The establishment is pushing the people of tribal India to the wall
BY AMIT SENGUPTA
On March 30, they tried yet again to crush this non-violent
movement. Since then, tribal villages in Kalinganagar in Orissa are under
siege by the police, in symphony with “Tata goons” – as locals call them –
and ruling party (BJD) supporters. ‘Outsiders’ are not allowed to get in.
People are not allowed to move out. Food, medicine, relatives,
journalists, civil society groups. Nothing and nobody is allowed. BJP
state president Jual Oram and Congress leaders were attacked by “BJD-Tata
goons”; three journalists were beaten up badly when they tried to record
this attack, their cameras smashed, their valuables looted.
Here’s a report by independent journalists from the
ground, confirmed by activists and documentary filmmakers from Orissa who
spoke to the news magazine Hardnews during the Independent People’s
Tribunal held in Delhi from April 9 to 11, 2010:
“The March 30 attack was the culmination of months of
sporadic aggression by the police and Tata goons. That day the police
simply did not try to maintain law and order, rather they first sprayed
rubber bullets and plastic pellets on the tribals, entered Baligotha
village, set food-stocks afire, poured kerosene in the wells, killed
cattle, vandalised the memorials of the martyrs of January 2, 2006 police
shootout, looted valuables, stole livestock and destroyed all sorts of
electronic machines like TVs, DVD players, sewing machines, etc…
“Surprisingly, this planned attack by some 27 platoons of
armed security forces and two platoons of Operation Green Hunt forces
along with a hundred-odd Tata goons happened exactly two days after the
district magistrate met the villagers and assured them that their
grievances would be looked into.”
“They have turned Kalinganagar into a fortress,” said
Mamata Das, an activist. Three people have apparently died due to lack of
medical attention – even doctors who wanted to enter are not being
allowed. Journalists are not allowed to go in. There is police everywhere
while the goons are given a free run. Several local leaders and tribals
have been arrested. They are raiding houses, beating up people, picking up
villagers. They want to teach the people a lesson so that the Tatas can go
ahead, and no one can oppose displacement.”
There is another pattern which often follows all these
peaceful struggles and conflict zones: mysterious deaths, dead bodies
found in strange places, accidents, murders. Activists say in some cases
identified tribal activists are charged with false cases, including murder
cases, beaten up mercilessly and put in jail for long periods. They want
to crush the spirit and body of the tribals with the Kafkaesque terror of
the police, judicial and prison system.
The Tatas and the BJD-led government under chief minister
Naveen Patnaik are adamant and cold. Patnaik, passionately backed by the
UPA regime (earlier, NDA), is selling off thousands of acres of precious
forests, mountains and indigenous land to miscellaneous Indian and foreign
big business corporates and mining giants at throw-away prices.
Even ecological hot spots are being given away to
notorious mining companies like the Vedanta of the UK. And when the people
resist they bring in platoons of armed cops who along with contractors and
company goons, move in tandem. Or else, they brand these peaceful locals
as Maoists.
This is a pattern of repression visible in all the
non-violent, peaceful resistance struggles in most conflict zones in the
pristine interiors of Orissa and elsewhere in India. Indeed, barring in
Malkangiri in western Orissa, these people’s movements have no
relationship with violent forms of struggle, or with Maoists. They have no
political linkages with Maoists despite the terrain and content of
struggle almost being the same.
They are derived from indigenous narratives of social and
political currents, Marxism-Leninism, Gandhian socialism, Ambedkar’s
ideas, indigenous philosophies experimenting with new ideas, influenced by
multiple forms of resistance, including oral and folk narratives, tribal
histories and the greatness of innumerable rebellions of the past (as in
Dantewada), including against the British. In short they provide a
kaleidoscopic view of militant rainbow struggles which have emerged
against the new economic policies of neo-liberalism in India.
Not one act of violence has been committed by any of the
various struggles in Orissa: against the Posco project in Jagatsinhpur,
against the mining projects in Kashipur and Niyamgiri, against the Vedanta
university project between Konarak and Puri or against the Tata steel
project in Kalinganagar.
