This piece first appeared in Radical Notes (Nov.2009). It offers valuable background to the revolutionary movement in India.

A more theoretical discussion of communist strategies in the Third World was recently published here on Kasama, offering background of a different kind.

India’s Maoists: Who they are and what they want

by Rita Khanna

This is meant to be a simple and brief explanation of the goals and strategies of the Maoist movement in India for people who may not have much awareness about it and are confused by the propaganda in the mainstream media. This does not go into the arcane debates about mode of production in India, the debates among communist revolutionaries over strategy and tactics etc. This aims at people who, for example, often resort to violent activities against the Government.The Indian government is launching a full-scale war against the Maoist rebels and the people led by them in different parts of the country. The initial battles, without any formal announcement, have already started. For this purpose, they intend to deploy about 75,000 security personnel in parts of Central and Eastern India, including Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. The government will organize its regular air-force in addition to paramilitary and specially trained COBRA forces. The air-force has begun to extend its logistic support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P. Chidambaram have declared the Maoist rebels to be ‘the biggest internal security threat’ to India and a hindrance to ‘development’. The mainstream media seem to have taken them at their face value.  Their publications and television programmes seem to be building a war-hysteria against the Maoist rebels regardless of the fact that this attack by the government will be directed against some of the most deprived of the Indian people. Indeed this is turning into a war of the state against its own people!

While paying lip service at times to the  notion that the current people’s insurgency led by the Maoist rebels has its root in decades of vicious exploitation of the poor, especially dalits and tribals, the blare of government propaganda tries to convince us that the Maoist rebels are dangerous , blood-thirsty terrorists determined to establish their areas of influence.  The government is preaching that the Maoists can go to any extent to maintain their influence in these areas – by either preventing the government from undertaking development activities or using the power of their guns, killing disobedient individuals.  Their ideology is to terrorize the common people, wrest power from the democratically elected governments and destroy the entire fabric of society.

The government and the media want us to believe that the only people, apart from a few romantic misguided intellectuals, who willingly support Maoists are the poor, ignorant, uneducated, uninformed tribal people. They seem to claim that no sensible, intelligent person living in a society like ours would support them voluntarily. But is this a true picture?

Could it be that the Maoist rebels are supporting and organizing the poor, exploited people to fight oppression, to establish a more egalitarian society where the wealth of our growing economy will be spread among all, not merely among a small minority. Could it be that in the name of suppressing the Maoists, the state is going all out to break the backbone of these poor peoples’ fight. Could it be that the government is planning to wage a war, in our name, against our own sisters and brothers to help line the pockets of the rich?

In this hour of crisis, we must ask those questions that the government seeks to suppress.

What do we really know about the Maoist rebels, their ideology, their plans and programs?Why does the government need to go to war against its own people and inside its own territory? Are the Maoists really blocking development? Who are these Maoists anyway and what do they want?

Let us take one question at a time?

Who are these Maoists?

The Maoists are revolutionaries mainly consisting of the extremely poor people including a large number of dalits and tribals. They come mainly from the toiling masses of India and they are trying ti organize the vast population of such masses of this country. They seek to arm and train them so that these masses can resist the onslaught of the rich. In this effort they go beyond the idea that mass movements should focus on some specific issues like increase of wages, better health care, more honesty of public servants and so forth.

The view of the Maoist rebels is that the poor and exploited people must first and foremost establish their own democratic political power and their own state power in various places. This is because without controlling state power, the poor and the exploited can at most hope for only limited improvements in their living conditions, i.e., so long as it does not inconvenience the rich who usually control state power. So the Maoists mobilize the the poor to fight against the existing state, even armed fight if possible, as they consider the existing  state to be a set of agents acting for the big multinational corporations, rich landlords and the wealthy in general.

The fight is an extremely challenging and unequal one as the rich are aided by the government bureaucrats, the police and even the military. Also, contrary to what the Government and the mainstream media are propagating, the Maoist rebels are actually completely opposed to individual killings, they openly denigrate such stray terrorism-like acts.   What they have been attempting to build up is a mass movement, even armed, to take on the violence of the ruling classes and its representative state machinery.

The Maoist movement was born in India in the late 1960′s, after a radical section of political workers broke away mainly from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) because they felt the CPIM and other such parties like CPI, RSP, etc. had discredited themselves with their opportunist politics of placating and compromising with the rich. The movement has a long history of development. The present party CPI (Maoist), came into being in 2004 by the merger of a number of fraternal organizations.

Is Development in India arrested because the Maoist rebels are blocking it?

What is the state of the people of India at present? With its current high rate of growth, this is also a country of abject poverty and extreme inequality. Home to 24 billionaires (second largest in Asia according to Forbes), India can also boast of 230 million people who go to bed on a half empty stomach (World Hunger Report).

A country whose economy grows at 9% cannot feed its own population – at least 50% of the people live below the official poverty line and 47% of the children below the age of three are underweight (World Bank report, Undernourished children: A call for reform and action). In this so called ‘hub of knowledge economy’, only  11% of the total population can afford higher education and 50% of the students drop out before class eight to start living as casual labourers (Education Statistics, Ministry of Human Resource Development). This is true of most of India  not just the areas where Maoist influence and control is high. Then how can we say that development in India is being blocked by the Maoiswts?

Maoists do not oppose ‘development’ at all, they only oppose the ‘pro-rich development’ at the expense of destitution or often total destruction of the poor. For example, in Dandakaranya region of Chhattisgarh they oppose setting up of  helipads but there, the poor themselves, led by the Maoist rebels , have built  irrigation tanks and wells for help in agriculture something the Indian government did not bother to do. The Indian government routinely blames the Maoist rebels that they blow up schools! But what the government tries to suppress is that these blown-up school buildings were actually being used or requisitioned to become camps for security personnel!

