Radical Notes
Journal
Cochabamba, Bolivia: Water (commons) Fair
Commons, understood generally as the autonomous institutions and practices of people self-organisations and self-help, are the backbone of people livelihoods all around the world. Especially in the global South, without commons people would die, because they would lack access to the basic resources like food and water necessary for life. When we hear the often-quoted statistics referring to the 40% of world population living on less than a dollar a day, we in the North tend to see only victims. We do not see self-reliant and dignified subjects from whom we have a lot to learn. Indeed, how could they live on such a low level of monetary income, if not through the fact that they pool their resources and labour together and build commons, thus overcoming the scarcity that they face as individuals? But to the external and untrained eye, commons are either invisible or opaque, because they are relational fields among a group of people that constitute itself as community, hence build some sort of wall or border around them which obscure its workings or indicate its presence to the outside only as an amorphous cluster.
Obviously, one cannot demand transparency to a commons, unless its activity create negative externalities on other commons, because a commons is not a public institution, and the borders around it — in spite of the different degree of porosity and possibility for an individual to go through — have generally a rational kernel: they represent the contextual limit of the sphere of its activity. On the other hand, we can legitimately demand transparency to a public institution because such institutions ought to benefit all of us, and not only a part of us, ought to be our commons. Hence our demand for transparency in this case implies a demand that we should all be part of its relational field and be able to exercise control over it, whether by sending people reps to its board of directors, or as social movements contesting the effects of its managerial and top-down administration. This is the same as regarding public institutions as distorted commons, i.e. to regard them in an aspirational way, as what, from the commons perspective that understand commons through the lens of commoning and grassroots democracy, they ought to be.
Now, if commons transparency and visibility is not a given property of commons, when commons become visible and invite you to see how they work and what they do, when in other words they come out, celebrate and share among themselves and communicate with others, we know there is something going on, we know that we are in the presence of a social movement that is not made of individual “citizens” or “civil society”, but of . . .commoners.
A social movements of commoners is one that seek to extend the scale of commons, extend the social power mobilised by commoning. In this sense, the struggle undertaken by this social movement is not only one that manifests itself in cathartic street demonstrations, but is also hidden in the daily reproduction of livelihoods. Actually, it is this latter activity that gives this movement both strength and its rhythmical presence into the streets. I do not think we can measure a commoners movement with the yardstick of traditional social movements where we correlate the presence on the streets with the strength of the movement. When we talk about commoners movement, strength seems to be, if not the cause, definitively the material basis of the presence in the streets. While the presence in the streets is produced through events, the strength is reproduced in daily processes, and there is an obvious lag between the time of productive contestation and the time of reproductive commoning. So for example, 500 years of indigenous resistance is not 500 years of daily street battles, but 500 years of value reproducing commoning activity that sustained and reproduced itself in spite of the massive wave of murderous enclosures deployed against it. Commoners movement is a type of social movement and social struggle we should hope to see growing and develop in the next century if any change to our conditions of life and living must occur.
One such a social movement is the one I saw at the III Feira del Agua in Cochabama. And indeed, if anybody had any doubt about the existence and relevance of commons to people lives and livelihoods, well a Fair like this should help dispel any such doubt. Spread along the four sides of a large football pitch and beyond, dozens of community water associations and cooperatives like the one of Flores Rancho that I visited the other day (see previous post) are making their own showcase, with the help of hand-made posters and polystyrene models, to mark their presence and to exchange information, knowledge and technology.
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| From feira de l’agua |
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Associations like these form the largest bulk of the third Feira del Agua, held in Cochabamba during the days of 15 and 18 April, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the water war that forced the then Bolivian government to repeal its water privatisation law. Among other participants in this feira del agua, noticeable presences besides some international development NGOs, some associations proposing waterless bio-toilets and some documentation centers, are also Semapa, the municipal water company that is highly controversial for the allegation of corruption and ineffectiveness in providing water, and Misicuni, a consortium of national and international companies that is building a large dam in the mountains North of Cochabamba and that promises to fill the water deficit of the region.
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| From feira de l’agua |
Cochabamba is indeed a region with a water deficit. In spite of all the amazing self-organisation efforts that community groups are doing, they cannot offer water to all the communities. The area of Cochabamba mostly affected is the South, the vast suburban area where about 200000 people live and water provision is poor. In the 1980s and 1990s, a large migration from rural and mines region into cities like Cochabamba occured, this putting pressure on water provisions. Three distinct realities in this region then developed with respect to water. First, the market reality, that is the reality of those who lack access to water, don’t organise and thus depend on private providers. This generally occurs in unsafe and unregulated forms. Water is delivered at home by private suppliers who drive cistern-trucks and is poured in “turril” , i.e. large 200 litres open canisters that households generally keep outside. Here the problems is not only the astronomical cost of this water (up to 30 bolivianos, £3, for a turril, and think that this is not just drinking water, but water for all household usage), but also the water contamination as a result of storage in old and rusty containers and exposure to the elements.
The second reality is of those who self-organise themselves and are lucky to live in areas in which there is water and community wells can be dig. Now, the work they are doing here is quite impressive, since community build from scratch entire water systems, dig deep wells (up to 100m), construct water deposits and connect pumps, lay the pipes for home distribution, monitor the water quality which in this region is always threatened by waste contamination, and manage the entire system. Not bad as a form of commoning! Interestingly, it is generally recognised here that the initiative to dig for water emerges in a population that has recently migrated from the countryside, and therefore has a memory of self-reliance and a relation to nature that is empowering. Rural people always go close to water sources and get their act together to use water. This is not a trivial fact, and I am starting to consider that indeed a crucial aspect of the countryside subjectivity’s everywhere in the world is such a self-reliance and autonomous spirit, one that is lost through successive waves of urbanisation which add mediations between people and nature in the form of money and bureaucratic and legal codes. A point here to be considered in the future: if we do not have the need for one revolutionary subject any longer, we may need a composite one, and one of its crucial components can be found in the self-reliant spirit of indigneous and campesinos wordwide.
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| From feira de l’agua |
The third reality is of those who self-organise themselves but are not lucky to live in areas with water. The commons self-organisation in this case occurs through a system of water collection by cistern trucks. The water is generally purchased from the municipal water company Semapa at far lower prices than those of the market, and distributed in the community. Generally, the community associations also establishes systems of distribution through deposits from which water is piped into the houses. In one case (the Asociation de Produccion y Administracion de Agua y Saneamiento APAAS, a community based organisation set up in 1990) water is fetched 7 km away, and to get the water the community has set up pipes, pomps and deposits along the crest of a mountain down to their suburban neighbourhood.
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| From feira de l’agua |
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The different community organisations seem to function in different ways according to different conditions, but all heavily rely on community work besides self-funding and some access to external funding. The need for some socialisation of production in some functions — and therefore of greater scale — is met with associations of the second level, i.e. associations of associations.
This is for the example the case of Asica-Sur (www.asica-sur.org/index.php), one of the main organiser of this feira de l’agua.
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| From feira de l’agua |
Asica-Sur pulls together about 90 community organisations of the second and third category discussed above roughly split in half among those which have access to a well and those that do not. Asica-Sur offers 4 types of services to their members: it offers community associations a platform of organisation and negotiating power vis-a’ vis the state and municipal water authorities; it strengthen the capacity of these water systems by facilitating information and sharing knowledge; provides technical assistance and services, for example through its cistern trucks that it provides to the communities without wells, but also enabling smaller community groups to access government and NGOs funds; and it offers help in the management of water resources, infrastructure and equipment. Its function seems also increasingly to mediate and find political solutions to problems encountered by larger water community systems.
For example, the case mentioned above of APAAS, is now encountering some problems due to recent human settlements along the 7 km pipeline, problems unknown 20 years earlier when it was established. The recent dwellers are allegedly stealing water and pretending that APAAS give them water for free as payment for the fact that the pipes are passing through their territory. Obviously, this water war among the poor need to find some solution, and political processes, rather than abstract recipees, are here fundamental. What situations like these also reveal is that the building of commons in a context ridded with socio-economic trends typical of capitalist systems (such as the continuous migration of the poor) is far from those studied as typical models in the West under the influence of neo-institutionalism. Unlike those cases, here the problem of access to a resource like water is never circumscribed to a given community, and although there is is an appeal to traditional forms of administrations or forms of convivir [living together] “based on ancient cultural rules and customs where the prevailing collective work and active participation in the deliberation and decision making on the assets and affairs concerning the community is under the principles of reciprocity, solidarity, justice , fairness and transparency” (from an Asica-Sur pamphlet), these forms have to deal with a reality in progress and a web of bottom-up and bottom-bottom conflictuous situations that continuously challenge the forms in which these basic principles apply. Here we have a major challenge of commons and commoning as a political paradigm, a challenge that is not envisaged by the many who while subscribing to this paradigm, offers static models as panaceas. The reality is one in which the commons and commoning perspective must embrace the new and the challenges of the times, while at the same time valorising and reclaiming the old and the ancient. The solution is not inscribed in written handbooks of given knowledge, but in the art of negotiation and political and organisational inventiveness of communities. In a seminar I attended I heard a Columbian activist referring not only to Mingas (community collective work) to build and maintain water systems, but also of Mingas of social resistance. And to this what we may add the need for Mingas of inter-communities relations and solidarity. In other words commoning of all types is really the ultimate material force of transformation of our realities.
One thing that it is clear while talking to the many associations and their collective organisations like Asica-Sur is that they all want to do more than what they are doing — whether it is a question of access to water to more members of the community, or of sanitation and water quality. We could say that in these days and age, their social movement is a social movement for growth (not so much “economic growth”, but growth in access to water and the betterment of its quality). This however implies that they all need more resources, i.e. to mobilise more social power. When we look into this more in details, we find that the question of resources and scale necessarily leads as to problematise the question of the construction of commons in relation to markets and states.
A “resource pool” is the first constituent element of a commons, the others being a community and commoning. Pooling resources address a specific need, the need of power to, that is to extend the scale of social production that a given community is able to mobilise for its own reproduction. Now, from the perspective of a community, and given its conditions of material and financial wealth, what are the sources of a resource pool or, which is the same thing, in what ways a community can increase its power to, or extend the social power it is able to mobilise? I think there are two general cases here to be considered. One, that applies to a community, say of fishers, who decide to manage their common fishing waters but in which production is organised by the individual fishers themselves. This is the case dealt with by a large bulk of neo-institutional commons literature, where much emphasis is put to confute Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. The commoning you need to refer to in order to make this confutation is only with respect to decisions and rules and not with respect of working together: the herders still go on the field with their own cattle and in their own time. There is in other words some equity principle at work (“now it is my turn and then is your turn” or, “not more than 5 cows each farmers”) and not some community sharing (“let us share the cows and the work on the field”)). The second case, which interests us here, is one that applies for all those resources that are required to engage in some form of common production.
If I am not missing something, I believe pooling of resources at this level can only occur in one or in a combination of the following ways — leaving out robbery of peers from other communities: a) the members of the community all tip in from their own material or financial savings; b) donors (like NGOs) are found; c) the community subscribe a debt; d) the state pour resources into the community; e) the community expropriate property, occupy, squats (like in the case of brazilian landless movement, MST).
Each of these sources represent challenges and limits from the perspective of scale and social justice, because themselves need to have “sources” and in particular sources of power. The first one, is of course limited by the degree of material wealth of the community, as well as complicated by the division of wealth within the community and the degree of cohesion in spite of wealth difference. The second one, a part from being limited by the money available and the work and know-how necessary to bid for the money, also may require to align local project to international NGOs priorities. The third one tie local community to repayment plans and therefore to markets. The fourth one bring with it the alignment of local communities to the state priorities and may favour their cooptation. The fifth one bring in the threat of repression. Talking to people from different water associations present in this Fair, I had the impression that all of these options have been used in one way or in another, a part from debt. For example, APAAS participated in a competition and won money from the World Bank to fund the purchase of pipes running 7 km. Some community organisations pull savings and buy the land upon which they dig the well partially funded by an NGOs. In another case, the state pour in money for a community water deposit as part of the “Bolivia Cambia Evo Cumple” campaign, and in others some foreign development funds are channelled into community organisations.
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| From feira de l’agua |
In other words, it feels like that in order to grow commons cannot escape development, whether we are talking about transfers from states, supranational institutions such as the World Bank or NGOs, or the need to access money from the market in order to pull savings. In principle, we could of course imagine an alternative process that does not use any state nor markets, i.e. one based entirely on point e) above. In this case, all extension of commons occurs by means of all communities expropriating resources from the wealthy and simultaneously forming direct relations of association among themselves, giving rise to associations of second, third and upper level controlling all forms of social production and distribution made possible by the recently expropriated resources that extend the “pool”.
