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A Maoist Agricultural Center in Nepal

By Neil Horning

On the way to Chorkate, Gorkha, about a 3 hour bus ride from the district headquarters, a conspicuous facility covered with red flags is noticeable by the roadside.

Nammuna Agricultural Center is run by the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) as an agricultural cooperative, intended to teach agricultural skills and collective farming to locals and serve as a model for similar facilities nation wide. Dr. Baburam Bhattarai’s childhood village overlooks the center.

The cooperative raises buffalo and pigs, farms fish and grows rice and vegetables. According to members, Sarmila Bagle and Hari Khanal, 20-30 Maoist cadres work in the center, with locals (paid 100-400 Rupees or about $1.50 to $6.00 a day) comprising an additional half of the workforce. Gender balance rests at 50%. Cooking is done on a rotational basis involving both men and women, and decisions are made through semi-regular meetings of the members.

Agricultural cooperatives are the first step in a Maoist development strategy known as collectivization, in where the manpower from individual plots is pooled to increase efficiency of production. In China, first land titles were distributed to peasants as part of a land reform process. Next, peasants with individual plots were encouraged to voluntarily join agricultural cooperatives which were later combined into massive communes. The initial stages of this plan met with measured success, while the later stages during the great leap forward have been blamed for massive famines and are the subject of much controversy.

Waiting for the bus in Chorkate. The Maoists have built a bus shelter dedicated to local martyrs here.

A viewpoint overlooking the cooperative

The beautiful valley surrounding the facility.

A closer view from above

the main hall

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao oversee whatever is broadcast from the speaker, left. For the record, Mao rated Stalin at 70%.

Member, Hari Khanal, presents the wall of martyrs.

Maoist development plans.

Member, Sarmila Bagle, presented with an opportunity to add to the report. Neither Hari nor Sarmila were interested in giving their personal stories, but Sarmila was a student known to one of the local teachers. A rough translation of her writing:

- Our party is the one true communist party in Nepal
- We follow the people who have the ideas to develop Nepal
- We have plans to give food, clothing, shelter, health care, and employment to everyone.
- All the people are our followers, and we need to do everything for the people.
- By developing a small piece of land we want to develop the whole country.

The buffalo stay here for the night.

Bhattarai assures Maoists will not pick up arms again

Nepal News, November 5, 2009

Amid speculations in the political fraternity that the Unified CPN (Maoist) is preparing for a people’s revolt to capture the state, a senior Maoist leader has clarified his party is committed to peace and not planning for any revolt.

Maoist vice-chairman Dr. Baburam Bhattarai called editors of some major media outlets at a hotel in Kamaladi, Kathmandu, Wednesday afternoon, and answered the latter’s questions on some burning issues related to the party.

Taking up arms again will only invite foreign intervention in Nepal and that will make this country another Afghanistan, said Bhattarai, adding that the Maoists are very aware of regional geopolitics and will not let Nepal take the Afghan road.

Bhattarai also said, leading the government was not his party’s priority.

However, at another programme the same day, Maoist party chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal said Maoists will be in power soon.

As the largest party in the parliament our demand to be allowed to lead the government is very much “legitimate”, he explained.

Bhattarai further said the priority of this agitation was to make Nepali Congress and CPN (UML) agree on the fundamental issues of “civilian supremacy”.

He also conceded it was a mistake not to include Nepali Congress in the Maoist-led government last year.

Had we included NC in the government then, the nation’s politics would have moved with consensus and present crisis would have been averted, Bhattarai said.

Defending allegations that the Maoists had instigated ethnic and caste-based conflict, Bhattarai said his party’s policy was wrongly explained and perceived by the public.

We have not said the federal units should be carved out based on ethnicity or caste, all we have said is the units should be named from the community dominant in a particular area, said Bhattarai, citing examples that the party had been calling for Magarat state, and not a Magar state or a Limbuwan state and not a Limbu state.

Bhattarai’s initiative to clarify such issues at a posh hotel in Kathmandu comes a day after the dinner meeting at UML leader KP Oli’s house in Balkot, Bhaktapur.

At the meeting, Bhattarai also explained that the take over of Dhankuta municipality by his party’s cadres was not as per the party’s central policy and that the party would probe the incident to identify the guilty and appropriate take action.

PLGA unit in Chhattisgarh

COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST), CENTRAL COMMITTEE

Press Release, October 30, 2009

CHIDAMBARAM CANNOT FOOL PEOPLE WITH THE DRAMA OF TALKS AT GUN-POINT!

AS LONG AS STATE TERROR AND MASSACRES OF UNARMED ADIVASIS CONTINUE THERE IS NO QUESTION OF TALKS!!

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister Chidambaram have been putting forth the most absurd proposal for talks with the CPI (Maoist) provided the latter abjured violence. While amassing thousands of paramilitary forces in the Maoist-dominated areas in the country and carrying out brutal attacks against unarmed adivasi people and the Maoist revolutionaries, they are shamelessly talking of violence by Maoists.

According to the grand plan of the reactionary rulers a total of 75,000 central forces, assisted by tactical air support by IAF choppers, will go to war by the end of this month. An equal number of police forces from the states will join these central forces to carry out the biggest ever military offensive against the people in general and the Maoists in particular. While deploying such a huge force, which is greater in size than the armies of most countries in the world, Chidambaram is trying to fool the people that he is not going to war with the Maoists.

It is the state terror, saffron terror, and state-sponsored terror that have become the greatest threat to peace and security in our country. The Congress-led UPA government has to its credit the massacre of over 2000 people and Maoist revolutionaries in the past five years. And yet, Manmohan and Chidambaram have the audacity to say that their government is implementing the “rule of law” and ask the Maoists to lay down arms and sit for talks.

Asking Maoists to lay down arms as a pre-condition for talks shows the utter ignorance of Manmohan and Chidambaram regarding the historical and socio-economic factors that had given rise to the Maoist movement or are too intoxicated by the brute force they possess by which they dream they can stamp out a movement rooted in the socio-economic causes. The CC, CPI (Maoist), makes it crystal-clear that laying down arms means a betrayal of the people’s interests. We have taken up arms for the defence of people’s rights and for achieving their liberation from all types of exploitation and oppression. As long as oppression and exploitation exist, people will continue to be armed in ever greater number.  However, an agreement could be reached by both sides on a cease-fire if Manmohan and Chidambaram give up their irrational, illogical, impractical, absurd and obstinate stand that the Maoists should abjure violence. They should be introspective and decide whether they are prepared to abjure state terror and unbridled violence on the people. If at all they are serious about talks then they should first create a conducive atmosphere by earnestly implementing at least what is guaranteed by the Indian constitution by which they swear.

