the endless legions of unemployed Indian youth from around the country marshalled in uniforms for this genocide.

That is precisely why when the masked Maoist leader Kishenji openly mocks the Indian State on prime time television and invites it to battle he should be careful, for he may get exactly what he wishes. The State would like nothing better than a war against its own citizens, as it becomes another opportunity to make lots of money, replenish its arsenal, demolish whatever little democratic space is left in the country and rollback all resistance to its skewed policies for decades to come. A war, for which the Maoists too, despite all their bravado, are simply not prepared well enough. Both the Maoist leadership and the Indian State it seems are keen on playing with each other only one game called ’revolution and counter-revolution’, which ends only when either of the two players ceases to exist forever.

One thing is very clear though. If a new game is to emerge forcefully on the Indian stage soon, far greater number of Indian citizens need to get down to the task of solving the problems of poverty, oppression and injustice than involved currently. The situation today, more than ever before, calls for the building of many, many more creative mass movements to establish the rights of the people than out there right now.

As the late K. Balagopal pointed out so insightfully in a piece on violence versus non-violence in the Economic and Political Weekly a few years ago, neither method has really made much difference to the course of Indian state policies since Independence. In other words, there is simply not enough happening to bring about change given the scale of the country’s various problems.

There is no point though in blaming either the Indian State or the Maoists, both of whom will continue to do only what they know best. While Indian democracy is too important to be left to ‘elected’ politicians, Maoist martyrdom by itself will also never be enough to change the Indian State.

It is for the rest of India to decide whether they are going to be mere spectators, pliant players or makers of a different destiny for themselves and their society.

This guest post is an appeal circulated by Progressive Students Union (PSU) – Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – about the state’s war on “Maoist violence” , adding to the growing criticism of the CPI(Maoist) that cannot be conveniently dismissed as pro-state or anti-Left.

As has already been declared all across the national media, the state has declared war on “Maoist violence” across the country and is about to unleash its might on some of the most neglected regions and people of this country. While the Maoists are the declared target of the State, it is needless to say that they have hardly any qualms about “breaking a few eggs to make an omlette”! The thousands of adivasis and civilians going to be caught in the crossfire would be portrayed by the media as an inevitable but necessary price to pay for the eradication of the Naxal ‘menace’. That may well be only less than half the story, because another reason for state operations in this area is the immense mineral wealth there which can not be passed on to Indian capital unless adivasis living there are displaced, and their survival systems completely destroyed. According to reports from Chhatisgarh, the state sponsored Salwa Judum has displaced more than three hundred and fifty thousand adivasis in the old Bastar area. Fifty thousand have moved to neighbouring states, another fifty thousand are living under the surveillance of para-military forces in state controlled camps, the remaining two hundred and fifty thousand have moved deeper into the jungle to escape the violence and pillage of Salwa Judum. While the adivasis of Central India have faced, and resisted state violence for long, the Central Home Ministry – under the leadership of the suave and genteel Home Minister and Prime Minister -  has made plans for a larger offensive named ‘Operation Green Hunt’ (with the open possibility of aerial bombardment) to be launched in November this year. Progressive Students Union (PSU) condemns in the strongest terms these actions of the state which amounts to nothing but declaring war on its own citizens.

The regions which have been declared Naxal-hit and where combing operations have already been started by the State are some of the most backward regions of our country and are inhabited by largely tribal populations. These deprived sections have always had to bear the costs of capitalist ‘development’ and accumulation pursued by the Indian State since independence; whether by giving up their lands and access to common property resources in order to aid corporate expansion or by a steady erosion of social safety nets continuously dismantled especially since 1990 by a State determined to minimize its welfarist role at the behest of the neoliberal masters it is enslaved to. It is clear that anti-naxal/Maoist operations are nothing but a ploy to silence dissent and divert attention from the real issue, i.e., the abject failure of the Indian State to ensure the well-being of ALL its citizens. The State in order to deflect responsibility is simply avoiding a debate on how the pattern of capitalist development so dear to the ruling classes will mean nothing but the continuous immiserisation of the vast majority of toiling masses whose labour provides the surplus a tiny minority feeds upon. In its place, it is propping up an empty debate peppered with slogans of “national security” and “internal threats”, hollow phrases that only seek to justify the State aiming its weaponry at its own people. Let us be very clear that throughout human history capitalist development has always been aided by the might of the State, as has been clearly witnessed during the Enclosure Movement in England or the expropriation of the indigenous people’s land and resources by the white settlers in America and Australia. So what we are witnessing now is nothing but a new phase of ‘primitive accumulation’.

However, at this juncture, PSU also feels that there is a need to critically look at the tactics adopted by the Maoists in leading the struggle against the State. To begin with, the Maoist line which has singularly been pre-occupied with violence as the core of their philosophical understanding, betrays the absolute lack of political understanding on their part. The Maoists have become victims/prisoners of their own limited understanding of the nature of the Indian state. This has led them to universalize their localized experiences and resort to strategies of armed struggle which may see them gaining the upper hand in isolated skirmishes but fails to hold good even ten kilometers outside the jungles. They see the Indian state as feudal when in reality the State, though steeped in regressive social structures of caste, communalism and patriarchy, is undeniably capitalist. Moreover, this capitalist state uses these pre-modern structures to propagate and entrench itself. These primordial relations make it difficult for them to perceive the actual capitalist character of the State and the mode of exploitation, and hence the appropriate mode of struggle. Their tactics of resistance consists in deploying a chosen few to lead or even fully undertake an armed struggle on behalf of the oppressed. The irresponsibility of this politics of behalf-ism has gone to the extent of carrying out surprise attacks in the name of resistance, and has left the impoverished masses exposed to the backlash unleashed by the State. The instances of irresponsibility shown by the Maoists are several, chief of which was observed in Kandhamal where  the Maoists displayed their bravado in killing a VHP sadhu, yet no trace of them was seen later when innocent Christian adivasis were butchered by the rabid right-wing Hindutva brigade seeking retribution. Let us be very clear about the fact that violence can never be anything more than a part of tactics. Whether a revolutionary organization will take to arms can only be decided by the context, by the people engaged in the struggle and through building a concrete understanding of concrete situations. Unlike the capitalist forces, who keep on unleashing massive violence on the people despite abhorring it in theory, faced with a perennial persecution by the uniformed goons of the capitalist world order, Marxists have always been honest about their readiness to engage in revolutionary violence if the need arises. However, that does not mean reducing all our understanding of politics to merely engaging in anarchic violence while failing to build a revolutionary class consciousness among the masses. Moreover, in order to formulate appropriate strategies to overthrow the existing system, it is imperative that we develop a concrete understanding of the different ways in which the capitalist Indian state seeks to stabilize itself. On the one hand the Indian State has a truly terrifying command over a wide range of sophisticated weapons of annihilation, which it has never hesitated at the slightest to unleash even if it were against its own people as we have already seen in the case of the North East and Kashmir. On the other hand, the State has also erected several hegemonic structures through which it seeks to legitimize its existence, structures which have to be combated ideologically and cannot be undermined or overthrown by an armed struggle alone.

It is a well accepted fact that the extent of deprivation in our country has reached overwhelming proportions such that more than three quarters of our population subsist on less than Rs 20 a day. The 77% of our population violently pushed to the margins of existence consists of not just adivasis, but rural and urban poor as well. In such a scenario, isolated struggles for adivasis or other such oppressed identities may win individual victories and concessions, but will surely not be enough in bringing about a comprehensive systemic change. The only way forward for building a revolutionary praxis is one in which all oppressed sections are politicized and made truly conscious of the contradictions that keep them chained and divided. A strong solidarity among and with the struggling masses must be forged in order to strengthen the bonds of class consciousness which would be most effective in countering the hegemonic structures created and maintained by the appropriating classes. A revolutionary politics can never get built without intensifying class struggle, which in turn is impossible in our country without smashing the structures of caste, communalism and patriarchy, the structures which divide working classes and are exploited by the right-wing forces to pit sections of the working classes against each other. Frederick Engels in the Introduction to Karl Marx’s “The Class Struggles in France – 1848 to 1850” pointed out as early as 1895 itself that “The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions, carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul… But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long persistent work is required…”

This is not to position parliamentary democracy as the solution to all our problems. Engels, while speaking on the subject of universal suffrage, wrote, “In election agitation, it provide[s] us with a means, second to none, of getting in touch with the mass of the people where they still stand aloof from us; of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions against our attacks before all the people…”  If parliamentary democracy allows you to assess your standing amongst the masses and represent their interests, how does entering into dubious alliances with reactionary forces serve the cause of building a revolutionary consciousness? Parliamentary democracy as practiced by the mainstream left has become nothing but a hollow brand of politics, where opportunistic alliances are formed in a bid to retain power, and where remaining in power is the end in itself and not the means to advance a social transformation. The degeneration and depoliticization that has set in among the mainstream left parties is self evident when on the one hand they continue to rhetorically pledge their solidarity with people’s movements emerging across the country, but go ahead and forge alliances with exactly the same powers that pledge to crush these movements. An instance of this can be seen in Orissa where adivasis are resisting corporate depredation and exploitation (without any Maoist intervention) carried out by Vedanta, Posco and Tata actively promoted by the BJD government. However the parliamentary left in the name of ‘not opposing industrialisation’ not only entered into an alliance with the BJD but has also refused to stand in solidarity with the emergent mass movement.

Progressive Students Union (PSU) stands in firm solidarity with the people of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and all others who are valiantly resisting the ploys of the Indian bourgeoisie and appeals to all progressive and left-democratic forces to join hands against this new phase of capitalist war against the working masses of India. We believe that only through a process of unity against the enemy and critical debate within the left wing forces, will the road be paved towards revolution.  All those forces will be condemned by history, that in the name of debate, expose their fissures to the enemy and also those, who in the name of struggle and unity, forget the critical debates within. An appreciation of this dialectics is the need of the hour.

Sd/- Vibha, PSU-JNU                                                                                                                     Sd/- Divya, PSU-JNU

PANAJI: Goa Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders like Manohar Parrikar have expressed support for the Sanatan Sanstha, the Hindu outfit blamed for the pre-Diwali blasts that killed two people  on Wednesday.
Virendra Marathe, managing trustee of the Sanstha, named BJP state president Shripad Naik, leader of opposition Parrikar and party legislator Dayanand Mandrekar as politicians who stood by them in the aftermath of the blasts in Margao, 35 km from here.
Police say the blasts were engineered and executed by members of the Sanstha.
“The BJP MLAs supported us. They advised us to sue the media for defamation, for slandering the Sansthan. Dayanand Mandrekar, Parrikar and Shripad Naik supported us,” Marathe said at a press conference in Panaji.
Goa BJP leaders support us: Sanatan Sanstha
IANS 28 October 2009, 02:35pm IST ( Times of India, 28 th October 2009)

1.

How much time do the powers that be need to make any significant move when they unearth a conspiracy hatched by a self proclaimed ’spiritual group’ to massacre dozens of innocent people supposedly to vindicate their weltanshauung and instigate a communal riot? Do they keep quibbling over minor details and let the real masterminds obfuscate their obvious links with the executioners? Do they keep talking in multiple voices and make themselves vulnerable over attacks by oppositional parties supposedly for their ‘dilly-dallying’?
It has been more than a fortnight that one witnessed a blast in Margao, where two people belonging to ‘Sanatan Sanstha’ carrying explosives in their scooter were killed and another bomb was detected – around twenty kilometres from the first spot – in a truck carrying 40 youth and a Narkasur for competition – which exposed a sinister conspiracy to instigate communal riots, but one is yet to see any concrete step on part of the government to nab the real terrorists and break their wider network.
The home minister of Goa, Mr Ravi Naik had also categorically stated ( Mail Today, 19 th Oct 2009) that ‘The Scooter on which the bombs were being carried belongs to Sanatan Sanstha. It seems to be a clear attempt to create communal discord in the state.” Many senior police officers of the state had also expressed similar opinions. There was also talk of questioning the wife of a cabinet minister herself because of her proximity to the extremist outfit including the proposal that the government is contemplating a ban on the controversial organisation.
The Herald, a prominent daily from Goa had rather voiced concerns of a the vast majority of Goans ( not to say  the majority of people in the subcontinent) when it asked the powers that be to (Herald front-page editorial, 18 October 2009) to take urgent steps to curb this phenomenon and had also delineated the real objectives of the perpetrators :

The blast in Margao, as well as the one averted in Sancoale, have brought to the fore the ugly face of terrorism in Goa. Fortunately, the bomb exploded before it could be planted, killing Malgonda Patil and critically injuring Yogesh Naik, the terrorists who planned to massacre dozens of innocent people. The bomb in Sancoale was detected by an alert youth. Had it exploded where it was planted – in a truck carrying 40 youth and a Narkasur for a competition – it would have taken a large number of lives. Those who made and planted it are yet to be brought to justice.
This dastardly terrorist attack was, first, intended to target the Diwali Narkasur festival, which is unique to Goa and Goans, but which the Hindu fundamentalist Sanatan Sanstha denounces as a glorification of evil. The second objective, far more sinister, was to instigate religious riots in Margao, which has a history of communal tension. This cowardly attempt to hurt Goan traditions and destroy the State’s communal harmony must be put down swiftly and decisively.
This is the second terrorist act linked to the Sanatan Sanstha, which is active mainly in Maharashtra and Goa, and has its national headquarters at Ramnathi. ..

It is clear that if enough pressure is not put on the powers that be, it is possible that much on the lines of Kanpur blasts and Nanded blasts – which also witnessed deaths of Hindutva terrorists – this blast would also get erased from people’s memory.

2.

For a layperson also it is easy to see how majoritarian terrorism has raised its ugly head after a brief lull in the aftermath of Malegaon bomb blast and the painstaking investigation undertaken by ATS Chief Hemant Karkare to nab the real culprits. It need not be underlined that this no nonsense officer was under tremendous pressure supposedly for going after top honchos of the Hindutva terrorism network. And looking back it is clear why he had asked for banning this organisation and its affiliated groups when he led the investigation in the Gadkari Rangayatan and similar other blasts which were engineered by activists associated with ‘Sanatan Sanstha’ and its affiliate ‘Hindu Janjagruti Samity’. Karkare had forwarded the proposal some time before he was gunned down by terrorists in 26/11 terror attacks.
In fact if Maharashtra government had acted on a proposal forwarded by the Anti-Terrorism Squad last year, then one could have saved lot of innocent blood spilling on the streets. As of now a proposal to ban the Sanstha is pending with the Maharashtra government since last year, a top ATS officer is reported to have told the media.
To proscribe an organisation, the state government has to forward its proposal to the centre, which takes a call after considering the recommendations. This had not been done, official sources said.
On June 4, 2008, there was a blast in the basement parking of Gadkari Rangayatan in Thane where Marathi play Amhi Pachpute was being staged. Probe revealed that members of the Sanstha had threatened the playwright not to stage the play, which was a satire on Mahabharat.
Around the same time there were two minor blasts in theatres at Panvel and Vashi in Navi Mumbai where Hindi film Jodha Akbar was being screened. Investigations linked these blasts to Sanstha members.
Apart from its involvement in these terrorist acts, it is also being revealed that members of Sanatan Sanstha were also involved in Miraj riots too. (Express, October 21, 2009). In fact Malgounda Patil, an active member of the Sanstha who was carrying explosives and died in the Goa blast, was in Miraj for two weeks when the construction of a controversial arch in the town sparked off communal riots.
The Superintendent of Police of Sangli Mr Krishna Prakash told Express reporter

“We had information that Sanatan Sanstha members were distributing weapons to Hindus during the riots. We had also seized a four-wheeler of the Sanatan Sanstha carrying swords and chains. Three Sanatan Sanstha members were arrested in the case.” According to him they had earlier arrested a female member of Sanstha identified as Bhakti Joglekar, for distributing pamphlets with communal content and there are so far five offences against Sanatan Sanstha in Sangli…”.
In an extensive coverage of the ‘Whiff of Hindutva Terror in Goa’ Mail today ( 20 th October 2009) tells us how ‘Sanatan Sanstha is no stranger to communal conspiracies. From riots to bombing theatres, this organisation was allegedly involved in many acts of violence in Maharashtra before the bomb blasts in Goa ripped apart its spiritual facade.” (Outfit No Stranger to Communal Conspiracies, Krishna Kumar) Of course, it does not forget to mention the BJP links of the fanatic group. ” Like the Malegaon blasts, this case too has a BJP link. One of the Sanstha’s top leaders in Miraj, Madhusudan Kulkarni, has been seen at political rallies of the party.In a thinly veiled argument on its website the Sanstha exhorts Hindus to attack Muslims and be better prepared during riots.”

3.

“violence towards evildoers is non-violence itself” and “it is a sin not to slay an evildoer”!
- Jayant Athavale

Sanatan Sanstha which talks of spreading spirituality as a science and was founded in 1990 by a a clinical hypnotherapist Jayant Balaji Athavale from Mumbai, conducts discourses and workshops on spirituality and religion at its ashrams and also known to impart ’self defence training to its members.It is really difficult to believe how an organisation which supposedly ‘aims to present religious mysticism in a scientific language for the curious and to guide seekers’ and which ‘conducts weekly spiritual meetings, discourses, child guidance classes, workshops on spirituality, training in self-defense and campaigns to create awareness of righteousness’ to further these aims can double up as an organisation which can invite prosecution under ‘laws meant for unlawful and terrorist organisations’.
The other part of the story is that here ‘destruction of evildoers’ is an integral part of ‘spiritual practice’. And this ‘destruction’ is to be done at ‘physical and psychological level’. Interestingly to facilitate this ‘Dharm Kranti’ (religious revolution) the seekers are also provided with training in arms – rifles, trishuls, lathis and other weapons. (www.sanatan.org)
It need be told that apart from the ‘magnum opus’ of the founder of SS and HJS, Jayant Athavale which is called “Science of Spirituality’ – which is book of 21 volumes – and other texts about ‘Divine Kingdom’, ‘Arts for God Realisation’ and ‘Spiritual Experiences of Seekers’ etc. a very important text in the training of the seekers is Texts on Defence where seekers of divine kingdom are also imparted training with air rifles ( Vol 3 H – Self Defence Training, Chapter 6, Page 108-109)
It would be opportune to discuss a portion from this text which trains the seeker in ‘Firing’ . In 7 a. it trains the seeker in standing stance (kada pavitra) [shooting in the standing posture] in section 7 b. it discusses Sitting Stance (baitha pavitra) [shooting in the sitting stance]. It also shows the photograph of Vinay Panvalkar wearing a hat showing the different positions.
7 B. Sitting Stance (baitha pavitra) [shooting in the sitting stance]
1. Load the rifle according to steps ‘A to F’ of point 6. Loading the rifle.’ Then proceed as given below.
2. Ready to fire – one ( fire ke liye sajja -ek) :
Once this command is given touch the right knee to the ground. Bending the toes of the right foot support the foot on its ball. At that time the left knee should be bent and kept in front of the right one. ….
Another writeup in Goan Observer also displays seven photographs of Vinay Panvalkar which have appeared in another of Sanatan Sanstha’s publication  [‘Swasaunrakshan Prashikshan’ (Self Defence Training)] While four photographs show training by rifle, two photographs show how to attack someone with a long Trishul and the last one is the usual fight with hands. The same writeup makes an interesting point vis-a-vis HJS/SS and RSS/VHP/Bajrang Dal.
According to the writeup
..It would appear that these hardline organisations have come up because of the disillusion meant amongst hardcore fanatic Hindus that the BJP and the RSS have compromised their core values for political gains. In fact  though the Sansthan boasted of over two lakh members when it started in 1999, many members were expelled because they were proved to be ‘corrupt’. Unlike the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal activists the activists of the Sanstha maintain a very low profile which makes it difficult to combat their mischief .
The same page carries a photograph of Jayant Athavale, founder of HJS, and SS, in military fatigue exhorting people to ‘Become Hindu Naxalites to combat the Naxalites who are the biggest enemies of Dharamrajya’.
Jayant Athavale’s magnum opus ‘Science of Spirituality’ in its chapter ‘Spiritual Practice of Protecting Seekers and Destroying Evildoers’ ( Vol I, E, Page 64-65) underlines the importance of Guru to undertake spiritual practice’. It clearly absolves the seeker from any act of destroying evildoers.
It says
B 2. One chanting continuously : The action of destroying evildoers becomes a non-action only if done along with chanting the Lord’s name, as then it becomes a mere act (Kriya). Then the Law of Karma (Action) does not apply.
B 3. One who is permitted by saints or Gurus to undertake this spiritual practice: Destroy evildoers if you have been advised by saints or Gurus to do so. Then these acts are not registered in your name.
According to the book
Timetable of the spiritual practice
a. Year 1997-1999 A.D. ( 3 Years) : Impressing upon the mind that ‘destruction of evildoers’ is a part of the spiritual nature.
b. Year 2000-2006 A.D. ( 7 years) : Actual destruction of evildoers at physical, psychological and spiritual levels.
c. Year 2007-2022 A.D. ( 16 Years ) : Generating the potential to run the kingdom of the Absolute truth
d. Year 2023 – 2025 A.D. ( 3 Years) : Commencement of the regime of Absolute Truth ( divine kingdom)
In Vol 4 of the book ‘Texts about the Divine Kingdom’ which focusses itself on Social Upliftment, National Security it measures someone’s ‘spiritual progress’ when he is compelled to ‘kill someone.’ (Page 48-49)
6 C 4. Test of Spiritual Progress : One will perceive how much spiritual progress one has made only when he is compelled to kill someon. It is easy to make statements like ‘everything is Brahman’ (God)’ When actually performing the act of killing, if the mind remains steady and does not waver at all like Arjun’s did, only then can one say that one has realised Brahman.
It also presents its ideas about who would ‘bring about a revolution’
6 D. Only warrior seekers (Kshatravir) can bring about a revolution.
6 D 1. Warrior seekers who have an unparalleled combination of a selfless attitude, unity, intense motivation to undertake the mission and faith in it The Lord. It is not an easy task to oust evil politicians. To achieve this, one will have to combat their ruffian party workers, the police force and the army under their command. Therefore, this is certainly not the work of selfish politicians. The people have experienced in the last 54 years after independence that despite granting opportunity to various parties to assume power, replacement of one politician by another does not bring about any change in society.

