Operation ‘Green Hunt’: UPA Government’s War on Democracy

CHAPTER - I

Political Economy of Operation Green Hunt

The original and central arena of OGH is the forested regions spread over the states of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. These are extremely rich in mineral and forest resources – bauxite, iron ore, uranium, limestone, marble, dolomite, tin, graphite, coal, copper, gold, diamonds, corundum, beryl, alexandrite and fluorite, as well as teak, hardwood, bamboo, abundant water resources, wildlife and fish. The bauxite deposits alone have been estimated to be worth between US$2-4 trillion. Big mining companies and steel manufacturers like the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Vedanta signed up MoUs with respective state governments to plunder these resources.

But these regions are also home to some of the oldest communities of India, whose land the corporates are preparing to grab, notwith-standing the fifth schedule of the constitution (which forbids the alienation of tribal land) and PESA (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (which empowers tribal panchayats with the authority to deny permission for mega projects, mining companies and industries in tribal areas. A Nandigram-like situation is thus building up in large swathes of adivasi homeland, the so-called Maoist corridor or MoUist corridor.

The real concern of the Indian ruling elite was expressed by the Prime Minister when he told parliament on 18 June, 2009, "If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected."

While OGH is usually taken to mean police/military repression, no less reprehensible is the economic terrorism of the Indian state. In a recent televised interview Dr Binayak Sen held the state guilty of genocide. “Everybody thinks that the word ‘genocide’ has to do with direct killing”, said he, “but the United Nations Convention’s definitions on genocide include the creation of conditions--mental and physical conditions – which would render the survival of these communities under question, and we already have a situation of chronic famine... this famine envelops, according to the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau, which is a government organization, 33 percent of the people in this country who have a clinically demonstrable chronic under-nutrition. And that includes 50 percent of the Scheduled Tribes and 60 percent of the Scheduled Castes.”

“These communities”, he added, “have thus far survived because of a fragile and tenuous equilibrium that they have established with their ecosystem and which they are able to maintain because of their access to common property resources like land, water and forests.” Activities of the mining mafia will destroy this equilibrium and throw the original inhabitants of the land from the accursed frying pan to hell-fire.

Leading the state-corporate crusade against the adivasis is a man whose credentials make him the perfect choice for the job. PC Chidambaram was a non-executive director of Vedanta – a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004. One of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group. Note that Anil Agarwal, CEO of Vedanta-Sterlite, has made a dramatic leap to the exclusive club of the world's billionaires and the UK's top ten richest people. A recent study showed him to be the second fastest wealth maker in Britain. Facilitating Agarwal's meteoric ascent is not only the current UPA regime's actions but also the NDA regime's brokering of Sterlite's takeover of the PSU BALCO in 2001.

The campaign in Bastar started way back in June 2005 in the shape of Salwa Judum, meaning "Purification (or Peace) Hunt" in the local Gondi language. It was India’s most scandalous PPP (where private stands for Tata, Essar and other business interests while public stands for the BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh state government and the Congress-ruled Union Government). The declared aim of the campaign is to eliminate Naxalite violence. But the past few years have been replete with evidences to suggest that the state is casting its net much wider and, to that end, arming itself to the teeth with new means of repression. The latter include: black acts like the UAPA; new contingents of special police/paramilitary forces like greyhounds; national networking of police stations and the proposed unique identification number for every citizen; importing American and Israeli expertise and hardware for terror-fighting and indigenous research for the same purpose. Recently the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has declared that it is developing a whole set of technologies and weapons systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), ground penetration radars, foliage penetration radars (to track movement of vehicles and people in jungles) etc. to help the fight against Maoists and other extremists. In official and corporate media parlance the terms Maoism and Naxalism are being used interchangeably and as an indefinitely expandable category that can include workers’ struggle for trade union rights (as in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu) or landless labourers’ agitation for promised homestead land (as in Mansa, Punjab) or anything/anyone else (like octogenarian Comrade Ram Naresh Ram, politburo member and the leader of our legislature party in Bihar; Comrade S Kumarasami, AICCTU president, polit bureau member of CPI(ML) and senior counsel in Chennai High Court) to suppress people’s struggles on basic issues and crush all voices of protest and resistance.

