India: West Bengal chief terrified of Maoist students

The following video Mamata Banerjee, the anti-communist chief minister of West Bengal becomes angry and storms out of a television station as she suspects students in the audience of being Maoist cadres or supporters. Thanks to B and BJ for pointing this out. 

The ruling classes tremble: Maoists expand influence in Northeast India

Location of Assam within India

The following article about the expanding operations of the CPI(Maoist) into northeast India originally appeared at A critique of the times. 

The Northeast is in danger of becoming the next Maoist hub

January 15 2012

Reports of Maoists mobilising people against dams in Arunachal Pradesh, shortly after Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi had warned about ultra-Left presence in Assam, can only mean that policymakers both in New Delhi and the North-East can no longer ignore the presence of the Reds in the region. The situation in the state is increasingly worrying, especially now that captured Maoist members have reportedly confessed links to elements in the North-East.

Gogoi’s claims were not backed by reports from the ground. All he said was that two officials – one from the Assam Students Youths Organisation (ASYO) and the other from the Assam Chah Janajati Suraksha Samiti (ACJSS) – had been nabbed by security forces in Orissa’s jungles. He did not have any more incriminating information to offer, except to say that these were frontal organisations of the Maoists. Moreover, the timing of this revelation was suspect – it came close on the heels of the tripartite Suspension of Operations being signed by the Union and state governments with the overground faction of the ULFA led by Arabinda Rajkhowa.

CPI(Maoist) calls for bandh on May 16

The following is a press statement released by the CPI(Maoist). It discusses recent attacks on Maoist forces and adivasi peoples by Operation Green Hunt, as well as the role of the Indian Army in these brutal incursions. In response, the Maoists are calling for a large bandh, which is a kind of strike, enforced by the revolutionaries:

The Central Committee of our Party has given the call for a 24-hour `Bharat Bandh’ on 16 May to stop the fascist attacks on the people of the country by the exploitative ruling governments, to prevent the deployment of army in Bastar under Operation Green Hunt, to send back the armed forces camping in the pretext of `training’, to unconditionally release the adivasis and political prisoners confined in the jails of the country, and to demand the scrapping of the proposed fascist NCTC.

Bharat Bandha : CPI (Maoist)

( Comrade Gudsa Usendi, the  Spokesperson of Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee (DKSZC) of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has released a press statement on  4 May 2012. He has focused on the brutal attacks on the oppressed people of  India, by the facist   Indian Government. He stresses : The Central Committee of our Party has given the call for a 24-hour `Bharat Bandh’ on 16 May to stop the fascist attacks on the people of the country by the exploitative ruling governments…)

The Indian state is relentlessly continuing its extremely brutal attacks on the people of the country, particularly the adivasis, in the last two and half years in the name of Operation Green Hunt. The police and paramilitary forces unleashed by the ruling classes are perpetrating acts of `encounter’ killings, mass murders, sexual assault, torture, burning of villages, destruction of crops and grains, plunder of peoples’ property, wanton arrests and forced `disappearances etc. These forces have carried out the cold-blooded murder of more than 250 adivasis in the last two and half years in Dandakaranya alone. The objective of this war on people is to uproot the ongoing Maoist movement in the country, particularly in its central and eastern regions.

India: CPI(Maoist) statement on Indian state brutality in Maad

‘Operation Green Hunt,’ the Indian state offensive against the CPI(Maoist) and their adivasi (tribal) allies, continues. Indian Army special forces are now assisting paramilitaries in the effort to harass, brutalize and displace tribals; it is also highly likely that US special forces are providing training to these groups. The following document gives an account of the effects of these operations on tribal villages:

Apart from this, in every village they entered, the government forces resorted to loot, beatings, razing of houses and destruction.
In Padko village on the southern side of Indravati River, the government forces destroyed a field. People are collectively growing vegetables, maize etc in this field. In the forest nearby this village a school is being run by the revolutionary Janatana Sarkar and hundreds of government forces attacked this school. The entire students and teachers had evacuated the school beforehand fearing attack. The police camped for two days there and wreaked havoc. 