Obviously, this solution is in principle conceivable not only in moments of intense social revolution, but moments of intense social revolution that do not require an extension of the role of the state, neither in terms of its apparatus in defence of new property configurations against threat of restauration, nor in terms of extension of socialised functions that at the moment of revolution cannot be organised by communities nor by existing markets. Allowing for the state indeed simplifies enormously the problem of transition to a socially just society, as through indirect expropriation (case d) it is possible to fund organised communities of commoners and give rise to an increase in scale of commoning without the use of capitalist markets. This seems the avenue taken by Morales government, although timidly. As I was told by some community associations activists, the government has started to give money directly to grassroots associations and not to local authorities, and this is seen as a great improvement. However, this has happened significantly in areas where there is more opposition to the govenrment — such as Santa Cruz — while in area like Cochabamba — the stronghold of MAS, the party in government — there has been only timid disboursements. However, it may well be the case that the existing power relations and configurations of needs of the people necessitate the state to operate also for the development of market themselves — including capitalist markets — in which case the problems of transition becomes even more complex and risky. This is also the case here in Bolivia.
In any case, ultimately, the “socialist” principle to be a transformational principle must be articulated to the anarchist principles of individual freedom, and the communist principles of community constitution of values through commoning. The extent to which the measuring and valuing mechanisms of capitalist markets overpower the measuring and valuing mechanisms of commoning is a crucial factor to decide whether the “socialist” state is functional to a process of capitalist development or a transformational process towards the development of social justice. In Bolivia I think it is still too early to tell, and the process seems a very interesting process to study. The general question posed by the problems of access to resources becomes how can development be instrumental to the extension of commons, without the latter becoming in turn instrumental to the extension of capitalist development?
The 5 cases listed above apply from the perspective of an association of producers which aim at mobilising more social power than what they have at their disposal, and hope to internalise the means for such a mobilisation. But if we scale up and reach higher levels of association, we discover that there are other ways to extend the social power of commoners. One for example is posed by Asica-Sur with the question of cogestión — co-management. The question of co-management with Semeca is not yet defined clearly, and it raises several eyebrows among some community activists who are afraid that the messing up with the organisational forms of the municipal company would irreversibly contaminate the community organizational values. This would be a case in which the quest for extension of social power would backfire. But the rationale is obvious: to have access to more resources now available to the ineffective and corrupt structure of Semapa. The question is really to find a form that articulates community forms of organisation with this greater urban scale organisation.
Another issue posed, and it is perhaps linked to the question of comanagement, is that the state must allow organisations and firms that have at their disposal means of production and equipment to make it available to smaller organisation who do not have. This is perhaps a type of mild form of temporary “expropriation” that does not damage anybody really, but would give community associations access to fundamental resources and increase the scale of their operations. It is also evidence of a conception that sees the need for private and public property to be communalised, not so much in its formal ownership status, but in terms of the forms of its access and control, allowing us to move beyond old dichotomies.
But mega-projects are also on the horizons and bring new challenges. Misicuni, is a consortium of public and private companies that is building a dam higher up in the mountains around Cochabamba and that promises to fill the water deficit of the area. It is a project that has been in the pipelines for some decades now, but that only in the last few years started to move on. There is some controversy surrounding the project, whether a mega project of this scale was really necessary and whether alternatives could not be found. However in general, all the association representatives I have talked to where happy with the promised water availability promised by Misicuni. I was told by one of the Misicuni representatives present at the Fair, that it will be finished by 2012, a date however that raised some eyebrows of incredulity given the past history. I asked Carlos Oropeza, a dirigente of Asica-Sur, if this development would reduce the need for grassroots associations, but he did not seem to be concerned. “Local coop will buy water and distribute it themselves”, he told me. Asica-Sur is apparently already building the deposits and strengthening the infrastructure for local distribution.
Courtesy: author’s blog
Condemn the use of Capital Punishment against 3 Kashmiris
185/3, Fourth Floor, Zakir Nagar, New Delhi—25
Giving Death Sentence to 3 Kashmiris and rigorous life imprisonment to another in the Lajpat Nagar Blast Case vindicates the observation that “being a Kashmiri itself is a crime to be punished in India!
Strongly Condemn the use of Capital Punishment by the Government of India!
Abolish Capital Punishment!
After 14 long years, a Delhi Court has finally given death sentence to three Kashmiris—Mohd Naushad, Mohd Ali Bhatt and Mirza Nissar Hussain—in the 1996 Lajpat Nagar blast case while putting Javed Ahmed Khan under rigorous life imprisonment. While two others—Farooq Ahmed Khan and Farida Dar—were released as the court observed that the 14 years that they had spent in the prison would be considered as their punishment. Here there is a catch. A week before the court had acquitted 4 others as it had found them innocent, that too after 14 long years! So the question that arises to any discerning mind is that if two have been released as their 14 year incarceration is being taken as punishment by the Hon’ble Court for them, then why is it that the court silent on the same quantum of years spent by the acquitted four. Can the court give back their 14 long years? Can it compensate for the physical and mental injury along with the social stigma that these four and their kith and kin have gone through? Who should be held accountable for such travesty of justice?
It should be noted that the Court has rapped the police for shoddy evidence and irresponsible conduct which it has termed as lack of seriousness. How can such criminal lapse on the side of the investigating agencies make life miserable for people who can only get justice that too to be declared innocent after almost spending a life sentence! So when one of the persons who have been on trial was on record saying that “being a Kashmiri itself is a crime to be punished in India” the court sentence proved to be a grim reminder, a tragic replay of the gross injustice meted out to the people of Kashmir by the Indian judiciary.
We at the CRPP reiterate that every democratic mind should raise this question about the authorities who have falsely implicated them and fed all kinds of insinuating and incriminating stories in the media on their so-called involvement. Will they ever stand for trial? Or raising a question against them would affect the morale of the investigating agencies? Once again what comes to sharp focus is a continuing story of calculated assault on the lives of particular people who have been targeted for their political convictions. More than a case of showing how fair the system is—as it has acquitted the genuinely innocent and tried the ones for their “various roles”—this once again brings forth the ugly face of blatant violation of procedures and rights of the accused, let alone their right to represent themselves without being prejudiced against.
Despite shoddy evidence and irresponsible conduct from the side of the police, it did not stop the court to give death sentence to 3 Kashmiris which is a punishment that has been long given up by many civilised countries. India is yet to sign this International treaty to which many of the democracies in the world are signatory against a worst form of barbaric punishment that can only further criminalise the people and the system. We demand unequivocally to abolish Capital Punishment and demand the Indian Government to immediately sign the International Treaty abandoning death penalty as a form of punishment.
Given the way things are unfolding for the people of Kashmir all claims of the Government of India about a bill against torture or allegedly safeguards against that sounds like a cruel joke as many of such detention centres in Kashmir are illegal and secret.
Ever since the news of the sentencing of six people along with the acquittal of four of the 1996 Lajpat Nagar blast case the valley of Kashmir has witnessed series of protest demonstrations, and complete shutdown. This reflects the general apathy of a people who have been subjected to the worst kinds of human rights violations.
Illegal detentions, trumped up cases and imprisonment being a common way of life for the average Kashmiri, the question of the political prisoner and his/her status and safeguards against all forms of torture and intimidation becomes paramount. While this is being written there are several people who have been kept behind bars including leaders for protesting against the gross violations of the civil and political rights of the people of Kashmir. In fact this anger is evident in the complete shutdown of the valley and when the people and their leaders say that they are being targeted for their demand for the Right to Self-Determination.
In Solidarity,
Gurusharan Singh (President), Amit Bhattacharyya (Secretary General), SAR Geelani (Working President), Rona Wilson (Secretary Public Relations)
CPI leader Manish Kunjam contextualises the Bastar violence
Manish Kunjam, a two-time MLA of the Communist Party of India (CPI), contexualises [the Bastar] violence:
“The area is mostly dominated by people of the Gondi Koya tribes, who rely on forest produce to sustain their livelihood. They sell mahua [a local fruit mostly processed to make liquor], tendu patta [a leaf from which bidis are made] and imli [tamarind] in the market. Historically, these people were exploited by Forest Department officials, forced into unpaid labour, and beaten up at the first sign of resistance. I am a witness to such kind of gruesome exploitation.
“They are very attached to their land, but because those lands came under the control of the state after Independence, the tribal people were suddenly seen as encroachers. This led to a great mess, the brunt of which the people are bearing even today. To add to this, the lands of these people were given away to private miners and local contractors. The naxalites fought against this injustice and became the leaders of the tribes here.
“In a phase where all the mainstream Left parties were concentrating only on workers’ issues and parties such as the Congress and the Jana Sangh [later on, the Bharatiya Janata Party] were party to the exploitation of tribal people in Bastar, the naxalites were the only force that spoke up for them and filled that political vacuum.”
He said even today the government did not have a plan to address the real livelihood issues of the tribal people. The implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which should have given forest-dwellers their historical right to land, was in disarray, he added. “There was a show of distribution of pattas [land ownership documents] in the beginning but even that is not happening now.”
He pointed to the two major memorandums of understanding (MoUs) that have been signed with the Tatas and Essar Steel, which will permit them to extract minerals here. He said: “The Bastar region has an abundance of minerals such as bauxite, tin and dolomite. Apart from this, it is also rich in timber. Instead of empowering the tribal people and giving them their right to these resources, the government is interested in shipping the resources out. In a place like Bastar, which has seen no development since Independence, a reaction against the state’s forces is bound to happen. The naxalites are just the one force but the problems of the tribal people are real. In this spree of violence, however, the naxalites do not realise that the jawans they killed were also poor people working for a livelihood and not class enemies as such. They only assist the class enemies bound by their duty.”
He felt that the increased deployment of security forces to counter the naxalites was a disguised attempt to enter those villages where Salwa Judum (an anti-Maoist vigilante group, meaning people’s peace movement in the local Gondi language) could not enter. “Every day, we see false encounters and physical torture by the police. In such a case, a villager has no choice but to retaliate either with the Maoists or alone.”
Excerpted from Frontline’s report, “In the war zone” by AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA (Volume 27 – Issue 09 : Apr. 24-May. 07, 2010)
Public Meeting: Indian State’s War on People and the Assault on Democratic Voices (April 24)
Public Meeting
Indian State’s War on People and the Assault on Democratic Voices
3PM-8PM, 24TH APRIL 2010
Gandhi Peace Foundation, Deen Dayal Upadhyay MARG, ITO, DELHI
SPEAKERS: Randhir Singh, Justice Rajender Sachar, PK Vijayan, Madan Kashyap, Sumit Chakravorty, Neelabh, B D Sharma, S A R Geelani, Aparna, Kabir Suman, Darshanpal, Arundhati Roy, Ravinder Goel, Karen Gabriel, N Venuh(NPMHR), S R Sankaran(to be confirmed), Kalpana Mehta, Rajkishore, Varavara Rao, G N Saibaba, Mrigank, Ish Mishra, Radhika Menon, Shivmangal Sidhantkar and others
Operation Green Hunt is an unprecedented military offensive on the people: Indian government has been at war with the people of Kashmir and the North East for decades. In the name of ‘national security and integrity’ and ‘national interest’, the government has been trying to crush the democratic aspirations of these oppressed nationalities with state terror. Through Operation Green Hunt, the government has brought its war on people to the heart of India. If the total number of government forces presently engaged in this Operation is taken in its entirety (including the paramilitary forces and the state police) it comes close to a quarter of a million (2.5 lakh). This is more than double the US forces presently deployed in the occupation of Iraq —approximately 1.2 lakh— and bigger than the armies of Australia, Netherlands and South Africa put together. The war preparations alone speak volumes about the real intentions of the government. Air Force helicopters equipped with guns are used against the adivasis, airstrips are constructed in Raipur and Jagdalpur, tens of Jungle-Warfare schools are established to train the forces in special operations, new barracks and bases to station armed forces are prepared all over the war zone, and public buildings such as schools, panchayat houses and health centres are converted to camps for the Security Forces and torture chambers. In the name of fighting Naxalites/Maoists, new armed forces such as the CoBRA, Jharkhand Jaguar, C-60, etc are raised with public money to unleash terror on the adivasis. With a heinous intent, special emphasis is given by the government to recruit adivasi youths into government forces and state-sponsored vigilante gangs to instigate a bloody internecine war. To top it all, army commanders are deputed to oversee the war operations while the US is providing ‘advisors’, military intelligence, satellite surveillance and overall ‘tactical guidance’.
The hidden objective behind this unprecedented military offensive is to crush all forms of people’s struggles and revolutionary movements so as to clear the way for the giant multinational companies, with whom hundreds of MoUs have been signed by the government. Till September 2009, MoUs worth of Rs.6,69,338 crores have been signed in the adivasi regions of these states (which is 14 percent of the total pledged private investment in the entire country). Arcelor Mittal alone is planning to invest $24 billion for the production of iron-ore in the mineral-rich regions of Jharkhand and Orissa. Likewise, the financial worth of the unexplored bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is estimated to exceed $4 trillion. The powerful foreign and Indian corporations are lying in wait for the government clears the land of the adivasis and smash their resistance, so that they can move into the land with earth-diggers and empty the land out of its minerals. The stage has been set to undertake what has been termed by a Government-appointed committee as the “biggest land-grab after Columbus”. The target this time is not the indigenous inhabitants of North America, but the adivasis of central and eastern India.
