The sordid saga of Accumulation through violent dispossession: Contextualizing the massacre of Adivasis in Kalinganagar (ODISHA)

The sordid saga of Accumulation through violent dispossession: Contextualizing the massacre of Adivasis in Kalinganagar (ODISHA)

Asit Das

Tribal societies can be an example for discussing a probable model for a future democratic, egalitarian social order for their inherent democratic social relations and economic equality . As their name, Adivasi, suggests, their civilization preceded vedic Hindu social order with its constitutive graded inequality. The tribals who inhabited almost the entire Indian peninsula were pushed to the forests by the consistent attacks by successive marauding armies of the Hindu Rajput Kings, Marathas, Muslims and British imperial invaders.  Our neo-liberal rulers and their professional army of upper caste bureaucrats, establishment academicians rarely mention the fact that the Adivasis were the first to take up arms and last to lay down arms against British colonialism, we are all aware of the heroic rebellions of Birsa munda, Sidhu Kano in the east, Khajyanayak, Tantyabhil, Rani Durgavati etc in central and western India against British colonialism, not forgetting the martyrdom of Laxman Naik in Orissa and stiff fight of Venkatappu Satyanarnyan in Andhra. According to a conservative estimate every tenth Adivasi family has produced a martyr in the fight against British imperial invaders .  They died defending their people’s traditional rights on land, water, forests and other natural resources, which they had been enjoying since time immemorial. There was no concept of private property or corporate control over natural resources in the lexicon of the indigenous population ; these concepts of commodification were imposed on them by the colonial masters.

An outstanding case in point of the non-commodified mind-set of indigenous people is the letter of native American chief of Seattle to the American President whom he called the great White chief.  In that letter he wrote to the American President, how can you buy air, land or sunshine? Anyone who is aware of modern American prosperity knows too well that the entire edifice of  the modern industrial American empire was built on the ruthless bloody massacre and decimation of native Americans to take possession of their land and natural  resources; to build modern American industrial capitalism accompanied by ruthless exploitation of slave labour of African slaves who were captured from Africa; to build the so called free civilized America and capitalism in Europe[ApJa5] . The colonialists all over the world replicated this story of brutal primitive accumulation or ruthless capital accumulation through dispossession, as is evident in the plunder of Latin America, Asia & Africa.

In India the glaring example of dispossession of tribals from their habitat is the Indian forest act, enacted by the British imperialists in the nineteenth century, which snatched away the forests from the Adivasis, which had been their main source of livelihood, the rights over which they had since millennia. Adivasis are still struggling against the draconian provisions of the act. Millions of Peasants workers and Adivasis fought against the British imperial order in the hope that they could regain their rights over the commons and the natural resources in independent India and lead a dignified life, with total control over their means of livelihood. Unfortunately this turned out to be a sour dream.

The newly independent post colonial state took the same path of plunder in the name of development, further displacing vulnerable communities of dalits and Adivasis by snatching their commons and means of livelihood. This path of neo-colonial development has displaced around 50 million people (Arundhati Roy - Greater Common Good), which is almost equal to the population of United Kingdom. These displacements occurred due to mega project like hydropower dams, factories, mines etc. These projects were mainly in the territories inhabited by the Adivsis. When they protested against displacement the state came down heavily against them, imprisoning the protesting Adivasis in large numbers. In the early nineties, when the Indian economy was opened under neo-liberal globalisation, there was a rush of multinational corporations to plunder the resource rich tribal areas of India. The government of India laid the red carpet for profit seeking multinational corporations bending all the protective laws to give away the resource rich tribal areas to these corporations for a song. Wherever the Adivasis protested, the most oppressive provisions of the penal laws were used to put down their revolt.  

Orissa, like the other Bimaru states of Bihar and Jharkhand, is quite low in the human development index with one of the lowest per capita incomes; on the other hand it is a highly endowed state with extensive mineral rich areas. Since the globalization of the Indian economy the state is up for sale to the predatory multinational corporations eyeing the resource rich tribal areas of Orissa. Orissa is a fifth schedule state with a high concentration of tribals living in hills and forest tracts where most of the mines, dams, factories and other mega projects are located. Since independence lakhs of Adivasis have been displaced and pushed into penury - the state has no account of them, nor does anybody know their fate.                             

POLICE FIRING IN KALINGA NAGAR

The recent police firing in Kalinga Nagar, in which more than a dozen Adivasis were killed, is the result of the eagerness of Orissa's rulers to catch up fast with other states. Though endowed with rich natural resources Orissa was late to get industrialized. Following the Nehruvian model there were several industries set up in Orissa, mostly rich in mines, which included almost one fifth of the country's iron ore deposit and the largest deposit of bauxite in India.

During the neo-liberal era the state is selling off its commons and rich natural resources for a song to the National and International big business. In this ruthless process millions of vulnerable communities like Adivasis and dalits get uprooted from their natural habitats and loose not only their livelihoods but also their cultural moorings and sense of belonging. This ruthless process of dispossession contributes to the slums in the cities and increases the pauperised reserve army of labour bulging the ranks of the unemployed.

Orissa’s tribal population is 22.21% of the total population and 73% of them are below poverty level. According to studies of displacement in the tribal areas of Orissa done by Dr.Walter Fernadez, ex-head of tribal research section of Indian Social Institute, displacement of tribals in Orissa caused by industrialisation, between 1951 and 1995, was more than 2 million people without any satisfactory rehabilitation. Out of these,  40% were tribals, 20% dalits and 20% were other backward castes. Since the past decade and half during the liberalisation phase, multinational giants have been usurping the mineral rich areas of Orissa and when the tribals protest the state government resorts to extreme repression.

A well known case is the Kasipur mining belt of Rayagada district formally part of the undivided District of Koraput, which has a cruel history of untold miseries caused to the Adivasis due to various mega projects like the Hindusthan Aeronatics Limited, National aluminum company, the upper Kolab hydro-electric dam etc. A few years ago six Adivasis were killed in police firing in the Maikanch village of Kashipur block in Rayagada district. They were protesting against their displacement to be caused by the bauxite mining and Alumina smelter plant, by the Canadian multinational Utkal Alumina, whose parent company is Alcan in Canada . This is one of the poorest regions in Orissa but with almost on half of the bauxite deposit of India, through mining, project people will be further pauperized after loosing their homestead and agricultural lands. The poor Adivasis of this area have been fighting against the management of Alcan and Hindalco under the banner of Prakrutik Sampad Suraksha Parishad since ten years. During their struggle, the villagers and activists of Kasipur have undergone being jailed, lathi charged and clamped with false criminal cases etc.

Another despicable incident in Kasipur was when the government decided to set up a police out post and police barrack at Karol near Kuchipadar village in Kasipur. On December 2nd 2004 the collector and SP of Rayagada arrived with 10 platoons of central reserve police and Orissa state armed police force. Around 400 people, men and women, sat down on the road in a peaceful Dharna. When asked to move they refused, to which the police force threatened the women if they don’t move each one of them will be raped; all this was happening in the presence of the district Collecter and SP. Ultimately when the people refused to budge there was a brutal lathi charge in which more than a dozen men and women were seriously injured and later sent to jail on trumped up charges. 

In the neo-liberal era some of the backward states with overwhelming tribal population have been bending over backwards on inviting multi-national companies (MNCs) to invest in the state, and competing with each other in the mad rush of getting foreign direct investment  (FDI). The state governments are in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing spree. The government of Orissa has signed 43, the government of Jharkhand 42 and the government of Chhatisgarh 48. It should be noted that all these states have high concentration of tribal population. These MOUs have been singed by some of the well known International and Indian mega corporations like Posco (Korea), Vedanta Alumina (UK), Rio Tinto(Uk), BHP Billiton (UK-Australia), Alcan (Canada), Hindalco, Jindal, Larsen and Tubro and Bhusam. Overall mining projects worth Rs. 30,000 crore have already begun in Orissa and projects worth a further Rs. 1.10000 crore are in the pipeline[i]. All these multinational corporations eye the resource rich tribal areas, a result of which tribals continue to get uprooted and marginalised.

The Kalinga Nagar police firing in Orissa should be seen in the context of a fast globalizing world where rapacious multinational and national industrialists try to grab every inch of land in the tribal areas, the areas of one of the most dispossessed and marginalised of the social groups in India. When they stand up to resist this predatory encroachment on their habitat and traditional livelihood they face the most brutal repression by the security forces acting on behalf the MNCs and National big businesses.

The state repression against trible resistance reached its Nadir in the recent Kalinga Nagar firing, in which 12 people were killed in police firing.. Here is a brief sketch about the objective facts of the predatory industrialisation which culminated in the police firing and Killing of tribal protestors at Kalinga nagar in Jaipur district of Orissa. The police firing should be seen in the context of peoples' uprisings in Orissa against the missile testing range in Baliapal, the privatisation of Chilika lake, the bauxite mining and Alumina complex in Kasipur, bauxite mining in the Gandhmardan hills in western Orissa, the resistance against the Tata steel plant in Gopalpur of Ganjam district, mining in Niyama giri, a dam in Lower Sukhtel and so on.  The Kalinga Nagar area in Jajpur district lies contiguously with iron ore and other mineral rich regions of nearby Keonjhar district. In early decades of independence an express highway was built from this region to Paradip port with Japanese aid mainly to export iron ore to Japan at a cheap price. Since the past one and half decades of the liberalisation regime these areas have been handed over to the MNCs and Indian big business by the government of Orissa at a throwaway price, forcibly evicting tribals, dalits and marginalised peasants. Most of the metallurgical plants coming up in this region are hi-tech export oriented enterprises, with minimum scope of employment generation for the local unemployed youth. They simultaniously cause massive destruction of livelihood by displacing people from their villages, thus adding to the unemployment by erasing rural communities with their artisan skills which had provided them self employment in agriculture and allied traditional artisan employment.

 The police massacre of tribals is an eye -opener to what has been happening in Orissa in the name of industrialisation - the competition to get more and more foreign direct investment, where the government of Orissa has been acquiring tribal lands at a very low price and handing them over to the MNCs without properly rehabilitating the tribals and paying them fair compensation. In the Kalinga Nagar area the land of the Adivasis of different villages was acquired in early 1990’s by the industrial development corporation of Orissa (IDCO) and were handed over to the house Tatas who wanted to build a steel plants. IDCO acquired the land from tribal for Rs. 35,000 per acre and sold it to Tisco (Tata iron and steel company) for Rs.3.5 lakh per acre.

What happened in January 2nd in Kalinga Nagar, when 12 people were killed by the state police in the presence of the district offcials, is the result of a new awareness spreading in the Adivasi regions in Orissa, thanks to the relentless struggles and campaigns carried out by different  people movements and left organisations pointing out the fact that the Adivasis and other marginal communities can not be the sacrificial lambs in this ruthless march of capitalism in the name industrialisation and development. This incident was symptomatic of the deeper malaise of intense commodification of the commons and ruthless accumulation through dispossession under the neo-liberal regime. Through their resistance from Kalinga Nagar to the Narmada valley to Koelkaro they are asking the pertinent question - development for whom? Where will this greedy senseless commodification of commons and war of elimination against Adivasis lead the country?  Is it development for a few urban elites including the national and international big business, corrupt politicians and bureaucrats or a dignified life for the teeming millions?