4.

For an organisation which is so ultra-sensitive about the slightest imagined insult to Hinduism — imagined or real — the literature of the Sanatan Sanstha is rife with attacks on other religions. Apart from valorising violence through its literature and actions, the organisations have achieved notoriety for abusing other religions and their prophets. e.g In one of its issues of Sanatan Prabhat ( 9 th Dec 2005) – a newspaper brought out by it from many districts in Maharashtra and Goa, it ‘exposes the real nature of Bible’ by calling it a ‘manual for teaching immorality’ which discusses in detail ‘ the rape of a sister by a brother’.  There are frequent references to the Bible, alleging that it promotes incest and other immoral practices. It is part of its usual practice to show a Pastor with horns whose sole agenda is proselytisation. In September 2004, Sanatan Prabhat carried a statement saying that the body of St. Francis Xavier should be destroyed. It has also carried other scurrilous articles about Goa’s patron saint. Its humiliation of Islam and Prophet Muhammad nearly created  a riot like situation in Miraj ( first week of November 2005) and the imprisonment of the editor of Sanatan Prabhat.
Interestingly all talk of Hindu Unity in the worldview of HJS falls at the altar caste and other regressive practices in our society. Believers are exhorted to guide offenders away from the path of incorrect practice. The volumes in the series support the regressive and obscurantist practices of the past, including the caste system, talking repeatedly about the proper role of various castes in society. (Herald Panjim, 22 June 2008)
Herald (Panjim, 22 June 2008) concludes with the observation

After having created an ideological framework which creates a fundamentalist mindset and makes it the ‘duty’ of the true seeker to defend the faith against all those who are projected as attacking it, it is disingenuous of the HJS and the SS to disclaim responsibility for the acts engaged in by their members. Ex-members of these organisations talk about the cult-like atmosphere that is created, with unquestioning obedience being stressed. Members are then brainwashed into believing that Hinduism is under siege. Against this background, and with all the talk about ‘defence’ and ‘elimination of evildoers’, it is hardly surprising that adherents begin to explore ways of taking direct action to defend the faith. In this regard, the philosophy of the HJS and the SS is not all that different from the philosophy of terrorists, whom they claim to oppose.

In a detailed writeup in Goan Observer ( Protecting Hinduism : Sanatan Style, Pradnya Gaonkar, 28 June 2008) the ‘covert activities of self-professed protectors of Hinduism, the Sanatan Sanstha and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti,’ have been looked into. The author writes that “The Chief Minister, Digamber Kamat, and the Leader of the Opposition, Manohar Parrikar, not to mention the IGP Kishen Kumar should be more concerned over the terrorist activities of the Sanatan Sanstha and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti than chasing imaginary naxalites.” Apart from their strong presence in Goa at rural levels the author also brings to the fore the political patronage received by them at the highest levels.
The investigations done by Goan Observer “..[r]evealed that Jyoti Sudin Dhavlikar, wife of the MGP leader and Transport Minister in the Digamber Kamat government Sudin Dhavlikar, is in charge of the Goa Unit of the Sanatan Sanstha. Goan Observer also understands that the IGP, Kishen Kumar, despite being directed to investigate the activities of the Sanatan Sanstha in Goa, did not follow it up seriously because of political pressure…The Marcaim MGP MLA, Sudin Dhavlikar, and his brother are crucial to the continued survival of the Digamber Kamat government which explains why the Chief Minister is not enthusiastic about investigating the credentials of the Sanatan Sanstha.”
The Self Defence manual of the Sanatan Sanstha “.[w]hich is mandatory reading for its activists, reveals the insidious nature of the communal propaganda being carried out by the ‘charitable organisation’. Surely, there can be nothing charitable about images showing young men in military uniform shooting dead a man typically dressed like a Muslim. The defence of course would be that the young men were shooting the ‘Muslim’, who is also shown armed, in self defence. The Sanatan Sanstha’s Swasaunrakshan Prashikshan contains explicit instructions on what parts of the anatomy should be targeted for causing maximum damage, shows how the trishul can be used as an offensive weapon and has entire chapter on how to use air rifles. Except that the training imparted for using air rifles can be used for handling AK-47s also. The images of the activists wielding the gun shows them wearing t-shirts identifying them as soldiers of the Sanatan Sanstha and exhorts activists to kill ‘evil’ and uphold Hindu values.”
The study also throws light on the process of indoctrination which follows a policy of targeting young minds and systematically brainwashing them. It is much on the lines of “.. …[o]ther Hindu fundamentalist organisations like the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad,”
“The fact that the moving spirit, if not the founder of the Sansthan, Dr. Jayant Balaji Athavale, was a clinical hypnotherapist has been reflected in the methodology adopted by the Sanatan Sanstha for indoctrinating and brainwashing young minds. Young people who attended the satsangs (weekly meets of the members of the SS) of the Sanstha narrate that they are required to fill pages with the name of the Kuldevta and obtain mental peace. The satsangs were cleverly packaged to convert young open minds into fanatical defenders of the Sanatan Sanstha version of dharma. The publication of the Sanstha revealed that it is committed to militant defence of Hinduism, which it claims is under threat not only from the minorities but from members of the Hindu community themselves who are either not conscious of the threat to Hinduism or not committed enough to Hinduism to aggressively protect it from real or imaginary threats.”

5.

As we go to the press there are reports that joint teams set up to probe blasts across the country which still remain unresolved despite the initial clamour that they were handiwork of SIMI, recently interrogated at least three people on Monday (Hindustan Times, 20 th Oct 2009) allegedly linked to Hindu right wing groups, in connection with the Samjhauta Express blasts.  (Fwb 18, 2007). “Police sources said officers were trying to figure out whether Ramji Kalsangra (main accused in the Sept 2008 Malegaon blast, who is still absconding) and Sunil Joshi, an RSS functionary who was shot dead in the neighbouring town of Dewas on December 23 2007, were also behind the Samjhauta Express blast.”
It may also be recalled that ATS chief Hemant Karkare was also looking into the links of the main accused in the Malegaon Bomb blast case Lieutenant Colonel Srikant Prasad Purohit with the perpetrators of the Gadkari Rangayatan and Panvel blasts before he was killed in the melee that followed the terrorist attack in Bombay.
There is no doubt that if he would have remained alive he would have moved ahead to unearth the hidden links between the different Hindutva groups who were engaged in terrorism.
It was not for nothing that Sangh Parivar, Shiv Sena and other fanatic Hindutva organisations continued to vilify him, continued to paint the accused in the Malegaon blast case as victims and tried every means to stymie investigations.
One just wishes that the investigations in the Goa blast do not follow a similar path and do not face a fate similar to many other mysterious blasts which made lot of noise at the time of occurence but were quickly buried in the selective amnesia of the people and the government.

This guest post by MONOBINA GUPTA is the original of the article published in The Times of India today.

Monobina’s book on Left politics, Postcards from the Margins, is in press with Orient Blackswan, forthcoming in 2010.

The Delhi bound Rajdhani Express held up by supposed ‘Maoists’ for seven hours in West Medinipore had emblazoned on its body: Chhatradhar Mahato is a good man. He is not a criminal.

People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA) Chief Mahato was put behind bars in the aftermath of waves of violence lashing West Bengal post 2009 general election results. There was speculation that the PCPA was demanding Mahato’s release. Equally, there was curiosity about Mahato who till a couple of months ago, did not seem to fit the bill of a gun-toting Maoist, a cold-blooded executioner.

When I met Mahato in Lalgarh on the eve of general elections in March earlier this year, he spoke a democratic language far removed from guns and killings. On my arrival that day I found Lalgarh abuzz with news of police picking up three villagers supposedly Maoists, and a murdered PCPA activist.  Mahato was in the midst of an organizational meeting under a tree in Lalgarh’s sublime, verdant surroundings. A tall, lanky man, smartly dressed, with a pair of sunglasses to beat the piercing July sun he was sitting with his comrades putting inside envelopes hand-written notices for PCPA’s next public meeting. Brother of Sashadhar Mahato, a Maoist fugitive, Chhatradhar was catapulted to the PCPA leadership virtually overnight, following a brutal police attack on villagers in the aftermath of a Maoist plot targetting Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.
Mahato said he would talk to me after lunch. The PCPA was running a community kitchen inside a mud hut where activists had their meals – rice and vegetable curry. This was where I met Mahato relaxed, lying down on the refreshingly cold mud floor.

For a man till recently unskilled in the art of communication, Mahato talked with precise clarity, dissecting issues, separating the strands of violent Maoist politics from the PCPA. He was getting used to his new public profile – addressing press briefings in Kolkata’s Press Club, engaging with Mahasweta Devi and intellectual in the city. Back in Lalgrah Mahato would travel village to village on a motorbike, chalking out plans of action.

His political trajectory, however, began with the Congress. Born in 1964, the eldest of three brothers, Mahato completed his Higher Secondary from Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapeeth. He went on to join Midnapore Day College, where he had his first taste of activism as a member of Chhatra Parishad, Congres’ student wing. Those who know him well say he was a follower of Mamata Bannerjee, then a Youth Congress leader. Mahato did not finish his graduation.  Later he joined Trinamool Congress. In 2001, when the police was randomly picking up tribals as Maoists Mahato’s political beliefs underwent a drastic change. By 2009, even as the media at large collapsed the PCPA and the Maoists as one, both Mahato and initially the Maoists themselves claimed they were distinct organizations with different agendas.

Under PCPA leadership Lalgarh had barred the entry of police. But the movement was still democratic. Mahato admitted the agitation could not be grounded solely in resistance to police atrocities. “We cannot make it the sole cause. There are development concerns – access to drinking water, more tube wells, bore wells; the issue of autonomy of Jangalkhand,” he said.  In addition to PCPA’s original 13-point charter of demands the committee had adopted a nine-point programme, seeking community rights over forests and land, recognition and promotion of Santhali language, development of Santhali script and autonomy of the Jangalkhand area.

I asked him about the extent of Maoist influence over the movement. “Maoists are there but they are not controlling the movement. PCPA is an autonomous body. We take our own decisions after consulting village-level committees,” said Mahato. Ten member committees, including 5 men and 5 women were actively functioning in the villages among them two, a man and a woman, were part of the central coordinating committee. The central committee could not take decisions independent of village committees.

He emphasized one of the high points of the movement was not allowing political parties entry into Lalgarh with party banners. The rallying symbol was PCPA, the ultimate authority. Not even security personnel accompanying political leaders were allowed inside. Mamata Bannerjee had to leave her security outside Lalgrah before she could address a meeting.
Did Mahato believe in ‘revolutionary violence’ as preached by Maoists today? In more ways than one he did not seem to fit either in the mould of the founding fathers of the 1967 armed insurrection or their contemporary ‘progeny’– the Maoists. Firstly, Mahato never explained the Lalgarh movement in the language of Marx or Mao. Neither ‘class struggle’ nor ‘armed insurrection’ constituted the spine of his arguments. The PCPA chief underlined the need to resist police repression and bring long-delayed development to the tribal backwaters. Secondly, unlike the Maoists, Mahato never spoke of capturing the Indian state through insurrection. In fact, the capture worked the other way round: the Maoists wanted to exert absolute authority over the PCPA. In the end they did succeed in the volatile aftermath of 2009 general elections.

Interestingly PCPA and the Maoists differed fundamentally in their approach to the 2009 general polls. Mahato said PCPA was not seeking a poll boycott since it would only benefit the CPI-M – a position drastically at odds with Maoists who threatened to disrupt the polls through violence. The PCPA was demanding the polls be held without police since their entry into Lalgrah was barred. He shared his comrades’ apprehension that a forced entry by police may trigger a violent confrontation in Lalgarh. The violence post 2009-poll however washed out distinctions between PCPA and Maoists. Mahato and his friends in the civil society while condemning state violence seemed to turn a blind eye to Maoist killings. Chhatradhar Mahato in that turmoil became the ‘Most Wanted’ political fugitive.

From passengers’ eyewitness accounts, and those of the driver and assistant driver of the train (congratulations, for once, to Times of India and to Indian Express reporter Debabrata Mohanty for going beyond statements from police and other officials of the Indian state), this is what happened:

The train was running on schedule when the driver noticed logs on the tracks and a large mob of about 300 waving red flags,  rushing towards the train. As the train screeched to a halt, stones were pelted (some passengers reported minor injuries from shattered window glass) and some men climbed into the driver’s cabin.  Said the driver, K Ananth Rao and his assistant K G Rao to the ToI reporter, Sukumar Mahato, “They said they were holding up the train because the state had waged a war on tribals. We followed them and sat by the tracks.”

[The Indian Express story by Ravik Bhattacharjee and Kanchan Chakrabarty, unattributed to any source, claims "The Rajdhani Express was intercepted by a 1500 strong mob and its driver and his assistant were taken hostage."]

The PCAPA (People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities) claimed

a) it was not hostage-taking, but a rail abarodha (a blockade) of the train for flouting the rail roko call, when an indefinite bandh against atrocities by the joint security forces in the district had begun since morning.

b) it was meant to draw attention to the arrest of Chhatradhar Mahato, the PCPA leader.  One of the slogans sprawling in red letters across the side of the train says, in English, Chhatradhar Mahato is a good man.

The passengers generally conveyed that they never felt a threat to their lives from the men, saying things like: “After about an hour they took pity on us since there were so many children with us, and they let us get back on the train” (Himanshu Patra, in Indian Express); “the commander said that we should report any attempt to harm us or loot us directly to him” (Harish Verma in ToI); “They asked us to come down with our luggage one by one” (Hamid Khan, to ToI); “We thought they would loot us. But they did not harm anybody after we followed their orders” (Susanta Das, DNA)

What did they loot? Samosas, sandwiches, water cartons, blankets. State property in this case, it being the Rajdhani Express.  Food, water and warmth – basic necessitites of life that most “citizens” of India cannot expect as a matter of course. The mobiles and walkie-talkies they took from the drivers were returned to them.

Most of the men were armed with tribal weapons (axes, swords, bows and arrows); some were carrying fire-arms.  When security forces arrived, there was some firing from the forests, and then the crowd melted away.

The general sense among those who speak in the public domain (including fellow-kafialite Aman Sethi, with whom many an argument has been had in the past!)  is that the Maoists have “learnt a lesson”.

But perhaps we need to be alert to something else altogether?

The PCAPA is not the CPI (Maoist), it seems worth stating. (Nor are all Maoists with the party that calls itself  CPI-Maoist.  One of the most pernicious conflations carried out by the mass media and the government – as well as unknowingly by intellectuals of integrity -  which suits the CPI-Maoist very well,  is the complete non-differentiation of of tribals taking up arms, Maoists in general, “Naxalites”,  and the CPI-Maoist). This operation was not a Maoist one, it has all the hallmarks of a tribal action. No blowing up rail tracks, no hostages, no demands to blackmail the state with the lives of innocents – these are not the signs of a Maoist operation. There were Maoists among them, the PCAPA is now “backed” by CPI (Maoist), and why did it need this backing?  Because a legitimate mass movement in Lalgarh against police atrocities in the wake of the bomb blast on Buddhadeb’s route, has been consistently demonized, dubbed Maoist, its members arrested without cause, and thus, step-by-step, driven by the state into the hands of the CPI (Maoist) – exactly what the bomb-blast was intended to accomplish.  It was not meant to kill anybody, but to provoke the state to do what it does best -  launch its war on terror so effectively as to make the most violent alternatives to democratic mass movements look like the only effective politics possible.

The arrest of Chhatradhar Mahato has been widely condemned, even by Left Front partner Forward Bloc. State general secretary Ashok Ghosh told PTI that Mahato, who has been in open contact with political leaders for some time and was issuing statements regularly, could have been arrested three months ago through the same process as today.  So why now? Whom does it help?

The arrest was illegal (of course, most arrests in India are) – he was arrested by policemen posing as journalists, flouting a judgement of the Supreme Court that says that during arrest, arresting police must be in uniform and bear the official badge.

Mahato is no criminal, there are no criminal cases against him, he is the leader of a democratic mass movement against indiscriminate state action. The arrest is unacceptable by any standard or argument, whether strategic (‘why now’) or democratic.

What we now see emerging in the Rajdhani incident is a legitimate people’s mass movement protesting state atrocities, that had contained the CPI (Maoist) within its formation for months, now being driven into the control of that party.

Can this be the beginning of the democratization of CPI (Maoist) under the pressure of being part of a mass movement?

I doubt it.  What many of us fear is really the case, is that the mass movement is going to come under the control of the inherently anti-democratic thrust of armed revolution as strategy to overthrow state power.

Let me be very clear, I’m not arguing that violence as such is “inherently anti-democratic”.  I am not a pacifist. Spontaneous violence against the structural violence of the state and structure of private property, violence in self-defence, even pre-planned violent  action designed to redress a specific situation – all of these possibilities always simmer just below the skin of normal society, and must be understood within the context of hideous, unrelenting, never-addressed injustice. As Eduardo Galeano puts it in The Upside-Down World:

“The killer instinct is an essential ingredient for getting ahead, a human virtue when it helps large companies digest small and strong countries devour weak, but proof of bestiality  when some jobless guy goes around with a knife in his fist.”