And what changes to they want? Why do they want these changes?

1) Overhauling the entire structure of oppression instead of piecemeal reforms

In addition to all the woes described above, India is also a country, where thousands of Muslims can be butchered in broad daylight by fascist Hindu forces (the most widespread and gruesome such pogrom in recent times happened in Gujarat in 2002), while the ministers and police look the other way. And these features are not stray results of the misdeeds of a few villains. The existing socio-political system in India has a built-in mechanism which ensures that the common masses would be oppressed by a rich and powerful few. Widespread systemic violence is required and is routinely applied by the Indian state so that common people remain disciplined and do not revolt in the face of oppression.

2) Land to the tillers and destruction of the landlord class

About 60% of the Indian population is still dependent on agriculture. However the primary input, land is predominantly concentrated in the hands of a few landlords and big farmers. Close to 60% of rural households are effectively landless (NSS report). The elite in the villages, by their collusion with the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats have blocked blocked any meaningful land reforms. In the last four decades the proportion of households with little or no land (landless and marginal farmer households) has increased steadily from 66% to 80%. On the other hand the top ten percent rural households own more land now than in 1951 (Source: NSS report). The Maoist revolutionaries want to change this to ensure equitable distribution of land. They do not deter from collective armed fight of the landless and poor peasants and the poor rural labourers against the existing state power for achieving this goal.

3) Freedom from moneylenders and traders

Indebtedness in rural India has been increasing by leaps and bounds especially in the recent decades. Public rural banks are closing down due to relaxation of government regulation. Therefore, instead of securing credits from public institutional sources, rural folk are now being forced to approach the village money lenders (who are often big landlords or rich farmers as well) on a larger and larger scale. Unscrupulous traders are adding to the misery of the poor peasants. They also make huge profits by buying their harvest at throwaway prices and selling them in urban areas at a premium.

Not-so-well-off peasants, in this no-win situation, of course end up needing substantial credit. Private moneylenders and various for-profit financial companies take advantage of this situation by extracting enormous sums from peasants.  Interest rage could be as high as 5% per month. The BBC News reported that more than 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997 under the pressure of such indebtedness. The Maoist rebels want to change this.

The introduction is from an interview Winter Has Its End journalists , Eric Ribellarsi and Jim Weill, did in Nepal with Tilak Pariyar, Chairman of the Dalit National Liberation Front of Nepal, an organization associated with the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

“ER: Can you start by explaining what it means to be a Dalit in Nepal?

Dalits are a community within the Hindu religion, based off the caste system. The caste system was brought here by India, and it has been spread all over the South Asian countries. People have been divided up into castes. The laboring classes have been treated as lower class people.

Laboring people have been called “untouchables”. It means that if you touch a laboring person, you will become impure. This system was adopted by the government, as well, which created all of these laws based off of the caste system. And this has been continuing in our society for about 3000 years. The laboring people are forgotten by this system. For this reason the Dalits have gathered in one party, the Maoist Party, the one party that wants to change society.”

The following article is from myrepublica, and is an example of the militant resistance of many of Nepal’s Dalits. 

Dalits Shut Down Palpa, Obstruct Highway

Republica

Palpa, Dec. 27: A Dalit organization in Palpa has called for a strike in Palpa district on Tuesday protesting the murder of Manbir Sunar.

Sunar was thrashed to death by locals in Jubitha-4, Kalikot for intruding into a kitchen of non-Dalit a few days ago.

The strike enforcers are demanding Sunar to be declared a martyr, due compensation to deceased family and stern action against the guilty.

United Dalit Struggle Committee has called for the strike and have shut all academic institutions, marketplaces and shops of the district.

Transportation services have come to a grinding halt. The strike enforcers have been rallying on the road since morning to ensure a total shutdown.

Meanwhile various Dalit organizations have disrupted transportation services in Damauli on Tuesday protesting the manhandling of a Dalit woman.

The Dalit communities have vowed to carry on with their protest until a stern action is taken against the culprits.

Maya Biswakarma, 27 of Nahala, Ghasikuwa-1 , Tanahun was beaten severely  by Ajit Shrestha and his family accusing her of touching a bucket of a non-dalit on Sunday.

Biswakarma  is undergoing treatment at Ratnahari Hospital in Damauli. She has sustained severe injuries in her face, neck and hands.

All transports along with the passengers have been stranded on the road since morning.

From a new article by Arundhati Roy:

“Capitalism’s real gravediggers, it turns out, are not Marx’s revolutionary proletariat but its own delusional cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. They seem to have trouble comprehending reality or grasping the science of climate change, which says, quite simply, that capitalism (including the Chinese variety) is destroying the planet.“

This article appeared in Financial Times

Beware the ‘gush-up gospel’ behind India’s Billionaires

by Arundhati Roy

January 13,2012

Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamount Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “pay your respects to our new ruler.”Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I’d read about this, the most expensive dwelling ever built, the 27 floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the 600 servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn – a soaring wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches, bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, “trickle down” had not worked.

But “gush-up” has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2bn, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to a quarter of gross domestic product.

The word on the street (and in The New York Times) is, or at least was, that the Ambanis were not living in Antilla. Perhaps they are there now, but people still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, vastu and feng shui. I think it is Marx’s fault. Capitalism, he said “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

In India, the 300m of us who belong to the new, post-”reforms” middle class – the market – live side by side with the ghosts of 250,000 debt ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800m  who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than 50 cents a day.

