PROTOCOLS OF ZION, OBC PUZZLE,ROSS MALLICK, MARICHJHANPI, OMARKOT and BINAYAK SEN

PROTOCOLS OF ZION, OBC PUZZLE,ROSS MALLICK, MARICHJHANPI, OMARKOT and BINAYAK SEN

Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 185

Palash Biswas

Binayak Sen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dr Binayak Sen is a paediatrician, public health specialist [1] and national .... On 7 June 2007, a submission from Dr. Binayak Sen's wife, Dr. Ilina Sen, ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binayak_Sen - 76k - Cached - Similar pages -
Free Dr. Binayak Sen Campaign | Resist Silent Emergency!.. Restore ...
Binayaksen.net is one more in the growing list of efforts by well wishers and supporters of Dr Binayak Sen to bring the injustice being done to him by the ...
www.binayaksen.net/ - 90k - Cached - Similar pages -
Dr. Binayak Sen's arrest: Updates
Detention of Dr. Binayak Sen under two black laws in itself a ...
The People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) – Chhattisgarh Unit has strongly condemned the police action in detaining Dr. Binayak Sen, General Secretary, ...
www.pucl.org/Topics/Human-rights/2007/sen-pucl-chhattisgarh.html - Similar pages -
Please Save Dr. Binayak Petition - Home
23 May 2007 ... Save Dr. Binayak Sen! ... Once the hospital was established, the Dr. Binayak Sen and his wife moved on to work with the NGO Rupantar, ...
www.savebinayak.ukaid.org.uk/ - 22k - Cached - Similar pages -
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Dr Binayak Sen: Tribal doctor
14 May 2008 ... A profile of India's jailed human rights activist Binayak Sen.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7397734.stm - 56k - Cached - Similar pages -
Global Health Council - Dr. Binayak Sen, 2008 Winner, Jonathan ...
Dr. Binayak Sen, with boy Since 1999, the Global Health Council has awarded the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights to 13 of the world's ...
www.globalhealth.org/binayak_sen/ - 28k - Cached - Similar pages -
Global Health Council - Jailed Indian Doctor Wins 2008 Jonathan ...
21 Apr 2008 ... Dr. Binayak Sen, with boy The Global Health Council announced April 21 that .... Jailed Doctor-Activist Binayak Sen Gets U.S.-Based Award ...
www.globalhealth.org/news/article/9833 - 38k - Cached - Similar pages -
Binayak Sen Campaign: About Dr. Binayak Sen
4 May 2008 ... Dr. Binayak Sen is a pediatrician, public health specialist and national Vice-President of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) ...
www.aidboston.org/FreeBinayakSen/bsen.htm - 12k - Cached - Similar pages -
AID - Support pours in for Dr. Binayak Sen
14 May 2007 ... Association for India's Development(AID) We aim to provide an alternate paradigm of development in India, Human Righs Activist Arrested.
aidindia.org/main/content/view/406/74/ - 29k - Cached - Similar pages -
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Dr. Sen: Press conference in Delhi , A team of activists to visit Raipur, May 20 - 21 - Dr. Binayak Sen's house searh yiels no incriminating evidence ...
www.pucl.org/Topics/Human-rights/2007/sen-updates.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages -


Palash Speaks
- 22 visits - 21 Mar
The book examines the process development in dandakaranya Project, ... East Bengali Refugees,Read Palash Speaks Blogs, » East Bengali Refugees Blogs at ...
blogs.ibibo.com/Baesekolkata/ - 977k - Cached - Similar pages -
JSTOR: Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy ...
A journalist of the Bengali dailyJugantar noted: the refugees of Dandakaranya are . . . mainly cultivators, fishermen, day-labourers, artisans, ...
links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-9118(199902)58%3A1%3C104%3ARRIFRW%3E2.0.CO%3... - Similar pages -
Caste Discrimination Translated into Ethnic Cleansing in this ...
They protested Bidhan Roy`s initiative to send bengali refugees out of Bengal . .... Contrary to dandakaranya People the uttarakhandi Bengalies are more ...
indiainteracts.com/utilities/printpage.php?source=memberstory&id=2515 - 21k - Cached - Similar pages -
Kalyani University :: Faculty Members :: History
A Bengali article on 19th century Bengali home-manuals, in Aitihasik, Calcutta, ... Recent Significant Publicatons, "Bengalee Refugees at Dandakaranya - A ...
www.klyuniv.ac.in/fac_history.html - 50k - Cached - Similar pages -
NationMaster - Encyclopedia: East Bengali Refugees
The majority of East Bengali refugees settled in the new state of West Bengal, ... million were also settled in other parts of India including Dandakaranya, ...
www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/East-Bengali-Refugees - 55k - Cached - Similar pages -
ajaytg.net
Maana was a transit camp for Bengali refugees from East Pakistan who had been rehabilitated as part of the Dandakaranya Project in 1964. ...
ajaytg.net/ - 89k - Cached - Similar pages -
From 'Land to Tiller' to 'Land to Tatas' by Amulya Ganguli
The hard-hearted manner in which the Left Front government evicted the East Bengali refugees from there and sent them back to Dandakaranya in what is now ...
www.boloji.com/opinion/0283.htm - 29k - Cached - Similar pages -
India Together: Fighting to learn in their language - 8 April 2008
8 Apr 2008 ... As mentioned earlier, Bengalis in Dandakaranya do not fall under any ... of Maharashtra to realise that the refugees of East Bengal came to ...
www.indiatogether.org/2008/apr/edu-mahbeng.htm - 63k - Cached - Similar pages -
World Prout Assembly: Fighting to learn in their language
Nirbendranath Banerjee, a retired school teacher from the same village, remembers that the refugee camps set up for East-Bengali refugees in Chandrapur and ...
www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2008/04/fighting_to_lea.html - Similar pages -
orissalive.com
A majority of them are Bengali refugees, the rest are from Tibet, ... Some of them were rehabilitated in Dandakaranya forest range of South Orissa by the ...
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Dilemmas of diaspora: partition, refugees, and the politics of ...
The East Bengali refugees did not, of course, accept this situation meekly. Transportation to Dandakaranya and other distant places was vocally opposed by ...
www.articlearchives.com/humanities-social-science/history/1274183-1.html - 105k - Cached - Similar pages -
The Sunday Indian - The Nation's Greatest News Weekly
In January 1979, thousands of refugees staying in a Dandakaranya (a ... first state sponsored terrorism has faded from the memory of Bengal and Bengalis. ...
www.thesundayindian.com/25112007/storyd.asp?sid=3175&pageno=2 - 24k - Cached - Similar pages -
nandigramunited: MARXIST STRATEGY against PROLETARIAT and final ...
The Marxist government would resettle all BENGALI REFUGEES scattered countrywide ... In Dandakaranya, encountering the INDIGENOUS ABORIGINAL Landscape and ...
nandigramunited.blogspot.com/2009/03/marxist-strategy-against-proletariat.html - 287k - Cached - Similar pages -
East Bengali Refugees | Palash Speaks
East Bengali Refugees,Read Palash Speaks Blogs, » East Bengali Refugees Blogs at ... East Bengali Refugees are people that left East Bengal following the ...
blogs.ibibo.com/Baesekolkata/East-Bengali-Refugees - 61k - Cached - Similar pages -
bangaindigenous: MARXIST STRATEGY against PROLETARIAT
The Marxist government would resettle all BENGALI REFUGEES scattered countrywide ... I had to hear from the VICTIMS of MARICHJHANPI returned to DANDAKARANYA ...
bangaindigenous.blogspot.com/2009/03/marxist-strategy-against-proletariat.html - Similar pages -
[PDF]
The Sundarbans: Whose World Heritage Site?
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to various camps such as Dandakaranya and Mana in central India where they ... When they did come to power in 1978, 30000 east Bengali refugees sailed to ...
eprints.lse.ac.uk/5484/1/The_Sundarbans-whose_world_heritage_site.pdf - Similar pages -
by A Jalais - 2007 - Cited by 2 - Related articles
Marichjhanpi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They argued that rehabilitation of all Bengali speaking refugees was possible ... In a demonstration in a refugee camp in Dandakaranya, the leader of CPI(M) ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morichjhapi - 33k - Cached - Similar pages -
[PDF]
1 Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of ...
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East Bengali refugees’ construction of the image of Partition victimhood--the ..... Dandakaranya in central India in search of people who had been “directly ...
www.swadhinata.org.uk/misc/chatterjeeEastBengal%20Refugee.pdf - Similar pages -
2009 February 10 « The Himalayan Beacon
APRIL 11 : Chief Minister’s appeal to the refugees from Dandakaranya issued. .... out in Siliguri and adjoining areas by the pro-Bengali organizations. ...
beacononline.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/ - 161k - Cached - Similar pages -
Deforestation - Palash Speaks
Sikh and Bengali refugees were engaged in deforestation in the best interest of ..... with other Marxist leaders visited Dandakaranya refugee colonies and ...
palashspeaks.blog.co.uk/tags/deforestation/ - Similar pages -
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The Sundarbans: Whose World Heritage Site?


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Dandakaranya and Mana in central India where they shared no common lan- ... power towards the end of 1977, 30000 to 35000 east Bengali refugees sailed ...
www.conservationandsociety.org/cs-5-3-335.pdf - Similar pages -
by A Jalais - 2007 - Cited by 2 - Related articles
The Assam Tribune Online
In contrast, the Bengali refugees were left to fend for themselves. In the name of rehabilitation, they were exiled to the dense jungles of Dandakaranya ...
www.assamtribune.com/scripts/details.asp?id=feb1609/letter1 - 11k - Cached - Similar pages -
Amitav Ghosh - Review
In 1978 a group of refugees fled from the Dandakaranya camp in Madhya Pradesh ... Some Bengali reviewers of The Hungry Tide have already asserted that their ...
www.amitavghosh.com/reviews/view.php?rid=12 - 17k - Cached - Similar pages -
KalingaTimes.com: Life endangered in heaven
Malkangiri is also a part of Dandakaranya which covers vast area of Chhattisgarh (Bastar .... Here large number of Bengali refugees have been settled, ...
kalingatimes.com/views/news_20080716-Life-endangered-in-heaven.htm - 24k - Cached - Similar pages -
Organiser - Content
In 1977, Bengali refugees from the erstwhile East Pakistan, ... Basu government called Ram Chatterjee actually went to Dandakaranya forest in Madhya Pradesh ...
www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=161&page=7 - 28k - Cached - Similar pages -
BOOK REVIEWS
28 Feb 2003 ... Almost half the refugees who were transported to land colonisation projects in Dandakaranya made their way back to Bengali-speaking towns ...
www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9493.00147 - Similar pages -
[PDF]
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 BASTAR DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY PEOPLE'S ...
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Notable among them was the Dandakaranya Displaced People's. Project where initially 7330 Bengali refugees were allotted 60000 hectares of forest land. ...
cssh.unipune.ernet.in/HumanRights/05%20STATE%20AGRICULTURE%20FOREST%20DALIT... - Similar pages -
Blogs
Kolkata Intelligentsia delebratly defends CPIM as they brand the Dandakaranya Refugees landed in Marichjhanpi as tresspasser Bangladeshi Nationals in a ...
crawlx.bixee.com/isearch/result/provider/ibiboblogs2/1/?q=marichjhanpi - 25k - Cached - Similar pages -
The Hindu : Tribals will have a say now
The Bengalis came into the region as part of the Dandakaranya settlement programme for refugees from Bangladesh. Over the decades, the refugees ended up ...
www.hindu.com/2002/03/06/stories/2002030602171300.htm - Similar pages -
The Telegraph - Calcutta : Opinion
Covering the transfer of East Bengal refugees to Dandakaranya in the Sixties, ... The recalcitrants explained to me in our common Bengali that they were ...
www.telegraphindia.com/1061202/asp/opinion/story_7077036.asp - 38k - Cached - Similar pages -
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ross mallick, Books - Development Policy Of A Communists ...
Search for ross mallick, books at Rediff Books. Development Policy Of A Communists Government and other great books by renowned authors.
shop.rediff.com/bookshop/buyersearch.jsp?Ross-Mallick,-Books&lookfor=Ross%20Mallick,&search=1 - 19k - Cached - Similar pages -
Author - Ross Mallick
Ross Mallick. Affiliations: - Development Consultant, Canada. Company · Management · Careers · Community · Press Room · Conferences · Site Map ...
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Development, Ethnicity and Human Rights in South Asia by Ross Mallick
South Asia is today facing seemingly intractable problems of uneven development, ethnic conflict and human rights violations. This book focuses specifically ...
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Development Policy Of A Communists Government: Ross Mallick: Buy ...
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Ross Mallick,'s Development, Ethnicity And Human Rights In South ...
Development, Ethnicity And Human Rights In South Asia for just Rs. 688. Shipping across India for all Ross Mallick, Books only at Rediff Books.
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Ross Mallick's Development Policy Of A Communist Government: West ...
Development Policy Of A Communist Government: West Bengal Since 1977 for just Rs. 1815. Shipping across India for all Ross Mallick Books only at Rediff ...
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Development Policy of a Communist Government: West Bengal Since 1977 - Google Books Result
by Ross Mallick - 2007 - Political Science - 253 pages
In this book, Dr Ross Mallick convincingly challenges this view of the Left Front government, arguing that it has been a failure in terms of redistributive...
books.google.co.in/books?isbn=0521047854...
Bagchee.com: Your Place for Indian Books & Much More.
By Ross Mallick Softcover 1998. South Asia is today facing seemingly intractable problems of uneven development, ethnic conflict and human rights violations ...
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© Cambridge University PressFile Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Cambridge University Press. 978-0-521-04785-2 - Development Policy of a Communist Government: West Bengal since 1977. Ross Mallick. Frontmatter ...
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Ms. Ross Mallick Books (Used, New, Out-of-Print) - Alibris
Alibris has new & used books by Ms. Ross Mallick, including hardcovers, softcovers, rare, out-of-print first editions, signed copies, and more.
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Scholarly articles for Dalit Voice on OBC
Of Brahmins, Sacred and Socialist - Omvedt - Cited by 3
Caste, Hindutva and Hideousness - Shah - Cited by 7
Untouchable: dalits in modern India - Michael - Cited by 4


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Dalit Voice - The Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied ...
- 20 Mar
And therefore, they were helped by all Dalit-OBC organizations, but they do not give equal .... The future is for revolutionary media led by Dalit Voice. ...
www.dalitvoice.org/Templates/march2009/articles.htm - 28k - Cached - Similar pages -
Dalit Voice - The Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied ...
16 Jan 2009 ... Upper caste bid to topple Kerala’s OBC Chief Minister ... Bangalore: Dalit Voice was the first in India to reveal the top secret that ...
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The Assault On Black Folk's Sanity: The Dalit Voice
Dalit Voice was the first Indian journal to expose this closely guarded .... communities as backward, to estimate the OBC population at 52%. ...
assaultonblacksanity.blogspot.com/2008/05/dalit-voice.html - 92k - Cached - Similar pages -
[ZESTCaste] VTR urged to start "OBC Voice"
To start an “OBC Voice”, no one is in a better position than you are. As I said, start with simply changing the cover of “Dalit Voice”, and gradually make ...
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[Reader-list] Protest (on April 1st) SC's stay on OBC ...
[Reader-list] Protest (on April 1st) SC's stay on OBC reservationand ... Dalit Voice Silver Jubilee Celebration Committee, Delhi invites you > to join a ...
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[Reader-list] Fwd: Re: Protest (on April 1st) SC's stay on OBC ...
Previous message: [Reader-list] Protest (on April 1st) SC's stay on OBC ... Dalit Voice Silver Jubilee Celebration Committee, > Delhi invites you > > to ...
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What is the Dalit/OBC voice on quotas? Tell us!
What is the Dalit/OBC voice on quotas? Tell us! May 22, 2006. As students continue protesting against the government's proposed changes in the reservation ...
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Dalit Voice Reports Feb/March: « Therearenosunglasses’s Weblog
When Dalit Voice came out with our “Caste identity” thesis, .... But our critics say that OBCs and Muslims should not be included in Bahujan. ...
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obc voice: The oppressors and the OBC script
29 Jun 2006 ... Have you ever read the Dalit Voice? Heard of VT Rajshekar?? This very "OBC" Shetty is a pretender to the throne of Dalit Leadership. ...
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540 Communication
Sethi and his readers must note that V.T. Rajshekar, editor of Dalit Voice, is not a dalit. He is an OBC of the powerful Shetty caste, though he edits a ...
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The Protocols Of Zion - A one page summary


Just visit:
http://koraputonline.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

http://planningcommission.nic.in/aboutus/committee/strgrp/stg_sts.pdf
By
Rense.com

Goyim are mentally inferior to Jews and can’t run their nations properly. For their sake and ours, we need to abolish their governments and replace them with a single government. This will take a long time and involve much bloodshed, but it’s for a good cause. Here’s what we’ll need to do:

* Place our agents and helpers everywhere
* Take control of the media and use it in propaganda for our plans
* Start fights between different races, classes and religions
* Use bribery, threats and blackmail to get our way
* Use Freemasonic Lodges to attract potential public officials
* Appeal to successful people’s egos
* Appoint puppet leaders who can be controlled by blackmail
* Replace royal rule with socialist rule, then communism, then despohttp://malkangiri.nic.in/Dance%20&%20Music.htmtism
* Abolish all rights and freedoms, except the right of force by us
* Sacrifice people (including Jews sometimes) when necessary
* Eliminate religion; replace it with science and materialism
* Control the education system to spread deception and destroy intellect
* Rewrite history to our benefit
* Create entertaining distractions
* Corrupt minds with filth and perversion
* Encourage people to spy on one another
* Keep the masses in poverty and perpetual labor
* Take possession of all wealth, property and (especially) gold
* Use gold to manipulate the markets, cause depressions etc.
* Introduce a progressive tax on wealth
* Replace sound investment with speculation
* Make long-term interest-bearing loans to governments
* Give bad advice to governments and everyone else

Eventually the Goyim will be so angry with their governments (because we’ll blame them for the resulting mess) that they’ll gladly have us take over. We will then appoint a descendant of David to be king of the world, and the remaining Goyim will bow down and sing his praises. Everyone will live in peace and obedient order under his glorious rule.

THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION (complete protocols & summary)




World / India / Orissa / Umarkot (19°40'12"N 82°13'11"E) Udanti Forest Sanctuary, Chhatisgarh
D.N.K.
Pendrani ma Temple (Created by Ashit Swain)
Beheda (located By N.S.Dhruwa)
Lalpara (Kumuli)(located by N.S.Dhruwa)
Sanat Praharaj's SEVA N.G.O.
Casa de Mario e sua irmã Gostosa (hy)
umerkote
14 (hy)
17 (hy)
18 (hy)
19 (be)
Umerkote Town
Pokemon factory
Umerkote Dam Site (located by N.S.Dhruwa)
Raighar
Global Consultancy,Raighar
gulipatna sera street(created by bulu)
Beet Almar7oom Abu Jehad " fayz abu sufian" (ar)
Dewangan's Colony (Created by Durgeswar)
Jamrunda (UV-13) (or)
Varsundi Gram (Bangali Para) (bn)
Raighar (bn)
bAhAy nI luis Cortez
Suresh
bikash das
Village TILONDI
Sarat Chandra Dash's HOUSE
Manoj home,gulipatana (umerkote)
kundai (located by N.S.Dhruwa)
litu's home
SANTOSH BISWAS HOME
15 No Sankorada
upendra patra home
anirudha patra's house
LAXMI BHAWAN, DAS TRADERS
Madan Mohan Panda
MR PRAFULA KUMAR BHUYAN, PRATAP KUMAR BHUYAN, PRANAB BHUYAN, PRANAYA BHUYAN, AT/PO-RAIGHAR, VIA-UMERKOTE, DIST-NABARANGAPUR LOCATED BY-SUNIL KUMAR BHUYAN (BUBU)
Hrushikesh Gond Dumardihi
Dumardihi
Samir nayak and Sahil nayak
babu parida n aswini bhuyan" s little home
babu raja litu goutam tiki street
AMAPANI MOUNTAIN RANGE
Satosa USO
kelia
Bhukta Colony
S.N. JHAWAR
SUBASH CH PRADHAN MEDANA
MEDANA

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This morning, Mr VIJOY KUMAR from TRISCHUR, KERALA called me and asked the details of CPIM in Bengal. He informed me that Ms MAWATI is certain to GAIN One or TWO Loksabha Seats in kerala.



He belongs to OBC and accepts that the OBC remains the BACKBONE of the Ruling Hegemony all over India as the SHUDRAS called KAYASTHA and the RAJPUTS who lost everything due to GANDHIAN Brahaminical Power Transfer!



He specially referred the FORTY Percent Bengal OBC population standing united ROCK SOLID with Bengali Brahmins and the CREAMY Layer of BAIDYA and Mahishya.



HE told me that as in Bengal OBC communities consisting of forty percent population without any cabinet berth or constitutional Reservation or quota with FACELESS IDENTITY, OBC communities in SOUTH INDIA fare very badly, specially in the LEFT RULED KERALA.



Mr VIJOY KUMAR seems concerned with the PUZZLE to link the COW BELT prominent ARYAN ENSLAVED Indigenous ABORIGINAL Minority communities with SOUTH INDIA and DRAVID nationality!



JYOTHI and RAJ with their BHOOSHAKTI Kendra in TUMKUR, KARNATAKA, WOMEN~S EMPOWERMENT and DALIT PANCHAYATS do engage themselves to cover the DISTANCE.



