Indian Society, the Adivasi Uprising and Operation Green Hunt
Reliable news about India has been difficult for people around the world to find. With a few exceptions, mainstream news reports are slanted to keep out of public view and discourse revealing information such as the fact that 77% of India’s people try to survive on US$.50 a day. Even more heavily shielded and banned from public discourse are the repressive actions of the Indian government, and the determined resistance that millions of adivasis (India’s indigenous peoples) have mounted to defend their land from open pit mining and industrial pollution.
Thousands of Indian and multinational corporations are forcibly asserting their right to carry out the biggest theft of indigenous people’s land since the Columbus invasion of the Americas. In a new chapter of a long history of murderous assaults by capitalist governments on the world’s indigenous peoples who refuse to give up resource-rich lands, the Indian government launched a massive military operation in November 2009 of over 200,000 paramilitaries and police. Code-named Operation Green Hunt, this offensive is targeting tens of thousands of adivasi communities in seven states that haveorganized themselves to defend the land they have lived on for thousands of years.
“Shining India”
Government officials, leaders of political parties and the capitalist media from India to the US claim that the “Shining India” of 2011 is on a path of rapid economic growth, technical progress, and assertion of economic and military power throughout South Asia. As evidence, they cite India’s 8% annual increase in Gross Domestic Product, and hundreds of new Silicon Valleys and industrial parks that ring major cities. They also point to the existence of a large middle class that shops in air conditioned malls and drives imported cars. It is even asserted at times that this newly created wealth is actually flowing down to poverty-stricken villages and to the urban slums seen in Slumdog Millionaire.
The “Shining India” that these people are describing is actually a capitalistand semi-feudal India that shines brightly only on the owners of multi-billionaire families like the Tatas, Ambanis and Jindals, top executives of multinational corporations, big landlords and money lendersin the countryside, high ranking government officials and military officers, and the top leaders ofthe governing and “opposition” political parties.
This oppressive system provides some economic and social benefits to 200-300 million middle class people living in India’s big cities. These benefits are already being eroded and taken away as the worldwide economic crisis deepens and pulls India down with it.
India’s cities are ringed by huge and rapidly growing urban slums. To take just one example, 70% of the population of Mumbai, a city of 12 million people, live in one-room “homes” made out of concrete or aluminum siding, and have no access to schools, health care and other city services.
More importantly, Mumbai, Kolkata and India’s other big cities are surrounded by the vast countryside where nearly a billion peasants, dalits, adivasis and other oppressed people live. This is the “Other India” that the well known political activist and writer Arundhati Roy has described so eloquently to Indian and international audiences.
To cite just a few figures: 63 years after the declaration of formal “independence”in 1947, 51% of Indians are illiterate and tens of millions of children have to leave school to support their families. 98 children out of every 1,000 between the ages of 1-5 die due to malnutrition and adequate health care.
“The Largest Democracy in the World”
Government leaders around the world and the global capitalist media think that if they repeat the claim that “India is the world's largest democracy”enough times, it will be accepted as the truth.
However, democracy in India only exists for the rich and powerful. Leading members of India’s industrial and financial conglomerates, together with their political and military counterparts, decide on and strictly enforce the many ways the Indian ruling class oppresses and exploits 1.2 billion people.
All but a handful of Indians are excluded from this system ofdemocracy and state power for the ruling class, and poverty and state repression for the people. In the villages and slums where 90% of the people live, politicians are seen only at election time when they get out of their SUVs, make empty promises and give out a few rupees to buy votes.
As this paper’s descriptions of the brutal tactics employed by the Indian military in Operation Green Hunt and in Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh will demonstrate, the Indian state is extremely repressive. The Indian Army occupies the formerly independent nation of Kashmir and several states in northeast India and rules them by martial law. As Amnesty International and other human rights groups have documented, Indian soldiers and police have a long history of executing political opponents,, and claiming afterwards that their victims were shot during armed “encounters” with the military.
The government has also passed laws that enable it to arrest, “interrogate” and keep political opponents in jail without trial for long periods of time. Taken together, the government’s suppression of political dissent has made India the country with the largest number of political prisoners in the world—over 100,000.
Thus, the Indian people are faced with a government whose anti-people laws and policies areenforced by over 1 million members of the Army, paramilitary forces and local police forces. For most of the Indian people, India is a police state.
How “Independent” is India?