So why is the state hounding them like criminals in their
own land, making them suffer a spiral of injustices, putting them in jail
with false cases, beating them up, forcing them to the brink, even killing
them in cold blood when democracy itself looks like a total farce? If they
don’t want to leave their land, why should they be forcibly displaced?
Why are they being crushed so ruthlessly? And can they
crush the human spirit because they are driven by nothing else but profit
and greed parroted as ‘development’ endlessly by the media, and especially
the union home minister? What about their side of the story? The people’s
version?
People too are adamant. They have witnessed the
dehumanisation in the name of rehabilitation in earlier projects. Earlier
struggles against other projects in this area too have been met with
intense repression, when men had to run away to the forests. The immediate
provocation now is the construction of a common corridor project, which
the tribals are opposing.
In the Kalinganagar industrial belt where the January 2,
2006 killings happened, most tribal villages live close by. In this huge
meadow-like expanse, next to a pucca road with factories in the
neighbourhood, the people, including hundreds of women, had quickly
gathered on that fateful day from all neighbouring villages, with their
bows and arrows and sickles, just behind the dilapidated school where the
Tatas, escorted by armed security forces, were planning to build a wall.
As the people rushed towards the spot in a peaceful mass action of
resistance, a rattled police opened indiscriminate fire, killing 14
people, including three women.
Tribals believe the corridor is just a ploy to divide the
villages physically (like the Israeli wall in the heart of occupied
Palestine?). They will not allow the corridor to happen. Hence the current
police siege. “In fact, the road was supposed to be used not as a common
corridor by many industries but as a major passageway to the site
earmarked for the proposed Tata steel plant,” said Jual Oram, after he was
attacked by BJD supporters.
The tribals in the villages of Kalinganagar have a
beautiful script. They write poetic tributes in memory of the dead. In
this aesthetic zone of intimacy, the dead are buried next to their homes,
in the cross-currents of connecting compounds, squares and across fences.
Huge stones, some of them massive and sculpted by hand, on
which little stories are written serve as memorials to those who have died
in the struggle. Children play on these stones, tired travellers stop by,
sit and take a pause, others share anecdotes, strangers are offered a
glass of water as they wait outside the sparse and clean homes with a few
worldly belongings. You criss-cross the memory of the dead, touch them,
speak with them, feel their absence and presence day and night, as if they
are still around, like the leaf in the wind and the vast expanse of green
which floats in their life and in their folk narratives.
Only those who die accidentally or in unnatural
circumstances are cremated. So they were cremated behind the headman’s
house on the ground, and on a raised platform, 14 landmarks in stones were
raised in memory of the tribals shot dead by the police. On the stones are
written their names and little tributes. Grotesquely, the goons tried to
desecrate the memorial also. This is like taking a knife and slashing
through the innermost zones of a tribal heart. And this is unacceptable.
On every memorial stone, there is Birsa Munda. In every
story of rebellion, there is Birsa Munda. So will Birsa Munda’s legacy
also be branded as Maoist and pushed to the wall?
On January 2 this year, Birsa Munda came alive again in
the form of his grandson Sukra Munda. Sukra came to the cluster of
villages in Kalinganagar in Jajpur district in solidarity with the
struggle of the tribals, all of them followers of Birsa Munda.
The memory of the legendary Birsa Munda, the great tribal
rebel of the magnificent forests, rocks and mountains of Chaibasa and
Singhbhum in Chhotanagpur, in what is now Jharkhand, is inscribed as
memory on the walls of their huts, in the beats of their hearts and in the
remains of the day. At Kalinganagar in Orissa, the legacy of Birsa is
still alive. Like a raw wound, and a moment of amazing pride. Far away
from the land of Birsa, the angst and anger of rebellion (ulgulun)
against the dikus (outsiders) pulsates in every man and woman’s
heart.
There is a thread of this magical inheritance in the
geography of their indigenous journey from one tribal land to another
because their maps are always differently designed. In these unwritten
maps, drawn like a line on the moist ground next to a river, are enshrined
the folk narratives of the oral traditions and their beautiful handwritten
script, like the paintings crafted on mud walls.