Thanks to Banned Thought for making this document available.

COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST)

DANDAKARANYA SPECIAL ZONAL COMMITTEE

March 30, 2012

 An appeal to all the democrats and patriots of our country

Condemn the brutal offensive conducted by the government armed forces in Maad !

Come forward to stop the unjust war on the most oppressed people of our country !

Indian state ‘discovers’ red Naxal village

The CPI(Maoist) has very deep roots among the people, gaining support in areas that the Indian state was, apparently, not even aware of.

The piece originally appeared at the Hindustan Times. Thanks also to The Prison Gates Are Open site for making it available.

By Harinder Baweja
April 22, 2012

Helicopters were kept on standby for casualty evacuation; targets were chosen with care after studying satellite images and the troops were warned — the encounters would be fierce and the naxals could be in the hundreds, even thousands. After weeks of planning, security forces armed with automatic rifles, satellite phones and Swedish Carl Gustav rocket launchers made their very first foray into the dense Abujhmad jungle, straddling the two states of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.  Abujhmad, or ‘unknown hill’ — 6,000 sq km of thick forest — has not been surveyed since the British.

As part of the operation, security forces had zoomed in on a map of the area with the help of Google Earth, on to a couple of structures they identified as a ‘naxal camp’. A plan was prepared to go in and take out the naxalites. The mission had a second aim — the stronghold had to be psychologically breached, since it is as much home to the naxals as it is a zone ‘liberated’ of all government control.

India: An economic analysis of the Nonadanga evictions

Nonadanga residents

Millions of people in India build their homes and shelters on land technically ‘owned’ by the state. In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress government has been selling off this land to corporations, which means the squatters and slum residents are brutally evicted. All in the name of ‘development’.  Recently officials have set their sites on the Nonadanga slum in Kolkata, attempting to displace residents and jailing all who resist. The following article in Radical Notes provides a useful political and economic analysis of the situation.

Nonadanga is at just a stone’s throw from the eastern metropolitan bypass behind such glitzy corporate hospitals like Fortis, Ruby and Desunand and plans are on to transfer the land at throwaway prices to big real-estate projects by ‘Urbana’ and IT hubs. Obviously, in such a strategic location in a metropolis, they will not tolerate slums and ‘all these dirty people’.

Nonadanga: Against Repression and Arrest

April 11, 2012

by Parag,
Krantikari Naujawan Sabha

Condemn Repression in the name of ‘Development’ of the ‘Beautiful’ !
Demand Immediate Release of Arrested Dissenters !!

The ‘beautiful’ and the ‘developed’ entwined as it is with power, must make war on its underside, the ‘ugly’, the toiling, and demolish it, hide it under the shine of corporate towers and election promises. The brutal violence of the present process of ‘development’ in India comes buttressed with State Repression. This is exposed yet again when the Trinamool-led West Bengal government with its brute police force and Kolkata Municipal Development Corporation (KMDA) bulldozed and burnt the houses of 800 slum-dwellers in Nonadanga, South Kolkata on 30th March 2012 in the name of ‘beautification’. This is backed up with continuous state repression- residents who tried to resist their homes being demolished were beaten, picked up and put into police vans. Picking up pieces from their broken homes, setting up temporary shelters with vinyl sheets and a community kitchen,

India: Support imprisoned slum residents and activists in Kolkata

We have received the following call for solidarity with activists and residents of Nonandanga who were recently arrested while defending the community. We encourage our readers to sign the petition and to seek out other ways of expressing solidarity.

Sanhati is deeply concerned by the West Bengal government’s arrest of seven democratic rights activists and its earlier detention of residents of the Nonadanga slum on April 8, 2012 at Ruby junction in Kolkata. These activists were engaged in a peaceful sit-in demonstration attended by a broad spectrum of left organisations and individuals of good conscience,
demanding rehabilitation of hundreds of residents evicted from the Nonadanga slum of Kolkata on March 30, 2012. The peaceful character of their protest is a matter of public record, documented by various media reports. We are shocked and dismayed at the response of the police forces to these democratic protests.

