The terror of development

The last quarter of 2009 has been quite significant in the annals of history

of the Indian subcontinent with the much publicised war, euphemistically

called as Operation Green Hunt, of the Government of India on the

Adivasis—the poorest of the poor— of the region ostensibly to usher in, what

is being time and again termed as Progress, Prosperity and Peace. The

tragedy unfolding behind the smokescreen of this media blitz of the

Government of India should be brought to the notice of one and all for its

alleged intentions, and the real, concrete fallout of this campaign that is

taking place under the direct guidance of the learned, erudite Prime

Minister Manmohan Singh and the lawyer/politician/finance minister turned

Home Minister P Chidambaram.

An unprecedented military offensive

If the total number of government forces presently engaged in this operation

is taken in its entirety (including the paramilitary forces and the state

elite police) it comes close to a quarter of a million. This is more than

double the US forces presently deployed in the occupation of

Iraq—approximately 120 thousand in September 2009—and bigger than the armies

of Australia, Netherlands and South Africa put together. The preparations

speak volumes about the real intentions of the government as Indian Air

Force helicopters turned into gun ships are being used against adivasis,

airstrips constructed in Raipur and Jagdalpur, jungle-warfare schools opened

to train the forces in special operations, new barracks and bases to station

armed forces are established all over the war zone, public buildings

including schools and panchayat houses are converted to paramilitary and

police camps and torture chambers. To top it all, army commanders are

overseeing the war operations while US is providing ‘advisors’, military

intelligence, satellite surveillance and ‘guidance’—in one word called

logistic support.

Contrary to the claims of the government, to secure the land against “the

single largest internal security threat”—Naxalism—to this country, what is

unfolding to the concern and anguish of every democratic and progressive

mind is the calculated assault on the tribal people inhabiting the forests

of Jharkhand, West Bengal stretching from Paschimi Midnapur-Bankura-Purulia

in West Bengal to Srikakulam-Vishakhapatnam-

Vizianagaram-East Godavari in

North Andhra Pradesh and Khammam-Warangal-Adilabad in North Telangana as

well as the eastern districts of Maharashtra – Gadchiroli and Chandrapur.

The war zone under the blue-print of the Operation Green Hunt slated by the

Government of India includes the Southern districts of Orissa – Koraput,

Gajapati, Ganjam and Mulkangiri.

This has added yet another sordid chapter to the continuing assault on the

tribals of the subcontinent in the form of Destruction, Destitution,

Displacement and Death (four dreaded Ds of the Indian state’s policy). Thus

the campaign for Prosperity, Progress and Peace by the Government of India

under the UPA government is bringing in untold miseries to the adivasis in

the form of Destruction of their lives and livelihoods, growing Destitution

among them, massive Displacement running into hundreds of thousands due to

increasing atrocities of barbaric dimensions by the paramilitary and

security personnel, and last but not the least Deaths and Disappearances of

tribals who have refused to leave the forest areas which are their natural

habitats. Thousands of paramilitary, CoBRA, Greyhounds, C-60 and other elite

armed police forces reared for this purpose by the state governments are

being deployed in each and every part of Dandakaranya and other

regions under this operation. These forces are entering forests, hills and

village settlements unleashing immense brutality on unarmed and defenceless

adivasis.

Adding intrigue to this murderous exercise, the Home Minister, who has been,

and is still travelling the length and breadth of this country, announcing

the various facets of this US inspired war on the poorest of the poor of

this land, is the sudden and audacious denial by the minister himself about

the presence of any such operation termed as the Operation Green Hunt. What

provokes any discerning mind into consternation is the total blackout in the

media of continuing atrocities on the tribals while P Chidambaram who had

earlier graphically explained the various manifests of the Operation goes on

a denial mode of such a massive military exercise—with the paramilitary

belonging to the CRPF, BSF, CoBRA, Grey Hounds, C-60, SPOs and what not

deployed in the forest tracts of Central and East India—unheard or untold in

the history of this region.