They should stop illegal abductions of Maoists and people suspected to be supporting Maoists. They should put an immediate halt to torture and murder of unarmed people, instruct their so-called security forces to desist from raping women in Maoist-dominated areas, abandon their policy of destroying the property of the people and burning adivasi villages. They should withdraw the police and para-military camps from the school buildings, panchayat community buildings and from the interior areas so as to instill a sense of security among the people.

They should disband the state-sponsored armed vigilante gangs like salwa judum, sendra, gram suraksha samiti, nagarik suraksha samiti, shanti sena, harmad bahini, and other blood-thirsty mercenary gangs that are unconstitutionally established by the police top brass and the ruling class parties. An impartial judicial commission of enquiry should be formed to go into the inhuman atrocities by the police, CRPF, other central forces and the vigilante gangs on Maoists and the people at large and basing on the investigations the culprits should be punished as per the law.

All those arrested for being Maoists or on suspicion of aiding the Maoists, including people in particular who do not have any connection with our organisation, should be released unconditionally. They should repeal all draconian laws and Acts such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), Chhattisgarh Special Powers Act, Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), etc.  They should disband the government-organised concentration camps in the name of rehabilitation of the adivasis displaced from their villages, pay adequate compensation to over two lakh adivasis who were forcibly displaced by the salwa judum gangs and the CRPF-police combine. All those who have become victims of state and state-sponsored terror, i.e., those who were murdered, maimed, raped and pushed into a state of mental trauma should be given adequate compensation.

As for socio-economic issues, the lands of the tribals should be handed back to them wherever they are snatched from them; the mining and other so-called development projects that lead to displacement of the tribals and destruction of their way of life should be immediately disbanded. All the MOUs signed with the imperialist MNCs like Vedanta and the big business houses like the Tatas, Mittals, Essar, Jindal, etc should be scrapped.

The much trumpeted policy of Special Economic Zones which is nothing but to create enclaves of foreign occupation and imperialist plunder that ruin havoc in the social, economic, ecologic and cultural lives of the people living in these areas should be immediately scrapped along with the colonial policy of land acquisition. The lands snatched away from the tribals by unscrupulous landlords, other non-adivasis, and by the government should be restored to their rightful owners. If these are fulfilled, then one can think of talks to discuss on the deeper issues that are blocking the real development of our country.

The CC, CPI (Maoist) unequivocally asserts that the government’s proposal for peace talks is only a propaganda ploy that in no way differs from the peace proposals of Hitler prior to World War II. After the Cabinet Committee on Security had given the final approval for the massive offensive against the Maoists, after the IAF choppers are ready with the Garuda commandos and gunships to pulverize the adivasi areas, these war-mongers are talking of peace! We appeal to all democratic and peace-loving forces to expose the hypocrisy and double-speak of Manmohan, Chidambaram, Raman Singh, Buddhadeb and others and oppose their war preparations against the oppressed downtrodden people of our country who are waging a struggle for land, livelihood and liberation from inhuman feudal and imperialist exploitation.

Azad,

Spokesperson,

Central Committee,

CPI(Maoist)

Protest against Centre’s anti-Maoist operation

Protestors termed it a ploy of the State to exert control over the mineral-rich regions of the country inhabited by the tribal populace


Akash Bisht and Sadiq Naqvi, Hard News, Delhi, November 3, 2009

The central government’s plan to launch an offensive against the Maoists is facing stiff opposition from all quarters. A students’ group held a protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi against the Operation Green Hunt. Apart from students, the gathering saw workers and professionals raise their voice against the offensive and in support of the development of the tribals. The agitators claimed that it’s a war of the people against exploitation by the neo-liberal State.

The protest was organised by the Forum against War on People, a newly formed initiative of students, teachers and other professionals and the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF).

Even as the home ministry is urging a section of intellectuals to rethink their pro-Maoist stand, the agitators seemed undeterred. “Much like the US government which sent 1.5 lakh soldiers to occupy Iraq and one lakh troops to Afghanistan, the Indian government, too, is sending one lakh troops to wage a war against its own people,” a statement by RDF said.

The protestors termed it a ploy of the State to exert control over the mineral-rich regions of the country inhabited by the tribal populace. “The booty of the war will be handed over to imperialist countries, particularly the US,” the statement by RDF read. According to them, if the tribals don’t pick up arms they will end up facing extinction like the Red Indians of America.

Post-2001, state governments have been competing for foreign direct investment. Subsequently, several MoUs were signed between big business houses and various state governments. “The Maoist movement has successfully organised the masses to fight for the scrapping of these agreements,” the statement by RDF read.

“We demand that the State withdraw the army, stop the war, revoke all MoUs and prevent multinationals from plundering the mineral resources. The main aim of the Operation Green Hunt is to forcibly evict the tribals for foreign investors because,” said SAR Geelani.

He claimed that the Maoists are adivasis, who are being forced to abandon their lands. They have suffered due to brutalities of the State for decades. Geelani, however, said that the Maoists shouldn’t have any problems in having unconditional talks with the Centre.

“The government has laid a condition for the Maoists to shun violence and then hold talks. Why should Maoists do that when the State hasn’t shown any interest in shunning violence?” Geelani said.

Govt puts security agencies on high alert

Nepal News, November 3, 2009

The government has directed all four security agencies to stay on high alert in the wake of nationwide protests launched by the Unified CPN (Maoist).

A marathon meeting of the Council of Ministers held in Singha Durbar Tuesday afternoon arrived at the decision to put the security mechanisms on high alert.

Chief of Army Staff Chhattraman Singh Gurung, Inspector General of Armed Police Force (APF) Sanat Kumar Basnet, Inspector General of Nepal Police Ramesh Chand Thakuri, and National Investigation Department (NID) chief Ashok Dev Bhatta were also invited at the cabinet meeting.

At the meeting chaired by Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, the security chiefs were asked to take necessary measures to control any critical situation during the Maoist protests, it is learnt.

Meanwhile, communication minister and government spokesperson Shankar Pokharel, who left the meeting early, told reporters that the government had concluded that the Maoists were violating the peace accord. He added that the government would be forced to deploy army if the Maoist protests took a violent turn.