Such acts of violence I will insist are justifiable political violence – from the long and glorious history of adivasi uprisings against repressive power, to the battered wife with an endlessly abusive husband, waiting for him to fall into a drunken sleep before stabbing him to death.

But make no mistake – this is not the violence enshrined in parties like the CPI-Maoist.  Armed revolution as a strategy to overthrow state power involves two things – working towards becoming the state, and in the process, intense, paranoid secrecy.  Both of these are what are inherently anti-democratic.

And to be fair, the CPI-Maoist is very up-front about its plans.  Here are excerpts from its document, Urban Perspective, available freely on the web:

“In order to mobilize the broadest possible sections in struggle it is absolutely essential that we should utilize all possible open and legal opportunities for work (and not reject the use of legality). Broad mass organizations help the Party to have wide contact with masses, so that it can work under cover for a long time and accumulate strength…Broad, open and legal forms of organizing the masses have, however, to be combined with the strictest methods of secrecy, especially with regard to the link between the open and underground organization….

Thus we must be clear that the open revolutionary mass organization cannot be a permanent form of mass organization in the urban areas. It can and must be utilized in the periods and situations of legal opportunities, and we must be ever alert to make use of such opportunities whenever they arise…

Fractional Work – Here the Party works through the numerous traditional mass organizations that operate in the urban areas. These traditional mass organizations are the organizations normally set up by the masses to fight for their sectional interests or otherwise fulfill their needs. The Party, through its members or other activists, penetrates such organizations without exposing any links with the Party. Through the activities of the organization, the masses, while being mobilized for their sectional interests, are attempted to be drawn towards the revolution. This method of organizing, if properly conducted, offers the best opportunity for cover work for a long period of time… Once we have decided to do fractional work within an organization we should strive to achieve a leading position in it. This means we should be in a position to influence and guide the decisions of the organization. If it is necessary to takeover office bearers’ posts in order to achieve this influence, then we should make attempts to do so. Whether we take up office bearers’ posts or not, the important point in fractional work is the skillful exposure of the reactionaries and reformists leading or participating within these organizations. This exposure is essential to draw the masses away from their influence. This must however be done without exposing ourselves to the enemy. The forms of exposure will thus differ depending upon the concrete situation. In vast areas where risk of direct exposure of our fractional work activists is low, we can use propaganda by the secret revolutionary mass organization or even direct calls by the Party. In smaller areas like a single factory or slum we may have to mainly or only use word-of-mouth propaganda. Sometimes we can create artificial banners like ‘angry workers’, ‘concerned slum dwellers’, etc. for doing our propaganda. Very often we may have to use a combination of various methods. Whatever is the method it should be applied carefully, skillfully, and consistently… It should ensure that the masses are drawn away from the influence of reactionaries and reformists…

Party-formed Cover Mass Organizations – It sometimes becomes necessary for us to directly form mass organizations under cover without disclosing their link with the Party. Mostly, such a need arises due to the absence of any other suitable mass organization within which we can do fractional work…The methods of mass work too are not very different from the areas of fractional work. The main difference is of course that we do not have the task of exposure, as when working within the reactionary and reformist organizations…

Legal Democratic Organizations – These are the organizations formed on an explicit political basis with some or all aspects of an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal programme, and with a programme of action and forms of struggle that broadly fall within a legal framework. …The scope of the legal democratic organization is very wide, extending to the broad coalitions and alliances formed against repression, globalization, Hindutva, and right up to the all-encompassing bodies formed with the banners of anti-capitalism or people’s struggles. ..The legal democratic movement itself too can grow from strength to strength and remain on the correct political course only if we concentrate sufficiently and simultaneously on developing the secret Party core within it.”

In short, take over existing mass organizations when you cannot set them up, work towards subverting their exisiting processes by producing secret propaganda about those who are influential in it, and so on and on – always, always, utilize people towards a secret end that you know if you reveal out in the open, very few will be with you.

Having participated over the 1990s in many broad non-party, non-funded formations in Delhi against the state in general and against Hindutva politics, the inexplicable and bitter break-up of some of them is now tragically crystal clear to me.

And yet, my democratic instincts insist, even the CPI-Maoist must be given its place within the spectrum of political dissent. As one element of the spectrum.

The problem is, the party in its turn has no notion of legitimate dissent to its politics. If you’re not with it, you’re with the state. If it declares war on the state, it commits everyone within range – willing or unwilling, knowing and unknowing – to that war. And this war is no metaphor. The entire document quoted above is a document of war strategy – there is the party, and there is the “enemy”. The rest are to be utilized.

Another voice must emerge. Based on a critique of the state – of any state, of this state, of corporate greed in partnership with institutions masquerading under cover of democracy. But insisting also, always, on the legitimacy of dissenting voices within the dissent to the state.

माओवादी हिंसा जायज़ है या नाजायज़? यह तसल्ली  की बात है कि  इस  सवाल पर अब बहस शुरू हो गई  है. इस प्रश्न पर बात करने का अर्थ यह नहीं है कि राज्य हिंसा का विरोध छोड दिया जाए. छत्तीसगढ़ में ”ऑपरेशन ग्रीन हंट” की व्यर्थता के बारे में और  कोई  नहीं , पंजाब के ” हीरो” के.पी.एस.गिल बोल रहे हैं. वे कोई  झोला वाले  मानवाधिकार कार्यकर्ता नहीं, जिनकी चीखो-पुकार को दीवानों की बड़ मान कर आज तक राज्य और पूंजी के पैरोकार नज़रअंदाज करते आए हैं.  दांतेवाडा  में दो दशकों से अधिक समय से काम कर रहे हिमान्शु ठीक ही पूछते हैं कि हर बार छत्तीसगढ़  के गाँवों  में राज्य की ओर से पुलिस या अर्धसैनिक बल ही क्यों भेजे जाते रहे हैं, डाक्टर, आंगनवाडी कार्यकर्ता या शिक्षक क्यों नहीं! इस देश के आदिवासियों के लिए राज्य का अर्थ क्या रह गया है?हमारे मित्र सत्या शिवरामन ने भी यह सवाल किया कि राज्य को आदिवासियों की सुध बीसवीं सदी के आखिरी दशकों में क्यों आयी? क्या इसका कारण यह था कि उसे यह अपराध बोध सालने लगा था कि उसकी विकास योजनाओं के लाभ से राष्ट्र का यह तबका छूटता चला गया है?  या क्या इसकी ज़्यादा सही वजह यह थी कि देश और विदेश की पूंजी को अब अपने लिए  जो संसाधन चाहिए, वे जंगलों की हरियाली में छिपे हुए हैं और उस ज़मीन के नीचे दबे पड़े हैं, जिन पर  आदिवासी ‘हमारे’ इतिहास के शुरू होने के पहले से रहते चले आ रहे है! क्या राज्य को यह अहसास हुआ कि वह इस संपदा से अब तक  वंचित रहा है और इसकी वजह आदिवासियों का पिछडे तरीके से रहना ही है? पूंजी की नए संसाधनों की खोज और  आदिवासियों के विकास में  राज्य की दिलचस्पी का बढ़ना, क्या ये दो घटनाएं एक ही साथ नहीं होती दिखाई देती ?

राज्य के लिए आदिवासियों के विकास का अर्थ उन्हें उस जंगल और ज़मीन से अलग करना है जो इस  विकास की भाषा में  ”प्राकृतिक संसाधन” कहे जाते हैं. आदिवासियों  के लिए वे उनके जीवन से अभिन्न रहे हैं.   जिसे वह पिछडेपन से आदिवासियों की मुक्ति बताना चाहता है, अधिक सही शायद यह कहना हो कि वह वस्तुतः इस जंगल, ज़मीन और खनिज संपदा को आदिवासियों से मुक्त करने का खूबसूरत नाम है.

आदिवासियों की मुक्ति जैसे राज्य का मिशन है, वैसे ही माओवादियों का भी. यह सवाल भी सत्या ने कई बार उठाया है कि आखिरकार माओवादियों को जंगल ही क्यों रास आते हैं?  क्या आदिवासियों से हमदर्दी की वजह से? क्या इस कारण कि मार्क्स ने जिसे सर्वहारा कहा था, वह अब कल-कारखानों  में नहीं पाया जाता? किसानों को लेकर  तो पहले से ही मार्क्सवादी परियोजना में एक संभ्रम का भाव रहा है. वे क्रान्ति के अगुवा दस्ते में शामिल नहीं किए जा सकते, हाँ, ”टैक्टिक्स”  के कारण उन्हें क्रान्ति के काम लाया जा सकता है! फिर आदिवासी, जो उत्पादन की पद्धति हो या उत्पादन सम्बन्ध हो, अत्यंत पिछडी अवस्था के प्रतिनिधि हैं ,  मार्क्सवादी विचारधारा पर आधारित  क्रान्ति के अभियान में अगुवा दस्ते में कैसे शामिल हो सकते है? जो लोग इस बात के लिए माओवादियों का शुक्रिया अदा करना चाहते हैं कि उन्होंने पहले पहल आदिवासियों की दारुण अवस्था की और ध्यान दिलाया, वे इस सैद्धांतिक और वैचारिक समस्या से गुजरे नहीं, जिसे  सुलझाना किसी भी मार्क्सवादी के लिए  ज़रूरी होगा, इस रहस्य से पर्दा  उठाने के लिए कि माओवादियों को जंगल और आदिवासी क्यों प्रिय हो उठे हैं? क्या मार्क्सवादी शब्दावली  में  ” बुनियादी अंतर्विरोधों” का चरित्र बदल गया है?  क्या क्रान्ति की संभावना खिसक कर अब आदिवासी समुदाय में आ गयी है?
सैद्धांतिक तौर पर इस समस्या का विवेचन माओवादी सिद्धांतकार करने में दिलचस्पी रखते हों, ऐसा कोई  प्रमाण अब तक  मिला नहीं है. तो फिर जो नतीजा हम निकाल सकते हैं वह यह कि जैसे आदिवासियों में राज्य की करुणा रणनीतिक है, वैसे ही आदिवासी माओवादियों के लिए वक्ती तौर पर चुने गए रणनीतिक ”कवर” हैं. माओवादियों का मकसद राज्यसत्ता   पर कब्जे का है. रास्ता संसदीय लोकतन्त्र का नहीं, सशस्त्र    क्रांति  का है. वह भी ”छापामार युद्ध” का.

माओवादियों की इस योजना के लिए जंगल उपयुक्त हैं. सिर्फ  छापामार दस्तों  के छिपने के लिए नहीं, बल्कि शुद्ध आर्थिक कारणों से भी. माओवादियों  की  यह ”रक्त वीथिका” आर्थिक दृष्टि से उपयोगी है. राज्य के अधिकारियों के लिए जैसे आदिवासी बहुल ये इलाके लूट के स्रोत हैं, जैसा छत्तीसगढ़, झारखंड या दूसरे आदिवासी क्षत्रों में अब तक का उनका आचरण बताता है, वैसे ही माओवादियों के लिए भी ये क्षेत्र साधन या स्रोत हैं. कम से कम इस मामले में गृह मंत्री सही बोल रहे हैं कि माओवादियों को कहीं  बाहर से आर्थिक मदद नहीं मिल रही है. आदिवासी क्षेत्रों में  राज्य संपोषित विकास योजनाओं का पैसा ही माओवादी क्रान्ति के काम आ रहा है. भ्रष्ट सरकारी अधिकारियों  और ठेकेदारों का जो गठजोड़ आदिवासियों के नामं पर दी गए साधन को हड़प करता रहा है, वह माओवादियों को इस लूट का हिस्सा देकर निधड़क अपनी लूट जारी रखे हुए है. माओवादियों का मकसद इस लूट को रोकना नहीं, अपने कब्जे के इलाके में विस्तार करना है. इसलिए पलामू में भयानक सूखे से मौत से जूझ रहे आदिवासियों के लिए राहत का संघर्ष माओवादियों के एजेंडे पर नहीं, वह क्षुद्र संसदीय दलों का काम है कि वे धरना, प्रदर्शन , हड़ताल जैसे गए-गुजरे तरीको से राज्य पर दबाव डाल कर इस क्षेत्र के लिए पैसे का इंतजाम करें. माओवादी इस पैसे के आने का इंतजार करेंगे, और इसमें से अपने हिस्से की वसूली करके सतत क्रान्ति की राह हमवार करने का उदात्त कार्य करेंगे.

आदिवासियों का विकास जैसे इस राज्य के लिए दरअसल पूंजी के लिए उनके और प्राकृतिक ‘ संपदा’ के बीच के अनिवार्य सम्बन्ध को हमेशा के लिए तोड़ कर उस संपदा पूंजी के सतत विकास के लिए हासिल करने का तरीका है, उसी तरह माओवादियों के लिए आदिवासी क्रान्ति की सतत परियोजना के लिए उपयोगी साधन हैं. इसी वजह से अपने उद्देश्यों की प्राप्ति में आदिवासियों की  ह्त्या में जैसे राज्य को कोई हिचक नहीं, वैसे ही  माओवादियों को भी, जब वे इस इतिहास प्रदत्त दायित्व के रास्ते में रुकावट बनते दिखाई दें, तो उनके सफाए से उन्हें कोई परहेज नहीं .

With the debate on Maoist violence and Operation Green Hunt hotting up, things are taking a disturbing turn. The danger really is that all spaces of radical political movements and indeed the entire space of the Left, part of it gradually vacated by the parliamentary ‘Left’ in recent decades and finally completely abandoned in the last few years, will now be virtually erased. In its place will be installed the phantom of an ‘armed struggle’ that threatens to completely swallow up the spaces once occupied by different shades of the CPI(ML) and the Naxalite movement and other Left-of-CPM groups and movements.
It all began, of course, with the declaration of the Prime Minister some years ago, that Maoism (which is used interchangeably, sometimes out of ignorance and often with deliberation, with Naxalism) ‘was the single biggest security threat to the country’ – a highly exaggerated claim but entirely understandable in retrospect. Understandable because, by reducing the entire spectrum of the non parliamentary Left and all shades of Naxalism – and more importantly all big anti-corporate mass stuggles – to ‘Maoism’, he was deligitimizing the very idea of the Left, as it were. This was the best bet of the fanatically neo-liberal Manhohan-Chidambaram-Montek group – the middle digit of this triumvirate also being more than just an ‘ideological’ neo-liberal; after all he is known to have actual stakes in the well-being of the corporate marauders of Niyamgiri/ Lanjigarh, Goa and other places.  Manmohan Singh’s identification of ‘Naxalites’ and ‘left-wing extremism’ as the ‘number one security threat’ makes eminent sense then, for it is only when all these struggles against corporate plunder of the forest and mining areas are defeated can the neo-liberal dream be realized.

It is well known that for quite sometime now state, district and local level administrations in different parts of the country have found it truly rewarding to brand all local activists – even those like the Gandhian Himanshu Kumar or Sandeep Pandey – as Maoists. A case of calling a dog mad before killing it, one might say.  Thus when there was a popular rebellion in Nandigram, we saw state CPM leaders allege a ‘Maoist plot’ with a politburo member of the party even alleging that ‘they’ were coming by the sea-route to Nandigram! It did not work that time. But by the time Lalgarh happened, it did. More often than not, this strategy works wonders. And it is employed by administrations and governments irrespective of whether they are run by the BJP, the Congress or the CPM.

This strategy suits the intentions and plans of corporate plunderers, the ruling coterie and their cheer-leaders in the media. Thus the effort to relentlessly reduce every voice of protest to ‘Maoism’. And it is here that the symbiosis between the state and its mimicry – in the form of the ’state-to-be’ (codenamed ‘Maoism/Maoist’) – becomes most evident. Each needs the other. A pervasive myth is manufactured through this symbiosis  – a myth that has lately found expression through some very articulate and high-profile voices among sections of the radical intelligentsia: The myth of the Maoist as the answer to Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and corporate designs in the forest and mining areas. This myth goes hand in hand with another: that the Maoist only takes up arms and kills because s/he (or her loved ones) is being killed and raped day in and day out. This is a story that has been endlessly retailed in the past few months and seems to be fast becoming some kind of common sense.
And yet, there is a sleight of hand involved here. In the first place, this myth deliberately screens out the fact that nowhere have the really powerful resistances to corporate and neo-liberal designs been more effective than where these resistances were actual mass movements. From Singur and Nandigram to Pen Raigad and Goa, to the various unreported and ‘unspectacular’ struggles in Jharkhand and Orissa, every struggle that has succeeded in rolling back such designs has been a mass struggle. There have, in fact, been even much older struggles like the Koel Karo struggle that have succeded in stalling the dam project without ever picking up the gun. This is not to say that these are non-violent Gandhian struggles. Yes, there was violence in Kalinganagar, Singur and Nandigram. In Kalinganagar, it was the naked violence of the state that came into full view and put a huge question mark over the ethics of the ‘Development’ neo-liberal style. In Singur, too, it was the violence of the police against the unarmed peasants that was on display. It was different in Nandigram – but there it was not really violence against aparticular set of people (at least initially) but a kind of symbolic violence against the CPM offices that gave vent to the anger that had boiled over once the information of impending land acquisition leaked out. It was only when the party-state violence began to be unleashed on the rebellion that more direct bloodshed took place. At any rate, the violence there had a close connection with breakdown of the long reign of unspoken terror in rural Bengal. The struggles that followed Nandigram – the Nandigram effect – in other parts of the country, or struggles that acquired a new legitimacy after it, put the state on the backfoot.Violence in all these cases was exercised at the limit point – or not at all.  At any rate, it was more a consequence of mass anger – not the premeditated terroristic attack of a force armed to the teeth.

It can be argued, in fact, that violence may at times become necessary in the course of an otherwise non-violent mass movement. In a country like India, it may be difficult to even contest a panchayat election, let alone win it, if the force of upper caste landlords’ armed might is not met with a deterrent – a possibility of retaliation. Such violence – or simply a threat of violence – is very different from the cult of the gun that has now become part and parcel of a celebratory rhetoric of the Maoists and their intellectual supporters.

The sleight of hand is also apparent at another level. It lies in the representation of the ‘Maoist’ as someone forced to resort to arms under threat of his/her life and honour. This representation obliterates the distinction that is most crucial here:  The Maoist – as in the party and its leadership – is a worshipper of violence independent of any contingency and needs to be discussed separately from those hundreds of others who might be attracted towards it in specific circumstances as the armed might of the Maoists seems to provide them some security against the violence of the state. A quick glance at the history of the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre should be enough to convince anyone that their attachment to violence is independent of everything else. Violence is to them not merely legitimate but a necessary means of achieving political ends – that is, ‘capture of state power’. Thus when sections of the radical intelligentsia demand ‘unconditional talks with the Maoists’ of the government, one is not quite sure what the talks are supposed to be about. Are they talks meant to negotiate something specific, say the several MOUs that have been signed between the government and the corporations? If that is the case, will the Maoists give up arms or armed struggle were these to be scrapped? Clearly not. The Maoists are fighting for state power and have made no bones about it. Then what are the talks meant to be – except as a ruse to buy time strategically, in order to regroup and reorganize?

It is true that in the aftermath of the final defeat of the Narmada Bachao Andolan – where every effort by the movement to seek redressal within the framework of the state’s institutions, its judiciary and its political process was met with cynical disregard – the Maoist option did begin to seem attractive to some people. Even leaders like Medha Patkar and BD Sharma, for example, began to express doubts about what signals the state was sending and whether allying with the Maoists was not something to be seriously considered. Needless to say, such a feeling of desperation among these stalwarts of people’s movements says more about the state than about military violence as a strategic option. As a matter of fact, it is well known that in many places where the Maoists hold sway, their extortion economy functions by making peace with contractors and corporations and with the local development bureaucracy. So clearly, the mere fact that at some point the Maoist option can seem attractive to some people is not argument enough, either about its ethicality or indeed, its efficacy.