Kindly read and sign the enclosed petition on the Nonadanga situation.
Click here in order to sign the petition.

You may also read regular coverage of this developing story on our website Sanhati.

CPI(Maoist) 13-point list of demands

The mainstream media in India, the UK and elsewhere have spilled plenty of ink over the CPI Maoist kidnapping of two Italian tourists last week. Such coverage ignores the frequent killing, rape and displacement that Indian state forces afflict on tribal communities. While this situation may or may not be a sign of weakening Maoist influence in Odisha, we must remember the context in which such actions occur. The following list of demands, reportedly released by the CPI(Maoist) after the kidnappings, provides a much more comprehensive view of the stakes. 

Readers who may have more insight into this situation are especially encouraged to comment with their thoughts.

 

13-point demand made by Sabyasachi Panda alias Sunil (Secretary, Odisha State Organising Committee of CPI-Maoist)

1. It should be declared unequivocally that tribals are not objects of tourism and tribal inhabited areas are not tourist places. Violators must be arrested.

2. Operation Green Hunt must be stopped. Except for places where Police were posted earlier, all Police camps set up in interior areas must be withdrawn. Efforts must be made towards creation of a congenial atmosphere to address problems of the common people in consultation with the revolutionaries.

3. Ban imposed on CPI-Maoist and other people’s organisations must be revoked.

4. Superintendents of Police and Police personnel involved in fake encounter and custodial deaths of Lalit Dehury,Junesh Badaraita and Pradeep Majhi, and gang rape of Arati Majhi must be charged and tried for murder and rape.

Transcription — Arundhati Roy on Free Speech Radio News

Many thanks to Julie for this transcription.

“You cannot equate violence of the resistance with the structural violence of the Indian state which is resulting in 250.000 farmers killing themselves, 80% of the population living in poverty.  You really can’t equate the two.  And that’s what many people do. “

Arundhati Roy on the Maoist movement in India – Free Speech Radio News – 17 November 2011

FSRN: In India’s rural forests, mining corporations and state militias have launched a violent assault on the Maoist guerillas and landless tribal communities.  Activist and author Arundhati Roy spent weeks with the Maoist fighters in the conflict zone, and her time there is the subject of a new book called ‘Walking with the Comrades’.  It’s a first-hand account of the hidden side of the global economy and an analysis of a long-running and often misunderstood armed movement.  She joins us from New-York.  Arundhati Roy, welcome to FSRN.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you so much.

FSRN: Let’s begin with the region where you spent time, Dantekaranya, in India.  Describe the place and the people who live there.

AR: It’s a kind of large strait of uninterrupted forest inhabited mostly by various indigenous tribes.  In the area that I visited, there was mostly one tribe, called the Gonds.  And there, for the last 30 years, there has been a sort of incipient Maoist movement which has right now surfaced in a really serious way because of the fact that the Indian government has signed over much of this forest land, the rivers, the mountains, everything to various multinational corporations for building dams, steel plants and aluminium refineries.  There are, all together in India, about 100 million indigenous people, seriously under threat, living very very fragile lives.

FSRN: You talk about the agreements, the formal agreements, that have been made between these multinational corporations and the Indian goverment.  One of those companies that is operating in the region is called Vedanta.  Can you tell us about that company and how it operates in the area?

AR: Vedanta wasn’t exactly in the area that I visited.  They’re just coming there.  But it has signed huge agreements for the mining of bauxite in the state of Orissa.  Vedanta is one of the largest corporations in the world.  It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.  It’s leader lives in the former house of the Shah of Iran.  It is mining in areas where these indigenous tribes, the Dongria, the Gonds, live.  And it’s one of the most ruthless mining company in the world, I would say.  Actually, the process of mining bauxite and turning it into aluminium is one of the most toxic processes in the world.  Aluminium is sort of central to the weapons industry.  So, because it’s such a toxic process, it has been sort of exported out of Europe and America to countries like India.  But that process requires such a lot of water and such a lot of electricity, and it creates such a lot of toxic wastes that it devastates the entire environment where an aluminium refinery might be set up.  Vedanta is one of the companies, but there are many others as well.

