Primitive Accumulation Proceeding Apace

 The Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch reports -

This year Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, a people’s organization active in South Western (Nimad) region of Madhya Pradesh has received several complaints from Bhil Adivasi workers of Barwani and Khargone districts who have gone to harvest sugarcane in Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers were recruited by contractors of Beed district in Maharashtra, whose modus operandi is as follows: A sum of Rs 30,000 – 40,000 is advanced to an Adivasi family in the lean summer months and in return for this loan, the couple is required to work in harvesting and loading sugarcane from October for an unspecified period. Children also accompany their parents. With the worsening economic situation due to inflation, agricultural crisis and near collapse of the MNREGS, more and more Adivasi families are falling into this debt trap. Such cases have also been reported by other grass roots people’s organizations based in the area – Veer Khaja Nayak Manav Vikas Pratishthan in Sendhwa in Madhya Pradesh and Vichardhara Sansthan in Nandurbar, Maharashtra. All the three organizations are part of the Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch, a network of trade unions and grass roots organizations that seeks to ensure labour and human rights for migrant Adivasi workers of Central India. The Adivasis now constitute the main agricultural work force in the black cotton soil region of peninsular India. 

The workers have now spent more than three months harvesting and loading sugarcane in conditions of practically slave labour. They do harvesting work for more than 10 hours from dawn to dusk and then they loadthe cane onto the transport vehicles till late at night, often working till 1 to 2 am at night, and are sometimes not even allowed enough time to eat their food properly. They thus work for 16-20 hours a day! They stay in tents of plastic sheets in the open fields. They have not been paid any wages and have been only given very inadequate sums of money or some grain for food and all workers are complaining of hunger. When the workers are asking for accounts of how much they are to be paid after the reconciliation of the loan advance they had taken, they are simply told that the advance amount has not been adjusted yet and they will have to work for many more months. When workers insist on “hisaab” (wage calculations) and say they want to go back, they are threatened and abused, and are told they can only return if they pay a few lakhs of Rupees to the contractor. On 16^th January, 2022, upon asking for “hisaab”, three members of a group in Belagavi in Karnataka had been held as “hostages” and locked up in the Nirani Sugar factory in Mudhol Bagalkot district for 6 days and were only released after the informal intervention of the Barwani district administration.

Pregnant women, women who have delivered a baby only a few days ago, those with injuries and children are also being made to work. Last month a group from district Khargone that escaped from Belagavi came back and reported that 3 women and 3 minor girls were repeatedly sexually assaulted by the contractors in the sugarcane fields. It was with great difficulty that an FIR was finally registered by Khargone police, but no action has been taken yet.

The situation of these workers is that of bonded labour according to the provisions of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 and there is also blatant violation of the provisions of the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act (which requires licensing of contractors, registration of workers in both states, payment of minimum wages, provision of basic amenities and a passbook recording work and wages). This is also a case of trafficking as defined by section 370 and 374 of the Indian Penal Code, an atrocity under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, violation of the Contract Labour Act, Prohibition of Child Labour Act, Minimum Wages Act, Payment of Wages Act and many other labour laws. However, the authorities in both the source districts as well as the destination area are reluctant to take action.

While the Sangathan and other civil society activists in Karnataka have been demanding legal action, this is not being done, even in cases such as when the Barwani administration rescued workers from Vijayapura. In none of these cases has the proper procedure prescribed by the National Human Rights Commission for release of bonded laborers been followed. The released workers have to be provided a Release Certificate that entitles them to rehabilitation from the Government. The administration needs to provide an immediate relief amount and arrange for their return journey. In the latest case, the Belagavi district administration dumped a group of Adivasi families comprising 57 persons on the train to Solapur with the same contractor who was forcing them to work in bondage!! The workers had no money to even buy their food. They had to be rescued by civil society organisations and sent back to their homes from Solapur. The three organizations have currently received many complaints from groups of workers in Pune, Baramati, Kolhapur and Satara in Maharashtra and Bagalkot, Belagavi, and Kalburgi in Karnataka seeking release and return. Three of these groups for which data is available, comprise of 200 persons including women and children.

Sugar industry in peninsular India is organized very differently from North India. Majority of the sugar factories are owned by sugarcane farmers cooperatives. The leaders of sugar cooperatives control the politics of a state like Maharashtra and wield considerable influence in other states like Gujarat and Karnataka where the same pattern is prevalent. One major way in which sugar industry is organized differently is in the method of harvesting sugarcane. In North India, the farmers harvest the sugarcane in their fields and bring it to the factory gate. In cooperative factories of peninsular India, the factory takes responsibility of getting the sugarcane cut and transported to the factory. This requires humanpower on a large scale. Sugarcane harvesting is highly labour intensive. The sugarcane cooperatives have set up elaborate mechanisms to recruit cheap labour for harvesting work from remote areas. Workers are given advances that tie them up to work for the whole harvesting season at very low piece rates. The workers live in temporary hutments, often made of polythene and move from field to field harvesting sugarcane. The unit of work is a couple so children also migrate with their families. Camps of harvesting workers give the appearance of temporary villages from pre historic times. There are no facilities like electricity, drinking water and sanitation.

Bondage like work conditions for sugarcane harvesting work have made the news repeatedly over the last decade. Couple of years back, Beed district, the major source of sugarcane harvesting workers in Maharashtra was in the news with female workers being enticed to undergo the hysterectomy operation. The operation ensured that they continued to work uninterrupted in sugarcane harvesting, without pregnancy leading to work breaks (https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/07/31/a-slaughterhouse-for-wombs-district-beed-maharashtra). Centre for Labor Research and Action (CLRA), a labor rights NGO working in the state of Gujarat for more than a decade, wrote about bondage conditions prevalent amongst sugarcane harvesting workers of South Gujarat, where the workers are recruited against advances at usurious interest rates. One and a half times advance has to be paid back at the end of the season that works out to an almost five percent monthly interest rate (https://www.newsclick.in/sugarcane-harvesters-south-gujarat-are-trapped-bondage-one-generation-after-another).