At any rate, we know that the historical destiny of all twentieth century revolutions has been to simply ‘build capitalism’: armed struggle or no armed struggle, no ’socialist’ experiment has produced anything but a more ruthless capitalism and and even more ruthelss modernity at the end of the day.  Even Prachanda, at the end of a decade-long Maoist insurgency, after he assumed power, had to asssure the Nepal Chamber of Commerce and Industry not to be frightened – for the Maoists only wanted to build capitalism.

A number of activists from the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) in New York have initiated a reading group on South Asia.  The notes below are the second in a series of commentaries following reading discussions that some members of the reading group are posting on Kafila.  This is an attempt to broaden the discussions and in the process make it a productive dialogue to understand developments in the region and deepen our solidarity.

Debating “Political Islam”

– Svati Shah, Biju Mathew, Sumitra Rajkumar, Prachi Patankar and Ahilan Kadirgamar

The recent debate between Samir Amin and Tariq Amin-Khan on a left perspective on “political Islam” in the context of imperialism, published in Monthly Review (December 2007 and March 2009), provides an opportunity to reflect on a number of issues that have vexed the anti-war movement and the left with respect to the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The most vexing of these issues has been the question of whom the left should target as its allies in those countries, and what position the left should take toward so-called “political Islam,” represented by Islamist groups calling for an end to foreign occupation.  The definition of “political Islam” is presented below in relation to each critique.  Both Amin and Amin-Khan are in agreement that both “political Islam” and imperialism have to be challenged simultaneously.  There are no strategic questions here, in terms of joining one to fight the other.  The defeat or withdrawal of both is desirable in the interests of a people-centred politics.  In imperialism’s projection of capitalism and reactionary Islam’s comfort with capitalism (that class and gender do not trouble it) they are objective allies even if on the ground their adherents are military enemies.  This initial agreement then delves into a number of nuanced questions that must be considered in order to foster the return to a people centred politics in both of these countries, and the regions as a whole.

Tariq Amin-Khan begins by making a nuanced distinction between “political Islam” and “militant Islam.”  “Political Islam” belonged to the elite and has a continuity from colonial times, when it was used to manoeuvre local elites, to the post-colonial and Cold War context, when it was used to capture state power, a strategy that has extended into the post-Cold War period.  Amin-Khan claims that the “political Islam” of the elites, for most part, did not take on an insurrectionary or armed politics, and attempted to capture state power through electoral politics or in alliance with the military.  “Militant Islam” on the other hand, while it finds its lineage in “political Islam” prior to 1989, emerges increasingly powerful in the latter part of the Cold War when it was complicit with US imperialism, the growth of the Taliban through support from the US government in the Cold War being a classic example of this phenomenon.  However, in the post-Cold War period, this “militant Islam” takes up armed opposition to both the elite-driven states in Muslim majority countries, as well as in opposing US imperialism.  Such nuance in understanding the various forms of Islamic movements is important for Amin-Khan to avoid the Left’s tendency to dismiss all Islamic movements as reactionary and, in the process, leaving the Left without the capacity to engage with people who, for different reasons and varying degrees, have supported such Islamic movements.  Such nuance can come only with a political economic analysis of our societies, the ground on which these Islamic movements have risen.  An ideological critique of these Islamic movements alone will not suffice to understand their capacity to reshape the political terrain and win over sections of the people.

Both authors highlight the ways in which the decimation of the Left in and around Iraq and Afghanistan, in the 1970s and 1980s, by the US and its client states, and the vacuum created by such decimation, also provided the room for anti-democratic, reactionary forces to come to the fore.  The Left’s weakness on the ground today is amplified by its inability to provide an alternative vision to the people in the post-Soviet era. Thus, both in its ability to mobilize as well as to put forward an alternative vision, Left movements have not recovered from their set backs, be they in 1989, or in 1968.

Both authors also convey that there is a way in which both imperialism and “political Islam” operate within and sustain capitalism. This conclusion is one that can be drawn out at multiple levels. The case on imperialism is an obvious one in as much as imperialism is often a response from segments of the capitalist class to certain internal crisis of capitalism. The case of where “political Islam” meets capitalism is more complicated. The most obvious level at which it operates is apparent in the ways in which imperialism consolidates its rationales and strategies around the idea of a threat.  “Political Islam” in the contemporary context is the new ‘perfect foil’ for imperialist forces.  We may also interrogate the notion of “political Islam” within the fold of capitalism by seriously asking the question of class.  The project of “political Islam,” in all its variations, still engenders the reproduction of a class-stratified society.

One clear conclusion from this debate for our reading group was that it is crucial for the left not to get locked into the thesis that imperialism and “political Islam” are opposed to each other, and therefore to oppose one means not to oppose the other. Instead if we follow through with the analysis, then it becomes clear that we need to oppose imperialism unequivocally, that we must oppose “political Islam” while understanding its appeal to poor people. In particular, we must think strategically about how to create that third space which neither ends up reproducing an anti Islamic line, nor fall into the trap of reducing US-led imperialism to a ‘cultural’ conflict.  The Left’s tendency to retreat into the received politics of the Cold War era, where indeed imperialism fostered the growth of reactionary Islamic forces against secular and Left forces and secular democratic states, opens up the much larger question of how “political Islam” is constituted, of secular politics and, for that matter, the secular state as well.  But that we must discuss at a later date.

(An edited version of this piece appeared as the cover story in Himal Southasian in December 2007. The report is based on travels across Andhra to Bihar in October of the same year. At a time when most of the media is pushing the same binaries we must avoid, this may help in conveying the enormous complexity of the issue. Some facts may be outdated, and Kafila readers will be more familiar with certain issues like Salwa Judum than this reporter, but the broad argument may still have some relevance. I will follow this up with posts on the Nepali process and Indian Naxalites.)

A people’s movement. The greatest internal security challenge. Struggle for the rights of the poor, tribals, Dalits, landless. Compact Revolutionary Zone with influence in almost 200 districts. A socio economic problem rooted in exploitation and idealism. A law and order threat . True people’s democracy. A criminal, authoritarian and opportunistic outfit. The revolution will smash the Indian state. The Maoists are ants and can be crushed anytime .

Neat black and white portrayals have come to characterise one of the most complex stories of our times. The Naxal as the saviour and the state as the oppressor. The state as protector and Naxal as the villain. Numbers and scale of action act as the judge of Maoist spread and activity. 1608 incidents of Naxalite violence and 677 people killed in 2005; 1509 incidents and 678 killed in 2006; 249 persons killed till June 2007.

But this narrative hides more than it tells. Like the fact that there is possibly no one Naxalite movement in India, neither is there a unified and organised state response. The Communist Party of India (Maoist), born in 2004 after the unity of the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre, leads the Maoist movement. It spreads across several states in varying degrees, and has a common political and military outlook. The movement is clearly national in character; the party is organised with a command structure and the aim of taking over state power. Connecting the dots to address the issue at the national level in Delhi is important for any sustainable way out.

Yet, the Naxalite movement looks different in Hyderbabad, Raipur, Ranchi, and Patna. Go further deep in each state and Warangal, Dantewada, Hazaribagh, and Jehanabad – datelines that punctuate India’s Naxal war – have more than their share of differences. Like any other political formation, it may be natural that the Maoists adapt themselves to specific set of dynamics. But the stark variations assume added significance. They pose difficult questions for those who portray it as a single movement that will destroy the Indian state and those who advocate any homogenised approach to deal with the issue.

Across Andhra Pradesh, there is a large degree of sympathy for the Maoists, yet today they face their most severe setback in this traditional southern bastion. There has been a massive escalation of violence and conflict in Chhatisgarh due to a flawed and brutal government strategy. In Jharkhand, a powerful but degenerated Maoist movement coupled with a corrupt and inert state has made life miserable and dangerous for citizens. The most powerful critique of armed Maoists comes from other ultra-left Naxalite groups in Bihar. The local politician-police-business-media lobby is exploitative, but there is a more intriguing Naxalite-mainstream politician and Naxalite-big business nexus that characterises the political landscape in places. In this almost incomprehensible maze, all that a visual footage driven media reveals are shots of sporadic armed attacks. All that a one-dimensional narrative provides is a simplified image of a Maoist party at war with a coherent Indian state.

What is certain however is that activities and strength of the CPI (Maoist) have increased in the past few years, particularly in the resource-rich states of central and eastern India. Inequitable government policies, absence of justice, land issues, a weak and corrupt administration, dearth of political actors who channelise people’s concerns on the ground, forced displacement and insensitivity to non violent movements have all contributed to creating space for an armed outfit that questions the legitimacy of the political system. There is little doubt that the Maoists gain initial popularity by raising concerns of the poorest and most exploited. But it takes them little time to evolve into a dictatorial power structure with enormous vested interests, and elements of corruption, brutality, and mindless violence thrown in.

The Indian state is a divided house and there is no one standard threat perception of Naxalites. For the Prime Minister, left-wing extremism is the gravest internal security challenge; for a home ministry official in Delhi, the Naxal problem can easily be managed if states get their act together. A Raipur bureaucrat thinks if the central government decides to use force, the Naxals can be crushed in one minute. The local administration, according to a Jharkhand district police official, is only a temporary barrier for the Maoists who will continue to grow if politicians don’t stand up. In the calculations of a Hyderbabad top cop, all it requires is a specialised force and good intelligence to defeat the rebels who are like a disease. Naxalites are working according to a plan, and there will be an explosion of violence in a few years across India, warns a Delhi security analyst. For a Dantewada politician, Naxalism is a threat to his life but also his moment to emerge in the limelight as a defender of the Indian state.

In this flurry of voices, often at odds, the government neither has a uniform view of how strong is the Naxalite ‘threat’, nor an effective plan to deal with it. Sometimes, it suits politicians and officials to exaggerate the Naxal ‘menace’, for it becomes a pretext to ask for more funds and justify repression. At other times, it is more convenient to downplay the issue to convey a sense of success in dealing with it. On paper, the state vacillates between treating it as a socio-economic issue as well as a law and order problem. In practice, it relies almost exclusively on a police solution, and even that is badly planned and executed. Strikingly, there is no mention in government documents or even left-liberal discourse of the one critical element that is necessary to deal with Naxalism – local-level political management.

Fundamentally, engagement between the state and Naxals can yield little. The Maoists have no faith in the present constitution or state structure; the state has no time and space for those who seek to destroy it with arms. But what is needed is introspection. The government must realise this is a political movement stemming from genuine grievances that cannot be crushed and its own policies provide ammunition for rebellion; the Naxalites need to know that despite some increase in strength, taking over even a district headquarter, let alone a state capital is not easy, and those who are suffering the most are the poor who they claim to represent. Obvious facts, but the lack of rethinking on both sides gives rise to suspicions that neither is interested in a solution. Yet, it remains the only way to enable a basic level of dialogue on issues raised by Naxals which do fall within the constitutional framework, and an agreement to minimise loss of lives.

The Machiavellian southern state

Andhra Pradesh will remain etched in any account of the Maoist movement. From the first ultra-left rebellion against the Indian state in Telangana six decades back to being the hub of Naxalite activity right from 1967 to the present, the state has been the ideological fount of the Maoist movement.

With the formation of a new government headed by the Congress party in 2004, there was a ceasefire between the state and the People’s War Group. Talks were initiated at the behest of an active citizen’s group. The two sides agreed to be on the table because of a behind the scenes understanding during the polls when the Naxals helped the Congress win in several constituencies and in return the Congress promised to go lenient after victory – a reflection that the line between the mainstream and rebel is often blurred. A section of Maoist activists emerged overground, organised mass rallies, and participated in a round of negotiations. But it took little time for the process to collapse. Both sides had continued to distrust each other and saw the interlude as merely tactical to organise themselves more effectively. The government accused the Maoists of continuing to carry arms and consolidating strength by uniting with Bihar’s MCC; the Naxalites alleged that the government was using the period to stage fake encounters against their activists.

In hindsight, the Maoists had a point. The government had shifted goalposts by insisting on disarming them without even a basic agreement – it was unreasonable to expect that the rebels would hand over their arms and give up the revolution. The Machiavellian state clearly acted in bad faith. They had used the break to track Maoist operations, weaken the armed squads or dalams, and plant a strong network of informers.

In the last three years, the Maoists have suffered a major setback in Andhra, particularly in the Telangana region – a fact accepted by Naxalites themselves. This is reflected in the reduced frequency and scale of armed actions, recruitment, and activities of mass organisations. The reversal stems from multiple factors, and deserves careful scrutiny because it is a marker of challenges that Naxalites might face in other parts of the country in the future.

One factor for the decline, much to the discomfort of all those who believe a law and order approach is completely futile, is strong and effective police action. The Andhra Pradesh police have built up a specialised fighting force called the Greyhounds. These are mobile squads, who know how to live in forests like the Naxalite dalams – the fulcrum of the movement – and have the ability to conduct surgical strikes based on sharp intelligence inputs.

Compared to police operations in the past, the Greyhounds are more careful not to violate human rights. While there have been allegations of rape against Greyhound members in Vakapalli in Vizag recently, human rights activists like K Balagopal see this as an aberration. “This is a disciplined force that roams around in villages and forests and does not harass people on a significant scale. Instead, they purchase information about location, use modern technology to track movement, surround the area and shoot,” he says. A top police official admits there has been a deliberate change in strategy. ‘Earlier we used to go to a village, round up all the able-bodied men and beat them to scare them. But that only pushes people away. Now, there is strict control over these activities. In fact, I keep telling my counterparts in the Islamic fundamentalist department to do the same.” For their part, the Naxals have not been able to conduct any major attacks on Greyhounds.

Technology has helped the counter-insurgency effort. The identity of informers can be concealed more easily given that all it requires is a mobile phone set and different SIM cards to alert the police. N Venugopal, a pro-Maoist journalist, adds, “What added to the Maoist woes is the fact that they over-estimated their strength and went on a mass recruitment drive during the ceasefire. The police used the moment to infiltrate within.”

The swinging masses

However, this should not make the police smug. For one, the setback is not irreversible. Indeed, there have been several ups and downs in the Maoist movement in Andhra since the 1970s but the rebels have consistently bounced back. And they continue to command sympathies of a large section of the society. From a Sikh auto-driver in Hyderabad to a Muslim cook; from pro-establishment journalists to even a government official in Bhadrachalam in Telangana, there is a consensus that Naxalites have served as a force for good in the past. They don’t harass common people and attack only the corrupt; they beat up the landlord in my village; they will stand by the poor; they are the only ones who give justice in the forests; give them a chance to rule – we have seen this system and it doesn’t work.

The Maoists also retain the ability to strike at will, as was witnessed in an attack on the convoy of former chief minister Janardhan Reddy in September. Indeed, the reversal inflicted by the police is coupled with the deliberate decision of the Maoists to retreat temporarily from the forests of Telangana and concentrate forces across the border in Chhatisgarh where an active war is raging with the government.

The Maoists are understood to have drawn two lessons from the recent Andhra experience. “They have decided to strengthen their military wing and adopt more aggressive strategies in the future. The party also feels that the answer lies in becoming more secretive and clamming up to prevent the possibility of information leaking. In fact, the district units do not even come out with statements now,” says a CPI (Maoist) member.

But they may have got their analysis wrong here. For the setback is not only due to police action but also other systemic factors which require them to engage more widely in mass politics, rather than shy away from it.

For one, a major challenge faced by the rebels nationally, and particularly in Andhra, is the inability to attract young people in urban areas and small towns.

Warangal is at the heart of Telangana. At the sprawling campus of Kaketiya University, the hub of Naxalite student activity in the 1970’s and 80s, there is a sense of calm. A few students are crowded around the National Service Scheme office to plan their next voluntary activity. There is a hand-written notice announcing the onset of placement interviews – ‘Golden job opportunities in Infosys’. A group of students in the canteen chat loudly about Telegu star Chiranjeevi’s daughter eloping with a man to ward off her father’s opposition.

At the School of Social Sciences, a group of professors are having a cup of tea and pondering over the changing aspirations of students. “The upper and intermediate caste students join science and want to be a part of the IT boom. Those in humanities are usually first generation students from SC and ST background who are here only because of reservations and minimal scholarships. They are financially insecure and look around for employment, even if is as a coolie or auto driver,” says S Rao, a political scientist.

Students have little time or incentive to join the Maoist movement, in the face of competition and pressure from peers and parents to ’settle down’ in life. Those at the Indian School of Business, a management school that has international tie-ups, in the outskirts of Hyderabad can barely locate the Telangana districts on the map and have their sights set on Silicon Valley. A little down, in the Nizam College of Osmania University, the aspirations are to get to the Hi-Tech city – an enclave of software companies and malls within the state capital. Students at the Regional Engineering College in Warangal aim for the green card as well, but would be satisfied with a well-paid job locally. And the Humanities students, already scorned for not making it to the science stream, are under pressure to get a job, try for government ’service’, and send money home.

Simplistic as it may sound – after all, there were career-oriented people in the 70s as well – this has become among the most potent factors in weaning the youth away from armed movement. The success of the Maoists over the past few decades – in attacking feudalism, creating a new sense of consciousness among the marginalised, and forcing the state to give concessions to the tribals – is now proving to be an obstacle, for the young now want to exploit the available opportunities. These people in traditional Naxal strongholds have seen the movement closely. They know the pain and suffering that comes from being a Maoist activist – death at any moment in an encounter, constant harassment of the family, a tough life in an authoritarian set-up – with little immediate dividends. Little surprise that the second generation in the area decide to make the best of whatever they can get rather than fight for a red India.

As much as the Naxalites may like to disagree, another reason for their decline is the fact that politics – mainstream and democratic politics – has percolated down to people. In Andhra, there are alternative political channels to express aspirations. And many would like to join one of these streams and be a part of the state rather than fight it and face repression. The Telegu Desam Party provides an outlet for regional aspirations; the mainstream Communist Parties have picked up issues of land displacement and distribution of surplus land; the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti is at the forefront of the movement for a separate statehood – a claim supported by the Maoists. Mainstream politicians do not hesitate to make promises which far surpass the incentives provided by the Maoists.

Varavara Rao, the public face of the Indian Naxals and one of the emissaries in the aborted talks, does not seem to realise the irony when he beams with pride and says, “The Maoists have forced all other parties to become more progressive and take up their agenda.” This not only reflects Maoist success in deepening democracy but also reveals the limits of their expansion, by showing the space within the system to raise issues.

Yet, it is undeniable that the PWG, and now the CPI (Maoist), have created space for dissent and influenced the way of seeing the world among large sections of Telegu society, across the political spectrum. A restaurant manager in the Secunderabad station area, when asked if he knew the way to Naxal balladeer Gadar’s house, jumped up excitedly. “Of course, it is near the Lotakunta bridge. Who doesn’t know Gadar? He sings for the poor and stands up against wrong.” The manager himself, it turned out, was a member of the ruling Congress party.

A war zone

Take a bus from Warangal and cross Bhadrachalam in Khammam district, travel through dense forests on both sides, and reach Chintoor. Sit in a shared auto to take you through the last mile of Andhra territory. Ask around about Maoist influence in the area and people clam up and look away. Suddenly six hefty gun-wielding men appear in plainclothes and stop the auto. They go through every item in your baggage, and only later care to identify themselves as members of the Andhra police. One constable wants an identification card and lights up at the mention of press – “See we are efficient and do our job well. Not like the ones across the border.”

