Of Mammaries And Rippling Biceps:
State, Civil Society And The Indian Citizen
08 July, 2011
Countercurrents.org
India 's “Superpower status” is a mantra of its media and political class. Foreign companies pay obeisance to what is assuredly India 's strength – its population, especially its young college-educated sections, to carry out their offshore operations at dirt-cheap prices. Indian labour, both blue and white collar, work hard in the Gulf countries, the US , Europe and Australia and are the largest sources of India 's foreign exchange.
Recent reports of the rescue of six Indian sailors held hostage on the MV Suez along with several others from a number of countries including Pakistan , caused one to think on the role of the aspiring superpower and its government. Pakistan earned brownie points by responding quickly to the appeals of the sailors. Ansar Burney, noted human rights campaigner from Pakistan added more Indian fans to his already large following by raising the ransom of over a million dollars to buy the freedom of the sailors. India, on the other hand, was the target of stringent criticism by the families of the sailors, and in the press, for its lack of timely initiative to protect the interests of the Indian sailors who risk their lives to go out to sea in commercial ships, given the state of lawlessness in the Indian ocean, especially around the Gulf of Aden.
Another detailed report in the Hindu dated 27 th June 2011 was regarding the fatality figures of the Chhatisgarh police. The Home Minister announced the deployment of 5000 more Central para-militia in to assist the 12600 and 7200 already deployed in Chhatisgarh and Orissa respectively in response to a series of incidents in June in which 18 paramilitary personnel were lost. But the fatality figures released by the Chhatisgarh police “suggest that increasing troop deployment without providing adequate medical infrastructure will simply mean more casualties more often”, says the Hindu. The headline states that in 2010, only 28% of the soldiers wounded in Chhatisgarh survived the attacks. In 2008, the figure was 56%. This implies that 72% of all soldiers injured in a Maoist attack last year died. In 2008, the report continues, an injured soldier had a 70% chance of surviving an IED blast. In 2010, the chance of survival was only 46%. The report contrasts this with the survival rate of American soldiers in Afghanistan – 92.1%. Only 7.9% of the soldiers wounded in Afghanistan died.
The report quotes a senior police officer as asking “ There are no doctors to treat ordinary patients in Dantewada, so from where will we get specialized doctors? Troops are usually evacuated to the Jagadalpur hospital via helicopter, but none of the helicopters is equipped to provide mobile trauma care.” The one man who took it on himself to provide medical care to the poor in Chhatisgarh – Dr. Binayak Sen – was jailed for years on sedition charges by the state's High Court, as we all know.
What is this callousness of the Indian state to its citizens? What makes it ignore the malnourished children and aged in backward regions of the country while piles of PDS grain rots in the open elsewhere? Why don't the senior officers of the paramilitary, the police and the army insist on better care, facilities and equipment including medical support, for their men? What makes the majority of teachers in government schools, usually highly qualified, so indifferent to their work that their students can barely read even in standard 7? What makes hospital staff and administrators so indifferent to their duties that even in reputed city hospitals, entire batches of newborn babies die of hospital infections and of electrocution in incubators? Or of post-inoculation or vaccination complications?
While a few are born into enjoying the overflowing abundance of the mammaries of the Motherland, masses live with only the experience of the rippling biceps of those in power. Young men from the poorer classes in the hinterland flock recruitment camps of the army and the paramilitary, as they represent a passport to a steady income, basic facilities and educational opportunity for the young. The alternative of course is only casual daily-wage labour which is often their lot even if they have a high school education. Thus India has one of the “largest standing armies in the world”. But unlike America , we do not have an international war machine straddling the globe to hammer values like “freedom” and “democracy” into ‘backward' societies like Vietnam , Afghanistan or Iraq . India's young soldiers are kept busy in hotspots right within the country: in the Northeast, in Jammu and Kashmir, Orissa, Chhatisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand, keeping pesky dissenters and terrorists at bay, who dare to question the incursions into Constitutionally-protected tribal homelands and challenge the right of the Indian state to ride roughshod and take over their traditional territories - their forests, rivers, land, sea-fronts and mountains loaded with minerals wealth; or urban slums located in the midst of or in the path of growth of teeming metros.
The Indian state employs the muscle and firepower power of its troops to deal with these semi-clothed starving homeless hill-dwelling primitives or slum-dwellers and their children who dare to stand up – or lie down in the dust and heat - against the right of the Indian state, upholding the rights of private industry, to roll into any nook and corner of the country occupied by these miserable specimens – or to pulverize them where they are: but these people aren't going anywhere – their foreparents have lived on the land for millennia, much before ideas like kings and queens, colonizers and democracy came into vogue. And many, many generations before the Indian state came into being a mere sixty-plus years ago. Its battalions occupy schools meant for tribal children, raid the homes and rape and exploit women, and engineer the disappearances of many young men and boys from communities where they are deployed. The government of Chhatisgarh raised an mercenary army of tribal youths (Salwa Judum) called them Special Protection Officers (SPOs) and used them to terrorise and implement a charred earth policy against local forest-dwelling tribals, to vacate them from mineral-rich dense forests under the pretext of eliminating Maosit/Naxalite activities.