DR BR AMBEDKAR could not mobilise OBC, ST and MINORITIES along with the MAJORITY Castes in SC category, though he did an EXCELLENT job to ensure maximum constitutional safeguards to SC, ST and OBC in INDEPENDENT BRAHAMINICAL India ruled by ZIONIST ILLUMINITI!



But the DEFICIT runs too high! SOCIAL barriers of OBC and SHUDRAS along with RAJPUTS and Minorities have become VERY HIGH as NARMADA DAM innundating whatsoever chances of LIBERATION of the ENSLAVED people in India!



I met some people down form TAMILNADU and ANDHRA in cuttuck last DECEMBER who seemed to be very INTERACTIVE but North INDIAN DEFECTED CONVERTED ARYAN PSYCHE never allow any space for Diologue with either South India or North EAST India.



I have always tried my best to interact with South India and NORTH EAST INDIA. but INDIVIDUAL ADVENTURES would never do any HELP unless we cover the DISTANCE.



For me CENTRAL India, specially DANDAKARANYA spread over FIVE states MP, Maharashtra, ORISSA, Chattishgarh and ANDHRA holds the KEY to solve the GEOGRAPHICAL STRATEGIC Puzzle to UNIFY INDIGENOUS ABORIGINAL ENSLAVED India. I am lucky to be in a position to interact with DADAKARNYA region since my student life.



The RULING Hegemony knows the DANGER the DANDAKARANYA Indigenous aboriginal Region may pose.



It ASSASINATED our friend SHANKAR GUHA NIYOGI and continues to PERSECUTE DR VINAYAK SEN!



It introduced MANDATORY SALWA JUDUM to created CIVIL WAR situation terming the only LINK AREA of UNIFIED INDIGENOUS ABORIGINAL India as MAOST Corridor.



The GLOBAL ORDER, US and ISRAEL, Indian STATE and MILITARY power and Corporates indulge themselves to CRUSH DANDAKARANYA.



Marichjhanpi and SALWA JUDUM are only TWO SIDES of a SINGLE COIN of ZION PROTOCOL!



I visited the SITES of CLASH, ENCOUNTER and AMBUSH in Dandakarany in my recent visit to DANDAKARANY! Only the SOCIAL and ECO ACTIVISTS may UNIFY our people the locals, ABORIGINAL Tribals, and Indigenous REFUGEES in DANDAKARANYA.



WE explained the AGENDA to MASSES in Malkangiri, OMARKOT and TIRUDIH joined by the REPRESENTATIVES of every Community and Place all over Dandakaranya spread over five states!



I often discuss the ISSUES with my social and ECO activist friends, Committed journalists and INTELLIGENTSIA! I alwys INTERACT with SOUTH INDIA, North EAST, North India, Maharashtra and Dandakaranya!



My Lucknow based friends including renowned Journalists like NAVEEN JOSHI and GOVIND BALLABH Joshi have arranged the FIRST UMESH DOBHAL Memorial ceremony in Lucknow.



Dobhal was killed by JUNGLE MAFIA in late eighties while we were based in MEERUT.



DOBHAl was a regular Contributor to NAINITAL SAMACHAR. he also continued the CAMPAIGN against JUNGLE Mafia in Hills of UTTARAKHAND! Based in PAUDHI!



SORRY DOBHAL, my friend!



Sorry Naveen!



Sorry Gobind !


Sorry my Lucknow based friends !



I got the INVITATION by Courier only Today afternoon! The incident would take place on 25th March in Lucknow.



Sabita is ILL and is UNDER MEDICAL Supervision with pending surgical operation.



How may I leave the STATION with such a short notice? i may only REPENT and wish for SUCCESS of the Incident and MOBILISATION of Social, ECO activists, Intelligentsia and Journalists so that no more SHANKAR GUHA NIYOGI or UMESH DOVAL might be ASSASSINATED anymore and hope the PERSECUTION of friends like DR VINAYAK SEN would WIDEN our PATH to LIBERATION!



I talked to Major Siddharth Vurve and A T BALA, both based in MUMBAI. Also talked to PK ROY based in UMORKOT and SRIDAM MANDAL in BHUVNESHWAR!



We share the same COMMITMENT as thousands of our friends do!


Meanwhile, ZION PROTOCOLS Complete in India as the RULING BRAHAMINICAL HEGEMONY as well as DESI ILLUMINITI ZIONIST finalises the SURVIVAL STRATEGY!



On the other hand DESI ILLUMINITI in making has kicked the BUM of UNION Home Minister thhe CETTITAR Chidambaram also a BANIA as BCCI declared to shift the VENUES of IPL second SEASON ABROAD challenging SOVEREIGNITY and RULE of Law in the nation!Cricket fans all over the country were left disappointed with the Indian cricket board's decision to shift the hugely popular Indian Premier League (IPL) out of the country.Meanwhile, Samsung has launched its widescreen portable multimedia player, P3, for the Indian market. The player was first announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) earlier this year.On the other hand, it may not be a part of the formal process, but the country’s shadowy and illegal betting industry has put in its own “expression of interest” in the hotting battle to take over Satyam Computer Services. As over 100 designers displayed creative clothing skills by making 56 models walk on the ramp at the five-day Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WIFW) ending today, they sent out a clear message: Fashion need not be expensive.




After businessmen, dancers, eunuchs and teachers, the colourful Indian political bandwagon will get a touch of intelligentsia in the coming polls with alumni of the elite IITs and IIMs planning to test their electoral fortunes.



Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass Sunday with hundreds of thousands of Angolans and decried the "clouds of evil" over Africa that have spawned war, tribalism and ethnic rivalry that he said condemned poor people to virtual slavery ...



US Treasury debt prices slipped on modest profit-taking on Friday as the Federal Reserve's plan to buy government debt supported prices even with $98 billion of new supply due to be auctioned next week.



Eight people, including an army major, have been killed in two ongoing gunfights between militants and security forces in north Kashmir, officials said today.Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani sought an early resolution of the Kashmir issue to enable Pakistan to "singularly focus its attention" on eradicating extremism and terrorism as he met CIA chief Leon Panetta in Islamabad in the wake of the US ...Lawyers and political activists carrying balloons and placards celebrated the return of Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry as chief justice 16 months after his dismissal plunged Pakistan into a political chaos.



Railway Minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Sunday said that if he were the country's home minister, Varun Gandhi would have been jailed for his speeches in Uttar Pradesh's Pilibhit constituency.



The new order took over in the Sangh Parivar with Mohan Rao Bhagwat being appointed as the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS and Suresh Joshi pipping Suresh Soni as Sahkaryavahak or general secretary of RSS.



This is not unexpected an event as the BRAHMINS in their Multi Linual national conference with FOUR SHANKARACHARYAS, Swami ramdev and the SACRED SANTS discarding SUDARSHAN, RSS and BJP accomodated CONGRESS CM Sheela dexit and host of Congress leader and resoluted to dump BJP as well as its PRIME MINISTER Face the SINDHI BANIA REFUGEE Lala Krisna Adwani as he is not a BRHAMIN!



The change was ushered in today at Nagpur after RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan decided to go into retirement, Suresh Joshi aka Bhaiya Joshi was elected as General Secretary of RSS after pipping joint general secretary Suresh Soni to the post. The retirement of 78 year old Sudershan and Bhagwat taking over the Sangh reins is expected to have a telling effect on the BJP also. While Sudershan and Soni were seen to be against BJP Prime Ministerial candidate L.K. Advani, Bhagwat is a supporter of Advani.



In fact, Advani was an apprentice under Bhagwat's father when he was a Pracharak in Gujarat after crossing over from Pakistan after parition.



Former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has been admitted to the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for a regular medical check-up, a hospital official said Saturday.


The BRAHMIN VOTE bank drifts towards CONGRESS as the BRAHMIN Chice for Indian prime Minister is vested in PRANAB Mukherjee, the Kayastha Brahmin from Bengal!



Incidentally, India is ruled by the lethal TRIO ZIONIST, BUDDHA ADWANI PRANAB and there is hardly anything to chose between ADWANI and PRANAB.



In fact the RULING BRAHAMINICAL Hegemony has STRATEGIC EQUATIONS to PREMPT Casteology and has got MULTIPLE Choices for the NEW FACE of TRI IBLIS SATANIC ORDER of PHOENIX ruling MANUSMRITI APARTEID ZIONIST FREESENSEX India shining.



FRACTURED MANDATE is predestined as PRE POLL SCENERIO predict.



Thus, the ZIONIST HEGEMONY has fixed the ZION PROTOCOL to stop overwhemling MAYAWATI and her casteology.



If THIRD front emerges very strong then DEVEGAUDA, BUDDHA, NAVEEN PATNAIK and even JYOTI Basu may be projected as HEGEMONY leader. NDA or UPA takeover may implement the agenda very well.



ANY DEFICIT in MANDATE might be covered well with Minor DEFECTIONS and major HORS TRADING so that the US CORPORATE ILLUMINITI Sponsered ETHNIC CLEANSING and MASS DESTRUCTION agenda may be executed very well killing the PRODUCTIVE FORCES, Working Class and the ABORIGINAL INDIGENOUS MINORITY communities!



Mayawati has to be STOPPED at any cost and PASWAN, LALU , PAWAR, MULAYAM, NITISH KUMAR, CHANDRA BABU, JAILALITA would not be allowed to tresspass any new region out of their bases irrespective of georgraphy and History.



Then, the DESI ILLUMINITI has its own Prime Minister and He happens to be NARENDRA Modi!



THIS is the GRAND INDIAN ZION PROTOCOL no political party or IDELOGY my dare to ignore!



FASCIST BLIND NATIONALISM to invoke the WAR GODS and GODDESSES is practiced with SURGICAL PRECISION as the HATE SPEECH of VARUN GANDHI focuses very well. WAR AGAINST Terrorism, SACRIFICE CALL, WAGE REDUCTION, RETRENCHMENT, Lay OFF, Lock OUT, JOB LOSS, FALSE RECESSION, EXEMPTIONS, WAIVERS, TRADE UNIONS, DISINVESTMENT, MODERNISATION, SEZ DRIVE, PCPIR, Chemical HUBS, Nuclear parks, RBI, FINMIN, WTO, WORLDBANK, IMF, INDO US NUKE DEAL, RETAIL CHAIN, GM SEEDS, NUCLEAR PARKS, INFRASTRUCTURE and so on ... combined reflects the PRIORITIES of GENOCIDE CULTURE only directed to CAPTURE NATURAL RESOURCES liquidating the Indigenous aboriginal ENSLAVE NATURE ASSOCIATED PEOPLE and it is called FREE MARKET Political ECONOMY under GLOBALISATIN!



Indian RULING Class dependsm on WAR against TERROR and intense MUSLIM HATRED to POLARISE HINDUTVA including SC, ST AND OBC!Contending that ‘overwhelming’ evidence suggests involvement of Pakistan's official agencies in the Mumbai attacks, India has said Islamabad is neither pursuing this angle nor allowing the FBI to do so. Home Minister P Chidambaram also pointed out that Pakistan has not shared any information it may have got from interrogation of people detained in that country in connection with 26/11. He underlined that India will ‘apply pressure’ and use ‘coercive diplomacy’ to ensure that perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks are brought to justice.


HENCE, Known for his canny political skills, Congress veteran and External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has lost no time in realising that young voters form a crucial chunk in his constituency of Jangipura, from where he is seeking a re-election to the Lok Sabha.



Graffito have sprung up in Jangipur portraying the 74-year-old, Pranabda to many, as “Dadu”.



“Pranab Dadu Ke Vote Din (vote for Grandfather Pranab),” reads the graffiti meant to appeal to the young voter.



So, what if MEN like LALU, PASWAN, NAVEEN, PAWAR, NITISH,MULAYAM revolts against the existing POWER EQUATIONS! MOST of the OBC lot is trying their best to adjust their CREAMY Layer STATUS in POST POLL situation with FRACTURED MANDATE as they amy SWING any DIRECTION!



Thus, the ZION PROTOCOL makes SURE to SUSTAIN BRAHAMINICAL ZIONIST HEGEMONY as SHUDRAS, RAJPUTS and the OBC lot would side with the BRAHAMINS as they have been doing for thousands and thousands years BLOCKING INDIGENOUS ABORIGINAL DALIT LIBERATION in this DIVIDED BLEEDING GEOPOLITICS!



Never MIND, the RECENT HISTORY and POLITICS may mislead you until you understand the GRADED HEIRARCHICAL CASTE SYSTEM and MANUSMRITI RULE practicing SUPREME APARTEID of UNTOUCHABILITY!



In a new turn in their tussle, RJD chief Lalu Prasad declared his party's intention to field its candidates against the Congress in three seats held by it in Bihar and accused it of trying to ‘finish’ regional parties. Blowing hot and cold against Congress, Lalu likened Congress' aim of contesting 37 seats in Bihar to build their organisation as "digging a well when one's house is on fire".



Arguing that Congress alone is not UPA, he told reporters "if the name UPA name remains it is good, otherwise some other name can be adopted and some other front will be formed."



In reply to questions, he said there is no plan to ally with the third front. "We are part and parcel of UPA...its my responsibility to keep the UPA intact and I am ready to make any sacrifice for it."



Lalu also said the UPA will come back to power and that Manmohan is ‘suitable’ for being the Prime Minister again.



Lalu remains an ENTERTAINMENT ETERNAL! What more?






Extending over an area of about 35,600 square miles, Dandakaranya is the physical region in east-central India covering the Abujhmar Hills in the west and bordering the Eastern Ghats in the east. It extends about 200 miles from the north to the south and about 300 miles from east to west. This vast forest expanse spread over the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Andhra Pradesh. It is very famous in the Ramayana as the Dandaka forest. The southern part of Orissa and adjoining Chhattisgarh of this forest region is an anthropological wonderland. Here, various tribal groups that belong to diverse ethnic and linguistic characters have been living side by side in primitive harmony from the time immemorial. The main portion lies in the Koraput Plateau, about 3000 ft above the mean sea level. This hidden paradise offering glimpses of the eco-friendly life and socio-cultural pattern of the hill tribes has immense tourist potential. Ecotourism resources are abundant here.




In spite of high poverty in Koraput district with 87 per cent of the total families living below the poverty line, the incidences of hunger death and child sale are coming down in the district, according to Sisir Kanta Pradhan, regional team leader of Foundation for Ecological Security of Bhubaneswar. The HINDU reports on 9th May.



It reminds me the ELECTION SPEECH of the Bengal GENOCIDE MASTER GESTAPO HEAD CHIEF MINISTER who justifies REPRESSION for Capaitalist devel;opment, Urbanisation and industrialisation. The country knows how his government BROKERED as any Builder or promoter would do, to BENEFIT CORPORATES and MNCS specially AMBANIES, MITTAL, SALIM, DLF, TATA Motors and so on.



He calims that Nandigram and SINGUR Insurrection swere SUICIDAL as the RESISTANCE UNWANTED halted the DEVELOPMENT and industrialisation of West Bengal. HE CRIES for NANO Unstopping!



Now he calims the PETRO CHEMICAL Industries are in VOGUE worldwide justifying Chemical HUB attempt in Nandigram and propsed new venue of NAYACHAR violating ENVIRONMENT, COAST SECURITY ACT, ECOLOGICAL BALNCE and coast Line Life and livelihood of Indigenous people along with BIOLOGICAL and WEATHER Cycle. He never cares to tell the TRUTH that CHEMICAL INDUSTRIES have to ensure ZERO POLLUTION in AMERICAS and EUROPE, hence the concerned INDUSTRIES have no OPTION to use the THIRD WORLD Indigenous people as GUINIPIGS for the exclusive experiments of BIOLOGICAL and CHEMICAL WELFARE!



I have talked to the Tribal ABORIGINAL people, leaders and OFFICIALS in KORAPUT, DANDAKARANYA and all over ORISSA. BPL STARVATION and FOODINSECURITY, DISPLACEMENT, JOBLOSS AND Unemployment and CHILD SALE situation is more than ALARMING!







I find the FOOD INSECURITY and STARVATION ALARMING! KALAHANDI MIRROR would show your face!



Jobloss and UNEMPLOYMENT alarming! DESPITE the IT BOOM in Bhuvneshwar, CUTTACK, JHARSUGURA and RAIGARHA!



Fascist attacks as HIGHLIGHTED in KANDHMAL ALARMING!



STATE sponsered Violence against Indigenosu People ALARMING as we have seen in Kalinga Nagar!



Tribal People are EVICTED from RURAL palces and DISPLACED, deprived of LIFELIHOOD.



No health care!



No RURAL DEVELOPMENT.



No Drinking water!



No IRRIGATION for land!



entire DANDAKARANYA Regionincluding Koraput and navrangpur Districts have no sufficient system whatsoever for either SANITATION or IRRIGATION.



Potteru Project could not enhance HARVESTING as the malkangiri bengali refugees have to depend on SINGLE HARVESTfrom hilly unfertile land of small holding. The tribals fare no better.



Plains in OMORKOT does not change the scenerio as there, too, the

people depend on only SINGLE harvest depending on RAIN WATER as they get WATER for IRRIGATION as LTERNATIVE basis only.



No NGO goes to the Poor RURAl or REFUGEE areas! Only the VOTE MONGERS and Trouble TENSION brookers do visit these areas.



Schools miss students as well as TEACHERS!



Panchayats have no FUND.



GOVT MACHINERY and Law and ORDER PROTECTORS are CORRUPT top to BOTTOM!



LOCAL MPs and MLAs are DEAF and DUMB.



ARVINDA Dhali, despite being a BENGALI and a powerful MINISTER is never concerned for NAVRANGPUR refugees.



The ST MP from NAVRANGPUR, PASHUPATI MANJHI belongs to BJP and hardly does anything and bound to be voted out!



kanker JEYPUR RAILWAY line was proposed which could have been a lifeline for KORAPUT as well as NAVRANGPUR but without MOBILISATION and POLITICAL WILL or SUPPORT it went abegging limited into a SURVEY done before almost a DECADE.



JEYPUR, NAVRANGPUR and KORAPUT have stunning LANDSCAPE as well as HUMANSCAPE of AFFLUENT people, but the SLUMDOGS have captured these cities also, who eventually happens to be Indigenous aboriginal minority People DISPLACED and JOBLEES.



HIRACUD DAM has done nothing for SAMBALPUR famous for SHAKTIPEETH SAMBHELASHWARI! VOLANGEER and RAIGARHA conditions are worser.



I have not to mention KALAHANDI or KANDHMAL!



No tribal welfare scheme works anywhere.



Neither any welfare exists for the WOMEN or CHILDREN!



EDUCATED Tribal people are slated for MINOR SUBORDINATE Jobs only! Whereas DEVELOPED communities like the BENGALI REFUGEES have DEGENERATED and LIE FACE LESS HELPLESS Wroge to be DEPRTED!



While attending a workshop on ‘mapping and analysis of the development context of Orissa with specific reference to Koraput district’ in the DNK conference hall, Sisir Kanta Pradhan said that according to the analysis done by the organisation on the basis of data available with the departmental records in the government and Census records, a positive trend of reduction in infant mortality rate (IMR) was observed in Koraput district. The IMR remained around 45 in both urban and rural areas of the district which was an encouraging scenario in comparison to the State figure of 83. However, the situation in the agricultural sector and forestry was a matter of concern as 20.89 per cent of the total geographical area in the district was not available for cultivation and the forest cover has remained at a low figure of merely 17.82 per cent, he added.





Shankar Guha Niyogi: Beyond Conventional Trade Unionism in India
Journal article by Sharat G. Lin; Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 24, 1992

Journal Article Excerpt


Shankar Guha Niyogi:
Beyond Conventional Trade Unionism in India
by Sharat G. Lin

Shankar Guha Niyogi was almost universally honored as
an honest and nonviolent labor leader. He founded the Chhattis­
garh Mines Shramik Sangh (CMSS),* and served as its organiz­
ing secretary for the last fourteen years of his life. He
championed the cause not only of the mine workers who formed
his primary base in Dalli-Rajahara (Durg District, Madhya
Pradesh), but also of textile mill workers in Rajnandgaon, con­
tract workers in Bhilai, and mine workers in Bilaspur District. In
fact, he was more than just a trade unionist, as he helped to
organize adivasis (tribals) from Bastar and the rural poor
throughout the region. He fought tirelessly not only for their
economic rights but for their social and political betterment. His
novel methods of implementing social reforms won him national
recognition.

But in the early hours of the morning of Saturday,
28 September 1991, six gunshots fired through a window ended
Niyogi's life in Bhilai. Returning late at night after an exhausting
trip from Raipur, he was sound asleep and was killed instantly.
The unidentified assassin had used a gun equipped with a si­
lencer and escaped after the shooting. Ironically, Niyogi had
known beforehand that there was a plot to kill him, having
received several anonymous letters threatening his life. To con­
firm his suspicions, a somewhat sympathetic businessman had
informed him that certain leading industrialists of Bhilai had
offered an assassin Rs. 150,000 to do the job.