The terror of development

While this massive operation is taking place in the rural interiors of

Central and Eastern India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke with a forked

tongue at the Chief Minister’s Conference on Implementation of the Forest

Rights Act 2006, on 4 November 2009 in New Delhi. To quote: "There has been

a systemic 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. The systematic exploitation and social and economic abuse of our

tribal communities can no longer be tolerated." But the Prime Minister was

quick to add while stressing the need to make tribals “the primary

beneficiaries of the development process”, the need to win the “the battle

for their hearts and their minds".

What is worth mentioning here is that the geographical terrain, where the

government’s military offensive is planned, is very well-endowed with

natural resources like minerals, forest wealth, biodiversity and water

resources, and has been the target of systematic usurpation by several

large, both Indian and foreign, corporations. So far, the resistance of the

local indigenous people against their displacement and dispossession has

prevented the government-backed corporates from exploiting the natural

resources for their own profits and without regard to ecological and social

concerns. As hundreds of MoUs have been signed by the various state

governments under the auspices of the Central Government and the foreign and

domestic corporations the government is deliberately hiding the truth behind

this unprecedented military offensive as an attempt to crush democratic and

popular resistance against dispossession and impoverishment. Significantly

the Prime Minister himself is on record talking about the need to make way

for the vast mineral and other forest wealth in these forest lands to be

exploited to facilitate the march to progress. This is corroborated by the

statement of the Home Minister about the need to ‘secure the whole area’

first so as to usher in ‘development’. Operation Green Hunt thus is

unequivocally a calculated move towards facilitating the entry and operation

of these large corporations and paving the way for unbridled exploitation of

the natural resources and people of these regions.

Operation Green Hunt—a euphemism for genocide of the tribals

Of significance is the number of killings that has happened ever since the

commencement of the Operation Green Hunt, say from the third week of

September under the gaze of the ‘Reality Show’ driven sensation hungry media

wherein more than 4000 CRPF and 600 anti-Naxal CoBRA commandos entered

Dantewada’s Chintagufa area. People resisted this intrusion by the

government’s armed forces, and in the battles six soldiers, including two

commanding officers were killed.

To avenge the death of the armed forces, the troops ‘managed’ a massacre of

adivasis while resorting to arson of their villages, in which at least nine

villagers were murdered in cold blood and four villages got totally gutted

leaving nothing behind. The government claimed that all those killed were

Maoists, while the eye-witness accounts, local media reports and independent

fact-finding visits have confirmed that it was yet another stage-managed

genocide of adivasi villagers, who were picked up and killed. Starting from

the incident of 9 August 2009 in Vechhapal under Bhairamgarh police station

(Bijapur district) to the one near Kistaram (Dantewada district) on 10

November 2009, all have been fake-encounters. Seventy adivasis in total have

been killed in these fake encounters in this period. It should be noted that

not a single one among them was a Maoist!

The government’s claim of killing 7 ‘Naxals’ in an encounter on the 10th of

November 2009 near Kistaram is incorrect as the CPI (Maoist) issued a

statement stating that none of their cadres died in the incident. It must be

registered here that even if one of their cadres get killed, the CPI

(Maoist) declares it openly apropos the normal conduct of CPI (Maoist) is

observed. On 9 December, more than 500 paramilitary and policemen entered

the area under Kistaram police station from Cherla Dommaguda police station

area in Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh. They reached Tetemadgu village

through Dokpad and Kurigundam, and encircled it. From morning to evening of

that day, the police burnt down houses, women were particularly targeted

through sexual violence while the rest of the villagers got brutally

tortured. They took away four persons from the village. Two more villagers

from Dokpad who came to visit their relatives in Tetemadgu were

also abducted in this manner. After spending the night in the forests, the

police force reached Palodi village in the morning of 10 December; they

detained yet another adivasi while completely burning down the village. The

police then took all the seven captives near Kistaram and riddled them with

bullets. The government is quick to claim this to be an ‘encounter’ with the

Maoists. The police took away a few more adivasi villagers with them. Till

date they are untraceable.

