Chitralekha, a dalit woman from Payyanur, Kannur, has been in the news since 2005, for her open challenge to the CITU in that left bastion. An autorickshaw driver, she had protested at the CITU’s constant interference at work and the intensely male hostility against her presence in an almost exclusively male line of work. Braving ‘character-assault’ from the CITU which called her a ‘loose woman’, a ‘regular drunk’ and so on, she continued working until,in December 2005, her autorickshaw was burned down. She fought, however, and was supported by various Dalit, Feminists and Citizen’s initiatives. In June 2008, she procured a new autorickshaw with their support. This did not mean that she was now acceptable to the CITU . Now recently, she complained that the CITU had seized a chance encounter to beat her and her husband, and the police, who arrived on the scene, took them to the police station and unleashed even worse violence. Her complaints have been ignored or treated with hostility by the mainstream media in Kerala. Activists and concerned persons in and outside Kerala, however, have rallied to her support.

I have been deeply perturbed not by the media (such pallid response is just what we should expect, perhaps!)but also by the reactions of many activists and ex-activists — whose have had long experience in fighting for democracy — which echo these responses. I was quite shocked when a respected activist from Chitralekha’s town, told me just the other day that she lacked ‘ethics’ . I don’t want to list the complaints he made — but he made her look like a shady character who couldn’t be trusted on financial matters. And therefore we should not ‘waste’ much time on ‘her’.

I do not know whether all this is true, but even if it is true, I think it does not affect our efforts.

My recent research into self-help groups in Kerala does reveal that there are thousands of women in Kerala who do not repay their loans, have to be pressurised into making prompt repayments, and indeed use whatever little influence they have to get away. Now, this often hurts the group which has women poorer than this borrower. However, in a society like Kerala where the mad rush for upward mobility and the hegemony of consumer-citizenship is too evident to be missed, how can a thinking person so readily attribute such behaviour to the individual’s personal ‘character’ failing? True, it is indeed a problem for activists that increasingly people in Kerala are resembling the rational agent of neoclassical economics — but does that justify our silence when an underprivileged person ( who may be behaving so) makes a complaint about harassment?

And I was also rather surprised by the manner in which the campaign was understood as ‘helping Chitralekha’. This smacks of the older style of social reformism in Kerala in which the Reformer-Man built a certain relationship of non-coercive influence with women he intended to reform (as part of the Reformer’s Burden) and therefore would reject those women who disobeyed. I was part of the campaign to raise resources for her rickshaw, but I always thought that this was not so much ‘helping’ her, as making a point to the dominant powers! I don’t think any of us can ’save’ anyone  or that we should try to– and in any case if at any point one feels that the victim is making unreasonable demands or demands that are beyond our strength, one can always state that clearly and take a stand.

But I’m not surprised if the ‘victims’ make such demands either! One of the shifts we have seen in the 90s is towards a kind of activism closely enmeshed with the thrust towards global governmentality.The kind of relationship between activism and the groups she/he tried to reach out to was often close to that of a caregiver — and the very same power relationship that exists between caregivers and receivers is reproduced here too. I often think about why the many new groups that appeared in Kerala’s political fields did not grow into strong and thriving movements — many have fallen back into invisibility. There are many reasons, including shifts in global funding and so on, but the non-sustainability of the above relations looks like a key one to me. If this is the case, we ought to engage in self-reflexive thinking — on why is it that, in these times, when we try to get together a group of women in Kerala for any issue, we are besieged by women asking what aanukoolyam (benefit) is on offer — rather than blame the poor.

Another ex-activist told me, shockingly, that there was nothing anti-Dalit about this! He was citing ‘drunkenness’ as a reason to ignore the incident. Now, I have seen events in which leading Malayalee intellectuals came dead drunk but that did not affect their minds at all — but I have also seen unbelievable nonsense being spewed by such characters and indeed demonstrate utterly abusive behaviour. But in the latter occasions, they were always quietly — almost gracefully — removed from the scene. And this is not just my experience — a friend was recently sharing memories of how, during the 1980s, when public poetry readings were common all over rural Kerala, there used to be requests made over the mic that ‘all the poets sitting in the toddy shop may kindly come over to the stage’! Mind you, it isn’t that such events were always superior cultural events! So how come it looks ok to react violently when an underprivileged woman gets drunk and gets rough? And there being nothing anti-Dalit! I asked this person if a daughter or wife (i.e suitably inserted in a familial role) of a powerful Nambiar feudal family of the area got drunk and created a fuss, will she be treated similarly? She would be removed from the scene and maybe beaten at home, but would she be beaten on the road and dragged into a police station? No, he had to admit.

A particularly interesting reaction was about the people trying to support her: they are ‘outsiders’, apparently, not located within Kerala and therefore suspect. Well, maybe those who voiced this fear haven’t noticed that Kerala, since the 1970s (and actually much earlier) has not been contained between Gokarnam and Kanyakumari, and that we are now a diaspora. It is despicable to argue that Malayalees who live outside the State should not intervene in what goes on here. We aren’t so bothered, it appears, about predatory forays of big-moneyed expats whose ‘interventions’ are radically altering the very geography of Kerala, turning every bit of land into nothing but real estate to be readied for their insatiable consumerist appetites! But it isn’t as though all expats are thus. In fact if there is any way to strengthen the women’s movement in Kerala, which is truly feeble these days, it is by getting rid of the Gokaranam-tol-Kanyakumari image and building networks between anti-patriarchal forces here and people who have fled Kerala’s secularised brahmanical patriarchy and taken refuge in other parts of India and in other countries!

But the worst was the way in which this ex-activist quipped, almost casually, that Chitralekha was ‘out of her mind’. So what should we do, I asked him, shut her up in an asylum? Get her out of your eye-shot? Oh, no, he said, recommending yet another dose of ‘help’ and ‘care’. Maybe he was right. Chitralekha has a lot to gain through being the CITU’s good girl. The Kerala government has approved of fifty percent reservation of seats for women in local governance and soon there is going to be a hunt for candidates, especially Dalit women candidates. Maybe only women out of their mind will tangle with them now! Ah, my friend, if that is the case, there are a few more of us who should be out of your eye-shot, shut up in mental asylums!

