Development Dialogues

LA NUIT BENGAL

2011-05-22T11:10:00.001+05:30

The Telegraph, Editorial

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110522/jsp/opinion/story_14011424.jsp

The wise believe that everyone has two countries — France and her own. It is a relief to realize that the chief minister of West Bengal, the redoubtable Mamata Banerjee, is not an exception to this sage generalization. Her cabinet, announced after much drama very early on Saturday morning, will bring to mind the old French saying, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’’ (“The more things change, the more they stay the same.’’) Change is, paradoxically, the guarantee of continuity. Ms Banerjee, it may be recalled despite the euphoria, had promised a small and compact cabinet. But she announced that her government would have 44 ministers. This is exactly the number her predecessor had in his cabinet. Under the existing law, West Bengal can only have 44 ministers since the upper limit for the number of ministers is 15 per cent of the total strength of the legislative assembly. Maximum leaders thus form maximum cabinets. Ms Banerjee has kept up with her rival. At the height of the Sino-Soviet dispute, the Chinese increased the alcohol content of the local vodka by a full percentage point to keep up with the Russians. Ms Banerjee has demonstrated that she is second to none in keeping up with the comrades.

By forming a large cabinet, Ms Banerjee has violated a very elementary principle. What is good politics is not necessarily good governance. Even its critics will be forced to admit that the Left was good in politics, otherwise it could not have been elected seven times in a row. But the Left also ran an incompetent government, in fact, one of the worst in India. This resulted in West Bengal’s humiliating decline in all spheres. The point can be illustrated with a different example. The creation of numerical quotas through reservations makes for good politics as it brings electoral dividends, but it is certainly not good governance as it reduces the society’s and the country’s dependence on merit and competence.

The largeness of Ms Banerjee’s cabinet is directly related to the largeness of her electoral success. Her triumph brings with it too many winners and too many expectations. To meet these expectations, she has, like her predecessor, chosen to address the demands of her party. Her party is only one of the stakeholders in the making of West Bengal. There are other stakeholders: most notably the people of the state. She has put the interests of one group of stakeholders above the others. This is the downside of a bloated victory. It has resulted in a bloated government. She would do well to remember that both Rajiv Gandhi and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had massive mandates that led to very high expectations, even outside the party. By failing to meet these expectations through good governance, they lost in subsequent elections. If Ms Banerjee overlooks these lessons, Bengal will not emerge from darkness.

Quality of Life: India vs. China

2011-05-22T11:07:00.001+05:30

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/quality-life-india-vs-china/?pagination=false

By Amartya Sen

1.

The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed about India’s overtaking China in the rate of growth of GNP, while not comparing India with China in other respects, like education, basic health, or life expectancy. Economic growth can, of course, be enormously helpful in advancing living standards and in battling poverty. But there is little cause for taking the growth of GNP to be an end in itself, rather than seeing it as an important means for achieving things we value.

Dinodia/Stock Connection/Aurora Photos

Girls in a classroom in the Indian model village of Ralegan Siddhi, northeast of Pune, Maharashtra, 2006

It could, however, be asked why this distinction should make much difference, since economic growth does enhance our ability to improve living standards. The central point to appreciate here is that while economic growth is important for enhancing living conditions, its reach and impact depend greatly on what we do with the increased income. The relation between economic growth and the advancement of living standards depends on many factors, including economic and social inequality and, no less importantly, on what the government does with the public revenue that is generated by economic growth.

Some statistics about China and India, drawn mainly from the World Bank and the United Nations, are relevant here. Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census.

As a result of India’s effort to improve the schooling of girls, its literacy rate for women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four has clearly risen; but that rate is still not much above 80 percent, whereas in China it is 99 percent. One of the serious failures of India is that a very substantial proportion of Indian children are, to varying degrees, undernourished (depending on the criteria used, the proportion can come close to half of all children), compared with a very small proportion in China. Only 66 percent of Indian children are immunized with triple vaccine (diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus), as opposed to 97 percent in China.

Comparing India with China according to such standards can be more useful for policy discussions in India than confining the comparison to GNP growth rates only. Those who are fearful that India’s growth performance would suffer if it paid more attention to “social objectives” such as education and health care should seriously consider that notwithstanding these “social” activities and achievements, China’s rate of GNP growth is still clearly higher than India’s.

2.

Higher GNP has certainly helped China to reduce various indicators of poverty and deprivation, and to expand different features of the quality of life. There is every reason to want to encourage sustainable economic growth in India in order to improve living standards today and in the future (including taking care of the environment in which we live). Sustainable economic growth is a very good thing in a way that “growth mania” is not.

GNP per capita is, however, not invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for those features depend also on other things that we do—or fail to do. Compare India with Bangladesh. In income, India has a huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of $1,170, compared with $590 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power. This difference has expanded rapidly because of India’s faster rate of recent economic growth, and that, of course, is a point in India’s favor. India’s substantially higher rank than Bangladesh in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) is largely due to this particular achievement. But we must ask how well India’s income advantage is reflected in other things that also matter. I fear the answer is: not well at all.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas young women still have substantially lower rates than young males in India. There is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh’s current progress has a great deal to do with the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the country.

What about health? The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPTvaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite having only half of India’s per capita income.

Of course, Bangladesh’s living conditions will benefit greatly from higher economic growth, particularly if the country uses it as a means of doing good things, rather than treating economic growth and high per capita income as ends in themselves. It is to the huge credit of Bangladesh that despite the adversity of low income it has been able to do so much so quickly; the imaginative activism of Bangladeshi NGOs (such as the Grameen Bank, the pioneering microcredit institution, and BRAC, a large-scale initiative aimed at removing poverty) as well as the committed public policies of the government have both contributed to the results. But higher income, including larger public resources, will obviously enhance Bangladesh’s ability to achieve better lives for its people.

3.

One of the positive things about economic growth is that it generates public resources that the government can devote to its priorities. In fact, public resources very often grow faster than the GNP. The gross tax revenue, for example, of the government of India (corrected for price rise) is now more than four times what it was just twenty years ago, in 1990–1991. This is a substantially bigger jump than the price-corrected GNP.

Expenditure on what is somewhat misleadingly called the “social sector”—health, education, nutrition, etc.—has certainly gone up in India. And yet India is still well behind China in many of these fields. For example, government expenditure on health care in China is nearly five times that in India. China does, of course, have a larger population and a higher per capita income than India, but even in relative terms, while the Chinese government spends nearly 2 percent of GDP (1.9 percent) on health care, the proportion is only a little above one percent (1.1 percent) in India.

One result of the relatively low allocation of funds to public health care in India is that large numbers of poor people across the country rely on private doctors, many of whom have little medical training. Since health is also a typical example of “asymmetric information,” in which the patients may know very little about what the doctors (or “supposed doctors”) are giving them, even the possibility of fraud and deceit is very large. In a study conducted by the Pratichi Trust—a public interest trust I set up in 1999—we found cases in which the ignorance of poor patients about their condition was exploited so as to make them pay for treatment they didn’t get. This is the result not only of shameful exploitation, but ultimately of the sheer unavailability of public health care in many parts of India. The benefit that we can expect to get from economic growth depends very much on how the public revenue generated by economic growth is expended.

4.

When we consider the impact of economic growth on people’s lives, comparisons favor China over India. However, there are many fields in which a comparison between China and India is not related to economic growth in any obvious way. Most Indians are strongly appreciative of the democratic structure of the country, including its many political parties, systematic free elections, uncensored media, free speech, and the independent standing of the judiciary, among other characteristics of a lively democracy. Those Indians who are critical of serious flaws in these arrangements (and I am certainly one of them) can also take account of what India has already achieved in sustaining democracy, in contrast to many other countries, including China.

Not only is access to the Internet and world opinion uncensored and unrestricted in India, a multitude of media present widely different points of view, often very critical of the government in office. India has a larger circulation of newspapers each day than any other country in the world. And the newspapers reflect contrasting political perspectives. Economic growth has helped—and this has certainly been a substantial gain—to expand the availability of radios and televisions across the country, including in rural areas, which very often are shared among many users. There are at least 360 independent television stations (and many are being established right now, judging from the licenses already issued) and their broadcasts reflect a remarkable variety of points of view. More than two hundred of these TV stations concentrate substantially or mainly on news, many of them around the clock. There is a sharp contrast here with the monolithic system of newscasting permitted by the state in China, with little variation of political perspectives on different channels.

Freedom of expression has its own value as a potentially important instrument for democratic politics, but also as something that people enjoy and treasure. Even the poorest parts of the population want to participate in social and political life, and in India they can do so. There is a contrast as well in the use of trial and punishment, including capital punishment. China often executes more people in a week than India has executed since independence in 1947. If our focus is on a comprehensive comparison of the quality of life in India and China, we have to look well beyond the traditional social indicators, and many of these comparisons are not to China’s advantage.

Could it be that India’s democratic system is somehow a barrier to using the benefits of economic growth in order to enhance health, education, and other social conditions? Clearly not, as I shall presently discuss. It is worth recalling that when India had a very low rate of economic growth, as was the case until the 1980s, a common argument was that democracy was hostile to fast economic growth. It was hard to convince those opposed to democracy that fast economic growth depends on an economic climate congenial to development rather than on fierce political control, and that a political system that protects democratic rights need not impede economic growth. That debate has now ended, not least because of the high economic growth rates of democratic India. We can now ask: How should we assess the alleged conflict between democracy and the use of the fruits of economic growth for social advancement?

5.

What a democratic system achieves depends greatly on which social conditions become political issues. Some conditions become politically important issues quickly, such as the calamity of a famine (thus famines tend not to occur at all when there is a functioning democracy), while other problems—less spectacular and less immediate—provide a much harder challenge. It is much more difficult to use democratic politics to remedy undernourishment that is not extreme, or persistent gender inequality, or the absence of regular medical care for all. Success or failure here depends on the range and vigor of democratic practice.¹ In recent years Indian democracy has made considerable progress in dealing with some of these conditions, such as gender inequality, lack of schools, and widespread undernourishment. Public protests, court decisions, and the use of the recently passed “Right to Information” Act have had telling effects. But India still has a long way to go in remedying these conditions.

In China, by contrast, the process of decision-making depends largely on decisions made by the top Party leaders, with relatively little democratic pressure from below. The Chinese leaders, despite their skepticism about the values of multiparty democracy and personal and political liberty, are strongly committed to eliminating poverty, undernourishment, illiteracy, and lack of health care; and this has greatly helped in China’s advancement. There is, however, a serious fragility in any authoritarian system of governance, since there is little recourse or remedy when the government leaders alter their goals or suppress their failures.

The reality of that danger revealed itself in a catastrophic form in the Chinese famine of 1959–1962, which killed more than 30 million people, when there was no public pressure against the regime’s policies, as would have arisen in a functioning democracy. Mistakes in policy continued for three years while tens of millions died. To take another example, the economic reforms of 1979 greatly improved the working and efficiency of Chinese agriculture and industry; but the Chinese government also eliminated, at the same time, the entitlement of all to public medical care (which was often administered through the communes). Most people were then required to buy their own health insurance, drastically reducing the proportion of the population with guaranteed health care.

In a functioning democracy an established right to social assistance could not have been so easily—and so swiftly—dropped. The change sharply reduced the progress of longevity in China. Its large lead over India in life expectancy dwindled during the following two decades—falling from a fourteen-year lead to one of just seven years.

The Chinese authorities, however, eventually realized what had been lost, and from 2004 they rapidly started reintroducing the right to medical care. China now has a considerably higher proportion of people with guaranteed health care than does India. The gap in life expectancy in China’s favor has been rising again, and it is now around nine years; and the degree of coverage is clearly central to the difference.² Whether India’s democratic political system can effectively remedy neglected public services such as health care is one of the most urgent questions facing the country.³

6.

For a minority of the Indian population—but still very large in actual numbers—economic growth alone has been very advantageous, since they are already comparatively privileged and need no social assistance to benefit from economic growth. The limited prosperity of recent years has helped to support a remarkable variety of lifestyles as well as globally acclaimed developments of Indian literature, music, cinema, theater, painting, and the culinary arts, among other cultural activities.

Yet an exaggerated concentration on the lives of the relatively prosperous, exacerbated by the Indian media, gives an unrealistically rosy picture of the lives of Indians in general. Since the fortunate group includes not only business leaders and the professional classes but also many of the country’s intellectuals, the story of unusual national advancement is widely and persistently heard. More worryingly, relatively privileged Indians can easily fall for the temptation to focus just on economic growth as a grand social benefactor for all.

Some critics of the huge social inequalities in India find something callous and uncouth in the self-centered lives and inward-looking preoccupations of a relatively prosperous minority. My primary concern, however, is that the illusions generated by those distorted perceptions of prosperity may prevent India from bringing social deprivations into political focus, which is essential for achieving what needs to be done for Indians at large through its democratic system. A fuller understanding of the real conditions of the mass of neglected Indians and what can be done to improve their lives through public policy should be a central issue in the politics of India.

This is exactly where the exclusive concentration on the rate of GNP growth has the most damaging effect. Economic growth can make a very large contribution to improving people’s lives; but single-minded emphasis on growth has limitations that need to be clearly understood.

1
I have discussed this issue more fully in " How Is India Doing? ," The New York Review , December 16, 1982; in (jointly with Jean Drèze) Hunger and Public Action(Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1989); and in Development as Freedom(Knopf, 1999). ↩
2
I discuss this in "The Art of Medicine: Learning from Others," The Lancet , January 15, 2011. ↩
3
I am grateful to Lincoln Chen, Jean Drèze, and A.K. Shiva Kumar for helpful discussion of this and related issues. ↩

Breaking Fast

2011-04-11T12:18:00.000+05:30

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/breaking-fast/773642/0

So Indian TV watched Egypt, and decided Al Jazeera led a revolution, and wanted one for themselves. Meanwhile, the World Cup ended; the IPL had not yet started; nobody wrote a book this week attacking a national idol; but, fortuitously, a Gandhian activist was fasting in Delhi for relatively abstruse changes to draft legislation. Excellent, they exclaimed! We’ll televise a revolution, even if there isn’t one. As Sagarika Ghose on CNN-IBN asked: “Is Jantar Mantar going to become Tahrir Square?” before mumbling “...as someone has asked,” showing impressive self-deprecation in not naming herself.

Look, TV channels are entitled to run whatever stories they want, even try to appropriate “movements”, as in “Citizens against Corruption — a CNN-IBN campaign.” It is far from certain, though, when they cross the line between chasing a story and finding one where there isn’t even a hint of it. Do a few hundred people in Jantar Mantar qualify as a revolution? In fact, anywhere, do we get a real sense of what the people-to-TV camera ratio is there? The pictures don’t deceive. But correspondents and anchors reaching for words to describe a moment they want to create come perilously close to doing so. IBN’s round-up was particularly worrying: Pallavi Ghosh informed us that “an Anna wave has swept the nation,” although the shots accompanying this were of the same few dozen at Jantar Mantar. Priyanka Gupta, in Kolkata, tried to claim a dozen people on Park Street were a lot for a city where a protest against out-of-tune Rabindrasangeet could get three lakh to the Maidan. Raksha Shetty in Mumbai stood next to a photogenic little group of well-heeled youngsters that she informed us was a crowd.

Arnab Goswami, on Times Now, pre-emptively struck against this allegation. He attacked an unsympathetic journalist on his show for implying that this was “just some television show going on.” Of course not, some superbly heeled young chap from Mumbai agreed: “This is not a media revolution... I am not a fool, I am an MBA graduate. I have left my posh job at an MNC to join this revolution. You can test my intelligence any way you want. I can tell you, this is a revolution of the people.” Please, nobody hire him for a marketing job.

Which brings us to the crass classism that has coloured TV’s debate and reporting. A random, superlatively heeled type in a Gandhi topi informed us on Times Now’s News-hour, angrily, that “these people are not like people at a political rally. They’re actually educated people, taking out their time.” Yes, agreed someone named Bharat Dabolkar, apparently a very busy actor: “Lots of professionals adjusted their daily schedule.” My, my, the revolution is totally upon us.

Newshour’s host seized upon this. “The groundswell is there!” he declaimed to the Nation. “This is spontaneous!” (Spontaneous = following appeals from a dozen news channels.) “These are not people turning up for 50 rupees and a bottle of liquor!”

The comfortable, contemptuous, self-congratulatory middle-classness of the coverage and TV’s chosen representatives of the protests were truly depressing. Meghnad Desai to Sardesai, shouting over chants of “Bharat Mata ki Jai” at Jantar Mantar: “The quality of our MPs is very low.” Right, perhaps we need a few peers, my lord. A panelist on Times Now, differentiating these rallies from others: “We pay taxes, it’s our money.” Chetan Bhagat, who otherwise managed to actually raise the quality of every debate he was in, and he was in them all, said one of the bills was like a “rubber stamp that you get at the airport”, inadvertently revealing that he lived the sort of life where you never saw rubber stamps except at airports. Swapan Dasgupta wryly declared that the crowd was diverse, “from all sections of the middle class.”

Neutrality, of course, was dumped by Times Now long ago, but CNN-IBN seemed to have decided to Times Now-ify itself, too, with Sagarika Ghose asking people to “fight”, and asking Anupam Kher, “Will you leave your comfortable life and sit with Anna?” (Kher replied, “People have to speak up”, which is certainly true on IBN, if you want to be heard above the anchors.) Ghose then asked Barun Mitra: “Why should you cast aspersions on the people’s movement?” Because you invited him on your show to do so, ma’am.

Really, if TV says so, it must be a revolution. All we need is Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Wait! Breaking news! Talat Aziz is reciting poetry on Times Now! Yes! It’s Faiz! The revolution is here!

Until the IPL, of course.

When the media gets hold of a cause

2011-04-11T12:11:00.001+05:30

By Sreelatha Menon

Lok Pal may be the first step towards the formation of new institutions, as the old ones get ineffective

Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi April 10, 2011, 0:57 IST

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sreelatha-menon-whenmedia-gets-holda-cause/431642/

Recently, Pappu Yadav, former member of parliament, went on a fast-unto-death in a Patna jail to show support for Anna Hazare’s fast against corruption. Yadav, who faces murder charges, demanded that corruption be weeded out of society.


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The case of television channels vying with each other to support the “people’s movement” against corruption is also similar to Yadav’s impulse to show support for a cause.

Incidentally, the media did not lose a wink of sleep when Lepchas were fasting in Sikkim against the taking over of their sacred valley and rivers by the government-aided private companies to build hydroelectric plants. Later, the courts thwarted this without much assistance of the media.

The media did not lose sleep when last month between March 11 and March 16 in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh’s Koya commandos, the Central Reserve Police Force and CoBRA battalions burnt more than 300 houses, raped five adivasi women and killed five men in Timapuram, Morpalli and Tarmetla villages of Dantewada, accusing them of being Naxalites (even Naxals don’t deserve to be raped and killed). It also never raised the plight of missing persons in Kashmir whose court cases are stuck in the home ministry for want of permission to proceed against officers.

Anyway, with or without the patronage of the media, the masses are angry with politicians and sooner or later they would get wise enough to get angry with the media too, for taking a stand only when it suits them.

Meanwhile, the achievements of the people who backed Hazare have been substantial. They have got a gazette notifying a joint committee, including people’s representatives to draft a Bill against corruption. Also, the Bill once passed, would guarantee quick action against the corrupt.

People have embraced these remedies following a total loss of faith in the governance system, comprising elected people and selected bureaucrats.

While there is no guarantee that vested interests won’t creep into these joint committees, there is an advantage in the presence of activists who have an expertise in the law of a particular subject. For instance, the seed bill now in Parliament, if drafted in partnership with farmer groups would have provided an outcome that would have helped the farmers rather than the seed industry, as it is feared to do now.

What the Lok Pal promises is a short cut to justice. For public servants (such as the government employees, judges, armed forces, and members of Parliament) can also be prosecuted for corruption under the Indian Penal Code, 1860, and the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988. However, these require the investigating agency (such as the CBI) to get prior sanction of the central or state government before it can initiate the prosecution process.

Lawyers wonder if an all-powerful Lok Pal would endanger democracy. For instance, now the judiciary and legislature keep a check on each other, but once the Lok Pal comes with powers to try government members and judges, it would be putting too many powers in one basket. Says lawyer Sanjay Parikh: A system has to be in place to ensure that the cure does not become worse than the disease. Also, the Lok Pal cannot break the nexus between the government and the private sector and restore the trust of the people.

However, an ombudsman like God, is an attractive idea and as decades would go by, there may exist one for each sector, for example for real estate (drafted by home dwellers rather than the real estate companies), one for educational institutions, one for health institutions, one for labour rights, etc. The lesson to be learnt is that new institutions would replace the old, if the latter don’t prove effective and accessible to the people.

Hazare meets a wet blanket

2011-04-11T12:03:00.001+05:30

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Hazare-meets-a-wet-blanket/H1-Article1-683304.aspx?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da139a29d8f6745%2C0

by Shiv Viswanathan

Sociology as a vocation is often depressing. The ideas and theories one proposes go against the conventional grain. The recent events around Anna Hazare put me in that mood. The media are acclaiming the movement. TV commentators in particular have gone ecstatic with a ringside seat to revolution. Words like 'Ground zero' and comparisons with the recent demands for democracy in Egypt and Tunisia give India a feeling of global togetherness. Yet the more I watch it, the more puzzled I feel. Spontaneously, I am all with its demands. But sociologically I feel something does not make sense. What we are watching is a sociological simulacra, an imitation of a social movement that looks more authentic than the original.

The recent scams, the epidemics of scandals have left middle-class India tongue-tied. What is worse is that there seems to be no mechanisms either for outlining the truth or bringing the criminals to justice. Our institutional systems seem too slow or appear to be in the hands of corrupt politicians. Reform becomes an invitation for oxymorons. Politics seems to be a desert between India's achievements in sport and India's capability in technology. Our democracy seems to be emptying out in our ability to handle corruption.

Enter Anna Hazare, an old-style Gandhian. An ex-army havaldar who has introduced social reform in his village combating alcoholism and advocating drip irrigation. He is a Gandhian who believes in development and has the Magsaysay award to prove it. Hazare, who has been around on the fringes of the development debate, becomes an archetypal Gandhian. He decides to fast unto death if the Lokpal Bill is not passed.

The prefix 'Gandhian' always intrigued me. The word is used loosely. Even scholars who study Gandhi call themselves Gandhian. People influenced by Gandhi, involved in politics or social work, dub themselves Gandhian. All they imply is an ascetic life and an honest character. The complexity, the diversity, the chaotic nature of the Gandhian experiment is a distant memory. These Gandhians are simplified versions of the original. But the simplification is crucial. They are easy to grasp. They have a single-point value. Their morality is unquestionable, their social work visible; they become vectors of a middle-class dream.

Their message is simple: a fast unto death until the Lokpal Bill is passed. In four days, the fast is termed 'the second war of Independence'. People are galvanised and the media see in Hazare the makings of the second JP movement. Oddly there is little memory here.

The styles of politics are so different. JP worked with -isms and parties and fought both authoritarianism and corruption. Hazare's movement is anti-politician. His movement refuses to let any politician grab presence on the dais. Uma Bharati had to beat a hurried exit. The movement seems to be anti-politically political. Yet it encourages visitors from Anupam Kher to Meghnad Desai, who turns press conferences into quick tutorials. It is almost as if the movement originates on Page 3 with approval ratings from fashion designers, movie directors and the city glitterati.

There's a wonderful middle classness to it. Professionals drift to it; housewives, students, young professionals, a coterie of NGOs provide the voices for it. Although it's a mix of generations, there is a preponderance of youth. It almost appears a part of the new demographic dividend, a more youthful idea of politics. It conveys the right mix of professionalism, lifestyle and a need for a deep sense of integrity.

There is almost no sense of the usual agitations, with the violence of lathi-charges or arrests. This demonstration seems different. Politicians from Sonia Gandhi to Narendra Modi approve of it and the BJP and the CPI(M) express support. Yet to those who have watched Nav Nirman, or the Emergency campaigns, this one doesn't look like a movement. It's more like a happening.

The candlelight rituals publicised by Aamir Khan's movie and the Jessica Lall campaign also provide a difference in style. The excitement is high. An India proud of its democracy pans its politicians. There is something surreal about the amiability, the bonhomie. Even the answers sound like something from a market survey, endorsing Hazare like a brand name. He could have been a piece of toothpaste or a pair of shoes.

The space within which it is enacted seems magical. It is carnival time but it reverses no categories. It does not threaten the regime, triggers no violence. It's almost playful as a spectacle. It appeals to a whole beyond parties, claiming a politics outside politics. It is an invitation to a temporary utopia where actors enact new rituals of hope, new possibilities of empowerment.

The closest I can get to it is to say that it reminds me of the great millennial movements. These were usually led by prophets and these Christ-like figures promised a new reign of prosperity. The Anna Hazare movement as the Second Independence movement has shades of milleniality with those joining caught in an ecstasy of empowerment. The Millenialists felt bullets could not harm them and here protestors feel that authority can't touch them. They feel they are at the roots of law, creating law for a new era.