The Maoists declared nationwide protest movement beginning November 1 as part of their campaign to restore ‘civilian supremacy’. The Maoist party has announced plans to picket Singha Durbar with a crowd of 100 thousand people and choke the capital valley by enforcing a blockade, among others.

Lalgarh’s PCPA turns into armed outfit, loots weapons

Times of India,

October 26, 2009

LALGARH: People’s Committee against Police Atrocities, the Lalgarh tribal forum that has all along denied links with Maoists, announced on Monday that it has turned into an armed outfit, ‘Sidhu Kanu Gana Militia’. The announcement came with the claim that PCPA members had looted 10 firearms by raiding a CPM armed rally in Goaltore.

PCPA spokesperson Asit Mahato, who replaced Chhatradhar Mahato, said the tribal forum would “no longer continue democratic processes of rallies and agitations”. “We have formed the People’s Militia Force,” he said. “After facing continuous torture by the joint forces and the administration in Jangalmahal, PCPA has decided to pick up arms to combat the forces.”

PCPA had been carrying out a ‘democratic movement’ since November 2008 when it was raised to protest ‘arbitrary arrests’ in the wake of the ambush on the chief minister’s convoy.

Just after the Sankrail attack, Maoist leader Kishanji had warned that villagers were looking for firearms to take on the forces and that the weapons looted from the police station were being distributed among them.

Since Monday morning, security forces on routine patrol were surprised to face strong resistance in villages like Teshkan, Makli and Hiraban-dh. Villagers seemed to be firing on security forces, which puzzled officers until Mahato came out with the statement. Soon after that, the militia opened fire on the Dharampur police camp, triggering a gunfight till late in the night.

Mahato threatened that the militia would soon hit state and central offices and government agencies. He called for an indefinite strike in Jangalmahal from Tuesday. “Police have rounded up over 350 common villagers and charged them with sedition and murder. They did not even spare elderly women. They are occupying schools, depriving our children of education. They torture villagers every day,” alleged Mahato.

Senior police officers didn’t make much of the threat. “Mahato’s announcement indicates that the reins of the Lalgarh movement are in the hands of Maoists. It will now be easy for us to pick up PCPA members who’ve been working for guerrillas for the past year under the guise of PCPA,” said a senior officer.
“If they’ve turned into a militia, they can no more claim innocence as mere villagers. Our task will be easier,” DGP Bhupinder Singh said. TOI

The heart of India is under attack

To justify enforcing a corporate land grab, the state needs an enemy – and it has chosen the Maoists

Arundhati Roy, The Guardian UK, October 30, 2009

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain.  For the Kondh it’s as though god had been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.

If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed, too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly under attack.

In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, “So what? Someone has to pay the price of progress.” Some even say, “Let’s face it, these are people whose time has come. Look at any developed country – Europe, the US, Australia – they all have a ‘past’.” Indeed they do. So why shouldn’t “we”?

In keeping with this line of thought, the government has announced Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly against the “Maoist” rebels headquartered in the jungles of central India. Of course, the Maoists are by no means the only ones rebelling. There is a whole spectrum of struggles all over the country that people are engaged in–the landless, the Dalits, the homeless, workers, peasants, weavers. They’re pitted against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people’s land and resources. However, it is the Maoists that the government has singled out as being the biggest threat.

Two years ago, when things were nowhere near as bad as they are now, the prime minister described the Maoists as the “single largest internal security threat” to the country. This will probably go down as the most popular and often repeated thing he ever said. For some reason, the comment he made on 6 January, 2009, at a meeting of state chief ministers, when he described the Maoists as having only “modest capabilities”, doesn’t seem to have had the same raw appeal. He revealed his government’s real concern on 18 June, 2009, when he told parliament: “If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected.”

Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist party of India (Maoist) – CPI (Maoist) – one of the several descendants of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising and was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian state. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004, 1.5 million people attended their rally in Warangal.)

But eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly. They left a violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest supporters into harsh critics. After a paroxysm of killing and counter-killing by the Andhra police as well as the Maoists, the PWG was decimated. Those who managed to survive fled Andhra Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in the heart of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been working there for decades.

Not many “outsiders” have any first-hand experience of the real nature of the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent interview with one of its top leaders, Comrade Ganapathy, in Open magazine, didn’t do much to change the minds of those who view the Maoists as a party with an unforgiving, totalitarian vision, which countenances no dissent whatsoever. Comrade Ganapathy said nothing that would persuade people that, were the Maoists ever to come to power, they would be equipped to properly address the almost insane diversity of India’s caste-ridden society. His casual approval of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka was enough to send a shiver down even the most sympathetic of spines, not just because of the brutal ways in which the LTTE chose to wage its war, but also because of the cataclysmic tragedy that has befallen the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, who it claimed to represent, and for whom it surely must take some responsibility.

Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called independence, have not had access to education, healthcare or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.

If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to “develop” their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.

Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually overthrow the Indian state, right now even they know that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.

In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a report called “Development Challenges in Extremist-Affected Areas”. It said, “the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis. Its emergence and growth need to be contextualised in the social conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions. Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power by force, in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local development.” A very far cry from the “single-largest internal security threat”.

Since the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody, from the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most sold-out newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to concede that it is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at the root of the problem. But instead of addressing that problem, which would mean putting the brakes on this 21st-century gold rush, they are trying to head the debate off in a completely different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious outrage about Maoist “terrorism”. But they’re only speaking to themselves.

The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to … They’re out there. They’re fighting. They believe they have the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve justice.

In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe from these dangerous people, the government has declared war on them. A war, which it tells us, may take between three and five years to win. Odd, isn’t it, that even after the Mumbai attacks of 26/11, the government was prepared to talk with Pakistan? It’s prepared to talk to China. But when it comes to waging war against the poor, it’s playing hard.

It’s not enough that special police with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and Scorpions are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. It’s not enough that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF) and the notorious Naga Battalion have already wreaked havoc and committed unconscionable atrocities in remote forest villages. It’s not enough that the government supports and arms the Salwa Judum, the “people’s militia” that has killed and raped and burned its way through the forests of Dantewada leaving 300,000 people homeless or on the run. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan border police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven). Obviously, these decisions were taken a while ago. Surveys have been done, sites chosen. Interesting. War has been in the offing for a while. And now the helicopters of the Indian air force have been given the right to fire in “self-defence”, the very right that the government denies its poorest citizens.

