Lady Tarzan Cuts Timber Mafia to Size

Here's an inspiring story of a brave tribal woman published in the Hindustan Times  

Eleven years ago, Muturkham forests, lying southeast of capital Ranchi, used to be the timber mafia’s busy workplace. No different from the rest of the state, which has lost 50% of forest cover to illegal logging in the last 10 years. Until 1999, when Muturkham’s jungle mafia met ‘Lady Tarzan'

Jamuna Tuddu, 32, a short and stout woman belonging to the Santahl tribe who had studied till Class X, led a band of 25 tribal housewives to form the Van Suraksha Samity (Forest Protection Committee) and registered it with the state forest department. The women patrolled the forests in three groups, collared illegal loggers — usually hired hands from nearby villages — and handed them over to the forest department. Word spread that the trees in Muturkham were not to be touched.

The 50-hectare forest in East Singhbhum district which had turned barren (the mafia had chopped down every tree over three metres tall) now has one lakh trees. There is a kendu, eucalyptus or acacia tree every six feet; the gap between two trees 10 years ago used to be more than 24 feet. Several species of reptiles and avians, wild boars, hares and the elephant have made this forest their home.The local initiative could well be the model for protecting the 23,60,500 hectares of Jharkhand’s rich jungle cover — the size of about 16 Delhis —  from timber cartels.

Tuddu  has worked as a mason as well as a beautician to supplement the family income. Her reasons for forming this committee were prompted by basic economics: there was no firewood in her kitchen.“In the summers, there was no shade. We had no firewood, no fodder for our cattle and water levels were dipping across a 15-km area,” she says. “Today, anyone caught felling trees is fined R501 and handed over to the forest department.” The amount is deposited in the Samity’s fund, utilised for community welfare work and to purchasing cell phones for better networking during patrols.Muturkham has been rewarded for its brave enterprise. A smooth road connects it with the Chakulia-Tata Main Road and an overhead water tank ensures 24-hour supply to every household. There is a well and a check dam on a hill stream. There is a school building, a generator set and machines to make leaf plates.Most of these were delivered by the forest department as a gesture of thanks for the Samity’s achievements under the World Food Program and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.Tuddu, however, does not rest on her laurels. It is 6 am and ‘Lady Tarzan’, as she is locally known, is tightening the strings of her bow in her house. A group of around 12 women, some with children in their arms, quietly assembles outside, each carrying traditional weapons and lathis for the daily patrol. Tuddu leads them to the Muturkham forests.

The Samity membership has now grown to 70 women. The youngest is Bahamayee Tuddu, 13, and the oldest is Malati Tuddu, 70. The older women guard the foothills with village dogs to prevent illegal lumberjacks from escaping. At night, some men accompany the patrol team.Tuddu’s women say their forest duties do not affect their household and farming responsibilities. The village head, Charu Charan Tuddu, says the entire village is in their debt. The forest department has adopted Muturkham as a model village.The work can be dangerous. Last November, Sister Valsa John, a 52-year-old nun from Kerala, was hacked to death with spears, clubs and axes in Pakur district for protecting tribal rights and forests. But Tuddu is not scared. Her team has so far nabbed over a dozen illegal woodcutters. “Now the summers are no longer unbearable. We have shade,” says local youth Kanu Ram Hansda, 28.Women who earlier had no mode of earning now make plates from sal leaves with hand-operated compressors and earn up to Rs 12,000-15,000 a year selling them in nearby marketplaces. The state government has recognised the committee’s achievements led by Tuddu with cash awards. Tuddu contested the panchayat polls last year for the mukhiya’s post but lost by just 18 votes. But Tuddu has a bigger job. She is the guardian of the forest.

The Original Holocaust

The White Settlers in the United States carried out a systematic elimination of the native indigenous peoples who had been residing there and over a period of a century killed as many as nineteen million people. This was the original holocaust and it appears that Hitler studied the techniques used by the Americans to effect this decimation of the Indian Population. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" is what General Philip Sheridan of the U.S. Army is supposed to have stated during his campaign against the Indians in the 1870s. Sheridan carried out an extermination of the wild buffaloes which provided the sustenance to the Indians and restricted them to their reservations. The practice of confining the Indians to their reservations was similar to the ghettoisation of the jews in Europe. A documentary film vividly depicts the details of this systematic genocide with interviews with present day native american researchers and activists -
American Holocaust of Native Americans
This video clearly brings to the fore the problem of modern development being against nature and those who traditionally lived in harmony with it.