The roots of the bondage lie in extremely low piece rates. To establish the energy consumed and time taken in harvesting one ton of sugarcane, CLRA sponsored a Time Motion study by Industrial Design Centre (IDC) of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The study report was submitted in the year 2019 (http://clra.in/files/documents/9f1d468e-b3e3-4a4b-8c88-ecaf295c2a2c.pdf). After intensive field studies, the study estimated the time taken to cut, bundle, and transport to the truck, one ton of sugarcane as 13.7 hours. Per day production for an eight-hour day for one person works out to be 0.58 ton. The minimum wage for sugarcane harvesting work was Rs. 238 per ton. Thus, per day wage for sugarcane harvesting workers turns out to be Rs. 138. This is 40 percent of the statutory minimum wage rate for agriculture workers in Gujarat that is Rs. 340. Similar situation prevails in states like Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers’ union Majur Adhikar Manch has now filed a petition in the High Court of Gujarat demanding that the minimum piece rate wages be hiked to Rs. 586 per ton.

In the case of the Adivasi workers now stranded in Maharashtra and Karnataka, even the piece rate is not being invoked, they are simply informed that their debt has not been repaid yet! While debt bondage has been passed down since generations amongst the dalit and Adivasi workers of Central India engaged in sugarcane harvesting work, it is the first time that a large number of workers have raised their voice against this stark exploitation. Adivasis from several villages have started campaigning against this bondage in support of the victims. They are demanding strict legal action.  It is now the bounden duty of the state and civil society to ensure that one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class gets its due.

Nitin Varghese (7869090287), Jayshree (8889289196), Tatyaji Pawar (9421470711), Sudhir Katiyar (94141296542)

 

 

 

Cry My Beloved Anjanbara

Two decades ago the village of Anjanbara on the banks of the Narmada River in Alirajpur District in Madhya Pradesh hit the international news headlines because of a fierce clash between its Adivasi residents and the police. A team of the Government of Madhya Pradesh accompanied by a substantial police contingent had gone to the village to forcibly survey it as part of the legal procedures for determining compensation to be paid to the residents who were to be displaced as a result of submergence that was to occur due to the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam downstream in Gujarat. The Narmada Bachao Andolan had petitioned the World Bank to withdraw its funding to the construction of the dam and an enquiry commission set up by the World Bank had advised it to withdraw from the project given its huge social, economic and ecological drawbacks. Following this the World Bank had given the Government of India a six month period in which to address all the shortcomings pointed out by the enquiry commission. The major point at issue was the lack of rehabilitation for the people to be ousted by the construction of the dam and so the Government of Madhya Pradesh in its high handed way had sought to force the people to agree to monetary compensation for their land in violation of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award which had stipulated that every land holder and his adult son were to get at least 2 hectares of irrigated land each. 

The clash between the police and the people of Anjanbara soon escalated into one between the state and the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) and as a result a number of members and activists of the KMCS and also some supporters who had come from outside to help were arrested and incarcerated in jail apart from being beaten up in custody and paraded handcuffed in the streets of Alirajpur. Eventually, the KMCS filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India of human rights violations by the state and this was upheld by the judges who not only castigated the state and its minions for their rampant violations of human rights but also initiated action against them. Thus, Anjanbara and the KMCS became internationally famous for sometime as international human rights groups too became vocal against the Indian Government and as a result the World Bank withdrew from the Sardar Sarovar Dam project.

The people of Anjanbara, the name means "valley of Anjan (Hardwickia Binata) trees" had been active against the dam since 1986 and continued to fight for its cancellation right up to 2014 or so when finally seeing that the dam and submergence was to become a reality, they decided to opt for resettlement in Gujarat. However, not only were not all people given land in Gujarat but also the land itself was not good. Most of the land could not be farmed in the monsoons as it remained water logged. Some of the land was occupied by others who did not want to give up cultivation in favour of the new allottees. So a substantial number of people of Anjanbara are still there in the village cultivating the forest land atop the hills. This land is of poor quality as compared to the land that has been submerged and so the people are in difficulties. Moreover, the village atop the hill does not have road connectivity and lacks electricity and so life is so much harder.

The biggest problem is the lack of potable water. The people have dug a few wells but these are underlaid with hard rock and so the water dries up in summer. Even now in winter the water availability is very low as shown in the picture below where a woman has to painstakingly fill water from a shallow spring. In summer the people have no recourse but to descend all the way to the river Narmada below to fetch water which is a very tiring exercise.

 The people are trying to make the most of a bad situation by undertaking soil and forest conservation work to improve artificial and natural recharge as shown in the pictures below.

This is the picture of stone bund in one of the farms with custard apple trees planted below it to hold the soil in place and also reduce runoff.

This is a dense mixed forest with considerable amount of bamboo which increases the natural recharge and also provides fodder for the livestock.

However, overall the situation is very bad and life is extremely hard for these people. There is no school in the village and the nearest hospital is all of 50 kms away. It is indeed tragic that after having fought so hard against the dam they should now have to go through so much difficulty to live on top of these hills without the basic amenities of a modern civilisation.

The Old Man and The Farm

Ernest Hemingway is one of my favourite authors whom I began reading in my early teens in school and by the time I reached the end of college I had read almost everything he had written both fiction and non-fiction. The first book of his that I read was, "The Old Man and The Sea", about an ageing Cuban sea fisherman, Santiago, who after a long spell of going without a catch finally kills a huge Marlin fish after much struggle. However, since he has gone deep into the ocean to catch the fish, he is unable to bring it back as sharks attack the fish strapped to the side of the boat and so even after many of them being killed by Santiago, eventually he returns with only the skeleton of the huge marlin that he has killed as the sharks polish off the meat. The novel immediately became both a popular and critical success and remains an inspiring story of the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of severe odds.

Inspired as I was by Santiago at that young age when I first read his story, I never imagined that one day I would be in a similar situation when I too became an old man!! This year I have officially become an old man having become sixty years old which is the age at which one becomes a senior citizen in India. While normally people retire from their jobs at this age to lead a peaceful life, in my case the exact opposite has happened as not only have I not retired from what I have been doing all these years as an activist but I have been forced to take up another profession of which I know next to nothing full time - FARMING. Primarily because the couple who were looking after our farm for the past three years decided to move on and so I had to step in to help my wife Subhadra with the farm work.

Farming is back breaking work, especially organic farming with a biodiverse crop as we practice on our farm where we grow close to thirty varieties of cereals, pulses, oilseeds and vegetables during the rainy season. Matters have been compounded by the fact that we are the only ones growing sorghum and millets of various kinds in our village. So all the birds converge on our farm and it is a big task shooing them away. When I had posted about this on Facebook a few weeks ago many people had suggested using mechanical and audio devices in automated scarecrows to drive the birds away. However, they will not succeed. Such is the hunger of the birds and their number, that they do not fly away till one gets absolutely close to them like in the picture below in which I have reached within three feet shouting at the top of my voice and yet it is calmly sipping the juice from the stem of the sorghum plant.