Fire at whom? How will the security forces be able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist sympathisers valid targets? When I was in Dantewada, the superintendent of police showed me pictures of 19 “Maoists” that “his boys” had killed. I asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists. He said, “See Ma’am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol bottles, all these things from outside.”

What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we ever know? Not much news comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been cordoned off. Those who try to go in are being beaten and arrested. And called Maoists, of course. In Dantewada, the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram, a Gandhian ashram run by Himanshu Kumar, was bulldozed in a few hours. It was the last neutral outpost before the war zone begins, a place where journalists, activists, researchers and fact-finding teams could stay while they worked in the area.

Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent weapon. Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its steady supply of planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about “Islamist terrorism” with planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about “Red terrorism”. In the midst of this racket, at ground zero, the cordon of silence is being inexorably tightened. The “Sri Lanka solution” could very well be on the cards. It’s not for nothing that the Indian government blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers.

The first move in that direction is the concerted campaign that has been orchestrated to shoehorn the myriad forms of resistance taking place in this country into a simple George Bush binary: If you are not with us, you are with the Maoists. The deliberate exaggeration of the Maoist “threat” helps the state justify militarisation. (And surely does no harm to the Maoists. Which political party would be unhappy to be singled out for such attention?) While all the oxygen is being used up by this new doppelganger of the “war on terror”, the state will use the opportunity to mop up the hundreds of other resistance movements in the sweep of its military operation, calling them all Maoist sympathisers.

I use the future tense, but this process is well under way. The West Bengal government tried to do this in Nandigram and Singur but failed. Right now in Lalgarh, the Pulishi Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee or the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities – which is a people’s movement that is separate from, though sympathetic to, the Maoists – is routinely referred to as an overground wing of the CPI (Maoist). Its leader, Chhatradhar Mahato, now arrested and being held without bail, is always called a “Maoist leader”. We all know the story of Dr Binayak Sen, a medical doctor and a civil liberties activist, who spent two years in jail on the absolutely facile charge of being a courier for the Maoists. While the light shines brightly on Operation Green Hunt, in other parts of India, away from the theatre of war, the assault on the rights of the poor, of workers, of the landless, of those whose lands the government wishes to acquire for “public purpose”, will pick up pace. Their suffering will deepen and it will be that much harder for them to get a hearing.

Once the war begins, like all wars, it will develop a momentum, a logic and an economics of its own. It will become a way of life, almost impossible to reverse. The police will be expected to behave like an army, a ruthless killing machine. The paramilitary will be expected to become like the police, a corrupt, bloated administrative force. We’ve seen it happen in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. The only difference in the “heartland” will be that it’ll become obvious very quickly to the security forces that they’re only a little less wretched than the people they’re fighting. In time, the divide between the people and the law enforcers will become porous. Guns and ammunition will be bought and sold. In fact, it’s already happening. Whether it’s the security forces or the Maoists or noncombatant civilians, the poorest people will die in this rich people’s war. However, if anybody believes that this war will leave them unaffected, they should think again. The resources it’ll consume will cripple the economy of this country.

Last week, civil liberties groups from all over the country organised a series of meetings in Delhi to discuss what could be done to turn the tide and stop the war. The absence of Dr Balagopal, one of the best-known civil rights activists of Andhra Pradesh, who died two weeks ago, closed around us like a physical pain. He was one of the bravest, wisest political thinkers of our time and left us just when we needed him most. Still, I’m sure he would have been reassured to hear speaker after speaker displaying the vision, the depth, the experience, the wisdom, the political acuity and, above all, the real humanity of the community of activists, academics, lawyers, judges and a range of other people who make up the civil liberties community in India. Their presence in the capital signalled that outside the arclights of our TV studios and beyond the drumbeat of media hysteria, even among India’s middle classes, a humane heart still beats. Small wonder then that these are the people who the Union home minister recently accused of creating an “intellectual climate” that was conducive to “terrorism”. If that charge was meant to frighten people, it had the opposite effect.

The speakers represented a range of opinion from the liberal to the radical left. Though none of those who spoke would describe themselves as Maoist, few were opposed in principle to the idea that people have a right to defend themselves against state violence. Many were uncomfortable about Maoist violence, about the “people’s courts” that delivered summary justice, about the authoritarianism that was bound to permeate an armed struggle and marginalise those who did not have arms. But even as they expressed their discomfort, they knew that people’s courts only existed because India’s courts are out of the reach of ordinary people and that the armed struggle that has broken out in the heartland is not the first, but the very last option of a desperate people pushed to the very brink of existence. The speakers were aware of the dangers of trying to extract a simple morality out of individual incidents of heinous violence, in a situation that had already begun to look very much like war. Everybody had graduated long ago from equating the structural violence of the state with the violence of the armed resistance.

In fact, retired Justice PB Sawant went so far as to thank the Maoists for forcing the establishment of this country to pay attention to the egregious injustice of the system. Hargopal from Andhra Pradesh spoke of his experience as a civil rights activist through the years of the Maoist interlude in his state. He mentioned in passing the fact that in a few days in Gujarat in 2002, Hindu mobs led by the Bajrang Dal and the VHP had killed more people than the Maoists ever had even in their bloodiest days in Andhra Pradesh.

People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the police repression, the arrests, the torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact that they sometimes seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People described the often dubious, malign role being played by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate prospects. Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh activists as well as ordinary people – anyone who was seen to be a dissenter – were being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms and join the Maoists.

They asked how a government that professed its inability to resettle even a fraction of the 50 million people who had been displaced by “development” projects was suddenly able to identify 1,40,000 hectares of prime land to give to industrialists for more than 300 Special Economic Zones, India’s onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what brand of justice the supreme court was practising when it refused to review the meaning of “public purpose” in the land acquisition act even when it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name of “public purpose” to give to private corporations. They asked why when the government says that “the writ of the state must run”, it seems to only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not schools or clinics or housing, or clean water, or a fair price for forest produce, or even being left alone and free from the fear of the police – anything that would make people’s lives a little easier. They asked why the “writ of the state” could never be taken to mean justice.

There was a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when in meetings like these, people were still debating the model of “development” that was being thrust on them by the New Economic Policy. Now the rejection of that model is complete. It is absolute. Everyone from the Gandhians to the Maoists agree on that. The only question now is, what is the most effective way to dismantle it?