As a simulacrum, it seeks a different code of revolution through reform, of realism through innocence, by legislation through tantrums, appropriating Gandhian idioms. It seeks to create history without a sense of history, forcing global affinities where there are none. One meets it with a sense of celebration and doubt because standard categories do not quite capture the nature of this happening.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist. The views expressed by the author are personal.

Why the difference in two languages? The Trinamool Congress should clarify its stand on SEZs

2011-04-11T11:56:00.001+05:30

http://sanhati.com/articles/3434/

April 10, 2011

Press release by SEZ-birodhi Prachar Mancha

Original Press Note [PDF, Bengali] »

It is well known that the Trinamool Congress has come so close to the corridors of power in West Bengal today, mainly because of the valiant resistance of the people of Singur and Nandigram against land acquisition and special economic zones (SEZs). Naturally, the people have an expectation that the Trinamool Congress would take a strong and pro-people position on SEZs and stop SEZs in West Bengal if it comes to power. We were happy to see that in the recently released Bangla edition of the election manifesto of the Trinamool Congress, it is clearly stated under the “establishment of land-bank” section in p 16 that “SEZs would not be allowed in West Bengal”. However, we were amazed, and alarmed, to find that not a single word has been written about SEZs in the English version of the election manifesto! A reading of the English version of the manifesto makes it abundantly clear that the English version has been addressed to the corporations and the chambers of commerce, whereas the Bangla version is full of pro-people promises. That is why the English version does not contain any statement about stopping SEZs. Possibly because this has come to public notice, the English version of the manifesto in the Trinamool Congress website has been renamed as “vision document”, although the pdf file is still named as “manifesto_english”.

The hypocrisy and double standards of the parties of the CPI(M)-led Left Front regarding SEZs is well known. Although these parties express their strong opposition to the SEZ policy at the national level, more than 50 SEZs are either running or are in various stages of the approval process in Left Front-ruled West Bengal. By passing the first SEZ act in the country (West Bengal SEZ Act, 2003), two years before the SEZ Act was passed by the central government in 2005, the Left Front government has appeared as the path breaker in the issue of establishing SEZs in India. The barbaric attack by the Left Front government on the people of Nandigram in order to acquire land for the SEZ of the Salem group has exposed its pro-capital and anti-people position to everyone.

We are concerned to see that the Trinamool Congress is following this same path of double standards. We demand that the Trinamool Congress adopt a clear stand on SEZs and maintain a consistent position in both the English and Bangla versions of its election manifesto. We appeal to all the people to demand that the candidates of various parties in their constituencies clarify their stand on SEZs. We call upon everyone to build up a movement to stop SEZs and cancel the SEZ Act which threatens the country’s sovereignty and the livelihood of its people, because only a peoples’ movement can force the established political parties to cancel this disastrous policy.

With greetings,

Arjun Sengupta/ Jayanta Sinha

Joint secretaries
SEZ-virodhi prachar manch
Contact: 9007386136

Buddhadeb promises industry at Singur

2011-04-11T11:54:00.000+05:30

http://www.hindu.com/2011/04/11/stories/2011041156421200.htm
Special Correspondent — PHOTO: PTI

West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee being greeted by an elderly woman during an election campaign meeting in Kolkata on Sunday.

KOLKATA: Reasserting the Left Front government's commitment to industrialisation in West Bengal for opening up job opportunities, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee vowed on Sunday to set up industry at Singur from where the Tata Motors' small car project was relocated in October, 2008 in the face of a prolonged agitation led by the Trinamool Congress.

Addressing a meeting of Left workers in the Jadavpur area, from where he is seeking re-election to the Assembly, Mr. Bhattacharjee said the relocation of the Nano project had been costly for the State, but “that would not stop the setting up of factories in West Bengal.”

“When the eighth Left Front government takes over I will set up a factory at Singur which will be among the largest in the State,” he said.

“We will then see if they [the Trinamool] have the courage to resist it,” he said, while asserting that the next Left Front government would not tolerate moves to obstruct the setting up of industry.

Food security

Mr. Bhattacharjee reiterated that the Left Front government would continue with its work towards consolidating the agricultural successes achieved in the past and ensuring food security for all, even as it took forward its plans for more industrial growth.

He pointed out that his government had made no mistake in initiating the industrialisation drive which was essential for the State. Nearly 27 lakh youth were studying in various educational institutions in the State and they expect to be employed. This was only possible with the setting up of more factories.

No child's play

The Chief Minister, who has been ridiculing the call for “change” by the Opposition, said it was not “child's play.” People were well aware who would take the State forward and know which political dispensation, if it came to power, would spell doom for West Bengal.

Mr. Bhattacharjee, travelling in an open-hooded jeep, waved out at people lining the streets and shook hands with some, even as hundreds, holding aloft flags of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and chanting slogans in support of him and the Left Front, marched down the roads and lanes criss-crossing the Jadvapur area in the southern fringes of the city.

He spent several hours in the morning and evening on the campaign trail there.

In the Thakurpukur-Behala area, a massive ‘padayatra' was taken out by Left Front workers and supporters in which Biman Bose, chairman of the Left Front committee and the State secretary of the CPI(M) participated.

Articles on Anna Hazare's Campaign by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Bobby Kunhu Aditya Nigam

2011-04-11T11:43:00.006+05:30

At the Risk of Heresy: Why I am not Celebrating with Anna Hazare

http://kafila.org/2011/04/09/at-the-risk-of-heresy-why-i-am-not-celebrating-with-anna-hazare/

At the risk of heresy, let me express my profound unease at the crescendo of euphoria surrounding the ‘Anna Hazare + Jan Lokpal Bill’ phenomenon as it has unfolded on Jantar Mantar in New Delhi and across several hysterical TV stations over the last few days.

This time around, I have to say that the print media has acted (upto now) with a degree of restraint that I think is commendable. Partly, this has to do with the different natures of the two media. If you have to write even five hundred words about the Jan Lokpal bill, you run out of platitudes against corruption in the first sentence (and who can speak ‘for’ corruption anyway?) and after that you have to begin thinking about what the bill actually says, and the moment you do that, you cannot but help consider the actual provisions and their implications. On television on the other hand, you never have to speak for more than a sound-byte, (and the anchor can just keep repeating himself or herself, because that is the anchor’s job) and the accumulation of pious vox-pop sound bytes ‘against corruption’ leads to a tsunami of ‘sentiment’ that brooks no dissent.

Between the last NDA government and the current UPA government, we have probably experienced a continuity of the most intense degree of corruption that this country has ever witnessed. The outcome of the ‘Anna Hazare’ phenomenon allows the ruling Congress to appear gracious (by bending to Anna Hazar’s will) and the BJP to appear pious (by cozying up to the Anna Hazare initiative) and a full spectrum of NGO and ‘civil society’ worthies to appear, as always, even holier than they already are.

Most importantly, it enables the current ruling elite to have just stage managed its own triumph, by crafting a ‘sensitive’ response (ably deployed by Kapil Sibal) to a television media conjured popular upsurge. Meanwhile, the electronic media, by and large, have played their part by offering us the masquerade of a ‘revolution’ that ends up making the state even more powerful than it was before this so called ‘revolution’ began. Some people in the corridors of power must be delighted at the smoothness and economy with which all this has been achieved. Hosni Mubarak should have taken a few lessons from the Indian ruling class about how to have your cake and eat it too on Tahrir Square,

We have been here before. Indira Gandhi’s early years were full of radical and populist posturing, and the mould that Anna Hazare fills is not necessarily the one that JP occupied (despite the commentary that repeatedly invokes JP). Perhaps we should be reminded of the man who was fondly spoken of as ‘Sarkari Sant’ – Vinoba Bhave. Bhave lent his considerable moral stature to the defence of the Internal Emergency (which, of course, dressed itself up in the colour of anti-corruption, anti-black marketeering rhetoric, to neutralize the anti-corruption thrust of the disaffection against Indira Gandhi’s regime). And while we are thinking about parallels in other times, let us not forget a parallel in another time and another place. Let us not forget the example of how Mao’s helmsmanship of the ‘cultural revolution’ skilfully orchestrated popular discontent against the ruling dispensation to strengthen the same ruling dispensation in China.

These are early days, but Anna Hazare may finally go down in history as the man who - perhaps against his own instincts and interests – (I am not disputing his moral uprightness here) - sanctified the entire spectrum of Indian politics by offering it the cosmetic cloak of the provisions of the draft Jan Lokpal Bill. The current UPA regime, like the NDA regime before it, has perfected the art of being the designer of its own opposition. The method is brilliant and imaginative. First, preside over profound corruption, then, utilise the public discontent against corruption to create a situation where the ruling dispensation can be seen as the source of the most sympathetic and sensitive response, while doing nothing, simultaneously, to challenge the abuse of power at a structural level.

I have studied the draft Jan Lokpal Bill carefully and I find some of its features are deeply disturbing. I want to take some time to think through why this appears disturbing to me.

The draft Jan Lokpal bill (as present on the website Indiaagainstcorruption.org) foresees a Lokpal who will become one of the most powerful institutions of state that India has ever known. It will combine in itself the powers of making law, implementing the law, and punishing those who break the law. A lokpal will be ‘deemed a police officer’ and can ‘While investigating any offence under Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, they shall be competent to investigate any offence under any other law in the same case.’

The appointment of the Lokpal will be done by a collegium consisting of several different kinds of people – Bharat Ratna awardees, Nobel prize winners of Indian origin, Magasaysay award winners, Senior Judges of Supreme and High Courts, the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Chief Election Commissioner, and members of the outgoing Lokpal board and the Chairpersons of both houses of Parliament. It may be noticed that in this entire body, only one person, the chairperson of the Lok Sabha, is a democratically elected person. No other person on this panel is accountable to the public in any way. As for ‘Nobel Prize Winners of Indian Origin’ they need not even be Indian citizens. The removal of the Lokpal from office is also not something amenable to a democratic process. Complaints will be investigated by a panel of supreme court judges.

This is middle class India’s dream of subverting the ‘messiness’ of democracy come delightfully true. So, now you have to imagine that Lata Mangeshkar (who is a Bharat Ratna), APJ Abul Kalam (Bharat Ratna, ex-President and Nuclear Weapons Hawk) V.S. Naipaul (who is a Nobel Prize Winner of Indian Origin) and spectrum of the kinds of people who take their morning walks in Lodhi Garden – Supreme Court Judges, Election Commissioners, Comptroller & Auditor Generals, NHRC chiefs and Rajya Sabha chairmen will basically elect the person who will run what may well become the most powerful institution in India.

This is a classic case of a privileged elite selecting how it will run its show without any restraint. It sets the precedent for the making of an unaccountable ‘council of guardians’ something like the institution of the ‘Velayat e Faqih’ – a self-selected body of clerics – in Iran who act as a super-state body, unrestrained by any democratic norms or procedures. I do not understand what qualifies Lata Mangeshkar and V.S. Naipaul (whose deeply reactionary views are well known) to take decisions about the future of all those who live in india.

The setting up of the institution of the Lokpal (as it is envisioned in what is held out as the draft Jan Lokpal Bill) needs to be seen, not as the deepening, but as the profound erosion of democracy.

I respect the sentiment that brings a large number of people out in support of the Jan Lokpal Bill movement. but I do not think there has been enough thought given to the implications of the provisions that it seeks to make into law. In these circumstances, one would have ordinarily expected the media to have played a responsible role by acting as a platform for debate and discussion about the issues, so that we can move, as a society, towards a better and more nuanced law. Instead, the electronic media have killed the possibility of any substantive discussion by creating a spectacle. It is absolutely imperative that this space be reclaimed by those who are genuinely interested in a serious discussion about what corruption represents in our society and in our political culture.

Clearly, there is a popular rage, (and not confined to earnest middle class people alone) about the helplessness that corruption engenders around us. But we have to ask very carefully whether this bill actually addresses the structural issues that cause corruption. In setting up a super-state body, that is almost self selecting and virtually unaccountable, it may in fact laying the foundations of an even more intense concentration of power. And as should be clear to all of us by now, nothing fosters corruption as much as the concentration of unaccountable and unrestrained power.

I am not arguing against the provision of an institution of a Lokpal, or Ombudsman, (and some of the provisions even in this draft bill – such as the provision of protection for whistle-blowers, are indeed commendable) but if we want to take this institution seriously, within a democratic political culture, we have to ask whether the methods of initiating and concluding the term of office of the Lokpal conforms to democratic norms or not. There are many models of selecting Ombudsmen available across the world, but I have never come across a situation where a country decides that Nobel Prize winners and those awarded with state conferred honours can be entrusted with the task selecting those entrusted with the power to punish people. I have also never come across the merging of the roles of investigator, judge and prosecutor within one office being hailed as the triumph of democratic values.

Nothing serves power better than the spectacle of resistance. The last few days have witnessed an unprecedented choreography of the spectacle of a united action. As I type this, I am watching visuals on Times Now, where a crescendo of cheesy ‘inspirational’ music strings together a montage of flag-waving children speaking in hypnotic unison. This kind of unison scares me. It reminds me of the happy synchronized calisthenics of the kind that totalitarian regimes love to use to produce the figure of their subjects. And all fascist regimes begin by sounding the tocsin of ‘cleansing’ society of corruption and evil.

When four Bombay page three worthies, Rishi Kapoor, Prithwish Nandy, Anupam Kher, Anil Dharker conduct a shrill inquisition (as they did on the Newshour on Times Now) against two co-panelists, Meenakshi Lekhi and Hartosh Singh Bal simply because they were not sounding ‘cheerful and celebratory’ (Anupam Kher even disapproved of their ‘body posture’) I begin to get really worried. The day we feel self-conscious and inhibited about expressing even non-verbally, or silently, our disappointment in public about a public issue, is the day when we know that authoritarian values have taken a firm hold on public discourse.

Of course, there are other reasons to get worried. All we need now is for someone, say like Baba Ramdev (one of the worthies behind Anna Hazare’s current campaign) to go on a fast on Jantar Mantar in support of some draconian and reactionary measure dear to him, backed by thousands of pious, earnest television supported, pranayamic middle class supporters.

Having said this, lets also pause to consider that it’s not as if others have not been on hunger strike before – Irom Sharmila has been force fed for several years now – but I do not see her intransigence being translated into a tele-visually orchestrated campaign against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The impunity that AFSPA breeds is nothing short of a corruption that eats deep into the culture of democracy, and yet, here, moral courage, and the refusal to eat, does not seem to work.

The current euphoria needs to be seen for what it is – a massive move towards legitimizing a strategy of simple emotional blackmail – a (conveniently reversible) method of suicide bombing in slow motion. There is no use dissenting against a pious worthy on a fast, because any effort to dissent will be immediately read as a callous indifference to his/her ‘sacrifice’ by the moral-earnestness brigade. Nothing can be more dangerous for democracy. Unrestrained debate and a fealty to accountable processes are the only means by which a democratic culture can sustain itself. The force of violence, whether it is inflicted on others, or on the self, or held out as a performance, can only act coercively. And coercion can never nourish democracy.

Finally, if, as a society, we were serious about combating the political nexus that sustains corruption – we would be thinking seriously about extending the provisions of the Right to Information Act to the areas where it can not currently operate – national security and defence; we would also think seriously about electoral reform – about proportional representation, about smaller constituencies, about strengthening local representative bodies, about the provision of uniform public funding for candidates and about the right to recall elected representatives. These are serious questions. The tragedy that we are facing today is that the legitimate public outrage against corruption is being channeled in a profoundly authoritarian direction that actually succeeds in creating a massive distraction.

In all the noise there has been a lot of talk about cynicism, and anyone who has expressed the faintest doubt has been branded as a cynic. I do not see every expression of doubt in this context as cynicism, though some may be. Instead, I see the fact that those who often cry hoarse about ‘democratic values’ seem to be turning a blind eye to the authoritarian strains within this draft ‘Jan Lokpal Bill’ as a clear indication of how powerful the politics of cynicism actually is.

I hope that eventually, once the din subsides, better sense will prevail, and we can all begin to think seriously, un-cynically about what can actually be done to combat the abuse and concentration of power in our society.

Allow me to pick and choose my revolutions. I am not celebrating at Jantar Manta tonight. Good night.

Of a Few, By a Few, For the Few: Bobby Kunhu

http://kafila.org/2011/04/10/of-a-few-by-a-few-for-the-few-bobby-kunhu/

I am distinctly uncomfortable with predictions – using either scientific or unscientific tools. For me it smacks of charlatanry – from astrology to psephology to stock market speculation. But with the charade that was unleashed for the past few days on news television by the mainstream media and of course at Jantar Mantar and a few other town squares across the “mainstream” Indian political landscape by Anna Hazare’s fast – I did dare to make an attempt – both at prediction and more comfortably with dissent. I foretold the outcome of the fast tableau at an emergency meeting that was convened by some co-travellers at the Salem Citizen’s Forum to debate on whether and how to show solidarity to Anna Hazare.

For a cricket obsessed national psyche reeling in the inebriation of the recent world cup victory – Anna Hazare was pitted to win this match comfortably – I was willing to place my bet on my prediction. And here I am trying to reckon the how and why of this prediction for me and the numerous friends and acquaintances who have been trying to rope me into joining facebook groups and sign electronic petitions in support of Anna Hazare’s crusade (or is it revolution?). And others who were indignant at my facebook post of Manu Joseph’s irreverent article or at Sudeep’s post in his diary.

Win-win

Well, it is not just Anna Hazare and his team who won this match comfortably. All actors who joined the show have won the match. Everyone – the “civil society” that sat on fast at Jantar Mantar and other places, the Corporate media, the glamour world, the Government, political establishment of all hues and shades – everyone who bothered to join the game. It was like bathing in the Ganges during the Maha Kumbh – everyone’s sins were washed away. And of course nobody in their right minds regardless of political affiliations or ideologies could take a position “for corruption”!!! A veritable Bush-ian position — either you are with Anna Hazare or you are with corruption. And yes, India Incorporated has won the match and it is time for celebrations!

The timing of course was impeccable. The drama was enacted exactly for five days in the interregnum between the cricket World Cup finals and the first Indian Premier League match leaving no scope for other infotainment distractions!

The timing also seems to be impeccable for reasons apart from TRP. India Inc. was facing a credibility crisis and the crisis had managed to drag the office of the most iconic representative of the lot – Dr. Manmohan Singh into every dreadful business. And then every representative of India Inc. seemed to be at the receiving end of the crisis – corporate houses to media icons. From Kashmir to Tamil Nadu – Manipur to Chattisgarh – people in the margins seemed to be mobilizing themselves trying to take their fights into their own hands. Mere cricket was not enough. A more serious national diversion was required – a diversion that would also help in subverting the multiple simmering discourses on democracy.

So what happened?

Anna Hazare announced a fast-unto-death – hold your horses – demanding that “the government agrees to form a joint committee comprising 50 per cent officials and the remaining citizens and intellectuals to draft the Jan Lokpal Bill,” – nothing less, nothing more. In other words Anna Hazare announced a fast unto death till people he thinks are qualified for the job are included in the group that is responsible for a legislation that is within the incumbent Government’s agenda. And going by the tenor of his letter to the Prime Minister dated 6th April 2011 is anything to go by, he would also like to have a say in the composition of the committee/Group of Ministers that has oversight over the process of this particular legislation.

So, what Mr. Hazare is praying for is a corruption free India and he hopes to get there through his version of an Ombudsman Legislation and he is on a hunger strike to ensure the composition of the team in charge of setting this legislation in place. Well, this throws up more disturbing concerns. Physically he conducted this prayer in the backdrop of a buxom picture of Bharat Mata bejeweled to the hilt including the proverbial crown standing on a white flex board Indian map!

So, Mr. Hazare and his friends went on hunger strike to realize this prayer with the blessings of the likes of Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravishankar. This was one particular dais that was truly homogenous in its caste-community-class composition. I was reminded of the historian Bipin Chandra’s analysis attributing the onus of thrusting the Hindutva Right on the Indian political mainstream on Jayaprakash Narayan and his anti-emergency coalition.

What was the response?

Obviously the Prime Minister expressed his dissatisfaction over Anna Hazare’s decision to go on a fast without forgetting to assert his profound respect for the man. Others soon joined the bandwagon. From the ruling United Progressive Alliance allies to the opposition National Democratic Alliance all of them joined the Anna Hazare choir and aptly expressed disgust over the prevailing state of (corruption) affairs. Left parties — mainstream as well as others, could not resist it either. Team Anna Hazare got its first wicket when Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar quietly resigned from the Lokpal bill related group of ministers (there has to be at least one resignation in the recipe for revolution). And once everyone had their fair bit of airtime at the crease – the Government threw in the towel. It accepted almost every demand that team Anna Hazare made and celebrations are afoot with India Inc. on that glorious road to that exhilarating freedom from corruption. At the end of five days of high drama everyone is happy with this victory to democracy and ready to live happily ever after.

So, what am I cribbing about in this hunky dory script of universal happiness?

What qualifies as corruption?

Firstly, the notion of corruption itself in the imaginations of both Anna Hazare’s version of the Lok Pal Bill and that of the Government’s seems to be in tandem – very simplistic and all that it would require to set things in correctional mode would be a school”master”ish cane – oops legislation. In other words, given the quantum of punishment and stringency of the legislation, the Lok Pal will ensure that from the Union Telecom Minister to the lowly Train Ticket Examiner will desist from taking bribes and more importantly everyone from the greedy telecom companies to the eager railway passenger will forthwith stop trying to bribe them regardless of their greed or need. This imagination of corruption somehow seemed to suit everyone who joined the Anna Hazare bandwagon from Lalit Modi to Barkha Dutt to Rahul Bajaj. Because this imagination would effectively prosecute Madhu Koda & Raja, while Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram would remain the knights in shining armour. Somehow the forces or agencies that facilitate structural spaces in which corruption thrives represented for me by the present composition of the Union Cabinet seems to be outside the ambit of these collective imaginations of corruption.

The freedom fighters

Next, the question of agency. Anna Hazare himself dubbed his hunger strike as the second freedom struggle – and of course – his corporate media promoters sold the idea to all like-minded wannabe freedom fighters. Though I am not sure of the numbers, a few hundred or even thousand people expressing solidarity was projected as the entire nation on the road to revolution and this was repeated over and over again reminding one of the adage that a lie repeated often enough becomes truth.

In what can only be described as complete lack of imagination and an insult to both the peoples of Egypt and India – the hunger strike was dubbed as India’s Tahrir Square! The joke is that one of the Anna Hazare acolytes who turned up for the Salem Citizen’s Forum meeting wanted the forum to take up the cause because the local Tamil media had totally ignored the hunger strike!! So much for the national character of the strike.

But Barkha Dutt did one better. She did a special show of The Buck Stops Here on Anna Hazare at Chennai and her voiced reason for the choice of location being 2G scam having become the buzzword for corruption. To add insult to injury – she declared her profound love to the Tamil people! If only she had done a little bit of homework or watched her own channel, she would have realized that the 2G scam hardly plays any role in the Tamil Nadu voters’ choice. Though, corruption does figure in the priority list of the Tamil Nadu voter – but a corruption that neither she nor her colleagues in Corporate Television media would acknowledge and rather would gloss over.

The fences that feed on the crops

Now, at the culmination of the hunger strike drama – a committee has been notified to draft the Lokpal bill. The composition of the committee itself reveals the seriousness of the drama. The government representatives include P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal – lawyers who have represented the interests of Corporate India as individuals (board members) and lawyers in and out of power. The lesser said about the process in which the civil society representatives were arrived the better – for there was hardly a process and all of them are all active participants in the Anna Hazare drama.

In 2003, as the editorial coordinator of the Citizen’s Report on Govrnance and Development (a full-time civil society position), we celebrated the marked shift in the social composition of the Parliament which many of us saw as deepening of democracy. In 2011, a motley bunch of homogenous people claim to be the sole representatives civil society and the Government of the day conveniently recognizes them – it smacks of a shift towards an oligarchic dispensation swinging between a Prime Minister who prefers not to face direct electoral challenges and a self-appointed civil society messiah.

What is even more bizarre and insulting is the repeated argument that there is no one else in the country more eligible to take on corruption than Anna Hazare. The argument insults the multitudes that have been carrying on their struggles in various parts of India.

Overriding the Constitution

More than that the drama insults Constitutional mechanisms and processes thereunder – thereby insulting the very notion of “We, the People”. The need for a Constitutional process is to ensure institutional transparency and accountability. Whatever might be the pitfalls of political culture of transparency in India – the only institutional mechanism of making day to day governance accountable are the Constitutional processes. For instance the Right to Information Act is applicable only to State actors – so regardless of the Government notification and the bona fides of the actors concerned – how do Citizens ensure accountability from the self-appointed civil society guardians – or are they so sacred as to remain outside the scope and need for accountability.

In what can be termed an ironic twist – the draft Jan Lokpal Bill brings in newer categories of eligibility to the selection committee for appointment of Lokpal – Magsaysay Award winners and Nobel laureates of Indian origin. I keep wondering why these awards and why the insistence on “Indian” origin (I hope Sonia Gandhi reads this). Maybe it is mere coincidence that many of the faces that have appeared in this drama have a Magsaysay award tucked under their belt (and a sacred thread over their shoulder).