These birds are actually beneficial to farming as throughout the year they eat various kinds of worms. So when the harvest comes they are entitled to their share of it. If all farmers are doing biodiverse agriculture and growing sorghum and millets then the birds will get distributed over the whole village and so it won't be so much of a loss for one farmer. Thus, the solution to this problem is not some mechanical or electronic technological solution but the adoption of ecologically sustainable bio-diverse agriculture which will also ensure that we eat good healthy food instead of the chemically poisoned stuff that is now coming to our plates.

Anyway, I soldiered on running around and shouting at the birds and firing stones at them from a slingshot. Since it was not possible to shoo the birds away from the whole farm singlehandedly I finally fell back on covering the cobs of the sorghum with plastic bags but this required constant supervision. The maturing grains in the cob evapo-transpirate and so the plastic bags have to be opened up from time to time to let the condensed water dry out as otherwise the grains would rot. 

When I had got this system going satisfactorily and the birds were held at bay, another problem cropped up. This year it has been raining heavily in September when normally the monsoon withdraws in the first week. The heavy rains resulted in the grain on the cobs rotting despite all that I could do and eventually we could only get the millets in with some difficulty and the early variety of sorghum rotted completely making me understand very well the frame of mind that Santiago must have been in after losing his huge marlin kill. Towards the end I felt like the poor farmer Halku in Premchand's famous story "Poos Ki Raat", who eventually can't stand the bone chilling winter cold anymore and goes to sleep instead of chasing away the boar that come to gorge on his ripening harvest. In fact other farmers in our area are even more morose than we are. Due to our biodiverse agriculture we will succeed in getting more than half our crop in eventually but the other farmers who are cultivating monocultures of hybrid maize and soyabean have been laid completely low with virus attacks and rotting cobs and pods due to excessive rains.

This is the dark reality of chemical monoculture farming these days. It has destroyed farmers practising it and it is also affecting the viability of the few farmers who are trying to do sustainable agriculture. Unfortunately, there is not enough of a demand from farmer's organisations that the Government provide a substantial subsidy for switching from the destructive chemical to sustainable agriculture. Instead the demand is for providing greater subsidies, insurance support and support prices to shore up the ecologically and economically unsustainable chemical agriculture. There is understandable anger on the part of farmers against the abolition of the Mandis and the opening up of the agricultural markets to corporations because they fear that this will eventually lead to the end of the current regime of support prices and government procurement. The mandi system even at present is dominated by big corporations through their agents and prices of raw agricultural produce is determined in commodity exchanges through algorithmic trading and relayed to the mandis in real time through their agents. Except for the main procurement crops of rice and wheat there is little effective support for other crops where open market prices rule. It does not matter which way the price moves and how much as any movement leads to profits with the huge speculative investments that are made by the corporations in the online commodity exchanges. The new law just makes this control of the agricultural commodity markets by corporations open and reduces their costs. The same applies to the easing of the conditions of contract farming and the removal of many crops from the essential commodities list. These amendments just make legal what has been going on under hand for quite some time now. Thus, what these new laws have done is just legalise the surreptitious control of corporations on the agricultural sector further facilitating the operation of a totally irrational global food system tuned to the churning out of profits for the corporations involved in seed, fertiliser and pesticide production, agricultural commodity trading, food processing and retail sale while the interests of the farmers and consumers are totally sidelined. 

Like in the case of Santiago and Halku who are unable to fight the larger forces that obstruct them, the structural obstacles that stifle the farmers are too strong for them to be able to do much. I too looking back on three and a half decades of activism find myself in the same situation as I have not been able to achieve much in my fight for bringing about sustainable and equitable development and am now an old man pursuing farming as fruitlessly as Santiago did his sea fishing!!

Whither Independence for Adivasis

There are provisions in the Indian Constitution, in its Fifth and Sixth Schedules, for Tribal Self Rule in accordance with their own indigenous genius. These have mostly been honoured in the breach by the Indian Central and State Governments, which have intensified the colonisation of Adivasi areas after independence in pursuit of resources for modern industrial development, starting from where the British left off. Consequently for most tribes people, apart from the few who have been elected as lawmakers and employed as Government servants, independence has never really meant freedom from tyranny and oppression and instead they have had to face direct and indirect displacement and the resultant misery.

I have had the privilege of being part of some mass movements of the Bhil Adivasis to implement the Fifth Schedule in their areas of residence and actualise Tribal Self Rule and achieve true independence.  One such was the effort by the Adivasi Morcha Sangathan in Dewas district in the late 1990s which tried to actualise the provisions of the Fifth Schedule by empowering the Adivasi Gram Sabhas to prevent sale of liquor, control the management of forests and prevent logging of trees both legal and illegal, prevent the police from falsely implicating Adivasis in criminal cases and reverse the alienation of Adivasi land usurped by Non-Adivasis.

Predictably, as the power of this mass movement increased the State Government of the time, a Congress one incidentally, came down hard and crushed this movement with police atrocities killing four of the Sangathan members and jailing many more in 2001 in a repeat of many other such repressive actions on Adivasis after independence. Many false cases of a serious nature like attempt to murder and waging war against the state were foisted on the leaders of the movement. Even though eventually, due to their fabricated nature, the Adivasis were acquitted by the trial courts in all of these cases, the Government in its perversity decided to appeal against this acquittal in one case which had charges of attempt to murder and waging war against the state. This appeal was admitted by the High Court in Indore in 2008 despite its flimsy nature because cases of appeal filed by the Government routinely get admitted without much application of thought.

The case is yet to come up for final hearing after ten years. This is because the High Courts throughout this country are hugely overburdened by cases mostly filed by the Government in a perverse manner and so there is very little time to hear the huge pending list of cases. In the present case, the Adivasi movement leaders were first falsely implicated with serious offences and then despite being acquitted in the lower court due to lack of evidence were further oppressed through appeal. Some of these leaders were in their fifties in 2001 and are now past the age of eighty. One has already expired. Another one Jagsingh is bedridden with rheumatic arthritis that has completely taken away the strength from his legs. Yet Jagsingh has to attend the court from time to time in a wheelchair as shown below.