In Search of A New Horizon

The year 2011 will remain an important one in history because of the many important mass protests that took place during the year. Consequently even Time magazine has anointed the anonymous protester as its Person of the Year. The most important mass protests were indubitably those that took place in the Arab countries beginning with Tunisia and still rumbling in Syria. These mass protests were against totalitarian regimes and have resulted in the establishment of bourgeois liberal democracy in most places where they took place. So they can be termed as being equivalent to the French Revolution. However, coming as they do all of three centuries after that epoch making event the mass upsurges of the Arab Spring can hardly be labelled as revolutions but must be considered to be reformist uprisings. Especially considering the fact that bourgeois liberal democracy has not been able to really bring freedom and justice to the masses even in countries like France, England and the USA where it has been practiced for quite some time now. In fact all these countries are seeing mass protests of one kind or another against the depredations of modern capitalism.
The Occupy movement in the USA is also something to be noted. It started off earlier with the Spanish youth who were the first to catch on to the Arab fever and occupy the city centres in Barcelona and Madrid. Later the American youth took heart from this and initiated the Occupy Wall Street movement which soon spread to other locations across the world. The fever later spread to Russia also as people came on to the streets to protest against what they felt was a rigged election in their country.
Closer home we had the India Against Corruption movement for the enactment of a strong centralised Ombudsman legislation. Beginning in an obscure way in April it very soon took on mass proportions and garnered very good media support to be able to pressurise the government into bowing to its demands initially. However, the end of the year saw this movement losing steam and not being able to maintain the same level of mobilisation that it had achieved earlier resulting in the Ombudsman legislation ultimately not being enacted. In fact the possibility now is that a weak legislation will finally come through in the new year.
Overall despite all these movements across the world the centralised state system and economy still rule the roost and not much has changed. Even in the Arab countries, political and economic power still remain in the hands of an elite. In Europe and the USA, the substantially unjust financial system and the centralised political governance that backs it remain unscathed and well ensconced.
This obviously brings to the fore the question as to why these mass protests have not been able to bring about any fundamental changes. The answer is that the centralised systems are very powerful and are able to wear out the mass protests which are more or less spontaneous. In the case of the Occupy movement in fact there is a stated aversion to getting organised and structured because of its anarchist fundamentals. In the case of the Arab movements, the leadership that has emerged has plumped for the establishment of bourgeois liberal democracy rather than look for something more radical and democratic.
The case of the IAC movement in India is even more quixotic. Their demand for a strong Ombudsman was well within the liberal democratic framework and voiced because its main protagonists had earlier seen the failure of the Right To Information Act to rein in corruption. However, the belief that a strong Ombudsman Act would be implemented even if it was enacted is a naive one. In fact in India any legislation or policy favouring the poor gets implemented only if there is pressure from the masses and even after that not very well. As things have turned out the political mainstream has refused to enact the strong centralised Ombudsman legislation that the IAC is pushing for. However, the IAC too has lost steam suddenly as it has not been able to muster the kind of mass support that it had earlier and is unable again to pressurise the political establishment to bow to its demands. It would be worthwhile to ponder on the reasons for this subsequent loss of support.
The mass support that had been mobilised by the IAC earlier was a spontaneous one spurred by extensive media coverage and covert support from the Sangh Parivar. Instead of building on this spontaneous mass turnout by putting in place a cadre based organisation built around a coherent programme of action the IAC then went about promoting a personality cult around Anna Hazare and its leading members engaged in frivolous activities like campaigning to make a Congress candidate lose in a peripheral by-election. The core group of the IAC is an amorphous one and soon there came to the surface contradictions between its members with different people talking in different political languages. Moreover, the Sangh Parivar having used the IAC to embarrass the Congress then launched its own anti-corruption campaign and at the same time went about ensuring that a strong Ombudsman legislation did not in fact come about. This time round it has forbidden its cadre from taking part in the IAC campaigns. The media too has now become lukewarm after there was considerable criticism of the way in which it became a party to the IAC campaign rather than being an objective reporter of events. The IAC this time had announced a nationwide "Jail Bharo" campaign and had claimed that more than a lakh people had confirmed that they would court arrest in favour of the Jan Lokpal Bill. The coordinator of the IAC in Mumbai had even gone to the extent of announcing that they would apply to the Guinness's Book of World Records to get them to cover the event! However, all this was going on through the internet and mobile messaging without any hardcore grassroots work. Eventually the expected mass turnout did not materialise and the IAC had to call  off its agitational programme.
Thus, what all these mass movements of the year gone by have underlined is the need for long term grassroots mobilisation and the building up of an organisation with a clear ideology and programme of action that can sustain a long drawn campaign against the centralised state system. The campaign has to be a positive one and there has to be democracy within the organisation instead of the present cabalic character of the core group of the IAC. We need to search for new horizons instead of trying to go for easy solutions because there are none.