Meanwhile in its enthusiasm for a corruption free India and prescriptions for stringent punishment and easier prosecution– Anna Hazare and team seem to have no qualms in sacrificing precious civil liberty provisions inbuilt into the criminal justice system and prescribed by the Indian Constitution. While Baba Ramdev, one of the mentors of Anna Hazare’s crusade advocates capital punishment for the corrupt, the draft bill itself blurs the line between investigation and adjudication. It makes the Lokpal a super cop with adjudicatory and delegated legislative powers.

If the Jan Lokpal bill is accepted – it would achieve what the Malimath Committee on Reforms of Criminal Justice System could not – subversion of the Criminal Justice system. At the risk of repetition, I would point out that the bulldozing by Malimath Committee could be stopped because that committee and the implementation of its recommendations were subject to Constitutional procedures. What would emerge would be another draconian legislation which would be used to hound and prosecute political dissent – this time “corruption” would replace “terrorism” and “Maoism”. And this time the law would be presumed to have the sanction of a purported civil society.

Of a lesser concern is the fact that Republic India’s record at social reforms through criminal legislations has been abysmal – if in doubt – look at the implementation of the Dowry Prohibition Act or the SC/ST Atrocities Act. Dowry is as prevalent as ever while India Inc. continues to lynch Dalits and dispossess Adivasi

Who Loses?

The major casualty in this whole drama was democracy itself. Through short cuts and “royal avenues”, the power goes back into the hands of a select few, undoing a process of over sixty years of democratization of the country. Those few decide what is in the best interest of the country, and what is not. No prizes for guessing the class and caste composition of this select few.

Tailpiece

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is in for stiff competition for the next Bharat Ratna from Kisan Bapat Baburao Hazare – a very difficult choice indeed between before the nation. Or are we looking at two awardees next season? That could be a fitting “double climax” for the viewers of live Indian English Television!

‘Anna Hazare’, Democracy and Politics: A Response to Shuddhabrata Sengupta

http://kafila.org/2011/04/10/anna-hazare-democracy-and-politics-a-response-to-shuddhabrata-sengupta/#more-7311

In an earlier post, (hits to which have broken all records on Kafila), Shuddhabrata Sengupta has raised some extremely important points in the context of the media-simulated coverage and celebrations around the ‘Anna Hazare’ movement. I agree with the central argument made by Shuddha – which is about the authoritarian, indeed totalitarian implications of the proposed Jan Lokpal Bill (though, as many commentators to the post have pointed out, the Bill really remains to be drafted and passed in parliament).

I have no doubt whatsoever that any demand that simply seeks a law of the sort that has been raised by the movement (even in the proposed form), is completely counterproductive. Indeed, it is naive. Matters like corruption or communalism cannot simply be legislated out of existence through tougher laws. Inevitably, they will lead us up to China type situations where you will end up demanding summary trials and executions. Even in the best of cases, a law and state-dependent mode of addressing such problems, adds to the powers of a corrupt bureaucracy. I also agree with his (and Bobby Kunhu’s) criticisms of some aspects of what they have both chosen to designate as ‘mass hysteria’ of sorts – I certainly do not agree with this description but that need not detain us here. I am interested in something else here and that has to do with the way the movement has struck a chord among unprecedentedly large numbers of people – mainly middle class people I am sure, but the support for it is not just confined to them. In fact, on the third day of the dharna at Jantar Mantar I received an excited call from a CPM leader who works among the peasants in villages of northern India in the Kisan Sabha, about the response to the movement he had encountered in his constituency. I doubt that this was a support simulated either by the government or by the electronic media.

On 30th January this year, when many of us were participating in a largish demonstration in Delhi demanding the release of Binayak Sen, precisely on that day a huge demonstration was held on this issue of the Jan Lokpal Bill. The fact that all the usual suspects like us were there at the Binayak Sen demonstration, meant that there were innumerable others, not the usual suspects, who were there at this other rally. Yes, some people could have been in both places, but by and large, the presence at the two rallies was very different. And there was no ‘media-simulated mass hysteria’ at that point. If Arnab Goswami and Times Now (and other TV channels) have now picked up the issue, that can be read as trying to appropriate a movement that was gathering strength independently of them. (By the way, it is also instructive to see the anger of the demonstrators at India Gate against Barkha Dutt in the video postes by Anirban in a comment on Shuddha’s post.) And if one looks at the cast of characters who have been associated with the mobilization, there are many (including Anna Hazare himself) who have been working tirelessly in villages and towns across the country. And while I hold no brief for Anna Hazare or the others, to reduce the entire movement to a media-simulated, anti-political middle class urge is to completely misread the signs.

What is disturbing in Shuddha’s post is the attribution of a kind of conspiracy where, apparently, UPA government and the electronic media have been complicit in ‘orchestrating’ this movement. I think this claim not only does not stand up to any actual scrutiny of facts on the ground but is, on the contrary, based on the mode of reasoning that is a staple of political rhetoric:

“We have been here before. Indira Gandhi’s early years were full of radical and populist posturing, and the mould that Anna Hazare fills is not necessarily the one that JP occupied (despite the commentary that repeatedly invokes JP). Perhaps we should be reminded of the man who was fondly spoken of as ‘Sarkari Sant’ – Vinoba Bhave. Bhave lent his considerable moral stature to the defence of the Internal Emergency (which, of course, dressed itself up in the colour of anti-corruption, anti-black marketeering rhetoric, to neutralize the anti-corruption thrust of the disaffection against Indira Gandhi’s regime).”

This passage is then followed up by a reference to the regime sponsored mass mobilization of the cultural revolution in China. Suggestions like these are taken to new heights in Bobby Kunhu’s post when he says:

“The timing also seems to be impeccable for reasons apart from TRP. India Inc. was facing a credibility crisis and the crisis had managed to drag the office of the most iconic representative of the lot – Dr. Manmohan Singh into every dreadful business. And then every representative of India Inc. seemed to be at the receiving end of the crisis – corporate houses to media icons. From Kashmir to Tamil Nadu – Manipur to Chattisgarh – people in the margins seemed to be mobilizing themselves trying to take their fights into their own hands. Mere cricket was not enough. A more serious national diversion was required – a diversion that would also help in subverting the multiple simmering discourses on democracy.”

What is the evidence for any of these claims? Give me any event, and I can guarantee you that I will cook up a conspiracy scenario (of the kind that Shuddha and Bobby do) with circumstantial ‘evidence’ of this nature. Our discomfort at certain kinds of mobilization cannot and must not become a reason for us to pass off that discomfort in rhetorical claims about the mobilization.

It is interesting that Shuddha and Bobby Kunhu posit this movement as one that is directed against democracy, in terms almost identical to those of Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Mehta argues:

“But the claim that the “people” are not represented by elected representatives, but are represented by their self-appointed guardians is disturbing. In a democracy, one ought to freely express views. But anyone who claims to be the “authentic” voice of the people is treading on very thin ice indeed. It is a form of Jacobinism that is intoxicated with its own certainties about the people. It is not willing to subject itself to an accountability, least of all to the only mechanism we know of designating representatives: elections.”

This can be said of any movement and any popular struggle; indeed, Mehta has made it his vocation to argue for liberal, procedural democracy every time there is a mass movement. From Mehta’s point of view – and from the point of view of the powers-that-be – this is a perfect argument for their intention is absolutely clear. They do not want the boat rocked under any circumstances. Every form of dissent must be tamed and brought within the ambit of the rotting structure of the parliamentary system, under whose sign every single act of fleecing of the people has taken place – Suresh Kalmadi, Sheila Dikshit, the Bellary brothers, the heroes of the 2G spectrum scam (and of course the Nira Radia folk!). We have been silent witnesses to the political system - to which Mehta sings paeans and whose virtues Shuddha seems to have suddenly discovered – lying prostrate before the marauders and looters of public money. Now, I understand where Pratap Mehta is coming from but Shuddha, when you say the following, I am stumped:

“Finally, if, as a society, we were serious about combating the political nexus that sustains corruption – we would be thinking seriously about extending the provisions of the Right to Information Act to the areas where it can not currently operate – national security and defence; we would also think seriously about electoral reform – about proportional representation, about smaller constituencies, about strengthening local representative bodies, about the provision of uniform public funding for candidates and about the right to recall elected representatives. These are serious questions. “

Electoral reform! And who will contest the elections, dear Shuddha? The same lot who from the Right to Centre to Left have now distinguished themselves by their service to corporate capital and their fleecing of the public exchequer? Here you almost begin to sound like a bourgeois policy-maker (or political theorist) advising saner and more responsible methods. I am also surprised that you find the threat to democracy coming from a movement that makes its demands to the government and the parliament, and makes them in the most peaceful, non-violent manner possible! After all, it is the parliament and the political parties that will have to draft the Bill (or give the draft the final shape) and pass it in parliament. What can be more democratic than that? For even the people behind the current draft of the bill know that this cannot but go through a period of negotiation, scrutiny and democratic debate, if the Bill has to become law.

I think it is also important to underline that for many years now, in India at least, issues have been posed outside the domains where formal politics takes place. Think of all the important issues that have been raised over the last two decades: the question of land acquisition, mass displacement of populations, nuclear energy, communalism and the anti-communal struggles, Right to Information, Forests Rights Act…none of these issues, have either been raised or even debated in parliament except under mass pressure. Was there even a squeak from the worthies of Left and Right who populate the parliament and legislatures, each time the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam was raised? Was there a squeak when innumerable villages and towns like Harsud and Tehri, drowned for the sake of the luxurious consumption of the metropolitan middle classes? So, your sudden faith in the system and its democracy, and your claim that only those who contest elections can be really ‘representative of the people,’ really surprises me.

The current movement, to me, is only a sign of the fact that there is no faith any longer in any of the institutions of parliamentary democracy among large sectors of the Indian population. Increasingly, their issues emerge through those whom you and Mehta dismiss as the ‘self-appointed representatives of the masses’. Indeed, I fear that if movements of this kind are also dismissed, and with the political class long out of reckoning, there is really no other option that the large masses of people will be left with except to support non-democratic Maoist-type outfits. I cannot help recalling here the long debate on Maoism that we had on Kafila where I had, among others, argued about the efficacy of democratic struggles in stalling many an SEZ project. Not one of those struggles Shuddha, had the prior permission of the state and its certification of being led by a “legitimate elected representative” of the people. They were democratic struggles nevertheless, at least in my sense of the term.

Mass movements throw up their own leadership, and sometimes the pulse of the masses is sensed by a charismatic leader. To de-legitimize this phenomenon by claiming the formal electoral process as the only reflection of democracy is to limit democracy to its most formal liberal procedural version. I think we need to remember that the Right to Information Act itself, is a product of a movement which has indeed gone far beyond the confines of a purely liberal provision and has invited some of the most violent reprisals from the those whose corrupt practices it affects. People have been killed – often with the connivance of political parties and their leaders – for using the provisions of the RTI. These people have no other recourse but work with ‘self-appointed’ leaders – usually a term deployed by power for those who have not received the official stamp of approval by the state.

2011-04-11T11:35:00.002+05:30

Hazare praises work of Modi, Nitish

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Hazare-praises-work-of-Modi-Nitish/articleshow/7935282.cms

NEW DELHI: Chief ministers Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar were praised by anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare for their efforts on rural development, with the Gandhian saying that their counterparts in other states should emulate them.

"The work of chief ministers of Gujarat and Bihar in their states should be adopted by other chief ministers," 73-year-old Hazare, who successfully led the agitation on Lokpal Bill issue, told reporters here on Sunday.

Hazare, though, was quick to add that he was not viewing their performance from any partisan angle but only highlighting the focus of development work at the grassroots level.

When a reporter referred to the 2002 riots in Gujarat when Modi was in power, the Gandhian said that he was only talking about the work of a chief minister and does not want to get into politics.

"I do not support communal politics, riots or any such thing. I am only talking about decentralisation of power," Hazare said.

When pointed out that Modi has not appointed a Lokayukta for the past nine years in Gujarat, he said, "I will accept Modi as 100 per cent ideal when he brings Lokayukta in his state."

Congress MP Rashid Alvi reacted sharply to Hazare's comments saying "no secular person in the country can support Modi.

"If you support Modi, you are supporting the massacre of 2002," he said,

BJP spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain, however, praised Hazare for appreciating the work done in the party-ruled state.

"These are NDA-ruled states. Concrete steps are being taken there against corruption. This is good that he cited both the states as examples.

"There are many other NDA-ruled states where good work is being done against corruption. We appreciate that he has praised us," he said.

At the press conference, Hazare also denied any "personal" animosity with agriculture minister Sharad Pawar.

"There is no rift with Pawar. Six Ministers had to go on corruption charges. Why only name Pawar. My fight is against the trend and not against one Pawar. It is the deed not the person that I object to and fight against," he said.

Activist Arvind Kejriwal dismissed suggestions that Hazare had invited Pawar to be part of his agitation for Lokpal Bill saying the "question does not arise".

Hazare backs Raj's tirade against Non-Marathis

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Hazare-backs-Raj-s-tirade-against-Non-Marathis/Article1-368036.aspx

Veteran social activist Anna Hazare backs Maharashtra Navnirmaan Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray's campaign against non-Marathi 'Dadagiri' (dominance) in Maharashtra, but opposes the violent means being used to achieve the purpose. The 71-year-old social activist expressed support for MNS's programme, while talking to journalists Saturday night after addressing students of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) on 'Gram Swaraj and Experience in Ralegan', his native village in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra which he transformed into a model village through persistent efforts.

"Some ideas of Raj Thackeray were correct, but damaging public and national property was not right," Hazare said.

When asked which ideas of the MNS chief were correct, Hazare noted people from many states live in Maharashtra, but "outsiders trying to prove their dominance in the state was not at all acceptable".

In a reference to North India-based political parties like Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal trying to show their strength in Maharashtra by holding rallies and other programmes in the state, he said such activities were not acceptable.

"They have ample space in their states to hold such programmes," he noted.

When asked to comment on attacks by MNS activists on students from Bihar who had gone to Mumbai to appear in railway recruitment exams, Hazare said: "I do not support everything Raj Thackeray does. If violent means are adopted by MNS, it will not be in interest of a united India."

"We need to work for unity of the country and not for its disintegration through violence against innocents," he added.

Mallika Sarabhai's Response to Hazare

http://www.facebook.com/soumik.dee#!/notes/shabnam-hashmi/mallika-sarabha-writes-to-anna-hazare/10150209532322597

Dear Annaji

We are deeply shocked by your endorsement of Narendra Modi's rural development. There has been little or no rural development in ths state. In fact gauchar lands and irrigated farmlands have been stealthily taken by the government and sold off at ridiculous prices to a small club of industrialists. There has been no Lokayukta in Gujarat for nearly seven years so hundreds of complaints against corruption are lying unheard. From the Sujalam Sufalam scam of 1700 crores to the NREGS boribund scam of 109 crores, the fisheries scam of 600 crores, every department is involved in thousands of crores of scams. The poor and rural peoiple are being sold to Modiu's friends the industrialists. The state is in terrible debt because of his largess to industry while 21 lakh farmers wait for compensation.

Your endorsement is apalling and we will be forced to distance ourselves from the Lokpal movement unless it is irrevocably retracted.

Sincerely

Mallika Sarabhai

11.4.2011

8.23am

The Jagran At Jantar Mantar

2011-04-11T11:26:00.004+05:30

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?271279

So we had a Gandhian morphed into an advocate of Sindoor and Shivaji, who led a crowd that raised a slogan created in Bengal, with some desh bhakti songs thrown in. This was India’s modern revolution?

Saba Naqvi

Anna Hazare is a good man. After taking part in the spectacle at Jantar Mantar for three days I have concluded that he is a good man who obviously believes in the glory of Bharat Mata under whose giant depiction the famous fast took place. Bharat Mata and nationalism are sentiments that apparently make for an upright citizenry.

My brain unfortunately has been warped by reading too much of George Orwell. In a thought provoking essay titled Notes on Nationalism (that I have perhaps read far too many times), Orwell wrote that “nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.”

Such random thoughts immediately came to my mind when I noted that the most popular slogan at the show was Vande Mataram. Only once did I hear the more secular Inquilab Zindabad. I have nothing against Vande Mataram. I have always found it more beautiful than Jana Gana Mana but I am aware that some religious minorities are uncomfortable with a song that is an ode to the Goddess Durga. Yet here we were in the year 2011 with youngsters screaming Vande Mataram with great passion.

None of them could possibly have been aware that Vande Mataram was first raised as a slogan on a large scale in opposition to the 1905 British sponsored partition of Bengal.

In this mish mash of ideas and slogans, Anna Hazare too took me by surprise when he declared that the corrupt should be hung, certainly not a sentiment one would expect from an advocate of ahimsa. But then he was a Gandhian who said that “in this age things would not work with Gandhi upfront and Chattrapati Shivaji was needed.”

The rhetoric was startlingly archaic. When the government met half the demands on day three, Hazare refused to break the fast saying it would be tantamount to a woman saying “pativrataa rahuungii lekin mathe pe tikaa nahiin lagaauungii” (I will be a devoted wife but will not put the vermillion mark of a married woman”). Presumably the young were too busy with their slogans (and Facebook and Twitter) to actually understand what was being said.

So we had a Gandhian morphed into an advocate of Sindoor and Shivaji, who led a crowd that raised a slogan created in Bengal. This was India’s modern revolution carried out from Jantar Mantar which many TV presenters described as India’s Tahrir Square. Hyper TV fed into hyper nationalism and the post world cup victory mood. It was Peepli Live where a reality was constructed by a hysterical and competitive visual media. What the smart young things on TV forgot to mention is that Hosni Mubarak may be gone, but the miltary is still very much in charge in Egypt and is now engaged in crushing the protests. That was a real people’s revolution in the face of great oppression that continues.

What we had in New Delhi was capitulation by a nervous government heading into critical assembly elections after a rash of corruption scandals. So they gave in to a motley crew of yoga gurus, ex -ervicemen associations, residents welfare associations, the Rotary club type do-gooders, combined with the odd celebrity or page three type who kept appearing at regular intervals.

New Delhi has actually set the precedent of succumbing to a sort of blackmail just because it is conducted by people who have the rage of the righteous and get round-the-clock coverage on TV. Forget the many agitations over land and livelihood that are simply ignored by media. Those at the forefront of such movements do not worship Bharat Mata since they have nothing to be grateful for from the state.

Certainly corruption is corrosive but the question now is: Which activists have the right to dictate terms to the government or the nation? There is certainly some merit to the argument that if Sonia Gandhi can pick some to sit in the NAC and dictate policy, what can stop Baba Ramdev, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar and Sadguru, mass healers of the mind and body, from claiming the right to be the national gurus?. And should the BJP ever come to power, one can now certainly expect the managers of the Saraswati Shishu Mandirs and other Sangh NGOs, from claiming the right to dictate to government.

As it is, many Sangh organistion members were there in strong numbers at the Anna Hazare show. This correspondent lent a pen to an old man in the crowd and was promptly handed a publication titled “Godhan” on cow protection and the miracles of cow urine. Certainly there is a great similarity in the vocabulary and symbolism of RSS activism with the lot that led the Jantar Mantar movement.

Yet it would perhaps be a mistake to see this as an RSS plot that legitimises retrograde forces. This was more in the nature of a mass jagran that provided a pravachan or a religious discourse and belted out desh bhakti songs. It was a made in India spectacle as kitschy as our popular culture.

So is this just a flash in the pan till we switch to the next big story? Or is it a movement that has set a precedent and will have a policy impact? If this movement is here to stay then although it may have rattled the Congress right now, in the long term it presents a far greater threat to the traditional BJP/RSS who will be challenged by a more robust force that expresses itself in the same idiom even though it is not circumscribed by any ideological commitment to sectarian politics.ends

Ethiopia at centre of global farmland rush

2011-03-21T16:53:00.002+05:30

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/21/ethiopia-centre-global-farmland-rush

It's the deal of the century: £150 a week to lease more than 2,500 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of virgin, fertile land – an area the size of Dorset – for 50 years. Bangalore-based food company Karuturi Global says it had not even seen the land when it was offered by the Ethiopian government with tax breaks thrown in.

Karuturi snapped it up, and next year the company, one of the world's top 25 agri-businesses, will export palm oil, sugar, rice and other foods from Gambella province – a remote region near the Sudan border – to world markets.

Ethiopia is one of the world's largest recipients of humanitarian food and development assistance, last year receiving more than 700,000 tonnes of food and £1.8bn in aid, but it has offered three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of virgin land to foreign corporations such as Karuturi.

"It's very good land. It's quite cheap. In fact it is very cheap. We have no land like this in India," says Karmjeet Sekhon, project manager for what is expected to be one of Africa's largest farms. "There you are lucky to get 1% of organic matter in the soil. Here it is more than 5%. We don't need fertiliser or herbicides. There is absolutely nothing that will not grow on it.

"To start with there will be 20,000 hectares of oil palm, 15,000 hectares of sugar cane and 40,000 hectares of rice, edible oils and maize and cotton. We are building reservoirs, dykes, roads, towns of 15,000 people. "This is phase one. In three years time we will have 300,000 hectares cultivated and maybe 60,000 workers. We could feed a nation here."

Sparsely-populated Gambella is at the centre of the global rush for cheap land, precipitated by the oil price rise in 2007/2008, when many countries racked by food riots encouraged their farmers to invest abroad to grow food.

The lowest prices are in Africa, where, says the World Bank, at least 35 million hectares of land has been bought or leased. Other groups, including Friends of the Earth International, say the figure is higher. The Ethiopian government says 36 countries including India, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have leased farm land there.

Gambella has offered investors 1.1 million hectares, nearly a quarter of its best farmland, and 896 companies have come to the region in the last three years. They range from Saudi billionaire Al Amoudi, who is constructing a 20-mile canal to irrigate 10,000 hectares to grow rice, to Ethiopian businessmen who have plots of less than 200 hectares.

This month the concessions are being worked at a breakneck pace, with giant tractors and heavy machinery clearing trees, draining swamps and ploughing the land in time to catch the next growing season.

Forests across hundreds of square km are being clear-felled and burned to the dismay of locals and environmentalists concerned about the fate of the region's rich wildlife.

Local government officers have denied claims that people are being forcibly moved to make way for foreign companies.

"This year we will relocate 15,000 people to give them better access to water, schools and transport. [But] it is a coincidence that the investors are coming at the same time as the villages are being relocated," said Kassahun Zerrfu from Gambella's department for investment.

"We are not relocating people to give land to the investors. The problem is there is no infrastructure where they have lived. It's all voluntary."

Under the government's "villagisation" programme, three or four villages at a time are being moved closer to roads and services, but many people say they are not being compensated and are having to wait. "We were promised a school, a health clinic and fresh water eight months ago. We only have one water pump so far," said Udul Ujulu, chief of Karmi village, a new village of 250 people nine miles outside Gambella town.

Others displaced by new farms said they were scared for their lives if they complained. "What power do we have to stop them? We just stay silent," said one farmer told to move off his land.

"There is no movement of population. It's their choice to have these basic services. But they have to abandon their previous way of life," said farm minister Wondirad Mandefro.

Dr Abhay Bang: the revolutionary paediatrician

2011-03-20T16:59:00.001+05:30

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/mar/20/dr-abhay-bang-revolutionary-paediatrician

Dr Abhay Bang does not look like a pioneer. He sits across the table in a London conference room, his posture slight and upright, his beard neatly trimmed. He is wearing a grey suit and tie, his hair brushed precisely to the right. And yet despite the conventional appearance, this is the man who has revolutionised healthcare for the poorest people in India and who has overseen a programme that has sent infant mortality rates plummeting in one of the most poverty-stricken areas of the world. Medical experts now believe that Dr Bang's radical beliefs hold the key to tackling the myriad endemic health problems that blight the developing word.

"I suppose my name might have something to do with the path I chose," he explains in rapid, accented English. "Abhay in Sanskrit means 'No fear.'" Dr Bang smiles. "'No fear of death.'"

It is a particularly fitting moniker for a man who has dedicated his life to turning medical orthodoxy on its head. Instead of accepting the traditional hospital-based treatment model, Dr Bang has spent the last 26 years training up local volunteers in Gadchiroli, one of the most deprived districts in the Indian state of Maharashtra, to treat simple maladies at home. The World Health Organisation and Unicef have recently endorsed his approach to treating newborn babies and the programme is currently being rolled out to parts of Africa.

But success has been a long time coming. When Dr Bang and his wife, Rani, set up the charity Search (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health) in Gadchiroli in 1985, their mission was simple. "We wanted to listen to the people," says Dr Bang. "What kind of healthcare did they want?"

Dr Bang, who had just graduated with a masters in public health at Johns Hopkins University in the US, started holding regular People's Health Assemblies were the local inhabitants could voice their concerns. Infant mortality emerged as one of the most pressing problems. In 1988, 121 newborn babies were dying out of every 1,000 births in the area. Dr Bang's solution was simple: he trained a group of local women in the basics of neonatal care.

They were taught how to diagnose pneumonia (using an abacus to count breaths), how to resuscitate children and how to administer some basic antibiotics. Instead of villagers having to walk for miles to get to the nearest hospital, these health visitors (called arogyadoots, which means "health messengers") went to where they were most needed, carrying a small health pack on their back. As more women were trained, they passed on their knowledge to others and, according to Dr Bang, entire communities became "empowered".