It is high time the Left and democratic organisations build up a powerful mass movement of tribals, dalits, women, peasants and workers against Neo-Liberal globalisation and usher in a democratic egalitarian society where there is no exploitation of man by man, man of woman, and man of nature, and build a society of producers where the development of each is the condition, for the development of all. 

(This writeup was published in Mainstream April 2007 and Hindi translation was published in “Filhaal” (Patna) in July 2007. it was also published in red star July 2007 and Hindi translation in “Barg Sangrash ki Pukar” in July 2007.)

Blog: www.stormingthewinterpalace.blogspot.com

Email-Id: asit1917@gmail.com

OF MANMOHAN SINGH, KUDANKULAM ANTI-NUCLEAR STRUGGLE AND THE POLITICS OF FOREIGN HAND IN INDIA: OR, WHO IS THE REAL FOREIGN HAND?

Asit Das

A Moment of Silence, Before I Start this Poem

Before I start this poem,

I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence

In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center

and the Pentagon last September 11^th.

I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence

For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,

Disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,

For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…

A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians

Who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces

Over decades of occupation.

Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment of starvation

As a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem: two months of silence

For the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,

Where homeland security made them aliens

in their own country.

Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

where death rained down and peeled back

every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin

and the survivors went on as if alive.

Emmanuel Ortiz, 9.11.02

__________________________

As I am writing this there has been a massive Police crack down on Anti-nuclear protesters at Kudankulam in Tamil nadu. More than six thousands police and paramilitary forces have been deployed. At Idinthakarai Village near the nuclear power plant 15, 000 people are protesting. 15 people including Dr. SP Uday Kumar and Pusparayan are into indefinite fast. More than 200 activists arrested. The latest update from the Kudankulam anti-nuclear struggle on 23^rd March 2012, 1.30 P.M. is. Between 1500 and 3000 protestors have been arrested in Jawahar Thidal, Tirunelveli, for attempting to march towards Idinthakarai today. Leading the march were prominent Tamil leaders including Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's Vaiko, Thanthai Periyar Dravida Kazhagam's Kolathur Mani, Naan Thamizhan's Seeman, Panruti Velmurugan, Com. Thiagu, and representatives of Viduthalai Chirutaikal Katchi (Dalit Panthers) and Pattali Makkal Katchi. In a dazzling display of Centre-State cooperation, Tamilnadu Police were ably assisted by army fatigues-clad Army Special Forces, to herd the protestors into waiting vans and onward to Rose Mahal, where they are currently detained. Rose Mahal is currently filled to capacity, and more vans are still coming in, said Jones Thomas Spartagus, one of the activists who is part of those arrested. 

Recently, Manmohan Singh the Prime Minister of India, in a very derogatory mala fide intention and to malign the anti-nuclear movement in Kudankulam (Tamil Nadu), said in an interview that the people’s resistance to the Kudankulam nuclear power plant and people who are campaigning against GM foods, are supported by a foreign hand. Apart from the interview, Manmohan Singh’s servitude to national and international capital has made him resort to the worst kind of slander and repression on anti-nuclear struggle in Kudankulam, including the struggle against other nuclear plants all over India. One protestor was shot dead by Maharashtra police in Jaitapur last year. In Kudankulam, thugs of Manmohan Singh’s party (Congress) have violently attacked the activists of anti-nuclear struggle in Kudankulam.

With hundreds of thousands of farmers committing suicide, millions of hectares of land are forcibly grabbed; thousands are dying of hunger and disease. This accusation of ‘foreign hand’ is a cruel joke on the hapless, millions of whom are suffering state repression and their land, resources, livelihood and dignity are being snatched away. The bogey of foreign hand has been played by post-independent rulers to divert the rising discontent of the masses.

I am reminded of Marx’s famous remark on Shakespearean tragedy; history repeating itself from tragedy to farce. Late Indira Gandhi had been invoking foreign hand to suppress the rising mass anger, radicalization of the working class and widespread peasant revolts. Governments at both the state and centre, justify pushing destructive projects and other anti-people policies blaming all the valid questions raised and opposition, by invoking the elusive foreign hand.

To suppress the legitimate voice emanating from Kudankulam anti-nuclear movement, Manmohan Singh has played the card of foreign hand. Therefore, it is necessary to examine who is this foreign hand, what is its motive, and whom does it represent and serve. Then it is important to expose the real foreign hand.

Ofcourse, there is a foreign hand, but nobody understands this better than the toiling people of the Indian sub-continent and the broad masses of the third world. They are still suffering from imperialist plunder so they feel the oppression of the foreign hand more than any one else.

The horrors of the foreign hand are imprinted in living memory of the peasants, workers, artisans, women and other producing sections of the third world. The ghastly tales of colonial plunder and ethnic genocide are testimony of what the foreign hand did to the conquered territories. The accounts are dripping in blood. It is this foreign hand which butchered 2.5 million Mexican Indians in the 5^th century. It is the foreign hand which plundered the resources in Latin America, North America, Australia and Africa.

The foreign hand eliminated the indigenous population of modern day Canada, USA and Australia, and forced the remaining to stay in reserve ghettoizing them as “natives” and aboroginees. Marx has vividly described this murder, plunder and brutalization of the natives and third world people including the first world peasantry, in his chapter on “Primitive Accumulation” in Capital Vol. 1.

The Adivasis, peasants, dalits, ethnic and national minorities of the Indian sub-continent understand the real meaning of foreign hand when British imperialism colonized them, looted their natural resources, subjugated them into service, took away their dignity, wiped out their economy, eliminating the artisans and ruining the peasantry. They suffered the subjugation by the foreign hand for three centuries. The agony was not over even after the transfer of power in 1947. Now they have to suffer the super imperial foreign hand of the USA.

The slave trade and the building of Robber Baron capitalism in the USA show how inhuman, dangerous and catastrophic has been the foreign hand for the people of Africa. Racism and the present plunder of resources, including buying up their land mines and forests by multinational corporations is not only the continuation of the centuries old “scramble for Africa”, but it also shows how the foreign hand still ruthlessly exploits Africa.

India and Foreign Hand :

Indian toiling people like the peasants, workers, Adivasis and dalits have suffered the cruellest aspects of the foreign hand. The deceit, sadism and the helplessness of a colonized people cannot be worse when the British imperialists under the premiership of Winston Churchill diverted grain for British war abroad, resulting in the Great Bengal Famine where millions of people died of starvation. “We got a taste of foreign hand”. Hence, we really cannot forget the foreign hand and so we are still struggling to fight that foreign hand. Broad masses of the working people and other artisans cannot forget the fact now that their indigenous textile industries and other crafts were destroyed.

The Adivasis are offering stiff resistance to the present foreign hands like Wall Street, hot money flowing via POSCO, Vedanta, Areva, etc., and their local agents like Manmohan Singh who have thrown open their resources, forests, livelihood and habitats cheaply for rapacious national and multinational corporations. It is the continuation of a glorious tradition of Adivasis’ rebellions led by Birsa Munda, Sidhu Kano, in the Santhal Parganas, and Chhitu Kirad in the Bhil region of western MP and eastern Gujarat. From Rajmahal Hills in the east to Khandesh in the west, the heroic Adivasi uprisings fought against the then foreign hand - the marauding British imperial invaders, who were out to usurp their land, livelihood and territories. They brutally colonized northeast; even in the post-independent era the Indian state betrayed the democratic aspiration of the people of northeast and resorted to the worst kind of neo-colonial plunder, brutally suppressing the peoples’ aspirations for a dignified life with barbaric state repression under draconian laws like AFPSA. The Adivasis had the bitter taste of foreign hand when their forests were snatched away by the British imperialists. Under the Indian Forest Act, they were declared intruders in their own habitat. There was massive deforestation for the sleepers for British Railways to plunder the natural resources of India, most of which is in Adivasi regions. Even after the transfer of power in 1947, the neo-colonial extractive plunder continues for cheap natural resources for world imperialism and their junior partners in the third world.

In India, the contemporary symbol of Uncle Sam’s hand is Manmohan Singh; like the earlier foreign hand, the British imperialists, the present dispensation is continuing with extreme repressive measures like Operation Green Hunt.

The post-war era was also the defining moment of national liberation struggle and decolonization. After the victory of the Chinese revolution and the emergence of an assertive socialist bloc, Sputnik was sent to space and Valentina Tereshkova created hopes in working women that socialism provides the necessary base for every working woman to develop her potential. Socialism was in the air, it was hope of the oppressed masses. The idea of socialism reinvigorated the trajectory of history towards national liberation, equality and dignity. World imperialism, now led by the USA, faced its nemesis socialism. Socialism was the guiding compass for the struggle for justice, democracy and equity. The European bourgeoisie took recourse to social democracy and welfare state to legitimize itself and fend off challenges posed by the socialist camp and militant trade union movement in their own countries trying to co-opt its own working classes.

Therefore, one has to deconstruct the project of decolonization in the third world countries in the context of growing attraction of the idea of socialism and the need for legitimacy of the third world ruling classes. Foreign hand again played a significant role in the lives of the oppressed masses in the third world in the so-called post-colonial world. Post-colonialism is the biggest myth because of the neo-colonial exploitation of the people and natural resources of the third world.

Absolutely intellectual slaves of imperialism and the compradors of the third world helped to perpetuate this neo-colonial exploitation. For the past two decades, Manmohan Singh has been the most crucial foreign hand in India for ruthlessly implementing the policies of neo-colonial exploitation in India. The so-called project of “Decolonization” proved to be fraudulent. Imperialism changed it from colonial exploitation to neo-colonial exploitation where the broad masses of people of the third world have entered into a direct contradiction with world imperialism.

The Bretton Woods Institutions like World Bank, and IMF of late WTO, were used as instruments of neo-colonial exploitation of the third world. In the post-war period, the cruelty of the foreign hand did not stop despite the rhetoric of “Decolonization” and “Non-Alignment”. It became more ruthless, cruel, barbaric and genocidal in the post-war period, under the leadership of the super imperial state - United States of America. The imperial horror continued. Vietnam was carpet-bombed, people sprayed up poisonous chemicals, Korea was invaded, Allende and Patrice Lumumba were murdered, hundreds of plots were made to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the great revolutionary Che Guevara was murdered. Tin-pot dictators imposed on Latin America to further enlarge the open veins of neo-colonial exploitation of its natural resources and sucking the blood of its working people. Compradors were installed in the name of regime change and so-called democracy (truly meaning exploitative bourgeois democracy and class rule). The predatory rule of the imperialist camp was managed by the local elites for their western masters as Manmohan Singh is doing now. The foreign hand was its most repulsive and sadistic impact in the recent decades.

Iraq and Afghanistan were mercilessly invaded by US-led NATO troops. Millions were killed, while the ordeal of Palestine continues under Zionist Imperialist designs. Another anti-people predatory weapon of the foreign hand has also used the anti-democratic arbitrary instrument of economic sanctions. It tried to strangle Cuba through sanctions; for appeasing the Zionist lobby, the criminal cowboy has used it against Iran recently. But the most savage, cruel and sadistic exploitative use of this monster US foreign hand was the sanction against Iraq to capture Iraq’s oil and the US imposed sanction has murdered 5 million Iraqi children much before its fascist attack on Iraq in 2003, overriding the democratic protests of the entire globe. The invasion on Iraq was most barbaric, ostensibly in the name of democracy and the non-existent weapons of mass destruction camouflaged to capture Iraq’s oil and to bring it under US imperial hegemony. Left thinker Ravi Sinha explains the attack on Iraq in the following words:

“We are all witness to and victims of the times characterized by monstrous brutalities of war and deep scars of deprivations, inequities and oppressions. We live under a world order wherein those who brought, for example, untold tragedy and destruction of Iraq, will never be brought to justice because they are global hegemons. They will not be questioned about the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi men, women and children; they will not be questioned about the thousands of dead and decapitated American soldiers; they will not be questioned about the trillions of dollars spent on the war and further trillions destroyed by the war; and they will not be questioned about the kind of Iraq they are leaving behind.”