An old college friend of a friend, a big noise in the corporate world, had come along for one of the meetings out of morbid curiosity about a world he knew very little about. Even though he had disguised himself in a Fabindia kurta, he couldn’t help looking (and smelling) expensive. At one point, he leaned across to me and said, “Someone should tell them not to bother. They won’t win this one. They have no idea what they’re up against. With the kind of money that’s involved here, these companies can buy ministers and media barons and policy wonks, they can run their own NGOs, their own militias, they can buy whole governments. They’ll even buy the Maoists. These good people here should save their breath and find something better to do.”

When people are being brutalised, what “better” thing is there for them to do than to fight back? It’s not as though anyone’s offering them a choice, unless it’s to commit suicide, like some of the farmers caught in a spiral of debt have done. (Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the Indian establishment and its representatives in the media are far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?)

For several years, people in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal – some of them Maoists, many not – have managed to hold off the big corporations. The question now is, how will Operation Green Hunt change the nature of their struggle? What exactly are the fighting people up against?

It’s true that, historically, mining companies have often won their battles against local people. Of all corporations, leaving aside the ones that make weapons, they probably have the most merciless past. They are cynical, battle-hardened campaigners and when people say, “Jaan denge par jameen nahin denge” (We’ll give away our lives, but never our land), it probably bounces off them like a light drizzle on a bomb shelter. They’ve heard it before, in a thousand different languages, in a hundred different countries.

Right now in India, many of them are still in the first class arrivals lounge, ordering cocktails, blinking slowly like lazy predators, waiting for the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) they have signed – some as far back as 2005 – to materialise into real money. But four years in a first class lounge is enough to test the patience of even the truly tolerant: the elaborate, if increasingly empty, rituals of democratic practice: the (sometimes rigged) public hearings, the (sometimes fake) environmental impact assessments, the (often purchased) clearances from various ministries, the long drawn-out court cases. Even phony democracy is time-consuming. And time is money.

So what kind of money are we talking about? In their seminal, soon-to-be-published work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is $2.27 trillion (more than twice India’s GDP). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices it would be about $4 trillion.

Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7%. Quite often, if the mining company is a known and recognised one, the chances are that, even though the ore is still in the mountain, it will have already been traded on the futures market. So, while for the adivasis the mountain is still a living deity, the fountainhead of life and faith, the keystone of the ecological health of the region, for the corporation, it’s just a cheap storage facility. Goods in storage have to be accessible. From the corporation’s point of view, the bauxite will have to come out of the mountain. Such are the pressures and the exigencies of the free market.

That’s just the story of the bauxite in Orissa. Expand the $4 trillion to include the value of the millions of tonnes of high-quality iron ore in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and the 28 other precious mineral resources, including uranium, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble, copper, diamond, gold, quartzite, corundum, beryl, alexandrite, silica, fluorite and garnet. Add to that the power plants, the dams, the highways, the steel and cement factories, the aluminium smelters, and all the other infrastructure projects that are part of the hundreds of MoUs (more than 90 in Jharkhand alone) that have been signed. That gives us a rough outline of the scale of the operation and the desperation of the stakeholders.

The forest once known as the Dandakaranya, which stretches from West Bengal through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, parts of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, is home to millions of India’s tribal people. The media has taken to calling it the Red corridor or the Maoist corridor. It could just as accurately be called the MoUist corridor. It doesn’t seem to matter at all that the fifth schedule of the constitution provides protection to adivasi people and disallows the alienation of their land. It looks as though the clause is there only to make the constitution look good – a bit of window-dressing, a slash of make-up. Scores of corporations, from relatively unknown ones to the biggest mining companies and steel manufacturers in the world, are in the fray to appropriate adivasi homelands – the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and, of course, Vedanta.

There’s an MoU on every mountain, river and forest glade. We’re talking about social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable scale. And most of this is secret. It’s not in the public domain. Somehow I don’t think that the plans afoot that would destroy one of the world’s most pristine forests and ecosystems, as well as the people who live in it, will be discussed at the climate change conference in Copenhagen. Our 24-hour news channels that are so busy hunting for macabre stories of Maoist violence – and making them up when they run out of the real thing – seem to have no interest at all in this side of the story. I wonder why?

Perhaps it’s because the development lobby to which they are so much in thrall says the mining industry will ratchet up the rate of GDP growth dramatically and provide employment to the people it displaces. This does not take into account the catastrophic costs of environmental damage. But even on its own narrow terms, it is simply untrue. Most of the money goes into the bank accounts of the mining corporations. Less than 10% comes to the public exchequer. A very tiny percentage of the displaced people get jobs, and those who do, earn slave-wages to do humiliating, backbreaking work. By caving in to this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology.

When the scale of money involved is what it is, the stakeholders are not always easy to identify. Between the CEOs in their private jets and the wretched tribal special police officers in the “people’s” militias – who for a couple of thousand rupees a month fight their own people, rape, kill and burn down whole villages in an effort to clear the ground for mining to begin – there is an entire universe of primary, secondary and tertiary stakeholders.

These people don’t have to declare their interests, but they’re allowed to use their positions and good offices to further them. How will we ever know which political party, which ministers, which MPs, which politicians, which judges, which NGOs, which expert consultants, which police officers, have a direct or indirect stake in the booty? How will we know which newspapers reporting the latest Maoist “atrocity”, which TV channels “reporting directly from ground zero” – or, more accurately, making it a point not to report from ground zero, or even more accurately, lying blatantly from ground zero – are stakeholders?

What is the provenance of the billions of dollars (several times more than India’s GDP) secretly stashed away by Indian citizens in Swiss bank accounts? Where did the $2bn spent on the last general elections come from? Where do the hundreds of millions of rupees that politicians and parties pay the media for the “high-end”, “low-end” and “live” pre-election “coverage packages” that P Sainath recently wrote about come from? (The next time you see a TV anchor haranguing a numb studio guest, shouting, “Why don’t the Maoists stand for elections? Why don’t they come in to the mainstream?”, do SMS the channel saying, “Because they can’t afford your rates.”)

Too many questions about conflicts of interest and cronyism remain unanswered. What are we to make of the fact that the Union home minister, P Chidambaram, the chief of Operation Green Hunt, has, in his career as a corporate lawyer, represented several mining corporations? What are we to make of the fact that he was a non-executive director of Vedanta – a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004? What are we to make of the fact that, when he became finance minister, one of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group?