Anjana Uikey, 40, who was one of the first arogyadoots to be trained, says that the experience has been one of "enormous [personal] growth". "I'm being useful to the village and on a daily basis I have people who are grateful to me," she explains. "Now I get a lot of respect. Earlier, I was nobody and today the whole village knows my name."

The newborn death rate in Gadchiroli has now fallen to 30 per 1,000 live births. In 1988, the death rate here among children who developed pneumonia was 13%. With Dr Bang's intervention, it has come down to 0.8%. The figures have had an extraordinary impact on ordinary women such as Meena Dhit, 28, who delivered her second child – a daughter – at home with the help of health visitors. "It was very well done," says Meena. "These women handled it so well. There is a lot of difference from the old days. Now I feel there is the support for young mothers that my mother did not have. There is someone to take care of me. I have more confidence now and less to worry about."

"We are very MUCH part of the community," says Dr Bang, when we meet in London at the launch of No Child Born to Die, a global initiative by Save the Children to achieve a two-thirds reduction in child mortality. "I really can't say where the line of separation is between them and me. It is research with the people, not on the people."

As an idea, it might sound obvious, but for decades well-intentioned non-governmental organisations from the developed world had attempted to impose the western model of healthcare on rural India. In Dr Bang's eyes, that clearly wasn't working. "The villagers said they were scared to go to hospital," he says. "When we asked why, they told us something fascinating. They said: 'Your doctors and nurses drape themselves in white clothes. We wrap dead bodies in white shawls. How can you save lives if you are dressed like a dead person?' They said: 'When they admit a patient, we can only visit between 3pm and 6pm and we don't have wristwatches. We don't have anywhere to stay in town, so we go back to the village. The patient doesn't want to stay on their own."

Dr Bang's solution was to build a hospital consisting of a series of huts that looked like a tribal village so that patients could stay with their relatives. "To me, with my modern education, it looked old-fashioned," he admits. "But the people said: 'This hospital belongs to us.'"

For Dr Bang, it was the culmination of a lifelong dream. His father, a supporter of the Indian independence movement, was a devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi and both Dr Bang and his brother Ashok grew up in Gandhi's ashram in Sabarmarti.

Dr Bang was heavily influenced by Gandhi's philosophy of "self-rule". "Gandhi had a vision of how society should be, of how India should be self-ruled," he says now. "But it was not only India that should be allowed to self-rule, it was every human being as well… I took inspiration from that and asked myself, 'How can individuals and communities become autonomous and independent with their own healthcare?'"

He remembers walking past a rural village at the age of 13 with his brother and seeing that the inhabitants didn't have enough food and were sick. "My brother said: 'I will improve agriculture when I'm older,' and I said: 'OK, I have no option but to improve their health.'" He emits a high-pitched giggle. Both brothers kept their promise – Ashok now works with farmers in central India while Dr Bang's wife, Rani, a contemporary from medical school, was swiftly co-opted to the healthcare cause.

"Her name in the Indian language means 'the Queen'," he says, eyes twinkling. "So I am an ex-officio king." Given that they live and work together under such intense conditions, do they ever argue? "Ooh don't ask me this! Now, at the age of 60, it has reduced. But when we were in our 30s, we were constantly arguing about the best way to do things."

Still, in spite of Search's impressive statistical results, the Bangs have been criticised in the past for allowing uneducated women to administer complex medical drugs. In response, Dr Bang insists that, so far, "our workers have given 15,000 injections. The rate of complication has been zero." The insistence that patients must be treated in "techno- centric" hospitals by western-trained physicians is, to his mind, simply not viable in rural India, where lack of transport and an inability to pay for treatment often mean that sick people stay away. "I think this view is, to say it mildly, impractical and to say it forcefully, it's an imperialistic way of thinking. What is do-able in Boston is not do-able in Gadchiroli… Needs are different in different societies."

But although he has saved countless lives, Dr Bang remains plagued by the memory of a single baby he could not help. "It was one of the turning points, before the hospital we constructed had been built," he recalls. "One rainy season, it was pouring outside and it was dark. I was relaxing in the evening after a day's work. Suddenly somebody knocked on my door. It was a young woman carrying a tiny child. The child was skin and bones. I held the baby up as there was no examination table and started examining him. He was malnourished and had severe dehydration and pneumonia. Within minutes of arriving at that diagnosis, the baby stopped breathing. I couldn't do anything.

"The woman had come from a village 4km away. I asked her: 'Why didn't you come earlier?'"

She replied by telling Dr Bang her story: her husband was an alcoholic and spent all his earnings on drink. During pregnancy, she had not eaten because of an ingrained tribal belief that if she did, it would make the baby too heavy to deliver. She developed malaria while pregnant, but there was no money to buy drugs to treat her. When the baby was born, she fed him diluted milk. Then when the baby fell sick, she took him to a witch doctor who sacrificed a chicken for 200 rupees. When that didn't work, she started walking to Dr Bang but a river that lay across her path had swollen and burst its banks. She could not cross because there was no bridge: the government had promised to build one, but it had been lying incomplete for months. So the woman slept rough overnight before resuming her journey the next day, when the water levels had fallen.

"I felt very miserable when she told me this story," says Dr Bang. "That baby died because of many factors: poverty, a wrong belief system, an alcoholic husband and corruption, because the bridge had not been constructed [by the government]. I felt terribly hopeless.

"But then I looked at the whole situation and asked myself: 'Do I really need to solve all the problems, all the links in the chain of this cause of death?' I started to think: 'Where is the weakest link I can attack?' and that was access to healthcare." He falls silent for a moment. "It was practical compassion, not a flash of genius."

And in a world where eight million children a year continue to die before they reach their fifth birthday, perhaps it is Dr Bang's practical compassion that offers the best hope of some kind of solution. Until then, the memory of that woman and her baby haunts him still.

bornto.savethechildren.org.uk

Illegal demolition of Ganesh Krupa Society, Golibar, Mumbai

2011-02-11T20:32:00.002+05:30

This is the second video in a series documenting Golibar's fight for their homes. The first can be viewed at -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jxA_w...

Residents of Ganesh Krupa society in Golibar, Khar East have been fighting to save their homes from builders Shivalik Ventures and corrupt government officials who want to illegally take over their land for redevelopment under SRA (Slum Redevelopment Auhtority) scheme.

On January 20th, MHADA officials and hundreds of police officers came to demolish their houses citing a court order. What they ignored was that the court had also directed the builder to provide habitable transit camps, registered agreements, and rehabilitation within 500m of their current homes. None of these conditions have been met.

On the contrary, Shivalik Ventures has encroached on Air Force land to construct rehabilitation housing for the residents. The Air Force has taken the builder to court on this matter.

The builder also forged signatures of the residents on a consent letter. The police only filed an FIR after the High Court directed them to do so. They have also failed to submit on time, findings of an enquiry into the matter. As a result the residents have filed a petition for contempt of court.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JncYN5yOS18

Contradictions of ‘development’ in contemporary India

2011-02-11T20:28:00.003+05:30

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/swapna-banerjee-guha/contradictions-of-%E2%80%98development%E2%80%99-in-contemporary-india?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_'2011-02-11+05:30:00'

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit?

About the author

Swapna Banerjee-Guha is Professor of Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences,Mumbai. Most recently she publishedAccumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order(Sage Publications, 2010).

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit? A large number of Indians from various cross-sections are currently enraged about this crucial question. While official outlets make frantic efforts to project this tendency as a contradiction between modernity and backwardness and label anyone questioning the validity of the above development model as ‘anti-development’ or ‘unlawful’, innumerable lived experiences go on reflecting heightening inequalities and the increasing expendability of the poor.

Take the case of the resource-rich tribal heartland of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh located in central and eastern India. Mining areas in these states are enthusiastically being leased out to global corporations leaving the poor tribal community homeless; common lands and waste lands in several states that have been traditionally providing livelihood and survival means to the poor are being taken over to make Special Economic Zones; rich coastal areas with enormous bio-diversity are being handed over to corporations like Dow Chemicals for making chemical hubs; natural resources like rivers are being privatised for industrial and commercial purposes, like the Sheonath river in Chattisgarh. Examples abound. This ‘development’ process that rests heavily on displacement, dispossession and destruction of the environment is creating an irreversible production structure in favour of the rich that is actively supported by all major international financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and the like and facilitated by the neoliberal Indian state.

Specific areas in India – large and small, rural and urban - are being identified as global economic regions to carry out modern hi-tech corporatised activities. Essentially global, these new economic spaces (location choices are made by investing corporations) are carved out from existing agricultural areas, forest lands, mining areas, fishing zones, peripheries of metropolitan regions, villages, even slums and dilapidated areas inside cities. In the process of converting these spaces into newer ones, large numbers of farmers, agricultural labourers, fishermen, in short a huge section of economically active but poor people are being displaced and dispossessed leading to fierce resistance struggles, inviting in response, state atrocities and violence.

The phenomenon has become pan-Indian: whether in Raigad in Maharashtra, Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal, in Jagatsinghapur-Kalinganagar in Orissa or Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, the patterns are comparable. The official argument says that as the State is not financially capable of providing ‘world class infrastructure’ in a short time, it is necessary to invite private capital to provide it initially in chosen pockets that will boost economic growth in the surrounding regions. While private capital undertakes this task, it becomes obligatory on the part of the State to offer them concessions and subsidies, in exchange. Land acquisition for such global spaces is undertaken by invoking a Colonial Act of 1894 that says that the State is the ultimate owner of land and can take over any tract for ‘public purposes’ by paying reasonable (sic) compensation. Enclave development, once a mainstay of the colonial state, has made a glorious come back in contemporary Indian economic policy.

The vociferous state

This newer form of capitalist development depends on global finance and technology and a supportive neoliberal hegemonic discourse. It goes beyond the previous practice of disaggregation and production relocation in areas with lower social reproduction costs to an altogether newer design of total appropriation of space for a novel exploitation process. Set to mutate all existing social relations, it further modifies the non-Fordist labour process, transforms relations between the dominant and the dominated and alienates space-economies from their respective social realities to construct an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory. The common collective interest and the public good start getting negotiated away by ideological, political and economic power-plays that privilege individual accumulation, subordinating the common people and their rights in a way that is even used to underpin justifications for state violence.

Resting on a contradictory framework of inclusion (of the few) and exclusion (of the many) it materialises a multiscalar, uneven development involving integration of selective regions and sections of societies in a globalised market framework. A destructive ensemble of obsoletism and reconstruction diffuses across the old spaces, displacing the existing use values and altering the discursive as well as the material geography of such spaces, creating a solid, material background for intense conflicts. A typical neoliberal construction of space, place and scale is taking place in India that is reconstructing a new geography of centrality and marginality, making the issues of production and capitalisation of space extremely crucial. The resultant landscapes of conflict invite resistance and contestation from below by those whose livelihoods get jeopardised and who are systematically marginalised by the state apparatus in diverse ways that expose their vulnerability in the current order.

To identify the causal factors, one needs to look at the direction of India’s current economic momentum. There has been a far-reaching shift in her economic policy, facilitating ingress of global capital in all economic sectors, downsizing labour, outsourcing economic activities, and promoting an aggressive urbanism based on gentrification and privatisation. Based on exploitation of the product of labour, pillage of nature and expropriation of social property, such policies have a close connection with international financial institutions, the global corporate sector, and quite significantly, the major capitalist countries. The State, backtracking from its previous role of a provider takes a neoliberal stance, becoming a vociferous facilitator of private capital pitching heavily on a ‘politically neutral’ practice of developmental governmentality. While the country’s growth roars ahead at an annual 8 per cent, growth in regular employment in recent years is found to have exceeded not even 1 per cent. Quite logically India accounts for the largest number of homeless, illiterate and ill-fed people in the world.

Amidst the euphoria of creating a free market, in practice the contemporary policies are resulting in a dramatic intensification of a coercive disciplinary form of state intervention to impose a market rule that subjugates the majority and protects the ‘strong’. This is taking place on an aggressively contested institutional landscape in which newly emerging ‘economic spaces’ stand in conflict with inherited regulatory arrangements, providing a political arena through which subsequent struggles over accumulation by dispossession and its associated contradictions are getting articulated and fought out at various scales questioning the prevailing development path of the country, assuming a national character, often supported by pan-Indian coalitions of regional resistance groups, broadly/basically left oriented but not belonging to mainstream left parties. The resultant negotiating strategy of the neoliberal state creating multi-level contradictory spaces of conciliation, coercion and atrocity is significant in exposing the porosity of the state apparatus.

One needs to emphasise that the contextual embeddedness of the current exclusionist economic policy in India, produced at national, regional and local scales, are not only getting defined by the nexus of policy regimes, disciplinary political authorities and their regulatory practices, but also by resistance struggles, consolidated grassroots movements and mobilisation of progressive forces that are challenging the state sponsored corporatised development paradigm. Peripatetic global capital in collision with state power may exhibit its authority in controlling spaces and territories for some time, but the ongoing struggles clearly point at an emerging discourse in search of an alternate paradigm, based on a democratically oriented sustainable development practice.

For references and full development of issues see:

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (1997). Spatial Dynamics of International Capital, Orient Longman, Hyderabad.

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2002). 'Critical Geographical Praxis: Globalisation and Socio-Spatial Disorder', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.37 (44 & 45), pp. 4503-09, Mumbai.

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2008): ‘Space Relations of Capital and Significance of New Economic Enclaves: SEZs in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 43(47), pp. 51-60, Mumbai

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2009): ‘Contradictions of Enclave Development in Contemporary Times: Special Economic Zones in India’ Human Geography, Vol. 2(1), pp 1-12, Massachusetts

Bhaduri, A (2008): 'Predatory Growth', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.43(16), pp.10-13, Mumbai.

Bourdieu, P (1998): 'The Essence of Neoliberalism', Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998.

Brenner, N and N. Theodore (2002): ’Cities and Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Antipode, Vol. 34, pp 349-379

Conway, D and N Heynen (2006): 'The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism and Emergence of Contemporary Globalisation' in Denis Conway and Nik Heynen, (eds.)., Globalisation's Contradictions, Routledge, U.K.

Cox, H (1999): 'The Market as God: Living in the New Dispensation',Atlantic Monthly, March, pp.18-23.

Gill, S (1995): ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium, Vol. 24, pp 399-423.

Harvey, D (2005): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York

Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Routledge, New Delhi.

The Potential of the Forest Rights Act

2011-02-04T11:20:00.000+05:30

http://sanhati.com/excerpted/3197/

By Sirisha Naidu, Sanhati

Introduction

Neoliberalism in India, rather than consisting of a wholesale withdrawal of the state, has seen its rollback in some spheres and an expansion in others. In the last few decades the state has withdrawn from providing basic goods and services, but has taken a much more active role in promoting new avenues of profitable investment (e.g., those associated with free market environmentalism, facilitating the process of commodification of goods and services that were previously outside the ambit of the capitalist market, and facilitating the privatization of state property). The Indian state has therefore played an active role in original accumulation, which involves the dispossession and expropriation of land from marginalized people in rural and urban areas, as well as ensuring that adequate resources (e.g., natural resources) are available to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of capital. It is in this context that the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA), hailed as a “historic” legislation was passed.

Shankar Gopalakrishnan identifies the opponents of the Act as the forest bureaucracy and the English media, and is particularly critical of the latter’s neoliberal outlook, its attack on the FRA, and its favourable view of state control “as a proxy for policies that favour private capital” (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a). However, he recognizes that certain aspects of the FRA might be beneficial to capital. Indeed, neoliberalism is not a single, undifferentiated process divorced from capitalism; rather its diverse and interlinked practices may reflect a “heightened, evolved and more destructive form of capitalism” (Heynen and Robbins, 2005). In this essay, I offer some exploratory observations about these neoliberal aspirations of the Act.

Reform and Revolution?

The compulsion to design and pass the Act might be located in the demands of a political constituency. It might also be located in the recognition of the growing threat of left-wing insurgency (Gopalakrishnan, 2010b). Samuel Huntington (1968) aptly noted that

If the countryside supports the government, the system is secure against revolution and the government has some hope of making itself secure against revolution. If the countryside is in opposition, both system and government are in danger of overthrow. (pp 292).

The Act however, goes beyond addressing the immediate issue of survival and security for forest dwellers that might be needed to pacify those marginalized and even persecuted by “development”. As Gopalakrishnan notes, it is also “an entry point into a deeper, wider politics of struggle over resources” (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a). For this reason, the representatives of the state (especially the Forest Department) have worked to restrict the scope of the FRA to tenurial security and subvert the provisions of community rights and the rights against arbitrary displacement [1].

As the recent controversy surrounding the sanction of Rs. 25 crore per “naxal-affected” district for so-called development purposes [2] indicates, the Indian state has little or no real interest in changing the terms of its engagement with forest dwellers, nor veering from the path of “development” itself. Control of these monies is to be given to a committee comprising the Collector, Superintendent of Police and District Forest Officer. To the extent that the FRA might stabilize political power and prevent revolutions, the Act might be considered desirable from the point of view of the state but beyond that even the interpretation restricted to implementing private property rights has seen limited success. Oddly, the economic and political context under which the FRA is being implemented is reminiscent of land reform carried out by the US in East Asia where large-scale land reform was accompanied by military suppression of radical forces, and involved no political marginalization of the landed class (see Moyo and Yeros, 2005).

The Environmental Fix

To the extent that neoliberals express an interest in the FRA, their focus has been on institutionalizing a particular property regime in forests (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a). The neoliberal property regimes include policies like titling, land surveys and mapping, establishing state land registries, creating new landholding legislation and removing restrictions on land leasing (Sethi, 2006). The policy goals are tenure security, creation of land markets, and improved creditworthiness, and fulfilling the needs of the agrarian export sector.

With the agroforestry expected to develop 25.36 million hectares of land in the next two decades from current utilization of 7.45 million hectares (NRCAF, 2007 cited in Dhyani, et al., 2009), the focus on property regimes could be beneficial. The bourgeoning agro-forestry sector has received a fillip with World Bank sponsored bio-carbon projects in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh under the Clean Development Mechanism (DTE, 2008), World Bank proposed plantation projects in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, and recent developments on REDD Plus discussions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun in 2010. Understandably, there is a legitimate fear that the newly titled lands could be used for agricultural or forestry related commercial projects. Agro-forestry may not be consistent with livelihood objectives of forest dwellers, but it also may not adequately satisfy the demands for democratization. Experiences with forestry schemes since the 1980s in their many avatars have been criticized for being hierarchical, exclusionary and undemocratic despite adopting buzzwords such as community, participation and decentralization (Sarin et al., 2003). Typically the state (represented by the Forest Department), donors and conservation and development agencies decide the management plan and forest dwellers participate as cheap wage labor and provide free monitoring.

The promotion of property rights in the forest sector will also provide incentives to engage in conservation and management to support the anticipated high growth carbon market. The World Bank’s State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2010 reported that the value of the global carbon market stood at $144 billion in 2009 [3]. While carbon finance dropped in 2009 as a response to the global economic crisis, At the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s third Participants Assembly meeting that took place in Washington DC in September 2010, donor counties committed $100 million in new pledges [4] to support REDD Plus initiatives. Incidentally, it is seen as the only silver lining in global negotiations over the successor to the Kyoto Protocol that is set to expire in 2012. According to Mr. Jairam Ramesh, Minister of Environment and Forests indications, India will participate in the bounties of the REDD Plus initiatives.

The commodification (even if incomplete) of forest goods and services re-engineers social and cultural notions of forests and nature to fit within the market rubric. Livelihoods can be conditioned through the market with the monetizing of forestland and forest resources and creating what Karl Polanyi termed as “fictional commodities”. This opens up the possibilities for the creation of a new capitalist class in the rural areas, dominated as they are by agrarian interests. The promotion of agroforestry on the one hand provides raw materials, and on the other hand provides fodder to sustain financial instruments in carbon and other forms of environmental trading. As Castree (2007) suggests about free market environmentalism and Sagari Ramdas (2009) demonstrates in her study on FRA implementation, there is sufficient reason to doubt the “ecofriendly motivations” of such instruments. Instead they may be viewed as environmental fixes to the problem of sustained economic growth (Castree, 2008; also see Naidu and Manolakos, 2010).

Self Provisioning, Social Reproduction and Enclosures

Under previous stages of capitalism, original accumulation freed up resources for efficient exploitation by capitalist production but was able to accommodate or absorb the consequent reliance of the population on wage labour, and produce rising wages and better economic conditions for workers. However, one may not expect past histories of capitalist industrialization to replicate themselves in a different milieu. Not only is the current form of capitalist development unable to maintain earlier levels of labour absorption, increasing labour flexibilisation and a decline in social provisioning (e.g., the rollback of the public distribution system) within a neoliberal economic regime serves to accentuate the fact that the system is increasingly unable or unwilling to accommodate the costs of social reproduction (see NCEUS, 2009).

Under conditions of insecure and oppressive wage employment, there is an increasing compulsion to engage in self provisioning by production of use values from land and other natural resources, and relying on the rural social net (Moyo and Yeros, 2005). The FRA partially fulfills this need. However, historically, self-provisioning has been beneficial to capitalist production as is acknowledged by writers in the 17th-19th century. Michael Perelman provides ample examples of writers who believed that workers should have some access to land so that they are not wholly reliant on wage labour but not sufficient to afford them independence from wage employment (Perelman, 2007). This sentiment is reflected in the following proposal in an 1800 issue of the Commercial and Agricultural Magazine

. . . a quarter acre of garden-ground will go a great way toward rendering the peasant independent of any assistance. However, in this beneficent intention moderation must be observed, or we may chance to transform the labourer into a petty farmer; from the most beneficial to the most useless of industry. When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings . . . the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work, and the hay-making and harvest . . . must suffer to a degree which . . . would sometimes prove a national inconvenience. [5]

Perelman surmises that individual property rights in land served as an inducement to more readily accept enclosures of the commons and so that agricultural employers could “profit from a cheaper labour force”. The latter follows from the subsidy that household production, care work as well as petty commodity production provides to proletarianised and semi-proletarianised wage labour. While livelihoods analysis scholars positively refer to the condition in which workers are forced to maintain a dual or multiple income strategy as livelihood diversification, it points to the insecurity associated with and inadequacy of wage labour employment. Secure access to land will allow workers to spend their “free” time and investment in providing for themselves outside of the market, thereby leaving workers to produce a higher surplus value in wage labour (Moyo and Yeros, 2005). Further, the existence of land as a fallback, however inadequate, also means that labour can always be pushed back to the land when no longer needed (Breman, 2000: 241). FRA implementation with its high rejection of claims and provision of titles to land much below that filed in claims is again consistent with this thesis though it is unclear whether this is a well-thought out strategy or merely points to the reluctance of the Forest Department to give up territorial control over forest land.

Further de jure rights also bring livelihoods and management practices hitherto unmonitored or uncontrolled within the ambit of state control (Poffenberger 1999 in Aguilar 2005). For instance, claiming forest rights necessarily disciplines the previously undisciplined population engaged in podu (slash and burn agriculture in Andhra Pradesh) into practicing settled agriculture. This represents a change in lifestyles conditioned by the FRA (Ramdas, 2009). While on the one hand, the market and the state can now control livelihood and related practices of forest dwellers, the settling of rights with its narrow interpretation of access and proprietorship, opens up vast amount of resources at the disposal of the state to engage in promoting capitalist interests and nation building (Springate-Baginski and Blaikie, 2007). This may be pursued without the need for even weak assurances that forest dwellers would partake in the resultant prosperity.

The potential implications of the FRA in enclosing the commons are not lost on its supposed beneficiaries as this quote from an interview by Sagari Ramdas (2009) with a Savara woman from Srikakulam district, AP suggests

I don’t know whether I was (more) free before the act or after the act. Earlier I was a “thief” in the eyes of the law, but learnt to survive. Now I am “legal” and have legally lost my land as the government took all and gave me nothing. We have “legally” been granted “two acres” of community land, whereas all this is ours (pointing to the hills beyond). We reject these titles. We reject these plantations. We will continue to struggle.

Concluding Thoughts

Heynen and Robbins (2005) list four aspects dominant to capital’s neoliberal agenda:

… governance, the institutional political compromises through which capitalist societies are negotiated; privatization, where natural resources … are turned over to firms and individuals; enclosure, the capture of common resources and the exclusion of the communities to which they are linked; and valuation, the process through which invaluable and complex ecosystems are reduced to commodities through pricing.

All four aspects of this agenda are embodied in India’s forest policies and are being imposed on the FRA. This essay discusses ways in which neoliberal capital might benefit from a neoliberal interpretation of the FRA, it must be noted that it also has to contend with a forest bureaucracy unwilling to fully implement even the most neoliberal friendly aspect of tenure security. Apart from neo-Malthusian narratives of the destruction of forests by poor forest dwellers, this might be explained using the notion of territorial logic (Harvey, 2003) that is reluctant to give up power over the forest sector as well as the fact that not all factions of capital will benefit from FRA implementation, one example is that of the Vedanta project in Orissa.