Leaders of many trade unions, civil liberties groups, and
other progressive organizations attended Niyogi's cremation in
Dalli-Rajahara. Prominent activists who attended included
Shibu Soren (J...
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=JGxGfr70YCnbmr51N1K1CTvqDjyynkb2nlTXhLmKcN4wLMt1N26t!-53255609!-96032562?docId=98203572



PDF]
Shankar Guha Niyogi His Work & Thinking
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
On September 28, 1992, it will be a year since Shankar Guha Niyogi was shot ... various ugly distortions, Shankar Guha Niyogi succeeded in ...
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This is certainly the perception among a wide cross-section of workers in Chhattisgarh over the murder of Shankar Guha Niyogi, one of the most well-beloved ...
www.tehelka.com/story_main27.asp?filename=Cr100307Justice_mocked.asp - 29k - Cached - Similar pages -
Shankar Guha Niyogi - A revolution cut short
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Sankar Guha Niyogi murder case
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Labour, Capital & Society: The article presents an obituary for trade union leader Shankar Guha Niyogi.
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Umerkote
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Umerkote



Umerkote
Location of Umerkote
in Orissa and India
Country India
State Orissa
District(s) Nabarangpur
MLA (AC90) Sri Dharmu Gond,(BJP)
Population
• Density 24,853 (2001[update])
• 192 /km2 (497 /sq mi)
Sex ratio 972 ♂/♀
Time zone IST (UTC+5:30)
Area
• Elevation
• 615.69 m (2,020 ft)
Codes[show]
• Pincode • 764073
• Telephone • +91 6866
• Vehicle • OR 24


Coordinates: 19°39′54″N 82°12′43″E / 19.665°N 82.212°E / 19.665; 82.212 Umerkote, also known as Umarkot and Amarkot, is a town of Nabarangpur District, Orissa, India. Umerkote is an urban area and a Notified Area Council. This town is a prominent business place of Nabarangpur District.

Situated in the northern corner of Nabarangpur District and administratively borders Chhattisgarh in west. It is 64 km away from district headquarters. A left diversion from National Highway 201 at Papadahandi towards Raipur takes you Umerkote.

This place is presiding by the local deity Maa Pendrani or Pendrahandiani. The word 'Maa' means the mother. She is believed to be the saviour of people living and provider of health, wealth and protection.

Contents
[hide]
1 Demographics
2 Geography
3 People
4 Economy
5 Festivals
6 Public places
7 Service
8 Communication
9 Tourist spots
9.1 Podagad
9.2 Chandan Dhara
10 Politics
11 References



[edit] Demographics
As of 2001[update] India census[1], Umerkote had a population of 24,853. Males constitute 51% of the population and females 49%. Umarkote has an average literacy rate of 56%, lower than the national average of 59.5%: male literacy is 65%, and female literacy is 47%. In Umerkote, 15% of the population is under 6 years of age. The average annual rainfall experienced is 888.22 mm. Usually summers are hot with a maximum of 45 degrees and winters a minimum of 6 degrees.


[edit] Geography
A plateau of the Kondan Range, a terrain of Eastern Ghats hold Umerkote at its centre. The average elevation of Umerkote is approximately 2020 feet from MSL. Small hills and mounts cover the place giving out a number of perennial source of water as streams and ponds. Bhaskel Minor Irrigation Project, a site 9 KM away of Umerkote town is the source of irrigation. Its out stream namely Bhaskel flows by the town giving a production of vegetables and pulses throughout the year.

Highest Summer Temperature on 2008 at Umerkote 44.30C on 22 May. Lowest Night Temperature on 2008 at Umerkote 9.20C on 28 December.


[edit] People
It was initially a tribal dominated place and post independent period added migrants to its population. Bangladesh Refugees have been given shelter after the Indo-Pak 1971 War which indeed made a revolution at this place developing communication, economy and society. With growing township people from other parts of Orissa and neighbouring states showed their interest to live at Umerkote. People out here are mostly do business and a considerable amount are government employees. Now this place has a majority of Hindus. However, Muslims are more in number than the Christians. Other religious people are very few in count.The major language spoken in this region is Oriya.


[edit] Economy
The main economical factor over which Umerkote stands is production of Maize. Outskirts yield maize and this town is the hub for the transportation of tonnes of maize in post rain seasons.


[edit] Festivals
The Oriya Hindu festivals Dussera, Rath Yatra, Ganesh Pooja, Kalisi Yatra are the three distinguishable festivals observed in Umerkote. Apart from other occasions traditional festivals like Holi, Biswakarma Pooja, Gajalaxmi Pooja and Deepawali are being celebrated with immense contrast.

Apart from the general celebrations, tribals retain their identity through several typical festivals like Mondei, Chaiti Parab and Kalishi Jatra. Mondei, an annual tribal festival has its uniqueness which has been predominately celebrated by tribals in order to share the happiness of their fruitful harvest. Later it has been declared a state level festival and is celebrated officially, each year, on first week of November.


[edit] Public places
Umerkote has many public places like Pendrani Temple, Ramakrishna Mission, Mixed Farms, Mangala Mandir, and a Church. It has also a beautiful Mosque and a Madrasa has been set up with help of the local people. A place is there near by umerkote called NUAGAON, it is in jharigaon road 3 k.m away from umerkote where a HANUMAN VATIKA is there. People from various places coming here.

It has two hospitals one of Government situated at the mid of the town and another as DNK Hospital (Later named as Zonal Hospital). Specialists in different branch provide health service to people. Pendrani College, established on 1984 has been set up with local help giving education to collegiates up to graduation. Sadasiv Sukumar Government High School, Government Girls' High School and Saheed Laxman Nayak Public School here are the centre for the Higher Secondary Education. Number of primary schools and upper primary schools have been set up at different locations of Umerkote town. RRTTSS with OUAT has set up a crop research centre near the town.


[edit] Service
The town has been given with a fully functional Government Machinery like Panchayat Samiti, Police Station, Post Office, Three Filling Stations, Government Secondary Training School, BSNL Telephone Exchange, Industrial Training Centre for Women, Water Supply, SOUTHCO, Circuit House and other different offices with it.

Among semi/non government institutions like Saraswati Sishu Mandir, Swami Vivekananda Vidya Mandir and Lions Club are owned by locals.

Cellular Mobile Service by BSNL and Airtel have been set up earlier and recently Reliance has started its Smart and RIM GSM Service. Internet Connectivity by BSNL Broadband has been lunched since March 2008. Aircel has set up its service. Tata Indicom is likely to provide cellular mobile service at Umerkote very soon.

State Bank of India (SBI), Utkal Gramya Bank and Andhra Bank have been established long since. In the month of February, SBI launched its ATM. After a long wait, ICICI Bank has opened its branch at Umerkote very recently.


[edit] Communication
Umerkote is communicated to almost all major cities of Orissa,Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh by road. No railway line communicates the town directly but several places nearby to Umerkote provide railway communication. Umerkote has been provided with a good number of buses to Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Puri, Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram, Raipur, Jagdalpur. Both private and OSRTC buses run in numbers for passenger transportation.

Nearest Railway Stations: Jeypore 106 KM, Kesinga 180 KM, Jagdalpur 112 KM, Raipur 340 KM.

Nearest Airports: Raipur 340 KM, Visakhapatnam 320 KM.


[edit] Tourist spots

[edit] Podagad
Podagad, a hill range in the west of the town preserves some historic evidences of ancient dynasties ruling over the area. Rock scriptures, caves and remains of usables have been found. It has a rich ruin of the Nala and Bhakataka dynasty during the invasion of the Mughals. Later it has been occupied by some Buddhists, and then by the Nanda Dyansty of Jeypore region.

It is roughly 22 km distant towards west of Umerkote.Dhodra a small village which is 9 KM ahead of Umerkote. From Dhodra u have to take diversion to Podagad The span of Podagad hill ranges from 11 km lengthwise and 3.5 km in width. It was 17 small hills meshed up with each other. It has a natural habitat covering many species and old days saw a mass of carnivores living in the area. Deforestation for fire-wood and timber is devastating the climate of Podagad. Picnic occasions are held at this place in a massive manner during New Years and other winter days.


[edit] Chandan Dhara
Its a beautiful place with scenic beauty situated in the deep forests at 28 km north of Umerkote through a village Jharigam. There is a marvelous waterfall nearby to the small village Dongriguda. Administrative efforts have been initiated to make it a place of attraction for tourists.


[edit] Politics
Current MLA from Umarkote (ST) Assembly Constituency is Dharmu Gond of BJP, who won the seat in State elections in 2004. Previous MLAs from this seat were Parama Pujari who won this seat representing INC in 2000, 1995 and 1985 and representing INC(I) in 1980, Gurubaru Majhi of JD in 1990, and Rabisingh Majhi of JNP in 1977.[2]

Umarkote is part of Nowrangpur (Lok Sabha constituency).[3]


[edit] References
^ "Census of India 2001: Data from the 2001 Census, including cities, villages and towns (Provisional)". Census Commission of India. Archived from the original on 2004-06-16. http://web.archive.org/web/20040616075334/http://www.censusindia.net/results/town.php?stad=A&state5=999. Retrieved on 2008-11-01.
^ "State Elections 2004 - Partywise Comparision for 93-Umarkote Constituency of ORISSA". Election Commission of India. http://archive.eci.gov.in/March2004/pollupd/ac/states/s18/Partycomp93.htm. Retrieved on 2008-09-20.
^ "Assembly Constituencies - Corresponding Districts and Parliamentary Constituencies of Orissa". Election Commission of India. http://archive.eci.gov.in/se2000/background/S18/Orissa_AC_Dist_PC.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-09-20.
[hide] v • d • eCities and towns in Nabarangpur district

Nabarangpur Khatiguda · Nabarangpur · Umerkote


Cities and towns
in other districts Angul · Balangir · Balasore · Bargarh · Bhadrak · Boudh · Cuttack · Debagarh · Dhenkanal · Gajapati · Ganjam · Jagatsinghpur · Jajpur · Jharsuguda · Kalahandi · Kandhamal · Kendrapara · Kendujhar · Khordha · Koraput · Malkangiri · Mayurbhanj · Nayagarh · Nuapada · Puri · Rayagada · Sambalpur · Subarnapur · Sundergarh



Nawarangapur District :: Introduction

It is one of the newly born districts of Orissa. This district is inhabited by aborigines, forests, natural resources and cultivable land. This district is famous for its contribution towards the national freedom movement of our country. Indravati river and irrigation & power project is one of the important places of this district.

................Kelia, Papadahandi, Podagarh and Umerkote are some of the visiting places of this district.

Important Places

Sri Nilakantheswar Temple : This famous temple is situated at Papadahandi. This temple is built in the artistic style of the famous Lingaraj temple of Bhubaneswar. This temple has some Buddhist religion statues in it.

Pendrani Temple : Maa Pendrani temple is situated in Umarkot. This temple was built by king Chaitanya Dev. Maa Pendrani is the most worshipped goddess of Koraput, Kalahandi and Bolangir.

Kelia Mahadev Temple : This temple is situated on a hill named as Kelia in Debgaon tahsil. This is one of the most famous Lord Shiva temples of Orissa.

General Information About Nawarangpur District

Area
5,294 Sq.Km.
Forest
2462.73Sq.Km.
Population 10,18,171 Literacy Rate 34.26%
Head quarter Nawarangpur Vidhasabha seats 4
Sub division 1 Villages 897
Blocks 10 Grama panchayat 148
Municipality 1 Towns 2
N.A.C 1 Rainfall 1303.2mm(Avg)
Tahasils 4 2 2



Blocks Tahasils Subdivisions
1. Nawarngpur sadar
2. Umarkot
3. Raigarh
4. Chandahandi
5. Papadahandi
6. Dabugaon
7. Jharigaon
8. Tentulikhunti
9. Kosagumuda
10. Nandahandi 1. Nawarangpur
2. Umarkot
3. Kodinga 1. Nawarangpur



Pl circulate
Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri

Binayak- Heart Patient
To members of FREE DR BINAYAK SEN CAMPAIGN


Kamayani Bali Mahabal
Today at 9:44am
Dear Friends

Below is message i received from anand patwardhan who was at the
Raipur satyagrah on March 16th.

the satyagraha yesterday in chhatisgarh went of very smoothly. after a
2 km march towards the jail where binayak is, we were all duly
arrested and subsequently released. the police was remarkably
restrained even respectful, with us.

the shock came this morning when the trial resumed.

binayak, and the two other co-accused narayan sanyal and piyush were
brought into court at noon. binayak has shaved off his beard and looks
younger than the last photo of his but the lines on his face are
deepening. he was really happy to see so many old friends and new
supporters.

the trial itself procceded very well in the sense that the police
tripped all over themselves in cross examination and our lawyers
expertly exposed them one after the other. one of the prosecution's
own witnesses was asked to withdraw his statement. i could not
understand the logic but clearly it points to a weakening of their
case.

just a few minutes before 2 pm when the session was to end binayak
spoke directly to the judge and said that he is suffering from heart
trouble. he stated in open court that he is in mortal danger and needs
proper examination and treatment and accused the court of taking no
action even after he had raised the matter at the last hearing. the
judge instead of being sympathetic flew into a temper and said "what
do you mean I have taken no action?" he then summarily ejected all the
accused and the trial ended for the day.

i am shocked. first because i had no idea that binayak is a heart
patient. ilina confirmed that he has had angina problems since 2004.
this is a dangerous situation unless we can force the court to allow
proper examination and treatment. by law binayak is entitled to a
doctor of his choice and even a hospital of his choice specially as he
is prepared to bear expenses for any special care that is required.

we must act now. pubicize this. put pressure on the state and the
court to act in time.

anand





Zion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zion (Hebrew: צִיּוֹן; Tiberian vocalization: tsiyyôn; transliterated Zion or Sion) is a term that most often designates the Land of Israel and its ...
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Israeli Spying in the United States
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
CounterPunch, March 12, 2009 - Excerpts
http://www.counterp unch.org/ ketcham03122009. html
Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they'll tell you
that Israel is not a friend to the United States. This is because Israel runs one
of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S..

The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in
the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the
U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which
punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where
the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy
theory -- the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top
intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the
Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The
effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed,
the more noxious the falsity that spreads.

Israel's spying on the U.S., however, is a matter of public record, and
neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. ....

Shah N. Khan
Editor http://www.netvert.biz
http://www.mmawards.com

Over one million workers protest across France

Xinhua
March 20, 2009

More than 1 million people marched against President Nicolas Sarkozy across
France on Thursday in a nationwide strike and protest over what they see as
the government's unjust economic policies.

Across the country an estimated 2.6 million people attended around 200
rallies, according to the General Confederation of Labor, one of the
nation's largest unions.

Police, however, put the number of protesters at 1.2 million. Nevertheless,
the national strike, the second of its kind in only seven weeks, was
reported as one of the biggest since Sarkozy took office in May 2007.

The protests showed dissatisfaction of French people with social
consequences of the global financial crisis.

"The replies from the bosses and the government are not enough," said
Francois Chereque, leader of the big CFDT union federation.

"Salaried workers won't any longer accept being the victims of this crisis,
which they had nothing to do with," Bernard Thibault, secretary of the
workers' confederation, was quoted as saying by BFM Radio.

The unions jointly called on the government to do more to safeguard jobs and
to improve workers' purchasing power.

Trains, government offices and schools were disrupted but public transport
in Paris worked almost as normal.

According to the Education Ministry, about 30 percent of France's teachers
were on strike Thursday.

Meanwhile, utilities, ports and refineries were also disrupted. Air France
said most of its flights were operating normally from Charles de Gaulle
Airport, while about one-third of its flights from Orly Airport had been
canceled.

Thursday's marches included an unusually large number of private sector
workers as the past month has seen a daily roll-call of factory closures.

In the northern town of Clairoix, around 10,000 people protested over the
closure of a tyre plant by the German Continental company with the loss of
1,120 jobs.

Many others are worried about job losses as 2 million were already
unemployed and 350,000 more layoffs are expected this year.

According to opinion polls, up to 80 percent of the public supported the
protests.

France faces mounting dissatisfaction amid rising unemployment as a result
of the economic downturn. French companies shed the most jobs in 40 years
during the fourth quarter of last year.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon, referring to the huge national deficit,
declined further measures to push the economy.

He said protesters voiced a "legitimate concern" but he urged the people to
wait for the 26-billion-euro (35.5-billion-U.S.-dollar) stimulus package
launched in December last year to bear fruits.

A similar strike on Jan. 29 with civil service stoppage and street marches
ended after the government pledged over 2 billion euros (some 2.73 billion
dollars) of new benefits for the low-paid and unemployed.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/20/content_11041859.htm

From: Soumya Guhathakurta
Date: Mar 21, 2009 11:17 AM
Subject: Ross Mallick on Marichjhanpi
To:


Please find attached an article By Ross Mallick on Marichjhanpi.

Request, circulate the article to the best possible extent.

thanks,

soumya guhathakurta



To: sanhati@yahoogroups.com
From: koustav2007@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:20:53 +0530
Subject: Re: [sanhati] An interesting piece on the Marichjhapi massacre by the CPM

30 years from the Marichjhanpi massacre, the interest in the incident is growing. This I feel is indeed a shocking but important incident in the political history of Bengal. Firstly it exposed the class and cast bias of the Bengal intelligentsia, they largely kept quiet to this horrifying genocide of refugees,majorly namasudras. And secondy it should have right then made it very clear the attitude of CPI(M), mainly thier intollerance of anything positive happening without them, beyond them. Right then Marichjhanpi should have made clear to everyone that CPI(M) was never a party that could have taken a positive path and the side of the 'have-nots'.
We must try and cultivate the subject further becasue not only is it the most brutal act by a state in Indepedent Inida but especially as it can be the overlooked cornerstone of rural bengal as far as alternate development is concerned.
In this respect Tushar Bhattacharya's documentary film about Marichjhanpi is worth mentioning, it is a work of tremendous effort and research.
Also there is an article on Marichjhanpi by Anu Jalais, that was published on 23rd April 2005 edition of EPW, it is both beautifully written and is a wealth on the subject in material as well as the references. I have a pdf copy from her but cannot uplaod it without the permission of the author.
Also another article by Ross Mallick appeared in JSTOR February 1999.(http://www.jstor.org/pss/2658391) However the site is irritatingly stringent in giving access to interested people. (And guess that is exactly why I'm uploading my copy without bothering for their permission)
Lastly a book 'Marichjhanpi, Naishabdyer Antoraal-e' (possibly meaning Marichjhanpi, behind the silence of darkness) by Jagadish Chandra Mondal is the most comprehensive book on the subject that I have come across.
I would ask all interested persons to look into these references. get back to me if anything requires more elaboration/clarification.
Regards,
Koustav.