Across the border is literally the centre of India. Across the border lies the heart of the civil war that continues to rage between a ruthless state and a militant force; between tribals and tribals; between the Naga regiment, Mizo battalion, Central Reserve Police Force, state police on one hand and the Naxals on the other; between 50,000 tribals locked in state camps on the main road and marked as defenders of the Indian flag, and thousands inside forests branded as terrorists – both caught in politics not of their making.

Walk across to enter Dantewada or South Bastar in the state of Chhatisgarh. But before that, face another six people with rifles slinging on their shoulders – only this time, they are wearing khaki uniforms. Only this time, they are short and skinny. Only this time, their average age is 14. After inspecting the luggage, and fiddling with the mobile phone, one child soldier commands, ‘Das rupaiya, ten rupees.’ Why? ‘To let you enter our land.’ Just then, a slightly older soldier winks and says, “Let him go, we will take it from someone else.”

Konta can pass off as a small border outpost. Report to the police station and let them know you will be visiting the ‘base camps’ located on the way to Dantewada five hours away, advise local journalists. The thana is a small concrete structure hidden behind barbed wires. It is 11.45 in the morning, and the place is littered with bottles of Bagpiper whiskey. A plump man, not in uniform, is rocking his chair and asks for identification, wallet, and mobile phone. The ‘press card’ is not enough to impress him. “Kathmandu haan? I am Manisha Koirala’s boyfriend. Give me your address details – name of your sarpanch, name of the area MLA. Has the government sent you? Your Nepali Maoists are here also. We can fuck all of you,” he glares. 50 minutes of telling him that there is neither a sarpanch nor an MLA in Kathmandu is not sufficient. Finally, it is a fake address, fake names of Kathmandu representatives, and lunch time that makes the man relent.

Salwa Judum territory is the land of the bizarre. The fear is palpable and people do not want to talk. We do not know. Let it be sir, we will get into trouble. Businessmen are reluctant to rent out cars. Locals warn you not to provoke anyone and be short and crisp.

The Naxals entered the area from Andhra in the late 70s and gained popularity soon after for standing up against exploitation of tribals by forest contractors, providing instant justice, organising people into sanghams and dalams, engaging in cultural activities, campaigning against the corrupt state which had done little for the adivasis, and living with the people. But local resentment against the Naxals was brewing gradually – against their interference in local customs, ban on tendu-leaf collection, dictatorial ways. This was exploited by local politicians and the administration to start Salwa Judum in 2005. Tribals were mobilised against Maoists and as the Naxals began retaliatory attacks, the state forced them to flee into camps.

The dissatisfaction against the Maoists was genuine and spontaneous, but a concerted movement to actively go after them was clearly state-supported and sponsored. The government went in with forces to evacuate villages under Naxalite influence and allegedly plundered houses, raped women, and killed with impunity to send a message to the tribals to come to camps. Those at the camps were seen as state supporters by the Naxals. Those who stayed behind in villages were immediately branded as terrorists by the administration. Many young men in the camps were appointed as Special Police Officers, to assist the state police in its responsibilities – several of them former Naxalites with inside knowledge of the forests.

The logic behind Salwa Judum remains difficult to fathom, for it abounds with irony. On the surface, the state appears to be giving up the land in the interiors to the Maoists by displacing the people to camps instead of fighting the rebels directly or winning support of people in those areas. The strategy divides people and leaves an entire constituency inside the forests as fodder for Naxalites. And to top it all, the Judum campaign is headed by Mahendra Karma, a Congress MLA who is the Leader of Opposition in the state assembly – but in a rare instance of co-operation, has the complete backing of the BJP government.

Sitting in a Dantewada rest house, Karma claims this is a “Gandhian movement against political terrorism”, and the camps are necessary to protect those who have stood up against Naxalites from their wrath. Others suspect that Karma is keen on Salwa Judum because it has given him prominence, allowed him to concentrate more than 50,000 people in specific areas, maintain a vigil on them, and keep them away from Naxal influence. As Raipur journalist Praful Jha explains, “Fish will survive where there is water. Dry out the river and the fish will die. The Salwa Judum is based on the calculation that keeping people away from the interiors will finish off the support base of the Maoists.”

Raipur bureaucrats see the Judum as helpful for it allows them to make neat and mechanical plans to ‘push the Maoists’, and ‘clean the forests’, based on the assumption that all those inside are militants. Drawing up a rough sketch, a top police official says, “See, we can now move into the forests with heave deployment of forces, defeat the Maoists in one area, and push them backwards. That area can thus be cleared and development can begin. Then we go further in and push Maoists even more backwards.” And push them where? “How does that matter? Our job is to make life difficult for them here. How do we care if they go to Andhra forests?” says a close aide of state chief minister Raman Singh.

Activists see a more sinister plan behind displacing such a substantial segment of population from resource rich areas which are being eyed by extractive industries. The camps are slums meant to enable industries. “Bastar has diamonds, iron ore, steel, and uranium. Industries want to begin operations there on a war footing. And the Judum has meant they will face no protests against displacement, for people have already been thrown out,” remarks Ilina Sen, an academic and activist. This is possible in the long-term. But at present these are areas where the state barely has any presence and there are no public plans of industrial capital coming in. The two projects that have been approved by the government and are in the offing – the Tata plant in Jagdalpur and Essar operations in Dhurli-Bhansi – are not in the same areas from where Judum related displacement has taken place.

But the primary character of the Salwa Judum is that it pits tribals against tribals, divides families on both sides, and creates a notion of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ in a community that has lived together for ages. It has also engineered a shift in the line of firing. If the rebels earlier used to attack the politicians and policemen, now they go after the tribals in the camps perceived as enemies. The SPOs are used as shields in battles against the Naxals.

The result – the poorest segment of the Indian population, tribals, are killed on both sides.

At the Errabora camp, the camp-in-charge advances another argument in favour of the Judum. Ram Lal Markan, a teacher, says, “See these tribals are illiterate and unaware. The camp gives us an opportunity to lock them in, teach the new generation about nationalism, law, Indian constitution. This will ensure they do not fall for the Maoist propaganda and the young know that mother India is great.” Strikingly these defenders of ‘mother India’ in camps, who are the heads of the camp panchayats or act as the local leaders, are all non tribals – many of them sidekicks of Karma who have been targeted by Maoists in the past. The patronising argument that the dumb tribal needs education is countered by Pratap Agarwal, a Jagdalpur advocate who has filed a PIL against Salwa Judum. “If you look at voting patterns, South Bastar has always been in tune with the larger national electoral mood. These tribals have local consultative mechanisms; they take joint decisions. It is wrong for us to think we know best.”

The implications of the Salwa Judum have been devastating. The violence has increased drastically, but the state has a ready defense on this count. “If we put up a fight, obviously violence will increase. This is a war. Make no mistake,” says a local police official in Dantewada. Communist Party of India leader Manish Kunjam claims that more than 700 people have been killed by the police and SPOs, and 5000 houses burnt. There has been little agriculture for the past few years. The SPOs are a law unto themselves and have indulged in innumerable human rights violations.

Most importantly, the state-sponsored campaign has removed the tribals from their natural habitat, forced them into artificial camps, and divided families and communities. Kura Erra, a 21 year old at the Dornapal camp, looks longingly towards his village, Gorkunda, 7 km away while sipping tea at a crowded shop. “I can only go to my village with heavy police force, and that too only rarely. Otherwise the Naxals will kill me.” The might of the Indian state cannot protect Erra’s right to life, liberty, and free movement a few miles down the main road in South Bastar. Ask if the strength of the Naxals has increased in the past few years and all heads nod in agreement. There is a forced smile and the tea-shop owner remarks, ‘Who knows who is a Naxal? He might be sitting right here.”

While there are 50,000 people in the camps, many others are reported to have fled across the border to Andhra to escape the wrath of the state and Naxals. It is difficult to put a figure to the number of refugees. Many are of Koya tribe who travel in packs of three-five families, and have kinship links on the other side and stay with relatives on the other side. But it is said that the forests surrounding Chintoor are home to almost 35 clusters of refugees, with the number of displaced running into thousands.

The problem with Salwa Judum is that there is no easy exit route. There has never been easy escape when the state decides to outsource its responsibilities and use people as fodder. Some politicians like CPI’s Manish Kunjam argue that the Naxals will not target all the 50,000 people who live in camps if they return – their ‘enemies’ are only the SPOs and Salwa Judum leaders. “Announce the phased withdrawal of camps and send people back.” Senior police officials agree that the natural tendency of tribals to live in open spaces cannot be curbed for long. But their solution is different. “Remember we plan to push the Naxals back. After we do that, tribals can go back.”

Maybe, an exit route appears difficult because too many people are happy with the Salwa Judum. Mahendra Karma is thrilled at becoming the symbol of the fight against Naxalism. He and his cronies, along with local bureaucrats, are getting to siphon off enormous funds that the government has allocated for the Salwa Judum. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has found a chance to begin a process of Hinduising the adivasis in camps. The BJP is establishing political presence in an area where they have been traditionally weak, thanks to the help of the leader of opposition. And even the Naxalites are happy for the resentment against tribals is turning into political capital for them.

The reign of terror

Jharkhand is the untold, and potentially the most dangerous, Naxalite story. A corrupt state that has given a free reign to Maoists who have lost their ideological moorings gives the place an air of anarchy. The rebellion can flare even further because the only sphere in which the government is active – signing mining contracts – will lead to displacement and force thousands into destitution. They will be the losers in this process of sustaining a shining and happy India. Losers who will be ready to pick the gun, and serve as foot soldiers.

Talk to a Ranchi editor, a corporate sales manager, a political party activist, a rickshaw-puller, or even a district correspondent – the refrain is common. Yahan tu sarkar hi nahin hai. There is no government here.

Madhu Koda, an independent MLA, is the head of a coalition government and has completed one year in office – a feat seen as miraculous in times of a fragmented polity where it takes little to buy legislators off, trample on the constitution, and defect without a prick in the conscience. Little wonder then that Koda, his ministers, top bureaucrats, and local officers in lucrative posts – all want to make a quick buck in their moment under the sun.

And for them the presence of the Naxaliye is not a threat but an opportunity. Play the victim card and ask the central government for more funds to tackle the ‘menace’ and make money off it; exchange money with the insurgents and promise them protection in return of support during polls in constituencies where the Naxals have influence; give the Maoists information about construction contractors and share the loot; turn a blind eye when the Maoists are extorting people and later ask for a commission. A young district administrator remarks exasperatedly, “The police force is not too competent and in several places is a part of such a set-up. But even when it comes close to nabbing a Naxalite or attacking them, there is a call from the local politicians or seniors who ask them to lay off.”

The nexus between mainstream politicians and the rebels receives a temporary jolt when there is a dramatic attack by Naxals like the one in Giridih at the end of October. The rebels had planned to target the brother of former chief minister and an anti-Naxal crusader Babulal Marandi. Instead Marandi’s young son and 17 other innocent tribals who were enjoying a cultural programme after a football match were killed. At times like this, the rhetoric escalates; all sides become careful; and media attention increases. The government promises to take the Maoists on. The rebels chose to justify the killings in the name of the revolution. In rare instances however, the Maoists deign to admit that targeting innocents was a mistake- a small price to pay in the war to take over the Indian state. But a lot of this, observers say, is a farce – a game before things go back to being normal. And normalcy is synonymous with fear and insecurity on the ground, as leaders who are hands-in-glove watch the fun from the top.

The Maoists are active in more then 18 out of the 24 districts in Jharkhand, with a steady increase in their recruitment. And this expansion is not only to do with a weak and corrupt state but other systemic factors.

The absence of justice plays a far greater role in helping Maoists win cadre than is often understood or acknowledged. This is not only at the level of millions of cases which are stuck in the judicial system but at the level of the local thana. “People go with complaints to file a report at the police station. If it is a poor person, or someone of a lower caste, the police will not listen to him in the first place. And even if they do, and the case happens to be against a richer person with connections, the local sub inspector will take the side of the latter,” explains a local crime reporter in Hazaribagh. The aggrieved are left with only one choice – the Maoists who provide instance justice, often rightfully against the oppressor.

Land issues continue to remain a factor in alienating people from the mainstream. Feudalism may not be as powerful anymore and the image of brutal landlord is, more often than not, misplaced in several narratives. But the land reform programme has other components – updating land records being one of them. More than half the criminal cases – not civil but criminal – are related to land disputes where ownership is contested. There was either never any proper documentation, or documents got burnt or rotted. “Do a survey and prepare a fresh record of land ownership. Computerise the findings. And 25 percent of the Naxal problem will be resolved,” argues a SP in a Maoist-affected district.

The incentives are also aligned in favour of joining the Maoist movement in several areas because it is the most attractive employment option. After a short training course, the recruit gets a gun and monthly expenses. From a hanger-on at the local tea-shop who is derisively dismissed by elders for not having a job, this person suddenly acquires a new social status and unbridled power. Petty criminals who want to protect themselves from police harassment also find Naxalism a convenient refuge. And they all become legitimate actors. For in parts of several districts of Jharkhand, and Chhatisgarh, the line between the legal state and illegal Naxals is blurred. In fact, the state is often not present at all. And even when it is, the sheer power and presence of the Maoists gives them de facto legitimacy and acceptance as a political actor.

The political vacuum is most intense in Jharkhand. “Panchayat elections have not taken place, and local level leaders who could address grievances and channelise aspirations are absent,” points out Harivansh, editor of the well-respected Prabhat Khabar. Political parties act merely as electoral machines. In instances where local parties are present, leaders prefer to keep silent rather than risk Maoist wrath. Parties don’t send their cadre to these places.

But in all this, a notable absence is that of ideologically trained activist. What is common is a utilitarian streak and incentive based calculation behind the decision to join the Maoists. And this has created a vacuum of the politically committed at the middle level, leaders who can keep a check on ‘mistakes’ of the cadre. A CPI (Maoist) member admits, “The politicisation of the cadre is weak. The top leadership has a set of principles and we have no desire to kill innocents. But the command structure is not in place which gives the local units a lot of autonomy. And in the absence of politicisation, corruption seeps in.”

The descent into corruption, criminalisation and internal caste feuds is most pronounced among the Jharkhand Naxals. Maoists Communist Centre (MCC), as it existed prior to the merger, is often referred to as the Money Collection Centre. Levies are imposed not only on local contractors and small shop-keepers. A big corporate wants to initiate an industrial project – it needs to remember to set aside a share for the Maoists. This trend is visible in parts of Chhatisgarh as well where companies are reported to have paid large sums to Maoists to allow them to construct pipelines and start factories. The government wants to initiate a development project – pay the Naxalites a levy. A striking fact, for it poses difficult questions for those who believe ‘development’ is the panacea to resolve the Maoist issue. In cases like this, development money only strengthens the rebels.

The Maoists have not been immune to that fundamental, and all-pervasive characteristic of Indian society – caste. Tussles over sharing money, as well as inter-caste clashes between Yadavs and Ganjus, a Dalit community, have led to the formation of splinter groups like Tritiya Sammellan Prastuti Committee (TPC) and the Jharkhand Prastuti Committee (JPC). This has come as delightful news to the local administration which often supports one group against the other, and seeks to extract information by providing protection. But the proliferation of actors has made life even more difficult for citizens. Rakesh Jha, the owner of watch-repair centre in Chatra – hotbed of Naxalite and TPC activity – says, “Earlier we had to pay one group. Now it is four. But look at their standards. They begin asking for Rs 50,000 and finally relent if we agree to pay for a Rs 500 mobile recharge card. It shows they are only out to make a quick buck.”

The future in Jharkhand looks like one where there will be an escalation in the levels of violence. The government has signed MOUs worth billions with Mittal, Tata, RPG group, Jindal, and many others for extractive industries. The process of land acquisition will entail massive displacement. Only a few agreements have been implemented yet. But the government and big industries seem to have prepared a multi-pronged strategy for the process – offer attractive rehabilitation packages in principle, co-opt some locally influential people and encourage them to persuade the community, rig Gram Sabha hearings in tribal areas, use hired goons to create pressure, and use state forces overtly and covertly.

Any question of displacement is bound to provoke widespread controversy. In certain areas, some sections of people may be willing to give up their land. But by most accounts, the resistance is strong. This stems both from a deep attachment to land and the dismal record of past rehabilitation projects. “There is a deeper logic to the opposition. For 150 years, adivasis have given their land, labour, minerals, forest produce to this country’s elite. And in return, they have been dispossessed and proletarianised,” says Xavier Dias, a Ranchi based activist. Responding to reports that the opposition is a move to gain better relief packages, Dias says,” This is not a tactical decision. It is the only way to save what is remaining of the tribal population. Should they give their land so that their children can become coolies? The state will have to crush people’s movement if they want to move with industrial expansionism. And then we will see blood aluminum and red coal.” In such a context, where anger is rife among tribals and the government appears insensitive to non-violent movements, it is likely that people will be attracted to Maoist violence.

The critique within

Ram Jatan Sharma is a Naxalite. He believes India is a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country which needs a revolutionary overthrow of the state. But Sharma does not carry arms and is not a member of the CPI (Maoist). Instead, he belongs to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, an ultra-left outfit that traces its roots to the Naxalbari movement. Male, as the party is popularly called in Bihar, interestingly participates in electoral politics and has six legislators (CHECK) in the Bihar assembly.

An introspective Sharma looks back at the days when his outfit was underground and believed in the precedence of armed action. He says that the fundamental flaw of far-left groups has been the inability to judge the revolutionary fervour of the masses. “A revolutionary situation existed for a brief period between 1968 and 1970. We continued with the tactic of boycotting elections till 1978 but then realised that mass mobilisation comes first.” Wondering loudly why the Maoists refuse to see that the other parties, derisively dismissed as comprador, have the support of masses, Sharma says, “The task of a true revolutionary is to utilise the institutions of the bourgeoisie system to break the illusions of the people and reveal the true character of the ruling class.”

A day earlier, a ruling party MLA, Anant Singh, had beat up an NDTV journalist when faced with tough questions about an alleged murder he had committed. Singh happened to be a close aide of chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has carefully sought to cultivate the image of a clean politician against criminalisation. “The system provides some space to intervene. See we can show the people how there is little difference between Laloo Yadav and Nitish Kumar and both harbour criminals,” argues Sharma. Liberation leaders say that using this space does not mean getting co-opted into the system, and point out that attacks on them by the ruling parties have increased since they began participating in the parliamentary system. “They are more insecure and scared now than they were when we were in the forests.” The Maoists contribute little by engaging in anarcho-militarism and mindless violence, when it is clear that an attack on a small landlord does not in any way translate into warfare against the Indian state. Instead, this violence gives the state a pretext to repress.

The critique of the Maoists from within the left stems from several other perspectives as well. Many Marxists claim that the Maoists have not recognised that the true nature of the ruling class and the Indian state – it is not the feudals but the capitalists who dictate policies. The mainstream Communist Party of India (Marxist) has, at the theoretical level, countered the categorisation of the Indian bourgeoisie as comprador, claiming that it has a dual character and strives for the autonomy of capital. Pro-CPM intellectuals also argue that at the present national and international juncture, armed revolution is not possible and the task of a Marxist is to radicalise democracy.

But Bihar remains significant because it is here that Naxalism has taken a different turn, besides the one heralded by the armed Maoist outfit. For their part, the Maoists appear to be concentrating more across the border in Jharkhand. There has been a lull in drastic Maoist actions since a daring jailbreak in Jehanabad sometime ago when the Naxalites killed members of a rival group and released their own cadre. What has changed in the expansion of the rebels to North Bihar – Muzaffarpur, Sitamarhi, Madhubani, and Champaran. Some observers link this to support and linkages from across the border in Nepal.