FSRN: And the effects of a move like that, with the mining of bauxite, not only comes in and takes parts of the land to displace people, but as you outline, it creates these toxic pools.  There a photographs in your book that shows the effects of this kind of mining and what it does to the land.  And one of those areas is, as you describe in your book, a sacred place for the indigenous people there.

AR: Yes, it’s a sacred place and one of them is a mountain called the Niyamgiri, which means ‘the mountain of justice’.  It is as sacred to them as a church or a mosque is to a christian or a muslim.  But since they are the poorest people, whatever sacred it is to them, it doesn’t seem to matter very much.

FSRN: Another aspect of this, in addition to the influence of multinational corporations and mining, is the military campaign.  The Indian government launched a campaign called ‘Operation Green Hunt’ against Maoist forces.  It came after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called them the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country.  How does ‘Operation Green Hunt’ play out on the ground there?

AR: ‘Operation Green Hunt’ was announced in 2009.  And the shares of mining companies went up.  And then, something like 200.000 paramilitaries, heavily armed paramilitary forces began to move into the forest.  So now, as we speak, preparations are on for the army to move in.  And so we are going to witness India, which calls itself the larger democracy in the world, which has already deployed its army several times in states of the north-east, in Kashmir, in Telengana, in Goa, in Punjab, deploying it against its poorest people.  India has one of the biggest defense budgets in the world.  All this power is going to be directed against the poorest people in the country because those Memorandum of Understanding have been signed and the corporations are running out of patience.

FSRN: While you talk about the operation under way now, you point out that in 2010, the chief negociator for the Communist Party of India was shot and killed by the Andhra Pradesh state police, and that was at the beginning of a round of peace talks.  Is there a peace process now?  Where does that stands today?

AR: No, there isn’t a peace process at all now.  India’s willing to talk to Pakistan, to talk to anybody else, but not to the poor.  Right now, as I said, I think that … when one side kills the peace emissary of the other side, it is pretty clear that they don’t want to have peace talks.  But it’s going to take them a while to move large numbers of soldiers into the area.  And the army is sort of refusing to be deployed unless it has the impunity of this law called the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which allows solders to kill on suspicion.  They have that law covering them in Kashmire, in the north-east, which is why we’re now dicovering mass graves there.  But the army won’t want to move in unless it has the cover of this law.  Otherwise, it’ll just be courts and all kinds of litigations and so on.  There’s a lot of reaction against this law in India, so I think they’re going to pretend to repeal it and then put provisions into some other laws and make it apply across the country.  Because, in fact, there’s a lot of unrest all over the country.  It’s gradually becoming very militarize.  You can’t push through this free market policies without taking over people’s land, without privatizing, without building dams and so on.  In order to control a restive population, you need to militarize.  And to militarize, the security forces need the impunity.  So I think all that is being negociated now, so there’s a sort of quiet ominous silence, I would say.

FSRN: Arundhati Roy, one of the aspect of your new book ‘Walking with the Comrades’ is its questioning, its investigation, its exploration of the comrades themselves: ‘Who are the comrades?’  And although the government often paints the Maoist movement in one bright brush, you write of how the Communist movement has evolved.  That, in the beginning, under the founder of the Naxalite movement, it was stuck to a strict ideology and followed China even as atrocities were taking place in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or killings in Bangladesh.  But at least, in the area where you were, it has changed somewhat.  Naxalites are made up of largely displaced tribal people.  Primarily, it’s local concerns rather than a global ideology that motivates them.  How has the movement changed over time?