Mr. Ambani is personally worth more than  $20bn. He has a controlling majority stake in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalization of Rs2.41tn($47bn) and an array of global business interests. RIL has a 95 per cent stake in Infotel, which a few weeks ago bought a major share in a media group than runs television news and entertainment channels. Infotel owns the only national 4G broadband license. He also has a cricket team.

RIL is one of a handful of corporations, some family-owned, some not, that run India. Some of the others are Tata, Jindal, Vedanta, Mittal, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG) owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil.Their race for growth has split across Europe, central Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s largest private-sector power companies.

Since the cross-ownership of businesses is not restricted by the “gush-up gospel” rules, the more you have, the more you can have. Meanwhile scandal after scandal has exposed, in painful detail, how corporations buy politicians, judges, bureaucrats and media houses, hollowing out democracy, retaining only its rituals.

Huge reserves of bauxite, iron ore, oil and natural gas worth trillions of dollars were sold to corporations for a pittance, defying even the twisted logic of the free market. Cartels of corrupt politicians and corporations have colluded to underestimate the quantity of reserves, and the actual market value of public assets, leading to the siphoning off of billions of dollars of public money.

Then there’s the land grab – the forced displacement of communities, of millions of people whose lands are being appropriated by the state and handed to private enterprise. (The concept of inviolability of private property rarely applies to the property of the poor.)

Mass revolts have broken out, many of them armed. The government has indicated that it will deploy the army to quell them.

Corporations have their own sly strategy to deal with dissent. With a minuscule percentage of their profits they run hospitals, educational institutes and trusts, which in turn fund NGO’s, academics, journalists, artists, film-makers, literary festivals and even protest movements. It is a way of using charity to lure opinion-makers into their sphere of influence. Of infiltrating normality, colonizing ordinariness, so that challenging them seems as absurd (or as esoteric) as challenging “reality” itself. From here, it’s a quick, easy step to “there is no alternative”.

The Tatas run two of the largest charitable trusts in India. (They donated $50m to that needy institution the Harvard Business School. ) The Jindals, with a major stake in mining, metals and power, run the Jindal Global Law School, and will soon open the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. Financed by the profits from the software giant Infosys, the New India Foundation gives prizes and fellowships to social scientists.

Having worked out how to manage the government, the opposition, the courts, the media and liberal opinion, what remains to be dealt with is the growing unrest, the threat of “people power”. How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys?

The largely middle-class, overtly nationalist anti-corruption  movement in India led by Anna Hazare is a good example. A round-the-clock, corporate sponsored media campaign proclaimed it to be “the voice of the people”. It called for a law that undermined even the remaining dregs of democracy.

Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement, it did not breathe a word against privatization, corporate monopolies or economic “reforms”. Its principal media backers successfully turned the spotlight away from the huge corporate corruption scandals and used the public mauling of politicians to call for the further withdrawal of discretionary powers from government, for more reforms and more privatization.

After two decades of these “reforms” and of phenomenal but jobless growth, India has more malnourished children than anywhere else in the world, and more poor people in eight of its states than 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa put together. And now the international financial crisis is closing in. The growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out.

Capitalism’s real gravediggers it turns out, are not Marx’s revolutionary proletariat but its own delusional cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. They seem to have difficulty comprehending reality or grasping the science of climate change, which says, quite simply, that capitalism (including the Chinese variety) is destroying the planet.

“Trickle down” failed. Now “gush-up” is in trouble  too. As early stars appear in Mumbai’s darkening sky, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appear outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blaze on. Perhaps it is time for the ghosts to come out and play.

According to the following article, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal(Maoist) are legalizing land transactions that occurred during the People’s War period (1996-2006). It seems likely that many of these transactions involved the distribution or confiscation of land held by wealthy peasants. 

Maoists set to leaglise 5‚000 war time transactions

January 19, 2012

The “People’s Government” formed by Maoists during the decade-long insurgency had certified some 5,000 land transactions in the Salyan district alone, and the incumbent Maoist-led government is all set to implement it legally.

The all-party mechanism coordinated by Maoist Secretary Tikaram Oli had sent the records approved by the Maoist People’s Government in the district to the Land Reform Ministry through the District Land Revenue Office one year ago.

“We had passed the lands to give relief to the people during people’s war. We are waiting for the implementation of the government decision to recognize them”, Oli said.

As per the government’s decision, District Land Revenue offices have to endorse any land transaction or division of property in a family if it was certified by Maoists’ so-called People’s Government.

Although scores of locals have taken land ownership certificates from the Land Revenue Office with the end of Maoist insurgency, the Maoist, however, said less than 30 percent have taken them.

“They have been given the land ownership certificate and we too have the xerox,” he said.

At a time when opposition parties have been demanding government to pull out the decision to legalize war time transactions, Oli warned if the legal recognition of the deal is not implemented, the farmers will rebel.

Most of war time transactions were conducted in Bafukhola, Shivarath and Bame VDCs as they were Maoist base areas during the conflict.

In the context of revolutionary war in the Indian countryside,

While the CPI (Maoist) is busy now defending itself and its mass base of poor agricultural classesand tribals against a relentless and violent attack by the Indian state, a revival of revolutionary democratic work in the urban areas is an extremely serious issue. Once again we emphasize that a careful reorganization of the entire matrix of the working class and democratic mass movements in urban area is necessary and such a complementary movement comprising such concrete mass-political actions in the sphere of health might be one component of that.

Thanks to Joe for the intro, and for alerting us to this article. It originally appeared at Sanhati.