On 5 th July, the Supreme court ordered that the “deployment of semi-literate tribal youth in anti-Maoist operations violated Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, that guarantee equality before the law and protection of life and personal liberty”, reports the Hindu of 6 th July. The state police defends their use saying “the SPOs provide crucial intelligence and information about the terrain and tactics of the Maoists”, while rights activists petitioned the Supreme court on the issue, accuinge the state and Union government of raising “ an unaccountable vigilante force that pits tribals against tribals”. The court agreed with the petitioners, stating that “the young tribals have literally become cannon fodder in the killing fields of Dantewada and other districts of Chhatisgarh.”
The officers from the defence forces and their families of course have it much easier; still, dwindling recruitments at officer levels has forced them to run TV commercials touting the lifestyle benefits of joining the Indian defence forces: exclusive colonial-era facilities, up-market housing, clubs, and other amenities and freebies. In contrast, there is a huge shortage of even basic family quarters for the Other Ranks – as “Othered” as the poor and rural communities they hail from – who put their lives on the line with little hope of survival and security for their families after they are killed, not so much by the insurgents' bombs or bullets as by sheer neglect of the Indian official and professional classes, as the casualty figures cited above show. Once idolized as the most honest and decisive institution in India , the actions of some of its officers, who have been convicted of involvement in huge land scams have marred its record.
But the rippling muscles of the Indian state are very visible against the poor. The powerful, rich and well connected experience the soft maternal breast even when they find themselves arrested for involvement in major scams, a la Raju of Satyam and Suresh Kalmadi, long-time sports impresario of the government. The State's rippling bicep end in hands clad in kid gloves when dealing with criminal acts by ruling elites. Even if they are arrested, it is said “The law will take its course”, which means that the case against them – even if it deals with the loss of numerous lives or multi-crore fraud - will meander leisurely from lower to district to High court over a couple of decades, while the accused are released on bail or secure vacation from prison and live in their own houses or in luxurious hospital suites enjoying the fat of the land.
The Press/Media , ‘Civil Society' and Freedom
The mainstream media which played a very important and socially responsible role in the anti-colonial struggle and the crisis of the Emergency and its immediate aftermath has now gone from being a roaring tiger to a tame pussy-cat which is most often found mewing to its financial master's tune or in mouthing middle-class platitudes, with notable exceptions. It tends to be a tool in the hands of vested interests promoting dangerously divisive communal agendas, reinforcing existing socio-economic divides at worst. It is left to the alternative media to uphold the truth and speak it to Power.
The so-called Indian national freedom struggle was won by the Indian religious and class elites of the early 20 th Century, against a British government weakened by two monumental World Wars and during the tenure of a Labour government which believed in justice and fair play especially for the working classes. But do the rulers of India have the same set of values and understanding of citizens' entitlements? There is no social security net, even the minimal provision of PDS foodgrains do not reach the starving millions who scrape out a minimal existence on less than Rs. 20/- a day. Education, health care, food security, civic amenities for the poor? Forget it, these are neoliberal times and we have to have our infrastructure – roads, airports, housing enclaves, Special economic zones, shopping malls, parks, glitzy cars, swimming pools, tourist resorts. All this while widows, deserted women, the aged, children, the disabled – running into hundreds of crores, a majority of India's poor population – have less and less reason for hope.
None of India 's political parties, community service groups, and most NGOs - all categories, from grassroots to multinational - really keep them at the centre of their vision. They are more focussed on their own sustainability, structures, and power networks. The so-called “Development” sector survived, even thrived – during the recent global Recession, and especially so in India . But only the most diehard activists take on “unpopular causes” such as custodial deaths, rapes of dalit women and girls or land struggles. The number of “civil society” agents,( who constitute an important power bloc in India today) making their careers and fortunes by selling the plight of their “target groups” probably exceeds the number of crooked politicians in India today. Many work in NGOs floated by politicians themselves or by industries to save taxes while they allegedly “develop” the communities and villages located near their factories and townships, built on land and resources which at one time kept these same poor in independent albeit frugal livelihoods. Other civil society activists engage with issues like animal rights or urban garbage collection and sanitation (which hides the ugly face of manual scavenging still extant in our society); HIV/AIDS ( has huge resources rivaling the public health budgets of states to reach a relatively small number) and Reproductive Rights, (a euphemism for well-funded by lobbies from the North and led in India by elitists making a living campaigning for the rights of those with ‘alternate' lifestyles) which may, or most often has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction.
Mammaries and kid gloves for the privileged, rippling biceps against the poor, the low-caste, the tribal, women, children and the aged : the ongoing reality in India .
Cynthia Stephen is an independent Writer and Researcher
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