Broken Republic

by Arundhati Roy

  I shall give you another example. Vast extent of land is required for locating industries. Mineral-based industries such as steel and aluminium require large tracts of land for mining, processing and production. Infrastructure projects like airports, seaports, dams and power stations need very large extents of land so that they can provide road and rail connectivity and the ancillary and support facilities. Hitherto, land was acquired by the governments in exercise of the power of eminent domain. The only issue was payment of adequate compensation. That situation has changed. There are new stakeholders in every project, and their claims have to be recognized. We are now obliged to address issues such as environmental impact assessment, justification for compulsory acquisition, right compensation, solatium, rehabilitation and resettlement of the displaced persons, alternative house sites and farm land, and one job for each affected family.

  Allowing ‘market forces’ to mine resources ‘quickly and efficiently’ is what colonizers did to their colonies, what Spain and North America did to South America, what Europe did (and continues to do) in Africa. It’s what the Apartheid regime did in South Africa. What puppet dictators in small countries do to bleed their people. It’s a formula for growth and development, but for someone else. It’s an old, old, old, old story—must we really go over that ground again?

  Now that mining licences have been issued with the urgency you’d associate with a knock-down distress sale, and the scams that are emerging have run into billions of dollars, now that mining companies have polluted rivers, mined away state borders, wrecked ecosystems and unleashed civil war, the consequence of what the coven has set into motion is playing out like an ancient lament over ruined landscapes and the bodies of the poor.

  Note the regret with which the minister in his lecture talks about democracy and the obligations it entails: ‘Democracy—rather, the institutions of democracy—and the legacy of the socialist era have actually added to the challenge of development.’ He follows that up with a standard-issue clutch of subterfuge about compensation, rehabilitation and jobs. What compensation? What solatium? What rehabilitation? And what ‘job for each affected family’? As for being ‘obliged’ to provide ‘justification’ for the ‘compulsory acquisition’ of land, a cabinet minister surely knows that to compulsorily acquire tribal land (which is where most of the minerals are) and turn it over to private mining corporations is illegal and unconstitutional under the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act. Passed in 1996, PESA is an amendment that attempts to right some of the wrongs done to tribal people by the Indian Constitution when it was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It overrides all existing laws that may be in conflict with it. It is a law that acknowledges the deepening marginalization of tribal communities and is meant to radically recast the balance of power. As a piece of legislation, it is unique because it makes the community—the collective—a legal entity and it confers on tribal societies that live in scheduled areas the right to self-governance. Under PESA, ‘compulsory acquisition’ of tribal land cannot be justified on any count. So, ironically, those who are being called ‘Maoists’ (which includes everyone who is resisting land acquisition) are actually fighting to uphold the Constitution while the government is doing its best to vandalize it.

  Between 2008 and 2009 the Ministry of Panchayati Raj commissioned two researchers to write a chapter for a report on the progress of Panchayati Raj in the country. The chapter is called ‘PESA, Left Wing Extremism and Governance: Concerns and Challenges in India’s Tribal Districts’, its authors are Ajay Dandekar and Chitrangada Choudhury.20 Here are some extracts:

  The central Land Acquisition Act of 1894 has till date not been amended to bring it in line with the provisions of PESA … At the moment, this colonial-era law is being widely misused on the ground to forcibly acquire individual and community land for private industry. In several cases, the practice of the state government is to sign high profile MOUs with corporate houses and then proceed to deploy the Acquisition Act to ostensibly acquire the land for the state industrial corporation. This body then simply leases the land to the private corporation—a complete travesty of the term ‘acquisition for a public purpose’, as sanctioned by the act….

  There are cases where the formal resolutions of gram sabha expressing dissent have been destroyed and substituted by forged documents. What is worse, no action has been taken by the state against concerned officials even after the facts got established. The message is clear and ominous. There is collusion in these deals at numerous levels….

  The sale of tribal lands to non-tribals in the Schedule V areas is prohibited in all these states. However, transfers continue to take place and have become more perceptible in the post liberalization era. The principal reasons are—transfer through fraudulent means, unrecorded transfers on the basis of oral transactions, transfers by misrepresentation of facts and misstating the purpose, forcible occupation of tribal lands, transfer through illegal marriages, collusive title suites, incorrect recording at the time of the survey, land acquisition process, eviction of encroachments and in the name of exploitation of timber and forest produce and even on the pretext of development of welfarism.

  The authors conclude:

  The Memorandum of Understandings signed by the state governments with industrial houses, including mining companies should be re-examined in a public exercise, with gram sabhas at the centre of this enquiry.

