A collective of activists/academics who have been working in
solidarity with peoples' movements in India by providing information
and analysis (www.sanhati.com) have taken the initiative in circulating
a statement against the Indian government's proposed military offensive
against alleged Maoist rebels.
The statement has been drafted/endorsed by progressive intellectuals
like Arundhati Roy, Sandeep Pandey, Amit Bhaduri, Manoranjan Mohanty,
Gautam Navlakha, Prashant Bhushan and others in India and your endorsement will lend it more weight and make the voice of democratic protest stronger. Along with the statement, there is also attached below a background note which provides a perspective on the current situation.
Kindly send a reply to this email address - sanhatiindia@sanhati.com if you would like to endorse the statement. Also, please circulate as widely as possible.
The endorsed statement will be sent to the Indian and international media in an effort to build public opinion against this
disastrous move of the Indian government.
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TEXT OF THE STATEMENT
To
Dr. Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister,
Government of India,
South Block, Raisina Hill,
New Delhi,
India-110 011.
We are deeply concerned by the Indian government's plans for launching
an unprecedented military offensive by army and paramilitary forces in
the adivasi (indigenous people)-populated regions of Andhra Pradesh,
Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa and West Bengal states.
The stated objective of the offensive is to "liberate" these areas
from the influence of Maoist rebels. Such a military campaign will
endanger the lives and livelihoods of millions of the poorest people
living in those areas, resulting in massive displacement, destitution
and human rights violation of ordinary citizens. To hunt down the
poorest of Indian citizens in the name of trying to curb the shadow of
an insurgency is both counter-productive and vicious. The ongoing
campaigns by paramilitary forces, buttressed by anti-rebel militias,
organised and funded by government agencies, have already created a
civil war like situation in some parts of Chattisgarh and West Bengal,
with hundreds killed and thousands displaced. The proposed armed
offensive will not only aggravate the poverty, hunger, humiliation and
insecurity of the adivasi people, but also spread it over a larger
region.
Grinding poverty and abysmal living conditions that has been the lot
of India's adivasi population has been complemented by increasing
state violence since the neoliberal turn
in the policy framework of the Indian state in the early 1990s.
Whatever little access the poor had to forests, land, rivers, common
pastures, village tanks and other common property resources has come
under increasing attack by the Indian state in the guise of Special
Economic Zones (SEZs) and other "development" projects related to
mining, industrial development, Information Technology parks, etc. The
geographical terrain, where the government's military offensive is
planned to be carried out, is very rich in natural resources like
minerals, forest wealth and water, and has been the target of large
scale appropriation by several corporations. The desperate resistance
of the local indigenous people against their displacement and
dispossession has in many cases prevented the government-backed
corporations from making inroads into these areas. We fear that the
government's offensive is also an attempt to crush such popular
resistances in order to facilitate the entry and operation of these
corporations and to pave the way for unbridled exploitation of the
natural resources and the people of these regions. It is the widening
levels of disparity and the continuing problems of social deprivation
and structural violence, and the state repression on the non-violent
resistance of the poor and marginalized against their dispossession,
which gives rise to social anger and unrest and takes the form of
political violence by the poor. Instead of addressing the source of
the problem, the Indian state has decided to launch a military
offensive to deal with this problem: kill the poor and not the
poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government.
We feel that it would deliver a crippling blow to Indian democracy if
the government tries to subjugate its own people militarily without
addressing their grievances. Even as the short-term military success
of such a venture is very doubtful, enormous misery for the common
people is not in doubt, as has been witnessed in the case of numerous
insurgent movements in the world. We urge the Indian government to
immediately withdraw the armed forces and stop all plans for carrying
out such military operations that has the potential for triggering a
civil war which will inflict widespread misery on the poorest and most
vulnerable section of the Indian population and clear the way for the
plundering of their resources by corporations. We call upon all
democratic-minded people to join us in this appeal.
Signed by –
Arundhati Roy
Amit Bhaduri
Sandeep Pandey
Prashant Bhushan
Manoranjan Mohanty
Gautam Navlakha
Sumanta Banerjee
Colin Gonzalves
Swapna Banerjee-Guha
Madhu Bhaduri
Arundhati Dhuru
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Howard Zinn
John Bellamy Foster
David Harvey
Mahmood Mamdani
Gilbert Achcar
Mira Nair
Arthur MacEwan
Michael A. Lebowitz
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BACKGROUND NOTE
It has been widely reported in the press that the Indian government is
planning an unprecedented military offensive against alleged Maoist
rebels, using paramilitary and counter-insurgency forces, possibly the
Indian Armed Forces and even the Indian Air Force. This military
operation is going to be carried out in the forested and semi-forested
rural areas of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand,
West Bengal and Maharashtra, populated mainly by the tribal
(indigenous) people of India. Reportedly, the offensive has been
planned in consultation with US counter-insurgency agencies.