The ongoing War on People leaves a trail of devastation and death: In the wake of this war imposed by the government on our own people the death-count in mounting. In a region where 40 people are said to be killed every week on an average (Outlook, 22 February 2010), what the corporate media has missed or has deliberately overlooked is the sheer number of adivasis who died in the hand of the government’s armed forces. Whereas the government has claimed success in killing around 170 ‘Maoists’/‘Naxalites’ during the joint operations under Operation Green Hunt till now, whereas the media quoted the Maoists saying that none of the killed were the members of their organisation. There are reasons to believe that a great part of the dead were unarmed and defenceless villagers killed in cold blood by the joint forces in fake encounters. The killing of adivasis in Gompad, Singanmadugu, Tetemadugu, Dogpadu, Palachelim, Palad, Kachalaram and scores of other villages in Chhattisgarh seems to have followed such a pattern.
An attack on democratic voices: By these acts of fascist repression, the government has made it very clear that the Naxalite movement is not the only target of its war operations. Any movement, organisation or individual that fights for people’s demands and against government policies, is to be branded as a part of the Naxalite/Maoist movement and suppressed by the government through Operation Green Hunt. Swapan Dasgupta, the editor of the journal People’s March in Bengali and owner of Radical Publications was arrested. He died in police custody on 2nd February 2010 even before his trial began due to police torture. He has become the first martyr to fall under the draconian UAPA. Lalmohan Tudu, president of People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) in Lalgarh was picked up from his house and shot dead by the paramilitary forces on 23rd February, 2010. On 20th November 2009, Wadeka Singana, the president of the Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangh (CMAS), Narayanpatna in Orissa along with another activist was shot dead by the police during a rally to protest against the atrocities committed on women by the government’s armed forces. Two of the CPI(ML) leaders Ganapati Patro and Tapan Malik have been arrested on numerous trumped up charges. In Kalinganagar 28 platoons of special police were used to attempt to forcibly acquire land for a road in service of Tatas. When the Bisthapan Birodhi Janmanch Sukinda led adivasis protested, police firing on 30th March 2010 led to bullet injuries to 16 tribal people. Repression is intensifying in the anti-land acquisition movements of Niyamgiri and Jagatsinghpur and against movements under Lok Sangram Manch in Rayagada of Orissa.
The Vanavasi Chetna Ashram of Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian social activist working in Dantewada for the past 18 years among the adivasis and fighting against the atrocities of Salwa Judum, was razed to the ground on 17th May 2009. In three eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh no mass activity is allowed by declaring these districts as ‘Naxal-infested.’ Two PUCL activists, Sheema and Vishwa Vijay were arrested in Utter Pradesh. Hundreds of leaders of farmers’ organisations in Punjab were arrested to prevent their democratic right to protest against state killings of farmers and other leaders. Thousands have been imprisoned in jails all over the country and tortured for allegedly being Naxalite/Maoist ‘sympathizers’. People’s organisations like PUCL, IAPL, PUDR, RDF, PDFI, CRPP, APDR, DSU, etc. and their activists have been falsely implicated by the government. This is an attempt to unleash state terror in order to curtail our democratic rights and to silence all voices of dissent against this genocidal Hunt of the Adivasis. A climate of undeclared emergency now prevails in the country in the wake of this war on people and the assault on democratic space by the Indian State.
The Home Minister, who has been campaigning desperately to mobilise support for this US-dictated war on the poorest of the poor, has even gone to the extent of denying the existence of Operation Green Hunt! Similarly, he continues to utter the rhetoric of ‘Talks’ while refusing to take a single step towards creating a conducive atmosphere for any negotiation to take place. Such, lies, hypocrisy and double-talk by Chidambaram with the support of the Arnab Goswamis, Rajdeep Sardesais and his other wily allies in the corporate media, has not been able to hide the truth of this war. Even the Supreme Court of India, while hearing a petition on the ‘disappearance’ of 12 adivasis from Gompad village of Dantewada district during Green Hunt, castigated the government’s offensive. The court observed, “Some of the reports appearing in the media are disturbing. Over two lakh people have been displaced in this fight… Where will they go? What will they grow?” (IBN Live, 17 February 2010).
The resistance to the government’s war on people is growing: The millions of adivasis under direct attack from the state’s offensive are using all means to defend themselves and their jal-jangal-jameen. The democratic and progressive sections of the country have also come out against the government’s war on the people in the last few months. Individuals and organisations within India and abroad have in one voice condemned the government’s genocidal war. Hundreds of protest rallys, dharnas and demonstrations are being organised in different parts of the country and outside. Peasants, workers, employees, intellectuals, artists, writers, civil rights activists, students etc. have registered their strong protest against the government, and demanded an immediate halt to the Operation Green Hunt. The need of the hour therefore is to unite and build the broadest possible solidarity among the people against this war and intensify the resistance. Only an unceasing wave of mass resistance can stop government’s assault on struggles against sale of the country and plunder of resources and suppression of democratic struggles.
In memory of Pyla Vasudeva Rao, a leader of the Srikakulam Armed Struggle
Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS)
Delhi Committee
Date: April 20 2010 (Tuesday), Time: 5:30 PM o
Venue: Gandhi Peace Foundation, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg (near ITO)
Veteran communist revolutionary of India and one of the foremost leaders of the glorious Srikakulam Armed Struggle Pyla Vasudeva Rao breathed his last at 10:00 AM on April 11, 2010 after fighting cancer. He was 78 years old at the time of his death; of these he had party life of 58 years of which the last 42 years were spent in underground.
Born in 1932 in Rittapadu village of Srikakulam dist, Com. Pyla joined the united Communist Party in 1953 when a party unit was formed in his village. Taking up a teacher’s job on the Party’s instruction, many of his students joined the revolutionary communist movement. He became a professional revolutionary in 1962 and also a member of the district committee of the party.
In response to the clarion call of the Great Naxalbari Peasant Armed Struggle, the Srikakulam Girijan Armed Peasant Struggle started on 25thNovember 1968 and on the decision of the party, Com. PV went underground. As a member of the Srikakulam leadership, Com. Pyla became part of the CPI(ML). He participated in the 1970 CPI(ML) Party Congress (first after Naxalbari). In Srikakulam movement he worked alongside Comrades Panchadi Krishnamurthy, Vempatapu Satyam, Adibhatta Kailasam, Subbarao Panigrahi and others.
Between 1969-70 many important leaders of Srikakulam leaders were martyred and the movement suffered huge losses and setbacks. CPI(ML) PC was reorganized of which Com. Pyla became the secretary. Opposing the line of individual annihilation, Com. Pyla resigned as PC secretary and joined with other Srikakulam comrades to revive CC led by S.N. Singh. Since then he was a member of the Central Committee of the Party. In 1974, APRCP led by Com. CP Reddy merged with the CPI(ML) led by Com. SN Singh and Srikakulam movement became part of the state movement. Com. Pyla was elected state committee secretary in 1976 when Com. P. Ramanarasaiah was killed in a fake encounter.
He was re-elected to the CC in the 1980 Special Congress. For long the Party in AP was identified with his name.
Com. Pyla consistently practiced and supported the revolutionary mass line and struggled against rightism and revisionism. He was an ardent votary of an armed agrarian revolution and of building areas of sustained resistance. His death comes at the time when the peasants of India are rising in many parts against the decadent rule of the ruling classes, against landlord oppression and forcible displacement. Srikakulam Armed Struggle continues to inspire the revolutionaries and struggling people of the country. Srikakulam Armed Struggle which reached the highest point in terms of resistance and people’s participation among all the struggles inspired by Naxalbari continues to serve as a beacon light for the present revolutionary movement. Com. Pyla as one of the leaders of that movement continues to live in the memory of the revolutionaries and the struggling people of the country.
The Independent People’s Tribunal Reveals the Underbelly of Indian “Development”
Deepankar Basu, MRZine
Organized by a collective of civil society groups, social movements, progressive academics, social activists, and concerned citizens, the recently concluded Independent People’s Tribunal (IPT) on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab, and Operation Green Hunt in New Delhi offers a unique perspective into contemporary Indian reality. While the national and international media talk profusely about the unprecedented growth of the Indian economy, as measured by growth of the gross domestic product, it shies away from looking at the underlying costs of that growth: increasing inequality, forced displacement and dispossession of the already vulnerable, growing social tensions, and a rapidly growing State terror. The IPT, by giving space to different activist voices from the grassroots, offers a much-needed alternative perspective on the growth process, a view, in a sense, of the dark underbelly of current-day Indian "development."
Running for three days, from April 9 to April 11, the IPT heard accounts of diverse grassroots activists from the states of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal, and Jharkhand, the theater of an insidious war — nicknamed Operation Green Hunt (OGH) — that the Indian State has launched against its own people. Supplementing activist accounts and testimonies of witnesses with critical insights and advice of social scientists, journalists, legal experts, former government functionaries, and human rights activists, the people’s jury of the IPT made its opinion known through its interim observations and recommendations, the most urgent of which was to stop OGH and initiate a process of dialogue with the local population in the affected areas.1 Other recommendations included: immediately stopping all compulsory acquisition of agricultural or forest land and the forced displacement of the tribal people; making the details of all the memorandum of understanding (MOUs) signed for mining, mineral, and power projects known to the public; stop victimizing and harassing dissenters of the government’s policies; withdraw all paramilitary and police forces from schools and hospitals; constitute an Empowered Citizen’s Commission to investigate and recommend action against persons responsible for human rights violations of the tribal communities.2
Why has the Indian State launched OGH? Why was the IPT organized? Who participated in the deliberations of the IPT? To address such questions, and therefore to understand the true import of the IPT, we need to step back a little and locate the ongoing war in the context of the political economy of contemporary India.
The Context
The announcement of the IPT and the interim observations of the people’s jury set out the context in clear-cut terms. The neoliberal turn in the economic policies pursued by the Indian State since the mid 1980s has, in line with similar experiences in the rest of the world, spelt unmitigated disaster for the vast masses of the country. While a small section of the population has increased its income, wealth, and social power at unimaginable speed and to preposterous levels, the majority of the population has continued to live in absolute poverty, marked by widespread hunger, malnutrition, and lack of access to even the most basic health and educational infrastructure necessary to guarantee a decent standard of living.
In 2009, India had 52 billionaires, about double the corresponding number in 2007. The wealthiest Indian, Mukesh Ambani, has a net worth of $ 32 billion; the combined net worth of the richest 100 Indians in 2009 was US$ 276 billion. On the other side of the social pyramid, about 77 per cent of Indians spent less than $2 (in PPP terms) on daily consumption expenditure in 2004-05 and roughly 80 per cent of Indian households did not have access to safe drinking water.
Not only has the neoliberal economic paradigm meant increasing disparities; it has also meant dispossession and pauperization for already vulnerable sections of the population, noted the interim observation of the people’s jury. This is because a key component of the neoliberal paradigm in India has been the attempt to foster unprecedented levels of State-assisted resource grab by big Indian and foreign capital. What a Ministry of Rural Development report itself termed the biggest resource grab since the time of Columbus, has gradually encompassed arable (often extremely fertile and multi-cropped) land, forest land, mineral resources, and water and has resulted in forcibly cutting off access of the poor and marginalized sections to virtually all forms of common property resources. Coming on top of the five-decade-long "development disaster" of the Indian state, this forcible exclusion from access to common property resources has increased the economic vulnerability of the poor to unprecedented levels.
The current phase of this unprecedented resource grab has been concentrated primarily in the forested regions of Central India, stretching from Chhattisgarh all the way to Jharkhand and West Bengal, which house enormous amounts of mineral resources like iron ore and bauxite. Big corporate houses with interests in mining, minerals, and power industries like Tata, Essar, Vedanta, POSCO, and others have lined up to appropriate these resources for quick economic gains, paying least attention to the enormous environmental and human costs inherent in their ventures. The state governments have welcomed these corporate houses with open arms by signing unknown numbers of memorandum of understandings (MOUs) whose details have not been made public, despite repeated requests by activists and the local population.
But the forested regions of Central India house not only mineral resources corporate capital is desperately after; the region is also home to a large section of the roughly 100-million-strong indigenous population, referred to as adivasis, of the country. To get at the resources, the tribal population needs to be moved, the area needs to be vacated; in Chattisgarh, according to some reports, 300,000 adivasis have already been forcibly displaced, some of whom have moved into the bordering state of Andhra Pradesh and while others have fled into the forests. That is the source of the current conflict: the Indian State, acting clearly in the interests of corporate capital, have decided to forcibly drive out the local indigenous population from this region.
The adivasi population, quite naturally, have resisted this move of the State, using all possible means at their disposal. Drawing on the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which is especially devoted to delineating adivasi rights and laying out special provisions for their protection and endogenous development, adivasi activists have attempted to challenge the government’s move. They have even taken recourse to the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act of 1996 and the Forest Rights Act of 2006, legislations — earned through years of arduous struggle — that have attempted to give more substance to the original impulse of the Fifth Schedule.