AR: As I said, there were a whole lot of ideological and moral questions that I had about their alignments in the past.  Their epicenter was China, not really the concerns of the country they lived in.  So they did keep quiet over the genocide in Bangladesh, what was going on in Cambodia.  That was unfortunate.  Now, the real question is: how Maoist are the Maoists?  Since they really are made up of… 99,9% of the guerilla army are indigenous, what we call adivasi people, 45% of them are women.  The party in the past has not had a very good reputation in the ways it deals with women within its own quarters.  I thought that had changed when I was there, I was quite impressed by the women that I met there and by how freely they spoke about their problems and what they were trying to do about it.  But I think the main question that I have right now, is, what is this battle about?  Is it a battle for a redefinition of the meaning of progress, of the meaning of civilization, of what constitutes human’s happiness?  And Communist Parties have not shown any great difference in the way they approach the environment or anything in their past, in Russia or in China.  And so I ask the comrades: you’re resisting this corporate take over now, but theoretically, if you were to come to power, would you leave the bauxite in the mountain?  Do you have a different view of development?  And I think that’s a kind of pressure that we all need to keep up because it is a question that the whole world has to consider.  Today, the planet is in crisis and there has to be a radical questionning of what is going on.  Just like America, in America, you have 400 people who own as much wealth as half of the American population.  In India, we have 100 people who own assests equal to one fourth of the GDP.  And we have 80% of the population living on less than 50 cents a day.  So something has to change radically.  The idea of capitalism, of progress, the measure of these things linked to consumption, all of this has to change.  While I support the resistance in the forest, I do think it’s time to begin to ask what exactly they are fighting for.

FSRN: Well, it’s not just those broad questions, philosophical questions, but also some of the practices.  The practices of summary executions, mistaken killings where civilians have been victims.  It’s not a movement without criticism in India.  And you bring up those issues too.

AR: I do.  The fact is that one of the problem is that the way the Indian government and the Indian security forces are trying to break the movement is by infiltrating it with informers and spies and so on.  And also the fact that the Indian legal system, the courts, are completely outside the reach of ordinary people.  So when that is happening, or if, let say, a thousand paramilitaries go and burn a village with information from somebody, you wonder who can the villagers turn to.  Because they can’t go and file a police case, they can’t go to court, the whole machinery of democracy is ranged against them.  The democracy in India is only for the middle class.  So then, this kind of system of rough justice surfaces and of course, sometimes it works, but sometimes it’s completely wrong.  And what are we to do about it?  Thses are not of course new questions.  There are questions that armed resistance and armed struggles have faced all along.  It becomes the responsibility of those of us who don’t condemn them outright to actually keep the pressure on and to question these things.

FSRN: Some of the most memorable people that you speak with and meet while you’re in the forest, and that we come to meet as readers, are women.  As you report, 45% of the members are women and that traditionnal discrimination and violence in some of the tribal communities have motivated some of the women to join the movement.  And also, once the women are inside the Communist Party, they faced discrimination over the years.  Can you tell us about one of the woman you met?

AR: Inside the forest, I met women who had watched their partners, who had had their partners being captured, tortured and killed.  I met women who had seen their families being slaughtered or who had watched their sisters or mothers being raped, and then had taken the gun.  When I was outside, I met an extraordinary woman called Padma, who used to be with the Maoists.  And then she had been arrested and she had been beaten so much that her organs were all hammered.  She had to have most of them removed.  Her knees were smashed because the police said: ‘we don’t want you to be walking in that forest again’.  When I met her, she was only in her thirties but she had to drag herself up the steps and down the steps.  But now, she’s working with an organisation of the parents, the relatives of murdered people.  And she would just criss-cross the state in whatever vehicule she could get and collect the dead bodies to take them back to the homes of the people who were just too poor to even make that journey (travel from this end of their state to the other to pick up their loved-ones who have been killed).