The Aftermath of the AMRI Tragedy: Some Related Thoughts on Democratic Work in Urban Areas of India

by Krishanu Mandal

January 5, 2012

This article provides a case for mass-political movements around health-care and expropriation of private health-care sector as one component of the revival of revolutionary democratic work in urban area.

The gruesome death of about 90 people, mostly critically ill and infirm patients, due to the fire at the AMRI (AdvancedMedicare and Research Institute) Hospital in Kolkata, India in the second week of December has made international news. This has been followed by a comparably gruesome death of more than 170 people by drinking poison-laced country-liquor in a region of southern West Bengal a few days later. The response of the common people to these incidents stimulates some introductory thoughts on diversification of democratic work in urban areas of India.

Let us take the AMRI fire incident first.

The background facts of the AMRI incident are quite transparent now. The hospital management did not inform the governmental fire services presumably because then it would have been officially confirmed that they have been violating fire-safety norms for long. Resident doctors were not present because the hospital seem to have been hiring junior unauthorized house-staff at some pittance for these jobs, a common practice in such private health care shops. Indeed, reading an account of the origin and development of this hospital is a masochistic exercise. The hospital is one of the first progenies, born in 1996, of the marriage between the greed of the business class and the CPIM, which had shed any veneer of communist ideology by the mid-1990s. The bonhomie was embodied at the personal level by the bond between Sravan Todi and Jyoti Basu. Todi, a pal of the patriarch, of course did not have to care a lot about legal use of land or safety norms for a public building. The Todis and the Goenkas and the Agarwals were not entirely ungrateful. In return of profitting perhaps billions, Basu and Subhash Chakraborty, two of the prime polluters of CPIM, were famously treated (and finally died) in AMRI, and not in any of the governmental hospitals of Kolkata where the actual proletarians perish due to lack of treatment, care and medicine. CPIM, of course, has mumbled protestations through `Ganashakti’, its Bengali mouthpiece, that they are not the sole thieves–that Trinamool Congress, during its tenure at the Kolkata Corporation, also had a finger in this pie.

The response from the administration and the “mainstream” political bodies so far has been along predictable lines. There have been candlelight vigils in Kolkata and formation of committees to oversee that fire-safety regulations are followed in public buildings. These committees are providing pious notifications to the errant institutions. When some rumblings rose about the Nightingale Hospital, another money-sucking machine in the posh part of Kolkata, governmental politicians soon assured that the hospital should continue its business as usual (yes, it gave a promise to take measures for fire-safety–just as AMRI did). The mighty police forces, who were so efficient in catching and then murdering Koteswara Rao (Kishenji), seem to be clueless about the whereabouts of Aditya Agarwal and Preeti Sureka, the high-flying, globe-trotting young scions of the Emami dynasty managing AMRI. Of course, it would be criminal for the police to torture the elder Goenkas and Agarwals to extract information as they did to Koteswara Rao (pictures here: http://indianvanguard.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/).

In contrast, the people in the Sangrampur-Magrahat region, where the mass-death by poisoned liquor took place, took swift action by themselves. They physically demolished the dens of manufacturing such liquors. The personnel of the local police station, famous for openly collecting cut-money from these liquor-based thugs (these thugs have a symbiotic life with CPIM and Trinamool Congress) locked the police station and fled.

The question that stands out then, is why, after the AMRI incident, did people stop merely at smashing the reception of another wing of the hospital. Why did they not invade the houses of the Todis and the Goenkas and the Agarwals, drag these big bosses out into the streets, punish them then and there and make them cough out fines of some crores of rupees–as allegedly happens in the famous “kangaroo courts” of the CPI (Maoist)–where justice for such blatant crimes are quick and immediately effective?

The private hospitals in Kolkata, and perhaps all over India, are almost literally “soulless, vampire bastards making money off human pain” (see Endnote 1). We do not know exactly the average rate of return for investments in private health-care in India, but the rapid pace of entry in this sector implies that the return must be abnormally high (see Endnote 2).

The very poor and destitute, of course, have no hope of ever being treated in such private hospitals and nursing homes–even though these were set up and are run, like AMRI, by direct assistance and munificence of the state governments. It is well known that, as a matter of course, such hospitals often decline to provide even life-saving emergency treatments to patients dying from road accidents nearby if they are not paid several thousands of rupees in advance (see, e.g.,http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Asia/Story/A1Story20100413-210095.html). Infuriated people sometimes react, but alas, again only by breaking a few glasses and computer monitors in the hospital buildings. And these hospitals continue to run their multi-million dollar businesses unimpeded, while some “official enquiries”, promised by disingenuous ministers (see Endnote 3) get conveniently forgotten over the years.

The people, certainly, can start taking steps for themselves in this regard. We are talking of those people who cannot pay the price of more than a thousand rupees to get a couple of X-Rays done from these private clinics and who, after waiting in a long queue in the cash-starved government hospitals, finally end up with a disfigured bone. Of those people who cannot pay several thousands of rupees for expensive blood tests and thus, may have to die undiagnosed. Of those people who cannot afford expensive chemotherapy in the AMRI Cancer Centre, who sometimes charge several thousands of rupees for injecting a blood-generating hormone and die a painful death, nearly untreated, in a local public health centre (if they are fortunate enough to get a bed). Of those people who have to mortgage their residence to have a heart-surgery done.

These people get angry at such injustice, they flare up bravely, but their anger gets dissipated and nothing sustainable emerges from these sporadic outbursts of the poor people’s justified anger.