To put the Indian government's proposed military offensive in proper
perspective one needs to understand the economic, social and political
background to the conflict. In particular, there are three dimensions
of the crisis that needs to be emphasized, because it is often
overlooked: (a) the development failure of the post-colonial Indian
state, (b) the continued existence and often exacerbation of the
structural violence faced by the poor and marginalized, and (c) the
full-scale assault on the meager resource base of the peasantry and
the tribal (indigenous people) in the name of "development". Let us
look at each of these in turn, but before we do so it needs to be
stressed that the facts we mention below are not novel; they are
well-known if only conveniently forgotten. Most of these facts were
pointed out by the April 2008 Report of the Expert Group of the
Planning Commission of the Indian Government (headed by retired civil
servant D. Bandopadhyay) to study "development challenges in extremist
affected areas".
The post-colonial Indian State, both in its earlier Nehruvian and the
more recent neoliberal variant, has failed miserably to solve the
basic problems of poverty, employment and income, housing, primary
health care, education and inequality and social discrimination of the
people of the country. The utter failure of the development strategy
of the post-colonial State is the ground on which the current conflict
arises.
To recount some well known but oft-forgotten facts, recall that about
77 percent of the Indian population in 2004-05 had a per capita daily
consumption expenditure of less than Rs. 20; that is less than 50
cents by the current nominal exchange rate between the rupee and the
US dollar and about $2 in purchasing power parity terms. According to
the 2001 Census, even 62 years after political independence, only
about 42 percent of Indian households have access to electricity.
About 80 percent of the households do not have access to safe drinking
water; that is a staggering 800 million people lacking access to
potable water.
What is the condition of the working people in the country? 93 percent
of the workforce, the overwhelming majority of the working people in
India, are what the National Commission for Enterprises in the
Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) called "informal workers"; these workers
lack any employment security, work security and social security. About
58 percent of them work in the agricultural sector and the rest is
engaged in manufacturing and services. Wages are very low and working
conditions extremely onerous, leading to persistent and deep poverty,
which has been increasing over the last decade and a half in absolute
terms: the number of what the National Commission for Enterprises in
the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) called the "poor and vulnerable"
increased from 811 million in 1999-00 to 836 million in 2004-05.
Since majority of the working people still work in the agricultural
sector, the economic stagnation in agriculture is a major cause for
the continued poverty of the vast majority of the people. Since the
Indian state did not undertake land reforms in any meaningful sense,
the distribution of land remains extremely skewed to this day. Close
to 60 percent of rural households are effectively landless; and
extreme economic vulnerability and despair among the small and
marginal peasantry has resulted in the largest wave of suicides in
history: between 1997 and 2007, 182,936 farmers committed suicide.
This is the economic setting of the current conflict.
But in this sea of poverty and misery, there are two sections of the
population that are much worse off than the rest: the Scheduled Caste
(SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) population. On almost all indicators of
social well being, the SCs and STs are worse off than the general
population: poverty rates are higher, landlessness is higher, infant
mortality rates are higher, levels of formal education are lower, and
so on. To understand this differential in social and economic
deprivation we need to look at the second aspect of the current crisis
that we had alluded to: structural violence.
There are two dimensions of this structural violence: (a) oppression,
humiliation and discrimination along the lines of caste and ethnicity
and (b) regular harassment, violence and torture by arms of the State.
For the SC and ST population, therefore, the violence of poverty,
hunger and abysmal living conditions has been complemented and
worsened by the structural violence that they encounter daily. It is
the combination of the two, general poverty and the brutality and
injustice of the age old caste system, kept alive by countless social
practices despite numerous legislative measures by the Indian state,
that makes this the most economically deprived and socially
marginalized section of the Indian population. This social
discrimination, humiliation and oppression is of course very
faithfully reflected in the behavior of the police and other
law-enforcing agencies of the State towards the poor SC and ST
population, who are constantly harassed, beaten up and arrested on the
slightest pretext. For this population, therefore, the State has not
only totally neglected their economic and social development, it is an
oppressor and exploiter. While the SC and ST population together
account for close to a quarter of the Indian population, they are the
overwhelming majority in the areas where the Indian government
proposes to carry out its military offensive against alleged Maoist
rebels. This, then, is the social background of the current conflict.