Yesterday was one such hearing where an application had been given on behalf of Jagsingh for exemption from court appearance. The motion hearings for cases of serious criminal offences along with civil cases of higher value are heard together by a Division Bench of the High Court consisting of two judges. Due to the huge vacancies of Judges posts in the High Court, the Division Bench sits for just the morning session for two and a half hours after which the judges sit as single benches in the afternoon. There were 131 cases listed to be heard by the Division bench in a space of two and a half hours. The case of Jagsingh was listed at number 91. Consequently by the time the lunch interval approached at 1.30 pm his case was still some ten cases away. So his lawyer got up and made a special plea for his case to be heard before the court rose as it would be difficult for him to come again and again given his serious medical condition. The Judges graciously agreed but by that time they had become very tired disposing of so many cases in each of which they not only have to apply their mind but also dictate orders all in double quick time. Therefore, the judges heard the arguments and just said heard without giving any orders and so the case of exemption from attendance for Jagsingh remains pending. However, because he had a senior lawyer appearing for him at least the case was notionally heard and he won't have to attend the court again as later an order in his favour can be coaxed out when the Judges have more time in the next hearing.

This is the kind of injustice that Adivasis are facing today. Throughout the country Adivasis are being displaced or oppressed in the interests of furthering modern industrial development and if they protest then they are being killed and jailed after being implicated in false cases. Even if they somehow manage to get acquitted in the trial courts, the State perversely appeals against the acquittals in the higher courts where, due to the huge pendency of cases, final hearings do not take place and even motion hearings do not come up for proper hearing. Jagsingh happens to be one of the few who has a Sangathan to back him and so he is not having to pay the exorbitant fees of engaging senior lawyers and the cost of travel to the court but today there are thousands of other Adivasis in jails across this country unable to secure their freedom because of their poverty. What kind of independence day are we celebrating is the question.

Celebrating Resistance

The biggest take away for me from the three decades of struggle at the grassroots is the privilege of having been close to some of the most extraordinary people in India. If one meets them casually somewhere one will not guess that these people are extraordinary but all of them have a fire burning inside and have contributed to the rich tradition of anti-establishment activism in this country. I was reminded of this the other day when I came across this iconic photograph that came on my timeline on Facebook.

This is a picture of a meeting of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) in 2001 in Kasrawad village near Badwani to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the struggle featuring some of the people from Alirajpur. The people from Alirajpur are sitting together in a discussion.
The person sitting on the left is Vania of Jhandana village. When we in the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) in Alirajpur began initiating the campaign for proper rehabilitation of the oustees of the Sardar Sarovar dam in 1986, Vania was sceptical and even said that nothing would come of it. However, a few months later there was a problem in his village in which the Police was threatening a villager with a criminal case because his dog had bitten and killed the dog of a neighbour!!! Vania approached the KMCS and we intervened to solve the matter amicably in the traditional Adivasi panchayat and warded off the police. With that began a long association for Vania with the KMCS and the NBA. Among those in the picture above, Vania along with Amit Bhatnagar sitting with his son, Sarang, on his lap and Bawa next to him in the white turban were once arrested and severely beaten up by the police after a protest action against the forcible survey of the houses in Anjanbara village. The great thing about Vania is that not only did he fight the state for his rights but also fought with the NBA later when he felt it was not helping his cause!! When it became clear after 2000 that the dam would not be stopped and so rehabilitation would be necessary, he broke with the NBA and opted for rehabilitation in Gujarat even though this led to him being labelled along with another Adivasi stalwart of the NBA in Alirajpur, Dhankia, as an agent of the state.
The man sitting just behind him in a turban is Luharia of Jalsindhi village. He is another doughty fighter against the state who sacrificed his home in the rising rivers of the water rather than uproot it and rebuild it higher up in the hills. He is a poor man with very little land yet he stuck to his stand of not going to Gujarat for rehabilitation.
The smiling person in the Kurta with long hair is another rebel Jacob Nellithanam.  Jacob ditched his studies for a graduation in science and instead joined Baba Amte initially and later branched out on his own to fight for establishing sustainable agriculture based on indigenous seeds and farming methods. He has spent a lifetime in doing sustainable farming and campaigning against the devastation wrought by modern chemical and bio-engineered agriculture. He has been a close associate of the KMCS and has helped us to initiate sustainable agriculture and conservation of indigenous seeds programmes.
At the right end of the picture is Jayashree Bhalerao, whose husband is Amit, a person who came to the Narmada valley inspired by a lecture by Medha Patkar in Pune and decided to stay on and fight for the rights of the Adivasis. When Amit and Jayashree had children, Revli and Sarang, they had to decide about their education. They did not want to send the children off to some distant school as there was no good school in Alirajpur. So they decided to set up a school to teach both their own children and the children of Adivasis. This is how the residential school Aadharshila Learning Centre came into existence in Sakar village in Badwani district. In the two decades of its existence, Aadharshila, has provided an alternative pedagogy providing quality education to children which questions the dominant development paradigm which has devastated Adivasi livelihoods.
Bawa is another uncompromising fighter against the Sardar Sarovar dam who has remained steadfast in his opposition to it. He is famous for having written a letter to the then Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Digvijay Singh, detailing the reasons for Adivasis preferring the hard life in the remote hills to one with modern amenities. According to him - "We have lived in the forest for generations. The forest is our moneylender and banker. In hard times we go to the forest. We build our houses from its wood. From its rushes and splints we weave screens. From the forests we make baskets and cots, ploughs and hoes, and many other useful things... We get various kinds of grasses; and when the grasses become dry in summer, we still get leaves... If there is a famine we survive by eating roots and tubers. When we fall sick, our medicine men bring us back to health by giving us leaves, roots, bark from the forest. We collect and sell gum, tendu leaves, bahera, chironji and mahua. The forest is like our mother; we have grown up in its lap. We know how to live by suckling at her breast. We know the name of each and every tree, shrub and herb; we know their uses. If we were made to live in a land without forests, then all this knowledge that we have cherished for generations will be useless and slowly we will forget it all". Right till the end he has fought the dam and finally he has been awarded a compensation of Rupees Sixty Lakhs by the Supreme Court for his perseverance and now he lives up in the hills above his old submerged lands.
Finally, there is Parthiv Shah who has clicked this photo and so he is not in it!! Parthiv is an alumnus of the National Institute of Design and a world renowned photographer and designer. He could have easily chosen a career in the corporate world but instead he has devoted himself to portraying the marginalised. He has done photo stories of mill workers, peasants, Dalits and Adivasis and their struggles like this one.
Thus, regardless of the fact that the dominant narrative of our times is that of late capitalist greed that is devastating nature and livelihoods across the world, there are a few people who discard the lures that a consumerist capitalist world have to offer and stick to their convictions and fight to bring about a more sustainable and equitable society in their own ways.  