What are we to make of the fact that, when activists from Orissa filed a case against Vedanta in the supreme court, citing its violations of government guidelines and pointing out that the Norwegian Pension Fund had withdrawn its investment from the company alleging gross environmental damage and human rights violations committed by the company, Justice Kapadia suggested that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite, a sister company of the same group? He then blithely announced in an open court that he, too, had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to Sterlite to go ahead with the mining, despite the fact that the supreme court’s own expert committee had explicitly said that permission should be denied and that mining would ruin the forests, water sources, environment and the lives and livelihoods of the thousands of tribals living there. Justice Kapadia gave this clearance without rebutting the report of the supreme court’s own committee.

What are we to make of the fact that the Salwa Judum, the brutal ground-clearing operation disguised as a “spontaneous” people’s militia in Dantewada, was formally inaugurated in 2005, just days after the MoU with the Tatas was signed? And that the Jungle Warfare Training School in Bastar was set up just around then?

What are we to make of the fact that two weeks ago, on 12 October, the mandatory public hearing for Tata Steel’s steel project in Lohandiguda, Dantewada, was held in a small hall inside the collectorate, cordoned off with massive security, with an audience of 50 tribal people brought in from two Bastar villages in a convoy of government jeeps? (The public hearing was declared a success and the district collector congratulated the people of Bastar for their co-operation.)

What are we to make of the fact that just around the time the prime minister began to call the Maoists the “single largest internal security threat” (which was a signal that the government was getting ready to go after them), the share prices of many of the mining companies in the region skyrocketed?

The mining companies desperately need this “war”. They will be the beneficiaries if the impact of the violence drives out the people who have so far managed to resist the attempts that have been made to evict them. Whether this will indeed be the outcome, or whether it’ll simply swell the ranks of the Maoists remains to be seen.

Reversing this argument, Dr Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, in an article called “The Phantom Enemy”, argues that the “grisly serial murders” that the Maoists are committing are a classic tactic, learned from guerrilla warfare textbooks. He suggests that they have built and trained a guerrilla army that is now ready to take on the Indian state, and that the Maoist “rampage” is a deliberate attempt on their part to invite the wrath of a blundering, angry Indian state which the Maoists hope will commit acts of cruelty that will enrage the adivasis. That rage, Dr Mitra says, is what the Maoists hope can be harvested and transformed into an insurrection.

This, of course, is the charge of “adventurism” that several currents of the left have always levelled at the Maoists. It suggests that Maoist ideologues are not above inviting destruction on the very people they claim to represent in order to bring about a revolution that will bring them to power. Ashok Mitra is an old Communist who had a ringside seat during the Naxalite uprising of the 60s and 70s in West Bengal. His views cannot be summarily dismissed. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the adivasi people have a long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them a disservice.

Presumably Dr Mitra is talking about the situation in Lalgarh where, up to now, there has been no talk of mineral wealth. (Lest we forget – the current uprising in Lalgarh was sparked off over the chief minister’s visit to inaugurate a Jindal Steel factory. And where there’s a steel factory, can the iron ore be very far away?) The people’s anger has to do with their desperate poverty, and the decades of suffering at the hands of the police and the Harmads, the armed militia of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that has ruled West Bengal for more than 30 years.

Even if, for argument’s sake, we don’t ask what tens of thousands of police and paramilitary troops are doing in Lalgarh, and we accept the theory of Maoist “adventurism”, it would still be only a very small part of the picture.

The real problem is that the flagship of India’s miraculous “growth” story has run aground. It came at a huge social and environmental cost. And now, as the rivers dry up and forests disappear, as the water table recedes and as people realise what is being done to them, the chickens are coming home to roost. All over the country, there’s unrest, there are protests by people refusing to give up their land and their access to resources, refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly, it’s beginning to look as though the 10% growth rate and democracy are mutually incompatible.

To get the bauxite out of the flat-topped hills, to get iron ore out from under the forest floor, to get 85% of India’s people off their land and into the cities (which is what Chidambaram says he’d like to see), India has to become a police state. The government has to militarise. To justify that militarisation, it needs an enemy. The Maoists are that enemy. They are to corporate fundamentalists what the Muslims are to Hindu fundamentalists. (Is there a fraternity of fundamentalists? Is that why the RSS has expressed open admiration for Chidambaram?)

It would be a grave mistake to imagine that the paramilitary troops, the Rajnandgaon air base, the Bilaspur brigade headquarters, the unlawful activities act, the Chhattisgarh special public security act and Operation Green Hunt are all being put in place just to flush out a few thousand Maoists from the forests. In all the talk of Operation Green Hunt, whether or not Chidambaram goes ahead and “presses the button”, I detect the kernel of a coming state of emergency. (Here’s a maths question: If it takes 600,000 soldiers to hold down the tiny valley of Kashmir, how many will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?)

Instead of narco-analysing Kobad Ghandy, the recently arrested Maoist leader, it might be a better idea to talk to him.

In the meanwhile, will someone who’s going to the climate change conference in Copenhagen later this year please ask the only question worth asking: Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?

The appearance and timing of this article on the front page of the Sunday New York Times–the leading voice of the U.S. imperialists–is very significant.  The Indian military is just starting an unprecentedly large offensive in the regions of the central and eastern India where the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has a strong popular base, especially among the adivasis (tribals). These areas of Maoist support contain a vast trove of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals whose exploitation requires removing the adivasis from their ancestral lands.

A major battle shaping up on the ground and in the media.  This situation requires progressive and revolutionary forces–including those of us outside India–to call for an end to the military offensive and to meet the demands of the adivasis for economic and social development that they control.  One way you can do so is to add your name to the statement initiated by Sanhati in West Bengal, which you can read below at the end of the NYT article.

Maoist Rebels Widen Deadly Reach Across India

Jim Yardley, New York Times,  October 31, 2009

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.

“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system.

Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality. Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated.

“The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,” said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. “The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.”

India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges and even an energy pipeline.

If the Maoists’ political goals seem unattainable, analysts warn they will not be easy to uproot, either.

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India.

Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station.

Efforts are under way to open peace negotiations, but as yet remain stalemated. With the government offensive drawing closer, the people who feel most at risk are the tribal villagers who live in the forests of Chattisgarh, where the police and Maoists, sometimes called Naxalites, are already skirmishing.

“Earlier,” said one villager, “we used to fear the tigers and wild boars. Now we fear the guns of the Naxalites and the police.”

The counterinsurgency campaign, called Operation Green Hunt, calls for sending police and paramilitary forces into the jungles to confront the Maoists and drive them out of newer footholds toward remote forest areas where they can be contained.