There have been several news reports recently about attempts by the builder Mafia to capture properties near the Jama Masjid in Shahjehanabad (popularly, known as old Delhi) to build a 100 room hotel. Reports have also suggested the involvement of a local politician, though the politician has refuted the allegations very firmly.

This piece is not about the builder mafia or the local politician, but about another issue that has cropped up during the investigation of the attempted land grab. It has been found that the ownership of one of the properties is under dispute and a case has been going on for close to two decades.

The reports say that the disputed property belongs to the “custodian of enemy properties”. Even a cursory reading of the reports would reveal the identity of the original owners of these properties. The original owners of these properties were Muslims of Delhi.

Muslims, who had lived in Shahjehanabad for generations, some for centuries like the families of my ancestors.

In the riots that followed the partition, entire families were wiped out and no one knows what became of their properties. There were those, considered lucky because they managed to escape, leaving behind all they had, including the small hovels or large establishments where they had lived, brought up families and perhaps also dreamt of and fought for a free India. When they left they also left behind the establishments, big and small, where they had worked, earning a living through all manner of trades including the fine handicrafts that this city was famous for.

Large parts of these properties were taken over by a Caretaker created for the purpose. The Custodian was called the “Custodian of Enemy Properties”.

My piece is about this nomenclature.

This nomenclature was evolved at a time when Gandhi Ji was telling his prayers meetings that ‘Hindus and Muslims are like my two eyes’.

This nomenclature was evolved around the time when Gandhi ji cancelled one of his prayer meetings, when someone (probably a survivor of the killings in what was now Pakistan) objected to the recitation of the Qur’aan. Gandhiji had said, ‘I understand your pain, but I cannot understand your refusal to hear what the Holy book says,’ or words to that effect

This nomenclature was invented at roughly the same time when Maulana Abul Kalaam was exhorting Muslims to stay back in the land of their ancestors and Nehru was promising equal rights to all the Citizens of India.

Many of those that had left had gone in the belief that they will come back when things settle down, when passions cool down somewhat.

Could they have ever returned and reclaimed their homes, shops, workshops, factories, schools, libraries or what have you, when all this was declared enemy property and many of those that had built this city been declared enemies.

I am sure they did exactly the same in Pakistan, because all these things had been decided in great detail after due diligence, having given considerable thought to all aspects of the issue. I am sure they had carefully weighed the pros and cons before arriving at this decision. Responsible governments, as we all know, do not take hasty decisions.

They exchanged, Prisoners and (if Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is not merely a figment of his imagination) they also exchanged the inmates of insane asylums, Muslim Lunatics for Pakistan and the rest for India!

What faith do madmen follow?

Why is it that even after 62 years no one has protested at this nomenclature, why do we persist with this term?

Is it any wonder that Muslims have been denied equal opportunities in all walks of life, and even afters hundreds of communal riots since 1947 and despite scores of enquiries, each one establishing that the Muslims did not instigate them and that they suffered most and despite the culprits being identified in most enquiries, hardly anyone ever gets punished.

Where is the need, why should anyone be punished for killing the enemy?

Konta: The mystery surrounding the killing of nine Adivasis in Gompad village in Dantewada district in October last year is deepening, with the Chhattisgarh police detaining three more witnesses to the incident and restricting all access to the area on the pretext of Operation Green Hunt.

Operation Green Hunt is a catch-all phrase, used by the police and media alike, for all major anti-naxal offensives since July 2009.

As previously reported by The Hindu, the Chhattisgarh police have assumed total control over the movements of Sodi Sambho – one of several witnesses in a Supreme Court petition that alleges that the 9 civilians were killed by the security forces.

On Friday, armed policemen and Special Police Officers (SPO) lined the length of the highway from Dantewada town to Konta, the block headquarters closest to Gompad, stopping vehicles and questioning commuters. Travelling with local journalists Anil Mishra of Nayi Duniya and Yashwant Yadav of Navbharat, this correspondent was repeatedly detained along the route and told that Gompad village was out of bounds as a major anti-naxal operation was underway. Non-journalists were, however, let through.

Concerned that we might enter the village from Andhra Pradesh, we were detained by SPOs for about 45 minutes on the Chhattisgarh-A.P. border and allowed to proceed only after the intervention of Deputy Inspector-General, Dantewada, S.R.P. Kalluri.

At present, the police have refused to comment on the veracity of the claims made in the Supreme Court petition filed by Sodi and others. “The Superintendent of Police of Dantewada has been told to initiate an enquiry into the Gompad incident,” said T.J. Longkumer, Inspector-General Police, Bastar.

However, witnesses to the killings insisted in interviews to The Hindu that the police were involved in the early morning ‘sanitisation operation’ and killed nine villagers (seven from Gompad and two from nearby villages), including three women and a 12-year-old girl. “The police also cut off the fingers of a two-year-old infant,” said one witness speaking on condition of anonymity fearing police retribution. “The police stabbed Madavi Venka [a victim] and then shot him fatally,” said another witness, “All those killed were innocent villagers with no involvement with the naxals.”

The witnesses were interviewed, via a translator, at a weekly bazaar at Adralpalli on the Andhra Pradesh side of the border between the two States. Due to the police cordon around Gompad village, witness reports could not be verified independently.

The villagers also claimed that the police have detained Soyam Rama, Soyam Dulla and Kattam Dulla, three witnesses whose testimonies could prove crucial when the case comes up for hearing in the Supreme Court. “All three men have been held at the police station at Konta for the last one week,” said a Gompad villager. The Adivasis were picked up by the police in the first week of January when they came to Dantewada town for a public airing of grievances, the villagers said, an assertion DIG Kalluri contests. “We have never detained these three men,” he said. “They have never been taken into police custody.”

However, police sources speaking to The Hindu on background confirmed that the three men were indeed held “for questioning” at the Konta police station till January 14 but could not confirm their current location. At present, their whereabouts are unknown.

Police control over witnesses and restrictions on the movement of the press have raised concerns that the facts surrounding the Gompad killings might never be known. In another PIL petition pending before the Supreme Court for the past three years, allegations of large-scale killing of Adivasis and arson by the Salwa Judum and security forces have yet to be addressed.