Injustice Against a People's Judge

The sordid story of injustice perpetrated against a Dalit Judge who stood up for the rights of the oppressed as reported by Dr Goldy George

Who is Prabhakar Gwal?

Prabhakar Gwal has been born in a Ganda community in a small village namely Nanakpali, near Saraipali of Mahasamund district. A community and region which has a history of bonded labour He has come up through all the pains his parents faced and bore the burden of the social system of caste in every day life from his childhood. After completing his early studies, he joined for law and become a lawyer. He practiced for 10 years after which he joined the judicial service in 2006. Life as an untouchable has given him the orientation on socio-cultural and political patterns of Indian society, which reflected in his tenure as a judge.

Gwal had reputation of an upright judge who had become an eyesore for the powerful politicians and bureaucrats, as he took cognisance of corruption related complaints and took strong action. He has questioned the manner in which the police have been indiscriminately arresting tribals in the conflict zones of Chhattisgarh.

What was his crime for the termination?

Gwal came into limelight after his remarkable judgement in which he sentenced five persons to six years imprisonment each in a case relating to leakage of question papers of PMT, being conducted by Chhattisgarh Professional Examination Board or Vyapam, in 2011. He passed the order as Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Bilaspur.

In August 2015 he passed orders for to file an FIR and subsequent investigation into the role of the then SP and current IG of Raipur, Deepanshu Kabra and another police officer for their role in attempting to suppress evidence in the case. After this, an attempt was made to intimidate him by a local BJP MLA who had been a subordinate of the SP.

He has had a history of exposing corrupt officials and politicians. While Gwal was posted in Bilaspur, he had ordered an inquiry against government officials and Police officers, for the infamous ‘Bhadaura Land-Scam’. The land scam is known for involvement of a senior minister of BJP (Amar Agrawal). Similarly, he had ordered for inquiry of Bilaspur RTO officials. He was then transferred to Raipur, where he rejected to accept Closure Report in the case of IPS Rahul Sharma’s suicide.

Gwal had filed a complaint of intimidation against the BJP MLA and DeepanshuKabra in his personal capacity at the local police station. After this all hell broke loose and instead of action against the BJP MLA and Kabra, the High Court issued a show cause notice to Gwalwhich claimed that he has violated rules under C.G. Civil Service Conduct Rule, 1965, under which they claimed that he was required to seek permission of the High Court before filing such an FIR against the BJP MLA and the police officer. An adverse order was passed against him without any inquiry and his one-year annual increment was cancelled as penalty.

  

As a punishment, Gwal was transferred to Sukma district as CJM, in Bastar division. In September 2015, he took charges where he was subjected to unfair treatment by police and administration right from the beginning. The police and local administration did not provide him the usual security allocated for judges in conflict areas. In his tenure as a judge in Sukma, he realised early on how the police were carrying out large scale arrests and surrenders of what seemed to be innocent Adivasis. Not only did he conduct fair and speedy trials, he also brought to the notice of the higher judiciary the conduct of the police in Bastar region.

In keeping with his fearless attitude and his adherence to the facts and the law, Gwal also passed orders indicting a school in Sukma district for taking inordinately high fees. After he took cognizance in this case he received a call (of which he has an audio recording) from the District Collector who said that he should consult him before passing such judgments. After receiving this call, Gwal wrote to the District Judge and Chief Justice of Chhattisgarh, notifying them about the phone call from Collector where he explained that there was an attempt to interfere in judicial process and to influence the court. No action was taken upon his complaint. Instead he received multiple show cause notices as a response to his complaints against some of the sitting judges in the lower judiciary.

This was because this upright and dutiful judicial officer would insist on asking the name, age, village, father’s name and all relevant details of those arrested; mostly poor and innocent Adivasis who were produced before him. Rather than accepting the regular practice till then of permanent warrants produced by the police which contained no other details other than the name of the arrestee, Gwal chose to stick to procedure. He would also make it difficult for the police by cross examining about the alleged seizures including weapons and their activities. When it became obvious that the police could not establish any crime against those arrested, he would conclude that those arrested are ordinary villagers. Gwal went to the extent of communicating directly to those arrested through a Gondi interpreter, the language the arrestee understood.

This judge was so fearless that he would term the arrests of thousands of people being produced before him as Maoists as fake arrests; he wrote to the District Judge and even Director General of Police Kalluri that the police is implicating innocent people. He went to the extent of issuing warnings to Thanedars that he would send them to jail if they framed innocent people.

In short, the BJP-led government in Chattisgarh prepared an all-out war pro-people officials and Prabhakar Gwal turned out to be a victim of the nefarious design. The people of Bastar viewed a ray of hope in Judge Prabhakar Gwal, in otherwise bleak scenario of displacement and large scale repression. In a conflict zone like the Bastar, where due systems and guarantees, and law and order have been completely torn off, it needs a great amount of courage to challenge the vested interests and powerful sections to remain independent in a polarised atmosphere. The casual removal of a district judge, in contravention of procedure appears to reveal the interference of the government and the police in the judiciary to the worst.

The Termination Process

On the April 4, 2016 Judge Prabhakar Gwal received an automated message on his phone. He was in fact removed by an order of the High Court on April 1, 2016. The message said he had been dismissed from his post as Chief Judicial Magistrate, Sukma, Chhattisgarh in ‘public interest.’ The official letter, that he later received, stated that the State Government on the recommendation of the full bench of the High Court of Chhattisgarh had dismissed him under Article 311 (2) of the Indian Constitution. The order stated no reasons or charges for his dismissal apart from that his removal was in public interest. Prior to his dismissal, Gwal had faced a series of irregular transfers; show cause notices, though what lead to this dismissal is still unclear.

The Present Crisis

Prabhakar Gwal’s plight did not end up with his termination. His woes continued to haunt him on a consistent basis. Life is too difficult for him and he is a person of integrity and self respect that he would not express it to anyone in the world. Many of his dues have either not been provided or got entangled in procedural circus. Financial crisis is haunting him day in and day out as the day-to-day expense is turning out to be a serious affair. His two children studying in schools are at the verge of being thrown off the school. He appeal in the High Court has been dismissed. This is the context under which this appeal comes.