Further, Ravi Sinha says about our immediate neighbourhood:

“We on the sub-continent, too, have suffered grievously and felt the heat form far too close. Afghanistan is a continuing saga of tragedy; Pakistan has been made to pay too heavy a price; and India too has not managed to steer clear of catastrophe. And we know very well that when we count the countries that have suffered, the loss is borne invariably by the people and not by their rulers. [See Ravi Sinha’s ‘Three Formidable Barriers to the Advance of Democracy’ keynote address at the joint convention of Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) at Allahabad from 29 to 31 December 2011].

Well, this is the foreign hand “US imperialism”. This is the story of real foreign hand, Uncle Sam’s monstrous brutalities. The obscene saga of Yankee Imperialism. The recent global economic crisis in 2008 was created by the favourite nieces and nephews of Uncle Sam, the greedy Wall Street operators of finance capital supported by the super imperial US state, or the emperor of the modern empire. Therefore, it is necessary to expose the economic basis of US imperial power. Explaining the economic basis of imperial power, James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer write: “Imperialism has taken diverse forms over time: ‘pre-modern’, ‘modern’, or ‘post-modern’ - to use the language of Robert Cooper, advisor to Tony Blair - or, in more analytically useful terms, pre-capitalist or capitalist. Lenin, one of the major 20^th century theorists of capitalist development and socialism, defined imperialism as the most advanced stage of capitalism, in which financial and industrial forms of capital are merged into large corporate monopolies that, through the dynamics of state power (military force, principally), engage in a process of carving up the world into markets for their capital and surplus production, converting subordinate countries into colonies and local ruling classes into satraps and clients. However, whatever the form taken by imperialism, it entails the projection of state power in its various forms (economic, political and military) – whatever it takes for some nations to dominate others – to advance their class or national interests and subordinate other countries to these interests.

The dominant actor involved in this projection of power and creating the resulting relations of domination-subordination within the current arena of global politics is the capitalist nation-state. It has evolved diverse forms: democratic or authoritarian, and (with reference to its dominant policy agenda) liberal or neo-liberal. Other agents of imperialism include the largest capitalist corporations, which, in popular imagery or the dominant political “imaginary” of academic, roam the world in search of returns on their investment or capital. However, these corporations are not footloose or free from consideration of national interest. Indeed, the economic interest advanced and protected by the nation-states that make up what can be termed the “imperial state system”, a system currently dominated by the US state.

Furthermore, it is these states, in their projections of military and political power, that create the conditions needed for the home-based multinational corporations to take advantage of and operate profitably in the world’s “emerging markets”. The US imperial state, both directly (via the departments of state and defense) and indirectly (via control over financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF), constitutes a directorate to manage the global systems. Just like the government of the country, the decision-making power concentrated in this directorate of the new world order (the world capitalist or imperialist system) is backed up by a repressive apparatus, the armed forces of the US State, whose maintenance and global operations cost US tax payers and US capital around $300 billion a year in 2003, at least $480 billion in 2004, and over $500 billion in 2005, including Iraq and Afghanistan supplementary budgets. (See “Empire with Imperialism - The Globalizing Dynamics of Neoliberal Capitalism”, James Petras and Henry Veltmayer. Aaakar Books, New Delhi.)

Foreign Hand and the Post-Colonial Developmental Trajectory of India :

Like elsewhere in the third world, the project of decolonization in India was equally fraudulent. Behind the veneer of “Nehruvian socialism”, “self-reliance”, “import substitution” and “non-alignment”, the Indian ruling classes maneuvered their path in the cold war rivalry to build what Prof. Randhir Singh calls “India specific capitalism”. True to the new Indian states commitment to the pre-independent “Bombay Plan”, the consumer goods sector was dominated by multinational corporations for which public money was spent to provide them infrastructure.

The public sector was projected as socialism, while in reality it was facilitating ruthless accumulation by imperialists and their Indian junior partners. Nehruvian socialism was extremely deceptive, American think-tanks like Ford Foundation imposed the so-called “Green Revolution” taking advantage of the humiliating PL-480 arrangements. Green Revolution opened up Indian agriculture for predatory penetration of imperialist capital. It was a big blow to the self-reliance and dignity of the Indian farmers. Hybrid seeds, pesticides (which were developed from Agent Orange used on Vietnamese) and chemical fertilizers were imposed on India to fill the coffers of the multinational corporations who control the seed and pesticide market. The entire Indian agriculture and the peasantry was mortgaged to the international agri-business, especially companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, etc. This is the foreign hand. Indian farmers still suffer the worst symptom of this -  the suicide of hundreds of thousands of farmers, unprecedented in Indian history.

Primitive Accumulation: Neo-Liberal Regime and Manmohan Singh the Contemporary Foreign Hand in India :

Due to the accumulation crisis suffered by global capitalism, world imperialism gave up Keynesian “demand management”, “welfare state” to adopt neo-liberalism. Oil price shock, falling rate of profit and stagnation led to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods arrangements, dollar was delinked from gold, and the collapse of the socialist camp led the imperialist masters to “Washington consensus”. The third world rulers were arm-twisted to adopt the new mantra “market fundamentalism”, where “liberalization”, “privatization” and “globalization” became the buzzword. Pauperisation, dispossession and commodification were the order of the day. Public sector, built on the sweat and toil of the working class, was sold to private players at throw-away prices. The imperialist camp, led by the US, unleashed the worst kind of primitive accumulation on the third world peasantry under the neo-liberal world economic order, forcible depeasantization was ruthlessly imposed on the third world peasantry to create the new reserve army of labour for predatory capital.

Following the balance of payment crisis, this World Bank employee Manmohan Singh, a slave of imperialist economic training, was imposed on India as the Finance Minster. The rest is history. World imperialism never had a faithful puppet like Manmohan Singh. This foreign hand was most useful and loyal to the imperialist masters, and institutions like IMF, World Bank and WTO dictated their policies to Manmohan Singh who sincerely implemented them. After the Narasimha Rao government, India has seen various formations like the United Front and the “India Shining” NDA rule marked by the ghastly Gujarat pogrom. Manmohan Singh became the Prime Minister in 2004 entrenching neo-liberalism in India. Explaining this phase and the hegemony of the neo-liberal project, my friend Shanker writes about the hegemony of the Indian neo-liberal project, “In itself the media’s behavior may seem nothing surprising. The alienation of the English media from India’s polity, and the solipsism and blindness of the elite it speaks for are hardly anything new; indeed, if anything, 2004 was only a further exposure of what was already increasingly obvious”.

But, in a way, this was precisely the reason why it was significant, for it hence had direct implication for the role that the English media has played in the rise of Indian neo-liberalism. To discuss this role, it is first important to note that, in the absence of a political/institutional formation that has generated and detained Indian neo-liberalism as an ideology (in contrast to Thatcherism, Reaganism or other such forces), the effort to push neo-liberalism as a political project in India has taken place in a far more diffused and complex manner. The functions that such formation would play, rather than being concentrated and organized, have instead been dispersed to multiple centres of power in the Indian system.

For instance, one such function - the individual policy changes and reforms that are required has worked not through “public opinion” or the legislative system, but instead through backdoor operations primarily focused in the bureaucracy (and in cases that do require legislation, through “consensus” achieved by cross party action through neo-liberal elements without an organized formation). This was described by Rob Jenkins as a process of “reforms by stealth”.

The second such role, increasingly appropriate in a time of shifts towards accumulation by dispossession, has been played by the judiciary. This has been the elimination and dilution of, on the one hand, legal protection for labour and criminal procedure, and on the other the strengthening and widening of state, coercive powers over resources (forests and urban land being the two most striking examples).

However, the third, and in our context the most important function, has been the evolution and projection of a hegemonic ideological project for neo-liberalism in the Indian context. (See Shankar Gopalakrishnan: The UPA Moment: Shadows of a Growing Crisis for the Indian State? In: Neoliberalism, Primitive Accumulation and Politics in India.)

This loyal foreign hand Manmohan Singh’s biggest regret in his tenure in UPA-1 and UPA-2 has been the opposition of the mass movements of the urban and rural working classes, the peasantry and Adivasis to his big ticket reforms like:

(1)      Dismantling of labour laws facilitating longer working hours, contractualisation of the workforce including the right to hire and fire.

(2)      Withdrawal of food subsidies and withdrawal of PDS

(3)      Privatisation of all major public sector enterprises

(4)      Withdrawal of fertilizers and other subsidies to agriculture

(5)      Pushing FDI in retail sector

(6)      Pushing financial deregulators, banking and insurance sector reforms

(7)      Unprecedented forcible land grab and expropriation of the peasantry

(8)      Pushing the dangerous option of nuclear energy upon an unwilling population

(9)      Severe repression of the mass movements

…. the list is endless.

Like the British imperial invaders, under this foreign hand Manmohan Singh, the peasants and Adivasis are facing the brunt of most violent dispossession in this neo-liberal regime of accumulation through dispossession. Millions of hectares of land are forcibly snatched, turning them into paupers and converting them into an impoverished army of reserve to serve as cheap contract labour for the private sector.

Singur, Nandigram, Kalinganagar, Kashipur, Bhatta Parsaul, etc., speak about the horrors of the 21^st century primitive accumulation in India pushed by Manmohan Singh. This loyal foreign hand not only has forced hundreds of thousands of farmers to commit suicide, but is also responsible for the extreme brutalization of the Indian society. His policies have produced poverty, destitution and marginalization. It is this foreign hand – the loyal slave of  World Bank, that has created Arjun Sengupta’s 77% subsisting on Rs. 20/- a day. His push to primitive accumulation has turned fertile lands into the deserts of destitution. All this is done to please his masters at the Capitol Hill and Wall Street. For this, I want to underline the role of International Finance Capital and its third world agent Manmohan Singh – the loyal foreign hand in India.

International Finance Capital, through its myriad institutions and the exercise of diplomatic pressure, has put in place most developing countries, local servitors in key decision-making positions to implement that particular set of policies which serve the interests of global finance and, to a lesser extent, of global industry. The core elements of these policies include, as is well-known by now, trade and investment openness, income deflating fiscal and monetary measures which reduce public development spending and social sector spending, privatization of public sector undertakings, an attack on labour unions, and an attack on the livelihood and assets of small producers mainly comprising peasants and artisans, in order to promote corporatization. In most developing countries, the peasantry and artisans numerically outnumber by far the class of wage paid workers.

The attack on the peasantry’s land assets and forest resources by the corporate sector – both domestic and foreign – usually aided by the ruling state power, is seen virtually everywhere in countries as diverse as India and China in Asia, and in Tanzania, Madagascar and Ethiopia in Africa. The bitter reaction which it has provoked, the resistance of the peasantry to corporate and state acquisition of its assets, is the stuff of the most significant unfolding of social and political mass mobilization to be seen today. What we see is a new phase of what Karl Marx had called “primitive accumulation of capital,” comprising the separation of small producers from their means of production. The difference between the earlier phase of primitive accumulation and the present one, however, is all-important. Earlier phases were transitional to industrialization in Europe and in the lands settled by Europeans and the new world. The present phase of primitive accumulation in developing countries is transitional not to capitalist industrialization but to the accumulation of riches at one pole of the social structure, with rising unemployment, pauperization, the proliferation of small-scale services, and increased absolute poverty at the other pole.