Never Say Die

The struggle of the Bhilalas of the villages bordering the Narmada river in Alirajpur and Badwani districts of Madhya Pradesh against their unjust submergence by various dams on the Narmada and its tributaries continues. Here is a report from the struggling bravehearts who are fighting it out once again by taking the attack to the government.
Undeterred by the biting winter cold, the Sardar Sarovar (SSP) and Jobat dam affected adivasi oustees successfully completed three full weeks (21 days) of their indefinite action at the Agricultural and Seed Production Farm, Jobat where they have occupied and been cultivating government-owned
land. Except for the Alirajpur District Collector, who has been trying to take forward the rehabilitation process, no responsible official from the Narmada Valley Development Authority (NVDA), Narmada Control Authority
(NCA) or the state government has cared to respond till now.  It is well known that there are hundreds of adivasi families affected by both the projects in Alirajpur district and Badwani district (SSP), but
none of them have been rehabilitated till date with cultivable and irrigable land as per legal and judicial stipulations. After 2 decades of litigation, dialogue with and agitation before the state and central
authorities and utter non-compliance with the binding Tribunal Award and the Supreme Court’s Judgements, the SSP oustees have resorted to this ‘Zameen Haq Satyagraha’, as a last resort, wherein they have occupied and are cultivating the seed farm land.
Fearing earlier  strictures passed by the High Court  for violating the ‘right to peaceful agitation’ of the oustees through brutal lathi-charge, the state government has so far not shown the temerity to use force or even any other means to ‘convince’ the oustees to vacate the land. However, the government has not been totally ambivalent as well. The administration has cut-off power and water supply within the Farm and the people have been living in the dark all through. Lack of electricity was a means for the government to frustrate the attempt of the oustees to cultivate & irrigate the land and destroy the maize and wheat crop. However, the people have innovatively decided to intensify their occupation over the land and have started cultivating native vegetables and greens which require less water. 
Earlier in the week, the Chief Minister, Mr. Shivraj Singh Chauhan on his visit to Alirajpur told the press that “Law will take its own course. Land would be given where it is available and where it is not, it is ‘legal’ to give cash compensation. This is as per law and judicial orders. People have a right to demonstrate peacefully, but this is certainly not a right approach of the oustees to agitate”. After 15 years of gross neglect, illegal submergence of land, crop loss, dire poverty, hunger, malnourishment, loss of dignity and even death of a generation of elders, seeking cultivable land for years, what else can the oustees do? What other‘right approach’ do they take up ? Has the CM and the Government complied with law? Is this the treatment that will be meted out to those believe in the legal system? Is this Rule of Law?, we are compelled to ask.
Stung by the CM’s response, the oustees, asserted their right to life and right to land on the ‘Human Rights Day, and have decided to intensify their actual occupation and cultivation over the entire expanse of the Seed Farm and also to other locations, wherever cultivable government land is available. The people are always open for a meaningful dialogue and lawful rehabilitation, but can wait no more for the State to deliver by itself.
“We, the dam-affected hilly adivasis are living in sub-human conditions since a decade and a half. If this is not a gross atrocity on the adivasis, what else is,” question the women and men, who have also begun igniting their own ‘village choolas’ at the satyagraha site, as a mark of protest against the State for violating their right to food and right to life. They say, “hame kaagaz nahi, pathar nahi, kheti laayak zamin
chahiye”. People have clearly decided that they shall not vacate this land, until they are actually provided cultivable, irrigable, suitable and unencroached land, with house plots at developed resettlement sites. Earlier, the oustees took out a death parade of the NVDA through the main streets of Jobat with the effigy of the CM to symbolize the fact that the ‘Authority’ is virtually dead, in so far as the displaced persons are concerned. More than a hundred children from the Narmada Jeevanshalas (life-schools) in villages Bhadal, Bhitada, Jalsindhi are also energizing the agitation and have shifted or immolated their schools to the satyagraha sthal. 
As a statutory monitoring body, the Narmada Control Authority has also totally failed in its role and has not taken any initiative till date to expedite the rehabilitation process nor has it issued stern directives to
the state government to provide land and house plots to the oustees, as per law. Shockingly, not one official from the NCA has made even a single  visit to the submergence areas in the past ten years to assess the serious impact of displacement without rehabilitation that people have been facing. NCA has also not checked the legality and viability of the unilateral land offers made to the oustees, most of which is uncultivable, unirrigable, encroached and hundreds of kms away from the house plots.The NCA has relied entirely on NVDA’s false Action Taken Reports and has reported in its recent Annual Reports that there are no balance families to be rehabilitated. This is absolutely incorrect, illegal and a gross violation of the right to life of hundreds of project-affected families (PAFs). 
On the other hand, the adamant stance of NVDA on the Land Bank, has once again led to a stalemate.The Supreme Court has directed in no uncertain terms that “oustees must be offered lands which are really cultivable or irrigable, along with basic civil amenities and benefits as specified in the Award”. In the background of large-scale refusal by oustees of land offered to them from the Land Bank, the Court directed in May 2011 that “The Government must continue to search for additional land than what is already available in the land bank and to find out the means of its purchase for allotment to
the oustees. The Government should also ensure that the allocated land is not encroached upon by the unscrupulous persons”.
NVDA, NCA, and even the authorities in Delhi must face the reality; accept the fact that the land bank offers are illegal and unviable and start a genuine process of identification and allotment of cultivable, irrigable, unencroached land to the oustees, beginning with the agitating hilly adivasis. This is possible and indispensible, with the participation of the oustees, as is happening in Maharashtra and Gujarat, through Land Purchase Committees.As already declared, until such a bonafide and concrete process takes-off, the Satyagraha shall continue…
...... Narmada Bachao Andolan.
The NBA has distinguished itself as a mass movement that never says die and has consequently been able to hold up the completion of many of the dams on the Narmada River.