“Maoism remains a force and finds recruits because the state has collapsed in a substantial part of the Hindi heartland,” says Saibal Gupta, a Patna academic. “Couple this with the fact that new economic policies have resulted in the withdrawal of the state from even the basic welfare services it was providing.” The political parties who are present on the ground inevitably take the side of the powerful- the underclass remains potential fodder for the rebels. The unemployed are looking for avenues and see the movement as a quick tool of upward mobility.

However, Bihar’s polity appears to have attained certain equilibrium, notwithstanding the churning within identity politics in the electoral realm. Caste wars are not as vicious as they were in the past. The politician-Naxal nexus has formed a pattern and reciprocal assistance has become a part of the norm. Prakash Louis, author a book on Naxalites in central Bihar, says, “Laloo and Nitish are benevolent oppressors. The movement is at its zenith when the opposition is at its zenith. If the state has an appearance of giving concessions, it becomes difficult for the Maoists to mobilise as actively. Laloo had made it clear that land grab should not result in police firing. The exploitation is present, but not as palpable and brutal.”

The Maoists do have the ability to conduct a major strike. But it is unlikely that this will alter the balance of power, political equations, and the state’s own presence. As Vinay Kanth of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties puts it, “There is no reason to think Naxal strength will increase dramatically. Equally, there is no reason to believe that the government can contain it with the same set of policies.”

The thinking cap

A quick scan of the Maoist movement in some key states is enough to reveal that all sides in this conflict need to sit back, look at their calculations, and reassess strategies.

The Maoist movement is increasingly becoming an exclusively armed movement, with little focus on political mobilisation. The leadership realised this and at the party congress earlier this year, made a conscious decision to form a united front with other like-minded people, and pick up mass-based issues. However, this has not translated into practice anywhere, apart from a few instances of engagement with displacement issues. This involvement is fairly minimal and the basic character of the organisation remains one which gives priority to violence.

This trend of not engaging enough in mass politics stems both from choice and compulsion. A repressive state leaves the rebels with little space to organise themselves and have meetings, let alone hold rallies. But it is also a deliberate decision. The MCC was traditionally a more militant force focusing on violence while the PWG had a greater component of mass activity. Since the merger of the two, the MCC line of thinking is said to have become pre-dominant. Maoists have also concluded that the rapid success of the Nepali Maoists was due to an aggressive military strategy, and this needs to be replicated in India.

What the Naxalites need to understand is that armed action can yield only limited political or military dividends, particularly if you are up against the might of the Indian state. 180 Naxalite-affected districts is a misnomer in more than one way. The Maoists do not have control over any district headquarter; they hold exclusive sway only in select areas in Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh, particularly dense forests, where the state is not present at all. To fall prey to the conception that the Maoists are all over Andhra, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Chhatisgarh just because they have presence in rural areas and the state is about to give way would be a mistake.

It is mass activity that attracts committed cadre; awakens a sense of consciousness; and keeps a check on the criminal and degenerative tendencies within the party. Beginning with violence, rather than winning the genuine support of the people, has never been a sustainable strategy for any outfit.

This focus on violence has inevitably led to several ‘mistakes’. Inadvertent or not, innocents are often killed. More often than not, these are people the Maoists claim to be fighting for and represent. This creates a sense of outrage and gives the state a pretext to repress. Not only do committed Maoists get crushed in the process, so do many others in politics and civil society who are seeking to dissent on fundamental questions within the system by being branded as Naxalites.

But civil society needs to bear its part of the blame as well. Across the board, human rights organisations are seen as more sympathetic to the Naxals and unconcerned when people are killed due to Maoist actions. While some of this may be state propaganda to discredit activists, there have been instances when PUCL members, particularly in Jharkhand, have refused to condemn the Maoists. After the Giridih attack, a PUCL activist told The Telegraph that their agenda is to solely expose the state’s crimes. Another activist Shashi Bhushan Pathak went a step ahead by criticising the government and Babulal Marandi for provoking the Maoists to attack. “Their credibility has taken a beating,” says Sunil Kumar, editor of the Chhatisgarh daily in Raipur.

Journalists have not covered themselves in glory either. Most newspapers are heavily dependent on government revenues and usually toe the government line, especially on sensitive issues. This is true of Chhatisgarh where only a few papers have exposed the Salwa Judum story for what it is. The prejudice seeps down to the local correspondents, who have vested interests tied with the local establishment. Few journalists in Dantewada were willing to stick their neck out and be critical of the campaign. Instead, one hears conversations among them of the last date for filing tender and contractor kickbacks.

Since the Naxal issue emerged in 1967, an easy way out for left-liberal academics has been to mouth the cliché that this is a socio-economic problem and development is the answer. It is true that development, defined as effective government services and creating opportunities, can lock people into the national mainstream and reduce their incentives to join the Naxalites. Yet, the issue here is as much of rights as of development. A person does not become a Maoist because there is no school or health centre in his village; he becomes a Maoist due to a different set of circumstances, spanning from lack of justice, brutality of state officials, perceiving participation as a tool of mobility, coercion from other Maoists, and other factors. In fact, the development money often goes straight into the pockets of politicians and Naxalites and strengthens them. So while development is a part of the solution, to treat it as a one-size-fits-all alternative without carving specific strategies for different places may not be productive.

The Naxal movement is fundamentally a political movement. And the answer lies in politics and political parties. As long as parties continue to be inert in areas and do not fulfill their core responsibilities – accommodating aspirations, putting pressure on the local administration, providing institutional protection to those who believe in the present system, standing up for the marginalised, speaking out if there are atrocities against Dalits and tribals – there will be space for alternative outfits. This becomes difficult in areas where the Maoists do not allow activities of other political parties. But there is no easy way out but to fill the political vacuum in a just manner.

The government pretends to recognise that this is more than just a law and order problem. But it has done little to build up or act on a non-police solution. In fact, its own policies over the past decade – SEZs, doing little to tackle agrarian distress, withdrawing basic support to enable health and education, lack of prompt redressal of grievances especially for the marginalised – have only contributed to the unrest. The state may have the right to suppress any movement that questions its authority and seeks to destroy its monopoly over violence. But the present strategy of only pumping in more money for the police force, or attempting a Salwa Judum like campaign, can yield little. Talks may not be possible, given that both sides have diametrically opposite positions, but a basic engagement to minimise violence could be in the interests of the people.

The Indian Maoists have undoubtedly pushed the envelope by putting several issues of the marginalised on the agenda, and forcing the government to pay heed to it, if out of nothing than self-protection. Their support among many of the poorest people in India is testament to the fact. Even as the government needs to address these aspirations, the Naxalites would do well to realise there are clear limits to their possible expansion. The Indian masses have, over the past six decades, shown they may have complaints, but retain faith in the present democratic system. As an old man on a bus from Hazaribagh to Patna put it, ” Sahib Naxal tu theek hain, par kaam tu sarkar hi karega na. Sir, the Naxals are fine but finally, it is the government which will do the work, isn’t it?”

[We publish below an open letter to Noam Chomsky, written in the wake of his endorsement of a statement against 'Operation Green Hunt', issued recently by a large number of intellectuals in India and in the US. Nirmalangshu's letter is important because it raises some very serious questions that are being brushed under the carpet by sections of the radical intelligentsia.  Unlike Nirmalangshu, I would not put 'radical' within scare quotes, since it is precisely this that highlights the immense tragedy of our times. Radical intellectuals - truly radical intellectuals - once again find themselves caught in this situation where in order to oppose state violence, they will wilfully turn a blind eye to the violence of armed nihilist gangs, simply because these claim to speak on behalf of the oppressed - a claim that Nirmalangshu's letter exposes in all its falsity. He lays bare how the politics that goes by the name of 'Maoism' (i.e. CPI-Maoist) believes in violently erasing all other voices of opposition to and criticism of the state, but that of itself. This brand of politics in fact lives in symbiosis with the state - delegitimizing all forms of mass democratic politics. At this moment one deeply misses the courageous voice of the late Balagopal - recently slightingly dubbed a 'liberal humanist' by a spokesperson of the Maoists, at a meeting meant to salute his memory. I cannot help recalling here the feeling of immense sadness many of us were overcome by, watching and hearing speakers at this meeting (in Delhi) for Balagopal - speakers who were ungenerous, if not carping and outright dismissive of the courage of conviction that was Balagopal. AN]

Dear Prof. Chomsky,

I saw your support to the statement issued by Sanhati in the form of a letter to the prime minister— endorsed by some intellectuals from India and abroad. Three points are transparent: (a) the Indian government is planning a massive armed operation in the tribal-hilly areas in the eastern part of the country, (b) the poorest of the poor and the historically marginalised will suffer the most in terms of loss of lives, livelihood and habitat, and (c) for whatever it’s worth, an all-out campaign by democratic forces is needed to resist the armed invasion of people’s habitat by any party. To that extent, the statement does bring out the urgency of the matter.

What is not so transparent from the statement is the condition that has brought about this state of affairs. It is said that large-scale neo-liberal policies—including formation of SEZs and encroachment of tribal habitats for mining and other forms of exploitation—has led to mass impoverishment. So, in desperation, the poor have allegedly taken up arms to defend themselves.

This picture is wrong in (i) ascribing the so-called armed struggle to the people, and (ii) being silent about the ’specific’ source of the current aggression by the state, namely, the armed operations of CPI (Maoist). The statement is otherwise right about the ‘general’ situation: sinister neo-liberal policies, growing impoverishment and marginalisation of the poor, and the resulting anger thereof.

Hundreds of organisations working at the grass roots level across the country are engaged in a variety of struggles against state repression and the insidious economic policies of the government. This includes many Gandhian, liberal and leftist organisations and individuals. Importantly, some of these—such as the organisations led by veteran activists Kanu Sanyal and Asim Chatterjee, among many others in Bengal, Andhra, Bihar, Orissa and elsewhere—also subscribe to maoism and are known initiators of the original naxalbari movement. Thus, the labels ‘maoist’ and ‘naxalite’ apply to a much wider category of organisations and individuals than the CPI (Maoist). Needless to say, even the wider category of maoists, not to mention just the CPI (Maoist), forms a tiny fraction of the broad democratic resistance to the policies of the state. The current armed operations of the state are directed ostensibly against the CPI (Maoist) in the areas under its control.

The state of course makes no such distinction in public; by identifying the wider category with the narrower one, it is constructing the opportunity to target the entire left-democratic fraternity in due course. To put the point differently, although the undeclared target of the state covers the entirety of left-democratic forces—as evidenced, for example, in the growing attacks on industrial workers especially in the private sector—the declared target currently consists of CPI (Maoist) and its area of control. The significance of this specificity is wholly missing from the statement you endorsed.

The identification of CPI (Maoist) with the entire resistance movement suits CPI (Maoist) as well. Its Supreme Commander recently declared from his hideout from a guerrilla-controlled area: ‘People, who are the makers of history, will rise up like a tornado under “our party’s leadership” to wipe out the reactionary blood-sucking vampires ruling our country … our party’s influence has grown stronger and “it” has now come to be recognised as the only genuine alternative before the people.’ (Open magazine). We will evaluate the factual content of this declaration below.

For now, it is interesting to note the character of the propaganda: somehow the propagandist interests of CPI (Maoist), the state, and the corporate media suitably converge. The Supreme Commander’s claim is grimly endorsed by the prime and the home ministers of India; according to them, the ‘naxalite menace’ is the greatest threat to internal security. It is also endorsed by the corporate media: the ‘menace’ is said to have spread in 15 of about 25 states, and in 180 of about 500 districts of the country—the numbers accelerating each month to encourage the prospect of a ‘civil war’ soon across the country. The Central government frequently convenes high-profile meetings of chief ministers, secretaries, and police chiefs of the country to meet the challenges posed by the menace. Cutting-edge special forces, carved out of the paramilitary forces, are being constructed and deployed in ‘naxal-infested’ areas. In recent months, even the army and the air force are beginning to enter into the picture. Naxalite actions—widespread arson, mass killings, and the ability to take on the security forces—are prominently reported in the corporate media with ill-concealed awe. This strand of the naxalite movement never had it so big in its close to 40 years of existence in hideouts in remote jungles.

As for the factual content of this dramatic story, I will briefly record some facts that do not find a place in the three-pronged propaganda.

- CPI (Maoist) is a comparatively new organisation formed in 2004 when two naxalite factions Maoist Coordination Committee (MCC) and People’s War Group (PWG)—located primarily in some tribal-inhabited jungle areas in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh respectively—decided to join hands after fighting a bloody war for area-control among themselves for close to two decades. By 2006, CPI (Maoist) was almost completely wiped out from Andhra after their presence there for close to forty years. They also lost major areas in Bihar. The organisation has basically shifted to two of the most backward, tiny, and newly-formed states of Jharkhand and Chatthisgarh. As noted, even there, their presence is basically centered in the areas of dense forest and adjacent tribal-dominated villages, especially in the Bastar district. Ostensibly, as the jungles extend from their headquarters, they have also developed some hideouts and some armed squads to create enough violence to mark their ‘presence’ in West Bengal, Orissa, and elsewhere. To sum, they have essentially failed to emerge out of portions of jungles of eastern India after over four decades of campaign for this particular strand of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Maoism’.

- The organisation has no presence whatsoever in the vast agrarian and industrial terrains of the rest of the country. It has no trade union, no peasant organisation worth its name, no penetration in the dalit, youth, and women’s movements. But it seems to have captured the imagination of sections of elite, urban, and ‘radical’ intelligentsia in Calcutta and Delhi who have impressive connections with some Indian intellectuals settled in universities abroad, as the statement you endorsed highlights (earlier, this intellectual support used to come from Bombay and Hyderabad). The phenomenon is historically familiar.

- ‘The only genuine alternative before the people’ is viewed as a terrorist organisation by none other than Kanu Sanyal and many other active maoists, not to speak of broad spectrums of left parties and organisations most of whom do not find a representation in the statement. The basic reason why Sanyal calls CPI (Maoist) ‘terrorists’ is as follows.

Ever since its inception in 1969, this brand of maoism rejected all classical forms of mass struggle and adopted the sinister doctrine of individual annihilation of ‘class enemies’. ‘Class enemies’ typically consisted of hapless, poorly armed police constables, petty landlords and traders, and an assorted category of ‘informers and traitors’. Most notably, the category of ‘class enemies’ also included grass-root cadres—not their leaders—of the parliamentary left. In the states of West Bengal and Andhra, where this campaign originated, the parliamentary left was typically the only organisation present at the grass root. The annihilation of these ‘class enemies’—typically, middle peasants, school teachers, party wholetimers, etc—effectively meant capturing of areas, by means of guns and knives, already under the left. To that end, the squads first targetted their own maoist fraternity who refused to subscribe to their murderous politics. After the ‘renegades’ were silenced, the next target was cadres of CPI(M), CPI, etc.

This ‘red terror’ basically led to the dismantling of democratic movements in the erstwhile red bastions. In West Bengal, a neo-fascist regime of the Congress Party won the elections handsomely and watched the mutual killings of the left with glee. Once the task was accomplished, the government turned on the maoists and the remaining left and white terror ruled West Bengal for five years. During the nightmare, all forms of democratic movements virtually disappeared from the state as lumpen youth accompanied by paramilitary forces roamed the streets.

In time, almost all of the initiators of this campaign realised their grave mistakes and those who survived encounters, long imprisonment, and psychological collapse, returned to classical mass lines in a variety of forms, including participation in the elections. However, a fragment continued the murderous politics in the jungles of Andhra and Bihar in the form of two organisations MCC and PWG, later unifying into CPI (Maoist), as noted.

Two recent—and contrasting—events in the neighbourhood throw significant light on the consequences of this brand of politics. In Sri Lanka, a vast freedom movement of Tamil nationalism arose about three decades ago. As the movement became progressively militant, it gave rise to a formidable militarist organisation: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). LTTE declared armed struggle, systematically eliminated all other groups advocating Tamil liberation, took to the jungles, and launched a civil war.

There were several rounds of ‘negotiations’ between the government and the LTTE, often with international effort. LTTE refused to give up arms and join the democratic process; thus, it used each pause in the hostilities to consolidate its forces. After over twenty years of bloody war with Sri Lankan security forces, resulting in incalculable suffering of Tamil people, the LTTE was recently wiped out from Sri Lanka. The calamity facilitated the emergence of a neo-fascist regime in Colombo; it also left behind nearly a million hapless Tamil refugees at the mercy of this government. With all moderate forces from both the sides eliminated from the scene, the Tamil freedom movement is now faced with a historical setback after over hundred thousand deaths.

The Supreme Commander (cited above), whose organisation was trained in guerrilla warfare by former commandos of LTTE, agrees with the consequences: ‘There is no doubt that the movement for a separate sovereign Tamil Eelam has suffered a severe setback with the defeat and considerable decimation of the LTTE. The Tamil people and the national liberation forces are now leaderless.’ But he puts the blame elsewhere: ‘The jingoistic rallies and celebrations organised by the government and Sinhala chauvinist parties all over Sri Lanka in the wake of Prabhakaran’s death and the defeat of the LTTE show the national hatred for Tamils nurtured by Sinhala organisations and the extent to which the minds of ordinary Sinhalese are poisoned with such chauvinist frenzy.’ Nonetheless, he hopes that ‘the ground remains fertile for the resurgence of the Tamil liberation struggle. Even if it takes time, the war for a separate Tamil Eelam is certain to revive, taking lessons from the defeat of the LTTE.’ Although he is prepared to learn—perhaps, tactical—‘lessons’, he does not seem to have any problems with the militarist, sectarian, and exclusivist politics of the LTTE.

In sharp contrast, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN(M)) also launched a civil war against a ruthless feudal monarchy protected by the Royal Nepalese Army after all democratic methods failed. The war lasted nearly a decade with the CPN(M)-directed People’s Liberation Army dominating vast terrains of the country with massive popular support. The basic point to note is that what CPN(M) strove for during the armed struggle—republic, constituent assembly, supremacy of the parliament created by universal franchise, etc.—India already has. Once that was achieved in Nepal, a genuine armed struggle—far far superior than anything Indian ‘maoists’ have ever envisaged—was immediately brought to a halt. CPN (M) proved its point by winning over 40% of the seats in the interim parliament after the republic was established. With this mandate in hand, innovative, peaceful but militant processes were then adopted to broaden the democratic base even in a context in which the possibility of a counter-revolution orchestrated by the ousted monarch, the army and the ruling elites of India loomed large.

The current impasse in Nepal is about the supremacy of the parliament over the army. As the leader of CPN(M) Prachanda points out, the democratic movement is at a crossroads due to this seminal conflict. Indian republicanism addressed and solved that problem 60 years ago.

During the war, PWG—followed by CPI (Maoist)—maintained close contact  with CPN(M). But after the CPN(M) joined—in fact, established—the democratic process in Nepal, the CPI (Maoist) does not find any lessons to be learned. This time the blame is on CPN(M). As the Supreme Commander puts it: ‘It is indeed a great tragedy that the CPN(M) has chosen to abandon the path of protracted people’s war and pursue a parliamentary path in spite of having de facto power in most of the countryside.’ In a letter to CPN(M), CPI (Maoist) ‘advised’ the former not to give up armed struggle until the ‘old order’ is smashed and the CPN (M) is able to seize power all by itself to usher in ‘new democratic revolution’. However, the Supreme Commander remains optimistic since ‘given the great revolutionary traditions of the CPN(M), we hope that the inner-party struggle will repudiate the right opportunist line pursued by its leadership, give up revisionist stands and practices, and apply minds creatively to the concrete conditions of Nepal.’ So, the statesman-like leadership of Prachanda is ‘revisionist’.