In this rain-soaked narrative lie silent, subaltern tribal
theatres of amazing fluidity and sharp memories: their land, trees,
rivers, forests, water bodies, earth, sky, flowers, birds, wildlife,
poetry, songs, dances, fires, fertility, love, lust, midnights, drums,
darkened bodies of the forest and the sun – they all share and form a
common, collective ethos.
All that belongs is for everyone. All what nature gives
must be shared. And they will die if this indigenous birthright and
geography is snatched away from them by aliens – often with guns.
This is the story in Dantewada of Dandakaranya. This is
the story in Kashipur in western Orissa in the Eastern Ghats. This is the
story in Niyamgiri, most precious ecological zone, sublimely beautiful and
untouched.
And this is the story of the many rainbows of struggle
against the mining mafia and corporates.
When Nandigram was burning with rage after the killings
and rapes by CPM goons and West Bengal police, and when the peasant
struggle led by the poorest of Dalits and Muslims became epical,
protracted and hard to crush, in solidarity, the tribals from Kalinganagar
joined them, holding their hands, speaking a different language but a
language of struggle nonethelss which all contemporary movements
understand. And it was not a Maoist movement, as the CPM claimed.
This is the language in the undulating hills, rivers,
waterfalls, streams and forests of Kashipur and its tribal epicentre at
Kucheipadar, also called the Kashmir of Orissa. For a decade and more,
this tribal, militant non-violent struggle has blocked the might of the
big companies looking for bauxite (processed alumina, later, also used in
the arms industry) and other treasures in the mineral rich, water-rich
hills and forests.
Journalists have been beaten up by goons of the
contractors, people have been arrested and packed off to jail, police
repression has followed countless times: but this indigenous movement has
not lost its innocence.
It is relentless, dogged and refusing to cave in. They
have seen the ravaged landscape near the Vedanta aluminium plant at
Lanjigarh in the neighbourhood. Rivers, mountains, streams, trees –
brutalised and poisoned. They will not allow this miracle of the Eastern
Ghats to be ravaged like that. And the fact is, despite the repression,
they have blocked the mining mafia and refused to move.
At Maikanch in this remote tribal belt, there are some
little stones placed on top of a hill, a few flowers and a branch of leafy
tree. This is the simplicity of memory – of those shot dead by the police
in the peaceful resistance in Kashipur. The ‘Maikanch murders’ of December
2000, when three young tribal men were shot dead by police as they
demonstrated against the Utkal Aluminium Joint Venture between Canada’s
Alcan and India’s Hindalco, are etched in the historical legacy of these
epic non-violent struggles in Orissa and elsewhere. As in Niyamgiri and
Jagatsinhpur. As earlier in Jadugoda in Jharkhand, Gandhamardhana hills
and Chilika in Orissa, Raigarh in Maharashtra, Dadri in UP, and Nandigram
and Singur, among countless other simmering struggles all over India, as
in the Narmada valley and Garhwal hills. Victorious, still fighting,
defeated, not defeated. As yet.
In Jagatsinhpur, in this demographically diverse and
amazingly rich biodiversity zone with multiple rivers, streams, water
bodies, fertile land, fishing, agriculture and vegetable crops, and the
smell of sea nearby, the multi-million multinational Posco project, the
prime minister’s pet project, is hanging like a sword which must slash
through the tribal heartland, if necessary with pure brute force. Here
they grow paan so soft and sweet that it melts in the mouth. And
the people have made barricades outside the villages to block ‘outsiders
and muscle-men’ – they are not allowed to enter the project area. The
villagers have refused to move.
They have tried dividing the people. They have done police
raids. They have threatened them with dire consequences. They have tried
to smash the movement. They put their leader, Abhay Sahoo of the CPI, in
jail for 10 months for no crime other than leading a completely
non-violent struggle.
Recently, the tribals did a long march from the port of
Paradip to Puri, when hundreds of locals marched and others from the
various movements in Orissa joined in solidarity. “Even today, everyday,
hundreds of women and men sit on peaceful sit-ins. And yet they want to
brand us Maoists, or condemn us by raiding our homes and arresting us.