Instead of addressing the genuine grievances of indigenous population facing forcible displacement and dispossession, the State has, in flagrant violation of the letter and intent of the Indian Constitution, cracked down on their legitimate protests. Peaceful resistance movements across this region have been met with police brutality and the military might of the State, forcing, in turn, the arming of the resistance movement. State-assisted vigilante groups like the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh and Harmad Bahini in West Bengal were the first response of the state to the armed resistance of the adivasis. When that failed, Operation Green Hunt, a further escalation and militarization of the State’s response, took shape. That, in brief, is the context in which the IPT was organized.
The Participants and the Discussion
Mindful of this ominous context and after hearing the testimonies of participants from various corners of the country, the distinguished people’s jury — comprising former justices H. Suresh and P. B. Sawant, scientist and former member of the National Security Council P. M. Bhargava, former UGC chairman Professor Yash Pal, former chairperson of the National Commission for Women Mohini V. Giri, and retired IPS officer Dr. K. S. Subramanian — recommended stopping OGH and the compulsory acquisition of agricultural or forested land, making details of all MOUs public, and rehabilitating all displaced adivasis.3
While the inaugural address was presented by noted environmental activist Vandana Shiva, the people’s jury was introduced by well-known advocate Prashant Bhushan. The inaugural session also saw presentations by Mr. S. P. Shukla and Dr. B D Sharma, a retired civil servant and ex-chairman of the SC/ST Commission. The latter, in particular, drew attention, based on years of ground-level activism in tribal areas across the country, to the utter and long-term failure of the Indian State to uphold the rights of indigenous people as a result of violations of provisions guaranteed by the Fifth Schedule, the PESA Act of 1996, and the Forest Rights Act of 2006.
The second part of the first day focused on the current situation in Chhattisgarh marked by atrocities of the police and Sulwa Judum SPOs (members of a brutal State-supported vigilante group), regular torture, killing, rape, interrogation, and illegal detention for being alleged Maoist supporters. Speakers included lawyer and human rights activist Sudha Bharadwaj of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, human rights activist Goldy M. George, Gandhian acivist Himanshu Kumar (whose Ashram was demolished by the administration in Chhattisgarh), world-renowned doctor and activist Binayak Sen (who had been jailed for two years in Chhatisgarh without any charges), and democratic activist Harish Dhawan of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, and Lingaram, who had himself been tortured and forced to join the Salwa Judum.
The second day of the IPT saw presentations from Jharkhand and West Bengal. Speakers on the Jharkhand session included: Dr. Alex Ekka, Prem Varma, James Topo, tribal rights activist Gladson Dungdung, Dr. Bani from the Azadi Bachao Andolan, Radha Krishna Munda from the Jharkhand Jungle Bacha Andolan. Speakers at the West Bengal session included human rights activist Sujato Bhadra of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, activist and academic Partho Sarathi Ray of Sanhati, and grassroots activists Montu Lal and Gajen Singh.
Running through all the days of the proceedings, there was also discussion about the attempts to silence every form of dissent, as part of the OGH, in urban areas, by clamping down especially on dissenting voices of urban activists who are opposing the neoliberal policies of the government. Activist Abhijnan from West Bengal, Sujato Bhadra of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, and Kavita Srivastava of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties spoke specifically about incidents of arrests, detentions, and human rights violations including denial of the right of activists to medical treatment while in custody (often under draconian laws).
The third and final day saw presentations on Orissa — with the main speakers being activist Praful Samantra, Abhay Sahu of the anti-POSCO movement, and Lingaraj Azad — and critical interventions by several eminent personalities including writer and activist Arundhati Roy, journalist Shoma Chaudhury, Bianca Jagger, Arun Aggarwal, civil rights activist Kavita Srivastava, and Advocate Shanti Bhushan. The IPT ended with the presentation of the interim observations and recommendations of the people’s jury.
What Is the Message?
All the presentations, though differing in terms of details, drew attention to two closely related facts. First, the current process of growth and "development" in India rests crucially on the forced displacement and dispossession of a sizable section of the indigenous population and peasantry; this process has key resemblance to what Marx had termed the primitive accumulation of capital. Second, any and every resistance to this State-assisted displacement and dispossession is met with military force, again harking back to the brutalities of primitive accumulation in England. Forced displacement, dislocation, and dispossession of the already vulnerable, systematic violations of their rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and an attack on any form of dissent which challenges the State’s policies are, thus, the festering wounds on the stinking underbelly of the current phase of Indian "development." This is probably what the proceedings of the Independent People’s Tribunal (IPT) on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab, and Operation Green Hunt wanted to draw the attention of the world that is so enamored with Indian economic growth.
But will the government heed the advice of the IPT? If past experience is anything to go by, the depressing answer is a resounding no. People’s tribunals are regularly organized the world over to highlight important social, economic, and political issues that affect the lives of ordinary people. India has also witnessed people’s tribunals in the past, the results of which have not only been totally ignored by the State but have even been used to harass their organizers.
Running for four days in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in September 2007, the Independent People’s Tribunal on the World Bank Group in Asia heard testimonies about the damage done by the policies of the World Bank across 26 sectors of social and economic development in India.4 A thirteen-member panel consisting of international jurists, renowned economists, prominent scientists, retired government officials, and social and religious leaders found the World Bank guilty of harming the environment and lowering the standard of living for most Indians.5 The findings of the people’s jury were released as a report on September 11, 2008, a year after the tribunal’s proceedings. Did the government change course because of the recommendations of the jury? My guess is as good as anybody else’s.
An even more outrageous case is the recent harassment and intimidation of human rights activists for highlighting the issue of custodial torture by the police. Kirity Roy, Secretary of the Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM) — a human rights organization in West Bengal — was arrested by the Kolkata police on 7 April 2010, and later released on bail, for organizing a People’s Tribunal on Torture on the June 9-10, 2008 in Kolkata.6 Instead of applauding the work of organizations like MASUM, who are doing public service by highlighting human rights violations of ordinary citizens, the move to arrest its activists and harass them in all possible ways tells a lot about the real intentions of the government. While both Human Rights Watch7 and Amnesty International8 have demanded that the Indian government drop all charges against Kirity Roy and others involved in organizing the People’s Tribunal on Torture, it is doubtful that the government will heed this sage advice unless pressured by citizens’ campaigns.
Given the absolutely negative attitude of the government in dealing with dissent of any kind, it is doubtful that it will heed the advice of the jury at the Independent People’s Tribunal (IPT) on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab, and Operation Green Hunt and call off its war on the tribal people. If this be so, then it must also take note of the warning that the IPT ended its interim observations with:
Even peaceful activists opposing these violent actions of the State against the tribals are being targeted by the State and victimized. This has led to a total alienation of the people from the State as well as their loss of faith in the government and the security forces. The Government — both at the Centre and in the States — must realize that its above-mentioned actions, combined with total apathy, could very well be sowing the seeds of a violent revolution demanding justice and rule of law that would engulf the entire country. We should not forget the French, Russian and American history, leave aside our own.
1 "Independent Tribunal Wants Operation Green Hunt to Stop," Indian Express, 12 April 2010.
2 "’Stop Operation Green Hunt,’"The Hindu, 13 April 2010.
3 Announcements, daily press releases, and the text of the jury’s interim observations and recommendations can be found on alternative media forums like Sanhati and Radical Notes.
4 "Independent People’s Tribunal on World Bank Gets Underway in Delhi," Bank Information Center, 22 September 2007.
5 "Independent People’s Tribunal Report Charges World Bank," BanglaPraxis, 29 October 2009.
6 "Kolkata — Prominent Human Rights Activist Kirity Roy Arrested," Sanhati.
7 "India: End Harassment of West Bengal Activist," Human Rights Watch, 9 April 2010.
8 "India: Government of West Bengal Must Drop False Charges against Activists Campaigning against Torture," Amnesty International, 9 April 2010.
I would like to thank Partho Sarathi Ray and Pinaki Chaudhury for useful comments on an earlier version of this article.
Deepankar Basu is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Courtesy: MRZine
University Struggles at the End of the Edu-Deal
We should not ask for the university to be destroyed, nor for it to be preserved. We should not ask for anything. We should ask ourselves and each other to take control of these universities, collectively, so that education can begin.
- From a flyer found in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, originally written in the University of California
Since the massive student revolt in France, in 2006, against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE), and the ‘anomalous wave’ in Italy in 2008, student protest has mounted in almost every part of the world, suggesting a reprise of the heady days of 1968. It reached a crescendo in the Fall and Winter of 2009 when campus strikes and occupations proliferated from California to Austria, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland and later the UK. The website Tinyurl.com/squatted-universities counted 168 universities (mostly in Europe) where actions took place between 20 October and the end of December 2009. And the surge is far from over. On 4 March, 2010 in the US, on the occasion of a nationwide day of action (the first since May 1970) called in defense of public education, one of the coordinating organisations listed 64 different campuses that saw some form of protest. (Defendeducation.org). On the same day, the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO) tried to close down nine universities calling for free university education. The protest at the University of Johannesburg proved to be the most contentious, with the police driving students away with water cannons from a burning barricade.
At the root of the most recent mobilisations are the budget cuts that governments and academic institutions have implemented in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown and the tuition hikes that have followed from them, up to 32 percent in the University of California system, and similar increases in some British universities. In this sense, the new student movement can be seen as the main organised response to the global financial crisis. Indeed, ‘We won’t pay for your crisis’ – the slogan of striking Italian students – has become an international battle cry. But the economic crisis has exacerbated a general dissatisfaction that has deeper sources, stemming from the neoliberal reform of education and the restructuring of production that have taken place over the last three decades, which have affected every aspect of student life throughout the world.(1)
The End of the Edu-Deal
The most outstanding elements of this restructuring have been the corporatisation of the university systems, and the commercialisation of education. ‘For profit’ universities are still a minority on the academic scene but the ‘becoming business’ of academe is well advanced especially in the US, where it dates back to the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, that enabled universities to apply for patents for ‘discoveries’ made in their labs that companies would have to pay to use. Since then, the restructuring of academe as a money-making venture has proceeded unabated. The opening of university labs to private enterprise, the selling of knowledge on the world market (through online education and off-shore teaching), the precarisation of academic labour and introduction of constantly rising tuition fees forcing students to plunge ever further into debt, have become standard features of the US academic life, and with regional differences the same trends can now be registered worldwide.
In Europe, the struggle epitomising the new student movement has been against the ‘Bologna Process’, an EU project that institutes a European Higher Education Area, and promotes the circulation of labour within its territory through the homogenisation and standardisation of schooling programs and degrees. The Bologna Process unabashedly places the university at the service of business. It redefines education as the production of mobile and flexible workers, possessing the skills employers require; it centralises the creation of pedagogical standards, removes control from local actors, and devalues local knowledge and local concerns. Similar developments have been taking place in many university systems in Africa and Asia (like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) that also are being ‘Americanized’ and standardised (for example, in Taiwan through the imposition of the Social Science Citation Index to evaluate professors) – so that global corporations can use Indian, Russian, South African or Brazilian, instead of US or EU ‘knowledge workers’, with the confidence that they are fit for the job.(2)
It is generally recognised that the commercialisation of the university system has partly been a response to the student struggles and social movements of the ’60s and ’70s, which marked the end of the education policy that had prevailed in the Keynesian era. As campus after campus, from Berkeley to Berlin, became the hotbed of an anti-authoritarian revolt, dispelling the Keynesian illusion that investment in college education would pay down the line in the form of an increase in the general productivity of work, the ideology of education as preparation to civic life and a public good had to be discarded.(3)
But the new neoliberal regime also represented the end of a class deal. With the elimination of stipends, allowances, and free tuition, the cost of ‘education’, i.e. the cost of preparing oneself for work, has been imposed squarely on the work-force, in what amounts to a massive wage-cut, that is particularly onerous considering that precarity has become the dominant work relation, and that, like any other commodity, the knowledge ‘bought’ is quickly devalued by technological innovation. It is also the end of the role of the state as mediator. In the corporatised university students now confront capital directly, in the crowded classrooms where teachers can hardly match names on the rosters with faces, in the expansion of adjunct teaching and, above all, in the mounting student debt which, by turning students into indentured servants to the banks and/or state, acts as a disciplinary mechanism on student life, also casting a long shadow on their future.
Still, through the 1990s, student enrollment continued to grow across the world under the pressure of an economic restructuring making education a condition for employment. It became a mantra, during the last two decades, from New York to Paris to Nairobi, to claim that with the rise of the ‘knowledge society’ and information revolution, cost what it may, college education is a ‘must’ (World Bank 2002). Statistics seemed to confirm the wisdom of climbing the education ladder, pointing to an 83 percent differential in the US between the wages of college graduates and those of workers with high school degrees. But the increase in enrollment and indebtedness must also be read as a form of struggle, a rejection of the restrictions imposed by the subjection of education to the logic of the market, a hidden form of appropriation, manifesting itself in time through the increase in the numbers of those defaulting on their loan repayments.