Between 7-9 November hundreds of CRPF, CoBRA, SPOs and police forces

unleashed a reign of terror in the adivasi villages under Chintagufa police

station. They attacked the villagers of Burkapal on 7 November, Elma Gonda

on 8 November, Minpa on 9 November, and forcibly abducted 24 persons. Their

whereabouts or their fate is still unknown even after two months. Given the

track record of the security personnel operating with impunity there is

every reason to apprehend that the police has murdered many of them and

disposed of the dead bodies.

At least seven adivasis were murdered by the paramilitary-Salwa Judum forces

in different villages under Kistaram police station between 9 and 10

November 2009. Of them six were abducted from Tetemadgu and Dogpadu villages

on 9 November while the other was picked up the next day from Palodi

village. As the recent Tehelka field investigation with eyewitness accounts

confirms, the two villagers from Dogpadu—Madkam Budra and Vando Mangdu—were

dragged from their villages and shot dead. Similarly, eight adivasi

villagers were killed on a single day on 9 January 2010 to be branded later

as ‘Maoists’. While four were murdered in Sarpanguda under Jegurgonda police

station in Dantewada, the other four were killed in Farasgaon under Benur

police station in Narayanpur district of Chhattisgarh.

The body count of the adivasis is mounting day by day with intensification

of the Operation Green Hunt. According to the government’s own admission 107

‘Maoists’ have been killed during the joint operations under Green Hunt till

mid-January. As more and more information pour in from local reporters and

facts collected by activists braving heavy repression and threat to their

lives, there are reasons to believe that as much as four-fifth of them were

unarmed and defenceless adivasi villagers who have been killed in cold blood

in fake encounters.

Operation Green Hunt has replaced the Salwa Judum—one of the worst murderous

campaigns on the adivasis—with much more brutality as is evident from what

is unfolding in the poor tribal hamlets in this mineral rich forest tracts.

If in Salwa Judum more than a thousand adivasis lost their lives in

Dantewada and Bijapur districts alone, in the hands of the 4500 SPOs created

by the government, the present onslaught reaching fascist proportions is

adding to those statistics of the growing casualties of adivasis. More than

700 villages were burnt down and close to three hundred thousand people were

displaced from their homes in the worst days of Salwa Judum. In all the

places where the Operation Green Hunt is on, the police, paramilitary and

SPOs are resorting to large scale arson, rape, torture, illegal detention,

destruction of property, burning down of villages apart from regularly

gunning down adivasis in so-called encounters claiming them as Maoists. The

print media has reported that an additional two hundred thousand adivasis

have left their homes and took refuge in the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh in

the last three months fearing atrocities during Operation Green Hunt.

Moreover, the Chhattisgarh government is planning to make strategic hamlets

out of the displaced population forced to live in government-run camps,

thereby permanently dispossessing them of their ancestral land.

In Maharashtra, Operation Green Hunt was launched in the second week of

October from the Gadchiroli district, in which 10,000 troops took part. M17

helicopters of the Air Force gave surveillance and logistical support. 18

bases have been established by the paramilitary forces from where they are

launching combing operations and extermination campaigns. Large scale

repression of people are reported from in the eastern districts of the

state, where the police and Anti-Naxal forces like the C-60 have a long

history of committing atrocities and terror on the adivasi people in the

name of curbing Maoism/Naxalism. In March 2009, policemen from the C-60

force gang-raped a 13 year old girl in the Pavarvel village in Dhanora

tehsil. In the Kosimi village of the same tehsil, policemen from Gyarapatti

police station raped and killed Mynaben, a 52 year old adivasi villager in

May last year. In the latest assault on the people, the paramilitary forces

are given a license to kill and torture by the government.