First published in The Hindu at: http://www.hindu.com/2010/01/17/stories/2010011761241000.htm

Here’s what happened when a reporter tried to meet Sodi Sambho: http://beta.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/article81193.ece

The dastardly attack on the eminent writer Paul Zachariah by the DYFI in the CPM fortress of Payyanur in north Kerala on 10 January has been roundly condemned across the political spectrum in Kerala. Zacharia was heckled and abused at a literary seminar organized by a publisher for  criticizing the moral policing  practiced by the official left in Kerala. He condemned the recent DYFI-PDP joint ‘moral action’ against the Congress leader Rajmohan Unnithan and a Sewa Dal leader which, according to the the DYFI leadership, were ‘provocative’. Zacharia was accosted by a gang of men when he was about to leave Payyanur and openly threatened. He was told that such talk was not permitted in the left bastion of Payyanur; when the threat did not produce the desired reaction, they resorted to physical intimidation, and relented only after the intervention of the organizers who are CPM sympathizers, and other writers present there. The day after, prominent leaders in the CPM, including the Chief Minister and the Minister for Education, condemned the action.

However, the CPM Czar Pinarayi Vijayan sounded quite unrepentant when he declared that ‘provocation’ is likely to produce violent reactions. He compared the outrage felt by the DYFI activists to that felt by Christians and Muslims  faced with blasphemous utterances. The lower CPM warlords of north Malabar sound deeply encouraged by Their Master’s Voice, and have been issuing similar statements. Zacharia has denied Vijayan’s accusation that he portrayed the early communist leaders as ’sexual anarchists’, pointing out that all he had accused them was of a modern, liberal attitude towards interaction between the sexes.

While the ‘liberal’ elements in and around the CPM have been struck dumb by their hero’s performance, many of us remain unsurprised. And not just because the CPM resembles, all the more recently,  anti-political and institutionalized religion. In fact, the communist elite in Kerala have always been ardent defenders of what Marxist theory has called ‘bourgeois morality’ from their earliest days (so I am not sure whether I agree with Zachariah on this). One needs only to glance at the debates about literary aesthetics that raged between the leftist ‘progressive writers’and early and later modernists, from the 1940s onwards.Nor have they been strangers to verbal lumpenism — rather, it has been a fine art practiced and perfected by, actually, the most Holy among them, and deployed against even the most venerable figures in the history of modern Malayalam literature like Kesari A. Balakrishna Pillai and Joseph Mundassery. However, the audacity of the present violence is scary indeed. Zacharia is an immensely popular writer respected in Kerala and outside and one of the most formidable public critics of organised religion in Kerala. That he should be physically threatened for voicing his views is new in the history of intellectual intimidation in Kerala.

Perhaps it is important to understand that this new phenomenon is not a chance occurrence, but related to the rise to hegemony of a certain style of anti-politics that is increasingly becoming the hallmark of the CPM in Kerala. In the mid-20th century, the communists were equally powerful in north Kerala — Malabar — and in the south — Travancore and Kochi. The south, however, was hegemonic in communist politics. Deeper social democratization had occurred through powerful lower caste community movements in the south; it was more advanced in literacy and health care; it had a strong, well-organized working class — which was very militant indeed.

In the north, the communist leaders had to combine political work with social reformism and anti-caste activism and hence the idealised image we possess of many communist leaders of the north, which are laden with a moral halo that leaders from the south do not often have. In the extreme north which were strongholds of communist peasant militancy, a violent style of activism far removed from the ‘civil’ style of the communist elite, or the ‘uncivil’ style of the organised working classes of the south remained active, which stressed the  (feudal) value of community loyalty above everything else. Communists of the extreme north were too uncritically praised for being ‘down to earth’, ’simple’, passionately committed — all else was forgiven, especially the ugly undemocratic tendencies that lay in the underside of precisely these ‘virtues’. Thus was born the image that was projected on the prominent CPM leader from the extreme north, the former Chief Minister of Kerala, the late E K Nayanar : of the simple soul,completely committed to the Party, ‘pure’ and unsophisticated in his ways, ‘direct’ and ‘uncomplicated’ in his speech. And this image underplayed the violence of his speech, his contempt, for instance, for women who demanded greater ‘civility’ in public life, evident in the crudity of his ‘jokes’.

It is perhaps important to distinguish between the early militancy of the left working classes and the kind of bullying that we are now witnessing. Indeed, in the earlier phases, militancy was identified with the working classes mobilized by the communist party and not its leadership — as a child I remember my very middle-class and upper caste relatives defend the communists against  common elite complaints about their ‘lawlessness’ by pointing out that this was a feature of the ‘lowest orders’ of the party and not its elite — who were praised as the most ‘civil’ in Kerala! Now, the scene appears reversed. The ‘lowest orders’ at present are perhaps a ‘civil-political society’ — welfare beneficiaries in the panchayats, especially the women in the government supported self-help groups’ network — which is utterly and terrifyingly ‘civil’ and docile (and not the organized working class, which is increasingly declared to be ‘problem’). The upper echelons, in contrast, are increasingly being filled with Pinarayi- clones who embrace his chillingly uncivil, openly threatening style. The content of militancy is also striking. The earlier working class militancy involved plenty of ‘ethical illegality’; it strained the very seams of India’s liberal political order; but it was also committed to the breakdown of caste and privilege. The present one, however, is closer to the intolerance perpetuated in the mid-20th century by the middle-class elite left intellectuals against writers who refused to wed their writing to immediate left political interest.It is also deeply elitist in its defense of ‘bourgeois morality’: the earlier working class militancy was much less committed to bourgeois morality and marriage, as the autobiographical accounts of working class mobilizers and activists show. In the 1970s, the left trade union leaders were more likely to support the public protests by working class women left pregnant by factory owners of supervisors, and thus we do have  stories of a number of garbhasatyagrahams (pregnancy satyagrahas)in Kollam in the narratives of workers active in struggles of those times.