FSRN: While you were there, there are numbers of vivid scenes that we come across and one of them is a moment where you’re looking through a laptop, I believe it is, and through media reports that have come out.  And you find a video interview with yourself, with you detailing your own work.  I was interested to hear how people you spent time with in the forest viewed you, and how they saw your visit there and what they hoped that you would bring to the outside world.

AR: The thing is that … just in order to be invited to go into the forest required a certain amount of trust from their part.  Because, as I said, having spies and informers infiltrating them was one of the major tactics used by the security and the intelligence services.  I think what happened with me is they viewed me as somebody who was not going to just go in there and please them, and say ‘I’m a Maoist’ and ‘I’m on your side’ and ‘I believe in everything that you do’.  But as somebody who is prepared to be open-minded and prepared to criticize them, but from a position of integrity.  Not from a vested interest or from a position where I was really working for somebody else, or somebody else’s agenda.  And also not to be superficial because what happens is that, in this kind of atrocity based analysis, where terrible things are done by both sides, you tend to forget what is actually going on.  You cannot equate violence of the resistance with the structural violence of the Indian state which is resulting in 250.000 farmers killing themselves, 80% of the population living in poverty.  You really can’t equate the two.  And that’s what many people do.  The liberal Indian intellectuals just say: ‘this is bad, that is bad, poor people are stuck in the middle, so let’s just leave it’.  Even the idea of non-violence, at some point, becomes immoral.  When you are watching a violent onslaught on a people who then respond, and you just say ‘no, at any cost, you have to be non-violent’… if you were in the middle of that conflict and you said it, that would be one thing.  But from a very safe distance, to sit there and say it, I think it’s unacceptable.  I think that was it.  They saw me as somebody who wasn’t someone who was playing for popularity or longing to please the establishment, who would think it through for myself.  Even if that resulted in criticizing them.

FSRN: Questions fill your writing in this book.  Questions about preconceptions, about the role of the military or corporations, about the idea even of armed struggle, of justice, of poverty.  It’s a continual and focused inquiry that animates this book.  What questions do you still have at this point?

AR: The question now is no an analytical question so much as a question of ‘what do we do to this mantle, what we know is an absolutely destructive way of thinking, way of living?’  What is it that connects the Wall Street Occupation to the people in the forest?  And I think what connects it is absolute exclusion of the majority of the people in the world for the obscene benefit of a very few.  So after having gone through almost ten or twelve years of travelling, thinking, writing about these things, I come to some pretty simple conclusion.  One of which is that there has to be a lid on the amassing of wealth for any individual or any corporation.  I believe that this cross-ownership of businesses has to stop, like a mining corporation can’t own a newspaper and a university and a NGO and a hospital and a law school and a few television companies.  It’s just suicidal.  I think we really have to enter a period where we begin to put a lid on all of this and a cap on all of this just for the survival of, not just human being, but the planet itself.

FSRN: Arundhati Roy’s new book is called ‘Walking with the Comrades’.  It documents the weeks she spent with Maoist guerillas in the forest of India, and it brings a critical look at the violent government response to the movement.

CPI Maoist statement on the arrests and torture of activists

Thanks to Revolutionary Frontlines for publishing this statement.

Ramakrishna of the CPI(Maoist)

CPI (Maoist): “Condemn the arrests and torture of Maoist activists in Kolkata and Mumbai!”
COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST) — CENTRAL COMMITTEE — Press Release — March 2, 2012

In the last week of February 2012, the police have arrested activists of our Party including some senior cadres from Kolkata and Mumbai. On the specific intelligence inputs provided by the murderous APSIB, joint forces of police and STF of AP, Maharashtra and West Bengal have raided the shelters of our comrades in Kolkata and Mumbai suburbs and arrested at least nine comrades including two women comrades. Comrades Sadanala Ramakrishna, Deepak Kumar Pargania, Sukumar Mandal, Bapi Mudi and Sambhu Charan were arrested from Kolkata while Comrades Dinesh Wankhede, Aasimkumar Bhattacharya, Suman Gawde and Paru Patel were picked up from Thane in Maharashtra. Comrades Sadanala Ramakrishna alias Santosh (62) and Aasimkumar Bhattacharya (65) were the seniors among the arrested. Senior comrade Sadanala Ramakrishna has been working for the revolution for at least four decades. He has been ailing with serious health problems for so many years. A mechanical engineer graduated in prestigious Regional Engineering College (REC) of Warangal from where martyr leaders like Surapaneni Janardhan and Azad were emerged as great revolutionaries of their times, Comrade Ramakrishna sacrificed his bright life for the cause of liberation of the downtrodden.