There is not doubt, in this context, that the global financial crisis of 2008 targets this strategy of resistance, removing, through budget cut backs, layoffs, and the massification of unemployment, the last remaining guarantees. Certainly the ‘edu-deal’, that promised higher wages and work satisfaction in exchange for workers and their families taking on the cost for higher education, is dissolving as well. In the crisis capital is reneging on this ‘deal’, certainly because of the proliferation of defaults and because capitalism today refuses any guarantees, such as the promise of high wages to future knowledge workers.
The university financial crisis (the tuition fee increases, budget cut backs, furloughs and lay-offs) is directly aimed at eliminating the wage guarantee that formal higher education was supposed to bring and at taming the ‘cognitariat’. As in the case of immigrant workers, the attack on the students does not signify that knowledge workers are not needed, but rather that they need to be further disciplined and proletarianised, through an attack on the power they have begun to claim partly because of their position in the process of accumulation.
Student rebellion is therefore deep-seated, with the prospect of debt slavery being compounded by a future of insecurity and a sense of alienation from an institution perceived to be mercenary and bureaucratic that, in the bargain, produces a commodity subject to rapid devaluation.
Demands or Occupations?
The student movement, however, faces a political problem, most evident in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The movement has two souls. On the one side, it demands free university education, reviving the dream of publicly financed ‘mass scholarity’, ostensibly proposing to return to the model of the Keynesian era. On the other, it is in revolt against the university itself, calling for a mass exit from it or aiming to transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls’.(4)
This dichotomy, which some characterise as a return to the ‘reform versus revolution’ disputes of the past, has become most visible in the debate sparked off during the University of California strikes last year, over ‘demands’ versus ‘occupations’, which at times has taken an acrimonious tone, as these terms have become complex signifiers for hierarchies and identities, differential power relations, and consequences for risk taking.
The contrast is not purely ideological. It is rooted in the contradictions facing every antagonistic movement today. Economic restructuring has fragmented the workforce, deepened divisions and, not last, it has increased the effort and time required for daily reproduction. A student population holding two or three jobs is less prone to organise than its more affluent peers in the ’6os.
At the same time there is a sense, among many, that there is nothing more to negotiate, that demands have become superfluous since, for the majority of students, acquiring a certificate is no guarantee for the future which promises simply more precarity and constant self-recycling. Many students realise that capitalism has nothing to offer this generation, that no ‘new deal’ is possible, even in the metropolitan areas of the world, where most wealth is accumulated. Though there is a widespread temptation to revive it, the Keynesian interest group politics of making demands and ‘dealing’ is long dead.
Thus the slogan ‘occupy everything’ – building occupation being seen as a means of self-empowerment, the creation of spaces that students can control, a break in the flow of work and value through which the university expands its reach, and the production of a ‘counter-power’ prefigurative of the communalising relations students today want to construct.
It is hard to know how the ‘demands/occupation’ conflict within the student movement will be resolved. What is certain is that this is a major challenge the movement must overcome in order to increase in its power and its capacity to connect with other struggles. This will be a necessary step if the movement is to gain the power to reclaim education from the hands of the academic authorities and the state. As a next step there is presently much discussion about creating ‘knowledge commons’, in the sense of creating forms of autonomous knowledge production, not finalised or conditioned by the market and open to those outside the campus walls.
Meanwhile, as Edu-Notes has recognised,
already the student movement is creating a common of its own in the very process of the struggle. At the speed of light, news of the strikes, rallies, and occupations, have circulated around the world prompting a global electronic tam-tam of exchanged communiqués, slogans, messages of solidarity and support, resulting in an exceptional volume of images, documents, stories.(5)
Yet, the main ‘common’ the movement will have to construct is the extension of its mobilisation to other workers in the crisis. Key to this construction will be the issue of the debt that is the arch ‘anti-common’, since it is the transformation of collective surplus that could be used for the liberation of workers into a tool of their enslavement. Abolition of the student debt can be the connective tissue between the movement and the others struggling against foreclosures in the US and the larger movement against sovereign debt internationally.
George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. Together with the collective, he has co-edited two books, Midnight Oil: Work Energy War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War. Both were published by Autonomedia Press.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the students and faculty I recently interviewed from the University of California, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Rhodes University in South Africa for sharing their knowledge. I also want to thank my comrades in the Edu-Notes group for their insights and inspiration.
Footnotes
(1) Edu-factory Collective, Towards a Global Autonomous University, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2009
(2) See, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Alidou, Ousseina, A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000, Richard Pithouse, Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006 and Arthur Hou-ming Huang, ‘Science as Ideology: SSCI, TSSCI and the Evaluation System of Social Sciences in Taiwan’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 10 2009, Number 2, pp. 282-291.
(3) George Caffentzis, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in the Crisis’, Zerowork I, 1975, pp. 128-142.
(4) After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California, 2010, Accessed at www.afterthefallcommuniques.info.
(5) Edu-Notes, ‘Introduction to Edu-Notes’, unpublished manuscript.
Courtesy:MUTE
Amid Talk of Air Strikes, Struggles in the Forest Continue
Campaign for Survival and Dignity
Even as the media fills itself with war cries and debates on air strikes, the struggle for democracy in the forest areas continues. The very government that preaches the rule of law continues to violate its own laws on a daily basis, both at the State and at the Central levels. Thus, even as it continues to violate the law, the Environment Ministry has revised its terms of reference for a Committee “to study the implementation of the Forest Rights Act”; the revisions meet some concerns but ignore the most important ones. Meanwhile, the Ministry continues to pour money into illegal plantations, relocation from tiger reserves and Joint Forest Management programs that are used as tools to steal people’s lands and forests. As a group of eminent retired civil servants said in response to the formation of this Committee, “If the government is indeed serious about following the law, it should be enforcing respect for people’s resource rights.”
Meanwhile, people continue to gather and protest for their democratic rights. In Gujarat and Jharkhand, mass dharnas were held on April 7th, demanding recognition of community rights, democratic forest control, an end to repression and respect for the Forest Rights Act. In Rajasthan, as part of an ongoing drive by organisations there, 20 villages have recently issued notices against the Forest Department for criminal offences under the Forest Rights Act. In West Bengal, the National Forum of Forest Peoples and Forest Workers issued an appeal after the house of the co-convenor of the North Bengal Regional Committee was raided by the police at 3 am; he was only saved from being taken away in the night by protests by the rest of the village. The Forum has been involved in struggles to claim community forest resource rights in the area.
The media and the government would do well to ask themselves: what about democracy? And precisely which rule of law is the government defending?
Contact: 9810819301, www.forestrightsact.com
Sanhati’s Statement on Attack on Freedom of Expression in Indian Universities
The imposition of neoliberal economic policies by the Indian State since the early 1990’s has, much along expected lines, spelt disaster for the vast masses of the country. A key component of this paradigm has been the unprecedented levels of State-assisted resource grab by big Indian and foreign capital. Termed as the biggest resource grab since the time of Columbus by a government report, it has extended to arable land, forest land, water and resulted in forcibly cutting off access of the poor and marginalized sections to virtually all forms of common property resources. This, in addition to the five decade long development disaster of the Indian state has increased the economic vulnerability of the poor to unprecedented levels. In responding to the resistance mounted by poor people, especially adivasis and poor peasants, against this forcible dispossession and pauperization, the Government of India has opted for a military solution: Operation Green Hunt. It has chosen to wage war on the most economically vulnerable and socially disadvantaged sections of the Indian population, instead of launching a war on poverty, destitution, hunger and malnutrition.
Going hand in hand with this unstated and unjust war on poor people is a growing authoritarianism of the Indian State. Any and every dissenting voice is sought to be silenced, any opposition is sought to be crushed with force, dialogue and debate is sought to be replaced with repression. While the murder and rape of tribals continue in the “war zone” across the forested regions of Central India, any voice of opposition to this policy is brutally silenced: Binayak Sen was arrested and kept in Raipur jail for close to two years without any charges, Himanshuji’s ashram, the Vanavasi Chetna Ashram, was demolished in Chhattisgarh, human rights activists across the country are being daily harassed and intimidated by the police and intelligence agencies, Akhil Gogoi of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) in Assam was harassed by the police, Dr. E Rati Rao, the vice-president of PUCL, Karnataka, has been charged with sedition, Prakash Korram of the Ekta Parishad was detained for several days in Gujarat. The list is growing at an alarmingly rapid rate.
The attack on the democratic rights of the people has now reached the university campuses of the country. It has been recently reported that legitimate political activity of students are coming under undue scrutiny, that the administrations of various universities are attempting to monitor and debar public meetings on “sensitive” political issues, that university teachers and students are being wilfully “picked up” by the police for interrogation. This is unacceptable, this cannot be allowed to continue.
We appeal to all democratic-minded people of India and the world to raise their voices against the unjust war of the Indian State and the concomitant attack on the democratic rights of the people. We must lend our support to the movement to protect the freedom of speech and expression, the right to democratic dissent.
Press Release on the JNU incident
Campaign against War on People
On 9th April, 2010, ‘JNU Forum against War on People’ organised a cultural programme titled ‘A Cultural Evening of Protest against Operation Green Hunt’ at Godavari Dhaba in JNU to oppose the sate-military offensive on tribals of Eastern and Central India. The programme included, as its pamphlet clearly states, a play called ‘Sadak’ written by Habib Tanvir, screening of documentary and songs, poetry, performances by students from JNU, Jamia and Delhi University. As soon as the programme started, a group of miscreants led by ABVP and NSUI leaders tried to disrupt the event by shouting slogans and abusing the organisers. Apprehending an attack on the performers, students present in the audience formed a human chain around the stage. However, the ABVP and NSUI hooligans broke this human chain forcefully, physically assaulting and injuring students, to clear their way to the stage. They disconnected the electricity, destroyed audio-visual equipments, vandalised the dais and beat-up anyone, who dared to come on their way. Number of students were injured in this attack and had to be taken to AIIMS for medical help. While ABVP-NSUI-YFE goons went on the rampage, the chief security officer of JNU, who was present at the spot, remained a mute spectator. The next day, when students were protesting against this incident, once again some ABVP-NSUI-YFE miscreants started pelting stones at the protesters and tore down the posters of ‘JNU Forum against War on People’.
In Delhi University we have seen similar attacks by fascist forces on students’ events as well. Two months ago, a mobile book store by ‘Janchetna’ was attacked by ABVP hooligans, where they tore books and damaged the van before students came out in numbers in protection of their own space. It is evident from these incidents that the fascist forces are afraid of any kind of pro people programme. They want to rob our democratic spaces by force. They want to silence any voice, which raises question on people’s misery, state repression and dismantling of democracy.
The JNU administration, instead of taking steps against these lumpens, is trying to propagate all sorts of misinformation about the incident. First, the administration raised the issue of prior permission for holding a meeting, knowing fully well that the cultural programme was hold at a ‘dhaba’ and there is no provision for and precedence of administrative permission for such events. We have experienced similar selective administrative harassment in Delhi University as well. It has become a standard practice of the university administration not to clamp down on the perpetrators of such incident. Instead these incidents have been used as an excuse to snatch away the remaining limited democratic space through official-legal measures. JNU administration has gone a step farther on this occasion by joining the ABVP-BJP-NSUI- YFE chorus of branding the event as an ‘anti-national’ protest. It is perhaps a cruel joke (and indeed a fascist strategy) that the architects of Operation Green Hunt, which has resulted in loss of life and livelihoods of millions of people, are claiming to be ‘patriots’ today!
Worldwide, universities have traditionally been a crucial space for freedom of expression, the exploration of ideas and critical debate. They have always been, and should always be, sites where even the strongest critique of the state can be – in fact, must and should be – made possible. This is an essential character, not just of the university as an institution, but of the democratic principles of the society it exists in. The JNU incident, once again, reveals the systematic way in which the democratic spaces are taken away by a nexus of fascist goons and the university administration.
We, ‘Campaign against War on People’, a community of students and teachers of Delhi University, unequivocally condemn ABVP-NSUI-YFE for the attack. We also condemn the JNU administration for their vicious propaganda campaign and for failing to take steps against the miscreants. We demand the following measures be taken immediately
1) Disciplinary actions must be taken against these goons, who are destroying the democratic fabric of our universities.
2) JNU administration must apologise for their misinformation campaign.
Event: Occupied! Workers’ Factory Occupations North and South
Date: Saturday, April 17, 2010
Time: 1:30pm – 5:30pm
Location: Indian Social Institute (ISI) 10, Institutional Area, Lodi Road, New Delhi (India)
We will screen two short documentaries about workers’ occupation of Visteon car parts factory in London in April 2009 and the occupation of Hero Honda plant near Gurgaon in May 2008. Marco, who has been involved in the Visteon occupation, will share his experience. We want to debate about the potentials and difficulties of workers’ struggles in Delhi’s industrial belt and about what kind of practice a revolutionary left can develop in support.