How did this shift happen? We need to think more, but perhaps this is related to the decline of the style of left politics that was shaped in the pre-independence south Kerala. This period saw the decay of working class clout, and the weakening of traditional industries in which the militant working class was concentrated; at the same time, the rise of the ‘rubber economy’, concentrated in largely non-left interests, and later, the flow of wealth through migration, increased the political clout of the non-left in the south, especially the Congress.While the north caught up with the south in development indices in a few decades after independence, the Gulf Boom ushered in a flow of wealth,which especially benefitted the north, and gradually coalesced into specific economic interests by the end of the 1990s.New flows of wealth strengthened non-left community interests in the north and the south, and this translated into strength for the Congress in the south; in the north, where it is not the Congress but the communists and the Muslim League which have been dominant traditionally, the new economic interests feeding on Gulf-based wealth seemed to have helped to create new centres of power within these two parties. In the same period, after the land reforms, the power of the farmers’ and agricultural workers’ organizations have also become divided and weaker within the left. The idealistic early leadership of the CPM and the genteel and development-and-reform-oriented early leadership of the Muslim League have disappeared.Kunhalikkutty’s rise in the Muslim League and the rise of the extreme north lobby in the CPM  may not be entirely coincidental, then.

The new millennium has seen the steady march of this lobby to power within the CPM, and their style is now increasingly copied by the lower ranks of leadership in the CPM. The brashness of the statements made by student and youth leaders of the CPM, often defending the completely indefensible — is quite visible at present.And all of the official left’s entrenched intolerance now come laced with a heady dose of extreme north-Kerala style of violent ‘feudalised’ activism. Interestingly, this style can only bring political disaster to the CPM, given the fact that the increasing horror of all sorts of ‘uncivility’, ‘feudalised’ or ‘ethical, that one finds circulating through the mainstream media and increasingly, in the views of the burgeoning consumerist middle-classes.We need a new term to describe this utter lack of sight, sense, and intuition in the CPM: blindness will not suffice. As for the rest of us, (if the Malabar Special Police was the most feared arm of the colonial oppressor in Malabar in the pre-independence years) here comes the Malabar Moral Police! Quite updated, actually, with considerable ‘civil society’ participation!

Raipur: Sodi Sambho was last seen in public on January 3 this year, when the Chhattisgarh Police intercepted her as she was en route to Delhi to receive treatment for a bullet wound.

Since then, neither the press nor her lawyer has been able to access her.

Ms. Sambho is a key witness in a petition filed in the Supreme Court which alleges that security forces fired upon and killed nine Adivasis in a ‘sanitisation operation’ at Gompad village, Dantewada district on October 1 2009.

“The police have not allowed me to speak to Ms. Sambho,” said her lawyer, Colin Gonzalves, “The Superintendent of Police, Dantewada, Ambreesh Mishra, offered to let me meet her relatives but consistently deflected my attempts to meet her. However, the police have no right to intervene between a petitioner and her lawyer.”

Earlier, concerned at her disappearance, the lawyer filed an application in the Supreme Court, alleging that the Chhattisgarh police was interfering in Ms. Sambho’s medical treatment.

On January 7, the Supreme Court directed the police “not to interfere, in any manner whatsoever …in her coming to Delhi for her medical treatment.”

On January 10, SP Dantewara Ambreesh Misra told The Hindu that his information suggested that Ms. Sambho was scheduled to arrive in Delhi the same day, but refused to provide confirmation.

“Sodi Sambho is neither under arrest nor in police custody or surveillance,” said N. Baijendra Kumar, Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister. “As a private citizen, she is free to travel as she pleases.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, doctors at the Raipur Medical College told The Hindu that Ms. Sambho had been examined in the hospital the following day and was referred to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. But enquiries at the office of the Medical Superintendent at the AIIMS showed no record of her ever being admitted to the hospital.

So where is she?

“Ms. Sambho has been admitted at the AIIMS. I instructed SP Dantewara to accompany her,” confirmed Directorate-General of Police for Chhattisgarh, Viswarajan, on Tuesday night in sharp contradiction to all prior statements issued by the police.

When asked why the AIIMS had no record of admitting her, he said, “She must be in a private room.”

However, the Chhattisgarh Police’s complete control over her movements is a major cause for concern for her lawyers.

Colin Gonzalves, her lawyer, stated that, as per his information, some of the 13 petitioners in the Gompad incident have been taken into police custody and might be pressured to change their statements.

First published in The Hindu at: http://www.hindu.com/2010/01/13/stories/2010011361401300.htm#

This is a Guest Post by ARATI CHOKSHI.

[Chhattisgarh and Dantewada have been in the news for quite some time now, as matters have reached a climax with the state on its anti-Maoist offensive after the near-failure of its stratgey to prop up Salwa Judum as a counter-insurgency outfit. All intermediate spaces stand wiped out now. Recently, Himanshu Kumar of the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram had planned a padayatra in Dantewada and around that time, a team of women's and human rights organization visited the area apprehending trouble. This a report of that team's experiences.]

It was night by the time we set out. Four jeeps sped carrying 39 women of diverse age, class, caste, religion, faith, ideologies, from ten states across the nation, and representing 20 women’s and human rights organisations. We sped from Raipur to Dantewada, on wide, smooth highways on a common journey, as part of our campaign to address the alarming reports of sexual violence and repression of women by the State, that were emerging, particularly from Dantewada, in Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. We were headed there both to get a first hand account and to show solidarity with victims of heinous crimes, who defying all threats and intimidation had managed to come forth and lodge complaints against their assailants – in this case, the State. This journey was to be an enquiry – a personal exploration and examination of the truth- of dark, dangerous, secret whispers that managed to trickle out from Dantewada and ooze into wider consciousness – tales of tortures, horror, and barbaric acts that our representatives, our own protectors and security forces meted out on a particular collective us, the weakest, most vulnerable, the voiceless adivasis of Bastar.

Over the next 22 hours, we were to find that our journey had become the goal, revealing to us far more from State’s desperate attempt to hide, than in our wanderings and talkings in Dantewada. In hindering us, we found how the State had repressed civil liberties of its citizens, how democratic spaces had vanished and how the authoritarian subjugation by the State had muted all voices – not just of protest, but of even posing a question.
But first the story of this journey.  The trip from Raipur to Dantewada is 380 km. After the initial excitement of a new journey, many of us settled down in slouched comfort and warmth proximity of companionship as our car sped through the dark night towards Bastar. Some of us attempted sleep, others conversed in soft voices, the music from the car’s loudspeakers was now low and mellow.