In Jharkhand too, the initial rhetoric of peace talks and negotiations by

the newly-elected chief minister Shibu Soren has now taken a u-turn for

support to the Operation Green Hunt. The government has stepped up the

mobilisation of its armed forces by bringing in CRPF battalions from Asom

and Tripura. The unleashing of state terror on the people of Jharkhand is

not new, particularly on those sections who have resisted the

state-sponsored corporate attack on jal-jangal-jameen. In fact, the police

and paramilitary forces along with the vigilante gangs propped up by them

like the Nagarik Suraksha Samiti, Tritiya Prastuti Committee, Sunlight Sena

etc. have long been a byname for repression, torture, rape and murder. Like

Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, Jharkhand too has recently raised a special

‘anti-Naxal’ force called the Jharkhand Jaguars in order to crush any voice

of dissent against the government’s policy of destruction in the name

of development. Anyone and everyone who dares to stand up against the attack

on the lives and livelihood of the oppressed, is branded as a Maoist or a

Maoist sympathiser, and persecuted. Various people’s movements against the

displacement of adivasis, civil rights organisations, etc. are facing state

repression for a long time in Jharkhand, the scale and brutality of which is

going to go up during the fascist extermination campaign of Operation Green

Hunt. We can already see the inevitable fallouts of this war on people as

exemplified by the murder of Rajendra Yadav who was picked up on the night

of 31st December 2009 by Jharkhand police, tortured in the name of

interrogation, and killed in custody. Similarly in Orissa there are several

cases of rape, arson and killing reported from Narayanpatna ever since the

commencement of the operation. In fact the president of the Chhasi Adivasi

Muliya Sangha was shot dead while in a demonstration before the police and

the paramilitary.

Draconian Laws and blanket ban on any form of dissent

Despite the rhetoric of the battle for the hearts and minds from none other

than the Prime Minister the manner in which the security and paramilitary

forces have wreaked havoc in the lives of the adivasis stand testimony to

the utter disregard for the laws and procedures of the land. In fact several

laws like the UAPA and the Chhattisgarh Special Areas Act are being

conveniently used on anyone and everyone who dares to raise the voice

against the policies of the government. The recent arrest and booking of KN

Pandit, veteran trade unionist and anti-displacement activist in Ranchi and

Gananath Patra, former professor and veteran communist leader who is also

the official advisor of Chhasi Adivasi Muliya Sangha of Narayanpatna at

Bhubaneswar are fresh examples of the increasing lawlessness of the police

and paramilitary in their desperate attempts to browbeat the people into

submission. In fact any effort to make independent fact findings into these

areas have become next to impossible with the police and the murderous goons

of the local parties join hands to humiliate and assault the civil rights

activists and intellectuals who took care to visit these areas. The recent

case of the humiliation and assault on the all women fact finding team that

went to the villages in Narayanpatna to record the testimonies of the rape

victims in the police stations let alone in public by the police and the

goons speaks volumes of how the Government of India would want to browbeat

the hearts and minds of the people into submission. Another case was the

detention of the 30 member fact finding team that was trying to visit the

areas of atrocities in Dantewada and Bijapur districts.

What is evident from the increasing arrests, incarceration of activists of

people’s movements fighting for the rights to lives and livelihoods is a

clear cut case of the government bringing in ‘development’ through the

barrel of the gun. As is evident from the protests and various submissions

made to the governments at the Centre and the states it is evident that

these talk about development is nothing but a total loot and plunder of the

local people and their resources. The fact that all these areas that are

under the cross hairs of the war machine of the government come under the

Fifth Schedule of the Constitution has hardly deterred the local

administration, police and the paramilitary to break laws and provisions

with impunity.

Despite the heavy militarisation and the terror unleashed by the governments

the protests from the people against such anti-people

pro-corporate/multinational policies of sell-out have only increased. The

efforts of the centre and the states to handle the situation as a pure ‘law

and order question’ have further deteriorated the situation. The Indian

government’s proposed military offensive will repeat that story all over

again. Instead of addressing the source of the conflict, instead of

addressing the genuine grievances of the marginalized people the Indian

state seems to have decided to opt for the extremely myopic option of

launching a military offensive. As conscious citizens of this country and

sensitive to the questions of inclusive growth, justice and equality for all

we strongly demand the government at the centre and the states to

immediately stop this extermination of the adivasis reminiscent to the days

of the US genocide of the Red Indians.