On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:48 AM, Garga Chatterjee wrote:

Refugees and Bengali Identity All through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s
Bengali Hindus from what had become East Pakistan and subsequently
Bangladesh entered West Bengal in the hope of settling down. They
were however sent to various inhospitable areas outside West Bengal
with the assurance that they would eventually be relocated in West
Bengal. Soon after the Left Front came to power, in 1978 they found
their refugee supporters return; amongst them, about 30,000 managed
to sail to Morichjhanpi – one of the northern-most forested islands
of the Sundarbans – from where they were brutally evicted for
violating the Forest Acts. Based on nearly two years' fieldwork in
the Sundarbans, this paper looks at how the memory of Morichjhanpi
was evoked by the islanders to talk about their resentment about the
unequal distribution of resources between them and the Royal Bengal
tigers of the Sundarbans reserve forest. This paper looks at how the
government's primacy on ecology and its use of force in Morichjhanpi
that saw hundreds of refugees dying, was seen by the Sundarbans
islanders as a betrayal not only of refugees and of the poor and
marginalised in general, but also, of the Bengali `nimnobarno'
identity.1 In fact, the Morichjhanpi massacre was considered a double
betrayal by the Sundarbans islanders. They argued that it was because
they were considered as lesser mortals situated at the periphery and
marginalised due to their social inferiority by the `bhadralok'2 – by
which is meant the anglicised, well-connected, educated, moneyed,
essentially Hindu upper caste, and mainly urban, Bengalis – that
tigers, taking the cue, had started feeding on them.3 As developed by
Ross Mallick,4 the reasons leading to the Morichjhanpi massacre have
to be understood in relation to the long history which led to the
partition of Bengal and the intricacies of caste, class and communal
differences. Briefly, in the colonial period, the East Bengal
namasudra movement had been one of the most powerful and politically
mobilised dalit movements in India.5 In alliance with the Muslims,
they had kept the Bengal Congress Party in opposition from the 1920s.
The exclusion of the bhadralok from power led to the Hindu elite and
eventually the Congress, pressing for the partition of Bengal at
independence, so that at least the western half would return to their
control.6 Partition, however, meant that dalits lost their bargaining
power when divided along religious lines of Hindus and Muslims and
became politically marginalised minorities in both countries.7 With
the partition of India, threatened by their Muslim and lower-caste
tenants, the upper-caste landed elite formed the first wave of
migrants from East Pakistan into West Bengal. Subsequent migrants
were rural middle class cultivators and artisans. If the richest
amongst them found a niche amongst relatives and friends in Kolkata
and its outskirts, the poorer amongst them squatted on public and
private land and tried to resist eviction. In the 1960s and 1970s
(especially after the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971, Mujibur
Rahman's assassination in 1975 and Zia-ur-Rahman's coming to power)
communal agitations started to hereafter be directed against the
poorest and low caste Hindus who had remained in East Bengal. They
now sought refuge in West Bengal. Unlike their richer counterparts,
who were backed by family and caste connections, many of these poorer
migrants did not find a way of living in Kolkata and were sent to
various inhospitable and infertile areas – most infamous amongst them
being Dandakaranya, a semi-arid and rocky place in east-central India
which included part of Orissa, and former Madhya Pradesh and Andhra
Pradesh, now in present-day Chhattisgarh – thus an area entirely
removed, both culturally and physically, from the refugees' known
world. The opposition, denounced the Congress' attempts to evict the
refugees from West Bengal and promised that when they came to power
they would settle the refugees in West Bengal;8 and that this would,
in all probability, be on one of the islands of the Sundarbans.9 Many
refugees, especially those from Khulna, had preferred settling in the
inhabited islands of the Sundarbans – where they had erstwhile
neighbours and relatives who had come from Khulna to clear the
forests in the West Bengal part of the Sundarbans during the early
part of the century – rather than go to the totally alien area of
Dandakaranya. In 1975, many of those who had been sent to these camps
started to move to a sand band called the Morich chak which was part
of Morichjhanpi island in the Gosaba police station. It was thought
to be possible to settle 16,000 families there, another 30,000
refugees in nearby Dattapasur,10 and in other Sundarbans places that
had `cultivable waste land'.11 However, in their repeated attempts to
settle there they were brutally evicted from the various train
stations where they congregated on their way to West Bengal, were
starved of water and food whilst in Morichjhanpi, and finally were
even shot at before being brutally evicted from there.12 The growing
polarisation of West Bengal and East Bengal as separate `homelands'
for Hindus and Muslims respectively, affected most the lower caste,
poor, rural population, especially of lower Bengal who were not
divided so much along religious lines as along the cultural and
economic divide of bhadralok/nimnoborner or `nimnoborger lok'. The
contending elements in being both `Bengali' and `Muslim' has often
been addressed,13 however, the tension that exists when one is
`Bengali' but not a bhadralok has been less studied and needs to be
recognised to comprehend why the islanders believed that they had
become `just tiger-food' for Kolkata's bhadralok. Though there has
been a growing emphasis – especially following the publication of
Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial
India (1983) and subsequently in the Subaltern Studies series – on
rural communities' consciousness through the study of rural movements
in colonial Bengal,14 but as Das Gupta argues,15 these studies focus
overwhelmingly on the religious discourse of the nimnobarger lok,
especially in relation to resistance. While understanding religion is
important, privileging it over all else distracts from the equally
important economic and political spheres, and from alternative, less
well known, cultural spheres. In this case the framing of community
consciousness was not so much undertaken through the valorisation of
religion but through a divide along caste/class which was expressed
through local narratives on Morichjhanpi and tigers turning man-
eaters. Here, through the rejection of the tiger as an animal one
needs to be proud of due to its status as `national animal' (of both
Bangladesh and India), the islanders' narratives of tigers
highlighted their perceptions of an unjust history. What this paper
attempts to underscore is how the Sundarbans islanders internalised
the injustice they felt had been levelled at the poorer refugees'
claims for settlement in West Bengal and why they thought their
request had been trivialised. Soon after my arrival, I was told that
the main reason why tigers had become man-eaters could be traced to
the violent events of Morichjhanpi. Many islanders explained to me
that they and tigers had lived in a sort of idyllic relationship
prior to the events of Morichjhanpi. After Morichjhanpi, they said,
tigers had started preying on humans. This sudden development of
their man-eating trait was believed to have been caused by two
factors. One was the defiling of the Sundarbans forest due to
government violence, the second was because of the stress which had
been put thereafter on the superiority of tigers in relation to the
inhabitants of the Sundarbans. The brutality and rhetoric with which
the refugees had been chased away, coupled with measures for
safeguarding tigers which the government initiated soon after the
events of Morichhapi, had, explained the villagers, gradually made
tigers `self-important'. With this increased conviction of their self-
worth, tigers had grown to see poorer people as `tiger-food'. The
anthropomorphisation of tigers in relation to the villagers' history
intrigued me. The essence of one's `bhadra' identity is often
revealed through one's romanticised vision of nature, in this case of
the Sundarbans – which literally means `beautiful forest' – and of
wildlife – here of the Royal Bengal tiger. Bhadralok sensitivity to
the Royal Bengal tiger with its association to both the regal and
colonial images of hunting as well as to its current position as
national animal has often been deployed to mark the urgency of having
the Sundarbans named a World Heritage Site and prime tiger area. But
the anthropomorphisation of tigers into that of a `bhadra' symbol of
national animal (an image I shall not dwell on in this paper) was
questioned by the islanders through their presentation of another
image of the tiger. Shrugging off the colonial and national drape off
this bhadra tiger, it portrayed the animal as one whose gentle
inoffensive nature was irretrievably transformed into that of a man-
eater following the bloody events of Morichjhanpi. Highlighting this
transformation of their tiger was a way, for the villagers, of
reclaiming the forgotten pages of a history which had relegated them
to oblivion, an injustice they felt they had been done by the
urbanised elite who believed tigers were more precious than them, the
nimnobarner or nimnobarger lok. II Brutal Evacuation of Refugees from
Morichjhanpi In 1977, when the Left Front came to power, they found
their refugee supporters had taken them at their word and sold their
belongings and land to return to West Bengal. In all, 1,50,000
refugees arrived from Dandakaranya16 expecting the government to
honour its word.17 Fearing that an influx of refugees might
jeopardise the prospects of the state's economic recovery, the
government started to forcibly send them back. Many refugees however
managed to escape to various places inside West Bengal, one of these
being the Sundarbans where they had family and where they would be
able to survive by working as fishers. From the month of May the same
year about 30,000 SC refugees, under the leadership of Satish Mandal,
president of the Udbastu Unnayansil Samity, a former close associate
of the Communist Party's refugee programme, sailed to Morichjhanpi
and set up a settlement there.18 Morichjhanpi, an island in the
northern-most forested part of the West Bengal Sundarbans, had been
cleared in 1975 and its mangrove vegetation replaced by a
governmental programme of coconut and tamarisk plantation to increase
state revenue. However, though this was not an island covered in
mangrove forest, the state government was in no mood to tolerate such
a settlement. It stated that the refugees were `in unauthorised
occupation of Morichjhanpi which is a part of the Sundarbans
government reserve forest violating thereby the Forest Acts' and that
refugees had come `with the intention of settling there permanently
thereby disturbing the existing and potential forest wealth and also
creating ecological imbalance'.19 The government placed primacy on
ecology, but this argument, believed the villagers, was more to
legitimise their ejection from Morichjhanpi in the eyes of the
Kolkata bhadralok. The argument that this might be a precedent for an
unmanageable refugee influx from Bangladesh was also heatedly argued
as baseless. Indeed, as Ross Mallick argues, by then, the last wave
of East Bengali migrants had been forcefully driven out of the state
and those who would have settled in Morichjhanpi would not have been
a financial liability for the state government.20 The refugees from
Dandakaranya were joined by people from the villages of the adjoining
Sundarbans islands of Satjelia, Kumirmari, Puinjali and Jharkhali.
Many islanders, being the descendants of immigrants from Khulna in
East Bengal brought by the British even as late as the 1930s and
1940s to reclaim the forest, identified with the refugees. A lot of
them also shared close blood ties with the refugees, ties reignited
through visits and gifts of paddy and vegetables. Young landless
couples were urged to settle with the Morichjhanpi dwellers; their
intimate knowledge of that part of the forest and generous lending of
boats and dinghies were further recompensed by the refugees'
eagerness that they too settle in Morichjhanpi to strengthen their
case. When narrating their memories, if some of the islanders evoked
their dismay at finding their ponds emptied of water overnight due to
the refugees' initial dependence on the adjoining islands' pond water
for their survival, most islanders also drew on memories of fraternal
bonding. Morichjhanpi island, being 125 square miles, was so big that
the refugees were keen that the islanders join them so as to have
`hands raise bunds and voices carry our pleas to Kolkata'; to help
improve the dire economic situation of the Sundarbans region as a
whole rather than squabble over land which, being neither fertile nor
theirs to distribute, was not worth fighting over. The settlers –
both refugees as well as islanders who had come from the adjoining
villages, initially built some makeshift huts along the cultivated
area of the island, beneath the government's coconut and tamarisk
trees. Most of them survived by working as crab and fish collectors
in the forest, and with the help of the islanders, by selling their
products in the nearby villages. In the memories of their time there,
the Sundarbans islanders often underlined the fraternal bonding they
shared with the refugees and their immense relief to have finally
come across vocal leaders. In contrast to the ruling elite of their
villages, composed essentially of large landowners who aspired to
migrate towards Kolkata, they saw the East Bengali leaders as more
apt to represent them. They explained that this was because they were
poor, rural, and low caste and hence not afraid to take up manual
work, such as fishing, and knew, through the twists of fate what it
was like to fight for their rights. As a whole, the refugees were
looked up to by the Sundarbans islanders of the islands adjoining
that of Morichjhapi because they were better educated and more
articulate than themselves and because, having lost everything, they
were seen as having the moral courage to face the Kolkata ruling
class with their rural concerns. The islanders often expressed their
awe at the way the East Bengali refugees rapidly established
Morichjhanpi as one of the best-developed islands of the Sundarbans –
within a few months tube-wells had been dug, a viable fishing
industry, saltpans, dispensaries and schools21 established, and this
contrasted lamentably with the islands they came from, where many of
these facilities were, and are, still lacking. Stories abounded about
the spirit of bonhomie and solidarity between refugees and islanders
whose similar experiences of marginalisation brought them together to
bond over a common cause which was to fight for a niche for
themselves; this would become a metaphor for the reclamation of
`voice' in the new West Bengal. The villagers explained the refugees'
bid to stay on in Morichjhanpi as a dignified attempt to forge a new
respectable identity for themselves as well as a bid to reclaim a
portion of the West Bengali political rostrum by the poorest and most
marginalised. They had also hoped that this would be taken up by the
government as an opportunity to absolve itself of the wrong it had
done to the poorer refugees by sending them away from West Bengal.
Unrepentant, and despite this display of self-help and cooperative
spirit, the government persisted in its effort to clear Morichjhanpi
of the settlers. On the January 31, 1979 the police opened fire
killing 36 persons. The media started to underscore the plight of the
refugees of Morichjhanpi and wrote in positive terms about the
progress they were making in their rehabilitation efforts.
Photographs were published in the Amrita Bazar Patrika of the
February 8, 1979 and the opposition members in the state assembly
staged a walkout in protest of the government's methods of treating
them. Fearing more backlash, and seeing the public growing warm
towards the refugees' cause, the chief minister declared Morichjhanpi
out of bounds for journalists and condemned their reports saying that
these contributed to the refugees' militancy and self-importance and
instead suggested that the press should support their eviction on the
grounds of national interest. After the failure of the economic
blockade (announced on January 26 – an ironical twist to Republic
Day!) in May the same year, the government started forcible
evacuation. Thirty police launches encircled the island thereby
depriving the settlers of food and water; they were also tear-gassed,
their huts razed, their boats sunk, their fisheries and tube-wells
destroyed, and those who tried to cross the river were shot at. To
fetch water, the settlers had now to venture after dark and deep into
the forested portion of the island and forced to eat wild grass.
Several hundred men, women and children were believed to have died
during that time and their bodies thrown in the river. The Calcutta
High Court ordered a two-week lifting of the ban but this was not
properly implemented. Based on Sikar (1982) and Biswas' (1982)
pieces, Ross Mallick estimates that in all 4,128 families who had
come from Dandakaranya to find a place in West Bengal perished of
cholera, starvation, disease, exhaustion, in transit while sent back
to their camps, by drowning when their boats were scuttled by the
police or shot to death in Kashipur, Kumirmari, and Morichjhanpi by
police firings.22 How many of these deaths actually occurred in
Morichjhapi we shall never know. However, what we do know, is that no
criminal charges were laid against any of the officials or
politicians involved. Even then prime minister Morarji Desai, wishing
to maintain the support of the Communists for his government, decided
not to pursue the matter. Many refugees and villagers had voted for
the government coalition based on their stated commitment to
resettling the refugees in West Bengal. The refugees saw the
brutality of the government as one that had been possible because it
was backed by the bhadralok who perceived the refugees and the
Sundarbans islanders as lesser beings who came behind tigers in their
classificatory scheme of importance. With the betrayal of
Morichjhanpi, the islanders voiced how they felt that the distinction
between the urban as central and the rural as peripheral was
reinforced. II Morichjhanpi: A Double Betrayal In the villagers'
memories, these events were recounted as a `war' between two groups
of people, one backed by state power and modern paraphernalia, the
other dispossessed and who had only their hands and the spirit of
companionship. Jayanta, an islander who had gone there as a young man
with his wife and baby child, gave a poignant narrative of the course
of events at Morichjhanpi. He remembered how when the refuges saw
their children dying of cholera and starvation they tried to break
the cordon formed by the police and the military launches. They sent
arrows made with wood, aimed pieces of brick and dried mud from their
slings and verbally abused the government officials. The officials
urged the police to retaliate by throwing tear-gas bombs and use
firearms. A `war' was on, one group fighting with wooden arrows and
stones, the other with tear-gas, guns, and loudspeakers. For greater
protection, the 30 launches were covered with a wire netting and
police camps were established in the surrounding villages. As one
islander put it, the launches started looking like `stinging swarms
of floating bee-hives'. The ease and brutality with which the
government wiped off all signs of the bustling life which had been
built there in the last 18 months were proof for the villagers that
they were considered completely irrelevant to the more influential
urban Bengali community, especially when weighed against tigers. In
two weeks' time all the plots had been destroyed and the refugees
`packed' off. `Were we vermin that our shacks had to be burned down?'
rhetorically asked one of the villagers. The refugees were then
forcefully put in launches and sent to Hasnabad where lorries carried
them back to Dandakaranya or to the Andamans. Many of the islanders
who had been rounded up along with the refugees, now fled, often with
some of their newfound refugee companions from the lorries taking
them back to Dandakaranya. They came back to their former islands and
settled along the embankments. Many others built shacks along railway
lines or in places like Barasat, Gobordanga, or Bongaon – in West
Bengal. To understand the identification of the islanders to the
refugees, the social context of life on these islands has to be
underlined. The Sundarbans – a cluster of about 300 islands, of which
half were reclaimed and inhabited under the British, is situated in
the delta of the Ganges, and stretches between West Bengal and
Bangladesh. It is crisscrossed by numerous rivers making access to
the islands difficult. The forested Sundarbans islands of both West
Bengal and Bangladesh put together (about 10,000 sq kms) provide the
largest remaining natural habitat of Bengal tigers and are home to
some 600 of them. With the success of Project Tiger, launched a few
years before the events of Morichjhanpi (in 1973), the Sundarbans'
fame grew phenomenally and has since 1985 been included in the
UNESCO's list of world heritage sites. The usual portrayal of the
Sundarbans is that of an exotic mangrove forest full of Royal Bengal
tigers rather than that of a region which is often referred to as
`mager mulluk' for the lawlessness and violence which characterises
it; moreover, the lack of basic infrastructure such as electricity,
drinking water and health centres make it one of the poorest regions
of West Bengal. The Sundarbans region is also referred to as
`Kolkata's servant' (`Kolkatar jhi'), due to the large number of
people from this region working as servants in the houses of
Kolkata's affluent. Before the introduction of shrimp seed collection
in the 1980s the islanders had barely enough to eat. For many
islanders, especially those who owned no land, working in the forest
was the only way of making a living. Jayanta, reflecting on the hope
the arrival of the settlers had brought them, had longed to start a
new life in Morichjhanpi where for once, the aspirations and rights
of the lowest would be established. But he and his family had barely
been there five months when their shack was burned down by the
police. He wondered why the government was bent on reclaiming
Morichjhanpi for tigers when it wasn't even part of the tiger
reserve. The other sore point was that the refugees had been promised
land in the Sundarbans. He saw the betrayal by the government as the
proof that for the Kolkata bhadralok they were just `tiger-food' –
disposable people who could be shot and killed because they wanted
the homestead they had been promised. Within the CPIM there were
divisions over the way the party leadership had handled the matter.
The CPIM cadres felt that the leadership had washed themselves off
the responsibility of the poorer refugees in a `bureaucratic way'
when it could have used the issue to develop a mass movement against
the central government's discrimination and neglect towards Bengali
refugees vis-à-vis the Punjabi ones. However, the CPIM state
committee's Political-Organisational Report, was keen to close the
matter and issued a statement saying that there was now `no
possibility of giving shelter to these large number of refugees under
any circumstances in the state'.23 Accusations were made, the land
revenue minister Benoy Chowdhury made the unsubstantiated allegation
that some foreign agencies were behind Morichjhanpi;24 the CPIM also
blamed vested interests, reactionary forces, Congress (I), and P C
Sen for using the issue for political gain and claimed that it had
met the challenge and had ultimately achieved success with the return
of the refugees to Dandakaranya in May 1979. The islanders had bonded
with the refugees not only because they shared with them a common
place of origin which was eastern Bengal but also because they could
identify with the terrible hardship they had gone through. Stressing
his affinity with them, Jayanta recounted how during the time they
had settled in Morichjhanpi they had `all become one big family' as
they had `the same hopes, went through the same ordeal, fought on the
same side'. That was till the moment Kolkata let them down, after
that, he said "we each went back to the islands or camps we had come
from with broken hearts and bloody hands; a broken, disunited and
utterly weakened group". The chapter was quickly closed. A few
journalists questioned the capacity of the upper class people,
Communists or others, to represent the poorest strata of Bengali
society. As noted by a journalist in the Bengali paper Jugantar: "The
refugees of Dandakaranya are men of the lowest stratum of society (…)
They are mainly cultivators, fishermen, day-labourers, artisans, the
exploited mass of the society (…) So long as the state machinery will
remain in the hands of the upper class elite, the poor, the helpless,
the beggar, the refugees will continue to be victimised."25 "Why have
our dead remained unaccounted for and un-mourned by the babus of
Kolkata, forced to hover as spirits in the forest, while a tiger who
enters our village and then gets killed puts us all behind bars?"
asked Jayanta voicing a general bitterness.26 IV New Repository of
Bhadralok Violence Now half-broken embankments and the few fruit
trees planted by the settlers during their stay remain as the only
vestiges of previous human habitation on Morichjhanpi, the rest has
been reclaimed by the forest. We shall never know exactly how many
people lost their lives. According to many of the islanders only 25
per cent of those who had come to Morichjhanpi left the island alive.
This figure is important more because it reflects what the villagers
feel rather than for its factual veracity. The main thrust of the
argument about the bloody events of Morichjhanpi was that the people
of the Sundarbans felt that they had been betrayed by the government
and the Kolkata urbanites. In many ways, Mujib's assassination was
seen by the villagers as marking the end of the new-found friendship
between India and Bangladesh, Hindus and Muslims, bhadralok and
nimnobarner lok, people and tigers. The villagers explained that
tigers, annoyed at the disturbances caused by the unleashed violence
in the forest had started attacking people and that this was how they
ended up getting a taste for human flesh. Others argued that it was
the corpses of killed refugees that had floated through the forest
that had given them the taste. Morichjhanpi was a turning point after
which man-eating became part of the tiger's `nature' or `behaviour'.
If in the early days, explained the islanders, tigers, to keep a
balance with their fellow human neighbours did not reproduce quickly,
it was believed that now their reproduction rate had gone up because
the government gave them fertilising injections in the hope that they
would reproduce faster. "Yes, and they have created hybrid tigers
which are even more dangerous; fearing a mass revolt the government
hides the true figures of tigers and always quote ridiculously small
numbers" said an islander. It was often expressed that the government
was happy as long as the tigers thrived, and that in contrast,
whether the islanders lived or died, as had been the case for the
refugees, made no difference, because they were just `tiger-food'.
These measures – which were believed to reflect the government's
inherent conviction about tigers being more important than the
fishers, honey-collectors and wood-cutters of the Sundarbans – were
taken to be one of the more important reasons for tigers turning man-
eaters. `After Morichjhanpi, tigers had become `arrogant',' I was
often told. As an old woman explained, tigers initially were fine
animals that were afraid of people. They were compassionate and were
agreeable to the fact that the products of the forest and rivers were
to be shared with people. But now, she lamented, due to the
legitimising of killings in their name, they had turned egotistical
and did not hesitate to attack people. Now tigers were no longer the
neighbours with whom the forest had to be shared but `state-
property', and backed by the ruling elite they had begun to treat the
islanders as `tiger-food'. In a final show of desperate anger, the
refugees had cut down the government plantation of coconut and
tamarisk before leaving the island of Morichjhanpi; just as now,
every time the islanders were angry with the representatives of the
state they destroyed public property – cut down trees, broke solar
lights and looted greedily from the various schemes launched by the
government. "As we are treated as lesser beings, we act as is
expected of them" said one of the islanders. After Morichjhanpi, the
tigers' importance only kept increasing. All through the 1980s,
various experts argued in the leading Kolkata dailies over the
Sundarbans tigers' `natural' propensity for man-eating.27 The
government devised ruses to thwart the tiger's predilection for human
flesh. Between November 1986 and October 1987, it took up the project
of digging fresh-water ponds inside the jungle, placing four
electrified dummies dressed in used clothing (to give them a human
smell) in strategic spots in the forest, and distributed 2,500
plastic masks free of cost among honey-collectors and wood-cutters
permitted to work in the buffer zone of the Sundarbans. The main
intention for digging these ponds was to `sweeten' the nature of
tigers. The dummies were installed with the belief that the tiger
would stop attacking humans after it had received an electric shock
(a safety fuse and a low current of 20-25 milliamps ensured that it
was not fatal to the animal). Each dummy was connected to a 12-volt
battery through an energiser that delivered a current of 230 volts.
The masks, were to be worn front-side back as it was believed that
the tiger – in his custom of attacking from behind, on seeing another
pair of eyes peering at him would leave his target puzzled and
chastised. These were believed by the villagers to be baseless
preventives because they did not address the real issue, which was
that there were increasing numbers of people killed by tigers,
because the existing means of livelihood was the only mechanisms the
poorest could rely on for their subsistence. The current average is
of 150 people killed per year by tigers and crocodiles in West Bengal
alone. Getting killed by a tiger in the Sundarbans in the 1980s was a
terrifying prospect for family members, co-workers, even the entire
village, of those who worked in the forest. The victim's body had to
be abandoned in the forest for fear that the forest officials would
get to know about it. The new widow and the victim's children were
forbidden to cry and taught to say that their father had died of
diarrhoea because if exposed, the family members were exhorted to pay
for the dead trespasser, and were, in effect, treated like criminals.
V Conclusion: Reclaiming Voices Subaltern Faced with people getting
killed by tigers, the only remedial procedures the West Bengal
government could come up with, were geared towards changing a tiger's
`nature' – a `nature' understood along the bhadralok's views of
tigers and nature. There was absolutely no engagement with the local
ways of understanding the reasons for tigers having become man-
eaters. Such a privileging of one understanding of tigers' nature
over another continues to establish hierarchical divisions between
peoples. In other words, a discourse on tigers' man-eating nature's
`naturalness' was (and still is) a way, as the villagers explained,
of legitimising, by the bhadralok leftist government, the relative
unimport

From: leofsaldanha@gmail.com
Subject: [PMARC] Endorse Appeal to Prime Minister of India to stop amendment to EIA Notification 2006
To: "Dalits Media Watch"
Date: Friday, 20 March, 2009, 8:45 PM



Sincere apologies for Cross Postings



REQUEST YOUR ENDORSEMENT TO AN URGENT APPEAL TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA


Dear Friends,

On behalf of Campaign for Environmental Justice - India, we request you to sign on an appeal to the Prime Minister of India urging him to direct the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), of which he is incharge, to immediately stop a comprehensive retrograde amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification - 2006.� MoEF in a notification issued recently proposes to amend the EIA Notification in such a manner that it will negate the very purpose of the Notification, besides compromising human rights of hundreds of project affected communities and the ecological security of India.