Both the two women comrades arrested – Vijaya and Suman – have been undergoing medical treatment for some time staying in the shelters outside the struggle zones. Particularly, comrade Vijaya has been suffering from serious heart problems.

The police forces, better known for worst kind of cruelty, have been torturing these comrades mentally and physically in custody. They have foisted several false cases against these comrades so that they could be languished behind the bars forever.

On one hand the ruling classes are asserting that these arrests are a big success for them and on the other hand, they are trying to portray our comrades as dangerous criminals claiming that they have recovered huge amounts of cash and other material that is used for making arms.

These arrests are nothing but a part of Operation Green Hunt (OGH), i.e. the ‘War on People’, which has been underway since 2009. The comprador ruling classes in connivance with their imperialist masters, particularly with the US imperialists, have unleashed this brutal war of suppression in the poorest parts of India so that their neo liberal policies of plunder of resources could get going unhindered. They are particularly targeting the revolutionary leadership and eliminating them. As the Pentagon itself claimed recently, the US Special Forces are not only actively involved, but also assisting their Indian counterparts on the ground in the counter-insurgency operations aimed at eliminating the revolutionary leadership. This fact also shows us that the US has been patronizing in the ongoing OGH making the values such as freedom, independence, and sovereignty of our country a joke. The exploiting rulers of our country are daydreaming that this movement can be suppressed if its leadership is wiped out.

Revolutionary movement cannot be crushed with arrests and murders. The bars of the dungeons can not restrict the revolutionary ideas from spreading among the vast masses.

The CC of CPI (Maoist) strongly condemns these arrests and inhuman torture being inflicted to them. We demand immediate and unconditional release of these comrades, as well as all of the political prisoners languishing in various jails in all corners of our land. We also demand to lift all the false cases foisted against these comrades.

(Abhay)

Spokesperson, Central Committee, CPI (Maoist)

India – Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion

This article was originally published by Sanhati.  We thank them for making this available.

This is the Introduction.  In the coming weeks SAREV will publish the entire article.

Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion

Gautam Navlakha

When every abuse has been hurled and epithet employed against the Maoists, half-truths and untruths begin to acquire wings. They are diagnosed, dissected, and demonized; the intelligentsia ae reluctant to face facts. Yet we are still compelled to demystify reality  and to answer some fundamental questions: Why this war? Who are these people, the “single biggest threat” to India’s internal security. What is their politics? Why do they justify violence? How do they perceive their “people’s war”, their political goals and themselves.? How do they intend to take a leap from their forest strongholds into the world outside?

US special forces on the ground in India, stationed in Nepal

BBC News reports that US special forces are “present” but “not stationed” in India. According to a Pentagon commander, these forces are training the Indian state in counter-terrorism measures. Though the article does not mention India’s Maoist insurgency, it can be assumed that the training provided by US special forces will be used against the CPI(Maoist) and other red militants as well.

Furthermore, the Pentagon official does confirm that US forces are not just “present,” but stationed in Nepal on a semi-permanent basis, no doubt with the intention of crushing any insurrection in Nepal. It is well-known that US forces have a close relationship with the Nepalese Army, but it is disturbing that the Pentagon is now leaking this information to international media.

The article notes that “US teams were also present in…Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives.”

We ask our readers to spread this information to as many sources as possible.

Pentagon commander says US special forces in India

US special forces are present in five South Asian countries, including India, a top Pentagon commander has revealed.