A Sting lies in this Tale!

In the remote village of Katkut in Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh, there is a government residential middle school for tribal and dalit girls. The residential school was set up to counter the problem that tribal and dalit girls in rural areas are not sent to school beyond the primary stage because parents are reluctant to take the risk of their adolescent girls commuting over a distance to do so. The premise being that if the girls stayed in hostels and were continually monitored then they would be able to break free of the patriarchal norms that doom most of them to early marriage. All very laudable and eminently reasonable no doubt but for the reality that actually prevails on the ground.
In the case of the school in Katkut the possibility of good education for adolescent tribal and dalit girls was tossed out by the presence of a corrupt Dalit headmistress of the school. The funds for the food and other accessories of the girls came to a bank account that had to be operated by two of the girl students. Once again an admirable arrangement to ensure transparency. However, the headmistress used to get the girls to sign on blank cheques that she kept with herself and which she used to withdraw the money as she pleased. The standard of food served obviously deteriorated and so the number of girl students also went down. But on paper the numbers were maintained at a healthy level of about twenty girls per class so that the funds continued to come to the bank account. Now, the headmistress could not have done such a big ripoff continuously over the years without paying off other people. She paid off the local non-tribal leaders of the village and her bosses in Khargone who were supposed to monitor the operation and performance of the school. So for many years together funds meant for the education of adolescent tribal girls were being siphoned off leaving them stuck in the same dark patriarchal morass in which their mothers were.
Then things changed for a time. The Adivasi Shakti Sangathan became active in the area in 1996 raising demands for justice and the rule of law. One of the parents of a girl studying in the school complained to the Sangathan in one of its weekly meetings about the sorry state of affairs prevailing there. A special village meeting was held in Katkut, the Gram Sabha, in which in the presence of hundreds of tribals a resolution was passed that the Sangathan should take up the issue of good governance in the girls' residential school. A delegation went to the school and recorded the statements of the girls about the defalcation of the funds. On the basis of this a formal complaint was filed with the higher authorities in Khargone. Since the Sangathan had already established itself as a feisty campaigner in other spheres the complaint was taken seriously and the girls' hostel began functioning properly for the first time since it had come into existence. The power of the Gram Sabha was visible. Grassroots democracy had become potent.
However, the State struck back. It announced that the Sangathan had become a parallel authority undermining that of the State and this could not be allowed. If the villagers assert their rights and demand transparency, justice and the rule of law then the authority of the state will obviously be reduced and it will have to share power with the Gram Sabha. This is what, in fact, is envisaged in the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution for tribal areas and in the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act (PESA). Thus, the Sangathan, like on many occasions earlier in the post independence era had brought to the fore the contradictions in the Indian Constitution between its centralist and anarchist provisions.
While many horrible things were done by the State to crush the organisation it will be fruitful here to follow the tale of the girls' school to its end. The local non-tribal leaders and the headmistress, who had been deprived of their illegal earnings, obviously with the support of the State, succeeded in getting a police case registered against the five member delegation of the Sangathan that had carried out the inspection of the girls' school alleging that they had threatened to kill the headmistress and prevented her from doing her administrative duty. The police then proceeded to catch these people one by one, beat them up and send them to jail.  When this happened the second time the whole Sangathan rose up and immediately surrounded the police station and refused to let the arrested member from being taken away to jail. A long day's sit in later the higher administrative authorities came down to Katkut and promised to take action against the guilty tormentors of the tribals and the demonstration ended. But like in earlier such instances the police instead of acting against the guilty government servants filed yet another criminal complaint against members of the Sangathan alleging that they had once again threatened to kill them and prevented them from doing their duty! This was in 1998. The focal point of this tale and the one that is the sting in it is the court case that resulted from the filing of this complaint.