Enfield, England
“Visteon Occupation – they fight for us all” (20min)
After the crisis blow of autumn 2008 the global car industry started an attack on its work-force. The Ford subsidiary Visteon decided to shut down three plants in the UK – the workers responded by spontaneous occupation. The documentary shows the self-activity of workers and the role of state and unions. We will have the possibility to discuss with a comrade who was actively involved in the occupation.
Gurgaon, India
“Interview with Hero Honda Workers” (20min)
In the last years there have been several ‘wild’ occupations of factories in Gurgaon. The occupations were organised mainly by workers hired through contractors and they remained largely unknown to the wider public: five days occupation at Hero Honda and Delphi in Gurgaon in 2006, at Medikit and Honda HMSI in 2007, at Hero Honda in Dharuhera in 2008. These struggles ask us – a revolutionary left – about our potentials of practical support. Comrades of Faridabad Majdoor Talmel will present some ideas.
More about Hero Honda and other struggles in Gurgaon
Interim Observations and Recommendations of the IPT Jury, 11th April 2010
Independent People’s Tribunal on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab and Operation Green Hunt: Interim Observations of the Jury, 11th April 2010
The jury heard the testimonies of a large number of witnesses over three days from the States of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa as well as some expert witnesses on land acquisition, mining and human rights violations of Operation Green Hunt. The immediate observations of the Jury are as follows:
Tribal communities represent a substantial and important proportion of Indian population and heritage. Not even ten countries in the world have more people than we have tribals in India. Not only are they crucial components of the country’s human biodiversity, which is greater than in the rest of the world put together, but they are also an important source of social, political and economic wisdom that would be currently relevant and can give India an edge. In addition, they understand the language of Nature better than anyone else, and have been the most successful custodian of our environment, including forests. There is also a great deal to learn from them in areas as diverse as art, culture, resource management, waste management, medicine and metallurgy. They have been also far more humane and committed to universally accepted values than our urban society.
It is clear that the country has been witnessing gross violation of the rights of the poor, particularly tribal rights, which have reached unprecedented levels since the new economic policies of the 90’s. The 5th Schedule rights of the tribals, in particular the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act and the Forest Rights Act have been grossly violated. These violations have now gone to the extent where fully tribal villages have been declared to be non-tribal. The entire executive and judicial administration appear to have been totally apathetic to their plight.
The development model which has been adopted and which is sharply embodied in the new economic policies of liberalization, privatization and globalization, have led in recent years to a huge drive by the state to transfer resources, particularly land and forests which are critical for the livelihood and the survival of the tribal people, to corporations for exploitation of mineral resources, SEZs and other industries most of which have been enormously destructive to the environment. These industries have critically polluted water bodies, land, trees, plants, and have had a devastating impact on the health and livelihoods of the people. The consultation with the Gram Sabhas required by the PESA Act has been rendered a farce as has the process of Environment Impact Assessment of these industries. This has resulted in leaving the tribals in a state of acute malnutrition and hunger which has pushed them to the very brink of survival. It could well be the severest indictment of the State in the history of democracy anywhere, on account of the sheer number of people (tribals) affected and the diabolic nature of the atrocities committed on them by the State, especially the police, leave aside the enormous and irreversible damage to the environment. It is also a glaring example of corruption – financial, intellectual and moral – sponsored and/or abetted by the State, that characterizes today’s India, cutting across all party lines.
Peaceful resistance movements of tribal communities against their forced displacement and the corporate grab of their resources is being sought to be violently crushed by the use of police and security forces and State and corporate funded and armed militias. The state violence has been accentuated by Operation Green Hunt in which a huge number of paramilitary forces are being used mostly on the tribals. The militarization of the State has reached a level where schools are occupied by security forces.
Even peaceful activists opposing these violent actions of the State against the tribals are being targeted by the State and victimized. This has led to a total alienation of the people from the State as well as their loss of faith in the government and the security forces. The Government – both at the Centre and in the States – must realize that it’s above-mentioned actions, combined with total apathy, could very well be sowing the seeds of a violent revolution demanding justice and rule of law that would engulf the entire country. We should not forget the French, Russian and American history, leave aside our own.
Recommendations:
1. Stop Operation Green Hunt and start a dialogue with the local people.
2. Immediately stop all compulsary acquisition of agricultural or forest land and the forced displacement of the tribal people.
3. Declare the details of all MOUs, industrial and infrastructural projects proposed in these areas and freeze all MOUs and leases for non-agricultural use of such land, which the Home Minister has proposed.
4. Rehabilitate and reinstate the tribals forcibly displaced back to their land and forests.
5. Stop all environmentally destructive industries as well as those on land acquired without the consent of the Gram Sabhas in these areas.
6. Withdraw the paramilitary and police forces from schools and health centres which must be effectuated with adequate teachers and infrastructure.
7. Stop victimizing dissenters and those who question the actions of the State.
8. Replace the model of development which is exploitative, environmentally destructive, iniquitous and not suitable for the country by a completely different model which is participatory, gives importance to agriculture and the rural sector, and respects equity and the environment.
9. It must be ensured that all development, especially use of land and natural resources, is with the consent and participation of the Tribal communities as guaranteed by the Constitution. Credible Citizen’s Commissions must be constituted to monitor and ensure this.
10. Constitute an Empowered Citizen’s Commission to investigate and recommend action against persons responsible for human rights violations of the tribal communities. This Commission must also be empowered to ensure that tribals actually receive the benefit of whatever government schemes exist for them.
The Independent People’s Tribunal took place from 9th – 11th April, 2010, at the Constitution Club, New Delhi. This was organized by a collective of civil society groups, social movements, activists, academics and concerned citizens in the country. The people’s jury, comprising of Hon’ble Justice P. B. Sawant, Justice H. Suresh, Professor Yash Pal, Dr. V. Mohini Giri, Dr. P. M. Bhargava, and Dr. K.S. Subramanian heard testimonies from the affected people, social activists and experts from Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal.
For more information, please contact: Sherebanu 9953466107; Purnima 9711178868
Independent People’s Tribunal (Final Day)
The Independent People’s Tribunal concluded today with the jury comprising of Justice (Retd.) Sawant, Justice (Retd.) Suresh, Professor Yash Pal, Dr. P. M. Bhargava, Dr. Mohini Giri and Dr. K S Subramanian presenting an interim recommendation report to the public, Government and the media on the issues of on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab and Operation Green Hunt. The interim report was drafted by the jury members after three days of deliberations and hearings of depositions and testimonies from affected people and activists from the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa.
Presenting the recommendations of the jury before the media, public and Government, Justice (Retd.) Sawant said “There is a perception within the Goivernment and media that by organising meetings like the IPT, we, everyone present in this room are supporting the Maoists and the death of the 76 CRPF jawans. Let me clarify this position for once and for all: We are not supporting the Maoists. We do not support violence in any form, State or otherwise. We here are discussing problems of the tribals and the crisis that is pushing people to a brink of desperation and escalating the cycle of violence.” It is clear that the state had let the tribals and the poor of this land down. Instead of restoring their faith in the Constitution of India, its judiciay and its spirit, the Government asked for abjuring of violence. “Are these morals only to be remembered in such times, and to be forgotten when atrocities are committed by the state itself?” Dr. P M Bhargava noted that the civil society needs to stand resolute in resisting the current development paradigm and that the case of the BT Brinjal was a case in point for small victories of the people. “The patience of the masses is running out if some serious rethinking is not.” Dr. Mohini Giri lamented on the fact that the Government took no notice of People’s Tribunals like these and recommendations that emanated from it. She criticised the Government for their lack of understanding of the issues that were affecting people and implored them to do so immediately.
The interim report of the Jury states “gross violation of the rights of the poor, particularly tribal rights, which have reached unprecedented levels since the new economic policies of the 90’s. The 5th Schedule rights of the tribals, in particular the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act and the Forest Rights Act have been grossly violated. These violations have now gone to the extent where fully tribal villages have been declared to be non-tribal. The entire executive and judicial administration appears to have been totally apathetic to their plight. It could well be the severest indictment of the State in the history of democracy anywhere, on account of the sheer number of people (tribals) affected and the diabolic nature of the atrocities committed on them by the State, especially the police, leave aside the enormous and irreversible damage to the environment. (Attached is the interim jury report).
The first session of the day took stock of the situation in Orissa with regards to industrial and mining projects, land acquisition and people’s resistance movements against such displacement, disposession. Addressed by activists Praveen Patel, Praful Samantra, Abhay Sahu and photographer Sanjit Das, the narratives pointed out to how corporate greed colluding with government officials was bleeding out the tribals. Praveen Patel presented a paper on the ‘Political Economy of Mining’ and pointed out that under the current policy, foreign companies were getting away with virtual robbery, taking huge profits, paying very little in taxes and in fact exacting a huge price from the poor (especially tribals) who are displaced and who suffer severe health and livelihood impacts from the rampant pollution.
The problematic exploitation of iron and bauxite ore was further highlighted in Praful Samantra’s talk. For example, the sites containing the most bauxite ore are located atop mountains and correspond to the sources of numerous streams. Mining the ores amounts to ruining the water supply for the adivasis living in the area, while leaving the company with zero liability. Protests are suppressed in a manner similar to that seen in other states: “…in the last year 14 people have been shot dead. In the last 6 months, villagers have been banned from leaving their areas, even to go to the hospital. In September 2009, 30 innocent villagers were put in jail and branded as Maoists. We went there and fought for them because they were innocent. The administration assured us that they would be released but they are still in jail now. Their families are starving now.”
Abhay Sahu, a leader of the Anti-POSCO movement, spoke about the situation on ground. Local people have been protesting the proposed port project, to be built by POSCO which would ruin the lucrative beetle vine cultivation as well as destroy the livelihood of lakhs of fishermen. He testified on the intimidation tactics used by the State-company nexus to kill the protests: “On 29 November 2007, state and company goons set fire to a village in my area. They occupied all schools and building in the area. When people started fighting back, the police had to abandon their posts.”
Lingaraj Azad, a tribal rights activist, talked about the delicate balance of nature in Niyamgiri, Orissa where the Dhongria Kondh tribe has dwelled for centuries. The Niyamgiri hill is under threat from Vedanta Resources for its bauxite reserves. “We have abundant herbs and trees. In the hills, there are 8000-9000 people in 200 villages. These people know nature and nature knows them. Soil, earth, water, trees—these are regarded as God and prayed to. They have no material possessions except Nature and all of it. There is no concept of private property, it is all for common use”. The Niyamgiri mining project has been receiving international media attention after the human-rights violations at Vedanta mining sites were made public.
Ajit Bhattacharjea, a journalist, stressed that lands in tribal areas were community property and did not belong to the State. Handing these lands to corporates needed to stop. Banwari Lal Sharma appealed to the politicians: “We need to spread a message of peace and make these politicians understand that we are not their enemies but we are all friends. When they sell away the country they are selling away parts of themselves.”
The session after break saw several eminent personalities addressing the audience, including Arundhati Roy, Shoma Chaudhury, Bianca Jagger, Arun Aggarwal, Kavita Srivastava and Advocate Shanti Bhushan. Arun Aggarwal presented a well researched paper on the Economics of Mining. According to him, revenue from mining activities to the state accounted for a measly 1.4% of total profits while the rest was pocketed by the corporation. The politics of mining was so complicated and corrupt that the nexus could be tracked between the corporations, politicians and police. For him, the fact that the ultra left movement was situated in areas of mineral wealth concentration, mining activities and displacement of people was a point of great importance and not to be ignored. He recommended that all mining activity should be conducted by Government owned enterprises so that the profits could be distributed more equitably. Shanti Bhushan, in a surprise address, asked the civil society to not remain silent but condemn violent acts by Maoists. Accepting the fact that tribals had been exploited for years, he added that civil society’s silence on condemning the recent carnage was being perceived as their support of Maoist violence. “How can you accept an armed resistance and overthrow of the State with violence? What is the agenda of the Maoists? If they mean well, then why don’t they give up arms and participate in elections? Let it be all done in the open.” Shoma Chaudhury, Editor-Features, Tehelka spoke on the role of the media and accepted that the debates and discussions on television channels were resolutely and sadly binary. The discussions on these topics needed to be made more complex, because they required a combination of solutions. “Keeping out perspectives – whether the Government’s, Civil Society’s or the general public will only narrow down the discourse on these complex problems that we find ourselves in. This exclusion in itself is a very dangerous trend and needs to be arrested”. She added “There is no place for violence in a democracy. Agreed. However, did democracy exist in the states of Chhattisgarh, Orissa? Democracy does not only mean election. The judiciary, police, forest officials and magistrates all represent India’s democratic structure and it is these very institutions that have failed the people.” Bianca Jagger, returning from a visit to Orissa, spoke about her experience with the Dongria Kondh tribe. She said that despite being a foreigner she related to the problem of India’s tribals. Her experience of having worked as a human rights activist in Latin and Central America shows that indigenous communities everywhere are being pressurised by the current development paradigm. Saying that there is a lot to be learnt from indigenous communities and their ecologically sustainable lifestyle, she added “I request the Government of India to retrospect into why there is an armed insurrection to begin with?”. Arundhati Roy began by asking a very poignant question “Does the government want war or peace?”. In the current context of anti-maoist operations and rampant industrial activity that was displacing people, she said “it seems to me that war is a synonym for creating an ideal investment climate.” According to her, in the 1970’s and 80’s, democracy was the single largest threat to imperialist, capitalist western nations, who overthrew democracies in Latin America. Now however war is being in Afghanistan and Iraq to install democracy and all its associated institutions. She questioned the nature of democracy, as it existed today, saying that “democracy and democratic institutions have been reduced to being vessels of Free Market Capitalism”.