US Pacific Commander Admiral Robert Willard said the teams were deployed to help India with their counter-terrorism co-operation.

The US and India were working together to contain Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, he said.

The US embassy in Delhi clarified that the troops were not stationed in India.

Odisha: Thousands of land grab protesters attacked by security thugs

The following joint statement has been circulating online. It details mass repression against unarmed demonstrators perpetrated by private security forces of the Jindal steel plant, owned by one of India’s richest families. On January 25, thousands were protesting to demand the compensation that had been promised to them (by both the O.P. Jindal Group and the government of Odisha) for the land stolen to build the plant. Hundreds have been reported wounded and hospitalized. The masses in this region, part of the “Red Corridor” of revolutionary power in central India, have also been facing the brunt of terroristic repression by the state police forces and paramilitary groups during the anti-Maoist Operation Green Hunt. Thanks to Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression. [Introduction by Joe]

Brutal Corporate Attack on Peaceful Protesters in Odisha

February 6, 2012

We are extremely shocked and distressed over the barbaric inhuman violence on peaceful protesters especially woman by the security guards and hired goons of Jindal steel plant in Angul, Odisha.  There has been series of attacks on unarmed peaceful protesters against forcibly land grab all over Odisha.  On 25th January 2012 when the entire Nation was gearing up for the Republic day celebrations and the Indian ruling classes, the big business and the corporate media was busy trumpeting the arrival of India major economical power house these recurring brutal violence by the corporate goons on mass movements in ODISHA exposes the hollowness of our rulers claim of India being the world largest democracy.

Mining operations stalled in Central India

Much of the February 28 strike action is happening in India’s cities, but there are reports of industries being shut down in rural areas as well. The following report from Zee News discusses the effects of the strike in Chhattisgarh, a heavily rural area in central India. Chhattisgarh is also a CPI(Maoist) stronghold, and an area where the Maoists have struggled against mining interests for years.

Strike hits mining in Chhattisgarh

February 28, 2012

Raipur: The nationwide strike called by the country’s trade unions has hit bauxite, coal and iron ore mining in mineral-rich Chhattisgarh, officials said on Tuesday.

Reports coming in from the state’s northern Surguja district say that bauxite mining has been severely hit at Mainpat area, about 450 km north from here. Aluminium major BALCO, in which Vedanta Resources Plc holds 51 percent stake, has mines in Manipat.

Contracted miners gathered in groups with flags and banners at mines and raised slogans against an alleged anti-labour policy of the Indian government. Dozens of trucks transporting bauxite from Mainpat to BALCO’s plant in Korba town were stranded on forested roads due to the strike.

India: Workers shut down the country

Tens of millions of Indian workers went into the streets today to challenge abysmal labor conditions. The 24-hour strike is a broad effort of trade unions  associated with various parties and ideologies. Their demands include social security benefits, a minimum wage, permanent jobs for contract workers, and an end to rampant inflation.

Though the strike includes 11 different unions–some aligned with reactionary parties like Congress and the BJP–at least one reactionary leader is not too pleased with the action. Mamata Banerjee, the anti-Maoist chief minister of West Bengal has opposed the strike. We will offer more analysis as the situation becomes clearer. 

The following article appeared at Al Jazeera.

Millions of Indian workers strike for rights

One-day walkout hits transport, banks and post offices, as unions seek better rights and protest over rising prices.

28 Feb 2012 

Millions of workers in India are staging a 24-hour strike to demand improved rights for employees and to protest over rising prices.

Tuesday’s strike, one of the biggest in recent times, is being backed by all 11 major trade unions in the country, including the left affiliated All India Trade Union Congress [AITUC] and Indian National Trade Union Congress [INTUC] linked to ruling Congress party, local television station NDTV said.

In the capital, New Delhi, and the financial hub, Mumbai, the effect of the strike was minimal. Banks and insurance offices were closed but buses and taxis plied the streets and shops were open for business.