I awoke around midnight as we pulled to the side at the police check point at Charama, Kanked. With sharply called orders and tapping batons on our car’s windows, we were ordered to get out. We noticed the police carrying a list of our jeeps’ license plate numbers that they verified. We were assured that this was part of their routine procedure – even as we noticed a lot of other vehicles whizz by the post without a pause. Personal information was noted for all individuals and vehicular papers scrutinised. This entire interrogation was being directed by DSP Neg. As we stood huddled around in the cold of the night, our drivers were ordered into the police station for further questioning.  Circumstances of our journey made us immediately protest, as our drivers were just innocent operators provided by the tour company. We insisted that we be allowed to accompany the drivers and all the questioning be directed to us. A few of us followed the drivers into the compound but were halted with shouts ” Goli Mar-denge” (we’ll shoot)! Meanwhile, we were told that the police needed further information including postal address, father/husband’s names, mobile numbers as part of their routine inquiry. Our drivers finally emerged about half an hour later, silent and shaken. Apparently one vehicular registration and one set of license papers were improper – one jeep and these documents were confiscated. We finally left around 2am in three jeeps heading towards Makori to organise an extra vehicle for our further travel. On the road our drivers told us that they had been threatened with dire consequences if they proceeded further with us.

We reached Makori within half hour to be again stopped at the check post. It turns out that the documents previously acceptable at Kanked had now become improper as they were photocopies of the original. As we deliberated our options, our drivers informed us that they could not proceed with us further. We were now getting increasingly resolved to continuing the journey, and decided to take a bus to Jagdalpur and then onto Dantewada. We squeezed into two buses headed our way still at 3 am, but our troubles were far from over. The drama of halting and questioning hounded us through the night at Keshkal, Farusgaon and finally Kondagaon, where we were finally forced to disembark at around 6am on the pretext of ID verification by SPOs. Kondegaon was still about 80 km from Jagdalpur which was a further 120km from Dantewada – we had barely covered half the distance from Raipur in eight hours.

At around 8 am, we met M. Khan, SO, Kondagaon. We were informed that we had been off loaded from the bus for our personal protection since there were between four and five thousand demonstrators blocking our way between Korenar and Dantewada, in anticipation of our arrival. However, we were free to leave if we insisted on doing so – and he would even facilitate our journey by providing vehicles. Meanwhile, most of us had been in contact, via sms, with our friends and families and heard that massive support was pouring in to offices at Delhi and Raipur via telephones and faxes from all across the country and also from international well wishers . We decided to continue to Jagdalpur, on bus, speak with the SPO there, before  deciding on a further course of action. We also decided to remain together and finally got a bus where all 39 of us could squeeze into and were just starting when the station manager came running, saying he had police orders that no bus was to take us. While we waited around, we were the subject of increasing curiosity by the public. Also some press had gathered there by this time. It was reassuring for many of us that we sensed no hostility from either of these groups. Meanwhile, two trucks loaded with armed and uniformed security personnel disembarked right in front of our group, and young men in orange paraphernalia cruised on motorcycles in hostile belligerence. We also received word that Shri Himanshu of Vanavasi Chetna Ashram, where we were headed was forced to call of the padayatra and was placed under forced state security i.e. house arrest. He advised us strongly to not come to Dantewada. In light of these circumstances, we had no other option but to turn back – towards Raipur again.

However, our troubles were far from over. At Kanked, our bus was stopped by a road block of 30-35 goons who yelled anti-naxal slogans, banged at the bus, windows, asked us to get off. A bunch of them entered inside with videos and took footage of us at uncomfortably close quarters. Finally, one person, who had earlier spoken to us claiming to be a part of Hari Bhoomi,  deflated a tire forcing the bus to come to a halt. More threatening, more intimidation later, tire replaced, we were finally out of Bastar.

A press conference had been called in Raipur by our campaign in the Circuit House. Here too our arrival was anticipated and organised disruptions awaited us. Now the slogans had changed from allegations of ‘naxals’ to ‘naxal leaders’ to leave Chattisgarh. The police took a very official position on these allegations and after, once again, documenting, individual information of the entire team – we were free to go. We found that each of the group was followed, at close quarters, by people on motorcycles, who remained in vigil throughout that night and to the final departure point as we left Chattisgarh.

This is not meant to be a story of hardship or recounting troubles. It is more to reflect on how far we have fallen off a page of legitimacy, democracy, civil liberties. How the ones who we choose to govern us, have become dark powerful evil governors of our fate – have ensnared all democratic spaces of expression, of movement. How we, as a country, have slept as this systematic and systemic progression of cancerous disease sucks away at the marrow of all we hold dear – the very concept of independence and free society – for all, with equity and equality. At the press conference we were asked finally, ” Did the police ‘do’ anything to you all?”  It was with surprise that we answered ” No, they were polite and even courteous – but they stopped us”.  We were credible, acceptable, respectable bunch of women, educated, vocal, and we were stopped even in an enquiry. Was there any scope for a faceless, voiceless adivasi to exercise democratic rights? And..why were we stopped? so aggressively opposed? What was the state attempting to hide from an independent inquiry, so vehemently, that they could not even afford for us to reach within 200km of darkness in Dantewada?  In thus opposing us they revealed how far Chhattisgarh had fallen – how state was complicit and  therefore afraid, that what we had heard could  be verified. And so, we women, we were raising our voices – in a yell, in  a loud call of protest, a waking up call to face and address our failures. We were finally awake to realities in Bastar – and now we shalt not sleep!

[Here on Kafila we have written before about the new contours of class struggle and unrest in industrial zones. As the demands of capital become ever more rapacious, and worker's bodies more dispensable, the last few years have witnessed increasing incidents of violent conflict in urban industrial areas across the country. In each case workers' demands fall on the deaf ears of an increasingly unresponsive management backed by the weapons of the state. When the simmering violence finally comes to a head, it is workers who are demonized. We carry below a report by the Jamia Teacher's Solidarity Association on the recent outbreaks of violence in Ludhiana's industrial zone.]

A fact-finding team of university teachers from Delhi visited Ludhiana on Sunday (20.12.2009) to ascertain the facts of the incidents of violence that have gripped the industrial part of the city involving migrant workers. The team visited Dhandari kalan and Sherpur and spoke to a large number of migrant workers and visited their homes. The team found that despite a large number of the migrant workforce (around 12 lakhs) living in Ludhiana for over 15 years, sometimes even much longer, a majority of them had no voting rights or ration cards. Even when they applied for voters I cards, their applications were rejected on spurious grounds. It is not surprising that no political party, not even the local Member of Parliament, Mr. Manish Tiwari, has bothered to visit them. This attitude percolates down to the bureaucracy and police force, who treat the migrant workers as virtually second class citizens.