This leads us to emphasize that health is an arena around which collective revolutionary activities can be built up fruitfully in urban parts of India perhaps with relative ease. While both time-tested class-based movements (like organized movements of the wage-labourers) and mass movements (like those against price-hike, privatization etc) are extremely necessary to fight against the relentless onslaught of the big capital and its local cronies on the common people of India, we put a tentative suggestion that generating a mass movement around the democratic demands of health-care may be a relatively easier task. First, this issue of healthcare has a universal appeal among the poor, the coalition of exploited classes. Next, unlike, for example in trade unions in organized sector, no revisionist caucus is occupying space here already, nor does there exist, in this arena, a history of betrayal by a leadership calling themselves communist. And thirdly, the spontaneity of protests by the common people against exploitation in this sector provides one encouragement.

Indeed, the space of such plausible movements in the entire matrix of urban activities of the revolutionary left has to be determined carefully by the activists with grassroot experiences. Also, the exact structure, formation and modes of operations for such activities in this sector, of course, would be shaped by concrete local conditions. However, below we give one possible avowedly utopian picture deriving from the recent and ongoing experiences of resistance movements in India.

People’s Committees at locality levels, the representative bodies of people’s power which brought about the mass rebellion against the oppressive CPIM in Bengal and which are leading death-defying struggles against multinational-imperialist aggression in various pockets in India, may be formed: People’s Committees for Health Security. Such committees can go to the various profiteering private health centres and find out how these facilities are flouting existing rules: using unauthorized structures, running commercial establishments in buildings meant for residential housing (and thus, availing cheap electricity and evading tax), dumping pollutants and hazardous substances and thus endangering the locality and so on…. Given the cheap cyber-access these days, documentation and communication of such evidences have also become easier. And then they can enforce some punishment instantly: for example, cutting illegal electricity supply will hit such private medical facilities where it hurts most as they have to switch to expensive private electricity generators. Moreover, they can also compel that the guility be fined punitively through mass agitations: thus expropriating these ruthless exploiters. The money thus collected can be spent in the local public health centres: so that these poor people themselves may reap the fruit and the functioning of these centres can also be actively monitored by such a people’s body. Quite naturally, these are steps also for establishing and asserting the genuine democratic power of the people, going beyond the periodic charades known as elections.

This sounds fanciful, utopian (and we emphasize again that the exact forms of such practices will, of course, be shaped by the relevant local conditions). Yet, the revolutionaries of the CPI (Maoist), the naxalites, have been implementing similar things for years in the more remote corners of India. Yes, such actions may require going beyond the existing legality of the Indian state: the state that kills Sidhu Soren and Azad and Kishenji, but actively arranges for Warren Anderson, whose excellent management led thousands to get killed in Bhopal in 1984, or Ottavio Quattrocchi, the noted thief of the Bofors case, to get into safety from Indian laws.

Of course we know that such assertion of power by the exploited classes will not be easy. The apparatus of the state will not sit pretty. To protect their masters, the big capital and its local allies and agents, the coercive apparatus of the state will pounce upon the poor people attempting such steps. Otherwise the Naxalites, fighting precisely for such people’s power, would not have had to take up arms and build underground organizations. The Indian state has proved that it is ready even to unleash a low-intensity civil war upon the common people to protect its interests, the interests of the exploiters. But the people can, and do, fight back.

It has been pointed out about CPI (Maoist) (and it agrees) that in very recent years this organization has been forced to sideline mass-political work, especially in urban areas. While the CPI (Maoist) is busy now defending itself and its mass base of poor agricultural classes and tribals against a relentless and violent attack by the Indian state, a revival of revolutionary democratic work in the urban areas is an extremely serious issue. Once again we emphasize that a careful reorganization of the entire matrix of the working class and democratic mass movements in urban area is necessary and such a complementary movement comprising such concrete mass-political actions in the sphere of health might be one component of that. We reiterate that launching such democratic work in a relatively virgin yet fertile territory provides another sphere where joint front among the working class, the middle classes and the students can be built up.

The Naxalites have shaken the Indian state in interior hinterlands–imported military choppers are hunting them now. Such complementary work in the urban areas would advance our revolution.

****

Endnotes:

Endnote 1: This is a telling and famous remark made by Bill Maher, the liberal American comedian, on for-profit healthcare in the context of the nationwide uproar in US over the introduction of the ‘Obamacare’ (seehttp://politicalhumor.about.com/b/2011/01/20/best-bill-maher-quotes-ever.htm).

Endnote 2: The only academically rigorous work, so far as we know, which has analyzed aspects of privately provided healthcare in recent metropolitan India is that by J. Das and J. Hammer (in 2007 in Journal of Development Economics, vol 83, pp. 1-36). It shows the prevalence of needless expenses induced by private health-practitioners in Delhi.

Endnote 3: Whatever has happened to the misdeeds of the Peerless Hospital in Kolkata cited above (http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Asia/Story/A1Story20100413-210095.html)?

The following is a discussion of a group of adivasi (tribal) people in Northeastern India who are resisting forced displacement from their land and homes by corporate mining and industrial interests.

In a span of three to four years the Jharkhandi people began to realize that the central & state governments were not for peoples’ welfare but that they were laying steps to sell off peoples’ land, their water & forest resources together with all the mineral riches to corporate houses. They decided to act. Wherever projects together with land requirements were announced, people mobilized and organized themselves and said a definite ‘no’ to the government and companies. People’s Resistance Movements Against Dispacement sprang up in different parts of Jharkhand from 2004 onwards.

Explanatory notes: an MOU is a “Memorandum of Understanding, in this case between corporations and the Indian state. A lakh is a unit of measurement equal to 100,000.

