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THE Border Security Force of India has yet again killed a Bangladesh national, needless to say, without any apparent reason. According to reports published in the media, the victim, a 13-year old girl, went to Kalo Dewanir Hat along the Roumari border in Kurigram, along with two other girls, to pluck flowers around 6:00pm on Friday when the Indian border guards opened fire on them. The killing has naturally touched off tension along the border, with the Bangladesh Rifles asking people of the bordering villages to shift to safer places. With the death of the teenager, the number of people killed in BSF firing over the past 10 months or so rose to 87 – i.e. just over eight persons a month. The BDR, according to reports, was to send a letter of protest to the BSF; however, if past records were any indicator, it is unlikely to bring about changes in the BSF behaviour, let alone rein in the trigger-happy members of the Indian border guards. In July this year, at the end of a three-day director general-level conference in Dhaka, the BSF chief, while assuring to take stern action against Indian border guards for violation of human rights through killing of unarmed Bangladeshis, nonetheless claimed that ‘most of those killings, almost 85 per cent, took place at the dead of night when public movement across the border is prohibited under section 144.’ Surely, the killing of the 13-year old girl did not take place at the dead of night. One wonders what explanation the BSF top brass would come up with this time around.
   Regardless of what the BSF authorities in particular and the Indian government in general would like to have us believe, the fact of the matter remains that most of the Bangladesh nationals killed by the Indian border guards over the years were poor and unarmed people. True, there may have been, and may still be, trespassing by Bangladesh nationals into the Indian territory and vice versa; however, it is often driven by reasons other than criminal intent. The people on the Bangladesh-India border share a long history and have come to be inter-dependent over not days or years but centuries. Many people in the border areas, while officially Indians or Bangladeshis, share the same family roots and often cross the border just to meet their relatives on the other side. Regarding such human impulse as criminal intent is inhumane and borders on the criminal.
   As we have written in these columns before, the continuation of killings of Bangladesh nationals by the BSF despite repeated assurance from the BSF top brass, at flag meetings and biannual conferences, tends to underline the fact that the problem is beyond the BDR-BSF leaderships to resolve and requires political intervention by the governments of the two countries. Hence, Dhaka needs to seek political resolution of the border problems at the summit-level talks with New Delhi. Dhaka needs to make New Delhi understand that unabated killings of Bangladeshis in BSF shooting only deepens resentment against India among the people of Bangladesh and that such resentment is detrimental not only to the relations between the two next-door neighbours but also to the greater peace and harmony of the region.

Drastic policy change needed
to protect peasants

THE report front-paged in New Age on Saturday once again illustrates that the poor and marginal farmers continue to suffer. That this group of people involved in subsistence farming are gradually becoming marginalised and increasingly landless has been a common contention among a wide section of the people. The New Age report, however, focuses on yet another reason contributing to their misery. The report relates to the plight of farmers who had to sell their produce cheaply and often below real production costs but have to buy rice at a higher price than that they sold their produce at. On the other hand, another report from the northern districts indicates that this year’s aman harvest may be under threat due to lack of rain and several other factors.
   It was pointed out a number of times during the tenure of the military-controlled interim government that the government should lower the prices of inputs so that the cost of production were low which would eventually benefit the farmers as well as the consumers. However, there were no such moves and the prices of diesel and fertilisers remained as before, although the government at that time could very well afford to slash their prices. Subsequently, the Awami League government did slash the prices of non-urea fertilisers substantially but by that time it had become too late to have much significance for the boro season.
   Consequently, a high supply of paddy right after harvest had deflated prices and poor farmers could not secure the kind of margin they were expecting to. Such problems are hardly new in the lives of the poor farmers. But unfortunately there were no changes to their plight under the new regime either. Thus, poor farmers ended up selling out to the cheap market and are not forced to buy rice at higher prices from those who had stocked up before. In this regard, the report cites an expert recommending easier and more loans for building storage capacity for the farmers.
   While such loans would surely be helpful, the farmers would benefit even more greatly if agricultural loans were made accessible and very easy to secure for the poorest farmers or even sharecroppers. Then these people would not have to turn to the usurious moneylenders and in turn could well avoid the utter desperation to rid themselves of their produce no matter what the price so they can pay off their debts. Besides easily available loans, the government should also ensure availability of power for irrigation, wherever possible, and direct subsidies for diesel and fertilisers that would prove far more beneficial than the prevailing system.
   To conclude one must point out that the question of agriculture has intrigued governments for ever. The answer does not lie in one or two band aid measures, nor in the modification of a few policies here and there. The answer lies in comprehensive agrarian reforms that require sincere commitment. The government will have to decide whether it wants to tweak around or dive in.