“It may take one year, two years, three years or four,” predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable. “There is no zero casualty doctrine,” he said.

Once an area is cleared, the plan also calls for introducing development projects such as roads, bridges and schools in hopes of winning support of the tribal people. Also known as adivasis, they have faced decades of exploitation from local officials, moneylenders and private contractors, numerous government reports have found.

“The adivasis are the group least incorporated into India’s political economy,” said Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, calling their plight one of the “unfinished quests of Indian democracy.”

The Maoist movement first coalesced after a violent 1967 uprising by local Communists over a land dispute in a West Bengal village known as Naxalbari, hence the name Naxalites.

Some Communists would enter the political system; today, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is an influential political force that holds power in West Bengal. But others went underground, and by the 1980s, many found sanctuary in Chattisgarh, especially in the region across from the Indravati River known as Abhujmad. From here, the Maoists recruited and trained disgruntled tribal villagers and slowly spread out. For years, the central government regarded them as mostly a nuisance. But in 2004, the movement radicalized, authorities say, when its two dominant wings merged with the more violent Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Authorities in Chattisgarh then deputized and armed civilian posses, which have been accused by human rights groups of terrorizing innocent villagers and committing atrocities of their own in the name of hunting Maoists. Now, violence is frequent, if unpredictable, like the ambush near the village of Laheri, in Maharashtra State, carried out by the Maoists on Oct. 8.

That morning, following a tip, a police patrol chased two Maoist fighters and stumbled into a trap. Two hundred Maoists with rifles and machine guns lay waiting and opened fire when the officers came into an exposed area of rice paddies. Seventeen officers died, fighting for hours until they ran out of ammunition.

“They surrounded us from every side,” said Ajay Bhushari, 31, who survived the ambush and is now the commanding officer in Laheri. “They were just stronger. They had more people.”

The Maoists felled trees across the only road leading to the village. The police, already wary of using roads because of improvised explosive devices, marched their reinforcements 10 miles through the jungle, arriving too late at the scene.

Officer Bhushari said violence in the area had risen so sharply that the police now left the fortified defenses of their outpost only in large groups, even for social outings. The Maoists also killed 31 police officers from other nearby outposts in attacks in February and May.

“It’s an open jail for us,” he said. “Either we are sitting here, or we are on patrol. There is nothing else.”

About 40 miles from Laheri, a processing plant owned by Essar Steel has been closed for five months. Maoists sabotaged Essar’s 166-mile underground pipeline, which transfers slurry from one of India’s most coveted iron ore deposits to the Bay of Bengal. “I’ve told my management that I’ll take a team and do the repairs,” said S. Ramesh, the project manager for Essar. “But I can’t promise how long it will last.”

The Essar plant is part of broader undertaking by the government and several private mining companies to extract the resources beneath land teeming with guerrillas. Mr. Ramesh said 70 percent of India’s iron ore lay in states infiltrated by Maoists; production in this area is stalled at 16 million tons a year even though the area has the potential to produce 100 million tons.

Mr. Ramesh fretted that India’s growth would be stunted if the country could not exploit its own natural resources. Yet he also cautioned that the counterinsurgency operation was no cure-all. “That alone is not going to help,” he said. “We are not fighting an enemy here. We are fighting citizens.”

With police officers dying in large numbers and Maoists carrying out bolder attacks, the debate around the insurgency has sharpened in India’s intellectual salons and on the opinion pages and talk shows.

The writer Arundhati Roy recently called for unconditional talks and told CNN-IBN that the Maoists were justified in taking up arms because of government oppression. Others who are sympathetic to the plight of the adivasis say the Maoist violence has become intolerable.

“You can’t defend the tactics,” said Mr. Varshney, the Brown University professor. “No modern state can accept attacks on state institutions, even when the state is wrong.”

Local people are caught in the middle. On a recent market day in the village of Palnar, women balancing urns of water on their heads and bare-footed, emaciated men came out of the forests to shop for vegetables, nuts or a rotting fruit fermented to produce local liquor. As peddlers spread their wares over blankets, the nearby government office was locked behind a closed gate.

“It’s a bad situation,” said one villager who asked not to be identified, fearing retribution from both sides. “The Naxalite activities have increased. They have their meetings in the village. They tell the people they have to fight. The people here do not vote out of fear.”

Another man arrived on a motorcycle from a more distant village. Several months ago, the police raided his village and arrested more than a dozen people after accusing them of being collaborators. A few were Maoist sympathizers, the man on the motorcycle said, but most were wrongly swept up in the raid. Now, Operation Green Hunt portends more confrontation.

“Life is very difficult,” the man said. “The Naxalites think we are helping the police. The police think we are helping the Naxalites. We are living in fear over who will kill us first.”

___________________________

Please consider adding your endorsement to this very important statement.

The list of Indian signatories includes Arundhati Roy, Mahashwata Devi, Dr. Vandana Shiva and Mira Nair.

The international signatories include Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, John Bellamy Foster and David Barsamian.

Statement against Government of India’s planned military offensive in adivasi-populated regions: National and international signatories

as of October 12, 2009

Sanhati, a collective of activists/academics who have been working in solidarity with peoples’ movements in India by providing information and analysis, took the initiative to bring together voices from around the world against the Government of India’s planned military offensive in Central India.

A statement and a background note were drafted in consultation with Indian activists, and duly circulated for endorsement. Readers are encouraged to endorse by mailing sanhatiindia@sanhati.com with full name and affiliation.

To: Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister, Government of India

South Block, Raisina Hill

New Delhi, India-110 011.

We are deeply concerned by the Indian government’s plans for launching an unprecedented military offensive by army and paramilitary forces in the adivasi (indigeneous people)-populated regions of Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa and West Bengal states. The stated objective of the offensive is to “liberate” these areas from the influence of Maoist rebels. Such a military campaign will endanger the lives and livelihoods of millions of the poorest people living in those areas, resulting in massive displacement, destitution and human rights violation of ordinary citizens. To hunt down the poorest of Indian citizens in the name of trying to curb the shadow of an insurgency is both counter-productive and vicious. The ongoing campaigns by paramilitary forces, buttressed by anti-rebel militias, organised and funded by government agencies, have already created a civil war like situation in some parts of Chattisgarh and West Bengal, with hundreds killed and thousands displaced. The proposed armed offensive will not only aggravate the poverty, hunger, humiliation and insecurity of the adivasi people, but also spread it over a larger region.