Though this piece is a great introduction to tribal resistance in India, this site does not necessarily endorse all the analysis contained within. The article originally appeared at Sanhati.

Where Ants Drove Out Elephants – The Story of People’s Resistance to Displacement in Jharkhand

January 6, 2012

By Stan Swamy

This article is an introduction to the trajectory of peoples’ movements against displacement in Jharkhand in the last few years. As the author writes, the resistance in Jharkhand has resulted in the fact that “[o]ut of the about one hundred MOUs signed by Jharkhand government with industrialists, hardly three or four companies have succeeded in acquiring some land, set up their industries and start partial production.” – Ed.

Displacement is painful for anybody – to leave the place where one was born and brought up, the house that one built with one’s own labour. It is most painful when no alternate resettlement has been worked out and one has nowhere to go. And when it comes to the indigenous Adivasi People for whom their land is not just an economic commodity but a source of spiritual sustenance, it can be heart-rending.

A very conservative estimate indicates that during the last 50 years approximately 2 crore 13 lakh people have been displaced in the country owing to big projects such as mines, dams, industries, wild-life sanctuaries, field firing range etc. Of this, at least 40%, approximating 85 lakhs, are Indigenous Adivasi People. Of all the displaced, only one-fourth have been resettled. The remaining were given some cash compensation arbitrarily fixed by local administration and then neatly forgotten.

Independent studies done during the mid-1990s reveal that in Jharkhand about 15 lakh persons have been displaced and about 15 lakh acres of land alienated from mainly Adivasi people. Needless to say, during the last 15 years a lot more displacement of people and alienation of land have taken place. Strange but true, rehabilitation of the displaced was never taken seriously by any govt during all these six decades when the process of industrialization for ‘national development’ has been in vogue. In fact there was no rehabilitation policy at all!

***
MOU-signing spree after the creation of Jharkhand
***

The real reason for the creation of Jharkhand as a separate state in November 2000 was not so much to respect and honour the long cherished wish and struggle of the indigenous people to govern themselves as per their culture & traditions, but in view of opening up the vast mineral resources to national & international mining companies whose pressure was increasingly brought to bear on the government. Quite understandably, one MOU after another was signed between the state government and various companies without any reference or consultation or consent of the mainly Adivasi people in whose land all this natural wealth is stored.

Legal safeguards meant to protect Adivasi land from being alienated to non-Adivasis such as The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908), The Santal Parganas Tenancy Act (1949), the Constitutional provisions through the Vth Schedule, The Provisions (Extension to Scheduled Areas)Act (1996), some significant Supreme Court judgments such as The Samata Judgment (1997) were and continue to be neatly ignored by the central & state govts in generously awarding vast tracts of land to industrialists at their asking. Over hundred such MOUs were signed during 2001 and 2010. Rough estimates indicate that about 1.4 lakh acres of land have been signed off. A cruel betrayal of the Adivasi people for whom land is not just an economic commodity but a source of spiritual/cultural sustenance.

***
Enough is enough . . .
***

In a span of three to four years the Jharkhandi people began to realize that the central & state governments were not for peoples’ welfare but that they were laying steps to sell off peoples’ land, their water & forest resources together with all the mineral riches to corporate houses. They decided to act. Wherever projects together with land requirements were announced, people mobilized and organized themselves and said a definite ‘no’ to the government and companies. People’s Resistance Movements Against Dispacement sprang up in different parts of Jharkhand from 2004 onwards.

Even as people stood together in the form of micro-resistance movements, the industrialists , local administration, police, lower judiciary, most of print & electronic media and the urban middle class joined forces. They began to sing the song of ‘development’ and accused the peoples’ resistance movements as ‘anti-development’. The police started to harass the leaders of people’s movements as ‘obstructing government work’ and as having extremist leanings. It is this situation which brought together activists leading anti-dispacement struggles, some socially concerned intellectuals, a few members of the media, a few folk artists, and some journalists. After a series of discussions & reflections it was decided to bring together the various anti-dispacement movements under some umbrella organizations so as to strengthen people’s struggles and to express support & solidarity to each other. Three to four such macro bodies emerged. Public meetings, rallies, advocacy , press conferences were held to educate and motivate the people in struggle. It was made very clear that these anti-displacement movements will not enter into any dialogue with the government or the company to discuss rehabilitation facilities for particular projects since it would imply that people accept to be displaced.

By 2009 it became clear that companies are not making any in roads in Jharkhand in terms of acquiring land and setting up their industries whereas they are ready with their large investments and latest technology and the only thing they want is land. The corporate houses then started to exert pressure on the central & state governments to take some drastic steps by which this stalemate could be put an end to.

***
Operation Green Hunt . . . meant to hunt out the people and clear their green fields & forests to give to mining companies.
***

A new philosophy was created to the effect that development is not taking place in the tribal belt of central India because of the ‘menace of Naxalism’ and if the Naxals/Maoists can be eliminated, the government will undertake systematic development programs and the tribal population will catch up in the developmental process. Hundreds of police and CRPF jawans were sent into the villages of the so-called “red zone”. They did not have the guts to go deep into the jungles and confront the Naxals. Instead they gave vent to their frustration on the helpless innocent village folk. They harassed them, beat them up, ransacked their houses, humiliated the elderly, dishonoured the women, arrested or shot any young person. They were not accountable to any civil authority. The peaceful life of village communities was shattered.