As a land reform program, the FRA is limited. Even on paper there is no intention to address the growing economic differentiation, no acknowledgement of landless forest dwellers, nor is the titling process accompanied by planned investment in agriculture (Das, 2010) or cheap sources of credit (Lerche, 2011). Its transformatory potential thus does not emerge merely from the change in property rights (to the extent that even this occurs). Rather its potential is vested in the space that it allows for a change in the discourse on forest rights with its inclusion of provisions for community rights and against arbitrary displacements, the political space that it allows for challenging existing hegemonies, and for building broader mobilizations (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a) - these are issues not tackled in this essay. The challenge that forest dwellers and their allies thus face is not only to secure the implementation of the FRA but also challenge its neoliberal interpretation.

Endnotes:

[1] See the Campaign for Survival and Dignity website http://www.forestrightsact.com/component/content/46?task=view , http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=69078

[2] http://www.indianexpress.com/news/snubbed-plan-panel-tells-pm-funds-to-officials-in-naxal-areas-very-bad-idea/736318/0

[3] http://go.worldbank.org/D2V9XWYHM0

[4]http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/ENVIRONMENT/EXTCARBONFINANCE/0,,contentMDK:22751912~pagePK:64168445~piPK:64168309~theSitePK:4125853,00.html

[5] Cited in Thompson, E.P. (1963).The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage), pp. 219- 20. In Perelman (2007).

References:

Aguilar, F.V. (2005). Rural land struggles in Asia: Overview of selected contexts. In S. Moyo & P. Yeros. Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. New York: Zed Books.

Springate-Baginski, O. & Blaikie, P. (2007). Annexation, struggle and response: forest, people and power in India and Nepal. In O. Springate-Baginski & P. Blaikie (eds). Forests, People and Power: The Political Ecology of Reform in South Asia. London: Earthscan.

Breman, J. (2000). Labour and landlessness in South and South-east Asia. In D. Bryceson et al. (Ed.). Disappearing Peasantries? London: ITDG Publishing.

Castree, N. (2008). Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation. Environment and Planning A. 40: 131-152.

Das, Debarshi (2010). Some aspects of agricultural investment In India: Part I. Sanhati, October 28, 2010. http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2905/

Dhyani, S.K., Kareemulla, K., Ajit, & Handa, A.K. (2009). Agroforestry potential and scope for development across agro-climatic zones in India. Indian Journal of Forestry 32(2): 181-190.

Gopalakrishnan, S. (2010a). Rights Legislations and the Indian State: Understanding The Nature and Meaning of the Forest Rights Act. Briefing prepared for mass organizations. Distributed by SRUTI.

Gopalakrishnan, S. (2010b). Forest Areas, Political Economy and the “Left-Progressive Line” on Operation Green Hunt. Radical Notes. 30th May 2010.

Harvey, D. (2003). A New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Heynen, N., & Robbins, P. (2005). The neoliberalization of nature: governance, privatization, enclosure and valuation. Capitalism Nature Socialism 16(1): 5-8.

Huntington, S. P. (1968). Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.

Lerche, J. (2011). Agrarian crisis and agrarian questions in India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 11(1): 104-118.

Moyo, S., & Yeros, P. (2005). Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. New York: Zed Books.

Naidu, S.C., & Manolakos, P.T. Primary accumulation, capitalist nature and sustainable development. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(29): 39-45.

National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (2009): The Challenge of Employment in India: An Informal Economy Perspective, Ministry of Small Scale Industries, Government of India, New Delhi.

Perelman, Michael (2007). Primitive accumulation from feudalism to neoliberalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 18(2): 44-61.

Ramdas, S. (2009). Women, forestspaces and the law: Transgressing the boundaries. Economic and Political Weekly, 44(44): 65-73

Sarin, M., Singh, N.M., Sundar, N., & Bhogal, M. (2003). Devolution as a threat to democratic decision-making in forestry? Findings from three states in India. In by D.Edmunds and E. Wollenberg (Eds.). Local Forest Management: The Impacts of Devolution Policies. London, Earthscan Publications.

Sethi, Manpreet (2006). Land reforms in India: issues and challenges. In P. Rosset, R. Patel, & M. Courville (Eds). Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform. Oakland, Calif.: Food first Books.

I thank Panayiotis Manolakos for his comments.

A Dangerous first

2011-02-04T11:14:00.001+05:30

Nitin Sethi, TNN, Feb 3, 2011, 11.58pm IST

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/developmental-issues/A-Dangerous-first/articleshow/7421256.cms

The biggest casualty in giving the go-ahead to the single biggest FDI project – Posco – has been the Forest Rights Act.

Till date, the triumvirate of tigerwallahs, industry lobbies and forest bureaucracy were the only ones seen opposed to it. But Congress backed it, using it when the occasion arose in the Vedanta-Niyamgiri case to give Rahul Gandhi the pro-tribal makeover. Jairam Ramesh evoked the provisions of the act, besides other regulations, to shut down Vedanta's aluminium plant in Orissa. The Congress scion flew into the Biju Janta Dal citadel to claim the mantel of "the protector of tribals" and their voice in Delhi.

But with Posco, the UPA government has shown that beyond the political mileage it may get out of the legislation, it can also jettison forest rights out of the way when required.

The act has simple but powerful provisions intended to change the way forestlands are alienated from tribals and those who have traditionally used them. Forestlands are to be handed back to their traditional users – tribals – but also others who have used it for three generations or more. The lands cannot be taken away before their rights are ascertained and then bought by the state government. Crucial to this is the mechanism by which it occurs. The village council is given quasi-judicial powers in the process and in many ways it becomes the key authority – a first in Indian history.

To ensure that the Union environment and forests ministry's forest clearance process was in alignment with these new regulations, Ramesh passed a critical order in August 2009. The ministry would not give a forest clearance – handing the land to project developers – until the state government provided proof that the village council agreed with the takeover of its forests and that all rights had been settled in the area.

Orissa's administration, but not the affected village councils, claimed that it had verified and found that no one had rights in the forestland demarcated for Posco. After violence at the site and complaints from protesters, the Centre sent a committee to review the case.

The Orissa government had done little to identify people who had rights in the forests being handed over, said the four-member committee. In fact they had done much to deny rights to these claimants, said three of the four members.

The environment ministry's statutory Forest Advisory Committee too found that the Orissa government had not provided the requisite evidence under the August 2009 order to show it had met the provisions of the Act. Orissa had instead questioned the very validity of the order.

All three recommended that Posco be denied the forest clearance till the state government adheres to the regulations.

Ramesh disregarded the opinion of his appointed experts.

He instead asked Orissa to give an assurance that no one could claim rights over the forestland. Orissa had already given such an assurance a year ago. But, there is no such provision in the Forest Rights Act for an overriding assurance from the state. The village council is the only body that could have given the nod for diversion of forestland.

One may conjecture that the UPA found a greater economic trade-off in allowing the project that intends to export high-grade iron ore from the country besides producing steel. But the damage caused in pushing it through will reflect on all future cases of forest clearances – and there are hundreds in the pipeline.

Every project developer can now ask for similar favours from the government. The forest bureaucracy and industry was against the August 2009 order of the environment ministry. Now it has been dumped without being revoked. The states may never need to give evidence that they acted legally. They can get away with an assurance, even if it flies in the face of proof.

Aside: it is worthwhile to note that not many self-claimed defenders of forests – the wildlife lobbies – have stood up to oppose this either.

Letter from PSSS to Jairam Ramesh, August 2010

2011-02-01T18:07:00.002+05:30

http://kafila.org/2011/02/01/a-green-signal-for-the-rape-of-justice-and-the-people-posco-pratirodh-sangram-samiti/

The following is the statement issued by the POSCO PRATIRODH SANGRAM SAMITIon the latest decision of the Environment Ministry on POSCO. The image below from an earlier round of land acquisition attempt is a telling illustration of how the ‘free market’ functions. Received via Shankar Gopalakrishnan.

Land being acquired for POSCO. Image courtesy The Hindu

Jairam Ramesh and the UPA government have shown their true colours with their decision today on the POSCO project. Ignoring the reports of its own advisory bodies and enquiry committees, violating its own orders and the laws of the land, this Ministry has shown that the naked face of corporate greed – it is not the “rule of law”, the “aam aadmi”, “inclusive growth” or any of these other lies – that rules this country. The decision today can be summarised in one sentence:”Repeat your lies, give us promises that we all know are false, and then loot at will.”

We repeat: we will not give up our lands, our forests and our homes to this company. It is not the meaningless orders of a mercenary government that will decide this project’s fate, but the tears and blood of our people. Through the road of peaceful demonstrations and people’s resistance we have fought this project, in the face of torture, jail, firings and killings. If this project comes it will come over our dead bodies.
We note the following about today’s decision:

The Orissa government has been asked to give an “assurance” that the affected people of the area are not forest dwellers under the Forest Rights Act, after which the “final forest clearance” will be granted. The Orissa government has already lied on this count on numerous occasions. Indeed, the majority report of the POSCO Enquiry Committee said “The Committee finds that the government’s own records such as census reports and voters list confirm that there are both other traditional forest dwellers (OTFD) and forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes in the project area and the statement of the District Collector of Jagatsinghpur to the contrary is false” (para II.1, Conclusions and Recommendations). Even the dissenting member agreed that the Act had not been implemented. The same finding had been reached by the subcommittee of the Saxena Committee earlier. After the Ministry’s own enquiry committees have found the Orissa government guilty of lying, what is the meaning of saying the project can proceed if the liars repeat their lies?

This Ministry has earlier made a song and dance of respect for people’s views and environmental laws. Under the Forest Rights Act, the consent of the gram sabhas of the area is an essential requirement, and this was confirmed by the Ministry’s own order. Three different committees – the Saxena Committee, the POSCO Enquiry Committee and the Ministry’s own Forest Advisory Committee – all therefore said the clearance should be withdrawn. The Minister today claims that the project can go ahead if he and the Orissa government decide they want it to. So much for the law and for people’s rights.

On the environment clearance, we recall again the words of the majority Enquiry Committee, which said “Potentially very serious impacts…have not even been assessed, leave alone planned for…The cavalier and reckless attitude of the concerned authorities to such potentially disastrous impacts is horrendous and shocks the collective conscience of the Committee….There appears to be a predominant belief that conditionalities in the EIA/ CRZ clearances are a substitute for comprehensive evaluation and assessment of the environmental impact by the authorities. Imposing vague conditionalities seems to be a way out for the various agencies from taking hard decisions on crucial issues.” Again, it is not us who said this – it is the Ministry’s own Committee! And yet this is exactly what the Minister has chosen to do.

Independent reports and studies by reputed academics have confirmed what we have always said – this project will be of no benefit to anyone except POSCO’s profit margins. But yet we find this being called a project of “strategic importance.” To whom?

Today the veil stands ripped open; the government stands exposed before the nation, a mercenary willing to put its regulations, officials and security forces at the disposal of the highest bidder. Let the UPA and the Central government answer: where is the rule of law today, in the name of which you crush struggles across the country? Where is your much vaunted love for the people and for the environment? What do you stand for if not for corporate greed?

Prashant Paikray
Spokesperson, PPSS
09437571547

Posco clearance: Govt to wait & watch on mining, MoU issues Read more: Posco clearance: Govt to wait & watch on mining, MoU issues - The Times of Ind

2011-02-01T18:02:00.000+05:30

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/Posco-clearance-Govt-to-wait-watch-on-mining-MoU-issues/articleshow/7400073.cms

BHUBANESWAR: Enthused over the Centre's nod to Posco's mega steel plant, the Orissa government on Monday said it would soon resume land acquisition work at the project site, but preferred a wait-and-watch approach on issues like mining and MoU renewal delaying fruition of India s biggest foreign direct investment.

"We welcome the decision and thank Union environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh for granting approval, although the process got delayed," steel and mines minister Raghunath Mohanty said. "Posco project is important not only for Orissa but for the country as it will provide employment and spur economic activities. We will begin the land acquisition process as soon as possible," he added.

The state government was forced to halt land acquisition for the 12 billion USD project in August following a central government s stop-work order on grounds of violation of Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006.

Ramesh announced environment clearance for the South Korean company's proposed steel and captive port projects near Paradeep in Jagatsinghpur district, but sought Orissa government's assurance that those claiming dependence on or cultivating land in the project area cannot be categorized as "other traditional forest dwellers" under FRA before it can give final nod for diversion of 1253 hectares of forest land for Posco project.

Posco's bid to access the Khandadhar iron ore reserves in Sunergarh district, around 600 km from the proposed 12 million tonne per annum-capacity steel facility site, is also pending before the Supreme Court.

Possibly keeping these in mind, CM Naveen Patnaik reacted to the development with caution. "It is good news," said Naveen, hours after Ramesh declared his decision in Delhi. "We will take appropriate action," Naveen replied to queries from journalists on when the state government would renew its memorandum of understanding with the company. The state government on June 22, 2005, signed with Posco a MoU valid for five years.

Senior government officers said Ramesh gave the green signal as he did not have "much option", but sounded caution about the Posco project becoming a reality. "A positive step has been taken. But there are a few other issues, most importantly mining, which need to resolved before the project can materialize," a senior government officer said.

Paradeep MLA and minister Damodar Rout attributed the controversy over forest law violations to "wrongful recording of forest land" and said people who cultivated betel vines on government land will be adequately compensated. The administration has identified 1877 people growing betel vines for their livelihood on 304 acres of government land. It had paid compensation to 96 of the farmers and retrieved around 11 acres of land.

Posco welcomed Ramesh's decision and said it appreciated the concerns of stakeholders on sustainability of environment and livelihood of affected people. "We are committed to take sustainable green initiatives and effective measures for conserving the land and marine environment of the area. We are also committed to create sustainable livelihood opportunities for the project affected people by implementing the R&R (rehabilitation and resettlement) package sincerely," it said, adding, "We will continue to work for welfare of the local community and plough back part of our earnings for CSR (corporate social responsibility) after operations commence."

Read more: Posco clearance: Govt to wait & watch on mining, MoU issues - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/Posco-clearance-Govt-to-wait-watch-on-mining-MoU-issues/articleshow/7400073.cms#ixzz1Ci4lGcUV

Letter from PSSS to Jairam Ramesh, August 2010

2011-02-01T17:04:00.001+05:30

http://kafila.org/2010/08/19/posco-pratirodh-sangram-samiti-to-jairam-ramesh/

This is a press release issued in August 2010 by PPSS, pointing out the illegalities being committed by the Orissa government and the Central Ministry of Environment and Forests in connection with the POSCO project.

POSCO PRATIRODH SANGRAM SAMITI

Dhinkia, Nuagaon, Gadkujang; Jagatsinghpur District, Orissa

11.08.2010

To:

Shri Jairam Ramesh

Minister of Environment and Forests

Paryavaran Bhavan

New Delhi

Sub: Regarding POSCO project – need for withdrawal of illegal final clearance; new Meena Gupta Committee clearly aimed at delaying matters

Dear Sir,

We are the people’s organisation spearheading the struggle against the illegal and unjust POSCO project in Orissa. We are writing to you in the context of the ongoing illegalities being committed by the Orissa government and the Central Ministry of Environment and Forests in connection with this project. We also condemn the decision of the Ministry to constitute yet another Committee to “look into the matter” instead of remedying its own illegal decision to grant final forest clearance to the project on December 29, 2009.

We wish to bring the following to your attention. While we welcome the stop work order of the Ministry dated August 6, 2010, we condemn the Ministry’s failure to withdraw the illegal clearance granted on December 29, 2009 to the project.

We, political leaders and now your Ministry’s own Committee to Study the Forest Rights Act (the NC Saxena Committee) have all pointed out that:

1. We are indeed Other Traditional Forest Dwellers and eligible for rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006. It may be noted that the palli sabhas of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Govindpur have also asserted this fact and it is therefore now simply illegal for any other authority to deny it without going through the process under the Forest Rights Act.

2. As we are other traditional forest dwellers, our consent is required for the

diversion of any forest land (this is also stated in your own Ministry’s circular of August 3, 2009). The palli sabhas of Nuagaon, Dhinkia and Govindpur have denied consent to any diversion on February 4, 5 and 6 of this year, which has also been admitted by your Ministry in its latest “stop work” order.

3. The process under the Forest Rights Act has not been completed in the area. No rights have been recognised and no claims processed. This has also been admitted by the Ministry and by the Orissa government itself, which has said in writing to you that it has not processed any claims.

In short, every single condition required with respect to the Forest Rights Act for a legal forest clearance has not been met; but the clearance was granted anyway on December 29, 2009.

Moreover, now that the palli sabhas have denied their consent, all other issues become irrelevant, and the clearance is invalid in any case. If the Ministry intends to comply with the law, it has no choice but to withdraw the clearance and reject the project’s application.

Yet instead of doing this, we now find the Ministry has constituted yet another Committee to “investigate” the status of “implementation of the Forest Rights Act” as well as “relief and rehabilitation” (vide its order dated 28.07.2010). It is clear that this new Committee is nothing but a delaying tactic intended to muddy the waters. What exactly is this Committee going to

do?

Please consider:

· The Committee cannot investigate whether or not we are eligible under the Act; we have already produced documentary proof of the same which has been accepted by the NC Saxena committee. In any case, at the most this can only be challenged by anyone through the process under the Forest Rights Act; the District Collector’s lies about the lack of eligible persons have no legal standing and should have been rejected in the first place. How many more Committees do you need to “investigate” this matter? What are they going to “investigate”?

· Although we are eligible under the Forest Rights Act, the Orissa government itself admits that it has not processed any claims. It is therefore clear that the Act has not been implemented. What exactly is there for the Committee to “ascertain”?

· The fact that the palli sabhas of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Govindpur have denied consent for the project in February 2010 is known and accepted. This requires no “investigation” except looking at the concerned panchayat registers. The clearance is therefore invalid. How then is any further investigation relevant?

· The key question before the government is why the Ministry issued a clearance on December 29, 2009, in violation of the law and its own orders and despite having none of the required documents. This can only be answered by the Ministry, not by any inquiry in our area.

· There is a direct conflict of interest in the composition of the Committee, in that the Chairperson was herself the Secretary of Environment and Forests when the project was granted environmental clearance. As such she is being asked to review a project which she has already taken a decision in favour of.

We may also note that on June 22 the MoU with POSCO for this project lapsed. In light of this the entire basis for the forest clearance becomes infructuous as there is no longer any project in existence. If a new MoU is signed, the existing clearance is in any case invalid as it relates to the earlier proposal.

In sum, there is no purpose in the Committee “investigating and ascertaining” any matters with respect to the Forest Rights Act. It also cannot look into any questions of “relief and rehabilitation” because no rehabilitation has been done yet. It cannot even consider the general wisdom of the clearance because there is no longer any clarity on what the project is.

We therefore reject this irrelevant Committee as an obvious attempt to delay and confuse matters. No doubt some elements will try to use it to muddy the waters and come up with bureaucratic excuses for continuing to violate the law. We call upon you to cancel this committee, withdraw the illegal forest clearance and finally reject the application by POSCO India for diversion of forest land in Jagatsinghpur. This is the minimum that is required by law.

We will continue our peaceful and democratic agitation for our rights.

Sincerely,

Abhay Sahoo

Chairperson

POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti

Contact:
Prashant Paikray,
Spokesperson,
POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti
09437571547

Gazan youth issue manifesto to vent their anger with all sides in the conflict

2011-01-25T09:38:00.002+05:30

The manifesto

"Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!

"We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in...

"We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal-dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, home-made fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world.

"There is a revolution growing inside of us, an immense dissatisfaction and frustration that will destroy us unless we find a way of canalising this energy into something that can challenge the status quo and give us some kind of hope.

"We barely survived the Operation Cast Lead, where Israel very effectively bombed the shit out of us, destroying thousands of homes and even more lives and dreams. During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the Earth. During the last years, Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed. We cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want.

"ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart-aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want! We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/02/free-gaza-youth-manifesto-palestinian

Members of Hamas's security forces on escort duty. A group of young Gazans say they are fed up with Hamas and 'sick of bearded guys with guns'. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

The meeting takes place in a bare room in a block of flats in the centre ofGaza City. No photographs, no real names – those are the conditions.

This is the first time that a group of young Palestinian cyber-activists has agreed to meet a journalist since launching what it calls Gaza Youth's Manifesto for Change. It is an incendiary document – written with courage and furious energy – that has captivated thousands of people who have come across it online, and the young university students are visibly excited, but also scared. "Not only are our lives in danger; we are also putting our families at risk," says one of them, who calls himself Abu George.

Gaza Youth's Manifesto for Change is an extraordinary, impassioned cyber-scream in which young men and women from Gaza – where more than half the 1.5 million population is under 18 – make it clear that they've had enough. "Fuck Hamas..." begins the text. "Fuck Israel. FuckFatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!"

It goes on to detail the daily humiliations and frustrations that constitute everyday life in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian slice of land that Israel and Egypt have virtually sealed off from the world since Hamas was elected to power in 2006.

"Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed," reads the extraordinary document. "We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes we even can't think what we want because the occupation has occupied our brains and hearts so terrible that it hurts and it makes us want to shed endless tears of frustration and rage!"

The text ends with a triple demand: "We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?"

On Facebook, the group calls itself Gaza Youth Breaks Out. When the cyber-activists wrote the manifesto three weeks ago, they gave themselves a year to gather enough support before thinking about further steps. But their text has travelled around the world at an unexpected speed and has harvested thousands of supporters, many of them human rights activists, who say they are ready to help.

Now, the authors are dealing with the impact of a document that could be a turning point in the life of the Strip. "We did not expect this to be so big," one of them admits. Eight people – three women and five men – wrote the text. They are normal students, from the more secular elements of Gazan society. All declare themselves to be non-political and disgusted with the tensions and rivalries that divide Palestinians between Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, and Fatah, the more secular party which governs the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank. "Politics is bollocks, it is screwing our lives up," said one member of the group. "Politicians only care about money and about their supporters. The Israelis are the only ones benefiting from the division."

Two of the group have been detained by the Gazan authorities several times, accused among other crimes of "immoral" behaviour. They say that they have been abused in jail and claim that physical and psychological punishment is commonplace in Gaza's detention centres.

Another one obtained a scholarship to attend a workshop at an American university, but he says Israel did not issue a permit that would allow him to leave the Strip.

"We are supposed to be the engine of change in this society, but our voices are muted. In the press, at university, there is no room in our society to talk freely, out of the frame, without putting yourself and your family at risk," says one, who wants to be called Abu Yazan. He adds: "In Gaza, you feel watched at school, in the streets, everywhere. You can be thrown into jail at any time. [Hamas] will threaten you with ruining your family reputation and that would be it."

These youngsters do not represent anybody except themselves, but their call for change has resonated strongly, not only abroad but also inside Gaza. Their Facebook page already has thousands of friends – including, they say, many from the Strip.

The causes of frustration are legion. The Israeli blockade forbids Gazans to travel in and out of the Strip without a permit, which is difficult to obtain. For Gazan students who wish to study abroad, the most difficult part is not being accepted at a foreign university or getting a scholarship, but simply being able to travel.

Inside the Strip, things do not get much better. Israeli shelling which follows the launching of rockets into Israel by Palestinian militants is part of their everyday life. Power cuts and ruinous sanitary conditions are among the side-effects of the embargo suffered by Gaza's inhabitants.

With high unemployment in the Strip and little access to other job markets after graduation, many feel that they have reached a dead end. Some keep studying and accumulating degrees and foreign languages, which they learn via the internet, hoping for better days to come. Others kill their time smoking hookahs with their friends day after day. There is an increasing number who rely on drugs to cope with their conflict traumas and frustrations.

Going out, meeting friends in cafés – let alone clubs or discotheques – or attending cultural events has become an increasingly complicated task as Hamas cracks down on western "decadence".

In Gaza there are no theatres and few concerts aside from the Islamic musical performances organised by the Hamas authorities. In the places where young men and women are allowed to meet, considered an "oasis" by the less conservative youth, the police are quick to interrogate mixed couples suspected of not being married or engaged.

The "last straw" for the writers of the Gaza manifesto came a month ago, when Hamas closed Sharek, an internationally financed organisation offering training and summer activities for thousands of adolescents and young people. Sharek had also became a hang-out place for the more liberal-minded in Gaza. Human Rights Watch recently issued a statement condemning its closure. "Hamas authorities in Gaza should allow an organisation that helps children and youth to reopen, and penalise officials who have harassed its workers," it said.

According to Ihab Al Ghusain, a spokesman for the Hamas Ministry of the Interior, the problems highlighted by Gaza's disaffected youth are sometimes the result of over-zealous officials. "There are no laws prohibiting men and women sitting together in public places in Gaza," he said. "But some policemen at their own initiative interrogate the couples. Those policemen should be punished."

He says that proof of the government's commitment to Gaza's young generation is that it has declared 2011 the Year for the Youth. But the authors of the youth manifesto are unlikely to be persuaded by such symbolic initiatives. The group is currently investing most of its time and energy in debating new strategies to pursue a web-based platform for change. The new year may yet become one for the youth of the Strip, but perhaps not in the way Hamas intended.