Grinding poverty and abysmal living conditions that has been the lot of India’s adivasi population has been complemented by increasing state violence since the neoliberal turn in the policy framework of the Indian state in the early 1990s. Whatever little access the poor had to forests, land, rivers, common pastures, village tanks and other common property resources has come under increasing attack by the Indian state in the guise of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and other “development” projects related to mining, industrial development, Information Technology parks, etc. The geographical terrain, where the government’s military offensive is planned to be carried out, is very rich in natural resources like minerals, forest wealth and water, and has been the target of large scale appropriation by several corporations. The desperate resistance of the local indigenous people against their displacement and dispossession has in many cases prevented the government-backed corporations from making inroads into these areas.

We fear that the government’s offensive is also an attempt to crush such popular resistances in order to facilitate the entry and operation of these corporations and to pave the way for unbridled exploitation of the natural resources and the people of these regions. It is the widening levels of disparity and the continuing problems of social deprivation and structural violence, and the state repression on the non-violent resistance of the poor and marginalized against their dispossession, which gives rise to social anger and unrest and takes the form of political violence by the poor. Instead of addressing the source of the problem, the Indian state has decided to launch a military offensive to deal with this problem: kill the poor and not the poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government.

We feel that it would deliver a crippling blow to Indian democracy if the government tries to subjugate its own people militarily without addressing their grievances. Even as the short-term military success of such a venture is very doubtful, enormous misery for the common people is not in doubt, as has been witnessed in the case of numerous insurgent movements in the world. We urge the Indian government to immediately withdraw the armed forces and stop all plans for carrying out such military operations that has the potential for triggering a civil war which will inflict widespread misery on the poorest and most vulnerable section of the Indian population and clear the way for the plundering of their resources by corporations. We call upon all democratic-minded people to join us in this appeal.

Click here for list of National Signatories

Click here for list of International Signatories

Detailed Background Note for the statement

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Alastair Reith has been posting pictures from Nepal — and we will be offering them here as the new wave of popular resistance mounts this week in Kathmandu and other parts of the country. The Maoist revolutionaries have called for mass resistance to the reactionary government and the caste-ridden royalist army. We urge everyone to follow this closely and make sure all progressive people have a sense of these events and their importance.

Supporters of the Maoist revolutionary movement staging a torch rally on the first day of the second round of protests against the President’s move to overrule the erstwhile government’s decision to sack the then army chief in Kathmandu, Sunday, Nov 01 09. nepalnews.com/rh

Maoists begin second round of protests against President’s move Sunday, 01 November 2009 20:13

The Unified CPN (Maoist) has begun its second round of protests against the President’s move to overrule the erstwhile government’s decision to sack the erstwhile Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) Rookmangud Katawal from Sunday.

more reporting and pix >>

Unified CPN (Maoist) cadres staging a torch rally on the first day of the second round of protests against the President’s move to overrule the erstwhile government’s decision to sack the then army chief in Kathmandu, Sunday, Nov 01 09. nepalnews.com/rhAs part of their protest programmes, UCPN (Maoist) organised torch rallies from various places in Kathmandu including Ratnapark, Jamal, Durbarmarg, New Road, and Bhaktapur and Lalitpur, Sunday evening.

Central leaders and CA members of the party participated in the rallies along with the party cadres. UCPN (Maoist) had issued circulars instructing all leaders present in the valley to compulsorily participate in the torch rallies.

Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal led the rally in Ratnapark, politburo member Pampha Bhusal led the rally in Lalitpur and politburo member Shakti Bahadur Basnet led the rally in Bhaktapur.

The rally in Kathmandu converged in New Road. Security had been heightened in Kathmandu during the torch rally.

Traffic as well has movement of pedestrians was adversely affected due to the rallies.

The Maoists have announced various protest programmes including sit-in protests, demonstrations, picketing of government offices, declaration of autonomous federal units and embargo in Kathmandu valley for 15 days beginning today.

The Maoists started the agitation after several rounds of talks with ruling parties Nepali Congress and CPN (UML) failed to reach any consensus. The Maoists had demanded that the President’s move be discussed at the parliament and be labeled ‘wrong’ in one or the other way.

However, NC and UML did not agree to the same saying the statutes and the Interim Constitution could be amended clarifying the jurisdiction of the President instead.

Maoist leaders have said they will continue efforts to resolve the dispute in a consensus through dialogues even during the agitation. Nepalnews.com

An overhead view of torch rally organised by UCPN (Maoist) in protest against the government in Kathmandu on Sunday, November 01, 2009.

REvolutionary cadre and supporters participating in a torch rally in Kathmandu on Sunday, November 01, 2009.

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UCPN-Maoist CA lawmaker Hari Lal Thapa Magar sustains injuries during the Singha Durbar gherao protest programme in Kathmandu on Sunday, November 1, 2009.

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Police baton charged the protest the bleeding CA member above was at, here’s another photo.

UCPN-Maoist CA lawmaker Hari Lal Thapa Magar sustains injuries during the Singha Durbar gherao protest programme in Kathmandu on Sunday, November 1, 2009.

Dahal warns against use of force to suppress Maoist agitation

Nepal News, November 1,  2009

Chairman of Unified CPN (Maoist) Pushpa Kamal Dahal said on Sunday that the current government is unsuccessfully trying to maintain its hold on power, although the international community has already called for the formation of “national unity government” in the country. The Maoist chairman made the remark a day after United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said a national unity government would be ‘desirable’ for timely drafting of new constitution and management of the Maoist army.

Speaking at a tea-reception organized in Kathmandu on the occasion of Nepal Sambat 1130, Dahal accused the Madhav Kumar Nepal government of being an “obstruction for the new constitution and establishment of peace in the country”.

Police baton charged the protest the bleeding CA member above was at, here's another photo.

He said that the intensity of the nationwide agitation his party is organizing from today will not wane but continue to grow until the President’s “unconstitutional move” on the Army chief row is corrected. Assuring that the party’s nationwide protest programme will be peaceful, the Maoist chairman, however, warned that if there are efforts to suppress the agitation through the use of force then its outcome would not be good.

Alluding to the remarks made by Defense Minister Bidya Devi Bhandari who has said that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement needs to be amended so that Nepal Army can take in new recruits and purchase weapons and ammunitions, Dahal said that such statements by the ministers of the current government are against the spirit of the CPA and “highly unfortunate”.