Sixteen people were arraigned including three old men in their sixties and four women. Then started the most frustrating part of the whole exercise. For thirteen long years the accused had to make rounds of the court at Barwah the nearby town at regular intervals. Despite many efforts in between to expedite the case it dragged on. Finally due to the huge public opinion building up against the delay in court cases the Madhya Pradesh Government in consultation with the High Court decided to appoint a few more magistrates across the state to clear the backlog. An extra magistrate was posted in the Barwah court to dispose of the older cases among which the one involving the Adivasi Shakti Sangathan members. This should have brought cheers at the prospect of an end to the case. However there was a twist. Over the years the higher judiciary has taken note of yet another public outcry. This is the tendency of the police to  do shoddy investigation against criminals and then the lower judiciary taking a lenient view of their crimes, both after receiving bribes, resulting in a very low conviction rate. Consequently, the higher judiciary has sent down strict directions to the lower judiciary that they should convict at the slightest hint of criminality and on the flimsiest of evidence. Thus, the combined pressure of disposing of cases quickly and of convicting the accused has made the lower judiciary insensitive to the context of the case. This has proved to be a bane for activists of mass organisations fighting for rights. They are frequently arraigned under criminal charges but the magistrates these days do not make a distinction between them and begin treating them as criminals and convicting them.
The new magistrate in Barwah, after taking charge, immediately began convicting the accused in the cases that came up before him. The lawyer of the Adivasi Shakti Sangathan activists became jittery and told them that the situation was serious. Neither was it possible to delay the case and nor was it possible to avoid conviction he said. This is when I thought it was time I stepped in. I too along with my wife Subhadra were among the accused. However, I had not paid much attention to the case and nor had I been attending the court proceedings as the other co-accused would file exemption requests for me. But now with the lawyer feeling cowed down by the magistrate I had to take things into my hand. I sat down with the charge sheet and the evidence given and found a number of flaws starting from the first information report filed itself. I then found out a host of previous rulings of the Supreme and High courts pointing out that such flaws were enough to dismiss the case. I also unearthed enough evidence to show that the police had concocted evidence to falsely implicate us. A defense argument was prepared on the basis of this which the lawyer, now emboldened with all this preparation, argued very well in front of the magistrate. Consequently not only were we acquitted but the magistrate also recorded in his judgment that the police had concocted the case!
We had won the case no doubt but only because I am not just a field level activist but also have considerable knowledge of the law.  A knowledge that has been built up over the years by fighting innumerable cases at various levels. Especially the one that the State foisted on us after killing four of our colleagues in police firing in Mehendikhera in 2001. I spent two and a half months in jail at that time being denied bail solely on the suspicion that I was a Naxalite. These days there is a lot of heartburn in the higher judiciary about denial of bail being a form of injustice because some high profile people have been arraigned in corruption cases, but for activists of mass movements there is no sympathy in the judiciary at all yet. We had to fight tooth and nail and do a lot of hard legal research to win that case and get ourselves acquitted. It is of course another matter that the State has appealed against our acquittal in the High Court. However, after that incident of 2001 we took a decision never again to undertake any action that would call for the State to foist criminal cases on us and put us behind bars. The costs in terms of money and time lost in fighting legal cases has become prohibitive these days and so the militancy of mass movements has decreased considerably. This is the final sting in the tail in the form of lengthy and expensive court cases that in many instances result in conviction that keeps the surging discontent among the masses in leash.
When a simple effort like trying to ensure that tribal girls get a good education can end up in so much harassment and require so much skill to avoid conviction in criminal cases foisted on the campaigners, then it is easy to see why more fundamental and challenging campaigns like ensuring the right to work, food and housing have never been successful.