This conclusion of absolute immiserization is not generally accepted in the extant mainstream or even the so-called “heterodox” discussions of globalization. (See Utsa Patnaik: “Capitalism and the Production of Poverty”, Social Scientist Vol. 464-465.)

Manmohan Singh and his camp followers like Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Chidambaram (with their unflinching loyalty to World Bank/IMF guidelines to cut subsidies on essential items like food grains and kerosene, despite rising food prices) have made the working people’s life hell. On the other hand, the working people have been subsidising the corporate sector. According to P. Sainath, since economic reforms led by this World Bank stooge Manmohan Singh, the Indian government has subsidised the corporate sector to the tune of Rs. 20 lakh crores, while his lackeys in the media and Planning Commission make a big hue and cry over MNREGA, proposed Food Security Act, etc.

POSCO is a test case, where this shameless comprador Manmohan Singh bends backwards to please his imperialist masters. Under pressure from the Korean President, the PMO directed the Ministry of Environment to give forest and environment clearance to the POSCO project. It is to be noted that both the Meena Gupta Committee and Saxena Committee had written in their reports about the serious violations of the Forest Rights Act and had recommended cancellation of the forest clearance. However, under pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Environment was forced to give forest and environmental clearance to POSCO. These examples are numerous.

Biodiversity, GM Foods and the Foreign Hand :

India has very rich flora and fauna with several agro-climatic zones – from the Himalayas to thick rain forests of the Western Ghats and various types of traditional agricultural practices, to food grains. Manmohan Singh is the biggest robber of India’s biodiversity and our seeds. He is the cruel imperial foreign hand to wipe out our seeds, traditions and agricultural practices.

Manmohan Singh is the foreign hand that facilitates “the great gene robbery” by multinational seed companies, especially Monsanto. Manmohan Singh is the foreign hand which has pushed Bt cotton down the farmers’ throat. He is that foreign hand which like a vulture feeds on the corpses of tens of thousands of Bt cotton farmers who were forced to commit suicide. It is a cruel paradox of history when this imperialist lapdog talks about the foreign hand behind the anti-GM seed campaign. The reality is Manmohan Singh is trying to work very hard to be the best area sales manager for Monsanto.

Protesting against Manmohan Singh’s interview to Science magazine about the foreign hand behind Kudankulam anti-nuclear struggle and anti-GM food campaign, eminent people like Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, Prof. Romila Thapar and 17 others say in their letter to Manmohan Singh, “There has been vide coverage of your interview with the journal ‘Science’ on 24 February 2012, concerning the opposition to nuclear power plants and GM crops in India. You choose to resurrect the old bogeyman of a ‘foreign hand’, this time pointing to external funding of NGOs to oppose Indian development, as if they are some sort of a fifth columnist operating to undermine that nation’s interest. This, we feel, is a highly inappropriate misrepresentation of facts. The misdemeanours of these NGOs, if any, may well be only minor infringements of the letter of restrictive law that enables government to harass them as is now being undertaken. In reality, what we are all fighting against is indeed a foreign hand operating at the behest of and from within your Government, supported by Indian and foreign commercial entities, to corporatize Indian agriculture and farming practices and the energy sector, without in-depth and impartial analyses which prioritise the country’s security and safety. If this is their sin, it is our too!

Your remarks, in essence, indict every signatory to this letter. Our individual and collective “unthinking state”, an unlikely charge as that is, does not unduly perturb us; on the other hand, your charge that all those who voice dissent of your government’s policy on GM crops and nuclear power do not belong to the “thinking segment” of society, is an indictment of a large section of our citizenry. It betrays an inappropriate distinction between “thinkers” and “non-thinkers” solely on the basis of agreement or disagreement with government policy. Surely, this cannot be. Informed dissent and a healthy response to it by our government through trusted dialogue are vital for a functioning democracy. The absurdity of this position is therefore self-evident and it absolutely requires us to make a measured and robust response through addressing the key issues surrounding GM crops and the nuclear power sector.

The prominently visible foreign hand of the US, in these greatly important issues with ramifications of our country far into the future (and with regard to GM crops, irreversibly so), is squarely created and abetted by the UPA government. One indication of such collusion is the line-up of support your government has sought or received thus far from ABLE (Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises). The Indo-US knowledge initiative on agriculture, the Indo-US CEOs Forum, the Indo-US Business Council, etc., all of which expose the distinct foreign influence, are deliberately brought into these critical policy areas. Along with your investigations of the so-called ‘anti-national misdeeds of the NGO’, why is your government not probing the influence peddled by these agencies and entities who are primarily furthering the interests of foreign governments and private multinational corporations? Or, is it that only those who support your policies are helping the nation, while those raising legitimate and scientifically based dissent are all branded as traitors working against the national interest?

(See the letter written by Krishna Iyer, Romila Thapar, Praful Bidwai, Admiral Ramdas and others to Manmohan Singh, dated 5 March 2012).

In fact, this insidious foreign hand Manmohan Singh (who is trying to devastate Indian agriculture and forcing farmers to commit suicide), is behaving like a ruthless field marshal of a foreign invading army. The great Second Green Revolution has been declared with much fanfare after turning the fields of Punjab and Haryana barren and poisonous. Now this salesman of international agri-business is casting his greedy eyes on the eastern states of India.

The aim of Indo-US knowledge initiative on agriculture is a conspiracy to recolonise India. The plan is being implemented through the present day Mir Jafar Manmohan Singh.

By submitting the Biotechnology Authority Bill in Parliament, this foreign hand is trying to impose legislative sanction for destroying Indian agriculture and handing it over to US-based seed giants. GM crops will not only damage health and environment, but our seeds will be lost forever and the entire peasantry will be mortgaged to the international agri-business led by Monsanto.

In the context of GM crops, Manmohan Singh’s loyalty to his imperial masters is self-evident. GM crops were invented by the US; given their raison’d’etre of profit for the industry patent laws in that country and their commercialisation promoted at the behest of the White House to “foster the biotech industry” led by Monsanto, the international market leader holding 90% of crop patents. No GM crop is approved “as safe” by the US regulatory authorities in the US when they are put to market GM cotton and other crops. The industry has held sway; there is little regulatory oversight.

Indo US Nuclear deal, Kudankulam Struggle and the Foreign Hand

Yankee imperialism can never find such an obedient puppet like Manmohan Singh in the entire world who even staked his own Government to implement Indo US nuclear deal. The entire episode was akin to feudal loyalty of the peasant serf to the lord of manor. It is a well known fact that nuclear energy is an extremely obsolete screw driver technology which is not even preferred in Manmohan Singhs ideological Mecca the United States.

Manmohan Singh’s imperial masters who have themselves abandoned this in their own country found a loyal slave in Manmohan Singh to bail out their private nuclear corporations like Westinghouse to make super profits in a poor third world country like India, when in their own country the technology is destined for oblivion. After Fukushima disaster when the ruling classes of advanced capitalist countries are giving up nuclear power this intellectual slave of the neo-liberal west is so blind informationwise. So blocked in his thinking that while his master have outgrown the nuclear option this loyal slave still thrusting nuclear energy into our throat. Nuclear Energy in India becoming an instrument for super profits of American nuclear corporations. They have  imposed their obsolete and dangerous technology in India.

The Indo US nuclear deal was not only an instrument for bailing out the American nuclear corporations but it was an brazan attack on our sovereignty. It allows unrestricted entry into our nuclear installations by the Americans, it was an outrageous act by the US imperialists to consolidate their hold in South Asia for their defense and geo strategic interests. This foreign hand Manmohan Singh did everything in his capacity including striking a deal with Samajwadi Party to thrust the imperialist Indo US nuclear deal on Indian people. The loyal Foreign hand in India was at full play during the debate on Indo US nuclear deal. A conservative estimate puts it that the US nuclear corporation will make around 6 lakh crores of the business facilitated by the  Indo US nuclear deal, Uncle Sam will never find such loyal agent like Manmohan Singh any where else.

It is a common sense world over that nuclear energy is undesirable ad dangerous. The per megawatt cost of nuclear energy is much higher than any other forms of power generation. Yet this extremely dangerous and price wise exorbitant this killer energy is being forcibly  thrust on Indian people by this loyal Foreign hand Manmohan Singh Nuclear Energy hardly provides 1% of our power generation, and the official claim of being a clean and green source of energy is pure bullshit. The nuclear establishment clearly fails to account the embedded energy requirement to build a nuclear power plant. There is genuine and increasing public concern over the dangers of nuclear technology, particularly because the Indian nuclear establishment is directed by the government to expand their nuclear power activity on the basis of the import of untested reactors and in the absence of an independent and transparent nuclear safety regulator.

No nuclear power plant is 100% safe and for the government to make such a statement, as have been made only recently, stretch credulity and cone across as glib assurances in the back drop of the Fukushima accident, which has been particularly devastating and is fresh in people’s minds. The accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) Chernobyl (1986) also involved human error and weak nuclear safety regulation. Japan is a technologically savvy country. Despite this, they have not been able to respond till date to the sheer Scale of the Fukushima disaster to contain its impacts. In India, with our dense population, our lack of management skills, the unilateral decision-making at the highest political levels on the purchase of very complex and hither to untested nuclear reactors and technology systems with out involving the national safety evaluation process, refusal to constitute a totally independent and transparent nuclear safety regulatory system in the country, and our singularly inefficient disaster mitigation abilities, etc. could altogether land us in a major nuclear disaster soon, if these deficiencies are not immediately corrected, cost estimates of the Fukushima accident are currently placed at more than immediately corrected. Cost estimates of the Fukushima accident are currently placed at more than US $16 billion and it is still rising.

It will take decade to cleanup Fukushima and the significant strech of surrounding areas of radioactive contamination, and the clean up may never be complete, as evident from the Chernobyl experience where the Russians are setting up a sarcophagus to shield the stricken reactors from humanity and the environment.

Despite an assurance given by the Prime Ministers office on April 26, 2011 that “Action taken on previous safety reviews will be put in the public domain”, neither the DAE Nor NPCIL seems to make a mockery of the spirit of Article 19 of the constitution that entitles every citizen, as a fundamental right, to be informed about the functioning of any public authority, to the extent that its acts of omission and commission affects individual life. AERB, which is required to oversee and regulate the activities of DAE and NPCIC, continues to be subordinate to DAE and the new regulatory authority bill introduced by DAE before parliament, further more, does not ensure the independence of the regulator from the executive that controls it.

At many of our nuclear sites including Kudankulam, no truthful and comprehensive EIAs have been made and associated public hearing conducted as stipulated by law. Where representations of the local population have prepared scientific reports to the best of their ability, on their own, on pertinent safety deficiencies of a nuclear plant, and DAE has ignored those reports and not responded to the concerns expressed. A typical example is the recent PMANE expert groups report dated 12^th Febuary 2012, which the Kudankulam protest groups prepared and submitted to the DAE. This report highlights serious questions about the safety of the Kudankulam site based on geotechnical and oceanographic considerations, backed by independent and scientific data ands publications from academic and research institutions. Through all this, the AERB which must come forth and defend the safety of these plants, has maintained a stoney silence, whereas, in any civilized country, it is the regulator’s duty to defend what they have approved as safe. In India, it is because the AERB is a captive regulator who seeks permission of the DAE before they speak publicly on any issue.