It is striking to note that amendment is proposed at the time of General Elections, and that the beneficiaries are the some of the largest corporate houses involved in mining, petrochemicals, manufacturing, construction, infrastructure development, dam building, etc.� All of these sectors are highly polluting and environmentally destructive and the benefit of a weak environmental regime, including exemptions from compliance with significant provisions of environmental regulatory procedures, would help these sectors save thousands of crores in monetary terms alone.� In effect therefore,� the proposed amendments amount to the extension of a largesse from the State to highly profit making industrial and infrastructure sectors.�

It is well known that corporate houses fund political parties and have consistently demanded and lobbied for a weak environmental clearance regime, including exemptions. This is exactly what is now proposed by the move to amend the EIA Notification (which is anyway very weak).�

The Election Commission of India has a Code of Conduct for political parties which requires that a Party in power should not initiate significant shifts in policies, schemes and regulatory practices that may secure benefits for some sectors and amount to the extention of largesse of the State.� The timing of the proposed amendments and the proposed changes in law leave little doubt about the possibility that the UPA Government at the Centre may have initiated these reforms to secure support of benefiting corporates to its party coffers.

The Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh is incharge of MoEF.� We have enclosed an appeal to him highlighting our concerns urging him to direct MoEF to immediately announce that the proposed amendments are kept in abeyance till such time a new Government has taken charge at the Centre.� This letter is enclosed and is self-explanatory.

We request you to endorse this letter, and also to circulate it amongst various networks for support.� We will fax this letter with your endorsements to the Prime Minister of India, and send a copy to all political parties, the Election Commission of India and the media on Monday, 23 March 2009.� .

You are requested therefore to endorse the letter by noon on Monday.� Subsequent endorsements will also be accepted and forwarded appropriately.

You may email your endorsements providing (full name, organisation and address, and optionally a brief comment) to esg@esgindia.org (Please keep the subject line above intact to help us sort email).� You can also sign online and leave comments at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/eianotification2009

We thank you for your cooperation and support as always.

Yours sincerely,


Leo F. Saldanha, Bhargavi S. Rao, Nandini Chami, Sruthi Subbanna, K. R. Mallesh, Divya Ravindranath
Environment Support Group, Bangalore


for Campaign for Environmental Justice - India


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~






APPEAL TO PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA


CAMPAIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE � INDIA




Dr. Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister of India
(i/c) Union Ministry of Environment and Forests
South Block, Raisina Hill,
New Delhi,
India-110 011.
Telephone: 91-11-23012312
Fax: 91-11-23019545 / 91-11-23016857




19 March 2009




Reg.: MoEF Notification proposing an amendment to the EIA Notification � 2006, offering various concessions to project developers, is in violation of Code of Conduct of Election Commission




Respected Sir,




We address you in your capacity as a Member of the Union Cabinet incharge of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF).




As you are aware, your Ministry has proposed a major amendment to the Environment Impact Assessment Notification � 2006 (EIA Notification - 2006) by way of Notification S.O. 195 (E) issued on 19 January 2009. Following the closure of the public commenting period of 60 days, MoEF proposes to go ahead with the amendments anytime now.




The EIA Notification � 2006 requires that projects that cause pollution, displacement, destruction of natural resources, etc., be they in the nature of expansion or as greenfield ventures, must go through a series of clearance steps as per standards and with the prior consent of a variety of statutory agencies, both at the State and Central levels, as applicable. The procedures laid down require project developers to comply with various national legislations such as the Environment Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act, Wildlife Protection Act, Water and Air (Control of Pollution) Act, and a range of international treaties, in particular the Rio Declaration of 1992. In addition a variety of legal principles that are part of the rubric of Indian law, such as Polluter Pays Principle, Doctrine of Public Trust, Precautionary Principle, etc., are to be adhered to when advancing any developmental project. Failure to comply with the procedures laid down in the EIA Notification is a criminal offence punishable under the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and related criminal procedure laws.




The Amendment Notification, accessible only on the website of the Ministry (in English and Hindi alone), proposes a series of amendments to the EIA Notification - 2006 which will significantly weaken, even negate, the role of the Ministry and other statutory agencies in reviewing the environmental and social impacts of a variety of high impact and polluting projects. In addition, the amendment proposes to grant a range of exemptions from mandatory statutory provisions of applicable environmental law for upto three years. There is also an extraordinary and clearly illegal concession offered to polluters who simply have to declare through a 'self certification' that they cause no additional pollution and thus escape from the need to secure environmental clearance! In a country which is known for its gross failure in enforcement of environmental regulations, and where there is no competent administrative and regulatory infrastructure to independently review compliance with law, this is certain to open the floodgates to environmental destruction and destabilisation of thousands of project affected communities across India. The frequent expose of corporate fraud, even amongst leading companies, cause great discomfort when we consider the consequences of such illegal concessions.




An indicative list of the beneficiaries of the concessions proposed include shipping, dredging and port development, building and construction sector, area development projects, special economic zones, mining, petrochemical sector, modernisation of airports, expansion of all sorts of manufacturing industries, etc. Without doubt each and every one of these sectors have the potential of causing extensive damage to our environment and society, sans effective regulation.




One of the reasons offered for granting such sweeping concessions is that the Ministry failed to create statutory environmental monitoring and clearances agencies, such as the State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities and State Expert Appraisal Committees, in several states since the enactment of the EIA Notification � 2006. Astonishingly, the failure to institute appropriate regulatory infrastructure is now being offered as a reason to comprehensively weaken, even negate, India's environmental regulatory framework.




Nowhere in the history of environmental regulation in the world have such sweeping concessions been accorded by any Government at any point in time. In fact, such a move is likely to be criticised globally as extending unfair advantage to Indian industry by lowering globally acceptable environmental standards for production, a factor that would weigh heavily against India's standing in the climate change negotiations.




All this considered, Sir, we find the reasons cited for the amendment and the timing of the proposed amendments quite specious. Your Government was well aware that its term in office was coming to a close when this Amendment Notification was issued in January 2009, and that too by a Ministry directly under your supervision. The concessions proposed by way of this Amendment Notification, besides being illegal and destructive of democratic decision making, constitute a largesse of the State to the beneficiary industries and infrastructure project developers. The monetary value alone would run into thousands of crores for beneficiaries while severely compromising our ecological security.




It is widely known now that many leading political parties are major beneficiaries of corporate grants. This proposed amendment amounts to your Government taking advantage of its position to harness much needed resources for elections by offering such astounding and clearly illegal concessions that attack the very edifice of environmental regulation in India.




With this in view, we urge you to immediately direct your Ministers of State in charge of Environment and Forests, and the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, to issue a public announcement stating that the proposed Amendment has been kept in abeyance till such time a new Government is in power and is able to take a fresh and independent decision on this matter.




We make this fervent request in light of the Code of Conduct issued by the Election Commission of India, wherein it is clearly and categorically stated that no significant change in existing policy, scheme or programme of the State is allowed at the time of elections. Conformance with these guidelines are critical to ensuring a Government in power does not abuse its executive privileges to advantage its party at the time of elections. The proposed amendment to the EIA Notification, being a subordinate legislation, is clearly within the realm of the executive power of the State and thus constitutes a fit case for application of the aformentioned Code of Conduct.




We do hope you will initiate action in this regard with due dispatch. Any failure to initiate such action will compel us to move the matter before the Election Commission of India for effective and appropriate action.




Thank you for your cooperation and support.




Yours truly,




For Campaign for Environmental Justice � India



The Bangladesh Military in Politics - A Brief Analysis

This was the first instance of abdication of political responsibility by the politicians where they failed to provide purpose, direction & control to both the Nation & its military; this was also the beginning of politicization of the Bangladesh Military.

Mahmud ur Rahman Choudhury

DATELINE: Chittagong Circuit House, Zonal Martial Law Headquarters, evening 17 March 1971. Four Bengali Army Officers namely Lt.Col M.R.Choudhury, Major Zia Ur Rahman, Captains Oli Ahmed & Amin Ahmed Choudhury, sat discussing what course of action they need to take under the circumstances then prevailing in East Pakistan. It was decided that they would execute a coordinated revolt against the Pakistan Army; the exact timing of the revolt depending on the situation. It was also decided that communication & liaison with the Awami League (AL) leadership would be established & maintained.

East Pakistan was in turmoil since January 1971. The Bangabandhu, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 7 March 1971, in a mammoth public meeting, had virtually declared the independence of Bangladesh, calling on the people to resist, to the utmost, any attempt to exert control by force by the Pakistan Government. The people were in open revolt although discussions continued between the representatives of AL & the Pakistan Government, aimed at a settlement acceptable to both parties.

After the meeting on 17 March 1971, attempts were made to establish contact with the AL leadership. At first, there was no response and then a feeble & cautious response to “to hold on as political discussions were continuing”. Bengali members of the Pakistan military, engaged in Martial Law duties, were fully aware that the Pakistan military was reinforcing itself, in East Pakistan, with men, material, armaments & ammunition. They also knew fully well that the Pakistan military would soon “go into action” in East Pakistan - all these were passed to the AL through various channels and still there was no decisive response to revolt. Sure enough starting from the night of 25/26 March 1971, the Pakistan Government took the road of forceful suppression by genocide, of the people of East Pakistan.

Caught totally unawares, the people, including Bengali members of Pakistan military, Police & East Pakistan Rifles were killed “en mass”. Left to fend for themselves, Bengali Officers & men analyzed situations, took decisions & executed the design to revolt against Pakistan. This was the first instance of abdication of political responsibility by the politicians where they failed to provide purpose, direction & control to both the Nation & its military; this was also the beginning of politicization of the Bangladesh Military.

Throughout the Liberation War, from 25 March to 16 December of 1971, the Bangladesh Military not only organized itself & fought but also organized, trained, motivated & led at least a million men & women in a brutal & ruthless war to liberate Bangladesh. Men in uniform were shoulder to shoulder with civilians, from every walk of life, fighting, bleeding & dying imbued with the same purpose & zeal & some of the same politics too. The ideal of Bangladesh was a political ideal & the liberation of Bangladesh was a tribute to the success of that political ideal - men in uniform were a part of that.

The immediate aftermath of Independence was chaos - social, economic & political. A very small Bangladesh Army, an even smaller Navy & Air Force pulled themselves back from the chaos by taking refuge in cantonments, garrisons & bases. In order to arrest the chaos, the AL Government abandoned the path of persuasion and took the path of compulsion deploying the military in “Aid of Civil Power” to disarm the many guerilla bands still roaming about the countryside, to curb militant & armed leftist movements and in general to establish & maintain law & order. Finding the military not as pliable & as responsive as they would have liked, the AL set about rapidly organizing an alternative in the form of a para-military force called the Jatiyo Rakkhi Bahini or JRB with its manpower recruited from AL cadres, activists & party members.

Many of the military’s better Officers were deputed to it to train & lead the force. The Military was not in the least bit pleased; it had initiated the armed revolt of the Liberation War, it had fought the war to a successful conclusion and it expected its classical role of National Defense to lie with it; it did not want to abdicate this role to anyone, least of all to a political upstart called the JRB.

In the meantime, the leftist movement, in the form of the Jatiyo Shamajtantrik Dal or JSD, very strong in the period 1974-1975, had infiltrated into every nook & cranny of the military, in particular its rank & file. So, when on 15 August 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with most of his family and a few of his closest colleagues were murdered by a group of Army officers, for reasons still not clear today, the Nation went into a tail spin. At the same time, the JSD instigated and initiated a “Sepahi Biplob” adding to the chaos & setting in motion a chain of coups & counter coups within the military. With great brutality & ruthlessness, chaos was controlled & Martial Law imposed. Meanwhile the politicians abandoned everything & ran for their lives; thus, for the second time abdicating political responsibility & failing to provide direction, purpose & control to the Nation & its Military.

With the imposition of Martial Law and as a response to events, quite unconsciously, the Military as a corporate body had decided not to be a party to politics but to control & direct politics itself and so for the next 5 years set about governing the state. Nation-building became a part of military vocabulary. From 1975 to 1980, all institutions of the state were strengthened and the people were motivated & imbued with the zeal to build the nation. With the Military participating in nation building activities & firmly standing behind, politics was indeed becoming difficult just as General Zia Ur Rahman had promised.

The coup that led to the murder of General Zia Ur Rahman, the President, was short lived. The BNP, the party formed by Zia Ur Rahman, was in government but it failed to take “control of the situation” preferring to leave it to the military to “sort itself out”. Consequently the military without a pause imposed a 2nd Martial Law & assumed the “reigns of government”. Not until 1990 was a serious challenge mounted to the control & domination of the military on both politics & government.

For 15 years from 1991 to 2006, democracy or some form of it prevailed. Politics, elections & parliament became big business. Lacking leadership, foresight, abilities & acumen, politicians & political parties got themselves busy in looting both public & private wealth leaving the Nation to fend for itself. Politics became a “zero-sum game”, where the party in power took everything leaving nothing for the vast majority of “others”. Not surprisingly politics became confrontational. Subjected to either neglect or manipulation every social, political & economic institution of the Sate simply broke down. Hectic attempts at reaching an understanding, which would pave the way for elections in January 2006, broke down. All avenues were now closed and the Military was once again called upon to fill a role that was not theirs to fill, this time in the form of an Emergency Government. For the third time politicians had failed to shoulder their responsibility in providing direction, purpose & control to the Nation & it’s Military.

Carl von Clausewitz, the chief & the most famous theoretician of the Napoleonic wars (mid 18th century), in his book “On War’ states: “War is not merely a political act but also a real political instrument...” The military which fights wars, is thus by association “a real political instrument” guided & controlled by policy -when this fails the military is constrained to decide “policy”. One common red thread runs throughout the 38 years (1971 - 2009) of the history of the Bangladesh Military and that is: a complete absence of political direction & control during times of crisis and “troubles”. Taking this analysis as a background, we shall discuss the reorganization of the Military, one of the 4 Core State Institutions.


The Reorganization of the Bangladesh Military
The Bangladesh military is as structured, organized, as equipped & armed and as trained as any military can be within the limited resources available to it in a Country like Bangladesh. Instead, I would like to focus on the “Higher Direction & Control” aspects of the Bangladesh Military - the whole tenor of our analysis & arguments has led us to the consideration of this single aspect. Again, in suggesting a “Higher Direction & Control” of the military I would concentrate on the functional rather then on the structural aspects of the issue.

Higher Direction & Control ipso facto implies political control of the military at the highest levels of the government through at least a Ministry of Defense (MOD) with the chain of control passing through the MOD to the Prime Minister (PM), thence to the President. That is what our Constitution specifies & that is what exists in theory. In practice, the MOD is moribund and all major & minor policy decisions are taken by the PM. Recommendations, by the Chiefs of Army, Navy & Air Force, is passed on either directly or through the Armed Forces Division (AFD), to the PM. The President, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, is not even consulted. When the Presidential system of government was in vogue, during & after the martial law regimes, the President was the fountainhead of all decisions regarding the military.

Immediately after Independence, the Awami League (AL) government did not envisage a substantial role for the military because a war, even in the distant future seemed unlikely. Bangladesh was surrounded on 3 sides by India with a small stretch of border with Myanmar in the southeast. External threats were limited & whatever threat existed was taken care of by the 25 years Indo-Bangla Friendship Treaty. Internal threats there were but these could very well be tackled by para-military forces like the Jatiyo Rakkhi Bahini (JRB). Therefore, as far as the AL was concerned there was no need for Higher Direction & Control of the military. Subsequent governments, both military & civil, personalized direction & control in the person of the PM or the President. Thus, a formal process & structure of policy & strategic decision-making was never put in place in Bangladesh.

In putting in place a formal process & structure of Higher Direction & Control, one has to ensure a balance of two things: effective control of the military on the one hand and structured participation of the military in the process on the other. Having said that, I would now like to discuss, in the following paragraphs, the essential functional aspects of Higher Direction & Control in the form of a reorganized MOD:

(1) CONTROL OF POLICY & STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING. Policy & strategic guidance provides purpose & direction to the Forces & therefore, this must be the prime function of the MOD. Policy & strategic guidance also provides guidelines for the structuring, organizing, equipping, training & employing of military forces and as such, participation of the Forces ought to be ensured through Chiefs of the 3 Forces (Army, Navy & Air Force) within the process & structure of the MOD. Such organization as the DGF1, Doctrine & Training Command, and tri-service training institutes must be under such control as these provide information & feedback on policy & strategic issues.

(2) CONTROL OF MILITARY PROCUREMENT. Structuring the process of procurement of military armaments & equipment ensures that Forces are equipped for the tasks & functions they are set to perform. This therefore, is an important MOD function that must be incorporated in its organization.

(3) BUDGETARY CONTROL. This control ensures that demands for moneys by Forces are logically & practically constructed & processed. It also ensures that funds placed are utilized for purposes for which they had been demanded. Accountability & transparency is thereby ensured.

(4) CONTROL OF HIGHER COMMANDS. Control of higher command echelons, in our case army Divisions & Independent Brigades, Naval & Air Bases, ensures that such formation react quickly & effectively to directives & situations in peace & in war. It also ensures that such Commands are always deployed & employed with explicit sanctions from the government & never for purposes for which they are not meant. In order to do that the MOD must have the prerogative to promote & position Commanders to such Commands. The process for this must be structured to ensure participation by the Chiefs of the 3 Forces. At the same time, it also must be ensured that the Control of the MOD in no way interferes with Operational & Tactical control exercised by Forces Headquarters when forces are deployed in the field.

(5) PARTICIPATION OF FORCES. This must be ensured by placement of personnel from the 3 forces in every functional area of the MOD. The Chiefs as well as higher commanders of the 3 Forces must form part of appropriate Committees of the MOD, both permanent & temporary. The reasons for this is obvious: military functions are complex & continuous feed-backs are necessary from experts in many functional areas, if policy & strategy are to be practical, logical & executable; additionally a close understanding is necessary between those who formulate policy & strategy & those who implement them.

The Military with its legally sanctioned monopoly of organized violence is a potent instrument of politics but that must be seen in the wider context of International politics & inter-state relationships. Whenever the military is employed for purposes other then this, such as political interventions within the State, it looses both its physical & moral capacity & capability to perform its primary task of war-fighting in wars & deterrence in peace. As we have seen, the Bangladesh Military has for long been intervening, in one form or another, in politics & governance within the State. This has been possible because of the absence of structured Higher Direction & Control of the military at the highest levels of government. The function of political control of the military had been personalized in the person of the PM or the President and in the absence of strong personalities in these positions, control & direction disappeared leaving the military to do as it thought best. If we are to take lessons from history, we must tightly structure the political direction & control of the military in such a way that in peace, crisis & war, direction & control never fails.


