Home

Why Subscribe ?

Popularise CC

Join News Letter

Twitter

Face Book

Editor's Picks

Feed Burner

Read CC In Your
Own Language

Mumbai Terror

Financial Crisis

Iraq

AfPak War

Peak Oil

Alternative Energy

Climate Change

US Imperialism

US Elections

Palestine

Latin America

Communalism

Gender/Feminism

Dalit

Globalisation

Humanrights

Economy

India-pakistan

Kashmir

Environment

Book Review

Gujarat Pogrom

WSF

Arts/Culture

India Elections

Archives

Links

Submission Policy

About CC

Disclaimer

Fair Use Notice

Contact Us

Search Our Archive

 



Our Site

Web

Subscribe To Our
News Letter

Name: E-mail:

Printer Friendly Version

Bastar : Business As Usual

By Siddhartha Mitra

16 April, 2010
Sanhati.com

A few days after the killings of 76 CRPF personnel in the Makrana forests near Dantewada, Mr. Amresh Mishra, Superintendent of Posice (SP) Dantewada, told a reporter of the Times of India that anyone who does not have “business” in the “zone” (which essentially encompasses most of the villages and the forested region in the area) would be considered a Maoist or a Maoist sympathizer.


Mr. Mishra did not clarify the kind of “business”. Did he mean the business of education? The business of healthcare? Human rights? Social work?

Or of mining? Land acquisition? Military?

Mr. Mishra is no stranger to using generalities. When speaking on camera about Sodhi Sambo’s abduction by the state forces, he seemed to be unable to differentiate between her parents and her mousa / mousi (uncle / aunt) - mysterious relatives who suddenly appeared at the police station to express their familial affection for Sodhi months after she had been shot. Perhaps he was not aware that even a tribal like her did not spontaneously sprout from the forest floor, and could have parents and uncles and aunts who could be different people. And apparently was not aware that she spoke Dorla, so she could not have communicated her request to not meet anyone in Gondi. Most outsiders who are in the region have little understanding of the diversity in the people in the area, and he seemed to be no exception.

But let us not dwell on Mr. Mishra. After all, like most government officials and military personnel deployed in the region, he might not just have had the adequate training to familiarise him with the territory and the people who live there. Like the CRPF jawans, who failed to identify a hillock as a possible vantage point for an attack by the Naxalites and thus paid the price with their lives.

However, his statement is revealing. It is representative of the government position about the people living in the area. Soon after Salwa Judum had started in 2005 and had started to burn down and empty villages in Bastar, the Chhattisgarh government declared that anyone who did not go to the squalid Salwa Judum camps would be considered a Maoist. And Mr. Mishra was just resonating this stance, stating that tribals who had lived for hundreds of generations in the forest were now persona non-grata in their own lands.

To get back to the original point. If one follows Mr. Mishra, one would conclude that people who had business in the region would not be considered a Maoist or Maoist sympathizer. And no wonder, after the massacre, the Tata’s declared that work on their Rs. 20000 crore steel project in Lohandiguda in Bastar would proceed as planned, stating that the location “did not suffer from the Maoist problem”.

So should one conclude that the business of mining is ok?

It was not just the mining operations by the mining giants that the locals had been opposing. They had been specially irked by the way the Memorandum Of Understanding’s (MOU) to Tata and Essar granted had them much more land than they needed for the projects themselves. Both the steel giants accept this fact, and have publicly stated that they intend to use this extra land to get loans from banks. One can imagine that real estate agents and property developers would take keen interest in this, as good business opportunities. Not only that, now there is a number of semi-cleared area in the form of hundreds of villages emptied by the Salwa Judum. Businessmen from out of state have expressed interest in acquiring land in these villages, and the CG govt seems more than willing to sell such for a song, in similar vein to the major concessions they have made to the mining giants.

So it looks like mining and land acquisition businesses can only prosper, and people interested in such will still be welcome, though one can assume that they would have to go into the region under heavy security, for their own protection.

But what about the social workers, the health care workers, the doctors and the teachers? Who is to provide them security? Not only that, would the CG state consider their work as legitimate “business”. It is very doubtful. Dr. Binayak Sen, a healthcare worker who revolutionised healthcare in the region had to stop his work after being imprisoned by the state government for two years on false charges. Mr. Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian activist, was hounded out of Dantewada earlier this year despite having spent more than 17 years with his family in trying to serve the tribals in the region. Nandini Sundar, a professor from New Delhi who is also a social activist with a long history of working with the tribals in the region, was “escorted” out of the area when she came to visit the VCA in Dantewada in December. The villages in south Bastar practically do not have any healthcare facilities, or teachers (thanks to many of them having fled the violence and many others who just failed to show up), so it does not look like their work would be the business of the kind the state would find acceptable.

Perhaps we are missing the point. The local people including the tribals and the villagers who do not live in the Salwa Judum camps have been declared Maoists. So people who are planning to work with them would automatically get branded similarly, wouldn’t they? And in the wake of the recent slaughter of the CRPF jawans, can one not imagine that the government is going to leave no stone unturned to see that all such people are either eliminated or entirely removed from the area?

The home minister has promised the nation that the Maoist movement will be will be uprooted in two to three years. That is a tall order, and one wonders if he seriously believes this is achievable. And what would be the metric to determine that the Maoist movement is gone? That all the villages in the forests in Chattisgarh have been emptied of their local inhabitants? That the Body Mass Index (BMI) of the majority of the tribal population in the area has suddenly jumped over that magic figure of 18.5, defying decades of hunger and deprivation - the famine like condition that leads them to support violent opposition movements? Even the planners in Delhi cannot fantasize of such a possibility. The forests themselves have no boundaries, and stretch across several states. There are just too many people in there to put away anywhere, specially in overcrowded cities. And with healthcare workers and social workers removed, one can imagine the BMI of the local people will take a turn for the worse, if anything.

But wait. There is a metric. After all, what is this about? Is it not about development and growth? The Tata’s, like true patriots have remained resolute in their stance of keeping the mining operations open. The face of shining India shall be established in the region. Though Essar’s fabled 267 kilometre long pipeline to Visakhpatnam has been damaged by the Maoists, they have not given up on their ambitions either.

A few weeks after the restaurant in the Taj hotel was scorched and people inside mercilessly gunned down in the Mumbai attacks, a large crowd of the India shining brigade poured into the re-opened restaurant in the hotel. A more raucous crowd, chanting nationalistic slogans, poured into the Leopold cafe, another high-end cafe that was a target of the attacks. It was a symbolic gesture of keeping the flag of progress flying; a somewhat incongruous one, specially in a place where killings had taken place not so long ago. The same brigade was inconspicous in the reopening of the Chhatrapati Shivaji train terminus where more than a hundred people had also been killed in the attacks. But those killed in the station were common people, and not symbols of modern India’s progress and prosperity.

In two to three years the problem will be over. The Tata’s will have a large inauguration ceremony, to celebrate the success of the completion of the first phase of the project. Essar might have their pipeline fully operational by then. One can imagine a similar patriotic crowd celebrating these events, a sign of defiance to the people who were deemed to oppose it. But they will not be celebrating an increase of the BMI or restoration of the lands to the people in the region. And perhaps then we will really see that we can win with our resolve.

This article was first published in Sanhati.com