I appeal to you to express your support and solidarity in terms of –

a)      Legal support to pursue his case in higher forums and courts

b)     Financial support for children’s education and his personal support

Kindly contact him directly on the number and have further discussion about his case +919479270390; +919826116714 prabhakar.gwalcg@gmail.com  

I am also hereby providing the bank details of Mr. Prabhakar Gwal in case you want to come up with some sort of financial support. No more 

PRABHAKAR GWAL

State Bank of India

30034101019

SBIN0002894

For further details please follow the links listed below

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/targeted-for-being-fair-says-sukma-judge/article8500992.ece

http://www.theindianherald.com/2016/04/judge-prabhakar-gwal-who-was-known-for.html

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/chhattisgarh-government-dismisses-cjm-who-accused-bjp-mla-of-threatening-him/

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/raipur/Chhattisgarh-govt-dismisses-civil-judge/articleshow/51687486.cms  

http://sanhati.com/articles/16902/

http://www.kractivist.org/chhattisgarh-cjm-sukma-district-prabhakar-gwal-dismissed-by-the-govt/

http://hindi.catchnews.com/state-news-in-hindi/raipur-high-court-serves-notice-to-terminated-judge-prabhakar-gwal-59443.html

Cleaning The World to Make it Better

The first two things that I had to do on reaching Alirajpur in 1985 to work among the Bhil Adivasis was to learn their language and also improve my Hindi. Learning of the Bhili language had to be done by speaking it with the Bhils since it was an oral language without any written literature. Hindi, however, had a rich literature so just speaking it with others would not do and I had to read to be able to not only speak in it but also write it as given the inability to read and write of most Bhils at that time, we activists had to shoulder the responsibility of written communication on their behalf. Since as a Bengali, my Hindi was limited to what I had read of it as my third language in school upto class eight, I had a lot of catching up to do!!
I am a voracious reader so reading by itself was not a problem but at that point of time I was a diehard Marxist, even if an unorthodox one and also paradoxically a Vedantist and so deeply into Upanishadic spiritualism!! So literature that appealed to me at that point of time was that which had a proletarian political tinge or a spiritual flavour and steered clear of romance. I read many of the proletarian classics in Hindi by Premchand, Renu, Rahi Masoom Raza, Balraj Sahni, Yashpal and the like. But that was all prose and as we all know one's literary education in a language is not complete without reading and appreciating poetry. Hindi poetry, however, is dominated by romance and so initially I did not find anyone who could pique my interest, even such modern greats like Harivansh Bacchan and Mahadevi Verma. Then slowly I got to know the proletarian poets, Nagarjun, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Adam Gondvi and Dushyant Kumar. However, the poet who really inspired me with his explosive mix of content, style and form was Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh. I have no hesitation in saying that I would not have been what I am today without having read him. This happens to be Muktibodh's centenary year and I feel the least I can do is to celebrate the lyrical power of this great poet.

I started the celebration of Muktibodh's centenary by first planning a consultancy that came my way by putting in it a trip to Sheopur which is his birth place. This is a small town in the northern part of Madhya Pradesh that was once a small princely state owing allegiance to the Scindias in Gwalior. Consequently, there was a small community of Maharashtrians there into one family of which Muktibodh was born in 1917. There is an active group there that researches Muktibodh's poetry and keeps his memory alive. After that I went back to a renewed reading of his poems which I have not done much of after the initial reading more than three decades ago. How things change over time. The context has changed considerably over the past three decades and I found that those of his poems which impress me now are not those that had inspired me earlier. Without much ado let me quote one such poem that now ranks for me as one of his best -

मैं तुम लोगों से दूर हूँ

मैं तुम लोगों से इतना दूर हूँ
तुम्हारी प्रेरणाओं से मेरी प्रेरणा इतनी भिन्न है
कि जो तुम्हारे लिए विष है, मेरे लिए अन्न है।

मेरी असंग स्थिति में चलता-फिरता साथ है,
अकेले में साहचर्य का हाथ है,
उनका जो तुम्हारे द्वारा गर्हित हैं
किन्तु वे मेरी व्याकुल आत्मा में बिम्बित हैं, पुरस्कृत हैं
इसीलिए, तुम्हारा मुझ पर सतत आघात है !!
सबके सामने और अकेले में।
( मेरे रक्त-भरे महाकाव्यों के पन्ने उड़ते हैं
तुम्हारे-हमारे इस सारे झमेले में )

असफलता का धूल-कचरा ओढ़े हूँ
इसलिए कि वह चक्करदार ज़ीनों पर मिलती है
छल-छद्म धन की
किन्तु मैं सीधी-सादी पटरी-पटरी दौड़ा हूँ
जीवन की।
फिर भी मैं अपनी सार्थकता से खिन्न हूँ
विष से अप्रसन्न हूँ
इसलिए कि जो है उससे बेहतर चाहिए
पूरी दुनिया साफ़ करन के लिए मेहतर चाहिए
वह मेहतर मैं हो नहीं पाता
पर , रोज़ कोई भीतर चिल्लाता है
कि कोई काम बुरा नहीं
बशर्ते कि आदमी खरा हो
फिर भी मैं उस ओर अपने को ढो नहीं पाता।
रिफ्रिजरेटरों, विटैमिनों, रेडियोग्रेमों के बाहर की
गतियों की दुनिया में
मेरी वह भूखी बच्ची मुनिया है शून्यों में
पेटों की आँतों में न्यूनों की पीड़ा है
छाती के कोषों में रहितों की व्रीड़ा है

शून्यों से घिरी हुई पीड़ा ही सत्य है
शेष सब अवास्तव अयथार्थ मिथ्या है भ्रम है
सत्य केवल एक जो कि
दुःखों का क्रम है

मैं कनफटा हूँ हेठा हूँ
शेव्रलेट-डॉज के नीचे मैं लेटा हूँ
तेलिया लिबास में पुरज़े सुधारता हूँ
तुम्हारी आज्ञाएँ ढोता हूँ।

Muktibodh's poetry gained in popularity and critical acclaim only after his untimely demise at the age of 47 in 1964 with the publication of his first anthology "Chand Ka Muh Teda Hai" or "The Face of the Moon is Crooked" in the same year. Surprisingly despite his continued popularity and the respect that he holds, very few of his poems have been translated into English and I could not immediately get hold of a suitable translation apart from the atrocious one done by Google!! So perforce I have to provide a translation of this poem myself so that I can convey why it is so appealing to me in the present context and give some idea of Muktibodh's genius to English speaking readers even if I haven't been able to do much justice to it!!