The author is the Editor of The Bangladesh Today

http://www.thebangladeshtoday.com/analysis.htm#anlysis-01

Reham Alhelsi - Palestinian Mothers: Homage to Steadfastness and Sacrifice
By Reham Alhelsi • Mar 20th, 2009 at 23:00 • Category: Analysis, Biography, Children's Corner, Culture and Heritage, Israel, Newswire, Palestine, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, War, Zionism
When the women came and told her to leave what she was doing and come and sit in front of the house with them, my grandmother knew what was to come. They sat outside and didn’t talk much. My uncle had been shot in the chest by the IOF that afternoon, and was at that moment being operated. He was in a critical condition, the doctors had told the men who had brought him to the hospital. Some were sent back home to prepare the family for the news and to prepare the refugee camp to welcome the hero, in case the worst happened. Although hope dies last, it was a necessity to prepare everything for a quick funeral and a quick burial. The Israeli army had been known to take bodies of Palestinian martyrs and steal their organs without the Palestinian family’s consent. The organs would then be given to Israelis who needed them. So a Palestinian killed by the IOF, mostly for no reason at all or for defending his country, would be labelled as terrorist by Israel and the biased media, while his organs would be used to save Israeli lives. In other countries, stealing the organs of dead people is considered a crime, but as usual, it doesn’t apply to Israel.



My grandmother sat quiet the whole time, no tears and no words. It was her youngest son, they said. His elder brothers had one time after another been imprisoned for everything that Israel considered “terror”, that she decided at least to spare the youngest the inside of an Israeli prison. Every day she would tell him to go to school and come back directly. “don’t go here or there”. I heard my mother say one time “she thought this way she was keeping him safe from the Israelis; everyday coming back from school after classes were over, and keeping him at her side most of the time.” Till one day, the boys came and told my grandmother that her son had been arrested. ”Arrested for what?” “he was throwing stones.” He hadn’t even bothered to go to school that day.” One of my other uncles said laughingly when the story was brought up once: but we had prepared him for this. And everyone laughed. I laughed too, because I have been though this process as well. Actually, to us kids, it was just another game. One of those bizarre refugee camp games, like the “UNRWA restaurant” game, where we would play little refugee kids standing in line and waiting for our daily portion of a slice of bread and small slice of tomato with salt, and being shouted at by the “UNRWA employee”. The other game, which was to prepare us for future imprisonment by the IOF was the “confession game”. Each one of us would be “tortured” to strengthen our resistance and prevent us from confessing anything in case we are interrogated by the IOF. There was really no “torture” in this game, because there was no real beating. We would be shouted at in a funny way, and the one among us to act the “IOF soldier” would be mimicking Israeli soldiers trying to be brave, but who are in fact afraid of us, little children. We would laugh while being “tortured”, for it was mostly fun for us. Although the game would not really prepare anyone for the barbaric Israeli interrogation and torture, in some way, the game was educational. It gave us the feeling that we are stronger than the IOF and that despite all their weapons, they feared us. So, we would just play being beaten by the IOF, and the one playing the IOF soldier would ask us continuously to confess and we would refuse. He would slash us, though not harshly, on the soles, and demand we confess. We would refuse, laughingly, because for us it was a game, a game that would prove useful one day.



That day, no funeral took place, for my uncle had made it. He had a strong will to live. But every time I think of that moment, I think about my grandmother. The 60 year old woman, who used to divide her week according to visiting days in Israeli prisons. Before one of them was released, another would be arrested, so that they rarely gathered at a dinner table. We were all used to it, not seeing all my uncles at the same time. I rarely heard my grandmother complain, but it was clear to everyone how much she loved her family and how sad she was that they weren’t all around her. She didn’t have to tell her children to go and demonstrate. It was a natural reaction to what these children themselves saw and went through, and it was the love of the land planted in their heart by my grandmother. She would often talk about Jrash, the village from which she and her family and all the residents were ethnically cleansed by the Zionist terror organizations. They were forced to move from one place to another, until they finally reached what is now Dheisheh refugee camp. There she tried to reconstruct her original home by planting some trees in the small piece of land near the UNRWA rooms they were to live in.



The life of my grandmother is typical of the lives of many Palestinian mothers. She was born in a small picturesque village in Palestine, where she grew up, got married and started a family. She would take care of her home, and help the family with the fields. She would care for her small garden and the apple trees which she loved most and would make marmalade for the winter. When the Zionist terror organizations started implementing their plan of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population, Palestinian villages were attacked one after the other, and horrific massacres took place. The residents of Jrash were finally forced to leave, but not before they fought heroically. My grandparents often talked about these days. During my last visit to Palestine a couple of months ago, I listened to my grandfather as he talked about the fight with the Zionist groups. With sharp memory, he mentioned such details, that for a few seconds I could feel myself there, with them, 60 years ago.



A number of times my grandmother was beaten by the IOF soldiers, some of whom were younger than her own sons and who didn’t care that she was an elderly woman. When IOF soldiers would attempt to arrest someone in the refugee camp, she would hurry with the other women and try and stop them. When Zionist settlers would attack the refugee camp, she would carry the tree stem she hides behind the couch and go protect the camp alongside the men and women. And in the early mornings of the day, when everyone is still fast asleep, after finishing the morning prayer I would hear her asking God to protect her family, her relatives, her neighbours, the refugee camp, the Palestinians and the whole world. I heard her day after day asking forgiveness for the whole world.



In Palestine mothers are sacred. Every one of us has several mothers: the mother that gave birth to us, the olive tree, the land and the mother of all: Palestine. And a Palestinian mother isn’t just a mother to the children she gives birth to, she is mother to all Palestinians. When a Palestinian is being arrested by the IOF, women of all ages will be surrounding the soldiers within seconds, trying to free the prisoner. And for that, sometimes they pay a heavy price, like the 60 year old Mariam Ayyad from Abu Dees. On the night of 20th of September 2008, IOF soldiers broke into her house. After arguing with her, the old woman was repeatedly hit and thrown on the ground by the soldiers until she died in front of her children and grandchildren. During curfews, it is mostly women who would move carefully from one house corner to another and from one street to the other and distribute wheat and milk. When young masked men wanted to go from one place to another, they would be assisted by these mothers, who would check that the roads were clear of IOF soldiers. And when one of their millions of children gets killed by the IOF, they all gather and mourn as one single mother, that it becomes difficult to figure out which one of these mothers is the martyr’s mother. They are the protectors, the helpers and the witnesses of Israeli brutality, for many of them not only carry the pain of losing their children, they carry the scars of more than 60 years of Zionist terror and destruction.



During the Nakba of 1948, Zionist terrorists massacred Palestinians indiscriminately. Even women and children, who are protected during wars under all human laws, were killed in a brutal way. Accounts of the Deir Yassin massacre mention that among the 254 Palestinians victims were 25 pregnant women who were bayoneted in the abdomen while still alive. Another 52 children were maimed in front of their mothers before having their heads cut off by the Zionist terrorists. After the village of Beit Darras had been surrounded by Zionist terror groups and further Zionist mobilization was on the way to occupy the village, the Zionist terror groups called on the Palestinian residents to leave the village safely from the south side. The villagers decided that it was safer for the women and children to leave, since it was the village the Zionists wanted. Upon leaving the village, all the women and children were massacred by the Zionist terrorists. Kafr Qasim, Qibya and many other massacres carry the same pattern of killing unarmed mothers and their children. Other mothers lost their children, and many their lives, after being forced out of their homes to wander the hills of Palestine in search of a safe spot.



The suffering and pain of Palestinian mothers continues till today. Palestinian mothers, including the elderly and the sick among them, are often humiliated at checkpoints in front of their children, and pregnant women are delayed, causing many to give birth at these checkpoint. Women are not only delayed at checkpoints, they are often prevented from reaching hospitals, causing miscarriages and even the death of some of women and infants. Many unnamed children are stillborn at Israeli checkpoints after unnecessary delays or after their mothers were forced to deliver on the dirt road or inside cars at the checkpoint. A report of the Palestinian Ministry of Health published in October 2006 states that since the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000 some 68 pregnant women gave birth at Israeli checkpoints, leading to 34 miscarriages and the death of four women. In 2002, in two consecutive days two pregnant women on their way to hospital were shot and injured by the IOF soldiers at a checkpoint in the Nablus area. One of the women lost her husband who was shot on the neck and the chest. Others are forced to give birth at home, despite fear of complications because they fear they will be stopped at checkpoints and won’t make it in time to the hospital. In Azzun Atma near Qalqilya pregnant women are even forced to take up residence outside the village until they deliver out of fear that they might not be able to get the necessary medical treatment. The village, encircled by the apartheid wall, is separated by a gate from the rest of the West Bank. This gate is not manned at night, making the village a prison to its residents. According to a B’Tselem report, alone during 2006 some 20 out of 30 pregnant women from Azzun Atma were forced to relocate outside of the village because of their pregnancy.



IOF soldiers don’t hesitate in arresting Palestinian mothers to be used as hostages to pressure wanted Palestinians to give themselves up. In its report “Behind the Bars: Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons” published in June 2008, Addammeer, Mandela Institute and the Palestinian Counselling Centre state that “As of May 2008, over 9.080 Palestinian political prisoners remain in Israeli prisons, detention facilities and camps; of those 73 Palestinian women (including 2 girls aged 16 and 17 of a total of 327 minors, and 24 mothers with a total number of 68 children.” Many of the prisoners are held without any charges, and are subjected to torture, humiliation and intimidation. There were four cases of women giving birth inside Israeli prisons under difficult conditions. These women had their hands and feet shackled to their beds. They remain so until they enter the delivery room and are chained again after they deliver.



Palestinian mothers are not only to suffer the loss of their children, husbands and other family members, they themselves are also targeted by the IOF. According to Miftah 7141 Palestinians had been killed by the IOF during the period from 28th September 2000 till 28th February 2009, 1138 of whom were children and 581 were women. A recent report of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights on Israel’s war on Gaza confirms that “Over the course of the 22 day Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, a total of 1,434 Palestinians were killed. Of these, 235 were combatants. The vast majority of the dead, however, were civilians and non-combatants: protected persons according to the principles of IHL. PCHR investigations confirm that, in total, 960 civilians lost their lives, including 288 children and 121 women. 239 police officers were also killed; the majority (235) in air strikes carried out on the first day of the attacks. The Ministry of Health has also confirmed that a total of 5,303 Palestinians were injured in the assault, including 1,606 children and 828 women.” Every single child killed had a mother. Human rights organization talked in their reports about mothers being killed together with their children, others witnessing the killing of their children and not able to prevent it, while others died in front of their children. Some of these mothers lost not only one child, but several. Of the many war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza, one horrific story tells the fate of a Palestinian mother of 10. While sitting with her children, the IOF soldiers entered her house and demanded she choose five of her children to “give as a gift to Israel”. After the woman screamed in horror, the IOF soldiers told her they would choose themselves and then killed five of her children in front of her.



Palestinian mothers have been actively participating in resisting the occupation. They are the first to organize sit-ins in front of international organizations and hold marches demanding the release of their children from Israeli prisons or protesting the brutality of the Israeli military occupation. They visit their sons in hospitals and in jails, despite the long wait and the humiliation they endure on the hands of the Israelis jailers. Also, many of these mothers are the supporters of their families. When the father or son is arrested or killed by the IOF, it is the mothers who take on the burden of providing for their families. Those among them who have a piece of land would plant it with vegetables and herbs, to be later sold to neighbours or at the local market. Others use their embroidery skills to stitch Palestinian tradition dresses “thob”, scarves, shawls and pillow covers. They hold their families together, particularly in difficult times.



Biased media, serving only Zionist propaganda, ignores the suffering of Palestinian mothers under Israeli occupation and instead often portrays them as heartless women, who send these children to the streets and encourage them to throw stones so be killed and then celebrate their death. Palestinian parents encourage their children to study and get a good education and build a better future for themselves. Some parents even lock their children inside the house to prevent them from participating in demonstration or any other kind of activity against the IOF because they know the brutality of the IOF and out of fear they might be killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers. Parents work hard to spare their children the suffering they themselves endured under the Israeli occupation. But as long as the Zionists occupy Palestine, Palestinian suffering will continue, and generation after generation will seek to get themselves rid of this brutal occupation, no matter how hard the parents try to keep their children away from it. Living in Palestine, and being confronted with Zionist terror every day, one is not in need of parents or teachers to form an idea about this Zionist state and decide to demonstrate for a better future. That is why many join demonstrations or get politically active without telling their parents. In many cases it is when the children get arrested or are killed that the parents first know of their children’s involvement in resisting the occupation. Palestinian mothers who lose their children often appear composed on TV and in the news, and if asked, most of them talk about their martyred children in pride and calm and without shedding a tear. It is behind the camera that they show their sorrow and anger at the loss of their beloved ones. Palestinians know that these mothers want to send a message to Israel: despite the suffering and the pain, you won’t break us, ever. Few journalists bother to visit these mothers days after their children have been killed. Many of them visit the grave of their killed child daily, and others keep their room as it was when they still lived there. Few reporters bother asking these mothers what memoires they have kept of their children. If they did, they would be shown clothes, hair brushes, notebooks and pictures, all soaked in tears. These mothers would have freely sacrificed their lives to save their children from death on the hands of the IOF and give them a future empty of Zionist occupation.



Mothers are sacred in Palestine because they are the personification of Palestine: the homeland and the mother of all Palestinians. It is the love of this land that is handed over from one generation to the next. Whenever in Dheisheh, we often sat with grandmother as children, listening to her talking about Palestine, the Nakba, the Naksa and the life in a refugee camp. She would talk about her mother and her grandmother, about her brothers and sisters, about my grandfather, and about her children. She was strong and was always there for her family, even at times when she herself was very weak. She was the safe island everyone seeks and the cave that sheltered us from the storm. Even long after her death, I still often think of her and ask for her guidance. She passed down her strength, steadfastness and kindness to her children. My mother continued the tradition of connecting us to the Palestinian landscape. As children, she and my father used to sit with us and tell us stories about Palestine, the history that one would not find in book, the history of the real people who lived on this land and appreciated it. For me, the personal experiences of my grandmother and mother are priceless. I am thankful to my grandmother and my mother for introducing me to a Palestine that was unknown to me, to parts of our history that others work hard to delete, to a heritage that is mine forever. Through our mothers Palestine is celebrated every single day.



In his poem “My Mother”, late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said:

I must be worth my life

At the hour of my death

Worth the tears of my mother



Sources:

www.pchrgaza.org/h

www.miftah.org

www.imemc.org

http://mecaforpeace.blogspot.com/2009/01/in-gaza.html
http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/03/20/reham-alhelsi-palestinian-mothers-homage-to-steadfastness-and-sacrifice/

Israelis told to fight 'holy war' in Gaza

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
The Independent - UK Saturday,
21 March 2009

Many Israeli troops had the sense of fighting a "religious war" against
Gentiles during the 22-day offensive in Gaza, according to a soldier who has
highlighted the martial role of military rabbis during the operation.

The soldier testified that the "clear" message of literature distributed to
troops by the rabbinate was: "We are the Jewish people, we came to this land
by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to
expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land."

The claim comes in the detailed transcript of a post-war discussion by
soldiers, publication of which has triggered a military police inquiry into
allegations about the use of lethal firepower against unarmed civilians.

The investigation was ordered by the military's advocate general Avichai
Mandleblit on Thursday after the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz published
extracts from the transcript describing incidents in which Palestinian
civilians were killed and property wantonly damaged.

In the fuller version of the transcript published yesterday, the soldier, a
unit commander from the Givati brigade, says: "This was the main message and
the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war."
He recalled that his own sergeant was from a hesder yeshiva, a college
combining religious study and military service, who led the whole platoon in
prayer before going into battle. The commander added that he had sought to
talk to the men about Palestinian politics and society and, "about how not
everyone in Gaza is Hamas and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us".

After the offensive, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group called for the
dismissal of the military's head chaplain, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, a
brigadier general. It said that he had distributed to troops a booklet
saying that it was "terribly immoral" to show mercy to a "cruel enemy" and
that the soldiers were fighting "murderers".

The longer transcript conveys a fuller sense of the debate involving
graduates from the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory course. At one point
Danny Zamir, the head of the course, says he would have questioned the
killing of 180 traffic policemen during bombing on the first day of the
operation. One pilot replies: "Tactically speaking you call them police. In
any case they are armed and belong to Hamas ... during better times they
take Fatah people and throw them off the roofs and see what happens."

The latest casualty figures published by the Palestinian Centre for Human
Rights list the names of 1,434 dead of whom they say 926 were civilians, 236
fighters and 255 police officers.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelis-told-to-fight-h
oly-war-in-gaza-1650616.html

- Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser
explaining why the CIA should violently intervene to support the Mujaheddin

in Afghanistan, even 6 months BEFORE the reluctant Soviets finally agreed

to heed the Afghan democratic government's request for military intervention

on their behalf.





"The Afghan Mujaheddin are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."
- Ronald Reagan, honoring Afghan "freedom fighters" at the White House






Afghanistan, Another Untold Story
(posted in 2009)


by Michael Parenti




Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghan history and the role played by the United States.

Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.




Some Real History

Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.

The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.

The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.

The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.



A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”

The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”

But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.

Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.

A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.

It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.





Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.

Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”

Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.

Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”

In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.

The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.

The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.

None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.

If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.

The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.




The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas

While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.

US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.

The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.

Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.

In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.

One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.

US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.

The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.

In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.





Michael Parenti’s recent books are Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader and the forthcoming God and His Demons. For further information, visit www.michaelparenti.org.



Michael Parenti is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Michael Parenti

Author's website: www.michaelparenti.org.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279
http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/michael-parenti-afghanistan-another-untold-story/
http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3695


See also:

The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan (6 months BEFORE the Soviet intervention)
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html


I explained to the president [Jimmy Carter] that this support [of Jihad] would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets.
- Brzezinski
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm


"The Afghan Mujaheddin are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."
- Ronald Reagan, honoring Afghan "freedom fighters" at the White House

Soviet Vets, 20 Years On, Warn Obama on Afghanistan
by Conor Humphries


MOSCOW - Soviet veterans marking 20 years since their defeat in Afghanistan warned the United States it would never truly control the country, citing bitter memories of a fiercely proud people and unforgiving landscape.


The withdrawal of the last Soviet troops from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989 ended a decade of fighting that killed an estimated 15,000 Soviet troops and convinced a generation of soldiers they had been sent to fight a war they could not win.


The United States, preparing to pour more troops into Afghanistan to fight a growing Taliban-led insurgency, is reliving their nightmare, they said.


"It's like fighting sand. No force in the world can get the better of the Afghans," said Oleg Kubanov, a stocky 47-year-old former officer with the Order of the Red Star pinned to his chest at an anniversary concert in Moscow.


"It's their holy land, it doesn't matter to them if you're Russian, American. We're all soldiers to them."


Thousands of veterans, some in dress suits, some in combats, gathered Friday for a lavish concert organized by Moscow City Hall. As they embraced and posed for pictures before the show, many cited America's troubles as proof their campaign in Afghanistan had been hopeless from the start.


Reports that U.S. President Barack Obama plans to boost U.S. forces there to 60,000 revived bitter memories for members of the Soviet deployment that steadily climbed to a peak of more than 100,000 troops as the insurgency deepened in the mid-1980s.


There are 36,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today, split between the 55,000-strong NATO force and separate U.S. missions, both charged with protecting a transitional government from Taliban forces.


"Numbers don't solve anything," said Shamil Tyukteyev, 59, who lead a regiment in Afghanistan from 1986-88. "You can't put a soldier outside every house or a base on every mountain. We saw it ourselves, the more troops, the more resistance."




PULL OUT


Soviet tanks and troops rolled into Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a puppet Communist government in Kabul [editor: some feel this wasn't a "puppet Communist government", but a largely indigineous, populist people's movement. Also Soviet military intervention was requested by the PDP government in Kabul to Moscow, and Moscow was reluctant to acquiesce].


But hopes of a swift victory were dashed as Soviet forces found themselves bogged down in a guerrilla war waged by a fierce mujahideen force that was backed by U.S. arms and money and had access to bases in neighboring Pakistan. [Editor: And Washington intervened 6 months BEFORE Moscow did.]



After a decade of pouring in more and more troops and money, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ordered a withdrawal in 1989.


"They'll send more in and they'll lose more," Andrei Bandarenko, 42, a former special forces officer, said of the U.S. plans. "What does Obama know about the situation on the ground. We had our own fool, Gorbachev, who knew even less."


Two decades on, Bandarenko is still bitter at being forced to withdraw through the mountains in mid-winter temperatures of minus 27 degrees Celsius -- a trip he sketched for friends on a commemorative map pinned to the wall of the concert hall buffet.


The Soviet military leadership, he said, never came to terms with the difficulties of fighting a native force in barren mountains where temperatures could dive from 40 degrees Celsius to freezing within hours.


Like the United States, the Soviet Union tried to mold Afghanistan into a unified state, papering over an ancient web of tribal and ethnic rivalries, he said.


"There is no common language between the ethnic groups, between the clans," he said. "They are impossible to control."


The United States has rejected comparisons with the Soviet failure, saying that by battling Islamic militants and establishing a democratic society based on the rule of law it is bringing freedom to a country Moscow sought to subjugate.


That brought a wry smile from former helicopter pilot instructor Gurgen Karapetyan, 73.


"We went in with good aims too," he said. Soviet soldiers were told Communism would provide schools, roads and electricity, transforming a primitive society.


"I believed we could help the people, make their lives better," he said. "The Americans want to give them democracy, but they don't want it. They live by their own rules."


Yury Shaidurov, a 47-year-old former solider with tightly cropped grey hair and a chest full of medals, said the best lesson the United States could take from the Soviet experience two decades ago was to simply accept defeat.