For more information, please contact: Sherry 9953466107; Purnima 971178868
Independent People’s Tribunal (Day 2)
Testimonies on Land Grab and Government/Corporate Atrocities in Jharkhand and West Bengal
A poignant session (9.4.2010) on Chhattisgarh and the situation of adivasis was presented at the Independent Peoples Tribunal on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab and Operation Green Hunt on 9.4.2010. This was followed by a second session focusing on two other states (where the Operation Green Hunt has recently commenced) with presentations and depositions on 10.4.2010. Speakers from Jharkhand and Orissa testified on numerous violations of laws, relating to land acquisition, tribal protection, pollution, and other violations of the Indian Constitution by corporations and the state governments.
At the Jharkhand session, several eminent speakers, including academics and leaders of popular resistance movements spoke about the situation of displacement, resistance and the looming threat of Operation Green Hunt recently commenced in Jharkhand as well. Prem Verma, spoke about the strength of the movements that have powerful grassroots support and have been largely successful in their struggles to keep their land.
Dr. Alex Ekka, spoke on the umbilical relationship between tribals and their forests. He said: “Our worldview is cosmocentric. Every being has a place in this worldview, whether it is a rock, a bird, or a person. This is the worldview that will lead to a sustainable and peaceful life on what we adivasis call our Mother Earth.”
James Topo spoke emphatically on the pathetic state of education in tribal areas. The content of textbooks is completely irrelevant to the needs and context of adivasi children with the content-writers unable or unwilling to grasp that difference. The failure of education is exploited by officials; an example was given of a land acquisition officer giving a cheque to a tribal, assuring him that it was only a record of their conversation.
Gladson Dungdung, a tribal rights activist spoke on the atrocities on civilians in the name of Operation Green Hunt in Jharkhand since March 2010. Adivasis in the area are experiencing this operation in the form of harassment, detention, looting and beating. The result, as it is being manifested now, and only likely to grow, is that the village economy has ground to a complete halt, threatening the delicate balance of sustenance on which the adivasis survive. Fear has set it, villagers are unwilling to go into the forest to collect minor forest produce, rural markets are empty and all democratic space for protest has been closed to the adivasis. Migration out of the forest has commenced. Gladson Dungdung stated: “Operation Green Hunt is not for cleansing Maoists but for establishing corporate houses in the mineral corridor, which was labeled the Red corridor only after the State realized that corporations were not signing MoUs for certain areas where protest was likely. The adivasis will never give their land – we tell the steel corporations that we don’t want to eat steel, we want to eat foodgrains.”
Dr. Bani of the Azadi Bachao Andolan spoke of the many hurdles faced in the successful struggle to stop the huge NTPC thermal power plant, which would have ruined thousands of acres of prime agricultural land. Most members of the Andolan have at least 10 false cases booked and pending against them. He spoke of the farce that is the public hearing for approval of projects. Hearings scheduled say, for 6th April at a distance of 20 km from the site of construction (in violation of the law) get secretively held on the 5th April, 11pm, to dissuade people from attending and participating (sited from a real 2009 incident).
Dr Bani also mentioned demonstrated alternatives to power production (touted as a mode of development) for example, where the government wants to buy land with mineral resources worth 40-60 crore/acre for a pittance from farmers, ABA have instead started small power plants, fully owned by the villagers, which utilize the local coal resources to power 50-60 households and all revenues would be split evenly between the villagers. He stressed on importance of development that was locally imagined and with locals benefitting and deciding on operations and economics.
Radha Krishna Munda of the Jharkhand Jungle Bachao Andolan spoke of ground realities in the implementation (or lack thereof) of the Forest Rights Act in Jharkhand. Additionally he talked of the harassment that adivasis and popular movements are facing. “An atmosphere of suspicion and intimidation has been created” he said – instead of implementing the Forest Rights Act, the nexus of police, civil administration and Forest Department is actively conniving with corporations to illegally give away adivasi land.
The West Bengal session saw a re-presentation of protests and peoples movements consistently dubbed Maoist in the past, Lalgarh being an example. Local activists and leaders of peoples’ movements are being branded as Maoists, a common thread that was also seen in the testimonies from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Sujato Bhadro talked about the grave situation in Lalgarh, where a day after the Chief Ministers convoy was blown up, the police attacked villages 40 km away and mistreated the villagers. A village woman’s eyes were brutally gorged in the attack, another miscarried her baby. Currently, joint forces in the “affected areas” run amok, in violation of Constitution of India and international norms to which India is a signatory. People are being abducted, not produced in 24 hours and night raids are being conducted. In an unprecedented move, the entire area of Lalgarh has been governed under Section 144 of the CRPC since 17th June 2009.
Anup Mandal, a marathon runner at the national level, spoke of being beaten by the police despite protesting about his lack of any Maoist connection and had to be recognised and rescued by a journalist after considerable damage. He was confined to bed for 4 months, putting an end to his dreams of competing at the international level. He said: “I want the SP to be held responsible; as it was due to him that my life was ruined.”
Montu Lal and Gajen Singh, activists, also testified on atrocities in Lalgarh. Government has set aside funds for Joint Forces and for the Harmat Vahini but there is no funding for the poor. People have evacuated the villages and the paramilitary forces have taken measures that seem to be designed to take vengeance on people – such as polluting village wells and forcibly recruit people for petty work. “It feels like these are actions of a foreign occupying force”.
The Independent People’s Tribunal will continue from 9th – 11th April, 2010, at the Constitution Club, New Delhi. This is organized by a collective of civil society groups, social movements, activists, academics and concerned citizens in the country.
For more information, please contact: Sherry 9953466107; Purnima 971178868
A Discussion with the Producer of “Inside the Revolution”, Roberto Navarrete
Date: Monday, 12/04/2010. Time: 2:00-5:00 pm
Location: Indian Social Institute 10, Institutional Area, Lodi Road, New Delhi (India)
Inside the Revolution: A Journey into the Heart of Venezuela
(Director Pablo Navarrete, 65mins, Alborada Films, 2009)
February 2009 marked 10 years since Hugo Chavez took office, following a landslide election victory, and launched his revolution to bring radical change to Venezuela. While wildly popular with many in the country, Chavez’s policies and his strongly-worded criticisms of the U.S. government have also made him powerful enemies, both at home and abroad, especially in the media.
Filmed in Caracas in November 2008, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of Chavez’s controversial presidency, this feature-length documentary takes a journey into the heart of Venezuela’s revolution to listen to the voices of the people driving the process forward.
The film traces the recent history of Venezuela, before and after the election of Hugo Chavez to the presidency, using archive material and interviews with Venezuelans living in the barrios of Caracas who are involved in community and social movements. The achievements and challenges facing the Bolivarian process are put into context by means of interviews with leading Venezuelan social scientists Edgardo Lander and Javier Biardeau, as well as the Canadian economist Michael Lebowitz, who currently lives in Venezuela.
“This is a rare film about Venezuela, a country in extraordinary transition. Watch this film because it is honest and fair and respectful of those who want to be told the truth about an epic attempt, flaws and all, to claim back the humanity of ordinary people.”
- John Pilger (Journalist, author and documentary filmmaker)
“A lively, well-researched documentary which pulls off that most difficult of tasks – an honest account of the achievements and the weaknesses of the Chavez government.”
- Sue Branford (Journalist, former Latin American analyst for the BBC World Service)
Independent People’s Tribunal (Day 1)
Press Release: 9th April, 2010
9th – 11th April, 2010, Constitution Club, New Delhi
Stop structural violence against adivasis
Stop destructive development and restore the faith of the adivasis in the Indian Constitution
The Independent People’s Tribunal on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab and Operation Green Hunt, organized by Citizen’s against Forced Displacement and War on People, kicked-off today to a packed hall, consisting of students, academics, activists and the media. The Independent People’s Tribunal is being held in New Delhi, Constitution Club.
Dr. Vandana Shiva, well-renowned environmental activist presented the inaugural address and spoke about the “urgent need to develop democratic spaces”, such as the IPT. She said “the complex issues related land acquisition, mining and exploitation of the tribals as well as mechanisms of state suppression need to be discussed in a open manner by concerned individuals and intellectuals without the threat of arrest”. Advocate Prashant Bhushan, continuing in a similar vein, referred to the mining mafia that was bleeding the nation of its resources. According to him “rampant mining is displacing adivasis from their lands and leading to the ecological ruin of India’s forest land”. He questioned the logic of undertaking such activity ‘in public interest’ when 80% of the profits were pocketed by private companies, while people were left dispossessed and left to suffer health hazards. Mr. Bhushan then introduce the People’s Jury comprising of Hon’ble (Retd) Justice P. B. Sawant, Justice (Retd) H. Suresh, Dr. V. Mohini Giri, Professor Yash Pal, Dr. P. M. Bhargava and retired IPS officer Dr. K. S. Subramanian. (Jury Bios are attached at the end of the press note). The first session was also addressed by Mr. S P Shukla who spoke about the deep injustice being met out to the tribals and the unfair polarisation of the debate in the media and the state. He said that violence by the Maoists was representative of years of injustice suffered by the poor in these lands and that use of excessive force, clamping down on democratic spaces by arrests and detention of activists like Binayak Sen would only exacerbate the situation. He strongly recommended that the State should engage in widening the discussion on the issue if it wanted to solve it. Dr. B D Sharma, a retired civil servant and ex-chairman of the SC/ST Commission, Bastar spoke about the continuous denial of rights of the tribals by the state – in the form of violations of the Vth Schedule of the Constitution, Panchayati (Extension) to Schedule Areas, Forests Rights Act.
Day 1 of the Independent People’s Tribunal focussed on the current situation in Chhattisgarh. Sudha Bhardwaj, lawyer and labour rights activist, Chattisgarh Mukti Morcha deposed on the intricate nexus between the State and Corporations in expropriating the land for industrial and mining purpose. She deposed on the ground situation in Chhattisgarh where in gross violation of the PESA Act, gram sabhas were being manipulated to take decisions on land use and sale, against collective community decision-making process. According to Sudha the scale of corruption was enormous. The district officials were facilitating the transfer of tribal land, flouting all legal and procedural conduct. She recommended that there should be strict enforcement of the Forest Rights Act and procedures of granting environmental clearances. In all cases, corporate acquisition of tribal land was to be stopped to restore the faith of the tribals in the State. Goldy M George, rights activist in Chhattisgarh also reiterated the corporate land grab and pointed out to the number of secret MOUs that were being signed, without adequate public consultation. Activists in these areas were being targeted by insidious campaigns by the State and corporates. The politics of alienation of the tribals was part of a larger strategy to use the politics of genocide in the game of Power. Harish Dhawan, human rights activist, Peoples Union for Democratic Rights spoke about the terror unleshed by the Salwa Judum and its role in the current operations.
The second part of the session focused on narratives by tribals, from the state of Chhattisgarh. The general narratives were different in details but similar in the pattern – atrocities by the police and Sulwa Judum SPOs; torture, interrogation and illegal detention for being an alleged ‘naxal’ supporter. Lingaram who was tortured and forced to join the Judum spoke about how the Gram Panchayats were mute to the cause of the tribals, and in fact, detrimental to their existence. He questioned the enormous amount of money spent since independence on the ‘welfare plans’ for the tribals and the lack of any progress in this regard. Lamenting on the lack of education and health services, he said that tribals needed development on their terms and not of the kind that was being enforced upon them from all quarters. Himanshu Kumar, Gandhian activist, spoke about the advisory, legal and rehabilitation support provided by the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram to the tribals and the consequent attempts by the state to squash the same by terrorizing villagers. Dr. Binayak Sen, offered a different perspective on structural violence that is embedded in the treatment meted out to the tribals. According to him, statistics on malnutrition revealed a severe hunger crisis and are emblematic of the neglect that these regions had been subjected to for long. He derided the state for using the development rhetoric when masses were dying of hunger and malaria.
The Independent People’s Tribunal will continue from 9th – 11th April, 2010, at the Constitution Club, New Delhi. This is organized by a collective of civil society groups, social movements, activists, academics and concerned citizens in the country.