The two principal architects of Operation Green Hunt, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Home Minister PC Chidambaram, are political agents for both the Indian ruling class and US imperialism. Singh spent most of his working life in the service of foreign-owned financial institutions, while Chidambaramwas a directorofBritish-based Vedanta. One of the biggest mining corporations in the world, Vedanta operates a massive bauxite strip mine that threatens the ancestral land of many adivasi communities in Orissa.
Lured by high profits to be made from exploiting India’s abundant natural resources, and employing Indian workers who are paid 1/8 of what US workers are paid, direct investment in India by US and other multinational corporations and financial institutions have become a substantial part of the Indian economy. The most notorious of these American corporate bandits is Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical, which was responsible for a massive leak of poisonous chemicals from its factory in Bhopal in 1984 that killed 35,000 people and maimed and disfigured at least 200,000 more for the rest of their lives.
A large part of US direct investment is in high-tech industries that are powering the growth of India’s capitalist economy. Likewise, a horde of US military industrialists and arms dealers are maneuvering to grab as big a share as possible of the $50-80billion in high-tech weapons that the Indian military is planning to buy over the next five years.
In another important commercial and strategic deal, India has agreed to buy nuclear fuel for its reactors from the US, thereby tying its civilian nuclear program to US imperialist interests. As a result of President Obama’s meetings with Prime Minister Singh and other government officials in the fall of 2010, barriers to US direct investment in India and to trade between India and the US are being significantly reduced.
The “independence” that has been the mantra of every Indian government since 1947 exists only in the rhetoric that officials and leaders of political parties deploy in order to shore up their legitimacy among the Indian people. In reality, the Indian economy has for been thoroughly integrated into the global capitalist economic system for centuries, and many of the most profitable and strategic sectors of the Indian economy are occupied today by US and other foreign-owned corporations and financial institutions.
India’s Diverse and Oppressive Society
Dalits
30% of the people of India are dalits (untouchables). They are on the bottom rung of the caste system. The founders of Hinduism created a religiously sanctioned system with the goal of locking all Indians into different social classes and types of work for life. Thus high caste Brahmins are the heads of corporate houses, banks and political parties, while dalits are confined to oppressive jobs such as garbage collectors in the cities and excrement haulers in the villages.Many dalits still live in communities that are separate from the villages where they work.Maoist activists live and work in dalit communities before they startup work in the villages.
The most oppressed among the large dalit population in the Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, are the landless Musahars. Supported by Maoist activists, Bihar’s Musahars have organized and mobilized their communities to take possession of government land. In Bihar,the dalits face pervasive social oppression, including massacres perpetrated by right wing militias such as the Ranbir Sena that are organized and funded by high caste groups and the state government. These pogroms force dalit families to flee their villages and become internal refugees. Bihar’s state and local governments invariably do not provide protection to dalit communities from the Ranbar Sena or shelter and economic support to displaced dalits.
As a concession to powerful dalit movements based in the cities, the Indian government reserves a certain percentage of seats in government and universities for dalits. The Indian government uses this relatively privileged group of dalits as a buffer against more oppressed and more radical dalit forces, and points to it as a sign of “dalit progress.” Meanwhile, the conditions of life for the vast majority of dalits in the countryside and slums remain unchanged or worse, deteriorate.
Peasants and Farmers
Peasants and farmers make up the majority of India’s population.One-third of the labourers in the countryside, or about 80 million people, are landless laborers. Peasants and farmers eke out a living on plots that average ½ to 5 hectares, depending on the state. This is hardly enough to support a family but enough to feed a layer of usurious bankers and moneylenders.
In most of India’s countryside, peasants no longer work for zamindars, big landlords, but are exploited by money-lenders. In Punjab, a different system for exploiting and suppressing peasants and farmers is controlled by arhtiyas, or money lenders. The arhtiyas lend money to farmers at exorbitant rates of interest. Many farmers are forced to foreclose on their land because they cannot afford to repay their loans, or due to legal chicanery by the arhtiyas and corrupt government officials. When farmers organize and struggle against illegal land-grabs, the arhtiyas’ hired goons and police officials with illegal detentions, torture and custodial deaths.
According to an article published by Sanhati on October 15, 2010, “Thearhtiyasin Punjab are a powerful exploitative class. They are an integral but useless part of the farm produce marketing system….A team of economists led by Dr Sukh Pal Singh of the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) observed in a recent study that “The main source of income of the commission agents is not the commission charged on the sale/purchase of crops but the interest taken on the credit advanced to the farmers….Thearhtiyasalso control the fertilizer, pesticides and seeds market.’
