Among the most serious charges levelled against the Maoists is that its leaders have a vested interest in keeping people poor and illiterate in order to retain their hold on them. Critics ask why, after working in areas like Dandakaranya for thirty years, they still do not run schools and clinics, why they don’t have check dams and advanced agriculture, and why people were still dying of malaria and malnutrition. Good question. But it ignores the reality of what it means to be a banned organization whose members—even if they are doctors or teachers—are liable to be shot on sight. It would be more useful to direct the same question to the Government of India that has none of these constraints. Why is it that in tribal areas that are not overrun by Maoists there are no schools, no hospitals, no check dams? Why do people in Chhattisgarh suffer from such acute malnutrition that doctors have begun to call it ‘nutritional AIDS’ because of the effect it has on the human immune system?
In their censored chapter in the Ministry of Panchayati Raj report, Ajay Dandekar and Chitrangada Choudhury (no fans of the Maoists—they call the party ideology ‘brutal and cynical’) write:
So the Maoists today have a dual effect on the ground in PESA areas. By virtue of the gun they wield, they are able to evoke some fear in the administration at the village/block/district level. They consequently prevent the common villager’s powerlessness over the neglect or violation of protective laws like PESA e.g. warning a talathi, who might be demanding bribes in return for fulfilling the duty mandated to him under the Forest Rights Act, a trader who might be paying an exploitative rate for forest produce, or a contractor who is violating the minimum wage. The party has also done an immense amount of rural development work, such as mobilizing community labour for farm ponds, rainwater harvesting and land conservation works in the Dandakaranya region, which villagers testified, had improved their crops and improved their food security situation.
In their recently published empirical analysis of the working of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) in 200 Maoist-affected districts in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, which appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, the authors Kaustav Banerjee and Partha Saha say:
The field survey revealed that the charge that the Maoists have been blocking developmental schemes does not seem to hold much ground. In fact, Bastar seems to be doing much better in terms of NREGA than some other areas…. On top of that, the enforcement of minimum wages can be traced back to the wage struggles led by the Maoists in that area. A clear result that we came across is the doubling of wage rates for tendu leaf collection in most of the Maoist areas…. Also, the Maoists have been encouraging the conduct of social audits since this helps in the creation of a new kind of democratic practice hitherto unseen in India.47
ADIVASI WAGE LABOURERS AT AN ALUMINIUM REFINERY, ORISSA
Now that mining companies have polluted rivers, mined away state boundaries, wrecked ecosystems and unleashed civil war, the consequences are playing out like an ancient lament over ruined landscapes and the bodies of the poor.
INDUSTRIAL DEBRIS, KEONJHAR, ORISSA
The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as Communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?
Implicit in a lot of the debate around Maoists is the old, patronizing tendency to cast ‘the masses’, the adivasi people in this case, in the role of the dimwitted horde, completely controlled by a handful of wicked ‘outsiders’. One university professor, a well-known Maoist-baiter, accused the leaders of the party of being parasites preying on poor adivasis.48 To bolster his case he compared the lack of development in Dandakaranya to the prosperity in Kerala. After suggesting that the non-adivasi leaders were all cowards ‘hiding safely in the forest’, he appealed to all adivasi Maoist guerrillas and village militia to surrender before a panel of middle-class Gandhian activists (hand-picked by him). He called for the non-adivasi leadership to be tried for war crimes. Why non-adivasi Gandhians are acceptable, but not non-adivasi Maoists, he did not say. There is something very disturbing about this inability to credit ordinary people with being capable of weighing the odds and making their own decisions.