For more information, please contact: Sherbanu (9953466107); Purnima 9711178868
Franklin Rosemont: Herbert Marcuse and Surrealism
Here we link an important essay that explores Marcuse’s engagement with Surrealism. It was written by a prominent American left activist and scholar, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group, Franklin Rosemont, who died last April (12 April, 2009). The essay also contains letters between Rosemont and Marcuse.
During the last twenty-five years of his life, Herbert Marcuse repeatedly affirmed a lively and sympathetic interest in surrealism. His many references to the subject, in Eros and Civilization and in nearly all his subsequent books, as well as in scattered articles and interviews, reveal that this interest was continually expanding and deepening. At least from May ’68 on, as his commentators have conceded, surrealism was central to his vision of revolutionary social transformation.
Marcuse’s letters to the Chicago surrealist in the early 1970s – published here for the first time – constitute his only sustained discussion of the aims and principles, theory and practice, past and future of surrealism. Adding appreciably to our knowledge of the great critical theorist’s mature thought, these letters should also help stimulate a broader discussion not only of surrealism as such, but of the whole complex interplay of poetry, imagination, revolt and revolution – today and tomorrow.
From one of Marcuse’s letters included in the essay:
“The gap which separates art and the people could be reduced to the degree to which the people cease to be “the people” (=those who are ruled) and become freely associated individuals. The real socialist revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries would be catastrophic transformation not only of the material and cultural institutions but also of the sensibility, imagination and reason of the men and women engaged in this transformation. In this transformation, the esthetic qualities would play a decisive part – not as decoration, ritual, and surface but as the expression of the vital needs of the individuals.”
A Generalised State of Exception and the Maoists in India
A shorter version of the article appeared in The Hindustan Times (April 8 2010)
Appearances, as the cliché goes, are often deceptive. The annihilation of 73 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, by combatants of the Maoist People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army has, however, given a new twist to that cliché. The incident, thanks to the phenomenology constructed for it by an ever-increasing number of breathlessly sensationalist television news channels, has become as overwhelming as its visual effect. But before ‘liberal’ middle India allows itself to be overwhelmed by the appearance of the incident and gives in to a sense of outrage served to it by its bad conscience – the tragedy-hungry, bloodthirsty and shrill mass media – it would do well to take a step back from the popular representations of the “massacre” and ponder hard on what lies beyond the vanishing point of those ‘galling images’.
Before the more vocal, patriotic and humane sections of this liberal citizenry begin shouting at the top of their voices that the law of the land, the sovereignty of its state and, therefore, the very idea of democratic India is facing its gravest adversary ever, they would do well to remember how the rule of the law (nomos) is envisaged in modern jurisprudence. Constitutive of a modern and democratic legal regime is its undemocratic exception, something that it bares when the socio-political order it is meant to maintain and enable runs into an existential crisis. This appearance of the undemocratic exception, from the depths of the democratic law where it lies carefully concealed, onto the surface of legal legitimacy entails the suspension of the democratic aspects of the ‘normal’ law. That the Indian Constitution has provisions for the declaration of internal emergency – something the nation actually experienced once as a matter of political and legal fact in the ’70s – under certain conditions shows how the democratic law of a democratic state can suspend itself to legitimately institute its undemocratic exception.
The first and most important thing we must, therefore, grasp is the conditions that lead to the institution of the exception as the norm imply a situation in which usual (‘normal’) forms of mass democratic politics, including electoral politics, cannot be allowed to have an unbridled run without imperiling the system of representative democracy that purportedly make such forms of politics possible and necessary in the first place. The emergence of the exception as the law ensures precisely that by either entirely precluding or significantly eliding rights that allow and/or enable such forms of democratic politics. In such circumstances, electoral politics ceases to be an effective vehicle in carrying forth the voice of the toiling masses and the underclass that are embodied in various identities of either religious/ linguistic/ regional/ gender minorities or socio-occupational marginals.
That, needless to say, compels such social groups, which encounter the law of the Indian state not as an embodiment of democracy but in the form of its undemocratic exception, to look to other not-so legitimate means of politics to express their disaffection and disenfranchisement. That has precisely been the case in large swathes of eastern and central India leading to the emergence of the Maoist path of armed struggle as the only possible form of politics for the agrarian-tribal working masses to articulate their utter lack of agency and their progressive immiseration. It would not, as a matter of fact, be an exaggeration to say the state has enforced an undeclared internal emergency in those areas. It is this that the liberal India must bear in mind before spewing, as is its wont, venom on the Maoists and their social base for not adopting the constitutionally-ordained way of elections and non-violent mass politics to articulate their discontent and having unleashed, instead, an armed campaign that seeks to jeopardise the sovereignty of the democratic Indian state. Our legalist democrats must understand that the state the Maoists challenge is not the state of democratic law but, to borrow Italian legal theorist Giorgio Agamben’s concept, the “generalised state of exception”.
Clearly, the Maoist-dominated areas of eastern and central India, of which Dantewada is a key nerve centre, are in a state of war that, in both the apparent military sense and the structural political-economic one, has been thrust upon the underclass and working strata of the local tribal population on behalf of global capital – of which Indian capital is a significant and powerful part – by the Indian state. This modern capitalist state consists not merely of multiple levels of governmental agency but devolves into the local elite, many of whom belong to the same tribal population from which the Maoists also derive their social base. That, one believes, should take care of the claim that the Maoists comprise an external force that has sowed the seeds of fratricidal conflicts within idyllic tribal communities. The capitalist Indian state, as the example above shows, is as much internal to such stratified tribal communities as the Maoists.
In that context, it might be useful to wonder how such conditions, which necessitate the suspension of democratic law and the institution of its undemocratic exception as an ethico-legal norm, get created in the life of a democratic state. For, only by seeking to answer that question would we arrive at a better understanding of how the political economy of capital, especially in areas under Maoist control, determines the military aspect of the conflict.
The undemocratic exception of the law is the established norm at the moment of the founding of the law of the liberal-democratic state and the capitalist socio-economic formation that such law is meant to facilitate, conserve and reinforce. It is this historical moment of founding of capitalism, when existing instruments of pre-capitalist feudal coercion were deployed to alienate a section of pre-capitalist producers such as peasants and artisans from their means of production, that Marx termed primitive accumulation of capital. This process was meant to be a double-whammy: resources in the form of capital were accumulated even as the dispossessed sections became the workforce that would labour in accordance with the demands, determinations and caprices of capital. The law of the liberal-democratic capitalist state, which allows competition and contention, could not have been the norm in the founding of capitalism and its state as such competition would have meant a direct challenge to the emergence and existence of capitalism as a system. That was precisely the reason why the undemocratic exception was the norm in the founding of capital. And it is this undemocratic exception that returns as the law, even as the ‘normal’ democratic law is suspended, to enable capital to indulge in primitive accumulation as and when that is required of it.
That has precisely been the case in those areas of Maoist influence. Primitive accumulation of capital, as Marx explicated it, is not a one-time historical affair. It recurs with cyclical constancy in and through various moments of stabilised and established capitalism, when those moments run into a crisis of overaccumulation, enabling capital to reconstitute and refound itself to tide over such crises. In such situations, primitive accumulation of capital kicks in, as does the undemocratic exception, to enable the crisis-ridden system to reconstitute itself. Overaccumulation is a moment in the development of capitalism when the value of accumulated capital falls. This spells a considerable weakening of the hegemony of the hierarchised configuration of capitalist class power.
The only way in which capitalism can beat this crisis is by investing in and expanding into relatively less capitalised zones. In a sense, this expansion is akin to the historical founding of capitalism. Thus primitive accumulation of capital must be seen not as the conception of a historical event but as a logico-historical conceptualisation, as indeed it is in Marx’s own theorisation That is precisely what has been happening in ‘Maoist country’ where the executive arms of capital have, through coercive means, been trying to enable capital to beat its current crisis of overaccumulation – of which the international financial crisis is the most visible symptom – by expanding into those areas and occupying them by dispossessing the populations of those less commodified areas of their community-held commons (such as mineral resources, forest produce and land), and even their autonomous means of expression and life, in order to be able to invest.
It is this attempt by capital to reconstitute itself into a stable system once again that has led to the suspension of the democratic laws and invocation of and amendments to constitutional-legal clauses that institute the coercive exception as the legal norm in those areas. The ongoing Maoist insurgency is no more than a response to this generalised state of exception and the political economy it is seeking to rescue and reconstitute.
Independent People’s Tribunal
Land Acquisition, Resource Grab and Operation Green Hunt
9-11 April 2010, Speaker’s Hall, Constitution Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi
Central India is home to the Adivasis and Dalits, India’s first people. It is also home to the richest concentration of natural resources in the country. Today, as powerful Indian and global corporations race each other to gain control of the land, water, forest and mineral wealth of the region, this natural wealth has become a curse to these indigenous but marginalised communities. What comes between corporate greed and natural resources are the tribals asserting their customary rights, right to life and livelihood, as well as their constitutional rights over the same natural resources. Corrupt corporations, joining hands with corrupt states, are helping destroy India’s vibrant natural heritage and mineral wealth. Human rights abuses by police, paramilitary forces and state-sponsored militia are spreading in the name of Operation Green Hunt, which seems to make it a war against the very citizens it promises to protect. A virtual information blockade prevents information from coming out of states like Chhattisgarh which are bearing the brunt of Operation Green Hunt. Our country needs to know the truth about such a massive war against our own people. That is why an Independent People’s Tribunal, consisting of eminent jury members, has been called to hear testimonies from affected people, deliberate and submit a report on the matter to the public.
The heartlands of India are the lungs of the country as they are part of a vital ecosystem comprising of the water cycle and the forests that produce oxygen. They also comprise of the rich agricultural lands. For centuries, the indigenous communities have fought against the greed of the forest and timber mafia in order to conserve these forests and the rich mineral wealth within them.
However, with the opening up of the global market, the pressure on the State to hand over most of these areas to global corporations for mining and other ‘industrial’ purposes has increased. Private companies, both domestic and foreign— Arcelor Mittal, Jindal, Essar, Posco, Tata, and Vedanta, to name but a few – are taking advantage of the opportunity thus presented. This worldview of ‘Development and Globalisation’ has also become the mantra that is threatening people’s rights to land, resources and livelihood. The Adivasis are being forced out of their own homes and villages, where their communities have lived for thousands of years. This violation of the democratic and constitutional rights of indigenous communities has led to the present situation of conflicts.
The vicious systemic violence is being taken to a new level by using military and paramilitary forces through Operation Green Hunt. The UPA government’s last election victory has emboldened Home Minister P. Chidambaram to arm-twist state governments into participating in Operation Green Hunt. Independent sources acknowledge that more than 100,000 paramilitary/police personnel armed to the teeth have been mobilized against the poorest of the poor. Air force, helicopter gunships, military trainers, special forces units etc. are on the roll in several Indian states since November 2009. With even independent journalists being barred from entering conflict zones, only government versions of violence and military operations are being released to the media and the public. While the state justification for Operation Green Hunt is an attack on the Maoists, it is evident that the brunt of this war and hunt will be borne by the Adivasis.
Citizens and civil rights groups who have voiced concerns against Operation Green Hunt are being labelled as ‘Naxal sympathizers’ and are being arrested. Journalists are being blocked from entering the impacted areas to investigate these brutalities. Unless stopped, this is likely to lead to an unending cycle of violence which could lead to genocide of the Adivasis and a civil war-like situation in many parts of the country.
It is in this context that an Independent People’s Tribunal (IPT) on these issues is being organised by several individuals and groups, inviting a panel of eminent jurists, administrative service personnel, social scientists and writers. The people’s jury will hear testimonies from the affected people, social activists and experts working in these areas. The authorities would also be invited to participate and present their viewpoint. The tribunal will conduct its hearings on the 9th, 10th and 11th of April 2010 at the Constitution Club, New Delhi.
The Independent or Indian People’s Tribunal (IPT) has, through earlier hearings, gained acceptance in the country as a means for civil society groups to present an issue of immense public concern before an impartial and eminent group of jury members, whose report on the subject would be useful in educating and informing the people and mobilizing public opinion.
The present IPT focuses on a vital issue that could spell life or death for 80 million indigenous people of our country. The IPT will focus on the States of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, which are bearing the brunt of Operation Green Hunt. In particular, it will examine human rights abuses, forcible acquisition of Adivasi land as well as the looting of land, water, forest and mineral wealth in these areas.
In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Every individual needs to stand up to defend our common natural heritage as well as the constitutional rights of our indigenous people.
As Martin Niemöller said:
“THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.”
When the government puts corporate interests ahead of constitutional law, suppresses free speech and victimizes those who it is meant to protect, every single citizen’s freedom is at risk.
Speak now.
Organised by: Citizens against Forced Displacements and War on People
Endorsed by: ……………………………….…………………………………………Campaign Secretariat
6/6, Jangpura B, New DelhiCoordinators
Sherebanu Frosh: +91-9953466107
Abhishek Jani: +91-9899111320
K. Madhuresh: +91-9818905316.