Protests against state repression by human rights & civic rights groups started in good earnest. During 2010 public meetings, rallies, advocacy work condemning state action against its own citizens were conducted. At the same time, resistance to displacement was also strengthened. The end result was despite the state coming down so heavily on them, the indigenous adivasi / moolvasi people steadfastly refused to part with their land for the industrialists. Out of the about one hundred MOUs signed by Jharkhand govt with industrialists, hardly three or four companies have succeeded in acquiring some land, set up their industries and start partial production. This too they did by dividing local communities, enticing them with false promises or threatening them by using hired hooligans. Most significantly, the big companies which asked for hundreds and thousands of acres of land were turned away empty handed. This is indeed a heroic achievement of the poorest of the poor against the mighty industrialist giants.

***
‘Operation Anaconda’!
***

This operation brought in a change of strategy in the state’s war against the Adivasi people. It was unleashed in August 2011. Anaconda, the huge serpent of the Amazon basin in Latin America, was the code name. A thickly forested area by name of ‘Saranda’ in Singhbhum district which had been under the influence of CPI (Maoists), was chosen as a forewarning of things to come. So now on it will not be a hunt spread out over a large area but pin point smaller compact areas as “terrorist affected” and swipe the Adivasi people out even as Anaconda swipes every thing in its way.

Thousands of police and para-military forces were brought in from the different parts of the country to do the swiping operation. Even the names of these battalions (“Greyhounds”, “Cobras”, “Scorpians”) were supposed to evoke a sense of fright among people. They were mostly outsiders who did not know the culture, language of the Adivasi people and they did not have any sympathy towards the simple village people. Their achievement during these months was three villagers dead, three in death bed, several houses destroyed and granaries incinerated. They swept through village after village, destroyed the straw roofs, drove the people out of their homes, burnt their clothes, valuables, stole their money and killed their cattle.

This cruel action of the state was brought to light and condemned by human rights activists, artists, leftist political parties, press & electronic media. An appeal was made to the National Human Rights Commission which was good enough to respond and made its investigation although its final report is still awaited.

The central & state governments have gone into face-saving exercise, ended the infamous Operation Anaconda, offered some monetary relief to the victims and is now speaking of developing Saranda villages with top bureaucrats in command. The end result of this cruel exercise on people is that the Jharkhand government has allotted iron-ore to 19 steel companies.

At the same time, the Adivasi people who have nothing to lose but the chains of state repression, will continue to resist displacement and land alienation.

***
Where lies the future …?
***

Three apparent possibilities:

1. The “red corridor” is also the mineral corridor. The state, through its war on people, may clear the mineral rich land from the indigenous adivasi and hand it over to mining corporates on a platter. The people will be driven out of their ancestral land and forced to settle down in the slums of towns & cities and eke out a living as casual and contract labour. They will lose their adivasi identity, their culture, their language, their communitarian character. The extermination of the indigenous adivasi will be complete.

2. Flocking to join the Maoist militants as the sole alternative. This is a real possibility insofar as the bourgeois state is bending over backwards to oblige the corporates rather than fulfill its constitutional obligations towards its own people, particularly the indigenous adivasi people who have been the most exploited and oppressed all through India’s independent history. It is this state which has scant regard for those constitutional & legal provisions and some judicial interventions which have sought to protect and safeguard the interests of the indigenous peoples of India.

Is there any wonder then the Adivasi youth constitute 99% of Maoists in Jharkhand and neighbouring states?

3. Drop the gun and start talking to Maoist militants. This is still a possibility if people who cherish the cause of justice will rise up to the occasion. Writers, poets, artists, media persons, human rights activists/defenders, trade/labour union activists, cultural activists, each using their own forums, can surely highlight the inhumanity in the state’s war on poorest of the poor. Justice -oriented legal professionals can well initiate legal action against the state for its violations of constitutional and legal provisions to protect the rights of the indigenous people. Advocacy work can be done with well-disposed legislators, parliamentarians, political parties. Christian churches, whose 90% membership consists of indigenous people in the tribal belt of central India, should surely raise their voice against the unjust displacement of adivasi people and alienation of adivasi land.

In short, It is time to stand up and be counted.

The Sri Lankan regime has carried out repression against the Tamil

“If the war on the side of the Regime and the State was
waged based on a political ideology and an accompanying military doctrine aimed at militarily liquidating the LTTE, along with its political-military leadership, and to annihilate the political status of the Tamil nation, if the war was waged under a military
doctrine with no regard for collateral damage in order to achieve this
objective; and with that, to consolidate a Sinhala-Buddhist
hegemonic-chauvinist-militarist State that would feed into the
political agenda of perpetuating the Rajapakse dynastic regime,
then the war itself is on trial.”

The original post appeared at Democracy and Class Struggle. Thanks to Joseph for pointing it out, and writing the introduction.

The LLRC Report: A Process of Reconciliation or Perpetuation of a

Dynastic Military Junta?

December 29, 2011

by Surendra Ajit Rupasinghe, Secretary, Ceylon Communist Party – Maoist

The LLRC Report has served to polarize an already, irrevocably, polarized society, placed barriers in bringing about reconciliation and opened the country to even more foreign intervention.  Here was a golden opportunity for the State and the Regime to come clean, on which basis the bridges of reconciliation could have been built and all foreign powers that intend to pursue their geo-political agendas by exploiting the situation would have been silenced. This issue affects all of us. It is our collective honor and dignity that is at stake. As citizens, as the supreme People of Lanka, we do not want our country to be seen as a morally degenerate banana republic. The country belongs to us, its citizens. It cannot be held hostage to any particular political agenda or regime. This issue affects our collective moral conscience, our shared sense of justice, our collective identity as a civilized human community. Therefore, we must pursue the debate, however consequential it may be.Why could not the LLRC be constituted by eminent and trusted citizens of all nationalities and communities, instead of servants of the State and the regime,  that is itself part of the investigation? Why could it not have been constituted with the participation and observation of eminent and trusted international personalities that have neither truck with foreign powers nor the regime? These questions have to be addressed with honesty and integrity.