Let us be clear that nuclear power, like most other power technologies, is not 100% safe and can never be. But, given that the downside risk of a nuclear accident can be immeasurable and the empirical evidence from the past three core meltdowns  the world has witnessed reinforces such a possibility, how safe it can be will depend on the integrity of our regulators and our leaders who on the other hand are constantly manipulating the system, including the safety regulator. Our government has not yet realized that there is a strong positive correlation between the transparency of a safety regulator and the degree of eventual safety obtained. While the public is kept entirely in the dark on how safety is assured, the Prime Minister personally continues to endorse the relentless claims of DAE and NPCIL that nuclear power technology is 100% safe. On that basic there is little reason for comfort.

The enactment of the current civil liability law by the government betrays the PM’s stance on safety claims. The government has gone out of its way to bow to pressures and demands exerted by the US and Western MNCs to ensure that civil nuclear liability law shields reactor suppliers from accident liability in excess of the ridiculously low cap of Rs 1500 crore (equivalent to US $ 300 million). Evidently, foreign reactor suppliers themselves are not as confident as the PM seems to be of the safety of their own reactors and want the Indian tax payer to bear what could be an astronomical part of the liability in case of a nuclear accident. The latest estimate of the Fukushima liability has touched US $ 16 billion, compared to the cap of US $ 300 million imposed by the civil nuclear liability law that the Indian government has enacted. Further more, yielding further to MNCS’ pressure, the government has framed the rules under the liability law, exceeding the limits set by the law itself, imposing limitations on the definition of “consequential” casts and the timespan within which the Indian operator can prefer accident claims against reactor suppliers. The easy terms that the Indian government has agreed to in this matter are truly a national betrayal; a constitutional aberration in letter and spirit.

As far as Kudankulam unit 1 and 2 are concerned, the sketchy EIA report completed several years ago does not contain a comprehensive risk analysis, estimation of the probabilities of core-melt down or major radioactive releases, the factoring in of potential human errors, or a proper site evaluation from the geotechnical and oceanography points of view. We believe not even a cursory examination of such issues was done when the site was finalized, or thereafter. Even if NPCIL claims that such an analysis has been carried out, they have not placed it in public domain. When DAE and NPCIL choose to function in a shroud of secrecy with the implicit approval of the Prime Minister, it hardly seems fair of prudent on the part of the government to demand that the people who are going to be directly affected should refrain from raising their concerns. Why should this be? If the government has decided to investigate NGOs who have allegedly received foreign funding, it is appropriate and even more necessary to investigate thoroughly, the circumstances under which unusual accommodation with western MNC’s has been made by the same government. (See the appendix to the letter written to the Prime Minister by eminent citizens)

The US pressure on the civil nuclear liability bill shows the impact of foreign hand in the nuclear matters in India. The struggle against the nuclear power plat at Kudankulam is the struggle against this foreign hand.

Conclusion: Manmohan Singh, operation Green hunt and state repression in India:

This foreign hand Manmohan Singh whose grips are tightening over throats of helpless peasants, Adivasis women, religious and national minorities has proved to be the most cruel henchman of Yankee imperialism in the third world, Manmohan Singh outclasses puppets like Batista, Marcos, Pinochet and other monsters in his competition to appease his imperial masters. How he crawls in front of his masters from the white house is proved by the fact he broke the tradition and protocol and went to receive Obama personally at the Delhi Airport. How he behaves as a starry eyed teenager was noticed when to meet President Bush he fell into love with him. This Uncle Sams favorite butler whose entire training has been in institutions like world bank designed for imperialist hegemony, has been ruthlessly commodifying every necessary life needs of Indian people, food, shelter, water, rivers, land, forest and so on. Life for the poor has become most difficult in the era of forward trading and speculative finance capital.

As soon as Manmohan Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister, he declared Maoists to be the greatest internal threat to India. Thus he declared a war on the poorest and poor people who are struggling for survival and dignity against snatching away their water, forest land, life livelihood and dignity. At the behest of his imperial masters Manmohan Singh has launched a war on his own people to snatch away their land, forest, mines and water for rapacious plunder by international and national corporates. He installed another running dog of imperialism Chidambaram as Home Minister who in equal desperation to please his imperial masters launched “Operation Green Hunt”. Tens of thousand of paramilitary forces with the tacit help of the army were deployed to severely crush the poorest of the poor’s uprising against total destitution and state repression. Hounds of the Indian ruling classes BSF, CRPF, COBRA, GREYHOUND were unleashed on the struggling Adivasis’ from Jangalmahal to Chattisgarh to Narayana Patna. Thousand were murdered, raped and tortured. Custodial torture, death and rape has became order of the day in the name of “Operation Green Hunt”. The recent brutal custodial torture of Soni Sori will put to shame even the most cruel dictators. There is a witch-hunt on oppressed nationalities and minorities. Kashmir, North-east and the Batla house encounter are stark indicators of what is being done to the oppressed nationalities and minorities in this country. The recent arrest of the Delhi based journalist Mr Kazmi under pressure from the imperialist Zionist lobby is a test case, how Manmohan Singh operates on behalf of CIA and Mossad. This Foreign hand Manmohan Singh’s hand is dripping in Blood from Kashmir to North-east, and regions from Bastar to Jangalmahal. We have seen blood dripping from this hand at Jaitapur, Kalinganagar, Nandigram, Narayan Patna, Kashipur, Sompetta, Bhatta parsaul and Tappal, the list is endless.

The people in Fatehabad, Jaitapur, Mithivirdi, Chutka are fighting to shove off this foreign hand off their back, to save themselves from the disasters of nuclear power plant. The struggle in Kudankulam is a struggle against this Foreign hand Manmohan Singh who is forcibly pushing the nuclear power plant into their throat. To save the people and environment of this country, and to free ourselves from the clutches of US imperialism this hand needs to be chopped off.

Blog:

www.stormingthewinterpalace.blogspot.com & www.revolutionarynucleus.blogspot.com

Email: asit1917@gmail.com

A NOTE ON THE ARMED FORCES (SPECIAL POWERS) ACT (AFSPA) AND IROM SHARMILA’S STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE

October 14, 2011)                                            

 "Today every pore of my body is screaming

For you Irom

The screams were suppressed since when…..

anger was coming out in my screams and protests

As I was screaming and shouting for your release at VT Station

My being had shaken within

To tell people about you, what you stand for

To tell people about draconian law AFSPA

I felt lighter”

“Anna Hazare you have won

After 85 hours of your FAST

The Lokpal bill will be implemented

After a decade of your fast

Still the AFSPA has not been repealed

Anna will you be able to stop the bloodshed

In the name of law”

(Kamayani Bali Mahabal)

THE ARMED FORCES (SPECIAL POWERS) ACT, 1958 (AFSPA)

The lofty proclamations of liberal democracy – like: equality, liberty and right to life are the social contracts signed by the Modern Nation-States to legitimize itself, values as liberal democracy, where citizens’ rights are sacrosanct, where individual rights are supposed to be the foundation in the structure of governance mechanisms including the coercive apparatus like the army, paramilitary, and the police.

However, the reality is different. The existence of extremely draconian acts like the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act  (UAPA),Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, National Security Act, and various provisions in the penal code like ‘sedition’ make a mockery of the claims of liberal democratic character of the Indian state. These claims are equally fraudulent and hilarious as the proclamations are made by the representations of the Indian ruling classes in forums like the United Nations, G20, World Economic Forum, etc. The propaganda machines for the neo-liberal exploitation parade India as the largest democracy and an emerging economic power-house. While the fact that more than 77% of the population lives a sub-human existence of 20 rupees a day, the trampling of the human rights of the poor Dalits, women, national ethnic and religious minorities with impunity is the order of the day. Operation Green Hunt is one of the prime examples. The rights provided in the Indian Constitution – like: right to life and dignity, expression, etc., are reduced to cruel jokes on a hapless people. Numerous false encounter killings, custodial deaths/rape, rape of women, gang-rapes, torture, disappearances, etc., are the stark realities of the so-called largest Democracy and Emerging Economic Power.

Recently discovered thousands of unmarked graves in Kashmir are a horrifying testimony of the state of human right to life and the legality of extrajudicial killings, which of course involves both rape and murder.

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 (AFSPA) is one of the most draconian legislations used by the Indian rulers to enslave and oppress peoples under the garb of fighting separatism. For the past sixty years the North-East, and for almost two decades Kashmir, both have been virtually under army rule. This rule by the army has had a drastic effect on the daily life of the average citizen residing in the North-East and Kashmir.

There is a state of de-facto abrogation of fundamental rights, including the all-important right to life, and large-scale encroachment by the army on the life and liberty of the citizens in the above-mentioned areas. AFSPA violates the fundamental constitutional rights of right to life, liberty, equality, freedom of speech and expression, peaceful assembly, moving freely, practice of any profession, protection against arbitrary arrest and freedom of religion enshrined in Articles 21, 14, 19, 22 and 25 of the Constitution.

AFSPA has been used in these regions for thousands of deaths, custodial deaths/rape, torture, encirclement of the civilian population, sadistic combing operations, looting of private citizen’s property, etc. Thousands of youth have simply disappeared - another euphemism for encounter deaths.

Draconian laws are antithetical to modern democracy since they overturn the fundamental tenets of modern jurisprudence on which democracy rests, viz., a person is presumed to be innocent till proven guilty. The genre of draconian laws thereby makes it difficult for persons booked under it to redress their grievances and get relief, such as bail. It grants extraordinary power to the investigating agencies (police, etc.) to elicit confessions, etc. Thus, the act empowers the investigating agencies to easily frame a person whom they suspect to be guilty.

Provisions of the AFSPA are far more severe. The provisions of the act provide special powers to the Governor, whereby he can at his own discretion (without consulting the duly elected Chief Minister), by notification in the Official Gazette, declare the whole or part of the state or union territory to be disturbed area. Bypassing the duly elected and representative political authority is tantamount to de-facto imposition of emergency.

Unlike other draconian laws, the AFSPA does not stop at providing special powers to the investigating agency to elicit confession and to conduct search and arrest operations. It in fact provides the investigating agency with absolute powers whereby, even a havaldar, if he is of the opinion that it is necessary to fire or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, can make use of the provisions of the act, thereby, harming the democratic fabric of the country.

More disturbingly, even while it provides the Armed Forces with such absolute powers, it also provides them with immunity from any legal accountability. Even though the acts are in operation in the states and union territories of the country, the elected initiate legal proceedings, let alone administrative, against Armed Forces without prior sanction of the Central Government. (License to Kill, INSAF, 2005)

Provisions of the Act

Section 1 defines the title of the Act.

Section 2(a) limits the jurisdiction of the Act to the seven states of the North-East; of late, it has been extended to Kashmir.

(b) Defines ‘disturbed area’ as an area notified under Section 3 to be a disturbed area.

Section 3 states that if the Governor of a State or Central Government is of the opinion that an area is in such a disturbed or dangerous state that the use of armed forces in aid of civil power is necessary, then either of them can declare it to be ‘disturbed area’ by notification in the Gazette.