Whither Anarchism

The Occupy Wall Street Movement has completed its initially announced time period of two months on November 17th 2011 and is still going strong. What had started off tentatively has now gained support across the globe and despite repression is refusing to die down. In many ways this is a significant protest movement -
1. First and foremost the movement is leaderless. It does not even have a core committee directing it. Everything is decided by mass consensus. Thus, an attempt in the middle by some participants to get some kind of a manifesto together and place some concrete demands before the authorities was shot down and apart from the broad demand that the exclusivist financial system should be dismantled, there is nothing else in the form of a programme of action coming out from the movement.
2. The movement has touched a chord among many people across the world who feel that the present economic and political system is unjust and they have spontaneously come out onto the streets. So not only young people who are without a job or older people who do not have social and economic support but also intellectuals and well heeled people, have come out in support of the movement.
3. Even though initially the mainstream media had totally blacked out the movement, the latter has through its persistence and spread to other cities in the USA and elsewhere in the world been able to force its way into the news and even got sympathetic attention.
4. The establishment has had to sit up and take note of the movement. Its persistence and resilience have made the authorities resort to repressive behaviour only to be met with peaceful protest again and again. No sooner is the Zuccotti Park cleared out than the protesters are back again. The courts have upheld the rights of the owners of the park to get the protesters evicted but that has done little to prevent the latter from occupying the park again.
However, though all this is fine as far as it goes, the problem is that it does not go really far in the present day and age. In fact anarchist mobilisation, especially of the peaceful variety, has always had a fundamental problem that the centralised state systems do not pay much attention to them unless they gather huge strength - mobilisation in hundreds of thousands or even millions. To get that kind of mobilisation on a sustained basis unfortunately there has to be some organisation, some leadership, some concrete demands and some programme of action. But this is against the basic anarchist credo which is why the OWS Movement has remained amorphous even if it has been resilient. Even though it claims to be inspired by the mass movements of the Arab Spring there is a fundamental difference here. Those movements had a clear agenda of overthrowing repressive dictatorships and so immediately large numbers of people joined the movements. That is not happening here because there is no clear agenda or programme of action and so there are a few hundred people at each of the locations and it is not causing the establishment any great worries. After all occupying Wall Street is only the first step and if that is not being done in large enough numbers to actually prevent Wall Street from functioning then just the symbolic nature of the occupation is not going to bring about any far reaching changes. Since there has not been any consensus, so an alternative system has also not been offered by the OWS.
The dilemma is a very deep one for anarchists. Having struggled in our work here among the Bhil tribals continuously with this question I feel that in the present context something new has to be evolved to counter the huge centralisation of the establishment. In India especially we have seen that much stronger movements than the OWS have not been able to achieve any substantial change other than some legislative leeway. As for example is going to happen with the India Against Corruption movement for a Jan Lokpal Act and as has happened earlier with the enactment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or the Forest Rights Act. A basic change in the way governance and development are practiced is not being achieved and that is what is required. In fact in more core areas even proper legislation is not coming up. The Land Acquistion, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill that is going to be tabled in Parliament shortly is a case in point. This is one issue on which there have been innumerable mass movements and at any given time there are movements going on with an activist Sister Valsa John having been murdered just a few days ago by the mining mafia in Jharkhand. Yet, the bill is a travesty of justice as it seeks to facilitate the alienation of landowners, especially those without the wherewithal to fight lengthy court cases, rather than protect their rights as has been rightly critiqued by a group of organisations and individuals. The weakness of anarchist mobilisation in the face of a state totally controlled by capitalist forces committed to exploitation and accumulation is there for all to see.
In the same way as liberalism or marxism cannot provide all the answers to the problems of social, economic and environmental injustice, so also anarchism too is a partial  ideology in the present context of centralised capitalist development. The challenge is to seek a balance between centralisation and decentralisation both in the alternative systems to be fought for and the programmes of action that have to be adopted in this fight.

Rural Development Dissected

I attended a workshop on rural development today. It was specifically about ensuring land rights for tribal women in Jhabua. The NGO which had organised the workshop had initiated a programme for empowering Bhil tribal women in Jhabua to gain formal rights to their land. However, after starting the programme they found that this was a very difficult proposition. Not only is the Bhil society highly patriarchal but also the average household landholding is now around 0.3 hectares. Consequently the Bhils do not get much of an income from agriculture and have to rely on migratory labour to make ends meet. Under the circumstances even if women were given formal rights to the land as per the law after considerable struggle with the men it would not really give them much in material terms.
The women who came from the villages, said that they wanted some livelihood support, so that they could stay in their villages and earn money and not have to migrate long distances to Gujarat and Rajasthan. This feedback had made the NGO too start some minimal livelihood programmes. However, undertaking large scale livelihood programmes requires the investment of huge amounts of funds and also skilled implementers. Since these are not easy to come by, so the trend these days is to do rights based work which requires less funds. However, doing good rights based work requires even greater skills which are more difficult to find than funds. Especially for trying to ensure land rights for women in a highly patriarchal milieu! In the end I advised them to try and improve the implementation of the MGNREGS which is pretty poor in Jhabua at the moment with on an average only 30 days of work is being provided every year to each household. If women were to organise and press for more work under MGNREGS for soil and water conservation work on their farm lands successfully, then this would considerably increase their standing within the family and society vis-a-vis their men. Thereafter, the general issue of gender justice could be taken up on a wider scale.
Earlier I had attended another field learning exercise and analysis workshop in Orissa organised by the same NGO in collaboration with its funders and the United Nations. The purpose of that visit was to study the work being done for rural development and specifically women's rights by NGOs there and then analyse the learnings from the visit to come up with recommendations for implementing good rural development. Some of the top rural development practitioners and thinkers from across India had been invited as resource persons and many people from Orissa too participated. Consequently the recommendations that came out of that workshop are unexceptionable. Covering all the key areas of governance, livelihoods, environment, gender rights and tribal rights these recommendations constitute an ideal set of guidelines for rural development. However, the problem is not about identifying the correct strategies for rural development but about implementing them. Implementation always comes up against vested interests which do not want the poor to improve their condition. Eventually true rights based action requires hard grassroots activism and this will also ensure good rural development. But such activism invariably faces state repression and so the status quo remains.