It was found that:

1)    The migrant workers have for the past 2-3 months been gripped by a sense of fear and insecurity following a series of violent attacks by ‘biker gangs’, in which several workers were injured, attacked, robbed of their daily earnings, with one worker even succumbing to his injuries later in PGI.

2)    The workers were greatly agitated that the police refused to file any complaints about these incidents of loot and attack. On 3^rd December, when the workers assembled at the Dhandhari PS to complain of yet another attack on them, the police hurled abuses at them and pushed them out of the gate, locking the gate to the PS. The workers jammed the highway close to the PS in the hope that the police would open the gates and come out and listen to them. However, the police responded by opening lathi charge and tear gas. This incensed a section of the workers into burning eight cars.

3)    The police meanwhile refused to engage/negotiate with the surging crowds of the workers, numbering according to eyewitnesses, around ten thousand. Instead, it sent messages to the neighbouring villages such as Pammi and Dhandari that migrant workers were marching towards their villages to loot and burn, and that the police was unable to control the crowds. The Police thus asked the local population to join them in controlling the migrant workers. Thus, an issue which was essentially a workers versus administration was maliciously turned by the administration into a migrant versus local issue.

4)    On the 4th Dec., there was a pitched battle between the workers on side of the railway track at Dhandari Kalan and the police and its army of anti-social criminal elements. The latter were brandishing, according to eyewitnesses, swords and iron rods as well as fire arms. The workers were trying to resist the entry of these criminal elements into their neighbourhood by pelting stones, however by around noon, they were pushed back and while the police provided them cover, these criminals entered the neighbourhood of Ishwar Colony and created mayhem.

5)    The team in its visit to the various bedas (housing complex with one-room tenement)  found them deserted, with a large majority of workers residing there having fled or missing. Only about 20 per cent of the original inhabitants remained with whom the team interacted. The Ishwar beda, for instance, has 125 rooms and each room houses 4-5 roommates. When we visited the complex on Sunday, only about 15 people remained.

6)    We found one room after another burnt, the belongings reduced to cinders. There were clear remnants of forcible entry: sword and spear marks on aluminium doors; in Pooja Complex, the lock to the main gate had been broken with a bullet shot; scooters, bikes and an auto rickshaw were burnt. The six shops in the Ishwar Complex were all completely burnt.

7)    Eyewitnesses and victims told us how they had returned from their night shift and were hiding inside their rooms while the clashes were on at the railway track. They had locked themselves inside their little rooms when the attackers came and set their rooms on fire. Women and children were manhandled, men attacked with rods and swords. Eye witnesses told us that on the 4^th December , men were taken to hospital with their heads bleeding, and deep gashes made by swords on their faces.

The team spoke to SSP Ludhiana who claimed that the workers had set their own houses on fire by themselves! Therefore, the question of compensation was not easy to address. While the people we met told us that they had filed complaints in the PS about the arson at their shops (in Ishwar Complex) and the huge losses incurred by them they were yet to receive a copy of their complaints. We raised this issue with the SSP and he said that no FIR had been filed till now (after 16 days), and if the need arose, these complaints could be accommodated in the FIR about the burning of the vehicles. He also dismissed the possibility of the existence of any biker gangs. This reflects the apathy and prejudice which is characteristic of the administration’s response towards the problems of the migrant workers. It is inconceivable that workers who work for 12 -14 hours a day, live in tiny rooms with no ventilation, 4-5 people in one room in almost sub-human conditions, to be able to survive and save some money, to have set their own belongings on fire.

The people of the area have made the following demands:

1) Compensation to be paid for all the losses incurred.

2) Given the prevailing atmosphere of fear, there should be a CRPF camp to secure the neighbourhood. The people have lost all faith in the local police.

3) The 42 migrant workers who have been arrested should be immediately released.

4) Charges against those responsible for the violence on migrant workers be framed without delay.

Signed: Tanweer Fazal, Sanghamitra Misra, Manisha Sethi, Ahmed Sohaib for JTSA

www.teacherssolidarity.org

Or, when suicide threat becomes political strategy

Guest post by ANANT MARINGANTI

I am witnessing a bizarre phenomenon in Andhra Pradesh which I can at the moment only call ‘Media Induced Morbidity Syndrome‘. That this is pathological, and that this has to do with the media I am certain. But it is difficult to pin down what the pathogen is.

First, in the days and weeks following the then chief minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy’s (YSR) death on September 2nd, 2009; over 450 people were reported to have died either of heart attacks or suicides. Newspapers kept a daily tally and the numbers kept mounting. Being in Singapore at the time, several thousands of miles away from Hyderabad during those weeks, I had no first hand experience of the mood in Hyderabad. I dismissed the reportage as a silly political gimmick. It was easy to surmise that vested interests had simply been collecting daily death reports from various government hospitals in different towns and attributing them to grief over YSR’s death. The largest number of these deaths – 227 occurred on the day of the funeral and the following day.

And now, since K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader began his fast on November 29th with the slogan – KCR sacchudo – Telangana vacchudo – (either KCR dies or we get Telangana), apparently more than 37 persons have either committed suicides or have died due to (of) heart attacks in sympathy with the Telangana cause.  This number does not include the mounting toll in heart attacks and suicides in the rest of the state since December 10^th, when the Home Minister Chidambaram’s announced  that  the process to bifurcate the state will be initiated and KCR withdrew the fast sparking frenzied protests against bifurcation. Nor does it include the continuing deaths and suicides in Telangana in protest against these other protests. If we include all those, the tally as on date may well be over a hundred.

What is striking about many of the reports is that most of the dead are reported to have been watching TV continuously before the death.  So if the TV happens to be covering YSR’s death at that time, then grief over the death of a popular leader is said to be the cause,  if the TV is covering protests in Telangana, then a desire for martyrdom in the name of Telangana must be the cause of suicide. So long as the death is attributed to a burning political issue, nobody can challenge the attribution of the cause. All parties are complicit in this silence.