Felani’s Hanging Body, Connectivity and our quiet Government

2011-01-25T09:35:00.000+05:30

http://unheardvoice.net/blog/2011/01/13/felanis-hanging-body-connectivity-and-our-quiet-government/

A new year came upon us, so is the 3rd year of the government of Sheikh Hasina- HM Ershad- Hasanul Inu – Maolana Misbah-Ul-Islam- Comrade Moinuddin Khan Badal. Under siege by police and neo-gestapo RAB; the new years eve was fairly uneventful. At least there was no public display of sexual harassment in the form of a torn clothe student at Dhaka University Student center premises.

There were some upheavals though. The long line for the upcoming World Cup Cricket tickets were lead news/ talking point in the news media. The world cup ticket hoopla was duly followed by nearly 24/7 news coverage of the roller coaster ride of the stock market. TV news as well as the talk shows were all filled with footage of angry investors, bleeding from RAB baton Charge, rallying and pelting stones at nearby cars and government offices. The Government took the challenge politically and made sure that the following day the stock index rebound with a two fold vigor.

Other than all these discussable and forgettable stuff, the new year as well as the second year anniversary of Hasina Ershad brother sister Government was supposed to be a happy and holy event. Well… except for the unhappy and ugly scene of a bright red deep blue spot hanging fifteen feet above the ground on our horizon.

It is irony that her name was Felani. Like Kurani, Felani is Generic name in Bangla literature. While Kurani is the name of a little girl living on the street, Felani usually describes an orphan or poor girl who serves her master’s household 24/7 only two get abused and deprived. Felani was a born in a very poor family in Northern Bangladesh. It is that region of Bangladesh where ‘Monga’ — seasonal shortage of work and food is endemic. In quest of the most basic of basic human needs, at least once or twice a day food to meet hunger, five year old Felani, her parents, along with many others like them, crossed international political border and managed the lowest wage job in a far away land, in Southwest India. They would do the hardest and lowest paid jobs which even the locals would pass. At least there was a job for little Felani and her family and that ensured food to eat. While politicians can have political borders, basic need like hunger does not care for any border.

While working as a child laborer carrying and washing brick in a far away land, Felani grew up and reached marriageable age per the standards of rural poor sections of Bangladesh. She was returning home after ten years to get married. All were set up.

Poor folks cross the border for meeting basic living needs. They don’t read newspapers or blogs. They don’t understand India’s growing stature and accompanying security concern. They only heard that there are jobs in this and that far away land. The procession is rather big. Some will stop in nearby Calcutta, some will travel to Delhi, Bombay and half of them will cross another fearsome border to land in Karachi, Pakistan.

Nahari’s mother used to help run errands in my grandmothers rural home in Chittagong. Two of her sons work in Pakistan. I met them during one of my trips. Many of them don’t have passport, visa — some don’t bother spending all the airfare money. For them getting into India costs more money and there are higher chances of getting arrested. Crossing border into Bangladesh costs much less, no chance of getting arrested but there are chances of getting killed.

Indiscriminate killing of Bangladeshis in Indian border started soon after independence. But over the last few years the killings have become a near daily event. In a blog post Rezwan compiles different write ups on this issue and quotes Bangladeshi Human Rights organization Odhikar this way,

Bangladeshi human rights organization Odhikar says in a report that BSF kills one Bangladeshi in every four days. It also says that BSF killed 74 innocent Bangladeshi citizens in 2010, injured seventy-two and kidnapped 43. In the past decade more than 1000 Bangladeshis were killed in the border regions by BSF.

Like 13 year old Parul who was shot by Indian security, Felani was shot as she her traditional clothes got stuck high up in the barbed wire fence. Felani was alive reportedly at least 4 hours after being shot. Local villagers report hearing her screaming and asking for water.

Felani bled to death. In the photos we see, blood could not be distinguished from her bright red and deep blue dress.

Local people protested. Bangla blogosphere erupted. Some newspapers ( especially those cunning-smart ones who can read peoples pulse way in advance) published the news.

And yet some folks saw Jamaati conspiracy to hamper “war Crimes trial” in Felani’s hanging dead body. Like the comment on a facebook page where image of Felani’s hanging body was posted. As one soul, in that facebook page, rather getting upset at the photo, questioned the source of the photo, other replies, ” It must be an act of the Jamaatis”.

The Government kept quite quite. Not a single word about Felani could be heard from the mouth of our ever talking prime Minister or her men-women.

Felani means disposable. Felani is really disposable to our Government. Felani’s death is not important enough to seek justice for or start a trial process.

We want connectivity. We are enclosed with 15 feet high barbed wire from all sides to prevent connecting, yet we are for connectivity.

Our folks are being shot and killed indiscriminately. Shoot at sight if caught in the process of connecting. Hell Yeah. We are for connectivity.

India’s truck, 18 wheeler lorries will drive through Bangladesh via special road built for them with our peoples’ money. But Parul or Felani or many Shafiq, Rafiq, Karim, Habib will be shot to death if seen crossing India-Bangladesh border.

If we talk more connectivity, more regional cooperation, like EU, why can’t we have EU style open border? Let’s open our borders. Let’s real economic cooperation begin. Let our Felani’s and their parents travel fearlessly providing cheap labor to the growing economies in this region.

The Water Wars

2011-01-25T09:24:00.001+05:30

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main48.asp?filename=Ne290111Thewater.asp

You can lease a river in Chhattisgarh for 22 years. At just Rs. 1 per annum. While thousands go thirsty

Rivers belong to nations. But, in Chhattisgarh they belong to corporations. BABA UMAR tracks the sale of six rivers in the state

IN MAHMARA village of Durg district in Chhattisgarh, Ramoram Thakur, 70, recalls how as a boy he would sing and hear folklore about water, fishermen and farmers of his village, tucked into the western edge of Sheonath river. However, such legends have a tragic ending nowadays.

Seated near a babul tree in the community choupal, the old man shares stories with children about how the river passed onto the hands of a private company, which denied villagers water for drinking, washing and irrigation, stopped fishermen from casting their nets and prevented locals from taking sand from the riverbed.

“Their barrage drowned a cremation ground on the banks. Dozens of village located downstream were left with little water. What belonged to us for centuries is no longer available for our use,” he laments.

Thakur is talking about the Sheonath, the first river to be handed over to a private group, Radius Water Limited (RWL), in 1998 by the government of undivided Madhya Pradesh through its undertaking, MP Aydhyogik Kendra Vikas Nigam Ltd (MPAKVN), now Chhattisgarh State Industrial Development Corporation (CSIDC). Despite major losses to the government, the state didn’t scrap the deal nor could it help the thirsty villagers.

Since then, Chhattisgarh has seen hundreds of companies investing in the state and many vying for the river waters. In a recent deal, the Water Resource Department (WRD) gave its nod to 141 private and government projects for which it will be supplying nearly 2,600 million cubic metres (mcm) of water from rivers every year. Interestingly the state supplies only 2,000 mcm of water for irrigation every year.

Carved out of Madhya Pradesh on 1 November 2000, Chhattisgarh wasn’t a water-scarce state. According to unofficial estimates, the state has 32,000 ponds. With major river basins — Mahanadi, Godavari, Narmada and Brahmani Kachar — and several major rivers — Kurkut, Mahanadi, Kharun, Sheonath, Indravati, Jonk, Kelo, Sabri, Hasdev, Peri, and Maand — water shortage was never an issue.

But the priorities have changed. Earlier, dams were built to store water for irrigation. Now, they are being constructed for supplying water to industry. In fact, the Chhattisgarh government openly declares that it is committed to giving water to industries throughout the year but not to farmers for rabi crop.

THE SALE of Chhattisgarh’s rivers began in 1998 when the then MP government handed a 23.6 km stretch of Sheonath river in Durg to RWL, pleading shortage of funds for supplying water to industries. In a shocking story of “corruption and favouritism”, as an Assembly nominated committee discovered later, the Rs. 9 crore project was signed on 5 October 1998 between MPAKVN and RWL on a build, own, operate and transfer (BOOT) basis. The plan was to build a barrage on the Sheonath to supply up to 30 million litres per day (mld) to the Borai Industrial Centre. Construction was completed in two years and operations began in January 2001.

“We got to know about the sale of the river only when RWL began harassing us,” alleges Khemlal Sahu, a farmer in Mahmara. “Almost 25 percent of the villagers are fishermen. They were stopped from fishing. Soon, fencing around the 23.6 km stretch began. Iron gates were erected on both sides of the barrage to prevent locals from approaching the river.”

The deal inherited by the CSIDC gave RWL exclusive access to the river water for 22 years. It also held control rights over the supply of water to the Borai Industrial Centre and the CSIDC was obliged to provide land free of cost. CSIDC also handed over its entire infrastructure in Borai, and assets worth Rs. 5 crore to Kailash Soni, owner of Kailash Engineering, for a lease of a token Rs. 1 per year for establishing a water supply project on BOOT basis. The CSIDC was to purchase water from RWL and later sell it to the industrial units in Borai.

Though there was a lack of sufficient demand for water, then MPAKVN managing director GS Mishra signed the agreement with RWL. Back then, Borai had two large and medium-scale industries, and their combined water requirement was between 1.14 and 2.5 mld, while the CSIDC had to compulsorily shell out money for 4 mld. Adding to the losses, CSIDC purchased water at Rs. 15 a cubic metre (1,000 litres) from RWL. However, it sold water to industries at only Rs. 12 a cubic metre. The agreement meant that CSIDC would incur a loss of 20 percent on every unit of water it sold. Increase in both supply or demand would mean higher losses. Adding to the toll was Hindustan Electro Graphite (HEG) that was to buy almost 90 percent of the CSIDC’s water sales but reneged on its agreement.

While CSIDC continued to incur losses, public outrage fuelled by continuous harassment of people by RWL saw several NGOs participating in the agitation. Those who joined the protest included villagers from Mohlai, Boludi, Malood, Kotni, Piperchadi, Kekro Koli, Bedwa Pathra, Vagrum Nala and Basik Hai — all affected by the drying up of the Sheonath downstream.

The Nadi Ghati Morcha (NGM) started a movement from Durg that reached Raipur and then Delhi. Roadblocks and rallies were held. The ferocity of the protests finally forced the then chief minister Ajit Jogi to announce the “abrogation of the RWL contract” on 2 April 2003. However, he didn’t keep his promise.

FOR A FEW LITRES MORE The industrial revolution is coming at a heavy price
90 paise is the price Jindal Steel and Power Limited pays for every 1,000 litres of river water. Other companies are charged about Rs. 3 for the same	23.6 km is the stretch of Sheonath river controlled by Radius Water. The area has been fenced and villagers are prohibited from using the water	54 million cubic metres drawn annually by Jindal Steel from Kurkut river. The agreement, signed on 14 January 2008, will be renewed after 30 years
Rs. 185 cr revenue loss suffered by the Chhattisgarh government during 2007-08 because of “undue benefits” provided to private companies	2,600 million cubic metres allotted annually to companies investing in the coming years. In contrast, agriculture and irrigation will get only 2,000 mcm

NGM coordinator Gautam Bandhopadhyay says, “People had plenty of fresh water for cooking and working. But they don’t have rights over the common property. RWL may have invested money but the villagers who are living in the area for centuries have invested resources and have equal rights on the water.”

‘The government is ruining its resources. By favouring the private firms, it is harming the interests of the tribal farmers’

RAMESH AGARWAL,Founder, Jan Chetana

PHOTOS: TARUN SEHRAWAT

In 2003, the state Assembly constituted a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to probe the privatisation of Sheonath. The committee presented its report on 16 March 2007 lambasting both CSIDC and RWL for signing a deal that caused loss to the state exchequer and harm to villagers.

THE GOVERNMENT vowed to cancel the contract “within a legal framework” and pay compensation to RWL for the lease period after the legal department and the Advocate General give their opinions. The legal department reportedly said, “If the government ends the contract, it has to pay a compensation of Rs. 400 crore.” Since then, nothing has changed. RWL continues to manage the barrage and the reservoir while the spate of public protests too has declined and so has their impact.

Ramchandra Singhdeo, who was the irrigation minister when the deal was struck, says, “Without the knowledge of the irrigation secretary, engineer-in-chief and myself, the CSIDC managing director signed a deal that proved detrimental to both villagers and government. We sought action reports from the government over the PAC’s recommendations but the usual reply was: the legal department is looking into the matter. I don’t know why the government is reluctant to scrap this deal.”

Current CSIDC MD Devendra Singh says the contract can continue as it has started to reap benefits. “Earlier, CSIDC was making losses. But now we are selling 8-9 mld of water to half-a-dozen big and small companies at beneficial rates,” he says. Singh is quick to add that scrapping the agreement would mean CSIDC paying Rs. 36 crore to RWL as compensation.

Water Resource Minister Hemchand Yadav concedes the deal between CSIDC and RWL was “flawed and skewed” in favour of the latter. The government is willing to scrap the contract and pay Rs. 10 crore to RWL as compensation. “This deal affected several villages and the government. I guess the controversy will die in a year,” he says.

But will RWL accept Rs. 10 crore? “If the contract is stopped before its term, the termination clauses have to be fulfilled. But nothing like that is going to happen,” says a defiant Pramod Agrawal, RWL project director. Lashing out at the PAC, he says it has no jurisdiction over the issue, which is in the domain of the public undertaking committee. “But the public undertaking committee was never formed by the state Assembly. Even PAC members never talked to us. It’s a farce. We reject it,” he says.

Agrawal says three other projects — New Capital Water Supply, Siltra Industrial Estate Water Supply and Urla Industrial Estate Water Supply — were also privatised “and if our project is terminated, these projects too should be abrogated. Why isn’t anyone talking about these projects? We are convinced the government or the CSIDC don’t have the money to compensate us and abrogate the agreement”.

Precious commodity Jindal Steel draws 35,400 cubic metres of water from Kelo every day

Agrawal denied that villagers are being stopped from using the river water. “It was on the orders of the CSIDC and sub-district magistrate that revenue department officials uprooted the villagers’ water pumps. We didn’t allow fishermen to catch fish because we were following police orders. The police wanted them to stay away from our power sub-station fearing violence.”

MEANWHILE, TROUBLE was brewing in Bonda Tikra village, Raigarh district. Shanti Bai and her husband Shauki Lal, both daily wagers, were living happily in Bonda Tikra, located on the banks of Kelo, a tributary of Mahanadi, until a check dam and intake well were constructed by Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL). “I didn’t know how precious water was until it was snatched from us,” says Bai.

‘Dozens of villages located downstream are now parched. What belonged to us for centuries is no longer available for us’

RAMORAM THAKUR, Villager, Mahmara

In 1996, JSPL tried to draw water from Kelo for its sponge iron factory and power plant. However, the government refused permission saying it would cause water shortage. JSPL mounted pressure and it soon erected a stop dam and began drawing 35,400 cubic metres of water every day.

The structures hampered irrigation in 14 villages downstream. “In summers, we usually dig the riverbed with our hands and draw water in plastic jugs. Now, the water pump sucks all the water while we struggle to get a drop,” says Bai.

To protest against JSPL’s dam and intake well, locals sat on a seven-day hunger strike in 1998. When the rest of the country was celebrating Republic Day, Satyabhama, an Adivasi woman, became the struggle’s first ‘martyr’. “Her death won’t go waste. Our resistance will continue,” vows Bai. “But our struggle’s success depends on whose side the government decides to take.”

Almost 13 years have passed since the fight to restore the river flow began. The intake well and the check dam still stand on the river Kelo protected by JSPL guards.

The success of Sheonath and Kelo spurred a series of private projects that saw villagers pitted against government and private firms. Private barrages and dams over many rivers have come up since then. Kurkut in Raigarh, Sabri in Dantewada, Kharun in Raipur, Hasdeo in Korba and Champa, and Maand in Janjgir-Champa have been handed over to private players.

Almost 60 km from Raigarh, Ghanau Ram Gariya, 62, along with dozens of tribals in Burbhona village, is waiting in line to collect subsidised rice not from a rice depot but from an official sitting inside a community dispensary. “This should tell you the state of affairs in our village,” says Gariya, a farmer-turned-casual labourer.

Till 2007, Gariya and other tribals grew melon and cucumber on Kurkut’s banks. Rabi farming was also done in April, May and June. However, a huge barrage and a dam that was built 35 km upstream at Rabo village soon choked the river flow. The water was being fed to 1,000 MW JSPL power plants at Tamnar. Soon, farmers living in 12 villages, including Jampali, Kikricholi, Dehjari, lost their water source.

“Since then, we have to migrate to other villages in the summer. Do you know how it feels when you don’t bathe or wash your face for weeks at a stretch?” asks Gariya. Last summer, a group of villagers headed for Rabo dam seeking immediate discharge of water from Kurkut. JSPL employees allegedly thrashed them with bamboo sticks. The distraught tribals and villagers wrote a letter to their MLA, Anand Kumar Patel, seeking immediate discharge of water. The MLA managed to get water released only once in 90 days of the harsh summer.

“That was the time when we cursed ourselves for not joining the agitation led by Rabo villagers. It taught us a lesson,” says Vedran Dhandsena, one of the village heads. He is referring to the agitation in which villagers of Rabo, where a dam and a barrage was built, had protested the construction of mega structures in the village and the agreement that allowed JSPL to draw 54 mcm of water every year from Kurkut and release only 7 mcm per year.

In 2004, when JSPL started acquisition of additional land in Rabo for its power project, residents of 15 villages started an agitation with tough resistance coming from Rabo village where the dam was to be built. The dam would submerge almost 350 hectares of forest land and affect thousands of hectares of irrigated land.

Rabo villagers spearheaded the protest and blocked roads leading to the project site with tree trunks and rocks. They also patrolled the entrance to the village for several nights. And soon public outrage pushed the government to order a halt on the work at site on 4 November 2004.

“But with government officials’ patronage, Jindal resumed work within a week,” recalls Champi Bai, who became famous for grabbing a revenue official by his collar during the protest. She says the government didn’t hold any public hearing when JSPL got clearance in 1997 for the first phase of the power project in Tamnar. “From the beginning, the government has worked to benefit the company,” she says.

The government not only gave up on the ownership of the dam but also charged JSPL a paltry 90 paise for every 1,000 litres when other firms pay around Rs. 3 for the same.

“This is just another example of how the government ruined its resources, favoured a private company and harmed tribals of a dozen villages,” says Ramesh Agarwal, 55, an activist and founder of Jan Chetana, which monitors mining, water and industrial projects in Raigarh.

The agreement dated 14 January 2008 signed with the JSPL, a copy of which is in TEHELKA’S possession, reads, “The company shall pay to the government rates for water drawn by it from the said natural or government water source at the rates fixed by the WRD order No. 1819/7-A/WR/TS/IWS/02/D-4 Raipur dated 21.03.2006, which is 90 paise only per cubic metre.”

THE JSPL management says it owns the dam without which “we couldn’t get 70 percent of the money from banks as loan”. “Banks give a loan only when the structure is yours,” says Pradeep Tandon, senior vice-president, corporate affairs, JSPL. Last May, the government revised the rates and JSPL would be paying Rs. 2.80 per cubic metre, he says. Asked about the tussle between JSPL and villagers, he says the people’s anger should be directed against the government and not at the JSPL, because “we only work under government rules”.

There are other instances when companies have guzzled water without any proper agreement with the government. According to the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report for the year ended 31 March 2009, National Thermal Power Corporation has been drawing water from a canal in the state for the past 11 years without any agreement. “The penalty charges for the unauthorised withdrawal amounts to Rs. 316.26 crore for the period between June 1998 to March 2009,” the report says.

‘Private pumps suck all the water while we don’t get any. I didn’t know how precious water was until it was snatched from us’

SHANTI BAI, Villager, Bonda Tikra

In its previous report, the CAG had lambasted the CSIDC for “causing a revenue loss of Rs. 22.09 crore due to the supply of water at lower rates, non-revision of usage charges and delay in execution of lease deeds” even as the report said that the Chhattisgarh government suffered a revenue loss of more than Rs. 185 crore during 2007-08 because of “undue benefits” provided to various companies such as “allotment of land and water at reduced rates”.

Despite the CAG’s adverse report and people’s protests, the government seems undeterred. In fact, it gave its nod last year to thermal power plants in Raigarh, Jangjir and Champa districts. In their project reports, most of them made it clear that they would be drawing water from the Mahanadi. It won’t be long before villagers living near the plants lose out on water.

In southern Chhattisgarh, a large portion of Sabri, which flows through Dantewada district, is under the operation of Essar Steel Chhattisgarh Ltd and Tata Steel. Both draw almost 100 mcm of water every year. Essar has a pipeline network from Dantewada to the port of Visakhapatnam. Essar sends iron-ore through this pipeline with the force of the water from Sabri.

According to the Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Mahasabha (ABAM), an umbrella organisation of tribal groups in Bastar, people had raised the issue of water shortage in the villages of downstream Sabri at several public hearings, “but government officials never listened to our pleas”. However, Essar denies the accusation. “Our intake of water does not affect local availability in any manner,” says Parikshit Kaul, joint general manager, corporate affairs.

According to a WRD report, almost 2,600 mcm per year has been allotted to industry while the state offers only 2,000 mcm for agriculture and irrigation, pushing many to think that Chhattisgarh will soon have a distinctive status and its industrial water use will far outstrip that of agriculture.

“Industries are the priority of the state government. This is not a democratised development. If this continues, a large part of the population could start a new kind of resistance that will have far-reaching consequences,” warns activist Agarwal.

baba.umar@tehelka.com

how and why i became a stone pelter

2011-01-25T09:10:00.000+05:30

http://kashmir-hr.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-and-why-i-became-stonepelter.html

Note from Kafila:

Given below is a note written by a Kashmiri student from downtown Srinagar who calls himself ‘Kale Kharab’, meaning ‘hot headed’. Taken from his blog, the note reads like a personal manifesto, a statement of purpose, a testimony more telling than what the most patient interviewer can elicit. This note gives you more insight into what is happening in Kashmir than a lot of what you may have read or seen on TV news about the killing of 115 protestors across Kashmir in 2010 by Indian forces. This testimony, written early on during the uprising, on 30 August 2010, shows how irredeemably India has lost the plot in Kashmir all over again, with a new generation of Kashmiris.

by KALE KHARAB

I am from downtown srinagar born in 1991. I was admitted to one of the best school of valley. As a child I had dream to became engineer. Whenever somebody used to ask me about my aim I would proudly say engineer. As I started to grow up I started to became familar with many words which everyone used to talk about that among them few were “azadi” (freedom), “hartal” (shutdown) but I was unable to understand the meaning of these words. I loved the word hartal as it was holiday, so I always wished for hartal. As I grew up I came to know about mujahids. I used to listen stories of mujahids. I would oftenly ask my elders to tell me about mujahids. They told me stories of many mujahids like Issac, Ishfaq, Jan Malik which I liked to share with my friends.

Even I was named after a shaheed mujahid (martyr fighter) who was killed before few weeks I was born. Then came 2007. Once I had to visit Nowahatta. It was month of Muharram. There was heavy stone pelting going on. I found it very intresting. I saw youth pelting stones and shouting freedom slogans. Initially I was afraid to go in front and pelt stones on Police and CRPF.

I used to think they are some angels fighting on the front. Days passed. Now I too had gathered guts to pelt stones on the frontline. It was now 2008 I was busy with my exams. I heard about Amarnath Land Row. Things started changing very fast I had never seen kind of hartals (shutdowns) before. I had never seen kind of stone pelting before. It was totally new expirience to me.

Now tear gas shell wasnt shot anymore, now bullets were fired directly. I saw many boys hit by a bullet and dying on spot. I was disturbed by this. I asked my grandfather once why they directly shoot on us. His answer was “cze chuk mangaan azadi” (u are asking for freedom). This answer changed my mind. I started realizing neither we are part of India nor India considers us their part.

Now I started reading history about our freedom struggle. I came to know about many things about the Kashmir struggle. Now I started reading newspaper, magazines very keenly. I started observing everything about the poltical system. I wept when I read about Gawkadal, Zukura, Hawal, Bijbihara, Sopore, Kupwara massacares. I too wanted to became mujahid.

i once joked with my mother that i will become mujahid, her answer was painfull, first give me poision then you will become mujahid.

Came 2009 I again started to remain busy with my studies but whenever there was stone pelting in Nowahatta I used go there and pelt stones. stone pelting for me now, has become a reactionto the attrocities and d illegal occupationof india. i do it for a cause.

I was once caught by police and was put in custody I was also beaten but that also couldn’t break me. When I was released I again started pelting stones. A policemen in custody told me why you pelt stones, do you think you will get freedom by pelting stones. If it is the case I am also ready to pelt stones, he said.
but still it is the only thing which makes me feel that gun or bullet cannot supress my thoughts
my sentiments and to live in occupied i want to be free…..

I am happy when I pelt stones because I want to take revenge for every innocent killing. I know my stone wont harm them but remember it is not stone it is my feelings. I pelt stones because we are oppressed.

It was june 2009 shopian rape and case occured. it was unbearable to hear rape and murder case of a girl and her sister in law. Tears rolled from my eyes when i read story of asiya in newspaper. once again hartals, stonepelting emerged with more boys felling to bullets to a response for protesting for justice from brutual indian militiary.