Beyond the bluster, it is not difficult to discern that, no matter what, the CPI (Maoist) is not prepared to give up its fatal policies. They are not open to any debates, no one can enter their ‘liberated zones’ without unconditional support to their line. Like Prabhakaran and his LTTE, having meticulously secured hideouts for themselves in ‘impregnable’ dense forests protected by squads armed with sophisticated weapons, they are prepared to carry on ‘protracted war’ for many years before their inevitable decimation. In the process, not only will the tribals under their control suffer immensely, it will give the growingly authoritarian state a golden opportunity to smash whatever avenues of hard-won democratic resistance still remain in place.

As noted, the CPI (Maoist) has exactly two channels of ‘popular’ support: the tribals they control and a section of ‘radical’, urban intelligentsia. It is the support of the latter that gives the CPI (Maoist) significant propaganda mileage and a false impression of invincibility and popular support. By posing the current military preparations of the state only as a state vs. people conflict, the statement you endorsed effectively exonerates the CPI (Maoist) and plays into their hands.

Sincerely

Nirmalangshu Mukherji
Department of Philosopy
University of Delhi

राजकीय हिंसा  के अन्यायपूर्ण होने को लेकर जिनके मन में कोई  शंका नहीं है, वे माओवादी या ‘जनता’की हिंसा के प्रश्न पर हिचकिचा जाते हैं.ऐसा इसलिए नहीं होता कि वे बेईमान हैं, बल्कि इस वजह से कि हिंसा को वैध राजनीतिक तरीका मानने को लेकर  चली आ रही बहस अभी ख़त्म नहीं हुई है. यह अलग बात है कि भगत सिंह जैसे बौद्धिक क्रांतिकारी पिछली सदी के पूर्वार्ध में ही यह समझ गए थे  कि  जन आंदोलनों  का कोई  विकल्प नहीं है. जनता की गोलबंदी,न कि हथियारबंद दस्तों के ज़रिये गुर्रिल्ला युद्ध,यह समझ भगत सिंह की बन रही थी.क्रांतिकारी कार्यक्रम का मसौदा में उन्होंने लिखा, “बम का रास्ता १९०५ से चला आ रहा है और क्रान्तिकारी भारत पर यह एक दर्दनाक टिप्पणी है….आतंकवाद हमारे समाज में क्रांतिकारी चिंतन के पकड़ के अभाव की अभिव्यक्ति है या एक पछतावा.इसी तरह यह अपनी असफलता का स्वीकार भी है. शुरू-शुरू में इसका कुछ लाभ था.इसने राजनीति को आमूल बदल दिया. नवयुवक बुद्धिजीवियों की सोच को चमकाया,आत्मत्याग की भावना को ज्वलंत रूप दिया और दुनिया व अपने दुश्मनों के सामने अपने आन्दोलन की सच्चाई को ज़ाहिर करने का अवसर मिला. लेकिन यह स्वयं में पर्याप्त नहीं है. सभी देशों में इसका इतिहास असफलता का इतिहास है…. . इसकी पराजय के बीज  इसके भीतर ही हैं.” इस उद्धरण से यह न समझ लिया जाए कि  भगत सिंह ने इस रास्ते से अपने आप को एकदम काट लिया था,पर यह साफ़ है कि वे बड़ी शिद्दत से यह महसूस करने लगे थे कि बिना सामूहिक कार्रवाई के  सफलता प्राप्त करना संभव नहीं.भगत सिंह के ये वाक्य मानीखेज और दिलचस्प है:”विशेषतः निराशा के समय आतंकवादी तरीका हमारे प्रचार-प्रसार में सहायक हो सकता है,लेकिन यह पटाखेबाजी के सिवाय कुछ है नहीं.”वे स्पष्टता से लिखते है, “क्रांतिकारी को निरर्थक आतंकवादी कार्रवाईयो और व्यतिगत आत्मबलिदान के दूषित चक्र में न डाला जाए. सभी के लिए उत्साहवर्द्धक आदर्श,उद्देश्य के लिए जीना -और वह भी लाभदायक तरीके से योग्य रूप में जीना – होना चाहिए.”
गांधी को कभी क्रांतिकारी नहीं कहा जाता, हालांकि राजनीतिक रूप से प्रतिरोध का एक बिलकुल नया  और लोकतांत्रिक तरीका उन्होंने ही सुझाया.जो क्रांतिकारी माने जाते है, वे तो हथियारों पर भरोसे की जमाने से चली आ रही समझ की लीक पर ही चलते रहे थे और राजनीतिक चिंतन में, विशेषकर संगठन को लेकर उन्होंने कोई नया नुक्ता  मानव चिंतन में नहीं जोड़ा. भगत सिंह गांधी को ध्यान से समझने की कोशिश कर रहे थे और उनसे अनेक असहमतियों के बावजूद यह कहने को तैयार थे कि चूंकि गांधीवाद सामूहिक कारवाई पर निभर है, वह क्रांतिकारी विचार के कुछ नजदीक पहुँचने का यत्न करता है.
भगत सिंह स्वेच्छा से एक ‘आतंकवादी’ कार्रवाई में भाग लेकर उसकी जिम्मेदारी लेने के साहस के चलते ही पकड़े गए और उसके बाद फांसी का इंतजार जेल में करते  हुए सोचते और लिखते  रहे. वे यह जानते थे कि इन विचारों के कारण गलतफहमी हो सकती है, “इस विषय पर मेरे विचारों को गलत रंग  देने की बहुत अधिक सम्भावना है. ऊपरी तौर पर मैने एक आतंकवादी की तरह काम किया है. लेकिन मैं  आतंकवादी नहीं हूं.मैं एक क्रांतिकारी हूं, जिसके दीर्घ्कालीन कार्यक्रम सम्बन्धी ठोस व विशिष्ट विचार हैं… .. ‘शस्त्रों के साथी’ मेरे  कुछ साथी मुझे रामप्रसाद बिस्मिल की तरह   इस बात के लिए दोषी ठहराएंगे कि फांसी की कोठरी में रह कर मेरे भीतर कुछ प्रतिक्रिया पैदा हुई है.”

हथियारबन्द गतिविधि या हिंसा ऊपर से कठिन प्रतीत होती है लेकिन भगत सिंह को यह पता था कि इसका रिश्ता भावुकता और उत्तेजना से ज़्यादा है. जनता की गोलबन्दी एक बिल्कुल अलग मसला है, “यदि आप सोचते हैं कि किसानों और मजदूरों को सक्रिय हिस्सेदारी के लिए आप मना लेंगे तो मैं बताना चाहता हूं वे किसी प्रकार की भावुक बातों से वे बेवकूफ नहीं बनाए जा सकते.वे साफ- साफ पूछेंगे कि आपकी क्रांति से क्या लाभ होगा? वह क्रांति जिसके लिए आप उनसे बलिदान की मांग कर रहे हैं.”

हाथियारों के सहारे के बिना जनता के हित सवाल पर उसी की गोलबन्दी काफी कठिन काम है और वह लम्बा और नीरस रास्ता है. यह “तेज़, भडकीला काम” नहीं, इसके लिए परिपक्वता और धीरज की आवश्यकता है, जैसा भगत सिंह ने इसी दस्तावेज में आगे लिखा.

हिंसा में यकीन रखने वाले दल क्या यह कहना चाहेंगे कि आदिवासियों को जंगल की उनकी ज़मीन पर हक़ दिलाने का कानून हिंसक संघर्ष के रास्ते हासिल किया गया? अधूरा ही सही, पर बच्चों की तालीम का हक़ भी क्या इसी रास्ते , या इसके भय से राज्य ने देना स्वीकार किया? सूचना का अधिकार किस हिंसक संघर्ष से प्राप्त किया गया? आज से बीस साल पहले औरतें जिस हाल में थीं, उससे बहुत कुछ आज़ाद होकर वे अगर सर उठा कर अपनी शहरियत और व्यक्तिमत्ता का दावा पेश ही नहीं करतीं, बल्कि उसे ठोस रूप में मह्सूस और इस्तेमाल भी करती हैं तो यह किसी भूमिगत, हिंसक कार्रवाई से नहीं हासिल किया गया. ये बडे दीर्घकालीन संघर्ष रहे हैं और इनमें भी कुरबानियां दी गई हैं. यह कोई नहीं कहना चाहता कि भारत में जनता के हितों को सबके ऊपर प्राथमिकता देने वाला शासन है. यह एक अधूरा लोकतंत्र  है  लेकिन मानवता का  इतिहास किसी भी पूर्ण  लोकतांत्रिक व्यवस्था का उदाहरण प्रस्तुत नहीं करता. लोकतंत्र का दायरा धीरे-धीरे ही बढाया जा सकता है. जनता के हित जनता की कीमत पर हसिल नहीं किए जा सकते.  आज जीयी जा रही ज़िंदगी, भले ही वह लड्खडाती हुई क्यों न हो, इसलिए कुर्बान नहीं की जा सकती कि कल एक पूर्णतर जीवन का वादा साकार होने वाला है. जिन समाजों ने “पूर्णतम” के वादे पर अपना आज निछावर कर दिया, उन्हें बड़ी भयानक अनुभव झेलने पडे और उन अनुभवों की वजह से समानता के पूरा विचार ही खतरे में पड गया. ऐसा लगने लगा मानो मानव समाज उसके काबिल ही नहीं.

सवाल सिर्फ माओवादी हिंसा का नहीं. जो मार्क्सवादी दल उन्हें हिंसा का रास्ता छोड्ने को कह रहा है, उसने साल भी नहीं बीता है, खुद इसे एक जायज़ राजनीतिक अस्त्र बताया था. जो राष्ट्रीय स्वयंसेवक संघ इसे घातक मानता है, वह अपना वार्षिक उत्सव हथियारों की पूजा करके ही मना पाता है. भगत सिंह के शब्दों में जो ‘शस्त्रों के साथी’ हैं वे अगर बर्तोल्त ब्रेख्त को याद करें और दुनिया की सबसे ताकतवर चीज़,यानी इंसानी दिमाग पर भरोसा करें तो शायद वे एक अधिक लोकतांत्रिक दुनिया की ओर बढ्ने में हमारी मदद  करेंगे , जो यह तय है , किसी बडे धमाके के गर्भ सी नहीं पैदा होगी.

A sense of irony is the only way for me to describe how I felt when I heard about Balagopal’s death. Ordinary people leading ordinary lives die of heart attacks. And despite the simplicity with which he led his life and interacted with people, every time one met Balagopal or heard him you always  knew you were in the presence of someone extraordinary. Whenever he left after any meeting, Balagopal left you a little scared about whether you would ever see him again. As a result of the position that he took- against the violence of the state as well as the violence of the Maoists, you were always left with the lurching fear that any point of time, you would be given the news that Balagopal had been killed in an encounter.

At the same time it is perhaps not surprising that despite living a life which was scripted towards a violent death, it was only appropriate that his death transcended any partisan act of violence. Film maker Deepa Dhanraj captures the essence of Balagopal when she describes him as a ‘moral force’ whose authority emerged from the integrity with which he led his life and the courage with which he stood by his belief. If Balagopal was a regular anti violent activist or a pacifist, then there would have been nothing surprising about his stance on violence, and to argue for the importance of non violence would hardly be an act of courage. But for someone who had spent a better part of his life in struggles, and in battles against the impunity of the state, the commitment to an ethical position on violence becomes a deeply ethical choice of bravery.

In an ironic way Balagaopal could be seen as a true inheritor of the Gandhian legacy, of leading a particular kind of life, and through such a life aspiring to change the world around you. In an interview with Janam Saxi, Balagopal once stated  “The Indian constitution has had a habit, right from its inception, to destroy democratic values completely in practice without any recourse to laws. This has grown very much recently. The apparatus of the police is the chief machinery for this destruction. The duty to safeguard democratic values from these limitations is a very important duty……. While performing this duty it is of no use to as the question in this form: is there or is there not at least a bourgeoisie type of democracy”. I can think of very few who followed this duty with the same kind of clarity, conviction and humility as Balagopal did.

The first time that  I met and heard Balagopal was in a workshop organized by PUCL in Chennai. I was a young student, and like many young students, whether of the revolutionary or the conservative variety, my main attribute was a nonchalant cynicism. Curiously Balagopal began by speaking of his initial love for mathematics. He did his bachelors, his masters a Phd and even a post doctorate in mathematics, and spoke with immense fondness of his obsession with abstraction. He then moved on to his encounter with various peoples movements and struggles, and his descent from the world of pure abstraction to the very material world of injustice and violence. For those who have heard Balagopal speak and have been amazed by his clarity of thought and analysis, you cannot help but think of how his love for mathematical precision clearly survived in a very different form.

It was one of those moments when you felt you just had to drop everything and follow this man. In a world where the epithet of hero is just too generously used, I can safely say ‘Balagopal you were a hero in the truest sense of the word to many of us’.

And at the same time I cannot help but feel that perhaps this descent from the heights of abstraction to the very ordinary and fragile business of activism is also what marked Balagopal as different from most activists. An abstract transcendental idea of rights was certainly not something for Balagopal, and yet he did not allow himself to be so immersed in the reality of struggles so as to forget any kind of moral claim that may be made of a movement. In an article on moving the debate beyond the terms set by the binaries of violence- non violence Balagopal argued that “To say that one should not be dogmatic about violence may be morally a little unsettling but it is a defensible position even without adopting a relativistic attitude towards the preciousness of life or a casual attitude towards one’s moral responsibility for injury caused in the course of a struggle”.

There will be a lot of time for us to think about ways in which we learn from his life and work, but for the moment let us spend sometime remembering the man who would be found standing outside a meeting venue selling books and pamphlets before he proceeded to go to the podium to make the most insightful speech you were likely to hear. Let us remember the man who when told that finally Justice Pasayat had retired, remarked that it was unfortunate that his decisions would not be retiring with him, and let us remember him most importantly in the days to come when violence and non violence will be offered to us again to choose, as though it were a real choice. Goodbye Balagopal, we will miss you immensely but thank you for giving us the freedom to not have to make false choices.

These are happy days in which everyone in Kerala wants too settle the land dispute at Chengara. A happy consensus between the Left and the Right seems to be growing there, after the Congress leader of the Opposition, Oommen Chandy, decided to take on Godfathership of the land struggle. The very language of the struggle had changed – interestingly, from ‘we are landless squatters’ to ‘we are settlers’! Now, it is well-known in Kerala that these terms have had different sorts of political associations – ‘squatter’ with the Left, and ‘settler’ with (largely) the Right. Indeed, this was inevitable perhaps, given the fact that the New Left didn’t look very keen on ‘squatters’. However, it is clear that neither dalit or tribal organisations are going to be part of the negotiations towards the final package –today’s newspapers report that prominent tribal and dalit leaders have protested against the state’s reluctance to negotiate with them. It would be very convenient for both the Left and the Right to delegitimize – indeed criminalize – tribal and dalit organizations. And what luck that precisely that boon has been granted to them by the sudden eruption of a ‘lower-caste terrorist group’ (according to the police), the ‘Dalit Human Rights Movement’!

Strange indeed, that the police should discover this outfit now, which, if we are to believe the police accounts and the dominant media, has been engaged in nefarious, criminal and secretive activity for quite some time. The DHRM burst upon us last week, through a bizarre crime that has given the dominant sections of the Malayali media an opportunity to indulge in a no-holds-barred spree of dalit-bashing. On 26 September two gruesome acts of violence were committed in a town near Thiruvananthapuram – an elderly morning-walker was murdered by assailants on a motorbike; the same gang hacked down the keeper of a roadside teashop. According to the police, which is still the media’s sole source of information, the assailants had no personal scores to settle against the persons they had attacked. The police claim that these were acts of ‘lower-caste terror’, committed by members of an organization called the Dalit Human Rights Movement or the ‘Black Shirts’. The police account claims that the DHRM has been engaged in ‘secret brainwashing’ of dalit people’s living in the misery and squalor of dalit colonies in Kerala. The dominant media is now busy unearthing the many evils of the DHRM. It is no surprise that the average upwardly- mobile middle-class consumer-citizen in Kerala whose faith in ‘India Shining’ remains unsullied even today, is gleefully exclaiming, “I  knew it!”. The Dalits did never deserve state protection; they were always criminal under the skin.

Mind you, dalit organisations in Kerala which have been actively contesting the state in democratic  fora have been taken entirely by surprise. Many of us who have been close to dalit and tribal activists of the recent land struggles in Kerala were hearing of this outfit for the first time. I’ve seen the DHRM  once holding a ritualized protest on a day of nationalistic ritual — the Indepence Day or Republic Day, I don’t remember which. From this, it looked like a dubious NGO out to dupe gullible folk. We did not see the DHRM in any of the political , public confrontations between the dalit and tribal organisations and the state which have been quite frequent in the past few years. None of us were ever contacted or invited to any of their events. Therefore I suppose we could be excused for our ignorance of the DHRM, which looked too similar to the many dubious NGOs which have been sprouting in Kerala in these times, like poisonous weeds in untimely rain. But how can the police be excused? After all, all protestors are expected to secure prior permission from the authorities – did the police never investigate any of the links of the DHRM (which has indeed been conducting public protests) when it applied for police permission? The police’s apparent innocence about the DHRM until the day of the murder reveals either their utter incompetence, or deeper, murkier motives.

But worse things appear to be in the offing – some of the  fears voiced by dalit young men in 2004, in the wake of a controversy ignited by the suicide of a young dalit woman student, seem to be coming true. In 2004, Rajani S. Anand committed suicide because the authorities refused to support her educational expenses. She took this step when it appeared that she was trapped in a labyrinth of no escape. She had no way of meeting basic expenses; further, she needed a tidy sum to avail of private tuitions to pass exams. Her marks turned out to be quite low because she could not afford such coaching. This became an excuse for banks to refuse her an educational loan. When the humiliation became unbearable, Rajani took her own life. It created a furore. But the authorities went to such an extent that the deceased Rajani had to prove her outlier status in another way: it seems that a virginity test was demanded of her body.The state’s response to Rajani’s death thus brought to view the easiest way, at present, to deny welfare to dalit women: by ‘proving’ them to be ‘prostitutes’. Many young dalit men I spoke with at that time told me that they suffered such threats, which, however, were suitably gendered. They related their experience of being constantly marked as criminals – and that was a way of denying them citizenship and welfare.

It seems that these men’s fears weren’t unfounded.Yesterday,the Mathrubhumi reported a murder in Chengannur, which was blithely attributed to the Kerala Dalit Panthers! Now, the KDP is certainly not the DHRM! The KDP condemned this slur, but one fears it may be only the beginning. In fact, it is difficult not to be suspicious of the dominant media’s attitude (if you don’t belong to the ‘India Shining’ consumerist-middle class in Kerala which has apparently never heard of something like an unbowed and independent press, and instead reposes faith in police accounts or in equally ignorant Gen-next blog stories) – after all, the ‘independent press’ which was so eager to plunge into ‘investigative reporting’ on the Paul Muthoot murder case seems to be totally happy with police accounts of the Varkala murder!