It is not hard to explain how this works. There are some 20 odd Telugu TV channels now in Hyderabad. Each has  a political line and complex web of business interests which are served by its political affiliations. Most of them also have inexperienced production teams that have practically no aesthetic judgement.  The screen real estate is constantly split and striated- audio and visual tracks are frantically shuffled with three to four moving images and two or three scroll lines at any time. In addition, for every occasion – instant lyrics – very badly composed mournful songs with terrible music are endlessly streamed.  Not to be outdone by the visual media, the print media (all major newspapers also have TV channels) is plastering all available print area with gory images and shocking text.

I returned to Hyderabad nearly a month after YSR’s death. I still remember my bewilderment in the first few days. Many friends told me that they had all personally grieved for YSR.  They talked about how charming he was, how warm his smile was and how firm his handshake was. Some mentioned some of his schemes especially ‘arogyasree’ – a medical reimbursement scheme that benefited the poor and so on. Few of them seemed to remember our longstanding shared criticism of YSR’s business interests, his emergence from the bloody faction politics of Rayalaseema, and the unprecedented rise in the levels of corruption authorized by him,  and none at all seemed to notice that one of the largest beneficiaries of the ‘arogyasree’ program were the empaneled hospitals.

I still could not believe that the media could induce this kind of muddleheadedness among people whose critical sensibilities could hardly be doubted on other matters.  Since then I have caught perhaps 10 hours of TV in all. I can vouch for it – what the Television Channels are telecasting here is morbid  enough to cause serious psychosomatic disorders among the viewers. At the same time, the general state of the cultural economy in Andhra Pradesh is  dismal. Displacement of crisis from one sphere to the other, one place to the other, and one scale to the other has become the norm.  It is impossible to pin down any single source of the problem – so much so that I am tempted to conclude that ‘crisis’ has become political and economic strategy.  But what exactly is the media doing ?

The frenzy on the Telangana issue began with high drama over KCR, a man with known severe medical complications and alcohol dependency, threatening to go on a fast unto death demanding a separate Telangana. On Nov 29^th, the day this his fast was supposed to begin commence, his convoy heading for the venue in Siddipet, a small town in Medak  district of Telangana was diverted by a special police force. While KCR was kept captive in a town over a hundred miles away, at the venue itself – nearly 6000 volunteers with identity cards had thrown a security ring around Chandrasekhar Rao’s son in law and MLA, Harish Rao who was to join the fast. As the police broke the ring, Harish Rao doused himself with petrol and threatened to set himself afire if he is arrested.

Even as this drama was being beamed to us from TV channels, Srikanth Chary, a young college student rushed out of a building in the outskirts of Hyderabad completely doused in petrol and lit the matchstick. Images of Srikanth captured on a mobile phone began circulating in the channels. After four days of hospitalization, Srikanth died on December 3rd. Since the 4th of December, images of Srikanth began to appear in newspapers (were the first thing newspaper readers saw). Andhra Jyothy, a large circulation daily published a full page image of Srikanth burning and staggering. Meanwhile, KCR’s fast unto death took some unexpected turns. On the second day, TV channels beamed clips of KCR   drinking a glass of some colored liquid and withdrawing the fast. As news of this spread, campuses across Telangana erupted with angry students declaring that KCR was inconsequential now for the movement. They would take it forward on their own. However, within hours, there was news again that KCR clarified that he was made to drink the liquid – colored water by deception, that the clips were unauthorised, and that he was continuing with the fast. At this point, he was shifted to the superspeciality hospital Nizams Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad and kept on saline drip until he announced withdrawal of his fast after the Central Government’s announcement on starting the process for state bifurcation. Throughout this drama unfolding over several days TV channels were flashing hourly bulletins with KCR’s pulse rate, blood pressure and blood sugar on one hand and the tempers and passions of agitating youth in response to this on the other. KCR himself kept threatening to kill himself with broken glass or by jumping out of the window anyone tried to force-feed him. Telangana Rashtra Samiti MLAs kept issuing threats to set themselves aflame in the assembly. Nonstop discussions on different dimensions of this problem were beamed with just about anyone willing to show up at the studio – mostly people who had strong bias about the issue as well as those with hardly any understanding of the context. For the strategists of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti, who perceive the media as generally hostile to their cause (most of the big media is owned by non Telangana investors) the racy media production nevertheless was helpful in building up instant momentum and draw in new constituencies into the agitation.

But then, overall, the sense of urgency and crisis whipped up by the  media with panic being spread every minute about the potential repercussions of KCR’s death – produced what was indeed an absurd situation – millions of people glued to the TV and reading the newspapers and experiencing the urgency with no possible way of influencing the course of events. It was this helplessness, and the overwhelming morbidity of the entire production that, I suspect which triggered many of the heart attacks and suicides.

To me, the puzzle of media induced morbidity is captured most starkly in the brief report that appeared two days ago in many local dailies http://tinyurl.com/ygl4tbw

Piecing together information from various reports, one learns that Gajula Ramulu – a construction worker (name the place) with no political affiliations of any kind (whatsoever) had been continuously watching TV (continuously) for three days. Then on December 13th, he receives a couple of phone calls from relatives in Hyderabad about difficulties in the city due to trouble over state separation. He gets up, screams – “let Andhra be united” and slits his own throat with a razor blade and dies!! And the Telugu Desam,  the Congress and the Praja Rajyam Party leaders of the area take the body to the collectorate and shout slogans for united Andhra Pradesh holding the state government responsible for the death!!

The puzzle gets more confounded as I remember being shocked by a newspaper tally of suicides in Hyderabad in an year-ender in a local daily in  2005. According to the report, over 130 people belonging to all sections of society ended their lives in the preceding year by jumping into Husain Sagar alone, the four hundred year old lake which is the pride of Hyderabad. It was said at that time that the city police was seized of the matter and was considering setting up a mounted police squad and a closed circuit surveillance of the lake. I do not see any evidence today that these plans were implemented. Nor do I see anything in the city to reassure me that there is any abatement of the circumstances which prompt people to commit suicides – financial ruin, debt trap, domestic violence, alienation in all spheres of life, chronic illness, harassment by spouse or boss – you name it. Nor is there anything to indicate that there are fewer triggers or avenues to commit the act. Hyderabad unbenownst to us may very well have become the suicide capital of the country.