I watched a press confrence of omar abdullah on news channel promising to bring culprits in front of people and punish them in 24 hors. Honestly i was happy with his promise i saw a hope in him in bringing justice to the duo.

But nothing happened instead of justice their relatives were beaten. This made me more agressive i wanted to take revenge, i wanted to punish murderers. More ever i considered cm for all this because his behivour made me much agressive much angry against india and their brutuallity here.
After one month of continous hartals(strikes) life was back to track. Again we started to remain busy with our studies.

But i always used to think why didnt the duo got justice i once had seen news of a 14 year old girl from delhi who was killed by unknown person in her bedroom. But Police wasnt able to solve the case. It was then handed over to CBI who arrested the culprits in few weeks.

But in case of kashmiri CBI solved the case differntly they didnt arrested the culprits but made a funny story of the victims that they died due to drowning in stream whose depth was hardly upto knees. This clearly showed policy of india in kashmir.

But whom could i ask these questions why didnt they get justice? why they shoot us if we protest for seeking justice? these questions always were in my mind. By pelting stones i dint got answer but i was happy i felt i am taking revenge by pelting stones but wat else i could do who was their to listen me. I felt stasfication by pelting stones by pelting stones i wanted to say them give us justice leave our kashmir let us leave in peace let us live in place where no mother has fear that her son may return dead. these are not stones these are my feelings.

Came 2010 it was january once i saw wamiq farooq Wamiq was neigbour of one of my relatives residing at rainawari area of srinagar. wamiq was very good boy he used to offer my times prayers. He used to call me baya(brother).

After few weeks on one friday evening i heard that a boy has been martyred after hitting by tear gas shell but i didnt know unfortunately it was wamiq the same guy whom i had seen before a day. when i woke up next morning i saw a picture of boy whose identity was yet to be revealed in newspaper. After few minutes i got call from my cousin that wamiq has been martyred. for few minutes i was totally freezed i wasnt able to speak. a boy hardly 13 was no more. You can understand how it feels when you hear death of person whom you know.

Wamiq was like my lilttle brother i had never thought a innocent young boy will fell prey to their brutuallity. Once again hartals(strikes), and stonepelting emerged with more boys getting injuried and martyred. Indian occipatinal forces were responding with more brutuallity i agree with thier brutiuality because they are occupatinal forces their cruelity and brutuality is not a surprise to us but i was surprised by the role of jammu and kashmir police our local police they are playing absurd role. One fails to understand the cause of their cruelity and brutulity, Is it they want to show more loyality to india or they are killing their brothers for money. what ever the reason is but the way they behave with their own countrymen is painful. Maybe they have became blind because of power goverment has given to them.

Wamiq’s death gave brith to a powerfull revolution. The revolution which shaked the existance of indian rule in kashmir. Now india started to show their milittary power to unarmed civillians. The way they deal with protests is answer to those people who call india integral part of kashmir.

India has started to engage its every front to curb this revolution from politically to techinically even media is being used to curb this revolution.

Streets of kashmir have become red with the blood of innocent people. Jehlem has become red with blood of innocent people.

I know one day may be i will also fell to their bullets even i am mentally prepared for that because i have attained extreme limit of stone pelting. But remember my death will give brith to hundreds of kale kharab (hotheads). As i became kale kharab (hothead) after death of innocent boys from last three years. 65 death have alredy given brith to hundreds of kale kharab (hot head) who are ready to fight till their last breath. These kale kharab (hothead) are present at every corner of kashmir. What ever will the future of present intifada but the struggle to free kashmir will continue even if takes 100 more years. Next generation will produce more dangerous kale kharabs (hot heads) to free kashmir.

http://stonepelter.blogspot.com/

The New Cellu-lar Jail

2011-01-25T09:06:00.001+05:30

http://kafila.org/2011/01/23/the-new-cellu-lar-jailmadhumita-dutta-venkatachandrika-radhakrishnan/#more-6349

Guest post by MADHUMITA DUTTA and VENKATACHANDRIKA RADHAKRISHNAN
The writers are activists based in Chennai working on issues of land, labour, industry and SEZs.

Sriperumbudur grabbed media attention in 1991 when former Prime Minister Mr Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated during an election rally. Since then, this nondescript little village-town in west Chennai, dotted with paddy fields and large expanses of natural water-bodies, has transformed itself into a little ‘Shenzen’- world’s largest special economic zone in Southern China, which churns out one out of every eight mobile handsets sold anywhere in the world. Slated to attract investments worth $4 billion in electronics and automobile manufacturing, Sriperumbudur is now home to the largest mobile handset making factory of Nokia, a Finnish company that can churn out 7.5 lakhs handsets a day. This town and its neighbouring region is also known as the Detroit of India, churning around 12,80,000 cars every year. With a booming manufacturing industry and a promise of 2 lakhs jobs, Sriperumbudur is touted as the jewel in the industrial crown of Tamil Nadu. But of recent this seemingly success story has turned a little sour.

The jewel has a tarnish which the state government does not know how to hide anymore: growing labour unrest, demand for unions, and frequent strikes.The state’s response has been swift—arrest the ‘erring’ workers and bust the unions. And it does that quite cleverly. It’s done as neatly as is the ‘clean’ image of these sophisticated modern industries, barring a few instances where police has lathi charged the workers.

“Their modus operandi is to form a party affiliated union, broker deal with the management, get the workers back to work and whoever does not fall in line, have them arrested or have their jobs terminated. Pretty neat. ”, alleged A Soundarajan, state general secretary of Centre for Indian Trade Union (CITU). Soundarajan and his colleagues should know better. They are out on bail after being incarcerated for 15 days in Vellore Central Jail in October. Their crime: daring to form a union and organising a strike in Foxconn India Limited, a Taiwanese MNCs. While the CITU leaders and workers were in jail, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-affiliated Labour Progressive Federation (LPF) union, which also has a union in Foxconn, brokered a ‘long term wage settlement’ with the Foxconn management, thereby compromising on the workers’ demands.

“This is a repeat of what happened in the 1960s. At that time, the congress-led government did the same thing during the strikes in MRF, Ashok Leyland, TI Cycles. Used party affiliated union to broker compromised deals to break genuine worker’s strikes”, said Soundarajan. For about 60 days since 24th September, the young workforce of Foxconn India, a special economic zone (SEZ) and a key supplier of electronic components to Nokia SEZ, were sitting on strike demanding better wages, good service conditions and recognition of their trade union . “We get very low wages. Trained permanent employees who have been with the company for more than 3 years get only about Rs 4500 per month,” said Dinesh of the CITU-affiliated Foxconn India Thozhilalar Sangam who is one of the 23 workers suspended for engaging in unionizing activities. “We have rejected the wage agreement reached between the management and Foxconn India Thozhilalar Munnetra Sangam (LPF). They did it behind our backs”, added Dinesh.

As per the ‘wage settlement’ published on 12th October by Foxconn management, workers will get a maximum gross salary of Rs 9500 per month staggered over a period of three years and starting with Rs 7830. “We had demanded Rs 10,000 per month as gross salary for the permanent workers, but the LPF union cut a deal for lower wages with the management and settled the dispute. The state government actively participated in this process through the labour commissioner’s office,” informed Soundarajan. “Things get desperate when the strike goes on for so long. We had so many rounds of talks with the labour commissioner, besides meeting the ministers, including the Chief Minister. But nothing came out of it. Management did not even reinstate the suspended workers. It is specifically targeting workers affiliated with our union”. The workers allege that the management is demanding a written undertaking from the suspended workers ‘to not join the union’ before they can be reinstated.

Unlike in Maharashtra and West Bengal, there is no law in Tamil Nadu which makes it mandatory for the private companies to recognize trade unions. Foxconn workers were forced to call off their two-month-long spirited strike, their demands unmet and 24 of their colleagues still suspended from job. Similar strikes were witnessed recently in a Chinese SEZ called Build Your Dream (BYD Co) in Sriperumbudur. On 21st October, 4000 permanent and contract workers of BYD Co went on strike. They were demanding 8-hour work shift, permanent employment, better amenities and right to associate. The same day BYD management and officials from the State Labour Department assured the striking workers that their demands will be ‘negotiated’. Workers resumed work the next day. But the management did not show any intention to fulfill its promise.

“Instead they abused and mentally tortured one of our workers named Prem. They accused him of organising the strike and trying to unionise. Prem felt so intimidated that he tried to commit suicide by consuming two bottles of Iso Propyl Alcohol. Another contract worker was also arbitrarily targeted and sacked by the management,” lamented Prema, a worker from BYD Co. Agitated BYD workers resumed their strike on 28th Oct and continued stay-in-strike (inside the factory) till 30th October. They were later forced to shift the strike outside the factory gates by the police. On 1st Nov’2010, the management stuck a ‘notice’ on the factory gates, suspending 437 workers. The notice further stated that the factory was “an SEZ” and “a Public Utility Facility under the SEZ Act”. Therefore under “section 22 of Industrial Disputes Act”, the ongoing strike by the workers was being declared “illegal”. It also made clear that during the lockout period workers will be treated in “no work no pay mode”. Unmindful of what the notice said, the workers, mostly young women in their 20s, continued to strike. But at the end of three weeks of strike, the workers were left with little choice but to go back to work.

Management has now issued them new IDs thus effectively obliterating their previous work records. Many of them hail from faraway districts, are first-generation literates and the only ones in their families with a steady income. “DMK government is compromising workers’ right in its greed to attract foreign investment. They are making the workers desperate. In the 70s’ Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi had declared that the government would crush the workers’ agitations with an iron hand. He is doing it again now”, recalled Soundarajan.In the past one year, Sriperumbudur, Orgadam, and Irrungattakottai have seen a number of labour strikes. In most cases, the demands have been more or less similar: better wages, better service conditions, safety and basic facilities at work place, and right to unionise. In June this year, workers of Hyundai Motor India went on a flash strike demanding that the management reinstate 67 of their co-workers who had been dismissed for demanding the recognition of trade union.

In a similar case, employees of Nokia India also resorted to strike early this year demanding wage revision. In August this year, 28, workers of Sanmina went on a 2-day strike for similar reasons but which was crushed by the police by threatening arrest if the workers persisted. As per state labour department’s policy note (Budget Performance 2010-‘11), between Jan’ 2009 and Mar’ 2010, the state had witnessed 72 strikes and lock outs, out of which 40% were related to wages.Tamil Nadu may eventually realise its dream of becoming an industrialised state, but not before thousands of young workers are consigned to a life of discontent, despair and disillusionment.

Full circle? Nandigram farmers now at receiving end of Mamata men Read more: Full circle? Nandigram farmers now at receiving end of Mamata men - The

2011-01-14T13:50:00.001+05:30

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Full-circle-Nandigram-farmers-now-at-receiving-end-of-Mamata-men/articleshow/7272963.cms

NANDIGRAM: Those who took up cudgels against forcible land acquisition at West Bengal's Nandigram in 2007 and turned the tide against the ruling CPM, emerged as tormentors on Wednesday. Trinamool Congress members attacked people who protested against land acquisition for railways on an 18km stretch from Nandigram to Deshpran.

Wielding lathis, the Trinamool members pounced on agitators in front of Gholpukur primary school, leaving five injured. One of them had to be taken to Reyapara hospital with critical wounds. Mahadeb Bag, sabhapati of the Trinamool-run Nandigram Panchayat Samiti, led the charge. Those protesting against land acquisition by the railways belonged to Annadata Bhumi Raksha Committee. They demanded the railways should come clear on the compensation price and its promise for railway jobs to each of the families whose land would be acquired.

"It was a peaceful agitation where those who feared losing land were trying to send out a message to Trinamool chief," said Dilip Guchhait, secretary of the committee. Trouble broke out when local Trinamool leaders called party supporters and began shouting slogans against the agitators. "We won't allow anyone to hold meeting here against land acquisition for railways," Bag announced. The Trinamool toughs swooped on the agitators, broke benches of the local primary school where farmers held the meeting. They thrashed the agitators.

Guchhait pointed out that the "draconian" Railway (Amendment) Act, 2008, vests all powers in a person nominated by the Railway Board who can take possession of the land without a proper hearing to landlosers. Trouble was brewing at Nandigrams' Gholpukur soon after the railway notification on December 25. According to the notification, landowners should come with their voter cards, bank passbooks, original land deed and stamp papers worth Rs 200. Farmers were apprehensive at the mention of stamp papers and land deed.

Nalini Maity from Rangkinipur and owner of about four bigha land that falls in the notified area said, "I was asked to appear for the hearing with valid documents at the Contai railway office today. But, the Railways hasn't mentioned anything about compensation rates for different categories of land. Neither has the railway come clear about giving a job. I am above 60, my son is 40. I don't know if my son will get a job," Maity said.

Why is Dr Binayak Sen being jailed?

2011-01-14T12:23:00.001+05:30

Aid, India and Peanuts

2011-01-14T12:04:00.001+05:30

http://www.globaldashboard.org/2011/01/06/aid-india-and-peanuts/#more-16191

Andy Sumner

The UK parliament’s development committee begins its inquiry into UK aid to India next week with a question mark over the future of UK aid to a country where there are 450 million poor people – a third of the world’s poor -living below US$1.25/day. In fact, 8 Indian states alone have more poor people than the 26 poorest African countries combined.

This is emotional territory – on both the UK and India side – during Cameron’s autumn 2010 visit sparks flew with the Indian finance minister calling UK aid ($700m) ‘peanuts’ in an angry response to the suggestion that the UK might end aid to India.

An Indian official’s memo leaked to the BBC largely concurred with the ‘who do you guys think you are?’ line.

It might be that the Indians got mad because DFID signaled it wanted to direct more aid to individual states rather than the central government. More recently the idea of an emerging power, that is a foreign aid donor itself, accepting aid has raised substantial debate within India itself.

DFID’s Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell is said to be open to discussion either way but was persuaded so far by Cameron that the UK can’t be seen to be cutting aid to a country that British people think is a poor country even if it isn’t.

Donors have a somewhat tangled logic on middle income countries (MICs):

1. The mission of donors is poverty reduction

2. 72% of the poor live in MICs

3. Donors are withdrawing from MICs, where the poor live

4. Oops…

Currently, India receives about $2bn of aid/year from donors and the UK makes up about a third of this. Since 1998, India has received more UK overseas aid than any other country. Further DFID works in 27 MICs and spends about a third of bilateral programming in MICs in 2008/9. In contrast, almost a half of EU ODA is to MICS.

The paradox is India, like many other countries was ‘graduated’ out of ‘poor country’ status by the World Bank in 2009 to middle income status (more than $1000 per person per year) but is still home to a third of the world’s poor or 450 million people. India is still IDA (World Bank) eligible but will likely graduate three years from now.

Of course this is a good news story of India getting richer but with an underside. Recent research suggests the level of inequality in India is at ‘Latin American type levels’ but the capacity for redistribution by taxation is limited as it would mean prohibitively high levels of taxation.

So sound like these’s still a case for UK aid?

The debate on UK aid to India is polarised but clear enough -

The case against UK aid to India is based on the large resources of the central government in India and that UK aid is small compared to: $300bn forex reserves; the Indian space programme and nuclear programme and India’s own aid programme estimated at at least $550m+.

Of course Pakistan also has a nuclear programme but no one in the suggesting cutting aid to Pakistan that is also now a middle income country and home to perhaps up 90 million poor people…

The case for continued UK aid to India is those 450 million poor people, most of whom live in India’s poor states in a decentralised system where some Indian states have been compared to fragile states in Africa. Also the poor in India are lower caste, tribes, etc and so very marginalised – not just a bit poor but very poor. Which makes reducing poverty much harder due to entrenched marginalization.

UK aid currently focuses on national-led level poverty programmes and 4 ‘focus states’ – Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. Of course only one of these is on the BIMARU (in hindi, sick) states group that are often thought to be the poorest states in India. By conventional reckoning Andhra Pradesh wouldn’t be poor, and West Bengal, while not poor, has certainly had some economic hard times as of late. The other two, most people would count as poor states.

If UK aid was ended there is no guarentee that the poorest states would be ‘topped’ up central government. Central allocations to states are based on the “Gadgil formula” which the Indian central Planning Commission uses to determine the allocation of central funds to the states. This is how it goes – feel free to correct fiscal experts if I’ve got this wrong – allocations are largely (60%) based on population size, with the rest accounted for by income per capita, tax collection, irrigation and power projects and ‘special problems’. There are also transfers under centrally sponsored and central sector schemes and a third category of transfer that is known as the ad hoc transfer and is non-formulaic. In short, remove aid from the poorest states and there is no guarantee of a top up.

What could DFID and donors do differently?

i. Focus on poor people, not poor countries

If the focus of aid is poor people not poor countries then the low income/middle income country way of looking at the world needs a rethink. DFID could switch its aid allocation metrics to fit DFID’s mission – ie from poor countries (low or middle income countries) to poor people. The new Oxford University and UN multidimensional poverty index (MPI) measure might be one alternative tool. But there are many others.

ii. Think beyond traditional aid

Maybe aid is no longer about money transfers with MICs. There is the ‘do no harm’ agenda – designing favourable and coherent development policies on remittances and migration, trade preferences, climate negotiations and climate financing, as well as tax havens – and a case for making aid increasingly about global public goods (and the importance of MICs support to these) and multilateralism, especially in middle-income countries and where aid might be channelled through the United Nations Children’s Fund, for example, or a new global fund for cash transfers to households as a direct poverty and redistributive measure.

OR maybe MICs may not want traditional aid at all.

iii. See equity and shared prosperity as a global and donor concern not just a domestic issue

More equitable countries reduce poverty faster, and stubborn asset, gender or identity inequality (ie caste systems) might begin to explain persistent poverty amid wealth in MICs. This entails some thinking on what aid is for and it’s role perhaps in supporting political voice of the poor and marginalized in policy processes. Any attempt to discuss inequality will be viewed as an infringement on political sovereignty but is domestic inequality solely a domestic issue if it hinders the effectiveness of aid? And it’s not just UN agencies such as UNICEF talking about equity even the IMF thinks inequality is now real concern as it slows down poverty reduction.

What is more of a mystery is why India accepts aid that amounts to 0.1-0.2% of GNI. Could it be:

Path dependency – it’s always happened so why stop now?

Or foreign policy relationship maintenance – why rock the boat?

Or is it that aid is doing good in the poorer states so why stop even if the central government could fund it?

Or something else?

And a final thought, after India, what about aid to Ghana? Which is due to graduate to middle income status next year…

Invisible Cities: Part Three: The ABC of Slum Demolition

2010-11-25T12:17:00.003+05:30

http://moonchasing.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/invisible-cities-part-three-the-abc-of-slum-demolition/

By Javed Iqbal
November 23, 2010

“‘These people want five star treatment or what?’ is what one of the developer’s lackies had said about us,’ Says Devansandhan Nair, of Ganesh Krupa Society, of Golibar in Santa Cruz, Mumbai. He is just one of 184 families who have refused to empty their homes for developers under the Slum Rehabilitation Act.

‘There is something fundamentally wrong with how the elite sees slums in Mumbai.’ Continues Devansandan, in perfect english.

On the 9^th of November, 2010, over 300 policemen descended into Ganesh Krupa Society, of Golibar in Santa Cruz, Mumbai.

They would break down two homes of a slum that already looks ravaged by an earthquake – every second home has been broken down, debris lies in every corner of a landscape of broken brick and stone .

One home belonged to Dadabhai Pandre, and the other to Ansari Abdul Hasan who lived at the edge of the slum. Ansari Abdul Hasan didn’t want to leave his home. Neither did his wife or his daughter. Yet behind everyone’s back, his son had accepted rent-compensation – Rs.7000 for 22 months – a total of 1,54,000.

‘I had asked for two days to empty my home, and the MHADA fellow said he won’t give me even two hours.’ Said Mr.Hasan. When Mr.Hasan was asked to why his son accepted compensation, he said, ‘My son said there’s no point fighting or resisting when everyone’s house is going to break.’

Out of 370 homes, 184 homes of Ganesh Krupa Society remain. In neighbouring Sambaji Seva Nagar Society, one home remains. In Shivaji Nagar Society, 4 homes remain.

There are around 69 societies in Golibar that have to make way to a ‘project that has the vision to develop mixed use integrated development of Residential Skyscrapers, State of art Commercial buildings, High-end Retail and Hospitality ventures.’ – or ‘Santa City’, according to Unitech’s website, ‘the flagship project of Unitech in Mumbai in partnership with Shivalik Ventures. Spread over 140 acres, this is one of the single largest slum rehabilitation projects in Mumbai.’

Unitech Group’s name has already featured extensively in numerous reports in the 1.7 Lakh Crore 2G scam, and almost every other resident remaining in Golibar, from those who have had their homes broken down, to those who are resisting ‘rehabilitation’ and demolition, think that their ‘slum rehabilitation project’ is a scam as well. Not only have Unitech/Shivalik started to build on 62 acres of Air force Land without getting an NOC from the Ministry, but almost no one since 2008 has gotten a flat under the SRA scheme yet, even though homes are broken down at a regular rate, often illegally and under duress and intimidation.

When the first buildings were built for the residents of Pragati Society of Golibar, people felt at ease with the developers. But eventually people believed that that was nothing but a ruse, especially as news started to spread that the current developers Shivalik had managed to acquire the project without competitive bidding, or the knowledge of the majority of slum dwellers. A little known clause in the Slum Rehabilitation Act had helped Shivalik/Unitech to become the only developer of Golibar.

This was discovered when the slum-dwellers used the Right To Information Act. And yet that was not the only thing that they discovered.

Aba Tandel, around 65 years old, grew up in Golibar right before the fences of the Airforce land, and when he saw Shivalik/Unitech building on their land, he along with other residents, were quick to file RTIs, and eventually alert the authorities at the Airforce. The Airforce now wants those buildings demolished and the matter is yet to be settled in the Courts.

A Commitment Is A Commitment

Navnant Murulidhar Shinde has the last home standing in Sambaji Nagar Society. He was fired from his job with Shivalik Ventures when he refused to empty his home. And when he was given a key to a home in the transit camp, the lock was changed.

‘They (the dalaals) offered me Rs.50,000 for my house.’ He says, ‘But I offered them Rs.1,00,000 to keep my home. They said it didn’t work like that.’

Dinker Dhuri lived with his wife and daughter in Ganesh Krupa Society. He was first deemed a legal tenant, but when he was threatened that he would be classified as an illegal tenant, he, along with his brother, took 12 lakhs and left their slum. Before leaving, the officials told them to break down their own homes.

Pravin Balkrishna Gupta was one of the landlords of Ganesh Krupa Society who had four rooms demolished in Ganesh Krupa Society. He had filed a case against Subangi Shinde, the once member of the committee of the society and ‘broker’ of the developers, who had ensured that three of his four rooms were deemed illegal as she ensured there was no survey done there. His ration-card holding, electricity-bill holding brothers were thrown out with nothing but one key to one room in the resettlement colony.

‘All these ‘dalaals’ were told to make 25 out of 100 rooms illegal tenants,’ says Vithal Ganpath Sawant, whose own tenancy was deemed illegal even though he has all the papers to show he has been living as a legal tenant.

Their stories are symbolic to the others in Golibar who don’t want anything to do with the developers – a trust deficit that gets worse by the day. Shivalik developer’s banners around the slums has the slogan, ‘A commitment is a commitment’ which the educated class of Golibar can read with brutal irony.

‘Shivalik have been involved in controversies from the beginning,’ Says Devanandhan Nair of Ganesh Krupa, ‘Under the SRA we have the right to choose our developer, why have we been denied this right?’

More so, those in the resettlement colony don’t want to be there. The colony itself is a dark, dingy four-storied steel frame with cement ply for walls where the water is often bad – a few days ago, there were insects in the water, as claimed by the residents.

The colony is humid in summer, during the rains it leaks from the top, and it is crowded with people who have no other place to go. All of them waiting for a flat, that they don’t know when they shall receive. The flats too might never be theirs, as they are being built on disputed property that the Airforce claims, belongs to them.

An embryonic resistance movement has now grown into a formidable movement ever since the residents across societies began to share information about how their homes were being broken down. On the 13^th of November, hundreds of people of Golibar, Ganesh Krupa Society, supported by other societies hit the streets, carrying placards accusing the government of being hand-in-gloves with the builders.

The Bombay High Court had given the remaining 181 families of Ganesh Krupa society, the 30^th of October to vacate their homes – either accept compensation, or go to the resettlement colonies. The residents then wrote a letter to the builder saying they will leave their homes, if the court order is followed by exact word – as the Court mentions that the resettlement colony needs to be within 300 metres of the slum, which it is not.

The residents are still there now. Withholding. Aware that they can’t be held for contempt of court as the builder has not built the resettlement colony within 300 metres.

Administration’s Response

The slum dwellers of Golibar have been supported by Medha Patkar and the National Alliance For People’s Movement’s, which, along with Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan have spoken up for the rights of the poor on housing issues for a couple of years now. And how have the authorities reacted to the insecurities of the slum dwellers in the rest of Mumbai?

On the 25^th of March, 2009, the slum dwellers of Mumbai had marched to the Slum Rehabilitation and MHADA office to talk to the officials about the irregularities, the numerous frauds in the SRA project and that a majority of the people are still languishing in Transit camps, or resettlement colonies.