I AM FAR FROM YOU

I am so far from you
My inspirations are so different from yours
That what is poison for you is food for me

In my friendlessness my constant companionship,
In my loneliness the hands of comradeship,
Are of those whom you consider to be the dregs
But it is they who are mirrored in my pained heart
And so you continuously attack me!!
In public and in private.
(The pages of my blood filled Epic fly
In this fracas between you and I)

I wear the dust and waste of failure
Because wealth is available on the spiral stairs
through cheating and lying
But I have run on the straight tracks of life.
Even so I am angry with my righteousness
Unhappy with the poison
Because we need to be much better than what we are
We need janitors to clean the world
And I am unable to be a janitor
But everyday someone inside me shouts
That no work is bad
Provided that the person is good
Even so I can't push myself towards that.

In the world of movement outside that of refrigerators, Vitamins and Radiograms
That hungry girl child of mine is there in nothingness
In my intestines there is the pain of the small
In the cells of my chest is the shame of the deprived

Suffering surrounded by nothingness is the truth
The rest is all an unreal impractical lie
There is only one truth
That is only a continuous pain

I am an outcaste
lying under a Chevrolet-Dodge
in oily clothes repairing the parts
bearing your orders.

Like all great poetry this one too has many meanings and I will leave it to the readers to enjoy this poem and if interested read more of Muktibodh's poetry and the vast literarcy appreciation of his oevre. But what comes out clearly is its strong criticism of the caste ridden society in India that has been one of the main factors in preventing socio-economic justice for the majority. In the current context of our country literally being drowned in municipal waste I particularly like the mention of the fact that we need janitors to clean this world and make it better but that we, even those of us who reject caste, are not prepared to take up the role of janitors whether in the real or the figurative sense.

 

Fifty Years of Spring Thunder

The recent attack by the Maoists deep inside the jungles of Chhattisgarh killing close to thirty Central Reserve Police Force personnel brings the spotlight back on these armed rebels in this their fiftieth year of operations. This deadly strike was a retaliatory action by the Naxalites or Indian Maoists against an offensive launched to finish them off by opening up the dense jungle areas in which they operate through the construction of a road. This daring attack against the armed might of the Indian State establishes the Maoists' ability to carry on their armed struggle despite the heavy repressive and cooptive tactics being adopted against them.

This tenacious armed struggle being waged by the Maoists to overwhelm the state apparatus and bring about a New Democratic Revolution through the armed mobilisation of the peasant masses has challenged the attempt of the Indian ruling classes to foist a counterfeit meta-narrative of socio-economic progress based on corrupt electoral politics and centralised industrial development on the Indian masses. In fact the current second phase of the Maoist movement has gained much more support among the masses and been much more of a headache for the Indian state than the resistance put up by the mass environmental movements which have emerged in the same period since the late nineteen seventies. It all began when a grassroots activist of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) in West Bengal, Charu Mazumdar, began pondering from 1965 onwards over the failure of the Indian communists, despite forty years of struggle since the formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI), in freeing the peasants from the feudal oppression of the landlords. Over a space of two years he wrote eight essays, which have since become famous as the "eight documents" that led to a section of the CPI(M) cadres breaking away and sparking off the Naxalbari movement in which peasants began seizing the produce and lands of the landlords in 1967. He analysed his own experiences beginning with the "Tebhaga" peasant movement in Bengal of the pre-independence days and the later struggles after independence all over India. In all of these struggles he found that the main reason for their failure was the inability of the communists to build up a cadre based revolutionary party capable of fighting the armed might of the state through a sustained armed struggle. He came down heavily on the Communist Party leaders for their "revisionist" approach of working within the bourgeois constitutional framework despite repeated illegal crackdowns by the Congress party after independence on the mass organisations of the party and also on the efforts to form governments through the fighting and winning of elections. He stressed the need for educating the peasant masses and giving them a taste of blood by following a policy of physical annihilation of class enemies and the police.

However Mazumdar and his Maoist comrades were themselves following the by then obsolete formulations of Mao Tse Tung for the nineteen thirties China of setting up of base areas in the villages and then laying siege to the cities and towns by surrounding them. There was no way in which this strategy could work against a much better entrenched and powerful modern bourgeois state apparatus in India. Crucially this state apparatus also had a fair amount of legitimacy in the minds of the people because of being chosen by them in the elections. The government the Maoists confronted was a leftist coalition in which the CPI(M) was a partner and had three ministers. The CPI(M) tried to reason with the rebels but when this did not work they chose the practical course of sending in the armed police and para military forces in strength to suppress the rebellion and so save its own government from falling. Thus the rebellion in the countryside was crushed within a few months in West Bengal. Nevertheless the coalition government did not survive and President's rule was imposed. The Congress government at the centre tried to use this opportunity to weed out more thoroughly what it must have considered a serious menace. A later Maoist spurt in Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh in 1968 too was similarly obliterated. In both instances heavy armed police repression was carried out including extra-judicial killings of peasants and activists, badly exposing the over estimation of the power and resilience of armed peasant militancy by Mazumdar.

Meanwhile the CPI(M) managed to come back to power as part of yet another coalition government in 1969 and release some of the Naxalite leaders and activists who had been jailed during President's rule. This opportunity was seized by the mostly urban activists of the Maoist movement, which had been transformed into the full fledged Communist Party of India Marxist Leninist (CPI(ML)) in 1969 with Mazumdar as its General Secretary, to compensate for the failure of the peasant insurrection by carrying on their programme of annihilation of class enemies in Kolkata, letting loose a murderous free for all in which they also targeted the CPI(M) cadre. Things soon got out of hand leading to the United Front Government being dismissed and President's rule being imposed by the Congress government at the centre. Thereafter criminal gangs and a totally lawless police were given a free hand by the Central government for wiping out the Maoists and their sympathisers. This urban terrorism and its repercussions in the form of heightened state repression resulted in alienating the CPI(ML) from the urban middle classes also which had provided it with much of its cadre and tacit support. Most of the cadre was either murdered or jailed by 1971 and with the arrest in 1972 and subsequent death in suspicious circumstances in jail of Mazumdar and the extrajudicial killing by the Police of another leader Saroj Datta, the first phase of the Maoist movement came to a sorry end.