But more sinister, it seems that the media is peddling plain morbidity in small doses every minute of the day – feeding off and feeding into a social pathology from which evidently someone somewhere (perhaps us included) is benefiting. How else does one explain this piling up of silence over silence over silence?

After months of uncertainty in which the entire political and state machinery has been galvanized to ensure that the perpetrators of the horrific rape and murder of two young women in Shopian go scot free, the Central Bureau of Investigation has produced a report that gives a clean chit to the indicted policemen and claims that the two women drowned in a stream. Below we carry a report by the Independent Women’s Initiative for Justice. Do circulate as widely as possible.

(with inputs from Mythri Prasad Aleyamma)
I admit, this title sounds sensationalist. But one can hardly avoid resorting to it when confronted with utterly stupefying news of attacks on dalit colonies almost next door to Kerala’s capital city and nerve centre of Malayalee politics, and that too, by a minor anti-political force that has a legacy of anti-South Indian hatred — the Siva Sena. And of course when one is confronted with the hard, stony silence of almost all sections of the media about this. The mystery of the murder of an elderly, innocent morning-walker in Varkala, a town close to Thiruvananthapuram (of which I wrote in an earlier post) still remains a mystery; the police story is so full of holes that it looks like a sieve. But the Guardians of our Free Press are still lapping police versions and not conducting independent investigation. Activists who have dared to do so have been heckled and hounded, even senior and respected human rights activists like B.R.P.Bhaskar, by the Siva Sena, and their protests have been ignored. Meanwhile violence continues to be unleashed against the supporters of the group that has been accused of murder, the Dalit Human Rights Movement (DHRM).

 The title, then, is meant to shake up those (if any) who may be under the impression that the time of troubles is past now that the Chengara land struggle did win some concessions, and that peace reigns in this sweet season of Christmas and IFFK between the savarna gods and the people they have condemned to be sinners in God’s Own Country. In fact, the effort seems to be towards ensuring that the will of the dalits should be broken decisively — so that another Chengara may never threaten the savarna elite of Kerala.

Not that such repression is new. For some time now, we have seen the agents of new forms of urban crime take over the dalit colonies of Kerala and build close links with political forces, on the right and left, and this nexus has worked well to terrorise the inhabitants of these settlements, especially those who dare to question. This process was precisely what remained unseen when, a few years back, members of sex workers’ organisations were driven out of the Bangladesh Colony in Kozhikode city in northern Kerala. On the surface it appeared to be ‘moral cleansing’ but it was actually the eviction of those residents of the colony — sex workers who had gained a public identity through the sex workers’ organisation — who had dared to question the rise of dangerous crime and drug dealings there. There is also plenty of report (all this, strangely enough, is rarely converted into news) of violence against dalits in colonies all over Kerala where people have left the CPM fold to join the Kerala Pulaya Maha Sabha or the BSP.

But the violence being unleashed against the DHRM by the Siva Sena and the police differs because it appears to be a direct attack on the dalit effort to construct the dalit subject afresh in Kerala, breaking away decisively from the available dominant models in Kerala’s history of social reformism and political mobilization. Activists who have been regularly visiting the colonies where the DHRM has been working reported that the Ambedkarite and Neo-Buddhist-inspired DHRM has been seeking not only to end alcoholism and drug-consumption in these settlements, but also working to create new models of community and family life radically at odds with the highly individualized and atomistic nuclear family unit-model dominant in Kerala. From these accounts, it appears that the DHRM aims at nothing less than the transformation of dalit subjectivity, through an array of new practices, including a new dress-code and this separatism has provoked much violence. Their practice of group singing, cooking for each others’ family, their introduction of a unisex dress code of jeans and black t-shirts with Ambedkar’s image have led to the circulation of horrendous stories about sexual excess. In fact, the opposition to the dress code is strongly reminiscent of the savarna anger against lower caste women’s appropriation of the savarna upper-cloth in early-mid 19th century South Travancore! They have broken from models of marriage, refusing to call it ‘vivaham’(which is a sacrament) and referring to it as ‘cheral’ (joining); they view it as an instrument of breaking down inter-caste differences among the dalits. They also destabilize given caste identities, referring to members of the pulaya or kurava caste not with the usual ‘pulayanmar’ (the pulayas) or ‘kuravanmar’ (the kuravas), but as ‘pulayaraakkappettavar’ (‘those who have been made pulayas’) and ‘kuravaraakkappettavar’(‘those who have been made kuravas’). They have refused the dominant mode in which the dalits have been inducted into the present neo-liberal welfarist regime in Kerala — as the passive recipient of welfare informed by the ideology of self-help by remaining sceptical of the virtues of State-sponsored microfinance. No wonder that the panchayat, the police, the Siva Sena, and other major political forces, have all ganged up to strangle the DHRM.

And the Siva Sena is not alone; just the other day, savarna terror has been unleashed at Kattappana in the Idukki district. Here, a memorial had been erected many years back to Ambedkar by a dalit on a small piece of land he had received. Recently, dalit youth in the locality gathered to renovate the memorial which had fallen into disrepair in preparation for celebrations on December 6. The panchayat, however, claimed that the land belongs to it — and erected a barbed wire fence around it. Dalit youth broke through the fence on December 6 and garlanded the Ambedkar statue. The retaliation was swift: cases were slapped on several dalits including the wife and college-going daughter of the owner of the land, apparently on the complaint that dalits were squatting on government land. The CPM-run panchayat then demolished the memorial with a JCB, and carted off the Ambedkar statue in a waste-collection van before a watching crowd! It appears beyond doubt that the murderous enmity towards the dalits stems directly from their efforts to create cultural capital for themselves — and of course the dominant media is yet to find anything significantly newsworthy in this.

I think there are important lessons to be learned from these experiences. On the one hand, any serious effort to shape resistant subjectivities in Kerala that work against the dominant individualising logic of neoliberal welfare and depoliticisation, which do garner some success are bound to face vehement attacks. Dalit identity politics and dalit public intellectuals have managed to carve for themselves some space, however limited, in Kerala’s political public. It is important for movements like the DHRM to build active links with these forces — strategically, the effort to start from the scratch, which the DHRM has undertaken, needs the support of the existing sources of strength in Kerala’s oppositional civil society.

(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.