Simpreet Singh of Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan was a part of the meeting.

‘We spoke politely to the officials, and the officials heard everything about what we said. But when we came out of the meeting, the police had lathi-charged all of us,’ Said Simpreet Singh, ‘Around two hundred people were taken to jail and released the next day. A warrant for that incident just came out on the 19^th of November now.’

To the residents of Golibar, all they have gotten so far is apathy from the administration. To nobody’s surprise.

The ABC of land acquisition

The people of Ganesh Krupa Society, Golibar.

‘They are breaking people apart, not just our homes.’

Sawant S, from Hanuman Society in the resettlement colony is afraid that he might never get a flat. The ‘dalaals’ or brokers had come to him and told him to go and convince the people of Ganesh Krupa Society to empty their homes.

‘You have links there, they said, you know them, why don’t you convince them to leave their homes? Why don’t you go break their resistance?’ He says, ‘They’re always coming, and I know that as long as I am here, I have fewer options. And please don’t write my name in your report, I might get into trouble.’

The manner of acquisition of land had been a methodically slow and tedious process even though both the developers had a lot of help from the Bombay High Court. The 181 families of Hanuman Society for instance had gone to the High Court and lost. An order was then passed on a Friday, to empty their homes in two days. The timing itself was precise. It ensured that the order wouldn’t be challenged on the weekend when the Court is closed, and on Monday, the society was demolished. Around 30 residents who had hope in the courts were given nothing but keys to a home in the transit camp. The rest took what they could get and left.

The initial committees of every society were the first to go. In every plan for acquisition, the developers first target the committee of the slum – and once the slum-dwellers realize their appointed representatives have been working in close affinity to the builders, there are often confrontations. The committee once exposed, leaves with everything they were bribed with. In Ganesh Krupa Society, every member of the original committee managed to wean out a flat or two for themselves along with money. What did the builder want from the committees? Get people surveyed, get them to leave, convince them to take money rather than a flat, and scuttle every effort of the people to build up resistance.

The ‘dalaals’ or brokers in Golibar are still actively trying to convince people that there is no reason to resist – first by breaking individuals with influence in the slum, by ensuring promises of a flat under special circumstances, then by finding weaker links in each family. If the father says no, they’d go and give the cheque to the son, then break the house down. In this manner, ‘development’ is breaking up communities, and neighbours, and families.

This too, in a society that was a once-loyal Shiv Sena voting base where Muslims and Hindus live in close affinity to each other. In Golibar, in 1992, according to the Srikrishna report, there were 12 incidents of stabbing. Today, Dutta Mane, a once loyal Shiv Sena party worker, has even lost faith in his own party.

‘In 1995, Mathoshri (Bal Thackeray) had sold us a dream about our right to our home. He’s old now, he may have forgotten. But maybe he has to remind his children about this.’

No member of any party is yet to offer solidarity to the people of Golibar. Mangesh Ghai of Golibar had close links with the corporator of Shiv Sena in Golibar until the troubles started. ‘After I spoke to him, he backed off completely. They’re all working with the builders.’

He, himself is too scared to work with the people of Ganesh Krupa society who’re resisting slum demolition for fear that his ‘legal’ settlement would be deemed into an ‘illegal settlement.’ Some people are too scared, they’ll take whatever they can get and leave, such as those from Shivaji Nagar Society who took a paltry Rs.50,000 and left, even when other’s were fighting.

Cynicism is the currency to break resistance.

Everyone who doesn’t believe that anything can change, has taken whatever they’ve gotten and left. Mumbai, a hopeless city built over their thousand scams and corrupt deals. ‘Nothing ever changes, how does it matter?’ – is literally stamped into the city like phosphorescent streetlamps. Yet nothing is hopeless to the desperate who stand before bulldozers.

Running out of steam

2010-07-28T12:09:00.000+05:30

http://kashmir-hr.blogspot.com/2010/07/running-out-of-steam.html

Soumitra Das

Journalism is not about patriotism. It is not about ‘my country right or wrong’. Journalism is about the Truth. In India, however, far too often a journalist’s first commitment is to his country rather than to the truth. Nowhere is this more evident than in our reportage on Kashmir and Pakistan. To talk about Kashmir first, we are in complete denial, we toe the government’s line unquestioningly: that everything in Kashmir would be hunky-dory if Pakistan stopped meddling; that Kashmir is actually madly in love with the Indian Army and it is only Pakistan which is holding Kashmiris back from expressing their true feelings about the army, the paramilitary forces and the J&K Police in good measure; that India has done nothing to deserve the violence and turbulence in that state; that the stone-pelters are just paid agents of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba.

What is the truth? The truth could be that many Kashmiris are sick and tired of the Indian security forces; the truth could be that Kashmiris are looking for deliverance from the cycle of brutality in which they are caught. The truth could be that India had for years foisted corrupt and venal regimes in Srinagar through rigging and other acts of skullduggery. The truth could be that India had a chance to redeem itself when it brought in Sheikh Abdullah as chief minister of the state, but apart from fostering yet another political dynasty, the Abdullahs have had little impact on the climate of political feeling in the state. The truth could be that the stone pelters are the vanguard of a ‘revolution’ whose immediate political expression is the rejection of India and everything that India has come to represent in Kashmir.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, our media are even more slavishly patriotic. All the usual clichés and stereotypes are summoned whenever our journalists and intellectuals write on the subject. Pakistan is a rogue nation; it is a failed State; it is almost a criminal enterprise; its democracy is a sham...

Everything we say about Pakistan speaks of our hatred and resentment against the country. And yet, we see that Pakistan does not disappear from the map of the world and definitely won’t in a hurry. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may not be accountable, but how accountable is India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the Intelligence Bureau?

It’s also the naivete of it all. I remember a journalist on national TV saying, “We (India) are better than them (Pakistan).” What does that mean? That Pakistan is an Islamic republic and India, even with its pogroms against Sikhs in 1984 Delhi and against Muslims in 2002 Gujarat is a shining example of democracy? It is India, if my figures are right, that has more than 50 per cent of its children suffering from various effects of malnourishment. India’s regular free-and-fair elections may be the only thing that should genuinely make us proud as citizens.

History has been kind to us. It has provided us with a stick with which to beat Pakistan: cross-border terrorism. So, we can use it as a pretext for not talking about Kashmir where our position is weak. Take the ruckus over Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafeez Sayeed. We want him gagged, arrested, tried and, ideally, executed, no matter what the legal position might be in Pakistan. We insist that Pakistan knows everything about Sayeed’s involvement in 26/11 and that Pakistan is resorting to lies and deception to evade taking responsibility. However, now, according to Home Secretary G.K. Pillai’s recent statement, it’s not Sayeed but the ISI “from start to finish”. What is germane is that no court in the world will convict a mass murderer only on the basis of what two major felons have to say about him. Ajmal Kasab’s and David Headley’s statements need corroboration.

There might be another lull in Kashmir, but this storm will continue to rage as long as the security forces continue to treat the local population the way they do. And the media continue to mix up their job of documenting ‘what is’ with ‘what they want things to be’.

Soumitro Das is a Kolkata-based writer

An Appeal to join the Candle Light Protest in Kolkata from Concerned Citizens for Kashmir

2010-07-15T11:45:00.003+05:30

http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php#!/event.php?eid=129173233791446

Tufail Mattoo (17)
Javid Ahmad Maila (18)
Shakeel Ahmad Ganai (14)
Firdous Ahmad Kakroo (17)
Asif Hassan Rather (9)
Ishteyaque Ahmad Khanday (15)
Imtiyaz Ahmad Itoo (17)
Muzaffar Ahmad Bhat (17)
Abrar Ahmad (17)

These are some of the twenty or so civilians killed by the security forces in the past month. The home minister has come out with statements like: “Parents should ensure that their children remain indoors. It is the responsibility of parents,” He further said that the purpose of moving in the Army was to “serve as a deterrent.” The Army would be in Kashmir “as long as it is necessary” to deal with the situation there. Fingers have been pointed at terrorist groups as well as the half-hearted attempts of the ruling NC state government to control the situation. But it is increasingly clear that spaces for civil dissent in Kashmir are few and continually shrinking. The armed forces have been used to crush all forms of civilian dissent in Kashmir and the protests and protesters in the valley are always criminalised more than anywhere else in the country.

No one from the central government has come out with a statement expressing grief at the loss of so many young lives and consoling the bereaved families. And all the while the civilian death-toll is mounting and will continue to do so as long as the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 (AFSPA)—which gives army officers the power to open fire on protesters and anyone else they decide is a potential lawbreaker whilst granting all personnel impunity from prosecution under civil law—remains in force in Kashmir.

Whatever our separate and individual takes on azaadi and armed insurgency, there cannot be any doubt that these killings of unarmed civilians—mostly angry teenagers—by the armed forces in Kashmir are gross violations of human rights and civil liberties. We must come together to

1. express our solidarity with the families of those who have been killed in the recent events and also with those who are protesting against the continued presence and the misconducts of the armed forces in the valley
2. strongly condemn the violence and the role of the security forces
3. insist that the Government of India and the state government take immediate action to prevent further loss of life and property and initiate an impartial investigation into the recent killings
4. demand the immediate repeal of the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 (AFSPA)
5. demand immediate steps for the gradual demilitarization of the valley with troops confined to the border areas

A candle light protest will be held on July 24, 2010 in front of Academy of Fine Arts between 5pm and 8 pm to protest and denounce the killings and human rights violation in Kashmir in the past weeks. We invite you to come and join the vigil and voice your protest. Please forward this appeal to others. We are also sorry about crosspostings, if there are any.

We would also request you to get in touch with us by July 16, 2010 to let us know if you would like to support and participate in the vigil.

Thanks,

Aniruddha, Debjani, Madhura, Parjanya

(on behalf of Concerned Citizens for Kashmir)

About Concerned Citizens for Kashmir: We are a group of citizens who have come together to express our concern over the events in Kashmir and to express our solidarity with the people affected by the 20 years of conflict there. We have no affiliations to any other groups.

Not Crushed, Merely Ignored

2010-07-14T13:07:00.000+05:30

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n14/tariq-ali/not-crushed-merely-ignored

Tariq Ali on the recent killings in Kashmir

A Kashmiri lawyer rang me last week in an agitated state. Had I heard about the latest tragedies in Kashmir? I had not. He was stunned. So was I when he told me in detail what had been taking place there over the last three weeks. As far as I could see, none of the British daily papers or TV news bulletins had covered the story; after I met him I rescued two emails from Kashmir informing me of the horrors from my spam box. I was truly shamed. The next day I scoured the press again. Nothing. The only story in the Guardian from the paper’s Delhi correspondent – a full half-page – was headlined: ‘Model’s death brings new claims of dark side to India’s fashion industry’. Accompanying the story was a fetching photograph of the ill-fated woman. The deaths of (at that point) 11 young men between the ages of 15 and 27, shot by Indian security forces in Kashmir, weren’t mentioned. Later I discovered that a short report had appeared in the New York Times on 28 June and one the day after in the Guardian; there has been no substantial follow-up. When it comes to reporting crimes committed by states considered friendly to the West, atrocity fatigue rapidly kicks in. A few facts have begun to percolate through, but they are likely to be read in Europe and the US as just another example of Muslims causing trouble, with the Indian security forces merely doing their duty, if in a high-handed fashion. The failure to report on the deaths in Kashmir contrasts strangely with the overheated coverage of even the most minor unrest in Tibet, leave alone Tehran.

On 11 June this year, the Indian paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force fired tear-gas canisters at demonstrators, who were themselves protesting about earlier killings. One of the canisters hit 17-year-old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo on the head. It blew out his brains. After a photograph was published in the Kashmiri press, thousands defied the police and joined his funeral procession the next day, chanting angry slogans and pledging revenge. The photograph was ignored by the mainstream Indian press and the country’s celebrity-trivia-obsessed TV channels. As I write, the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, and several other towns are under strict military curfew. Whenever it is lifted, however briefly, young men pour out onto the streets to protest and are greeted with tear gas. In most of the province there has been an effective general strike for more than three weeks. All shops are closed.

An ugly anti-Muslim chauvinism accompanies India’s violence. It has been open season on Muslims since 9/11, when the liberation struggle in Kashmir was conveniently subsumed under the war on terror and Israeli military officers were invited to visit Akhnur military base in the province and advise on counter-terrorism measures. The website India Defence noted in September 2008 that ‘Maj-Gen Avi Mizrahi paid an unscheduled visit to the disputed state of Kashmir last week to get an up-close look at the challenges the Indian military faces in its fight against Islamic insurgents. Mizrahi was in India for three days of meetings with the country’s military brass and to discuss a plan the IDF is drafting for Israeli commandos to train Indian counterterror forces.’ Their advice was straightforward: do as we do in Palestine and buy our weapons. In the six years since 2002 New Delhi had purchased $5 billion-worth of weaponry from the Israelis, to good effect.

Demonstrations against Indian security forces escalated in early June this year when it was revealed in the extra-alert Kashmiri press that three young men – Mohammed Shafi, Shahzad Ahmad Khan and Riyaz Ahmad – had been executed in April by Indian army officers. A colonel and a major were suspended from duty, a rare enough event, suggesting that their superiors knew exactly what had taken place. The colonel claimed that the young men were separatist militants who had been killed in an ‘encounter’ near the Line of Control (the border between Indian-controlled and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir). This account is regarded by local police as pure fiction.

An Amnesty International letter to the Indian prime minister in 2008 listed his country’s human rights abuses in Kashmir and called for an independent inquiry, claiming that ‘grave sites are believed to contain the remains of victims of unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other abuses which occurred in the context of armed conflict persisting in the state since 1989. The graves of at least 940 persons have reportedly been found in 18 villages in Uri district alone.’ A local NGO, the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir (IPTK), states that extrajudicial killings and torture are a commonplace in the valley and that Western institutions don’t even try to do anything about this for fear of damaging relations with New Delhi. The figures provided by the IPTK are startling. It claims that the Indian military occupation of Kashmir ‘between 1989-2009 has resulted in 70,000+ deaths’. The report disputes claims that these killings are aberrations. On the contrary, they are part of the occupation process, considered as ‘acts of service’, and leading to promotion and financial reward (bounty is paid after claims made by officers are verified). In this dirty and enduring conflict, more than half a million ‘military and paramilitary personnel [more than the number of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan combined] continue to act with impunity to regulate movement, law and order across Kashmir. The Indian state itself, through its legal, political and military actions, has demonstrated the existence of a state of continuing conflict within Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.’

Public opinion in India is mute. The parties of the left prefer to avoid the subject for fear that political rivals will question their patriotism. Kashmir is never spoken of, and has never been allowed to speak. With its Muslim majority it wasn’t permitted a referendum in 1947 to determine which of the two countries it wished to be part of. In 1984, when Indira Gandhi was the Indian prime minister, I asked her why she had not taken advantage of the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 (when Kashmiris had watched with horror how the Pakistan army treated their coreligionists) and allowed a referendum. She remained silent. I pointed out that even Farooq Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, was convinced that India would win if a democratic election were held. Her face had clouded. ‘He’s completely untrustworthy.’ I had to agree, but her refusal to contemplate the Kashmiri self-determination promised by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was troubling. These days the very suggestion seems utopian.

The Abdullah dynasty continues to hold power in Kashmir and is keen to collaborate with New Delhi and enrich itself. I rang a journalist in Srinagar and asked him about the current chief minister, Omar Abdullah, a callow and callous youth whose only claim to office is dynastic. ‘Farooq Abdullah,’ he told me, ‘is our Asif Ali Zardari when it comes to corruption. Now he’s made his son chief minister so that he can concentrate on managing his various businesses.’ The opposition isn’t much better. Some Kashmiris, the journalist said, call Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the effective leader of the opposition, and his cronies ‘double agents. That is, they are taking money from Pakistan and India.’ He is the 12th ‘mirwaiz’, the self-appointed spiritual leaders of the Muslims in the Kashmir Valley, and is adept at playing both sides. ‘Mirwaiz’s security outside his house is provided by the Indian state,’ a friend in Srinagar told me, ‘his wife is Kashmiri American, he lives very comfortably (without any source of income) and he is engaged in secret talks with India, news of which is constantly leaked. Furthermore, he also makes an annual pilgrimage to Pakistan to keep that channel open as well. He hangs out with “separatists” in Kashmir who are open to being used by both India and Pakistan, for a good price of course. The Indian authorities do not have to do much to crush Kashmiris while there are people like Mirwaiz. So, all in all, our leadership is working against us. India has always used this to its advantage.’

The Zardari government is silent on the issue of Kashmir and there has been little media reaction in Pakistan to the recent killings. For the ruling elite Kashmir is just a bargaining counter. ‘Give us Afghanistan and you can have Kashmir’ is the message currently emanating from the bunker in Islamabad. Zardari, it’s worth recalling, is the only Pakistani leader whose effigy has been burned in public in Indian Kashmir (soon after becoming president he had seriously downplayed Kashmiri aspirations). The Pakistani president and his ministers are more interested in business deals than in Kashmir. At the moment this suits Washington perfectly, since India is regarded as a major ally in the region and the US doesn’t want to have to justify its actions in Kashmir. Pakistan’s indifference also suggests that Indian allegations that recent events in Kashmir were triggered by Pakistan are baseless. Pakistan virtually dismantled the jihadi networks it had set up in Kashmir after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan not long after 9/11. Islamabad, high on the victory in Kabul, had stupidly assumed that they could repeat the trick in Kashmir. Those sent to infiltrate Indian Kashmir were brutal and mindless fanatics who harmed the Kashmiri case for self-determination, though some young people, tired of the patience exhibited by their elders, embraced the jihad, hoping it would bring them freedom. They were wrong.

As Indian politicians stood on the battlements of the Red Fort in Delhi to celebrate Independence Day in August 2008, Kashmiris began a mass campaign of civil disobedience. More than a hundred thousand people marched peacefully to the UN office in Srinagar. They burned effigies, chanted ‘Azadi, azadi’ (‘freedom’) and appealed to India to leave Kashmir. The movement was not crushed. It was merely ignored. Nothing changed. Now a new generation of Kashmiri youth is on the march. They fight, like the young Palestinians, with stones. Many have lost their fear of death and will not surrender. Ignored by politicians at home, abandoned by Pakistan, they are developing the independence of spirit that comes with isolation and it will not be easily quelled. It’s unlikely, however, that the prime minister of India and his colleagues will pay any attention to them. And just to show who’s master, the Indian army flag-marched through the streets of Srinagar on 7 July in an awesome show of strength.

8 July

The dead are:

11 June: Tufail Ahmad Mattoo, 17, killed in teargas fire in Srinagar.

19 June: Rafiq Ahmad Bangroo, 27, beaten by members of the Central Reserve Police Force near his home in old Srinagar on 12 June, died of his injuries.

20 June: Javed Ahmad Malla, 26, died when mourners, returning from Bangroo’s burial, attacked a CRPF bunker, causing its occupants to open fire.

25 June: Shakeel Ganai, 17, and Firdous Khan, 18, killed when the CRPF fired at protesters in Sopore.

27 June: Bilal Ahmad Wani, 22, died following CRPF fire in Sopore.

28 June: Tajamul Bashir, 20, killed in Delina; Tauqeer Rather, 15, killed in Sopore.

29 June: Ishtiyaq Ahmed, 15, Imtiyaz Ahmed Itoo, 17, and Shujaat-ul-Islam, 17, died after being shot by police in southern Anantnag.

5 July: Muzaffar Ahmad Bhat, 17, died in CRPF custody in Srinagar.

6 July: Fayaz Ahmad Wani, 18, shot by the CRPF during Bhat’s funeral procession in Srinagar; Fancy Jan, 25, the first woman to die, killed when a bullet hit her as she watched events from a window in her house; Abrah Ahmad Khan, 16, killed during protests over Wani’s death.

Age of the stone wars in Kashmir

2010-07-08T06:25:00.003+05:30

by Najib Mubarki
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Comments--Analysis/Age-of-the-stone-wars-in-Kashmir/articleshow/6117640.cms?curpg=1

Insanity , Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Apply that to Kashmir, and one doesn’t need to be an Einstein to figure out that he had got the equation right, again.

Leave, for argument’s sake, the baggage of history — of events from 1947: the accession , New Delhi’s political machinations , dismissed governments and rigged elections to the eruption of insurgency in 1989 — alone for a moment.

Let us assume , for that moment, that there is utter veracity in the official narrative that but for afew elements, who are being discredited, peace and harmony would be restored in the Valley.

Add the fact that armed militancy has been curbed significantly and a regime, elected via a surprisingly well-attended electoral exercise, is in charge.

Add also the statements emanating from the top echelons of both the central and state governments that there will be zero tolerance for human rights abuses. Given all that, if not perfect, things surely should have been better.

So why did the patent insanity of the last few days occur? Why does it happen repeatedly? Why did, day after day, the police and the CRPF shoot dead youngsters who were out protesting, rioting , against the deaths of the day before?

Most Kashmiris would answer that it is because they are under occupation, that the security forces behave as they do, use brute force, as they are the most acute and clear manifestation of the state people are alienated from and resisting. Or, at least, that Kashmiris live in a police state, where, literally, the law allows and supports torture , imprisonment and killings.

Official narrative, of course, invokes the Paksponsored terrorism theme. That, somehow , everything that doesn’t go according to plan in Kashmir has its roots across the border. The other way of looking at things would be to comprehend that essentially there are two competing nationalisms at work, at variance.

The Kashmiri version that seeks separation, exclusion, and the Indian version that insists on inclusion. And the violence that occurs is, therefore, squarely in the realm of the political. So, the broadest answer as to why those killings took place is that there is a denial of that political reality.

That, leaving Pakistan out entirely, New Delhi refuses to recognise and engage with the fact that it faces a political crisis in Kashmir.

Of course, elections were held, a democratic process seemingly restarted. But the mistake is to ignore both the deep roots of separatism and the complexity of political consciousness in Kashmir that separates issues of immediate governance, after years of debilitating strife, and that of the larger tehreek or ‘movement’ .

And the latter , clearly, has transformed. From a belief in armed insurgency, with the gradual realisation that it did not achieve its desired goals, to an incipient rights-and-protest based phase. And hartals , strikes and stone pelting are part of that.

Indeed, Kashmir has reverted to an older form of political expression. Stone-throwing or kani jung (stone war), has historically been a feature of Kashmir’s political battles.

That, if once, pelting stones and bricks were used in fights between different political factions within Kashmir, it now is emerging as the most violent way of showing resistance and dissent.

So, just who are these stonethrowers ? Just why are youngsters again and again coming out to pelt stones, even when they know they might be thrashed, detained or plain killed (as someone said, employing some Kashmiri black humour, the ages of those killed in the last few days, 17, 16, 14...9, read like the scores of a batsman in really bad form)?

The first thing to understand is that this is a generation that has seen and knows nothing else but violence. In a place steeped in political violence and brutal force, they are also a generation perhaps more politicised than those before.

And that is why they also represent, though it may come as a surprise, both an awareness of the failure of the separatist leadership as well as the apparent lack of need to have any leaders in order to protest.
Remember, it isn’t just the government that thinks them dangerous, many among the separatist leaders do too. And some have called them everything from miscreants to drug addicts to being Indian agents. But as part of wider Kashmiri society, they are one manifestation of the rage of having suffered incredible violence, of living lives of daily humiliation.

As part of Kashmiri society , they are aware of the doublespeak, the dissembling that is part of the official version of each killing, each act of violence. And they are part, most immediately visible right now, of the dissent against, the political response to, that violence.

And the governments’ response basically is to use force to contain that political crisis. But the crisis remains. Even in its instrumentalities . Talk of standard operating procedures, for example, has no meaning for Kashmiris when live fire, tear gas shells, even rubber bullets are aimed at the head or chest, as the injuries of the dead reveal.

There can, again to speak of an instrumentality , be no meeting point between a CM who lauds a paramilitary force which, even as it supposedly is exercising restraint , kills daily, barges into homes, shatters windows and thrashes people.

There can be no greater absurdity that while that elected state government endorses using force, the army chief speaks of the need to now use politics to deal with the situation.

It is evident that a bout of conflict subsides after a peak, only to erupt again over the next incident, the next event. And Kashmir is now in a dangerous zone where more suppression, mere reliance on using state force, could fuel the rage into unpredictable territory.

Using absurd phrases like agitational terrorism or nonviolent terrorism or perpetually seeking to link protests over killings to Pakistan or Islamist groups only widens the rupture between what should be done and what is.

Allowing a political process, after all, would also mean allowing those sections or leaders the state is averse to some space, allowing that dissent, those protests or marches, not trying to choke everything all the time. The only thing that can emerge in such a situation is other, more violent forms of that dissent.

The stone throwers are a reminder that there is no way out except engaging with that dissent in Kashmir. That without such an engagement, by only using force again and again, Kashmir will, to borrow the words of the Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky , stay a place where destiny seems to shadow events like a madman with a razor in his hand.

A conversation in Sopore and other stories

2010-07-07T16:26:00.000+05:30

by Shivam Vij

http://kafila.org/2010/06/30/if-protest-could-kill-what-would-bullets-do/