Section 4 gives the following special powers to any Commissioned Officer, Warrant Officer or Non-Commissioned Officer of the armed forces in a disturbed area:

(a)    If in his opinion, it is necessary for maintenance for public order to fire even to the extent of causing death or otherwise use force against a person who is acting in contravention of an order prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons or the carrying of weapons or of ‘things capable of being used as weapons’.

(b)   If in his opinion, it is necessary to do so, then to destroy any arms dump or fortified position, any shelter from which armed attacks are made or are ‘likely to be made’, and any structure used as training camp for armed volunteers or as a hide-out for armed gangs or absconders.

(c)    Arrest without warrant any person who has committed a cognizable offence or against whom a reasonable suspicion exists that he has committed or is likely to commit a cognizable offence and to use whatever force is necessary to affect the arrest.

(d)   To enter and search without warrant any premises to make an arrest or to recover any person wrongfully confined or to recover any arms, ammunition, explosive substance or suspected stolen property.

Section 5 makes it mandatory for the army to hand over a person arrested under the Act to the nearest police station with least possible delay.

Section 6 lays down that prosecution, suit or other legal proceedings can be instituted against a person acting under the act, only after getting previous sanction of the Central Government.

Historical Background of AFSPA

The AFSPA gives the armed forces wide powers to shoot, arrest and search all in the name of aiding civil power. It was first applied to the north-eastern states of Assam and Manipur, and was amended in 1972 to extend to all the seven states in the north-eastern region of India. They are Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland, also known as the ‘Seven Sisters’. The enforcement of the AFSPA has resulted in innumerable incidents of arbitrary detention, torture, rape and looting by security personnel. This legislation is sought to be justified by the Government of India, on the plea that it is required to stop the North-East states from seceding from the Indian Union. There is a strong movement for self-determination which precedes the formation of the Indian Union.

As the great Himalayan range dividing South and Central Asia runs down the east, it takes a southward curve and splits into lower hill ranges. The hills are punctuated by valleys and the valleys are washed by the rivers that drain into the Bay of Bengal. Waves of people settled in these blue hills and green valleys at various times in history. They brought with them cultures and traditions. The new interacted with the old and evolved into the unique cultural mosaic that characterizes the region.

Through the centuries, these hills and valleys have bridged South, South-East, and Central Asia. On today’s geo-political map, a large part of the original region constitutes the seven states of the Republic of India, but its political, economic and socio-cultural systems have always been linked with South-East Asia. The great Hindu and Muslim empires that reigned over the Indian sub-continent never extended east of the Brahmaputra River.

India’s British colonizers were the first to break this barrier. In the early 19^th century they moved in to check Burmese expansion into today’s Manipur and Assam. The British, with the help of the then Manipur King, Gambhir Singh, crushed the Burmese imperialist dream and the treaty of Yandabo was signed in 1828. Under this treaty, Assam became a part of British India, and British continued to influence the political affairs of the region.

This undue interference eventually led to the bloody Anglo-Manipuri conflict of 1891. The British reaffirmed their position but were cognizant of the ferocious spirit of independence of these people and did not administer directly but only through the King.

It was during the Second World War, when the Japanese tried to enter the Indian sub-continent through this narrow corridor, that the strategic significance of the region to the Indian armed forces was realized. With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a disenchanted Japanese had to retreat from the Imphal and Kohima fronts; however the importance of control over the region subsequently remained a priority for the Government of India.

With the end of the war, the global political map was changed overnight. As the British were preparing to leave Asia, the Political Department of the British Government planned to carve out a buffer state consisting of the Naga Hills, Mikir Hills, Sadiya Area, Balipara Tract, Manipur, Lushai Hills, Khasi Hills, and hills in Assam, as well as the Chin Hills and the hills of northern Burma. The impending departure of the British created confusion and turmoil over how to fill the political vacuum they would leave behind. Ultimately, the various territories were parceled out to Nehru’s India, Jinnah’s Pakistan, and Aung Sang’s Burma, according to strategic requirements. As expected, there were some rumblings between the new Asiatic powers on who should get how much.

Compromises were made, and issues were finally settled in distant capitals, to the satisfaction of the new rulers. The people who had been dwelling in these hills and valleys for thousands of years were systematically excluded from the consultation process. The Indian greed of the disputed British colonial cake in this region constitutes the present “Seven Sisters” states of the North-East.

Over the years, local democratic movements evolved as the people aspired to a new social and political order. One important example is a strong popular democratic movement against feudalism and colonialism in Manipur led by Hijam Irabot. After the departure of the British, the Kingdom of Manipur was reconstituted as a constitutional monarchy by passing the Manipur Constitution Act, 1947.

Elections were held under the new constitution. A legislative assembly was formed. In 1949 V.P. Menon, a senior representative of Government of India, invited the King to a meeting on the pretext of discussing the deteriorating law and order situation in the state in Shillong. Upon his arrival, the King was forced to sign under duress. The agreement was never ratified in the Manipur Legislative Assembly. Rather, the Assembly was dissolved and Manipur was kept under the charge of a Chief Commissioner. There were strong protests, but by using violent brutal state repression, the Government of India has been ruthlessly suppressing the democratic movement in Manipur.

The Deception in Nagaland

At the beginning of the century, the inhabitants of the Naga Hills, which extend across the Indo-Burmese border, came together under the banner of Naga National Council (NNC), aspiring for a common homeland and self-governance. As early as 1929, the NNC petitioned the Simon Commission, which was examining the feasibility of future of self-governance of India.

The Naga leaders forcefully articulated the demand of self-governance once British pulled out of India. Gandhi publicly announced that Nagas had every right to be independent. Under the Hydari Agreement signed between NNC and British administration, Nagaland was granted protected status for ten years, after which the Nagas would decide whether they should stay in the Indian Union or not. However, shortly after the British withdrew, the new Indian rulers colonized Nagaland and claimed it to be Indian Territory.

Articulating the democratic aspirations of the people of Nagaland, The Naga National Council proclaimed Nagaland’s independence. In retaliation, Indian authorities arrested the Naga leaders. The AFSPA is one of the instruments which the Indian state used to violently suppress the democratic aspirations of the people of North-East.

In 1975, some Naga leaders held talks with the Government of India which resulted in the Shillong agreement - this agreement was forced on them. Democratic forces of Nagaland smelt a rat in this deceptive agreement and rallied the people behind them for the national liberation of Nagas. One of the voices which articulates the democratic demand of Naga people for national liberation is National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN).

Mizoram

In the Lushai Hills of Assam in the early sixties, a famine broke out. A relief team requested for help from the Government of India. But there was little help. The relief team organised themselves into the Mizo National Front (MNF) to liberate themselves from the neocolonial occupation of India. Against the democratic aspirations of the people, the Indian army moved in. This is the only place in India where the Indian security forces actually aerially bombed its own civilian population. The armed forces compelled people to leave their homes and dumped them on the road-side to set up new villages, so that the armed forces would be able to control them. This devasted the structure of the Mizo society. In 1986, the Mizo Accord was signed between MNF and Government of India. This accord was as deceptive as the Shillong Accord made with the Nagas earlier.

Much of this bloodshed and genocides by the Indian state could have been avoided if the Indian ruling classes had listened to the voices of democratic aspirations of the people of Nagaland and the rights of colonized nationalities. This brutal, force accession was based on a feudal, brahamanical and patriarchal notion of the so-called Indian mainstream based on the dominant Aryan brahamanical culture, destroying the cultures and aspirations of national, linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities, in the process eliminating indigenous populations.

Culturally the high caste dominated feudal Indian society is totally incompatible with the ethics of North-East cultures, which were by and large democratic and egalitarian. To make matters worse, the Indian ruling classes forcibly clubbed these different non-feudal ethnic groups with Adivasis cheating them in the name of scheduled tribes and in the process forcing them to be marginalized and stigmatized by the upper caste ruling elites of India.

The languages of the North-East are of the Tibeto-Chinese family rather than the Indo-Aryan of Dravidian like the rest of India. Until the later Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, none of the Tibeto–Chinese languages were recognized as Indian languages.

Politically dependent, the North-East is being economically undermined; the traditional trade routes with South-East Asia and Bangladesh have been closed. It was kept out of the Government of India’s massive infrastructural development in the five year plans. Gradually, it became the neocolonial hinterland for exploitation by the Indian state, where local industries were made worthless and now the people are entirely dependent on goods and businesses owned predominantly by those from the Indo-Gangetic plains. The new Indian unscrupulous businesses pull the economic strings of this region.

All the states of the North-East are connected to India by the ‘chicken neck’ - a narrow corridor between Bangladesh and Bhutan. At partition, the area was cut off from the nearest port of Chittagong, in what is now Bangladesh, reducing traffic to and from the region to a trickle. The states in the region are largely unconnected to India’s vast rail system. Indian ruling classes freely exploit the natural resources of the North-East. Assam produces one-fourth of all petroleum for India, yet it is processed outside of Assam, so the state does not receive the revenues. Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram are far far behind. In a rough calculation, in the infrastructural development, North-East region lags behind the rest of the country by more than 40%. Even strictly neutral and independent observers have pointed out that in the North-East insurgency and underdevelopment have been closely linked in such a situation that strong-arm tactics will only help to further alienate the people.

The shifting demographic balance due to large-scale immigration from within and outside the country is another source of frustration. The indigenous people fear that they will be outnumbered by outsiders in their own land. Laborers from Bihar and Bengal, who live under rigidly feudal, casteist socio-economic conditions in their own states, are ready for all kinds of menial jobs at much lower wages. As they pour in, more and more local laborers are being edged out of their jobs. Illegal immigration from Bangladesh and Nepal is also perceived as a threat. In Tripura, the indigenous population has been reduced to a mere 25% of the total population of the state because of large-scale immigration from the North-East and Bangladesh.

The Indian states primary interest in the North-East was strategic, and so was its response to problems. A series of repressive laws were passed by the Government of India in order to deal with the rising national liberation aspirations of the people of North-East. In 1953, the Assam Maintenance of Public Order (Autonomous District) Regulation Act was passed. It was applicable to the then Naga Hills and Tuensang districts. It empowered the Governor to impose collective fines, prohibit public meetings, and detain anybody without a warrant.

On 22 May 1958 (a mere 12 days after the Budget Session of Parliament was over), the Armed Forces (Assam & Manipur) Special Powers Ordinance was passed. A bill was introduced in the Monsoon session of Parliament that year. Amongst those who cautioned against such blanket powers to the Army included the then Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha Mr. P.N. Sapru. In a brief discussion that lasted for three hours, in the Rajya Sabha, Parliament approved the Armed Forces (Assam & Manipur) Special Powers Act retrospectively from 22 May 1958.

Enactment of AFSPA From Colonialism to Neocolonialism

After the transfer of power in 1947, the Indian ruling classes enacted draconian laws like AFSPA for the neocolonial exploitation and to suppress the aspirations of democracy and national liberation in North-East. Since two decades, it has been imposed in Kashmir, resulting in thousands of extrajudicial murders, torture, rapes and custodial killings.

My friend Nayan writes – With the so-called de-colonization, India along with its South Asian neighbors, entered a period of socio-economic restructuring, declaring itself a democratic secular republic, whence it sought to self-fashion its path of economic progress and development springing from its backward stagnant agrarian economy. The much trumpeted Nehruvian welfare state was the result - with its techno managerial elite and a vision of socialist tinged, non-aligned path, it was a model that was built on the back of a heavy security-centric approach in its periphery, where resided a population which was to be excluded from this vision, only to be integrated as the ‘other’ on the ‘centers’ terms whenever it saw fit. Thus it points to the intrinsic link between development, modernization and exclusion which can be almost through a strict militization. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 or AFSPA, which was a continuation of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance of 1942 of British colonial regime, is the clearest instance of this.