The Question of Legitimacy

The question of the legitimacy of non-adivasi activists working among adivasis has cropped up once again. A few young adivasi intellectuals in Jharkhand have raised an objection to two non-adivasi activists getting the Gandhi Foundation Award for 2011 because the citation says that the award is being given to them on behalf of the adivasis of India. The adivasi activists claim that there are enough qualified activists from among themselves and so if the foundation wants to award the adivasis of India they should choose an adivasi to represent the adivasis and not a non-adivasi. Such was the controversy raked up over the initial letter that eventually one of the awardees decided not to accept the award and wrote to the Gandhi Foundation declining.
This non-adivasi activist in his initial response to the adivasi activists' letter had said that the adivasis were not a homogeneous group and that even among them there were some bad elements like for instance the members of the Salwa Judum vigilante outfit and so targeting a non-adivasi who has after all borne tremendous sacrifices for sticking up for the rights of the adivasis is not fair. In the second letter declining the award this non-adivasi activist says that he has always thought and felt like he was an adivasi and so just the fact of his being born a non-adivasi should not disqualify him from claiming to be an adivasi. He goes on to say that this kind of segregation on the basis of birth is akin to being an ethnic fundamentalism.
The basic issue, however, is not about whether non-adivasis can or cannot represent adivasis or whether birth should or should not determine whether one is an adivasi or not but about the fairness of an award being given to a non-adivasi on behalf of the adivasis of India. The vast majority of adivasis have suffered horrendous injustices from non-adivasis or, as in the case of the Salwa Judum vigilantes, adivasis sponsored by non-adivasis and continue to do so. They have formulated their own strategies for fighting these injustices and are capably implementing them. In fact they are doing much more for themselves than the non-adivasi activists who are fighting along with them. Then going just by the numbers, there are many more adivasis suffering state and capitalist repression than there are non-adivasis who are fighting for them and so any award to the adivasis of India should go to an adivasi who is by birth an adivasi and not to a non-adivasi who may think that he is in thought and deed an adivasi. Especially since there are a number of adivasi activists who are fighting capably for the adivasis and should be rewarded for their efforts much more than any non-adivasis.
There is also of course the whole debate about the politics of awards. Like charity and philanthropy the phenomenon of awards also is a kind of sop that seeks to paper over the deeper injustices of capitalist exploitation. If there is no exploitation and resultant poverty in the first place then where is the need for philanthropy and awarding people who work to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Ideally those working for a just social order should refuse awards from an unjust social order. However, given that such awards do give some strength to the fight against injustice, there may be some justification in accepting these awards but only if they are given to the actual sufferers of capitalist exploitation and repression and not to those from the upper or middle classes who go and help them, however laudable their work may be.