In Orissa, for instance, there are a number of diverse struggles being waged by unarmed resistance movements that often have sharp differences with each other. And yet, between them all, they have managed to temporarily stop some major corporations from being able to proceed with their projects—the Tatas in Kalinganagar, Posco in Jagatsinghpur, Vedanta in Niyamgiri. Unlike in Bastar, where they control territory and are well-entrenched, the Maoists tend to use Orissa only as a corridor for their squads to pass through. But as the security forces close in on peaceful movements and ratchet up the repression, local people have to think very seriously about the pros and cons of involving the Maoist party in their struggles. Will its armed squads stay and fight the State repression that will inevitably follow a Maoist ‘action’? Or will they retreat and leave unarmed people to deal with police terror? Activists and ordinary people falsely accused of being Maoists are already being jailed. Many have been killed in cold blood. But a tense, uneasy dance continues between the unarmed resistance and the CPI (Maoist). On occasion the party has done irresponsible things that have led to horrible consequences for ordinary people. In 2008, in Kandhamal district, the Maoists shot dead Laxmanananda Saraswati, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a fascist outfit of proselytizers working among adivasis to bring them ‘back into the Hindu fold’.49 After the murder, enraged Kandha tribals who had been recently ‘returned’ to Hinduism were encouraged to go on a rampage. Almost 400 villages were convulsed with anti-Christian violence. Many Christians, adivasis as well as Dalits were killed, more than 200 churches burnt; tens of thousands had to flee their homes. Two years later, many of them are still not able to return to their homes. Thousands of people are spiralling into destitution, migrating to nearby towns in search of a means of survival, making the women folk, as always, the most vulnerable. The Hindu fascists have tightened their grip on the area. They are doing their best to mine the adivasi–Dalit divide and to force conversions from Christianity back to Hinduism. In Narayanpatna in Koraput district on the other hand, the situation is somewhat different. The Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangh, which the police say is a Maoist ‘front’, is fighting to restore to adivasis land that was illegally appropriated by local moneylenders and liquor dealers. There have been serious internecine battles among the various political groups and the area is reeling under police terror, with hundreds of adivasis thrown into Koraput jail and thousands living in the forests. In June 2009 the Maoists killed ten Orissa state police in a landmine blast. It gave the state government an excuse to deploy the CRPF in villages and begin combing operations. And yet, from several accounts, the movement is becoming more and more militant, with thousands of adivasis rallying, coming together to cultivate land they have reclaimed right under the security force’s nose. It’s an old story in India—without militant resistance the poor get pulverized. The minute the resistance becomes effective, the State moves in with all the armed might at its disposal.
People who live in situations like this do not have easy choices. They certainly do not simply take instructions from a handful of ideologues who appear out of nowhere waving guns. Their decisions on what strategies to employ take into account a whole host of considerations: the history of the struggle, the nature of the repression, the urgency of the situation and, quite crucially, the landscape in which their struggle is taking place. The decision whether to be a Gandhian or a
Maoist, militant or peaceful, or a bit of both (like in Nandigram) is not always a moral or ideological one. Quite often it’s a tactical one. Gandhian satyagraha, for example, is a kind of political theatre. In order for it to be effective, it needs a sympathetic audience, which villagers deep in the forest do not have. When a posse of 800 policemen lay a cordon around a forest village at night and begin to burn houses and shoot people, will a hunger strike help? (Can starving people go on a hunger strike? And do hunger strikes work when they’re not on TV?) Equally, guerrilla warfare is a strategy that villages in the plains, with no cover for tactical retreat, cannot afford. Sometimes, tactics get confused with ideology and lead to unnecessary internecine battles. Fortunately ordinary people are capable of breaking through ideological categories, and of being Gandhian in Jantar Mantar, militant in the plains and guerrilla fighters in the forest without necessarily suffering from a crisis of identity. The strength of the insurrection in India is its diversity, not uniformity.
Since the government has expanded its definition of ‘Maoist’ to include anybody who opposes it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Maoists have moved to centre stage. However, their doctrinal inflexibility, their reputed inability to countenance dissent, or work with other political formations, and most of all their single-minded, grim, military imagination make them too small to fill the giant pair of boots that is currently on offer.
(When I met Comrade Roopi in the forest, the first thing the tech-whiz did after greeting me was to ask about an interview I did soon after the Maoists had attacked Rani Bodili, a girls’ school in Dantewada that had been turned into a police camp.50 More than fifty policemen and SPOs were killed in the attack.51 ‘We were glad that you refused to condemn our Rani Bodili attack, but then in the same interview you said that if the Maoists ever come to power the first person we would hang would probably be you. Why did you say that? Why do you think we’re like that?’ I was settling into my long answer, but we were distracted. I would probably have started with Stalin’s purges—in which millions of ordinary people and almost half of the 75,000 Red Army officers were either jailed or shot, and 98 out of 139 Central Committee members were arrested; gone on to the huge price people paid for China’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; and might have ended with the Pedamallapuram incident in Andhra Pradesh, when the Maoists, in their previous avatar of People’s War Group, killed the village sarpanch and assaulted women activists for refusing to obey their call to boycott elections.)