“Taking advantage of the farmers’ illiteracy and financial dependence, they sell spurious fertilizers, pesticides and deeds to make big money. Resultantly the farmer is ruined. At many places, thearhtiyasunder-weigh the farm produces to dupe the farmers. The main political parties – the Akalis, BJP, and Congress-- mostly support thearhtiyas, being their important source of election funds. They generally plead that thearhtiyasand the farmers have a deep and inseparable relationship like the Siamese twins.”
Anti-Displacement Struggles
Some of the most powerful struggles to erupt in the countryside in recent years have involved farmers and landless peasants threatened with displacement by the construction of big factories and mines, many of which are part of over 500 Special Economic Zones.These are more accurately known as “Special Exploitation Zones.” They ban strikes and labor unions, and are run by specially designed corporations that are not bound by Indian law.
At Nandigram in West Bengal in 2006, the land and livelihoods of 90,000 farmers and shopkeepers, both Hindus and Muslims, were threatened by the plans ofDow Chemical, notorious for supplying napalm to the US Air Force to drop on civilian communities during the Vietnam War,to builda massive petrochemical complex.
In the course of two powerful uprisings, the people of Nandigram liberated their villages from widely hated local governments that were controlled by the Communist Party of India(Marxist)--CPM-- the ruling party in West Bengal. Thousands of people in Nandigram organized and armed themselves to defend their villages from relentless armed attacks by CPM goons (harmads).
Militant women were at the frontlines of struggle, using traditional weapons, household implements, condiments like chili powder, and signaling through conch shells to organize and mobilize the masses of people to press forward in the struggle. The CPM Chief Minister of West Bengal had no choice but to announce that the construction project would not go forward.
Today, tens of thousands of villagers in Jagatsingur, Orissa are fighting pitched battles against the police to stop the plans of POSCO, a US/South Korean steel corporation, to build a $12 billion steel plant and port that will displacemore than 20,000 farmers from their villages and fertile, multi-crop lands.
In the Kalinganagar industrial area of Orissa, which the government has plans will become India’s second “steel city,” the plans of Tata Steel (Tata is one the biggest corporations in India) to build a massive plant have faced determined resistance from farmers and adivasis. When Tata's bulldozers tried to begin construction of the plant in early 2006, the Orissa police killed 12 adivasi protestors. Since then, a mass-based anti-displacement group has stopped Tata from moving forward with its plant by organizing and mobilizing thousands of people by means ofroad blockades and demonstrations against the police.
The breath and impact of this powerful anti-displacement movement is demonstrated by these remarks by Pandey Nath, a farmer from Kalinganagar. Nath says his land is not being acquired but he still opposes Tata. “Tomorrow they will have a factory near my land, pollute it and edge me out. No one wants to sell but they have all taken money now. No one was taking initially, so they sent three or four people to jail to set an example. They did impersonation, faked papers and everything they could to show that compensation had been paid,” he says to the collective nods of 10 other farmers whose lands are being acquired.d
“Kamal Gajviye, a CPI [Communist Party of India] member and farmer, is also losing his land to the Tata project. “The collector has often accused me of being a Naxalite. I am not. But I will become one, if this continues.They will all become Naxalites.”’ (Express Buzz, 25 Oct 2009)
Women and Patriarchal Oppression
According toContemporary Anti-Displacement Struggles and Women’s Resistance, by Shoma Sen,Associate Professor at RTM Nagpur University, “Women’s exclusion in the present model of development needs to be understood as inherent to a system that benefits from patriarchy. Seen as a reserve force of labour, women, excluded from economic activity, are valued for their unrecognized role in social reproduction. The capitalist, patriarchal system that keeps the majority of women confined to domestic work and child rearing uses this as a way of keeping the wage rates low.
“The limited participation of women in economic activity is also an extension of their traditional gender roles (nursing, teaching or labour intensive jobs requiring patience and delicate skills) with wages based on gender discrimination. Largely part of the unorganized sector, deprived of the benefits of labour legislation, insecurity leads to sexual exploitation at the workplace. In the paradigm of globalization, these forms of exploitation, in export oriented industries, SEZs [Special Economic Zones] and the service sector have greatly increased.
In spite of 63 years of so-called independence, women’s presence is negligible in political bodies and reservations for the same have been strongly resisted in a patriarchal political system. Though at the lower levels, reservations have made a limited entry possible, the success stories are more exceptions than the rule. Social institutions, thriving on feudal patriarchal notions are disapproving of women’s participation in production and laud her reproductive roles; violence against women at the familial and societal level is given social sanction and women are confined to a dependent life within the domestic space.