The following is an interview with CP Gajurel, a leader of the revolutionary faction of Nepal’s Maoist party. Here, he responds to Prachanda’s recent Central Committee document. 

It originally appeared at myrepublica.com

Interview – ‘Dahal’s Paper a Surrender’

by Kiran Pun

December 25,2011

Republica: Party Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal has presented a political document at the CC meeting. What do you have to say about it?

CP Gajurel: The document has proved that our leadership is swiftly heading toward ‘rightist and opportunistic” political line. The document has justified the mistakes committed by political leadership. So, the document has adopted the path of surrender.  We do not accept it. Party Senior Vice-chairman Kiran (Mohan Baidya) will present another document from our side.This means, the document would not be helpful for party unity?

CP Gajurel: Yes. How will the party unite when the genuine concerns that have already been registered by party leaders and cadres are not addressed.  So, the document would not be in anyway helpful for party unity.

What do you think would be crucial to party unity?

CP Gajurel: First of all, the document has to clearly address the mandate of the Palungtar plenum. But Dahal’s document has neglected the mandate. He has claimed in his document that the four-point deal, the seven-point deal, army integration, BIPPA, return of seized properties, were the decisions taken by the party. But these decisions have been taken by Dahal and PM Bhattarai and not the party.

“One Western reporter compared the atmosphere in Wukan to that of the Paris Commune, a veteran Hong Kong journalist reminisced about Beijing in the spring of 1989, before the crackdown on Tiananmen. He described then an almost intoxicating sense of unity and generosity, where cab drivers drove protesters for free and thieves vowed to switch professions, buoyed  by a feeling that all was good and possible in the fleeting moment.”

This article is from Foreign Policy

The Spirit of Wukan

by Rachel Beitarie

December 23, 2011

Wukan,China – Peasants do not have a good record of facing off with the Communist Party. Rural standoffs usually end with the arrest of the ringleaders and an increased security presence for the remaining residents. Yet on Thursday afternoon, Dec. 22, residents of the embattled village of Wukan scored a major achievement in their 11-day stand-off with local government, securing the release of one of the village’s three detained leaders, the other two were released today.On Wednesday, a deputy party secretary of Guangdong Province arrived to negotiate with village leaders, promising to grant all of their initial demands: release of three elected representatives of Wukan who were detained two seeks ago; return of the body of Xue Jinbo, a village leader who died in police custody; and direct negotiations with the temporary committee, an interim governing body chosen by villagers, whose members were earlier denounced by the government as criminals. “It is totally unprecedented that a high-level official will come to talk  with protesting farmers,” one activist who came to witness events told me on Tuesday night.

In September, residents of Wukan accused local officials of embezzling more than $110 million dollars of money owed to them for selling more than 80 percent of the villagers arable land to developers, and marched on the county seat. Significantly, compared with the tens of thousands of other protests that happen across China each year, local officials fled Wukan on Dec. 11, leaving the town in the hands of the village community. Their success puts them in a risky position, as the Wukanese have challenged  not just the local authorities but a basic assumption behind Communist Party rule: that the Chinese people, and especially the rural masses, need authoritarian rule to prevent the country from descending into chaos.

Ten days into life without police or party officials, Wukan was almost peaceful, save for the array of police forces that surrounded the town.  Still, the gumption of the Wukanese may be a new model  for activism in communities across China.

After initial destruction of property of local government offices. Wukan’s temporary committee announced this to be a nonviolent protest.  The deserted police station is still locked and intact, as are the houses of local elites and families of officials, most of whom never left the village.

Villagers refrained from looting and instead focused on bringing food into the village through back roads, away from security forces that massed outside. They coordinated mass rallies, making protest signs and cooked for the hordes of journalists who descended on the village.

One western reporter compared the atmosphere in Wukan to that of the Paris Commune; a veteran Hong Kong journalist reminisced about Beijing in the spring of 19989, before the crackdown on Tienanmen. He described then an almost intoxicating sense of unity and generosity, where cab drivers drove protesters for free and thieves vowed to switch professions , buoyed by a feeling that all was good and possible in the fleeting moment.

But can the spirit of Wukan last? The small farming village of 13,000 thousand embodies social changes brought about  by more than 30 years of economic reforms in China. The first generation of migrant workers that  left their villages to work in the cities is now retiring from factory work. Many of them have returned to their villages to open small businesses or work their families’ fields. But they have found a harsh truth. Local governments, relying ever more heavily on land sales to generate income and wielding unchecked power over their citizens, have left rural residents with few ways to support themselves.

In Wuken, the protest was supported by a group of returnees, mostly in their thirties and forties, who had moved back to the village over the past few years planning to settle back into  rural life – but who have been unsettled by the pervasive corruption.

Yang Semao, 43, head of the temporary committee, came back to the village in June after a few years working in the boomtown of Shehzhen, about 100 miles away. “When I returned it became clear to me that things are getting worse here,” he says. Many of the villagers had lost much of their land in the deal, while high inflation eats away at their savings.

Until a few months ago, it was each person to himself here,” says another recent returnee, Jiang, who gave just his last name for fear of government reprisal for speaking to reporters. “Some of us petitioned but we weren’t very organized. Now we think it’s better if we act together. We become more organized, more united, with each day that passes.”

Rachel Beitarie is a freelance writer in China.