Coming back to the question: who can fill this giant pair of boots? Perhaps it cannot, and should not, be a single pair of feet. Sometimes it seems very much as though those who have a radical vision for a newer, better world do not have the steel it takes to resist the military onslaught, and those who have the steel do not have the vision.
Right now the Maoists are the most militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements fighting an assault on adivasi homelands by a cartel of mining and infrastructure companies. To deduce from this that the CPI (Maoist) is a party with a new way of thinking about ‘development’ or the environment might be a little far-fetched. (The one reassuring sign is that it has cautiously said that it is against big dams. If it means what it says, that alone would automatically lead to a radically different development model.) For a political party that is widely seen as opposing the onslaught of corporate mining, the Maoists’ policy (and practice) on mining remains pretty woolly. In several places where people are fighting mining companies, there is a persistent view that the Maoists are not averse to allowing mining and mining-related infrastructure projects to go ahead as long as they are given protection money. From interviews and statements made by their senior leaders on the subject of mining, what emerges is a sort of ‘we’ll do a better job’ approach. They vaguely promise ‘environmentally sustainable’ mining, higher royalties, better resettlement for the displaced and higher stakes for the ‘stakeholders’. (The present Indian mining minister, thinking along the same lines, recently promised that 26 per cent of the profits from mining would go to local tribals displaced by mines. What a feast that will be for the pigs at the trough!)
But let’s take a brief look at the star attraction in the mining belt—the several trillion dollars’ worth of bauxite. There is no environmentally sustainable way of mining bauxite and processing it into aluminium. It’s a highly toxic process that most Western countries have exported out of their own environments. To produce one tonne of aluminium, you need about six tonnes of bauxite, more than a thousand tonnes of water and a massive amount of electricity.52 For that amount of captive water and electricity, you need big dams, which, as we know, come with their own cycle of cataclysmic destruction. Last of all—the big question—what is the aluminium for? Where is it going? Aluminium is a principal ingredient in the weapons industry—for other countries’ weapons industries. Given this, what would a sane, ‘sustainable’ mining policy be? Suppose, for the sake of argument, the CPI (Maoist) were given control of the so-called Red Corridor, the tribal homeland—with its riches of uranium, bauxite, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble—how would it go about the business of policy making and governance? Would it mine minerals to put on the market in order to create revenue, build infrastructure and expand its operations? Or would it mine only enough to meet people’s basic needs? How would it define ‘basic needs’? For instance, would nuclear weapons be a ‘basic need’ in a Maoist nation state?
Judging from what is happening in Russia and China and even Vietnam, eventually Communist and capitalist societies seem to have one thing in common—the DNA of their dreams. After their revolutions, after building societies that millions of workers and peasants paid for with their lives, these countries now have begun to reverse some of the gains of their revolutions and have turned into unbridled capitalist economies. For them, too, the ability to consume has become the yardstick by which progress is measured. For this kind of ‘progress’, you need industry. To feed the industry, you need a steady supply of raw material. For that you need mines, dams, domination, colonies, war. Old powers are waning, new ones rising. Same story, different characters—rich countries plundering poor ones. Yesterday it was Europe and the United States, today it’s India and China. Maybe tomorrow it will be Africa. Will there be a tomorrow? Perhaps it’s too late to ask, but then hope has little to do with reason.
Can we expect that an alternative to what looks like certain death for the planet will come from the imagination that has brought about this crisis in the first place? It seems unlikely. The alternative, if there is one, will emerge from the places and the people who have resisted the hegemonic impulse of capitalism and imperialism instead of being co-opted by it.
Here in India, even in the midst of all the violence and greed, there is still hope. If anyone can do it, we can. We still have a population that has not yet been completely colonized by that consumerist dream. We have a living tradition of those who have struggled for Gandhi’s vision of sustainability and self-reliance, for socialist ideas of egalitarianism and social justice. We have Ambedkar’s vision, which challenges the Gandhians as well as the socialists in serious ways. We have the most spectacular coalition of resistance movements, with their experience, understanding and vision.
Most important of all, India has a surviving adivasi population of almost 100 million. They are the ones who still know the secrets of sustainable living. If they disappear, they will take those secrets with them. Wars like Operation Green Hunt will make them disappear. So victory for the prosecutors of these wars will contain within itself the seeds of destruction, not just for adivasis but, eventually, for the human race. That’s why the war in central India is so important. That’s why we need a real and urgent conversation between all those political formations that are resisting this war.
The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw
material will not be endless, is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.
The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as Communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars.
Broken Republic Page 13