The CPI(M) leaders in West Bengal learnt their lessons from the deep ideological and tactical challenge that this movement had posed to its supremacy among the peasant masses and the left leaning intelligentsia and students. They were also concerned about the danger that the threat of such armed struggle posed to their practice of participating in parliamentary democracy. So while using force against the Maoists, they also carried out wide ranging land reforms by identifying and redistributing ceiling surplus land during both its limited stints in power in 1967 and 1969-70. The Maoists protested vociferously against this legal land reform as it successfully weaned the peasants away from them but all to no avail as even Charu Mazumdar lost twelve acres of his ceiling surplus land for redistribution in this campaign! Later when it came to power again in 1978 after a landslide victory in the elections held after the lifting of the internal emergency the CPI(M) launched "Operation Barga" a programme for the registration of the rights of the "bargadars" or tenant farmers to the cultivation of the land of the landlords. The CPI(M) also introduced a participatory Panchayati Raj, which considerably increased the political power of the peasants in the rural areas. These measures created a ground swell of long lasting support for it that has ensured that it has been returned to power consecutively for a record six more terms. More importantly this created so much dynamism in the agricultural sector in West Bengal that the overall economic growth momentum of the state was sustained for a long time despite an initial decline in industrial growth due to the burgeoning of trade union militancy during CPI(M) rule .

However, in the rest of India there was not much of an impact of the Maoist movement towards bringing about land reforms. The deeply feudal control of the landlords over the peasants continued unabated. This was especially so in the neighbouring states of Bihar and Jharkhand, which had earlier seen the Bhoodan movement being reduced to a mockery. The subsequent Sampoorna Kranti Andolan in the mid 1970s, which had considerable peasant support too, was also crushed. This failure on the part of the Congress governments at the centre and in the states to pay serious attention to the problems of the peasantry in most parts of the country provided a fertile ground in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh which had witnessed some armed mobilisations in the initial phase, for a rekindling of the Maoist rebellion from 1980 onwards. In the meantime during the decade of the 1970s the movement had remained alive in the form of many splintered groups scattered over the whole country. One such group the CPI(ML) Liberation began mobilising the peasants openly in Bihar and Jharkhand and also participating successfully in electoral politics. Two other groups in Bihar and Jharkhand, the CPI(ML) Party Unity and the Maoist Communist Centre opted for renewing the armed struggle. Similarly the CPI(ML) People's War Group and some other marginal groups too began the armed struggle in Andhra Pradesh.

This time round the movement began among the dalit and the adivasi peasants and with a clear-cut understanding that it would be subjected to heavy repression by the state. So right from the beginning armed squads were built up and provided with sophisticated weapons. These squads were extremely mobile and mostly stayed in the dense jungles only to essay forth to carry out armed actions and then retreat into their safety and anonymity once again. Simultaneously open mass organisations were built up among the peasants, workers, students, intellectuals and artistes, which worked towards raising the level of political consciousness of the masses and solving their immediate socio-economic problems arising from social and economic oppression. These mass organisations also provided the cadre for the armed squads and the underground party.  Moreover realising that the state forces could easily ring in an isolated armed movement like they had done earlier in Naxalbari and Srikakulam the movement spread its wings early on into the contiguous states and so now it has a vast area of influence extending from Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south through Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Jharkhand to Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Bihar in the north. 

Thus when the going gets too hot in one place then the squads move out from there to concentrate their action on some other place where things are relatively easier and so keep the movement going. Consequently even though coordinated police action in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, has put a lid on Maoist activity there this has resulted in all the cadre and armed squads migrating to neighbouring states of Chattisgarh, Maharashtra and Orissa to intensify operations there. This mobility has become so crucial to their survival and effectiveness that all the major armed factions of the Naxalites patched up their ideological differences and came together to form the CPI (Maoist) in 2004. Consequently the spring thunder that first cracked in West Bengal in 1967 is still rolling ominously to the acute discomfort of the Indian ruling classes.

This ability to sustain an armed struggle against the state has earned it enough credibility among the poverty stricken youth mainly from among the dalits and adivasis and also from other sections of the masses to inspire them to sacrifice all for overthrowing a patently unjust politico-economic dispensation. The commitment to the overthrow of the bourgeois Indian state, though they themselves term it as being semi-feudal and semi-colonial, through the successful conduct of an armed New Democratic Revolution is so total in the movement that despite the killing of hundreds of its cadres in extra-judicial "encounters" after arrest and the jailing of thousands more of its cadres and supporters it continues to survive. Enough to force the Indian state to plan a coordinated higher scale armed intervention against the movement spread across all the states in which it has an influence. But there are limits to the violence that the state can resort to. While the state has been able to deploy the regular army to suppress the armed separatist movements in the peripheral areas in the Northeast, Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab, it cannot so easily do the same in the very heart of the country without affecting its combat readiness for meeting external threats, which are of a far more menacing nature. There is also the problem of the human rights violations that the army will commit on the populace in general alienating them from whichever political party decides to launch full scale military operations against the Maoists. 

However, this cycle of violence and counter violence has meant that the people in the areas of influence of the Maoists have been caught in the crossfire between them and the state forces. The exigencies of a civil war like situation have led to both sides targeting those people whom they feel to be informers and sympathisers of the enemy. The scope for democratic mass action has as a result been severely curtailed and at present all the open mass organisations of the Maoists are officially banned with their leading activists in jail. Moreover, to keep alive the false Maoist meta-narrative of the character of the Indian state being semi-feudal and semi-colonial in the face of the considerably stronger but equally false meta-narrative of modern market centred development the Maoists have had to oppose modern development and the further penetration of the market in the areas of their influence and maintain them in an undeveloped condition. All this has effectively put a brake on the spread of the Maoist struggle beyond the really remote rural areas of the country and also led to disaffection among the masses and activists in these areas in some cases with a tiredness having set in due to the endless wait for the elusive revolution resulting in surrenders of cadre. 

So fifty years after the first revolt in remote Naxalbari in West Bengal, which was then hailed as the "Spring Thunder" by the Communist Party of China, the Maoists are still at it playing out a politically obsolete side drama which has now been limited to the remote jungles of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, sustained by extortion from the industrial interests that operate there to mine natural resources like iron and coal. Historically it has had a role in highlighting the oppressive nature of the Indian state but has not had much impact in reducing oppression. Not that any other movement has had much impact in mitigating the oppressive nature of the Indian state but that just underlines the difficulty of fighting the huge power of modern capitalism which has now entered a resurgent neo-liberal phase on the strength of global outsourcing of economic activities and contractualisation of labour both physical and intellectual and near complete control of the minds of the masses through the media and academia.