  Here it is then—not troublesome activists, not the Maoists, but a government report calling for the mining MoUs to be re-examined. What does the government do with this document? How does it respond? On 24 April 2010, at a formal ceremony, the prime minister released the report. Brave of him, you’d think. Except, this chapter wasn’t in it. It was dropped.21

  Half a century ago, just a year before he was killed, Che Guevara wrote: ‘When the oppressive forces come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken.’22 Indeed it must. In 2009 Manmohan Singh said in Parliament, ‘If Left Wing extremism continues to flourish in important parts of our country which have tremendous natural resources of minerals and other precious things, that will certainly affect the climate for investment.’23 This was a furtive declaration of war.

  (Permit me a small digression here, a moment to tell a very short Tale of Two Sikhs: In his last petition to the Punjab Governor, before he was hanged by the British government in 1931, Bhagat Singh, the celebrated revolutionary—and Marxist—said, ‘Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites. They may be purely British Capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian…. All these things make no difference.’24)

  If you pay attention to many of the struggles taking place in India, people are demanding no more than their constitutional rights. But the Government of India no longer feels it needs to abide by the Indian Constitution, which is supposed to be the legal and moral framework on which our democracy rests. As constitutions go, it is an enlightened document, but its enlightenment is not used to protect people. Quite the opposite. It is used as a spiked club to beat down those who are protesting against the growing tide of violence being perpetrated by a state on its people in the name of the ‘public good’. In a recent article in Outlook, B.G. Verghese, a senior journalist, came out waving that club in defence of the state and big corporations: ‘The Maoists will fade away, democratic India and the Constitution will prevail, despite the time it takes and the pain involved.’25 To this, Azad replied (it was the last piece he wrote before he was murdered):

  In which part of India is the Constitution prevailing, Mr. Verghese? In Dantewada, Bijapur, Kanker, Narayanpur, Rajnandgaon? In Jharkhand, Orissa? In Lalgarh, Jangalmahal? In the Kashmir Valley? Manipur? Where was your Constitution hiding for 25 long years after thousand of Sikhs were massacred? When thousands of Muslims were decimated? When lakhs of peasants are compelled to commit suicides? When
thousands of people are murdered by state-sponsored Salwa Judum gangs? When adivasi women are gangraped? When people are simply abducted by uniformed goons? Your Constitution is a piece of paper that does not even have the value of a toilet paper for the vast majority of the Indian people.26

  After Azad was killed, several media commentators tried to paper over the crime by shamelessly inverting what he had said, accusing him of calling the Indian Constitution a piece of toilet paper.

  If the government won’t respect the Constitution, perhaps we should push for an amendment to the preamble. ‘We, the People of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic…’ could be substituted with ‘We, the upper castes and classes of India, having secretly resolved to constitute India into a Corporate, Hindu, Satellite State…’

  ~

  The insurrection in the Indian countryside, in particular in the tribal heartland, poses a radical challenge not only to the Indian State, but to resistance movements too. It questions the accepted ideas of what constitutes progress, development and indeed civilization itself. It questions the ethics, as well as the effectiveness, of different strategies of resistance. These questions have been asked before, yes. They have been asked persistently, peacefully, year after year in a hundred different ways—by the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, the Koel Karo and Gandhamardhan agitations—and hundreds of other people’s movements. It was asked most persuasively, and perhaps most visibly, by the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the anti-dam movement in the Narmada Valley. The Government of India’s only answer has been repression, deviousness and the kind of opacity that can only come from a pathological disrespect for ordinary people. Worse, it went ahead and accelerated the process of displacement and dispossession to a point when people’s anger has built up in ways that cannot be controlled. Today the poorest people in the world have managed to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks. It’s a huge victory.

  Those who have risen up are aware that their country is in a state of emergency. They are aware that like the people of Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland and Assam they too have now been stripped of their civil rights by laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, which criminalize every kind of dissent—by word, deed and even intent.

  MILITIA AT BHUMKAL, DANDAKARANYA, 2010

  How in god’s name will the security forces be able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as Maoists too?

  A PHOTO EXHIBITION OF MARTYRS OF THE MOVEMENT, BHUMKAL, DANDAKARANYA 2010

  Chairman Mao. He’s here too. A little lonely, perhaps, but present. There’s a photograph of him, up on a red cloth screen. Marx too. And Charu Mazumdar, the founder and chief theoretician of the Naxalite movement. His abrasive rhetoric fetishizes violence, blood and martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse as to be almost genocidal. Standing here, on Bhumkal day, I can’t help thinking that his analysis, so vital to the structure of this revolution, is so removed from its emotion and texture.

  When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency at midnight on 25 June 1975, she did it to crush an incipient revolution. As grim as they were, those were days when people still allowed themselves to dream of bettering their lot, to dream of justice. The Naxalite uprising in Bengal had been more or less decimated. But then millions of people rallied to Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for ‘Sampoorna Kranti’ (Total Revolution). At the heart of all the unrest was the demand for land to the tiller. (Even back then it was no different—you needed a revolution to implement land redistribution, which is one of the directive principles of the Constitution.)