Whosoever is not ready to join this ‘coalition of the willing’ based on the “either with us or against us” doctrine, or dares question the wisdom of this approach, is being branded a Maoist sympathizer. Dr Binayak Sen was made to languish for two years in jail on this ground. Time and again Chidambaram has blamed intellectuals and the civil society, bracketing them all with Maoists. It is not just a case of branding; many are already being harassed, hounded out and persecuted in real life. The plight of Himanshu Kumar, a practising Gandhian whose Vanvasi Chetna Ashram in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, has been ransacked and razed to the ground, is a clear case in point. Fact-finding teams trying to make an independent assessment of the actual situation have all been debarred from visiting ‘conflict zones’ whether in Chhattisgarh or West Bengal.

Meanwhile, the UAPA is being invoked on a daily basis to arrest people across the country and we already have the first case of custodial death under UAPA when journalist Swapan Dasgupta, a UAPA detainee in CPI(M)-ruled West Bengal, was left to die without timely and proper medical care. Even the Supreme Court has admonished the Chhattisgarh government for its attacks on human rights activists in the name of tackling Maoism.

For and Against Talks: A Quick Recap

Since middle of last year, eminent intellectuals, activists and others have been repeatedly calling for peace through dialogue. “The Citizens’ Initiative for Peace”, for example, demanded that the government should first stop the offensive, and this should be reciprocated by Maoists, to facilitate a ceasefire. Amit Bhaduri and Romila Thapar on their parts have argued in favour of “An alternative form of intervention ushered in through a multi-lateral dialogue involving all the concerned parties ...." “Will the mindset from the past change?” -- The Hindu, Nov 8, 2009 In this connection it should be noted, however, that the question of involvement of democratic bodies or other stakeholders should arise only when the talks are not limited to the narrow confines of state-Maoist truce but covers the broader agenda of development, dignity and democracy.

An opposite position was aired by “Concerned Citizens on “Maoist” Violence”, which includes Prabhat Patnaik, Irfan Habib, Utsa Patnaik, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and others. They concentrated fire against Maoists while also criticising “acts of oppression committed by members of the exploiting classes or individuals in the state apparatus” (only individual errant members — not the ruling classes or the state as such!). On this premise they urged upon the state to “restore its presence and credibility in tribal areas whose interests it has largely been ignoring” (a social democratic endorsement of Rahul Gandhi’s comment that Maoism grows where the state fails!) and recommend dialogue “with those "Maoists" who are ready to give up the path of armed struggle”.

It is significant to note how easily and conveniently our renowned Marxist intellectuals forget that every state – even the so-called wel-fare state, which India is not -- is an instrument of class dictatorship of the rulers. It is one thing to mobilise the masses against divisive and communal forces or even anarchist activities for that matter, but to wage a joint campaign in collaboration with the ruling classes is a totally different proposition.

More recently, it was Buddhababu’s state terror on innocent adivasis in the wake of the Maoist landmine blast in November 2008 that triggered the latest phase of the Lalgarh movement, with the CPI(M) government then unleashing a vicious circle of escalating state repression and Maoist killings. Against this backdrop, it should not really come as a surprise that academics who are more concerned about Maoist violence than about state terror, should champion the statist logic of shock-awe-negotiate!

Taking this position another step forward, the CPI(M) Polit bureau issued a statement on the 16th of February calling for speeding up OGH, stressing the "necessity for better coordination between the state police and the Central paramilitary forces" and demanding that the "Central Government should ensure that joint operations begin across the border in Jharkhand, without delay." Not a word was uttered in favour of dialogue.

Some people often wonder if there can really be any ground for talks between the state which is bent upon ‘wiping out’ the Maoist insurgency and the Maoists who talk about overthrowing the state by violent means. The possibility of talks between the two sides has already been vindicated by the experience of Andhra Pradesh where the Maoist leadership and the Congress government had begun a process of open and official negotiations in 2005. Of course, the talks collapsed with the government unleashing a military crackdown accusing the Maoists of using the breather for amassing money and arms and ammunitions. The Maoists, on their part, had raised the agenda of land reforms, but devoid of any real land struggle on the ground or any network of peasant associations, they clearly had no effective means to pin the government down on this issue.

A repetition of the Andhra-type farce is certainly not what is desired by consistent democratic forces. War, we all know, is continuation of politics by other means. No one expects either the ruling classes or the Maoists to give up their ‘politics’, but whoever is concerned about the escalating military confrontation between the state and the Maoists and the expanding contours of Operation Green Hunt, must raise his or her voice for a cease-fire and for initiation of talks between the two warring parties. We do not have to take it upon ourselves to define the trajectory of such a non-military engagement though, that may well be left to evolve over a period of time through a political process.