North-East India is one of South Asia’s most contested spaces. Contestations have taken many forms - from armed opposition to the Indian state, movement for separate federal states and autonomous units based on ethnic lines, to struggles against extractive industries and for more funds from central government. The AFSPA stands almost in centrality of creating spaces for such contestation, with the content of the Act having changed little over the last 50 years and impacting North-East India and South Asia in profound ways. The Act itself stems from the specific context of North-East’s integration into post-colonial India emerged out of a dominant mainstream Hindu (even as enshrined ‘secular’) Nationalist imagination. Long drawn self-determination struggles, first inaugurated by Naga rebellion who asserted their own independent history, became the defining characteristic of the region which is materially, and ideationally a space distinct from the larger vision of a developing India. While India contains diverse regions and holistic national polity or even a national society however unassimilated, there is a strong belief in both the Indian mainland and in most of the North-East itself, that an unbridgeable binary/gap exists in the two regions. This then makes one understand how a law like the AFSPA with its extraordinary provisions by any measure, persists in India’s democratic polity for 52 years.

Disunity as a factor that led to British rule over South Asia had been a part and parcel of the awareness of nationalist awakening since the 19^th century. The trauma of partition at independence accentuated the anxiety of ‘disunity’. Emergence of the post-revolutionary regime in 1949 in China heightened the sense of persecutory anxiety once represented by ‘castrating Muslim plunderers’ and ‘bad British-colonial mother’. Thus, long before insurgency became the defining characteristic of North-East, referring to Assam, the land of nationalist Gopinath Bordoloi, and political leadership of Manipur, Sardar Patel wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru, “The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India. Even the Darjeeling and Kalimpong areas are not free from pro-Mongoloid prejudices” defining the population clearly as the ‘cultural other’.

While there are other instances of “Merger Agreements” being signed in situations of stress and duress (Jammu & Kashmir) as well as of military intervention (the police action that ended Nizam’s rule in Hyderabad in 1948), what makes the Manipur situation unique is the steam-rolling of democratic institutions that the merger represents, the irony of a state (India) which at that time aspired to be a democratic  republic, but was not one yet, effectively undermining the foundations of an existing democratic state through a basically military manoeuvre, makes the case of Manipur quite exceptional.

That all this was justified not by reference to the ‘will of the people’ of the territories concerned (as was the case with Hyderabad) or by a response to internal aggression (as is said to be the case with Jammu & Kashmir), but by invoking a ‘strategic necessity’ is all the more revealing. The reason cited for the decision to ‘take over’: Manipur is a ‘border state’ and ‘backward’, therefore its take over is a ‘strategic necessity’. These were the expressions used by V.P. Menon (then – Home Minister Sardar Vallabhai Patel’s able bureaucratic lieutenant, who has been described as the ‘Arch Manoeuverer’ of ‘Integration’) when referring to the merger of Manipur with the Indian Dominion. The fact that he uses the expression ‘take over’ to mean ‘integration’ speaks for itself. (Nayanjyoti)

A ‘border state’ that is also ‘backward’ needs to be ‘taken over’ because it is a ‘strategic necessity’. A ‘backward’ people need not be consulted about whether they would actually like to be ‘taken over’. A battalion marches in, and a population is told by the armed forces of a state that is still trying to get its own constitution together, that the constitutions that ‘backward’ people give to themselves, or the democratic institutions that they evolve in the course of their ‘history’, are of no consequence. What is of consequence is the ‘strategic necessity’ of the emerging Indian state, trying to live up to the imperatives of its imperial inheritance (see Bimol Akoijam - Another 9/11, Another Act of Terror - The ‘Embedded Disorder’ of the AFSPA).

Writing further about the nature of AFSPA, Nayan says:

A cursory reading of AFSPA reveals that the Act is an act of legitimizing the involvement of the military in the domestic space, not supplementing by replacing ‘civil power’. The military character of the Act is reflected in multiple ways. AFSPA allows ‘use of armed forces’, defined as ‘military forces and the air forces operating as land forces’ and ‘any other armed forces’ of ‘the union’ (Section 3) in the domestic space.

Section 2(c) of the Act also clearly shows the close affinity between AFSPA and those laws governing the military, such as the Army Act (1950). It reads, “All other words and expressions used herein but not defined in the Air Force Act, 1950, or the Army Act, 1950, shall have the meaning respectively assigned to them in those Acts”.

In six sections, being one of the most shortest Acts to be passed in the history of the Indian legislation, it unmasks the military paradigm involved. For example, what constitutes the ‘disturbed and dangerous condition’ for an area to be declared a ‘disturbed area’ in not defined at all (Section 3). All that is required, is that an area be declared as a ‘disturbed area’. It is as good or bad as declaring war, once it is so declared, what it means is clear. In fact, the principle of war is unmistakable here. Just like declaring war, once an area is declared as ‘disturbed area’, the personnel of the ‘armed forces’ simultaneously acquire powers to us ‘force as may be necessary’ based on their ‘opinion’ and ‘suspicion’ to effect ‘arrest without warrant’ or ‘fire upon or otherwise use force, even to causing death’. (Section 4).

Also, unlike assumption of innocence of a ‘suspect’ or ‘accused’ in the domestic space, hostile intention of the inhabitants of the alien and hostile space is taken for granted for the military personnel. Thus, the ‘opinion’ and ‘suspicion’ of the commanding officer of a military formation serves as the basis for exercising power to ‘fire upon or otherwise use force’ which he thinks is ‘necessary’ not only to ‘search any premises or destroy any shelter and structure’ but also ‘arrest or even to causing death’. (Section 4).

The presumption of hostile intent as the legitimate basis for the ‘armed forces’ to take action, characteristic of a war zone, is highlighted when these powers can also be exercised for acts that are ‘likely to be made’ or ‘about to be committed’. Besides, the nature of the power conferred upon the armed forces, the fact that commanding officers are given the power to judge and execute action on his own, only proves that the Act is based on the business of war. In a ‘war situation’, any officer - irrespective of whether he is a Commissioned, Junior Commissioned or Non-Commissioned Officer - leading his men in the field has to be the judge as well as part of the body that executes his judgments. In the context of ‘maintaining law and order’ within the domestic space, the same person or body cannot be the judge as well as the one who executes the judgment.

Moreover, ‘the soldiers’ operational space, that is ‘alien and hostile’, is a relatively undifferentiated space and it does not require elaborate conditions and procedures as in the case of the differentiated domestic space. Hence, unlike other Acts (including the erstwhile POTA) which provide explicit conditions and elaborate procedures running into pages, AFSPA is hardly a one-page Act with six sections. All that the Act requires is to restate the assumption of taken-for-granted hostile intent (based on ‘opinion’ and ‘suspicion’) of the inhabitants of the alien and hostile space (‘disturbed’) to exercise the power to eliminate, destroy or neutralize the latter (Section 4).

AFSPA does not have any provision for interrogation and/or gathering evidence. Nor is it like any other so-called ‘special laws’, meant to ‘facilitate’ trial or ‘enhance’ conviction rate. It is plainly an instrument of war empowering the military and forces operating under it to eliminate, neutralize and destroy the enemy or ‘suspected enemies’, which more often than not practically include everybody residing in the ‘disturbed area’. Enough instances are there to show that civilians in a ‘disturbed area’ are also inherent targets under the Act.

Civilians are always at the receiving end of the Act, as in any other war zone in alien territory forming part and parcel of the ‘collateral damage’ thus making indiscriminate firing and killing of civilians, including women and children, by security forces intrinsic to the use rather than deployment of the military, in concrete terms insurgency has spread and thrived in the North-East. This begs the question: What has the military been doing all these decades and how has AFSPA furthered counter-insurgency? Such questions, along with subversion of democratic institutions and principles through prolonged and continuous deployment of the armed forces under AFSPA, raise questions of militarism i.e., a ‘phenomenon by which a nation’s armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of achieving national security or even commitment to the integrity of the government structure of which they are a part, which goes far beyond the idea of the military or use of military per se in counter-insurgency.’

Interestingly, it was observed that American troops deployed and engaged in actual combat in the recent Iraq war primarily came from the American soil, not from its military bases in foreign countries. In this sense, the ‘American network of (military) bases is not a sign of military preparedness but of militarism’. In a similar sense, continuous enforcement of AFSPA and deployment of troops under the Act seem to serve as a reminder of a ‘presence’ rather than ‘combating’ the insurgency per se in the region. The columns of ‘armed forces’ during ‘combing operations’ and troops patrolling the streets, towns and villages have not restricted the activities of the insurgents who are as active as, if not more than, they were twenty years ago. But these movements and activities of the ‘armed forces’ definitely convey the presence of the might of the Indian state to the people. This reminder is also communicated in frightening dimensions by the so-called ‘excesses’ in which men, women and children are killed in ‘retaliation’ to attacks on the ‘armed forces’ by the ‘insurgents’. More than being cases of ‘human rights abuses’, those ‘excesses’ for which no accountability can be fixed on anybody are reminders of the militarism that has subverted the democratic institutions and ethos in the North-East. (See Nayanjyoti: Integrate, Develop or “Shooting-to-Kill on Suspicion” in a South Asian Periphery, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in North-East India. Term paper submitted by Nayanjyoti to CSSS/SSS/JNU.)   

IROM SHARMILA’S STRUGGLE AND

HER BODY AS A SITE OF CONTESTATION

“Indian Army Rape Us” read the banner which the women were holding when they protested against the murder and death of Manorama Devi in front of Army Headquarters in Imphal (Manipur) in the year 2004. Thangjam Manorama, a Manipuri woman, was raped and murdered by jawans of Rashtriya Rifles in July 2004. Testifying before the (retired) Justice Upendra Inquiry Commission, instituted to probe the circumstances leading to the death of Ms. Manorama, her bereaved mother said that around seven or eight personnel of the Assam Rifles (AR) violently entered their house in the intervening night of July 10 and 11, and one of the personnel pointing his gun at her, asked about Ms. Manorama. “At that point of time, Manorama came out of her room and the AR men pounced on her and took her towards the verandah”. She further said that Manorama was dragged outside the house and the personnel severely beat her up, and that she could hear the ‘muffled voice’ of her daughter. After sometime, the personnel brought Manorama back into the house. At this time, the mother said that Manorama “was clutching her phanek (a sarong-like traditional garment worn by Manipuri women) with her left hand”, and that her “shirt was unbuttoned”. The personnel made out an arrest memo and got Manorama’s mother to put her thumb impression on the memo. Before taking her away, the personnel allowed Ms. Manorama to change into a new phanek and shirt. The mother said that the lifeless body was discovered at Yaipharok Manik village the next morning. The autopsy on Manorama’s body was conducted at the Regional Institute of Medical Sciences hospital in Imphal, the state capital, after the Irilbung police picked up her body. Testifying before the Upendra Commission, the doctors who conducted the autopsy confirmed the presence of semen on the undergarments of the victim, and more than half a dozen bullet injuries, including the genitals.