  Thirty-five years later, things have changed drastically. Justice, that grand, beautiful idea, has been whittled down to mean human rights. Equality is a utopian fantasy. That word has been more or less evicted from our vocabulary. The poor have been pushed to the wall. From fighting for land for the landless, revolutionary parties and resistance movements have had to lower their sights to fighting for people’s rights to hold on to what little land they have. The only kind of land redistribution that seems to be on the cards is the land being grabbed from the poor and redistributed to the rich for their land banks, which go under the name of special economic zones. The landless (mostly Dalits), the jobless, the slum dwellers and the urban working class are more or less out of the reckoning. In places like Lalgarh in West Bengal, people are only asking the police and the government to leave them alone. The adivasi organization called the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) began with one simple demand—that the superintendent of police visit Lalgarh and apologize to the people for the atrocities his men had committed on villagers. That was considered preposterous. (How could half-naked savages expect a government officer to apologize to them?) So people barricaded their villages and refused to let the police in. The police stepped up the violence. People responded with fury. Now, two years down the line, and many gruesome rapes, killings and fake encounters later, it’s all-out war. The PCAPA has been banned and dubbed a Maoist outfit. Its leaders have been jailed or shot. (A similar fate has befallen the Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangh in Narayanpatna in Orissa and the Visthapen Virodhi Ekta Manch in Potka in Jharkhand.)

  People who once dreamed of justice and equality, and dared to demand land to the tiller, have been reduced to asking for an apology from the police for being beaten and maimed. Is this progress?

  During the Emergency, the saying goes, when Mrs Gandhi asked the press to bend, it crawled. And yet, in those days, there were instances when national dailies defiantly published blank editorials to protest censorship. (Irony of ironies—one of those defiant editors was B.G. Verghese.) This time around, in the undeclared emergency, there’s not much scope for defiance because the media is the government. Nobody, except the corporations who control it, can tell it what to do. Senior politicians, ministers and officers of the security establishment vie to appear on TV, feebly imploring news anchors for permission to interrupt the day’s sermon. Several TV channels and newspapers are overtly manning Operation Green Hunt’s war room and its disinformation campaign. There was the identically worded story about the ‘1,500 crore Maoist industry’ filed under the byline of different reporters in several different papers.27 Almost all newspapers and TV channels ran stories blaming the PCAPA (used interchangeably with ‘Maoists’) for the horrific train derailment in Jhargram in West Bengal in May 2010 in which 150 people died. Two of the main suspects have been shot down by the police in ‘encounters’, even though the mystery around the train accident is still unravelling. The Press Trust of India put out several untruthful stories, faithfully showcased by the Indian Express, including one about Maoists mutilating the bodies of policemen they had killed.28 (The denial, which came from the police themselves, was published postage-stamp size, hidden in the middle pages.) There are the several identical interviews, all of them billed as ‘exclusive’, with the female guerrilla about how she had been raped repeatedly by Maoist leaders.29 She was supposed to have recently escaped from the forests and the clutches of the Maoists to tell the world her tale. Now it turns out that she has been in police custody for months.

  The atrocity-based analyses shouted out at us from our TV screens are designed to smoke up the mirrors, and hustle us into thinking, ‘Yes, the tribals have been neglected and are having a very bad time. Yes, they need development. Yes, it’s the government’s fault, and it’s a great pity. But right now there is a crisis. We need to get rid of the Maoists, secure the land and then we can help the tribals.’

  As war closes in, the armed forces have announced, in the way only they can, that they too are getting into the business of messing with our heads. In June 2010 they released two ‘operational doctrines’.30 One was a joint doctrine for air–land operations. The other was a doctrine on Military Psychological Operations, which ‘cons
titutes a planned process of conveying a message to select target audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of the country’. In addition, ‘The Doctrine also provides guidelines for activities related to perception management in sub conventional operations, specially in an internal environment wherein misguided population may have to be brought into the mainstream.’ According to the Press Trust of India, ‘The doctrine on Military Psychological Operations is a policy, planning and implementation document that aims to create a conducive environment for the armed forces to operate by using the media available with the Services to their advantage’.

  A month later, at a meeting of chief ministers of Naxalite-affected states, a decision was taken to escalate the war. Thirty-six battalions of the India Reserve Force were added to the existing 105 battalions, and 16,000 special police officers (civilians armed and contracted to function as police) were added to the existing 30,000. The Home Secretary promised to hire 800,000 policemen over the next five years.31 (It’s a good model for an employment guarantee scheme: hire half the population to shoot the other half. You can fool around with the ratios if you like.)