The DHRM may have had a role in the violence at Varkala; and Iam not saying that a ‘lower-caste dalit terrorism’ is an impossibility. If the DHRM is indeed as apolitical, anti-democratic, opaque, and violent as it appears to be in the recent newsreports,  then it has nothing in common with the tribal and dalit organizations in Kerala, which have been engaged in political struggle, and we would openly condemn it. But still, how come the police and the intelligence did not have a clue of its venom till today? How come it was allowed to hold so many public protests — when leaders of C.K. Janu’s stature were beaten mercilessly and dragged into jail after the Muthanga incident? How come the alleged and apparently unprovoked violence breaks out just when the Left and Right are moving fast to settle the land struggle with no intention of consulting the very organisations that repoliticised the issue of tribal and dalit landlessness in Kerala? Whatever our consumer-citizen-new elite-comrade/congressman feels, the entire discussion on the Varkala murder in Kerala looks like a  bad idea — a badly-crafted plot in a cheap Malayalam movie, in which ’social wisdom’ about the behaviour of particular castes, ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ gender etc. give away the suspense from the very first scene.

Last night I heard a public conversation between the Marxist Geographer David Harvey and Alexander Cockburn the editor of CounterPunch and columnist with The Nation.  The conversation titled, ‘The End or Future of Capitalism’ was hosted by The Center for Place, Culture & Politics.  Cockburn opened the conversation by speaking about the lack of vision in the Left.  Harvey argued that the capitalist system was facing tremendous stress and that a different path of economic development had to be envisioned.  Harvey continued on the end of capitalism as one needing analysis in terms of how this crisis arose with the problem of accumulation and realization of surplus, and poses the question of what is to be done?  Central to Harvey’s argument is that the mounting stress seen at the centre of the capitalist system in the last three decades is the culmination of the inability to sustain the two and a half percent compounded accumulation that has been a characteristic of global capital over the last couple hundred years.  That the capitalist system is unable to find productive investments for the two and a half percent accumulation rate leading to repetitious and aggravating crises in the unproductive bubbles in financial assets.

I stood in line when the floor was open, but much to my disappointment the moderator had brought the conversation to an end before I could ask my question, and so I am going to ask it here.  Both Harvey and Cockburn talked about the urgency of the moment and the need for provocative questions from the Left.  But what is the more urgent question to ask at this moment?  Is it the end or future of capitalism? Or is it the end or future of the American Empire?  The two may well be related and even two sides of the same coin, but the question for me is influenced by the urgency of the situation in our region; the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The relatedness of the two questions also leads me to ask what would be the consequence of the tremendous stress at the centre of the capitalist system on the wars fought at the periphery of Empire?  And in turn, what is the impact of the tremendous stress of the wars on the periphery for the hegemonic centre of the capitalist system?

Harvey mentioned the lunacy of the financial bailout package of $700 billion that was pushed through with a three page proposal by Treasury Secretary Paulson last year and approved with little questioning by much of Congress and for that matter by Obama.  Harvey characterized it as a financial coup by Wall Street, evident of the relationship between class power and state power in the US.  And as I thought of my question about the American empire, there is an eerie similarity with the lunacy of the decision on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the massive destruction and massacre of the hundreds of the thousands.  The Congressional Research Service puts the financial cost as follows: “Congress has approved a total of about $864 billion for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the three operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) Afghanistan and other counter terror operations; Operation Noble Eagle (ONE), providing enhanced security at military bases; and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).”

What seems to be the madness of such decisions whether they be in relation to finance capital or the military establishment, ultimately relate to state power in the US.  An interesting article in the Nation recently talks about the increasing militarization of US foreign policy and development aid.  If Wall Street has set the destructive course for capitalism the Pentagon is competing to chart the corresponding course for Empire.

The urgency of the daily deaths and destruction in the escalation of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will see another discussion titled ‘Ending Obama’s War’ initiated by the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) which I am a member of and co-hosted by The Centre for Place Culture and Politics at the very same auditorium of last night’s public conversation.  ‘Ending Obama’s War’ will be held on Oct 7th, the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.  Some may question the characterization of ‘Obama’s War’ and for them I would point to Obama’s policy statement on March 27th.

Code Pink has put out a video on Barbara Lee, the only voice to oppose the vote in both chambers of Congress (98-0 and 420-1) on authorization for use of military force in Afghanistan in September 2001.  Not only is this symptomatic of the fragility of dissent in the US, it is reflective of the depth of the Bush Regime’s “war on terror” which will outlast the of end Obama’s war, unless there is a rethinking in the United States with perhaps a reversal of the votes in Congress, where only one vote is against ending the use of military force in Afghanistan!

Harvey in his talk dismissed the rhetoric of “re-regulation” and the need to think of abolishing the financial practices and the derivative markets that have aggravated the global financial crisis.  There might be a parallel to the war discourse in the US today, which is in the realm of re-calibrating military operations, about increasing or decreasing troops and not about abolishing war.  There are increasing calls from the Left in the US for full withdrawal from Afghanistan and to allow regional diplomacy to address the situation, but as to whether the American Leviathan or the Pentagon will allow that as much as Wall Street will accept abolishing finance capital’s ponzi schemes pose a fundamental challenge to the people of the United States.  And indeed, the possibilities of regional diplomacy as an alternative to the wars and militarisation in South Asia are also contingent on the problems that emerge out of improving US-India relations.

Code Pink replays Barbara Lee’s intervention in the courageous No vote: “as we act let us not become the evil that we deplore”.  And at home in Sri Lanka, where the recent discourse has been about the victory in the local “war on terror”, that has indeed become the case where the “terror” that was deplored, seems to have been taken over from the Tigers to become the motivating theme of the Rajapaksa Regime.  And this weekend as Lankan dissenters remember the political activist Rajani Thiranagama slain twenty years ago by the LTTE, Nandita Haksar is to speak on ‘Resistance and the Politics of Fear’.  All this to say, that as we oppose Empire, we must also oppose the repressive politics of local states and reactionary non-state forces.  That would be a return to the people-centred politics in solidarity with the peoples in Empire’s periphery ravaged by the manoeuvrings of the financial and military establishments at the centre of Empire.

“What a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law? . . . Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?”- Karl Marx, 1853

The letter sent by an undertrial Mukesh Kumar, as present lodged in Karnal Jail (Haryana) through his counsel to the Chief Justice of India makes depressing reading. The letter talks about the manner in which he was brutalised by the Jail staff for disobeying their orders. It is learnt that the Jail wardens compelled him to clean the toilets calling him names and ‘reminding’ him of his ‘caste profession’. His refusal to continue the dehumanising work led to his public thrashing and tonsuring/shaving of his head and moustache.

According to the administration, Mukesh Kumar is one of those persons who were arrested from different parts of Haryana from April to June 2009 as part of the state campaign ‘to curb Maoist activity’.

Of course, any close watcher of the human rights situation in the state would tell you that it is not for the first time that jail officials in Haryana were engaged in targetting particular section of undertrials/detainees. Three years back Gohana, a place around 50 kms of Delhi had witnessed burning of dalit houses with the police turning a mute spectator supposedly to avenge the death of a Jat youth. Few dalit youths who were arrested for the death of the Jat youth were similarly brutalised by the jail staff.

It is beyond any sane person’s comprehension that when the matter is pending before the court itself, which is deliberating on it, then what is the rationale behind the extra enthusiasm shown by the jail staff. It would be height of innocence to say that jail officials are ignorant about the human rights of prisoners/detainees/undertrials. In fact, the impunity with which they operate makes it clear that they know the wide chasm which exists between precepts and practice.

It has been more than three decades that the Supreme Court has given its verdict on it.

Responding to two separate writ petitions filed namely by Sunil Batra and Charles Sobharaj, two prisoners in Delhi’s Tihar jail, the highest court made an intervention to humanize jail conditions. As noted in a writeup ‘Prisoners Rights : Some Landmark Judgements’ the question before the Court was: “Does a prison setting, ipso facto, outlaw the rule of law, lock out the judicial process from the jail gates and declare a long holiday for human rights of con-victs in confinement ? And if there is no total eclipse what luscent segment is open for judicial justice? Sunil Batra, sentenced to death had challenged his incarcera-tion in solitary confinement and Charles Sobhraj had challenged his confinement with bar-fetters.

The Supreme Court held that there is no total deprivation of a prisoner’s rights of life and liberty. The “safe keeping” in jail custody is the limited juris-diction of the jailer. “To desort safe-keeping into a hidden opportunity to care the ward and to traumatize him is to betray the custodian of law, safe custody does not mean deprivations, violation, banishment from the lanter barguet of prison life and infliction’s of travails as if guardianship were best fulfilled by making the ward suffer near insanity.”

Despite clearcut instructions from the Supreme Court, one discovers that brutalisation and dehumanisation of inmates at the hands of Jail officials, is not an exception but the rule.

It was only in March 2009 that Gujarat high court ordered the Session Judge to visit Sabarmati jail and asked him to contact the detainees/prisoners lodged there. Responding to a petition filed by Jan Sangharsh Manch about the alleged atrocities committed by the jail staff on the inmates- most of whom were Muslims – it also issued notices to Inspector General of Police (Jails) and V. Chandrasekhar, Jail Supdt of Sabarmati Central Jail (Indian Express, 28 th March 2009) In fact, tension between the inmates and the jail staff flared up when one of the prisoners Yunus Sareswala was not allowed to meet his ailing mother. In the melee that ensued, twenty two prisoners were badly beaten up by the jail staff(25 th March 2009).As noted in a fact finding report of human rights activists which met with prison officials as well as detainees and their relatives, “…[I]nmates, most of them Muslim, who were on a hunger strike, were denied medical attention after a brutal attack on them by jail staff, which left at least three of them unconscious for so long as to start rumours in the city that they had died. They were subsequently denied access to counsel, their relatives were refused permission to meet them for three days, and then the Sabarmati Police station failed to register an FIR as sought by relatives and counsel of the victims.

A question naturally arises why one notices quantum jump in cases of custodial human rights violations despite all talk of humanising jail conditions. One should see it as a product of faulty government policies and lack of transparency observed by the powers that be. Much on the lines of United States of America, our government also shies away from accountability in all such matters. Figures collated at National Human Rights Commission confirm this trend. As of now complaints which have reached its offices have already surpassed a figure of 70,000. While fourty percent of the complaints focusses themselves on the police, violations of human rights inside jail comes second.

Of course, there are moments when jail officials are held accountable for their acts of omission and commission.In an important writeup ‘Walls Not A Prison Make’ Editor at large of ‘Tehelka’ Mr Ajit Sahi provides details of a case where ‘Terror accused dare to take on their brutal jailers – and win’ (Vol 6, Issue 35, Dated September 05, 2009).

The said story discusses the brutal assault on Sohail and 26 other inmates in the prison on June 28, 2008 when the jail staff rained “…[b]lows, belts, bamboo sticks and stones on them, smashing their heads, breaking their bones and spilling blood.” Accused of participating in terror attack in Bombay and brought to Mumbai’s Central Prison in 2006, Sohail and his fellow accused were quickly branded traitors not just by the jail staff but also by the “regular” prisoners and faced all-round hatred and contempt. To cover up their attack, jail authorities claimed that the prisoners had rioted unprovoked shouting Pakistan Zindabad, Hindustan Murdabad [Long live Pakistan, Down with India] and attacked the jail staff.

Undeterred by the ongoing brutalisation Sohail with the help of his son Saeed filed a case against the jail authorities despite the odds and actually won a favourable ruling. As noted in the writeup : “The order of Bombay High Court judges Bilal Nazki and AR Joshi, delivered on July 21, 2009, does not just bring justice to Sohail and the others the prison staff brutally attacked. The ruling is historic because it restores the Constitutional rights of tens of thousands of inmates who face indignities and brutalities inside Indian prisons without let or hindrance. It also prescribes criminal prosecution of the jail staff for brutalising the inmates.”

According to the judges: “… We have found [that] force was used against the under trial prisoners for no fault of theirs. Force was used excessively for extraneous reasons and [the] law was also flouted. Even as a formality, the Jail Manual was not followed. We, therefore, direct the Chief Secretary, State of Maharashtra to initiate [a] disciplinary inquiry against all the Officers involved in the incident… If need be, in addition to the departmental inquiry, criminal action be also initiated against the concerned Officers.”

The said judgement unequivocally lays down that the jail authorities have no authority over an inmate’s life: “Once a charge sheet has been filed, nobody has authority over the custody of an under-trial except the court… It has to be remembered that the convicts or the under-trials are human beings and they have to be treated like human beings. The jail authorities who have custody over them have [a] special responsibility to protect their rights and in fact they are their custodian, reformer and counsellor.”

“They cannot assume the role by which they turn into [a] villain. They in fact should command respect from the prisoners and that respect should come as a result of their conduct with prisoners. This is no longer in debate in this country whether or not the prisoners have fundamental rights available to them as this has been decided in [a] number of cases by the Supreme Court.”

It need be noted that the judges also slammed the Jail Superintendent at the Central Prison, Swati Sathe, a female officer who is infamous for her brutalities among inmates.As of now a departmental inquiry has been started against Sathe and there are plans to seek her criminal prosecution once the departmental inquiry is completed.

There have been so many ragging incidents coming out in the news, but the media is done with ragging and there’s no hype beyond the singular news report. It would be a mistake to presume that there’s been a spurt in ragging incidents; the spurt has instead been in the reporting of incidents, in punishment and implementation of the law.

A student in Howrah was subjected to the things mentioned in the headline of this post, but it became a news story when the fresher tried to commit sucide by consuming poison. So the headline in the Times of India goes, “Howrah student attempts suicide after ragging“. A reader flipping through news reports could well think, another loser, another victim, another case. The attention is not on the victimiser, the perpetrator.

On Friday, Nayan was waiting at Uluberia station to catch a train home when four seniors grabbed him and took him to a house in the locality, says his uncle. Once inside, the door was barred and the torture began. Nayan was beaten and forced to smoke a cigarette. Then an unknown drug was forced down his throat. When he lay delirious, his wrists were slashed with a razor. Then, one of the seniors asked another to fetch an empty syringe, the FIR says. As Nayan desperately struggled, he was held down and air injected into his left hand.

Surely, the FIR named the four seniors? Why could they not be named in this news report?

The Times report also misses the point, mentioned in the Telegraph report, that the wrist slashing happened because Nayan Adak refused to obey orders to undress and dance. Ragging always does boil down to the fresher’s body, doesn’t it? The Telegraph and Express reports don’t mention names of the four accused either.

A number of activists from the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) in New York have initiated a reading group on South Asia.  The notes below are the first in a series of commentaries following reading discussions that some members of the reading group hope to post on Kafila.  This is an attempt to broaden the discussions and in the process make it a productive dialogue to understand developments in the region and deepen our solidarity.

Reading Land and Reform in Pakistan

– Svati Shah, Prachi Patankar and Ahilan Kadirgamar

“…any strategy to stem the tide of Taliban-Al Qaida led militancy cannot ignore the issue of land rights…. Any reforms that revalue and formally recognize the local management of common property resources, therefore, will elevate the authority of tribal leaders over religious clerics or TAQ militants.”
Haris Gazdar, ‘The Fourth Round, And Why They Fight On: An Essay on the History of Land and Reform in Pakistan’

Given the escalation of a multifaceted war in Pakistan, and given our own commitment to a peace with justice in South Asia, we have started reading and discussing issues of importance in Pakistan and South Asia more broadly.  This inquiry is informed by the alarming and rapidly changing situation in Pakistan, and by an interest in interrogating the category ‘South Asia’ itself.  While all are agreed that the term ‘South Asia’ is indispensable, we wonder how ‘South Asia’ could be used to describe more than a region or a set of places outlined by shared borders. We wonder how we can move beyond the limitations of finding historical unity in South Asia primarily through the lens of British colonialism?  We wonder how we could describe the political unities and potential solidarities of ‘South Asia’ in this moment?  We find it particularly helpful to approach these questions by seeing common issues in the region relating to labour, land and the role of the state in societies in South Asia.  At the same time, we want to move away from the received notions of South Asia, whether they be the statist conceptions of SAARC, South Asia as seen by the US State Department or, for that matter, as a region defined by area studies.

On this occasion we chose to read and discuss the history of land and reform in Pakistan and found many similarities with other regions of South Asia that we are more familiar.  The reasons why we, who are of Indian and Sri Lankan origin, are more familiar with some of the politics and histories of South Asia than others, and why Pakistan exists in the relative gap in our knowledge, can and must be elaborated.  While the reasons may be fairly straightforward, individual, and experiential, we also know that these parameters do not serve to fully explain the politics of the gap to which we refer, a gap that describes the ways in which South Asian peoples have been systematically been kept apart from one another, as much as we have sequestered ourselves.  In aiming to bridge this gap, we have found similarities of the legacy of colonial land policy between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the changes to the concept of land over time, the failed attempts at land reform by the post-colonial states and the impact of neoliberalism on the transformation of the politics of land.  We are conscious of land in Pakistan and South Asia as much more than a geographical category and see it more importantly as a political category, wherein the politics of land help to elaborate the materialist struggles that South Asian peoples share.  Furthermore, we are aware that land reform or land distribution, or, for that matter, dispossession and resistance, are not just about land and its relationship to agriculture and irrigation.  Land has come to mean much more than agriculture, even as we recognize the continuing importance of land for farmers – the relationship of land to people, capital and the state has different economic and political implications over time and space.

In Pakistan, we find not only the relationship of the land owning political elite, but also the bureaucracy and the military and its relationship to land and its people to be of great importance.  Land, we read, is at the centre of civil-military relations, which has brought about repression in many forms.  Land in Pakistan, as in many other states in South Asia has been at the centre of debates around devolution of power to the regions; it has become central to ethnic mobilizations and conflicts.  We are conscious that the people’s real and perceived relationship to land often influences the ability of different powerful actors, whether it be those aligned with the state or opposed to it in the form armed non-state actors, to mobilize in different ways depending on the social relations that have developed over time in different parts of Pakistan.

In what later became Pakistan, British colonial powers further entrenched an already existing systems of caste and class hierarchies within the society.  The monopoly of the landlords installed during the Mughal rule to collect revenues from the peasants was solidified through British colonization. As the colonial government did throughout the continent, they maintained the elite class of loyal landowners across all the areas of Pakistan, who came to dominate local politics in Pakistan after independence.  Creating this loyal elite landowning class was a necessary step in the politics of securing the colonial empire. After independence, the domination of the same elite landlords continued in the local politics in the years following independence.  We see no real attempts being made today to transform the basic social structures that contributed to the inequality in land policies. In the post-independence moment, colonial land reforms did little for the peasants who actually cultivated the land.

For those of us residing in the US, the imperative to understand the escalation of the war in Pakistan is made more urgent when we realize that reportage of the conflict there is ahistorical, at best, and participates in a banal and dangerous exercise in substituting ethnicity and religion for an explanation of how and why the current situation came to be.  Reading about land and peoples relationships to land are also attempts to understand the escalation of war and violence beyond how the armed and powerful actors see the war, US imperialist intervention, the role of the Pakistani state and ambitions of the Taliban. In other words it is an attempt to understand the bedrock of social relations.  It is an attempt to understand the history of peoples’ concerns and their resistance and the kind of movements that have shaped history.

Reading about land is an attempt to look at the ongoing militarization and war in the broader historical context and with a political economic framing, whereas the dominant discourse in the US is shaped so much around security and ideology; security in the context of the War on Terror and ideology in terms of a superficial understanding of Political Islam.  We want to understand politics in Pakistan including the alternatives for a different future from the point of view of the peoples of Pakistan and through the visions put forward by social movements.  From the perspectives of those who have struggled over the decades and from the interests of the people who will have to endure the consequences of the war and political developments in Pakistan

The stories of resistance by indigenous people who fought against the British for their collective ownership of land, by the civilian farmers who opposed the coercive tenant contracts of military authorities or by the Balochistan mobilization against the dispossession and marginalization of local working caste and class communities in the name of infrastructure development, give us sources of hope.  It is our responsibility to highlight such stories and find ways of being in solidarity with people’s resistance movements in Pakistan as we do the necessary task of resisting the ongoing wars in the region.