"They'll never win," he said. "They have to run before it is too late."


Editing by Janet Lawrence.
Published on Saturday, February 14, 2009 by Reuters
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/14-6






See also:


Afghanistan: Another Untold Story
http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279
http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/michael-parenti-afghanistan-another-untold-story/
http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3695




The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan (6 months BEFORE the Soviet intervention)
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html


I explained to the president [Jimmy Carter] that this support [of Jihad] would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets.
- Brzezinski
You can read the full interview here:
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm




(As they say, "Birds of a feather...")
"The Afghan Mujaheddin are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."
- Ronald Reagan, honoring Afghan "freedom fighters" [i.e. drug runners, feudal warlords and religious extremists] at the White House

Saudi Bin Laden Friend of America and Business Partner of America is calling illitrate people of Somalia financed by Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf Countries, to topple the New President who brought peace and Calm in Somalia.
The Zionist has policy "To Devide and Rule", the whole Muslim world is been devided by land, parties, faith and also so called Sharia Court.

But what is the motive of Al Qa'eda, Wahhabi, Salafi, Al Ittihad, Al Shebab all new group with different names and banners under the name of Islam, unfortunately; that claim majority of Sunni Kafir and Shi'a Kafir, gains by deviding Muslim Ummah.

Saudi Arabian Sheikhs who are the in charge of Muslims Holy Places, have direct friendship with Americans and Zionist. Not only that without their permission they can not even do anything. The Arab Gulf sheikhs has the same friendship with Americans and Zionist. The Question is why Saudi born Osama bin Laden does not care about toppling the kingdoms or sheikhdoms? How can a Muslim accept Saudi Osama bin Laden's double standard.

The recent message of Saudi born Bin Laden, Friend of America and Business partner of America to topple newly elected Somali President, has no other meaning accept to devide the innocent people of Somalia and to destroy the rich land of Somalia that has unbelievable natural resources from minerals, agriculture and maritime food - fish.

Since the Suez Canal issue 19th and 20th century, the stay of Zionist state Israel was in danger. Somalia has the longest ever maritime control in the Indian Ocean. And Somali state has full power to control all ships passing towards Suez Canal. In the cold war both Americans and Russians were fighting to gain power for the Somali strategic state.

Why Saudi Arabia is interefering in Somalia, and why Saudi Arabian Al Qa'eda and Al Shebab are killing innocent people of Somalia to create unstablity is Somalia, there is hidden motive for the interest of Saudi Arabia and Zionist state of Israel.

First as we said that all ships passing towards Suez Canal can be easily monitered from Somalia, Second, Somali is very rich in minirals and has enough oil resource. The threat is Somalia state if starts exploring Oil its risk for Saudi Arabian oil wells that they will not get enough oil, because Somalia lyes lower than Saudi state.

This two factors is the main cause why Saudi born Bin Laden who sponsors Al Qa'ida, Al Shebab, Al Ittihad, Al Selaf, Al etc etc. to create disturbance and unstablity in Somalia.

Hope that Muslims and the blind followers of these newly created Muslim faith, Islamist and immotional and desperate people who turn to go for sucide killing, open their eyes and study deeply why Saudi Osama bin Laden want to kill innocent people in the world. Thousands of Muslim population lost their lives because of Saudi Osama bin Laden's teachings and still he is believed to be Muslim?

Labbayk Ya Mahdi

Bin Laden urges overthrow of Somali president
Module body

Thu Mar 19, 2:57 PM



DUBAI (AFP) - Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called on radical Islamists in Somalia to overthrow new President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, according to an audiotape posted on the Internet on Thursday.


ADVERTISEMENT

Ahmed, a moderate Islamist, was elected president of the war-ravaged African state only in January following UN-brokered reconciliation talks but faces a tough task to bring peace to a country wracked by civil war since 1991.

"This Sheikh Sharif... must be fought and toppled," bin Laden said in a message addressed to the "champions of Somalia,"


"He is like the presidents who are in the pay of our enemies," he said in the tape, whose authenticity could not be immediately confirmed.

Somalia has had no effective central authority since the 1991 ouster of former president Mohamed Siad Barre touched off a bloody cycle of clashes between rival factions.


Bin Laden said Ahmed has "changed and turned on his heels" as a result of American "enticements", and agreed to mix Islamic sharia law with civic laws in the troubled Horn of Africa country.

The Somali cabinet agreed on Tuesday to introduce Islamic law, a move Ahmed said was "to ensure that he who claims that he is fighting to have sharia no longer has a reason to fight."


Bin Laden warned Islamist militants against heeding calls to be patient and give Ahmed time to implement sharia.

"My Muslim brothers in Somalia: you must beware of the initiatives which wear the dress of Islam ... like the initiative attributed to some of the ulama (scholars) of Somalia which gives Sheikh Sharif six months to implement Islamic Sharia.

"They are asking him (to build) something he was in fact installed to demolish," he added. "It is a duty to fight the apostate government and not stop the battle."


Islamist fighters including the hardline Shebab militia have waged battles against the government and its allies since and before Ahmed came to power, vowing to fight until all foreign forces withdraw and sharia law is imposed.

The Shebab is a hardline Islamist organisation opposed to Ahmed's national unity government and which controls large swathes of Somalia.


It re-took several towns in southern and central Somalia in battles against the Ethiopia-backed Somali troops who ousted their movement in early 2007. Ethiopian forces pulled out of Somalia in January, ending an ill-fated two-year intervention.


Somalia's information minister Farahan Ali Mohamoud dismissed bin Laden's call and said the Al-Qaeda supremo should focus on surviving in his Afghan hide-out.

"We know that bin Laden has his own problems in the mountainous area of Tora Bora where he is hiding, so he has no place making such statements at a time when Somalia is keen to emerge from 21 years violence," he told reporters in

Mogadishu.

"His statements will not affect our efforts to bring peace to this country and we will work hard," he added.




Muslims "must" unite all over the World
and pray for the appearance of al Mahdi (r.a.) the Saviour of mankind
the descendent of Prophet Muhammed s.a.w.





Volume 7, No. 1, January. 2006


"The Forest is Ours"

— Assert the indigenous Adivasi inhabitants of Dandakaranya and the vast hinterland of India

Nitin







"Jal, Jungle, Jameen hamara hai!" "The forest is ours! Our Right over the forest produce is inalienable!"—These slogans are reverberating across the vast forested, hilly regions of India stretching from the seven North Eastern States to the Wynad belt in the south western tip of the Peninsula, where the indigenous adivasi people of India reside, people who have long suffered the oppression, suppression, exploitation and discrimination in the hands of the imperialists, comprador big business houses, feudal forces, rapacious contractors, moneylenders and traders, forest officials, government bureaucrats and policemen. Ironically, despite its unending chatter about uplifting the girijans (literally hill people), it is the Indian state that is spearheading this oppression and exploitation of the adivasis.

The oppression and exploitation of the adivasis has been continuing for centuries and has taken the most cruel forms since the invasion and occupation of our country by the British colonialists. The British colonialists, recognising the vast potential for profits that the backward, hinterland inhabited by the adivasis held in store, exploited its rich mineral and forest resources to the maximum possible extent. They undertook mining exploration, set up plantations and constructed railways on a war footing to plunder the vast natural wealth. They converted these regions into profitable sources of raw material inputs for their industries or for simply looting and selling off the forest wealth. They dug several mines all over the country to carry away the iron ore, manganese, coal, bauxite, gold, diamonds, dolomite, quartz, limestone and lots of other mineral wealth. They cut down the forests for Sal, Teak, bamboo and other natural wealth. They hunted and killed animals and birds driving several rare species to near-extinction. In short, they destroyed the economy, society and culture of the adivasi communities, broke up their collective life, carried them away to distant places to work as cheap labour in tea-gardens, coffee plantations, as construction labour, as casual labour in mines and industries. This was the first big onslaught by imperialist capital on the adivasis of India.

Revolts broke out all across the country against the terrible exploitation of these thugs. The great Santhali rebellion of the mid-19th century led by heroic warriors like Siddu Kanu, Birsa Munda and others, the Halba rebellion of 1774-79, the Paralkot rebellion of Gend Singh in 1825, the Muria rebellion of 1876, Gond adivasi revolt (bhumkal) of Abhujmad led by Gundadhur in 1910, the Rampa rebellion of the 1930s led by Alluri Seetharama Raju in East Godavari and Vishakhapatnam in north Andhra, the Gond rebellion of Adilabad led by Komuram Bheem, and several such adivasi revolts shook the British empire and showed the seething anger and the united might of the adivasis.

The post-British period in India saw the same pattern of development by the reactionary ruling classes of India who came to power by colluding with the British and other imperialists. Large-scale eviction of the tribals became one of the cornerstones of the new pattern of industrial development. Millions of adivasis have been uprooted from their natural habitat by the huge irrigation, hydro-electric and multipurpose projects, thermal plants, steel plants, bauxite and alumina plants, etc., initiated since the time of Nehru and that are continuing till date. National Parks under various nomenaclature have displaced several lakhs of adivasis from the interior forests.

In addition to tribal land alienation there are tribals/ non tribals displaced by development projects (such as dams, mines, industry etc.) that have not received rehabilitation and have ‘encroached’ forest land to eke out a living. According to the estimates of the Planning Commission, 21.3 million people were displaced by development projects between 1951 and 1990 alone. Of these, 8.54 million (40%) belonged to Scheduled Tribes who constitute less than 8% of the total population. Only 2.1 million (25%) of them are reported to have been rehabilitated. The rest were left to fend for themselves.

Today, the imperialists continue to step up their plunder unhindered along with their comprador capitalists in India. Contractors, traders and forest officials continue their rampage fleecing the adivasis of what they have. The adivasis are prevented from enjoying their traditional rights of collecting forest produce and they are fined even for collecting wood for the construction of their huts. On the other hand, the contractor-smuggler-CBB-bureaucrat nexus, with the blessings and active connivance of the State, take away the forest wealth without paying a pie. The story of exploitation of the adivasis and the snatching away of their traditional rights over the forests differs little whether it is in the deep jungles of the North East or in mineral-rich Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka or Kerala. The pattern of so-called development being pursued by the reactionary ruling classes of India in collusion with the imperialists is the same—plunder the mineral and forest wealth in the name of developing the industries, displace the local adivasi communities, snatch their rights over the forests, convert them into cheap labourers for the big business and imperialist ventures. And now this plunder is set to increase ten-fold with just the three states of Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa having signed MoUs of over Rs.3 lakh crores in the course of just the past one year for mega iron ore and steel plants.

In the present article let us see the pattern of development pursued by the reactionary ruling classes led by the CBB and backed by the imperialists in Dandakaranya, its impact on the region and its people, the history of struggles of the adivasis and the present upsurge in these struggles for their right over land and forest and mainly for their political power.

The Exploitation of Dandakaranya and the Myth of Development

Undivided Bastar district, now divided into three revenue districts—Bastar, Kanker and Dantawara—and two police districts, Bijapur and Narayanpur, is the heart of the region of Dandakaranya. It is in this district that the exploitation is at its worst. Besides undivided Bastar, the other two districts that form part of Dandakaranya are Rajnandgaon and Gadchiroli in Maharashtra. Undivided Bastar has an area of over 39,114 sq km (which is slightly larger than the state of Kerala), of which 62 per cent is covered by forests. The forests provide livelihood to the predominantly tribal population that comprises around 87 per cent of the total population in the district. The trees are sal, teak, bijasal, sirsa, kusum, palas, kanha, harra, dhowara, amla, samara etc. Almost 93 per cent of the district’s population is rural and the relative index of development had come down from 44 in 1980 to 35 at present if we take 100 for India as a whole. The comparative index for MP is 73. Irrigation covers only 2 per cent of the cropped area. Agriculture is still subsistent in nature and collection of forest products such as mahua, tamarind, chironji seed, ambadi, kusum, mango kernel, harra, shikakai, karanji, peng seeds, Kosa cocoons, charota seeds, amchur, tora, chirayta, nirmali seeds, karkatiya seeds, bhilwan seeds, cashew, dhavai phool, gum are an important means of livelihood for the majority of the adivasis. Plucking of tendu leaves and cutting of timber provide some income to the families. All family members participate in the collection of tendu leaves during the summer season.

The adivasis sell the forest produce in the haat i.e., the weekly bazaar at nominal prices. The traders dupe them by exchanging goods by their weights such as selling a Kilogram of salt for a Kilogram of tamarind, mango kernel, chironge seed, or mahua. The traders also offer loans at an exorbitant rate of 120 per cent per annum to the adivasis. Although traders are prohibited from buying the forest produce from the adivasis under the Mandi Act, they continue to be the biggest buyers in the haats due to the connivance of the police and administration. The unscrupulous traders cheat the innocent adivasis in every sphere—in pricing, grading, weighing and counting of the forest produce. The tendu leaf contractors and officials exploit the adivasis by paying low prices which compels the adivasis to often go on strikes demanding a rise in the rates.

While the traders and contractors are looting the adivasis at the micro level, the Indian state, the CBB and the imperialists are carrying out large-scale exploitation by draining the region of its minerals and natural wealth. Iron ore is sold at a nominal price from Bailadilla mines to the imperialists and the CBB. A special railway line was laid to supply iron ore to the Japanese imperialists at a very cheap rate. The Bailadila range of mines is perched on the southern tip of Chattisgarh in Dantewada District. The range comprises of 14 iron ore deposits rising to a height of 1260 metres above mean sea level. The Commercial discovery of Bailadila dates back to 1955-56 when Prof. Euemura of Japanese Steel Mills Association, drew the attention of the Japanese Steel Mills to the richness of the vast deposits of iron ore and its proximity to the Eastern Coast of India. Later an agreement has been signed with the Japanese Steel Mills in 1960. An approval of the project report prepared by NMDC has been given in 1964 and the Mine Plant was inaugurated in November 1968.

Recently, the Gujarat-based comprador house of Essar was given permission to set up a pipe-line to transport iron ore from Bailadilla to Vishakhapatnam. In Kanker district, plans have been drawn to open iron ore mines in Chargaon and Raoghat. The government also sanctioned the construction of a railway line from Dalli-Rajahara to Jagdalpur via Raoghat in order to fully exploit the mineral wealth. The Courts rejected a public interest petition filed by an organization against the opening of the mines and gave its green signal to the government to go ahead with its monstrous plans to drain the district of its iron ore. Earlier, the mining of iron ore had begun in Kuvvemari and Budhwarimaad in the same district.

The contract for mining the ore in Chargaon and Raoghat was given to NIKKO company which opened an office in Bhanupratappur. The company officials conducted a survey and tried to send the material but were obstructed by the local people. It is said that the mining in Chargaon can go on for 125 years so much are the reserves of iron ore. The effects of the mining on the people’s livelihood and environment are quite terrible. Due to the mining of iron ore in Bailadilla in Dantewara district the water of the two rivers, Sankhani and Dankini, have become poisoned. The mining in Chargaon hill would pollute the stream that flows into rivers Paralkot and Mendhaki ruining the livelihood of thousands of families who survive on these rivers for their irrigation and for fish. Several villages along the stretch of the rivers will not have access to drinking water. The villages around Chargaon have fertile land and they produce two crops of foodgrains. But if the mining is taken up 16 of these villages will be the direct sufferers while several hundred more villages will suffer acute shortages of even drinking water. Following these developments the people of the district formed the Chargaon Khadaan Virodhi Jan Sangharsh Manch. The adivasis of Chattisgarh have been agitating against the various iron ore and other mining projects since long and they bore the brunt of government repression as when they protested setting up of the projects in Bailadilla, Nagarnar and Maulibhat.

Let us see the disastrous effects of other projects in Dandakaranya. It is estimated that around 3,278 hectares of forest would be cleared by Raoghat mines. There is a proposal to set up a hydro-electric project on the Indravati river near Jeethamkhandi which would uproot several villages and deplete the forest. Permission has been granted to a private company to set up industry in Maulibhaat. The proposed Rs. 600 crore power project near Bodhghat over the Indrawati is estimated to generate 400 MW of power. This project would clear 13,750 hectares of agricultural land and 9,309 hectares of forest. Adivasi families in 60 villages will become homeless. The effects on the environment are quite severe. Moreover, the power generated from this project is meant for use not for local people but for the big industrial houses and for other states. In undivided Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh produced a substantial 36 percent of the total power generated, contributing 42 percent Thermal and 14 percent of Hydel power but in terms of power consumption, it consumed around 24 percent of total consumption in 1996-97 and 1997-98. Thus the power generated by Chattisgarh is used up by other states even as the people in the state face acute shortages in supply. Hence the people formed the Bodhghat Sangharsh Samiti and began a campaign for the scrapping of the proposed project.

Why are the ruling classes showing keen interest in the region? The secret, obviously, lies in the vast treasure that the region holds in its bosom—the millions of tonnes of mineral wealth and timber that could fatten the vultures from Washington to New Delhi. No matter if the entire region is devastated, rivers are contaminated, environment is polluted, homes of adivasi families in hundreds of villages are destroyed and lakhs of people are displaced by this "development". The wealth of the region is mind-boggling to greedy hawkish treasure-seekers who will not hesitate to unleash brutal war against their own people and spell death and destruction to countless people in order to capture this natural wealth.

For instance, in Tiriya-Machkot area alone 450 lakh tonnes of dolomite reserves are found which can be used in the iron and steel industry. In Deverapal, Potanar-Laroji, Raikot and Manjhi Dongri of Bastar district 1770 lakh tones of lime stone reserves are estimated. Bauxite is found in abundance in Keshkal tehsil of Bastar district. 53 lakh tones of bauxite reserves are estimated in this region alone. In Markatola of Kanker district and in Barchhegondi region silimanite/ kinite deposits have been discovered and gold deposits have been found in Sona dehi, Michgaon and in some other region of Bhanupratappur Tehsil.

Chathisgarh has a variety of rich minerals—iron ore, bauxite, coal, manganese, limestone, dolomite, tin ore, china-clay, quartzite, quartz-silica, fluorite, diamond, granite, corundum etc. In the districts of Bastar, Dantewara, Kanker and Rajnandgaon, iron ore is abundant. In Dantewara and Kanker the reserves are in excess of 600 million metric tonnes each. Bastar also has dolomite and bauxite. Tin ore and corundum are exploited by the MP State Mining Corp in Bastar. It is estimated by the government that there are 75 lakh tonnes of bauxite in Chattisgarh and the entire tin ore is found in Chattisgarh.

A fifth of the iron ore in the country is here, and one of the best quality iron ore deposits in the world is found in the Bailadila mines in south Chhattisgarh, from where it is exported to Japan. Rich deposits of Bauxite, Limestone, Dolomite and Corundum are found in the State. The State is lucky to have large deposits of coal, iron ore and limestone in close proximity, making it the ideal location for the lowest cost of steel production. Workable deposits of Corundum are widespread in South Chhattisgarh. Corundum includes semi-precious varieties of Ruby and Blue Sapphire, and possibilities of finding precious varieties exist as well. The corundum mines in Bhopalapatnam have become a source of enrichment for the smugglers and government officials but are of no use for the local adivasis.

According to an estimate, the amount of reserves available for some of the major minerals in the region are: 35,000 million tones of coal, 2336 million tones of iron ore, 3580 million tones of lime stone, 606 million tones of dolomite, 96 million tonnes of bauxite and so on.

The 150-year-long history of struggles of the adivasi peasantry of Dandakaranya

The region of Chhattisgarh, which falls in the present Dandakaranya, has witnessed several tribal rebellions starting from the late 18 century through the 19 century to the first few decades of the 20 century. Some of these tribal revolts were localised while others were more widespread. All these rebellions were centred around the traditionally inalienable right of the tribals on the local resources land and forests. Often the mobilisation was around the issues of tradition, culture and the tribal way of life. These rebellions were also a protest against an alien system of governance and an alien political, economic and social order that had been forced upon them by the British. These tribal rebellions, although they predominantly took place in Bastar, were spread across the various tribal areas of Chhattisgarh as well. It is important to understand the long tradition of protest and rebellion of the adivasis of the region in order to understand their present role in the ongoing people’s war against the Indian state.

The Halba rebellion was the first documented rebellion of the adivasis in Bastar against the British and the Marathas. It lasted for nearly five years from 1774-1779. Its significance lies in the fact that it was the first organized resistance by the adivasis against the intrusion of the British in Bastar. The Halba rebellion is also a very important event in the history of Bastar as it was responsible for the decline of the Chalukya dynasty. The fundamental reasons for the rebellion were economic in nature. There had been a prolonged famine, which had severely affected the people who had very little cultivable land. The presence of Maratha forces and the terror caused by the East India Company in these adverse circumstances precipitated the rebellion. The stronger armies of Bastar supported by the British and the Marathas crushed the rebellion. A massacre of Halba tribesmen followed the defeat of the Halba army.

The Paralkot rebellion was representative of the resentment felt by the Maria gonds of Abujhmar against the invasion of outsiders, primarily the Marathas and the British. This rebellion was led by Gend Singh who mobilized the Marias against the British. One of the objectives of the rebellion was to establish a world free of loot, plunder and exploitation. The presence of the Marathas and the British threatened the identity of the Marias and they resisted this through organising the rebellion of Paralkot in 1825. The immediate reason for their resentment was the heavy taxes levied by the Maratha rulers. In essence this rebellion was directed against the foreign interference and control of Bastar and its aim was to re-establish the independence of Bastar.