The spokesman of the security forces, while claiming ‘responsibility’ for the ‘killing of a hard core PLA cadre’, stated that they had acted on the basis of ‘specific information’ about the presence of PLA cadres at Bamon Kampu area. They went on to state that, on this basis, an “AR team rushed to the area and apprehended Manorama. During interrogation, she disclosed that she possessed an AK-47 rifle and was willing to take the army personnel to recover the weapon. However, on the way, she was gunned down by the AR personnel as she made a bid to escape by jumping down from the army vehicle. One radio set, hand grenade and some incriminating documents were recovered from her possession.”

On the face of it, these accounts seem no different from the familiar stories that emanate from the ‘normal’ world of counter-insurgency operations in the North-East.

The bereaved mother’s statement could have been any ‘unofficial’ account, made only to be delegitimised by official spokesmen as ‘baseless allegations’ made by vested parties against the patriotic soldiers of the Indian security forces fighting the ‘enemy within’. The post-hoc statements of the army officials would have been the final say on the ‘official’ reality of the situation on how they have eliminated an ‘enemy’.

This time, however, there was a ‘Freudian slip’ that revealed the inner reality beneath the normality of hitherto familiar counter-insurgency narratives in the North-East. Havaldar Suresh Kumar of the Assam Rifles, who signed the arrest memo, inscribed on the memo that Ms. Manorama was being arrested as a ‘suspect’ and that nothing had been taken from her house or her person.

There is no legal ‘absurdity’ in the killing of Ms. Manorama under the AFSPA. What does ring hollow is the incredulity of a narrative that features a group of armed men of the mighty India military having necessarily to fire more half-a-dozen bullets in order to subdue a women dressed in phanek while she was allegedly trying to escape from them by jumping down from their vehicle, and that too late at night. Havaldar Suresh Kumar’s inscription on the arrest memo says that nothing was recovered from her - meaning she was un-armed. The post-hoc statement by the spokesman of the security forces, on the other hand, mentions the recovery of a ‘hand grenade’, a ‘radio set’ and ‘incriminating documents’ from ‘her possession’.

The death of Manorama opened out issues that became too unpalatable for the brutalized people of Manipur.

Indeed, for many, this was the last straw. Venting decades of suppressed rage, a group of prominent women in the community protested by disrobing and staging a “Naked Protest” in front of the Assam Rifles Headquarters in the heart of Imphal City. They shouted, “Rape us, kill us, take our flesh”, while attempting to break open the gate of the AR Headquarters. In immediate response, an indefinite curfew was imposed in Imphal and the surrounding areas (seeBimol Akoijam - Another 9/11, Another Act of Terror - The ‘Embedded Disorder’ of the AFSPA).

The rape and murder of Manorama is not an isolated case, but thousands of these kinds of sexual assaults and murders happen to the women in the North-East every day since the past sixty years.

The Indian state and its killing machines use the body of the women in these areas to exercise the control on behalf of the Indian state.

Irom Sharmila has been on a fast for the revocation of AFSPA since 11 years; her body also has become a site of contest for legality and illegality of the Indian state. Indian state, whose constitution guarantees right to life and liberty, also kills, rapes and murders thousands of women every passing year. Irom Sharmila has been arrested, rearrested and force-fed many times ostensibly to make her live, this was done by the authorities to stop her from dying - invoking the attempt to suicide of the Indian penal code.

On the other hand, Indian security forces go on killing, raping and torturing women every day.

This exposes the farce of legality of the Indian system which has been imposed on the body of Irom Sharmila.

The 39-year-old Manipuri is about to complete 11 years of a hunger strike in protest against AFSPA that gives security forces powers to kill with impunity. The UPA promised as far back as 2004, to replace the act with a ‘more humane’ law but has shown little interest in taking up the task in the face of opposition from the internal security establishment. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram recently admitted there was no consensus within the Government on the issue. Ms. Sharmila’s fast began on 3^rd November 2000, a day after security personnel shot down 10 people at a bus stand just outside Imphal. Within days, she was detained by the police. Since then, she has been nasally force-fed a liquid concoction of nutrients in a hospital, which serves as her prison. After every year in detention, she is released for a day and rearrested for attempting to commit suicide - because she refuses to call off her fast until the government repeals the legislation, which is in force in Manipur, Assam, Nagaland and parts of Arunachal Pradesh, besides Jammu & Kashmir. Hers may be the longest hunger strike in recorded history but it has generated little or no interest outside Manipur. In recent days, the attention Ms. Sharmila has received in the wake of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption hunger strike has served to highlight her personal life. She comes out as a resolute but lonely woman, caught between her iconic importance to the struggle against AFSPA and her human desire to lead a normal life, therefore making her struggle an epic struggle in modern Indian history.

CONCLUSION

“In fact, by legitimizing the use of military force in the internal affairs of the state beyond what is already provided in the Criminal Procedure Code and the provisions of emergency in the constitution, AFSPA seeks to supplant rather than supplement civil authority with military authority in the administration of everyday life. There is no question that if exigency demands, the State, under the Indian constitution, can always promulgate an ordinance to use its military might to deal with that exigency. But to convert such an ordinance into a regular law that stays in place for almost half a century is to entrench a military structure and ethos in the polity and structure of the state. It sets into motion the process of reproduction and appropriation of the military structure and ethos by other instruments of the State (the paramilitary and police) as well as civil society itself. Ultimately, it leads to a complete subversion of the basic foundation of society and polity. It blurs the necessary distinctions between the police and the military, between the civilian and the combatant, and between ‘domestic’ and ‘alien’ space. This is what has happened in Manipur.” (Bimol Akoijam)

As Bimol Akoijam says, the single Act AFSPA has given rise to a plethora of ‘acts of horror’, like the thousands of murders, rapes, custodial deaths/rapes, disappearances, torture, encirclements, combing operations and genocides. Recently discovered unmarked graves in Kashmir are a chilling testimony to these hard realities of everyday living in Kashmir and North-East.

The list of such acts in the North-East is long, but to name a few well-known cases, from 1980 onwards, they include the massacres of civilians at Heirangoithong (Manipur) in 1984; at Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS Manipur) in 1995; at Malom (Manipur) in 2000; the horror of army torture and violence on civilians during Operation Blue Bird (Manipur) in 1987 and Operation Rhino (Assam) in 1991; indiscriminate firing on civilians by armed forces personnel when a tyre of their own vehicle burst in the town of Kohima (Nagaland) in March 1995; the shelling and destruction of the town of Makokchung (Nagaland) in 1994; the enforced disappearances of Loken and Lokendro (Manipur) in 1980; and the rape of Miss N. Sanjita [who subsequently committed suicide (Manipur)] in 2003.

I would conclude by stating a fact-finding report-cum-demand by SAHELI-PUDR fact sheets.

SAHELI and PUDR Fact Sheets and Demands

Outside the North-East too, human rights violations in Jammu & Kashmir under the AFSPA are commonplace, including disappearances, torture, arbitrary killings and numerous instances of mass rape of Kashmiri women by security forces.

AFSPA: Constitutional Contradictions

The large-scale violations of fundamental rights in the north-eastern states is a direct consequence of the provisions of the AFSPA, of areas declared as Disturbed Areas under Section No. 3 and the simultaneous acquiring of wide powers by army personnel under Section 4 of the Act.

The AFSPA which grants armed forces personnel the power to shoot to arrest, search, seize and even shoot-to-kill, violate the Right to Life enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution of India which guarantees the right to life to all people.

The AFSPA also violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). India signed the ICCPR in 1978, taking on the responsibility of securing the rights guaranteed by the Covenant to all its citizens. In particular, the Act is in contravention of Article 6 of the ICCPR guaranteeing the right to life.

Crucially, the AFSPA effectively undermines civil authority. For instance:

After the Oinam incident (1987) the Chief Minister wrote to the Union Home Minister, “The civil law has, unfortunately, ceased to operate in Senapati District Manipur due to excesses committed by the Assam Rifles with complete disregard shown to the civil administration….the Deputy Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police were wrongfully confined, humiliated and prevented from discharging their official duties by the Security Forces”. And consequent to the Kohima incident in 1995, even the Superintendent of Police, Kohima, was stopped at gun point by army personnel.

At the same time, the AFSPA is an emergency legislation that constitutionally requires to be reviewed every 6 months. Yet it has been imposed in Manipur and other states of the North-East for years on end, which contributes the misuse of unbridled and arbitrary powers by the armed forces.

END THE LAW THAT GIVES THE ARMED FORCES IMMUNITY FOR RAPE, MURDER, TORTURE AND OTHER HEINOUS CRIMES.

END THE ARMED FORCES (SPECIAL POWERS) ACT, 1958

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958: A Fact Sheet

[A fact sheet adapted by the SAHELI and PUDR team from earlier reports and submissions to the Jeevan Reddy Committee]

Over the last five decades, heavy militarization in the North-East has taken its toll on normal civilian life and led to innumerable instances of violations committed against the civilian populations there. Encounter deaths, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, rape and torture have been a regular feature among the relentless series of atrocities meted out to the people by the army with impunity, especially in areas where they are protected by legislations like AFSPA.

Some of the most widely known incidents of such excesses in the North-East are:

·        Army torture and violence against the villagers of Oinam (Manipur) in 1987 who were detained in army camps, beaten mercilessly, given electric shocks. At least 3 women were raped, 15 villagers killed, and many left permanently disabled.

·        The gang-rape of the women of Ujanmaidan (Tripura) by security forces.

·        The terror wreaked by the army in Assam during Operation Rhino in 1991.

·        The shelling of the town of Ukhrul (Manipur) with mortars in May 1994 by the Assam Rifles when they violently ransacked the town, leaving many homes damaged, over a hundred men and women bleeding with serious injuries and 3 dead.

·        Four women raped at gunpoint, and homes and shops set on fire by the Maratha Light Infantry, killing other people in December 1994 in Mokokchung (Nagaland).

·        Indiscriminate firing on civilians and combing operations by the combined forces of the 16^th Rashtriya Rifles, CRPF and Assam Rifles when a tyre of an army jeep burst in the Kohima town (Nagaland) in March 1995.

·        Torture, forced detaining, starvation, sexual assault of women and looting in the 5 villages of Namtiram (Manipur) in 1995 by the 21^st Rajputana Rifles.

·        The army’s reign of terror in Jesami (Manipur) in January 1996.

·        The rampage of the village of Huishu (Manipur) by the Assam rifles in March 1996.

·        The massacre of 10 innocent civilians by the Assam Rifles in Malom (Manipur) on 2^ndNovember 2000 by security forces.

·        The torture, rape and killing of Thangjam Manorama in Imphal (Manipur) in 2004.

REFERENCES

1.      A. Bimol Akoijam – Another 9/11, Another Act of Terror - The ‘Embedded Disorder’ of the AFSPA.

2.      Nayanjyoti – Integrate, Develop or “Shooting-to-Kill on Suspicion” in South Asian Periphery – Term paper submitted to CSSS/SSS/JNU.

3.      End Army Rule - Committee for the Repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, Delhi.

4.      An Illusion of Justice - PUDR Delhi 1998.

5.      Licence to Kill – INSAF, Delhi 2005.

6.      Fantasies of Development and The Democracy Deficit in North East India by Sanjib Baruah.

7.      An Analysis of Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 - PUCL and Asian Centre for Human Rights.

8.      Manipur in the Shadow of AFSPA.

9.      Love in the time of AFSPA. Hindu editorial.

10.  Poem on Sharmila by Kamayani Bali Mahabal - Movement of India.

11.  SAHELI–PUDR Fact Sheet on Human Rights abused in North-East.