THE low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god had been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ.
   Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.
   If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed, too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly under attack.
   In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, ‘So what? Someone has to pay the price of progress.’ Some even say, ‘Let’s face it, these are people whose time has come. Look at any developed country – Europe, the US, Australia – they all have a “past”.’ Indeed they do. So why shouldn’t ‘we’?
   In keeping with this line of thought, the government has announced Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly against the ‘Maoist’ rebels headquartered in the jungles of central India. Of course, the Maoists are by no means the only ones rebelling. There is a whole spectrum of struggles all over the country that people are engaged in – the landless, the Dalits, the homeless, workers, peasants, weavers. They’re pitted against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people’s land and resources. However, it is the Maoists that the government has singled out as being the biggest threat.
   Two years ago, when things were nowhere near as bad as they are now, the prime minister described the Maoists as the ‘single largest internal security threat’ to the country. This will probably go down as the most popular and often repeated thing he ever said. For some reason, the comment he made on January 6, at a meeting of state chief ministers, when he described the Maoists as having only ‘modest capabilities’, doesn’t seem to have had the same raw appeal. He revealed his government’s real concern on June 18, when he told parliament: ‘If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected.’
   Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) – CPI (Maoist) – one of the several descendants of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising and was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian state. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People’s War Group in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004, 1.5 million people attended their rally in Warangal.)
   But eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly. They left a violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest supporters into harsh critics. After a paroxysm of killing and counter-killing by the Andhra police as well as the Maoists, the PWG was decimated. Those who managed to survive fled Andhra Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in the heart of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been working there for decades.
   Not many ‘outsiders’ have any first-hand experience of the real nature of the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent interview with one of its top leaders, Comrade Ganapathy, in Open magazine, didn’t do much to change the minds of those who view the Maoists as a party with an unforgiving, totalitarian vision, which countenances no dissent whatsoever. Comrade Ganapathy said nothing that would persuade people that, were the Maoists ever to come to power, they would be equipped to properly address the almost insane diversity of India’s caste-ridden society. His casual approval of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka was enough to send a shiver down even the most sympathetic of spines, not just because of the brutal ways in which the LTTE chose to wage its war, but also because of the cataclysmic tragedy that has befallen the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, who it claimed to represent, and for whom it surely must take some responsibility.
   Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called independence, have not had access to education, healthcare or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.
   If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to ‘develop’ their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.
   Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually overthrow the Indian state, right now even they know that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.
   In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a report called ‘Development Challenges in Extremist-Affected Areas’. It said ‘the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis. Its emergence and growth need to be contextualised in the social conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions. Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power by force, in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local development.’ A very far cry from the ‘single-largest internal security threat’.
   Since the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody, from the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most sold-out newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to concede that it is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at the root of the problem. But instead of addressing that problem, which would mean putting the brakes on this 21st-century gold rush, they are trying to head the debate off in a completely different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious outrage about Maoist ‘terrorism’. But they’re only speaking to themselves.
   The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to ... They’re out there. They’re fighting. They believe they have the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve justice.
   In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe from these dangerous people, the government has declared war on them. A war, which it tells us, may take between three and five years to win. Odd, isn’t it, that even after the Mumbai attacks of 26/11, the government was prepared to talk with Pakistan? It’s prepared to talk to China. But when it comes to waging war against the poor, it’s playing hard.
   It’s not enough that special police with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and Scorpions are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. It’s not enough that the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force and the notorious Naga Battalion have already wreaked havoc and committed unconscionable atrocities in remote forest villages. It’s not enough that the government supports and arms the Salwa Judum, the ‘people’s militia’ that has killed and raped and burned its way through the forests of Dantewada leaving 300,000 people homeless or on the run. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan border police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven). Obviously, these decisions were taken a while ago. Surveys have been done, sites chosen. Interesting. War has been in the offing for a while. And now the helicopters of the Indian air force have been given the right to fire in ‘self-defence’, the very right that the government denies its poorest citizens.
   Fire at whom? How will the security forces be able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist sympathisers valid targets? When I was in Dantewada, the superintendent of police showed me pictures of 19 ‘Maoists’ that ‘his boys’ had killed. I asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists. He said, ‘See Ma’am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol bottles, all these things from outside.’
   What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we ever know? Not much news comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been cordoned off. Those who try to go in are being beaten and arrested. And called Maoists, of course. In Dantewada, the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram, a Gandhian ashram run by Himanshu Kumar, was bulldozed in a few hours. It was the last neutral outpost before the war zone begins, a place where journalists, activists, researchers and fact-finding teams could stay while they worked in the area.
   To be continued on Op-Ed Page
   The Guardian, UK, October 30.