Development, Democratic Space, and Beyond

Along with dialogue, development – the lack of which common sense regards as the root cause of “Naxalite/Maoist insurgency” – has figured as a major concern of pro-people forces. Even as the state spearheads and intensifies the military operation, the Central and state governments continue to wax eloquent on the development agenda and rationalise the military operation only in the name of development. In November 2009 we saw Manmohan Singh conversing with chief ministers to wean the tribals away from the Maoists. West Bengal Chief Minister Budhhadev Bhattacharya also met police and administrative officials of West Medinipur district and took them to task for utter failure of the grand development plans announced soon after the initiation of para-military campaign in Jangalmahal (Lalgarh and adjoining areas).The reply he got was that nothing could move until Maoists were flushed out. The PM too had endorsed this typical bureaucratic-militarist logic in his aforesaid meeting, but at the same time he identified what he considered to be the basic fault line: "There has been a systematic failure in giving the tribals a stake in the modern economic processes that inexorably intrude into their living spaces ... The alienation built over decades is now taking a dangerous turn in some parts of our country.”

How much is this concern for development worth? What are the ground realities? Conditions in tribal areas in West Bengal from Amlashol to Lalgarh are well documented. For Bastar in Chhattisgarh, let us hear from a rather unexpected witness: tough cop KPS Gill.

“Politics itself is an extortion network – more so now, in the name of development and industrialisation; land acquisitions and SEZs. When you have political leaders saying that development should be part of the response mechanism, ask them what they mean by development in Chhattisgarh. How does a good road affect a man who has no transport whatsoever? Of what use is the road for a tribal with two bare feet?... We are in a great, vicious circle of violence because today development is corruption driven. ...take Jharkhand, where you have a governor whose foremost achievement is corruption. I have always maintained that corruption and operations against organisations of this nature cannot go together. ...I know what the police officer in charge of Bastar was doing. He was taking Rs 35,000 per man to transfer them out of Bastar. This was in the knowledge of everyone. ...Property ownership is very very important, but the State can’t seem to find ways to give tribals property ownership in this huge forest.”

In this backdrop he believes that, “Operation Green Hunt is going to be a big failure. Who is the State hunting? And once an operation fails, it is a very difficult task to repeat it. This is what the American forces are facing in Afghanistan. We need to consider: do we want to be in a similar situation?”

Gill said all this in an interview to Tehelka Magazine (Vol 6, Issue 42, dated October 24, 2009). Is the recent emphasis on development an attempt to address the concerns of people like him?

The fact is, brute force and palliatives – or coercion and hegemony in Gramscian terms – have always and everywhere complemented each other in propping up oppressive regimes; only their relative proportions have changed over time and place. To look at the record of the present dispensation, the April 2008 “Report of An Expert Group to the Planning Commission” titled “Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas” argued that a socially responsible decentralised state could and should wean people away from the Naxalites/Maoists and provide the basis for negotiations with the Maoists. Many see Rahul Gandhi as an advocate of the developmentalist line in contrast to the Chidambaram style of spitting venom against Maoists/Naxalites. Recently, Digvijay Singh made big news by accusing Chidambaram of following a law and order approach. But it is patently clear that there is an overwhelming consensus among the ruling classes around Chidambaram’s line.

While seeking to crush the Maoist insurgency, bourgeois political leaders are also equally interested in utilising the Maoists in their bid for power. We have seen such examples in Andhra where both NTR and Rajsekhar Reddy have praised and used Maoists whenever necessary, in Bihar where Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar both would like to distance themselves from any overtly repressive approach, in Jharkhand where Shibu Soren has historically had a close rapport with the Maoists and in West Bengal where the bonhomie between Mamata Banerjee and Maoists is no secret. There is nothing surprising if Digvijay Singh now strikes a similar chord in the MP-Chhattisgarh region in his battle with the BJP. The Congress has no difficulty in reconciling and exploiting such ‘diversity of views’ while pressing ahead with Operation Green Hunt much as it has been combining the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and cease-fire agreements with insurgent groups in the North-East.

Instead of being duped and distracted by such clever political campaigns of the ruling classes, we must continue with our basic struggle for land and livelihood, justice and democracy, dignity and development; and as an important part of this broader movement we must also insist on an immediate end to all forms of state terror!