This brings us to the third dimension of the problem: unprecedented
attack on the access of the marginalized and poor to common property
resources. Compounding the persistent poverty and the continuing
structural violence has been the State's recent attempt to usurp the
meager resource base of the poor and marginalized, a resource base
that was so far largely outside the ambit of the market. The
neoliberal turn in the policy framework of the Indian state since the
mid 1980s has, therefore, only further worsened the problems of
economic vulnerability and social deprivation. Whatever little access
the poor had to forests, land, rivers, common pastures, village tanks
and other common property resources to cushion their inevitable slide
into poverty and immiserization has come under increasing attack by
the Indian state in the guise of so-called development projects:
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and other "development" projects related
to mining, industrial
development, Information Technology parks, etc.
Despite numerous protests from people and warnings from academics, the
Indian State has gone ahead with the establishment of 531 SEZs. The
SEZs are areas of the country where labour and tax laws have been
consciously weakened, if not totally abrogated by the State to
"attract" foreign and domestic capital; SEZs, almost by definition,
require a large and compact tract of land, and thus inevitably mean
the loss of land, and thus livelihood, by the peasantry. To the best
of our knowledge, there have been no serious, rigorous cost-benefit
analysis of these projects to date; but this does not prevent the
government from claiming that the benefits of these projects, in terms
of employment generation and income growth, will far outweigh the
costs of revenue loss from foregone taxes and lost livelihoods due to
the assault on land.
The opposition to the acquisition of land for these SEZ and similar
projects have another dimension to it. Dr. Walter Fernandes, who has
studied the process of displacement in post-independence India in
great detail, suggests that around 60 million people have faced
displacement between 1947 and 2004; this process of displacement has
involved about 25 million hectares of land, which includes 7 million
hectares of forests and 6 million hectares of other common property
resources. How many of these displaced people have been resettled?
Only one in every three. Thus, there is every reason for people not to
believe the government's claims that those displaced from their land
will be, in any meaningful sense, resettled. This is one of the most
basic reasons for the opposition to displacement and dispossession.
But, how have the rich done during this period of unmitigated disaster
for the poor? While the poor have seen their incomes and purchasing
power tumble down precipitously in real terms, the rich have, by all
accounts, prospered beyond their wildest dreams since the onset of the
liberalization of the Indian economy. There is widespread evidence
from recent research that the levels of income and wealth inequality
in India has increased steadily and drastically since the mid 1980s. A
rough overview of this growing inequality is found by juxtaposing two
well known facts: (a) in 2004-05, 77 percent of the population spent
less than Rs. 20 a day on consumption expenditure; and (b) according
to the annual World Wealth Report released by Merrill Lynch and
Capgemini in 2008, the millionaire population in India grew in 2007 by
22.6 per cent from the previous year, which is higher than in any
other country in the world.
It is, thus, the development disaster of the Indian State, the
widening levels of disparity and the continuing problems of social
deprivation and structural violence when compounded by the all-out
effort to restrict access to common property resources that, according
to the Expert Group of the Planning Commission, give rise to social
anger, desperation and unrest. In almost all cases the affected people
try to ventilate their grievances using peaceful means of protest;
they take our processions, they sit on demonstrations, they submit
petitions. The response of the State is remarkably consistent in all
these cases: it cracks down on the peaceful protestors, sends in armed
goons to attack the people, slaps false charges against the leaders
and arrests them and often also resorts to police firing and violence
to terrorize the people. We only need to remember Singur, Nandigram,
Kalinganagar and countless other instances where peaceful and
democratic forms of protest were crushed by the state with ruthless
force. It is, thus, the action of the State that blocks off all forms
of democratic protest and forces the poor and dispossessed to take up
arms to defend their rights, as has been pointed out by social
activists like Arundhati Roy. The Indian government's proposed
military offensive will repeat that story all over again. Instead of
addressing the source of the conflict, instead of addressing the
genuine grievances of the marginalized people along the three
dimensions that we have pointed to, the Indian state seems to have
decided to opt for the extremely myopic option of launching a military
offensive.
It is also worth remembering that the geographical terrain, where the
government's military offensive is planned, is very well-endowed with
natural resources like minerals, forest wealth, biodiversity and water
resources, and has of late been the target of systematic usurpation by
several large, both Indian and foreign, corporations. So far, the
resistance of the local indigenous people against their displacement
and dispossession has prevented the government-backed corporates from
exploiting the natural resources for their own profits and without
regard to ecological and social concerns. We fear that the
government's offensive is also an attempt to crush such democratic and
popular resistance against dispossession and impoverishment; the whole
move seems to be geared towards facilitating the entry and operation
of these large corporations and paving the way for unbridled
exploitation of the natural resources and people of these regions.