Their goons threaten the villagers. The fear of police atrocity is real,”
Abhay Sahoo told Hardnews.
Truth: Between justice and injustice, the centre and state
governments stand with injustice. Between corporates and people: the state
stands with the corporates, with armed forces out to kill and terrorise
people. Between armed struggle and unarmed non-violent struggle, all state
violence is considered legitimate.
And why only blame Maoists for extra-constitutional
tactics, including violence? Don’t the political class and corporates
routinely use extra-constitutional tactics and violence by state and
non-state actors? And what are they doing in these non-Maoist zones?
Development?
At the Independent People’s Tribunal, women from Dantewada
recited heart-rending stories of despair and brutality. More than 3,00,000
rendered homeless, 700 villages burnt and ravaged, innumerable women
raped, gang-raped, others shot in cold blood, men killed in cold blood and
then branded Maoists, eyewitnesses killed, others “disappeared”, kidnapped
and eliminated. All this by the police of the BJP-led state regime and the
armed Salwa Judum led by Congress leader Mahendra Karma and directly
patronised by the state government and the Centre. Even the ashram of
Gandhian Himanshu Kumar was demolished several times. When he followed the
Supreme Court order to rehabilitate displaced tribals, his activists were
arrested, beaten up and packed off to jail.
The media reports only the police version. This too is
embedded journalism. Only Maoist violence is reported. Censorship is
legitimate. The Maoist statements on extra-constitutional encounters,
murders and rapes are not reported.
There is no semblance of either development in these
squashed memories of underdevelopment or an iota of constitutional rights
or justice. If the testimonies of the people of Dantewada are evidence
that there have been unprecedented brutalities and there are thousands of
tales of unimaginable injustices. And anybody can be raped, killed,
arrested, shot dead in an encounter by the Salwa Judum, special police
officers, paramilitary forces and police.
Arundhati Roy narrated one of the many stories from
Dantewada in the tribunal. Stunningly heart-rending, a story which
shatters the cracked mirror of Indian democracy: “I met Chamri, mother of
Comrade Dilip who was shot on July 6, 2009. She says that after they
killed him, the police tied her son’s body to a pole, like an animal and
carried it with them. (They need to produce bodies to get their cash
rewards before someone else muscles in on the kill.) Chamri ran behind
them all the way to the police station. By the time they reached, the body
did not have a scrap of clothing on it. On the way, Chamri says, they left
the body by the roadside while they stopped at a dhaba to have tea
and biscuits. (Which they did not pay for.) Picture this mother for a
moment, following her son’s corpse through the forest, stopping at a
distance to wait for his murderers to finish their tea. They did not let
her have her son’s body back so she could give him a proper funeral. They
only let her throw a fistful of earth in the pit in which they buried the
others they had killed that day. Chamri says she wants revenge. Badla
ku badla. Blood for blood.”
So is Maoist violence the only truth of this cracked
mirror?
In this silent zone of absolute suffering, despair and
tragedy – mass legitimacy of the Maoists and the total loss of legitimacy
of the Indian state are feeding on each other. Locals say, and so do the
Maoists, since Operation Green Hunt, 100 tribals and Naxalites have been
killed. “Why don’t the media report about them?” they ask.
The tribunal also noted what the media never tells: that
the Salwa Judum was started in 2005 immediately after the people and the
Maoists rejected the mining bid in mineral rich Dantewada and Bastar by
two gigantic industrial houses. The strategy was time-tested: use the
official machinery, pitch people versus people, burn their villages, rape
them, kill them, displace them, scatter them. And then take their land and
forests with the treasure below in the name of development, law and order
and nationalism.
As Arundhati Roy said at the tribunal: “The Maoists are
trying to overthrow the Indian state. I would say the Indian state has
already been overthrown – by the corporates.”
(Amit Sengupta is editor-in-charge of Hardnews.)
Courtesy: Hardnews; www.hardnewsmedia.com