India Against Corruption in Trouble

The India Against Corruption movement is in a spot of bother. Allegations are surfacing that two of its leading members may have done financial dealings that do not appear to be above board. One other member has made a statement favouring a plebiscite in Kashmir that has not gone down well with Anna Hazare. Some others from its core team have quit on the ground that the IAC should not be campaigning against any one party as some of its members had done in the Hissar Lok Sabha by election. These developments bring to the fore the problems of the hodge podge kind of mobilisation that the IAC is.
There is first and foremost a lack of ideological clarity. Corruption is a part and parcel of capitalist liberal democracy so there is no question of being able to get rid of it without getting rid of capitalism itself. The so called core team of the IAC has a varied character with people from the right to the centre in it but none from the left of centre. Moreover its support base is a fluid one that came together at the time of the dharna at the Ramlila Ground but seems to have melted away thereafter. Any movement has to have continuous programmes of actions if it is to stay alive. However, there seems to be a lack of unanimity regarding the kind of action to be taken. The stand taken by some that the IAC will not itself participate in the elections but will campaign against the Congress for dilly dallying in enacting the Jan Lokpal Bill is not endorsed by others in the core team. To make matters worse the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad have publicly stated that their members participated actively in the Ramlila dharna and the associated mobilisations across the country.
The problems of the IAC can be further illustrated with what is happening in Alirajpur. At the peak of the IAC movement in August there were daily demonstrations in Alirajpur also. The leaders of these demonstrations were members of the Bharatiya Janata Party's youth wing Akhil Bharatiya Yuva Morcha.  These non-tribal youth are all the children of the wealthy traders and moneylenders who have been exploiting the tribals for ages together. Consequently even thought the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath morally supports the IAC it did not mobilise its own members to join these demonstrations. In fact the KMCS has been conducting a campaign for quite some time against these traders and moneylenders. There are strict anti-usury laws to regulate the practice of moneylending in tribal areas. As is to be expected these laws were not being implemented and the moneylenders were having a field day in extorting money from the tribals. The KMCS has taken action against these moneylenders by lodging complaints against them for violating the legal provisions. Consequently hundreds of tribals have regained their silver ornaments which they had kept as security with the moneylenders for taking loans. The moneylenders had extorted many times the principle amount over the years.
This campaign was so effective that the moneylenders and traders made a formal complaint to the Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh when he visited Alirajpur recently that the KMCS should be reined in and prevented from helping the adivasis in this matter. Thus, the important question surfaces as to what is going to be the mass base of the IAC. If the mass base is going to be the middle and upper classes who are steeped in corruption and are exploiting the lower classes then the IAC does not have much of a future. Also if its action programmes are built around campaigning against the Congress for not enacting its Jan Lokpal Bill rather than around basic problems faced by the poor then also it is going to face problems in the future if the media does not provide the same kind of coverage that it did at the Ramlila Grounds. 

Ensuring Nutrition Security and banishing Profits

A Bhil tribal before taking his food always dedicates a small piece to the Gods. This is an acknowledgement that the food is a gift from nature. This reverence for the forces of nature that make it possible to have food is a feature of all religions and cultures which were the products of a traditional agricultural lifestyle. Even though humans had developed agriculture for a long time they remained dependent on the vagaries of nature and so they paid their obeisance to it. The Bhil tribals have in fact named some of their main Gods after their food crops. Kansari the most prominent Goddess of the Bhils is symbolic of the staple cereal sorghum and is propitiated through elaborate night long rituals accompanied by the singing of epic paeans to her virtues as a life giver.

This reverence for nature also resulted in the Bhils developing their agriculture in tune with the natural endowments of their dry land environment. It was a highly bio-diverse agriculture. Each small plot had many crops of cereals, pulses and oilseeds with various levels of capacity to sustain water stress. So, regardless of whether there were too much or too little of rains some part of the crop would always come in. Simultaneously the forests too provided many fruits and vegetables. Even some of the weeds in the agricultural fields were eaten as food. Thus, there was a bio-diverse agriculture that made the best use of the local natural resource endowment and gave the tribals foods rich in necessary nutrients. These foods were cooked simply and provided a wholesome meal to the Bhils with which they could work hard in the fields and the forests. They remained healthy and active despite the hard work.

However, with the coming of the modern economy all this gradually began changing. Subsistence farming was replaced by commercial agriculture. Instead of producing for home consumption the Bhils were enticed into producing for the market. The bio-diverse agriculture was replaced with mono-cropping and instead of organic manure, chemical fertilisers were introduced. However, this latter regime was not suitable to the soil and water situation of the mostly undulating lands of the Bhils and so despite the greater investments in chemical inputs, irrigation and hybrid seeds the yields have been less and less over time. The money earned from crops such as cotton and soyabean is not enough to buy adequate food from the market. Due to the cultivation of soyabean the production of pulses has gone down drastically. So the Bhils are eating food that is inferior in quality and quantity. This is in fact a trend in agriculture throughout the world regardless of the natural endowments of the land but it is more pronounced in the poorer soil and water resource environments in which the Bhils live.
The Bhils today have no answer to their food woes like other marginal farmers around the world. The multinational corporations controlling commercial agricultural from inputs to the food reaching the dining table, too, do not have any answers to this problem busy as they are in ensuring more and more profits rather than food security. Matters have been compounded by Financial companies speculating on the global agricultural commodity futures markets to bolster their profits which have been threatened by the downturn in the other financial security markets. 
There has to be a radical re-orientation of agriculture and our food habits and this will only be possible if we also think of re-orienting the industry and the economy. Unless there is a move away from profit making in general there is very little chance of establishing bio-diverse organic agriculture and ensuring local food and nutrition security.