The rebellion of Tarapur (1842-54) was once again the assertion of the tribals against the invasion of their local culture and the tampering with their traditional principles of social, economic and political organization. It started with an opposition to taxes levied under the pressure of the Anglo-Maratha rule. For the tribals, these experiences of coercive taxation were alien and new, and therefore they opposed them. The local Diwan became a symbol of oppression and bore the brunt of tribal anger.

The Maria rebellion, which lasted nearly 20 years from 1842 to 1863, was seemingly in favour of an inhuman practice of human sacrifice. In reality, the revolt was against the insensitive and intrusive handling of tribal faith. The Anglo Maratha combine did not hesitate to enter and pollute the temple of Danteswari. The facts clearly indicate that this rebellion was more defensive in nature and was waged by the tribals to protect their land and tradition. Furer Hamendorf (Aboriginal Rebellions in the Deccan, Man in India, No.4,1945, PP 2089) writes that all these rebellions were defensive movements, they were the last resort of tribesmen driven to despair by the encroachments of outsiders on their land and economic resources.

The adivasis of Bastar were actively involved in the First War of Independence of 1857 with Southern Bastar as the centre of the revolt. Under the leadership of Dhruvarao a battle was waged against the British. He belonged to one of the Maria tribes called Dorla and was supported by his tribesmen.

The First war of independence in 1857 was spearheaded in Chhattisgarh by Vir Narain Singh who was a benevolent jamindar of Sonakhan. The British arrested him in 1856 for looting a trader’s grain stocks and distributing it amongst the poor in a severe famine year. In 1857 with the help of the soldiers of the British Army at Raipur, Vir Narain Singh escaped form prison. He reached Sonakhan and formed an army of 500 men. Under the leadership of Smith, a powerful British army was dispatched to crush the Sonakhan army. The British succeeded after a prolonged battle and Vir Narain Singh was arrested and later hanged on the 10th December, 1857. He became the first martyr from Chhattisgarh in the War of Independence. Vir Narain Singh’s martyrdom has been resurrected in the 1980’s and he has become a potent symbol of Chhattisgarhi pride.

Later in 1858, the Gonds challenged the British in several battles. In 1859 a very important rebellion began to take shape in Southern Bastar with the tribals refusing to let contractors undertake cutting of Sal trees. The people of these Jamindaris were called Kois or Koyas. This rebellion was against the decision of the British to give contracts for cutting forests to contractors from Hyderabad. These contractors were also responsible for the exploitation of the tribals. The local tribals in 1859 decided that they would not allow the felling of a single tree. The British took this as a challenge to the might of the empire and used coercive methods to continue the felling of trees. This rebellion was a loud and clear assertion by the tribals of their inalienable rights on their forests and natural resources.

In 1867, Gopinath Kapardas was appointed the Diwan of Bastar State and was responsible for large scale exploitation of the tribal population. Tribals from different parganas jointly requested the King to remove the Diwan but the King did not concede to these demands. This led to the Muria Revolt of 1876 The rebelling tribals surrounded Jagdalpur on 2 March 1876; the King with great difficulty was able to inform the British forces. Finally a strong British army sent by the Resident of Orissa, crushed the rebellion.

The 150 year history of protests and rebellion in Bastar culminated in the Bhumkal rebellion of 1910. This rebellion was widespread affecting more than half of the parganas of Bastar. It symbolized the struggle of tribals against an alien rule attempting to remould the tribal pattern of life. The rebellion was ultimately crushed by strong armies of the British. After the crushing of the rebellion, the local tribals and supporters of the rebellion were subjected to severe abuse. However, the post Bhumkal British policy in Bastar was forced to be more sensitive to the tribals and their traditional way of life.

Several policies of the state at that time proved extremely oppressive for the tribals of the region and became focal points of the Bhumkal rebellion. Extensive forest areas were declared reserved forests; resulting in the tribals feeling that their inalienable right over forests has been subverted. Due to the excessive revenue demands of the colonial rule, several tribal villages were given on lease to thekedars who adopted extremely oppressive means to collect revenues from the tribals. The monopoly on liquor brewing also was a causal factor for the Bhumkal rebellion. The tribals considered liquor as the prasad of Gods, and the order banning liquor brewing, amounted to interference in their religious affairs to them.

During the rebellion on 7 February 1910, Rani Subaran Kunwar declared that the British rule on Bastar has been abolished and tribal rule was re-established. This declaration sums up the Bhumkal rebellion and the protests of Bastar. It articulates the assertion of the tribals to weed out alien rule and protect their traditional tribal way of life.

The anti-imperialist and anti-State struggles of the adivasi peasantry of Dandakaranya

It is against the above background of continuous intrusion into tribal lands, society and culture by the outside exploiters and the continuous struggle of the adivasi peasantry for their inalienable right over their traditional lands and right over the forests that the present explosive situation in Dandakaranya, the militant struggles of the adivasis against exploitation in all its forms, particularly against the rapacious plunder by the CBB and the Indian state, and the increasing role of the Gond adivasis in the advancing people’s war can be properly understood.

Gonds, who are almost 70 lakhs, are spread out in seven states, but mainly concentrated in five states. This division of the Gond population into several administrative territories is a cruel ploy of the ruling classes to scuttle their development into a single nation. While several other advanced nationalities achieved their statehood through prolonged struggles or through political lobbying, the Gonds have not yet been able to unify their community into a single nationality. In fact, the subjugation of the Gonds commenced from the period of the Kakatiya kings who ruled from Andhra Pradesh in the 14th century. They remain victims of the policy of ‘divide and rule’ first introduced by the British colonialists and which is continuing after the British left. The Gonds are known by different names—Rajgond, Baiga, Madia, Muria, Dhurva/Parja, Bhatra, , Halba, Durggond and Dorla.

The Gonds began to lose their traditional lands to the non-adivasis who came from outside and snatched away the lands by taking advantage of the adivasi culture of considering land as a non-commodity and as collective property. As long as the adivasis were unconnected with the outside world, the influx of non-adivasis from the "civilized" world was hardly existent. However, with the construction of roads, railways and bridges, the civilized people from outside flocked to adivasi areas and began to usurp their lands. This so-called development, without any protection to the local adivasis, only made them landless and drove them away from their traditional lands. As observed rightly by the renowned anthropologist, Hamendorf, construction of roads and bridges in the adivasi areas brought forth, not real development, but, impoverishment and destitution to the ordinary adivasis.

It is this pattern of development that is continuing to displace the Gonds from their hearths and homes, turning them into homeless migrants, beggars and cheap labourers. The slogan "The Right over the Forest belongs to adivasis!" arose out of this alienation of the adivasis from their traditional means of livelihood.

In continuation of their 150-year-long tradition of militant protests and armed rebellions, the adivasis of Dandakaranya, during the period since 1980, have demonstrated their collective might and fighting capacity by turning up in thousands to protest against the government policies that were aimed at depriving them of their rights over the forests. And thousands of them joined the armed struggle spearheaded by the CPI(ML)[People’ War] since 1980 and now advancing under the leadership of the newly-formed CPI(Maoist). Hundreds of villages have armed people’s militia units whose presence, along with that of the regular units of the PLGA, protects the adivasis from the exploitation by the outside land-grabbers, comprador capitalists, contractors, forest officials, government bureaucrats, traders and policemen. The adivasis have taken up massive struggles against the tendu leaf contractors, traders and forest officials and won several victories. Of particular significance is the continuous struggle of the adivasis of Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra against the Ballarpur Paper Mills of the big comprador business house of Thapar. As a result of this militant struggle against Thapar’s exploitation of the adivasis, the latter could increase the rates of bamboo several times. The adivasis had also stopped the indiscriminate felling of the forest by the contractors, timber smugglers and the CBB in Dandakaranya region. Now wherever they are organized they enjoy the right over the land and the forest resources. It is now well established that it is not the adivasis who are responsible for the denudation of the forests but it is the contractors and the CBB who are the culprits. Contrary to the myth floated by the ruling classes that forests are being denuded by the adivasis, it is the latter, led by the CPI(Maoist), who are the real protectors in DK and other regions in the country. The attempts by the ruling classes to plunder the wealth of the region through various mining and other projects that cater to the needs of the imperialists and the CBB, have been thwarted by the organized and consistent resistance of the adivasis.

The Indian state is desperately trying to break the back of the movement by resorting to massive suppression campaigns through the might of the police and central para-military forces as well as through various cunning ploys and intrigues such as: creating divisions among the adivasis, taking up so-called developmental activities to win over a tiny section, creating a network of police informers, and unleashing a brutal reign of terror. The Jan Jagaran Abhiyan or Salwa Judum, initiated mainly in Dantewara district, and Gaon Bandhi in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, are recent examples of the attempts by the reactionary ruling classes to pit one section of adivasis against another, aimed at creating schisms within the adivasis and weakening the ongoing revolt of the adivasis. Given the huge mining interests in the region the ongoing Salwa Judum campaign in the region is particularly horrifying with the forces having mobilised lumpens burning down 50 villages, brutally killing over 100, including children and raping about 30-40 women. To terrorise the populace the severed heads are hung on trees and post of their own houses.

Despite all these desperate attempts by the Indian state, the struggles of the adivasis are forging ahead undeterred. For instance, adivasis of Bastar came out in large number protesting against the inclusion of Bastar (i.e., the three districts of Bastar, Dantewara and Kanker which were in Bastar district until 1998) in the new state of Chattisgarh which was formed in November 2000. Thousands participated in demonstrations and rallies held in Kunta, Bhopalapatnam, Madded, Bhairamgarh, Bhasagudem, Narayanpur, Kondagaon, Koelbeda and other towns. Around 25,000 people attended the rally in Narayanpur in 2001. Also in end-2001, a 10,000-strong morcha was held by adivasi peasantry in Orcha in Maad division demanding education for their children and healthcare for the adivasi people. Demonstrations took place in Kunta, Bijapur and other towns in south and west Bastar. As drought struck the area in 2002 and government bureaucrats played with the lives of the people by swallowing the foodgrains and funds allotted for the ‘Food for Work’ scheme, adivasis under the leadership of the DAKMS confiscated the foodgrains from the government godowns and private hoardings and distributed them to the starving people. In Maad and North Bastar divisions several famine raids were conducted on the godowns and foodgrains were seized. In south Bastar, the houses of landlords and traders mainly in the bordering areas of Andhra Pradesh were attacked and several tones of foodgrain were distributed to the people. Thousands of people were mobilized in these raids which became successful despite heavy police protection to the landlords.

The gond adivasis have also begun to directly confront the armed police defying the threats, intimidation and restrictions imposed by the latter. In January 2003, for instance, around 12,000 people demonstrated in front of Manpur PS in Rajnandgaon district protesting against police atrocities. When the police opened fire on the adivasis they retaliated by beating up some police officials upon which the latter turned tail. Soon after 3000 adivasis demonstrated in front of Gyarapathi PS in Gadchiroli district in Maharashtra and warned the police of dire consequences if they did not stop their atrocities. The peasants also issued similar warnings to the police in Marripalli PS. Four thousand adivasis of Kishtaram area in south Bastar demonstrated peacefully in Seethapuram village condemning the atrocities perpetrated by the police of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. The police opened indiscriminate fire on the people killing an 18-year-old adivasi girl, Kadthi Some.

On February 10, 2004 bhumkal divas was celebrated throughout the region of Maad. 10,000 adivasis, including 4,000 women, attended the meeting held in Nelnaar village to commemorate the bhumkal (rebellion) that took place in 1910 against the British imperialists. The significance of bhumkal lies in the fact that for the first time the Madiya gonds formed their own kingdom by throwing out the British. The uprising, however, was crushed within five days after the formation of the adivasi kingdom.

Conclusion

No society can survive without food and no industrial development can take place without access to minerals and forest products. A society can survive without the computer or the internet but it is impossible to do so without agriculture, mining, and forest products. That is why in spite of the hype about information technology and knowledge revolution, the imperialists and the ruling classes everywhere are unleashing plans to control the natural wealth without which the wheels of industry and, consequently, the advance of society, grinds to a halt.

It is a fact that the natural resources in the world are limited. In India the resources are continually being depleted due to the unbridled loot by the imperialists and big business. As the mineral and other natural resources are getting depleted the imperialists and the ruling classes of India led by the CBB and their imperialist masters are evincing keen interest in the hitherto unexplored mineral-rich regions in order to keep their profits from falling. Today, most of these resources lie in regions where the people’s war led by the CPI(Maoist) is strong and advancing. Whether it is the mineral-rich region of Jharkhand, or Orissa, Chattisgarh or Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra or Andhra Pradesh, the regions inhabited by the adivasis are virtually in the control of the Maoists. This fact was acknowledged by none other than the Prime Minister himself. Talking to journalists at Bangalore, he stated: "The Union Government is concerned, particularly as the Naxalites have emerged in the hilly areas of central India, where there are our mineral and hydel resources. The Naxalite movement is gaining momentum and the Centre (the Central Govt.) is concerned."

The Indian ruling classes are obviously worried that the adivasis in this vast tract of land have risen up in arms against the reactionary Indian state and exploiters of various hues and are asserting their inalienable right over land, natural resources and forest. They are fighting for establishing their power and authority over these regions by destroying the power and authority of the Indian state that represents the comprador capitalist and feudal forces.

Hence the imperialists and the Indian ruling classes, through the armed might of the Indian state, have been drawing up diabolic schemes to unleash the most cruel terror over this vast tract, to enact massacres of adivasi people who dare to resist the exploitative practices of the ruling classes and to turn the entire region into a graveyard if necessary in order to squeeze it of its mineral and forest wealth. Hence it is all the more important that the people of the entire country stand up in support of the ongoing people’s war and the militant struggles of the adivasis and fight unitedly against the machinations of the Indian ruling classes and their mentors abroad.

http://www.bannedthought.net/India/PeoplesMarch/PM1999-2006/archives/2006/Jan2k6/DK.htm
Volume 7, No. 7, August-September-October, 2006


Government Prepares for a Massive Clamp Down on Maoists


As though the butchery of Maoists in AP and Dandakaranya are not enough the Hitlerian state prepares for a massive crackdown on Naxalites to please their imperialist and comprador masters.

In AP the fake encounter of the AP State secretary of the party, Com. Madhav, is just the latest in the series of ruthless brutality of the state. This was preceded by the massacre of nine comrades in Rayalseema in end April 2006 followed by four killed a few days later on May 1st; the butchery of eight in Mahboobnagar; the killing of state secretariat leader, com Shridhar and two others; and now the state secretary of the party together with another seven to eight. In all the incidents senior leaders of the CPI(Maoist) Party have been martyred. But not satisfied with this level of brutality the AP government is demanding the introduction of the Army.

In the DK area since the Salwa Judum terror was started last June over 250 innocent villagers have been massacred by the marauders. But here the Maoists have been able to effectively hit back. The latest action at Errabore village of Dantewada district in which about 33 SPOs and Salwa Judum lumpens were wiped out, and the camp destroyed, under the very nose of the CRPF, have created even greater panic in the rulers, with the Chhathisgarh government also demanding the introduction of the army.

In Bihar over hundred have been arrested over the last few months and Jharkhand extensive combing operations are going on. Both the states have already beefed up their forces. Yet both the states have also been demanding the introduction of the Army.

It was not surprising therefore that on August 9th at a top secret conclave top brass of the Naxalite affected states and para-military forces gathered at Bhatinda (in Punjab) and held a high level meeting with the army authorities at the local military station. The participation of senior police officials of AP, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhathisgarh was reported. It was attended by various DGPs, ADGPs, IGs, and even some of SP rank officials from these four states, along with officials from the Indian army, the CRPF and the Intelligence Bureau. The meeting was also attended by the Punjab DGP.

In addition the Centre has allocated five of the most sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles, latterly purchased from Israel, to spy on the Maoist camps and bomb them. These are being allocated to all the effected Maoist states.

While all other meetings, and there have been a series of them, have been held under the auspices of the Home Ministry, this was the first to be initiated by the army in their own headquarters. In fact the Union Home Secretary, V.K.Duggal, appears to have become an expert on planning and execution of anti-Naxalite activities. In just the last few months he has held a series of such meetings.

In end April itself at a meeting chaired by Union Home Secretary, V.K.Duggal, and attended by the Chhatisagrh Chief Secretary and DGP, besides KPS Gill, CRPF Chief and IB top brass a tentative plan was chalked out to be vetted by KPS Gill.

But the action at Errabore upset these plans and new plans were chalked out at a hurriedly called meeting by the Union Home Secretary, V.K.Duggal. Present at this meeting were Chhathisgarh Chief Secretary, IB Director, CRPF Director General, and senior officials of the MHA. At this meeting the Centre proposed full time arming of the SPOs, consolidation of the camps by bringing down the numbers, drawing up of a proper security plan for the ‘relief’ camps of SJ lumpens, strengthening of local intelligence and also enhancing the number of the CRPF.

A few days later, on July 21st yet again a high level meeting was held in Bubhaneshwar which was attended by the Chief Secretaries and DGPs of the Naxalite affected states.

And so the preparations for an even more ruthless offensive are taking place. Even the web site of this independent magazine has been illegally banned. Though this is a legally registered magazine the rulers have banned the web site sine May 15th.

Two states, Orissa and Jharkhand, have recently banned the Maoist Party and many mass organisations. This was done in a crude and blatant manner to placate the mining mafia don, Laxmi Mittal. The latter, on a recent visit to these states, had openly threatened that he cannot be expected to invest such large sums in his mining projects unless the Naxalites are crushed. Obviously the army and police are to be used for the service of the likes of the Mittals, TNCs and the big time compradors. This fact should not be missed by those who tend to equate the violence of the revolutionaries with that of the state.

Unfortunately some human rights activists are unable to understand the ruler’s game-plan in this Salwa Judum campaign of using tribals as cannon fodder and tend to condemn both the State and Naxalites for the deaths of tribals. If they do not want innocent tribals not to be killed they should first talk of their upliftment where thousands and thousands die each year out of hunger, disease and poverty. This is no less a brutal violence against the lives of the people. In areas of naxalite influence for the first time ever the tribals saw a better life — of dignity and self-respect. For the first time ever they saw an end of their inhuman exploitation and were able to better their standard of living.

The masses of the country and all progressives need to strongly demand of the government to stop the use of the para-military and the proposed use of the army against its own people. Of course the oppressed masses will resist any onslaught on them by these forces and beat back their offensive however ruthless it may be.


http://www.bannedthought.net/India/PeoplesMarch/PM1999-2006/archives/2006/Aug2k6/Massive%20Clamp%20Down.htm
Volume 7, No. 7, August-September-October, 2006


PM’s Vidarbha ‘Package’ a Big Hoax


The Prime Minister’s visit to the cotton belt of Vidarbha in early July was a big hoax for the cotton growing farmers of the area. The so-called package had virtually nothing for the affected farmers and so it was quite natural the number of suicides have in fact gone up after his visit. Though crores were spent for this show-piece visit the outcome was nothing. For the meeting with a select 35 farmers at Waifad in Wardha district, a special helipad was built; massive security was put in place in every corner of the village and enroute, and he was accompanied with an entourage of officials and politicians.

Meanwhile suicide deaths continue at an even faster rate. Rural distress is increasing. While the PM’s ‘package’ will only be a boon to the big farmer, the seed company, the textile magnates, the banks and moneylenders.

The major amount of the ‘package’ of Rs.3,750 crores comprised Rs.2,177 crores for 82 major and 442 minor irrigation works. This was anyhow part of existing programmes and was nothing new. Anyhow, even if implemented, it would only irrigate a further 3% of the area where the irrigated land at present adds up to a mere 11%. But while supposedly giving this benefit the PM was totally silent on the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Act, 2005 which puts irrigation beyond the reach of all except corporate farmers. It compels farmers to use drip irrigation and could raise irrigation costs by thousands of rupees per acre. Those unable to pay the huge hikes in the offing could be fined of up to ten times the new charges. So what is the purpose of even this limited irrigation for the poor and middle peasants with such an Act in place?

Then, another part of the package is Rs.180 crores for "seed replacement". This is nothing but a gift to the multinational Monsanto whose Bt cotton seeds badly failed in Vidarbha.

All that the package really gives is a Rs.712 crore waiver on the interest on bank loans. But this too will go primarily to the rich farmers to whom the bulk of the institutional loans go to; the poor being primarily dependent on the moneylenders.

So, notwithstanding all the fanfare, in the PM’s package there was little for the poor farmer, but it was, in essence, yet another step to push commercialization of agriculture in the interests of the big TNCs and compradors. In addition Rs.50 lakhs has been given to each of the six collectors of the region for immediate relief. One knows how such funds are primarily diverted to the corrupt officials.

Not even a word was mentioned on raising the price of cotton which was drastically reduced by Rs.500 per quintal last year. Even when the price was Rs.2,200 per quintal farmers were in deep distress; yet the Maharashtra government further reduced the price to Rs1,700 per quintal last year. When prices of all commodities are going up this reduction has been the major cause in the increased spurt in suicides in the current year. Not only that, there was no word from the PM to reverse the decision that now allows big corporations to freely purchase the cotton. Prices will be steadily pushed down by the powerful cartels.

In addition there was no waiver on the actual bank loans (not to mention those of the moneylender), 80% of which are up to a mere Rs.25,000. If these small loans to banks were written off it would have cost a mere Rs.1,200 crores which is insignificant compared to the massive amounts written off to big business in the name of NPAs (non-performing assets), and the huge subsidies given to seed companies. While 60% of the land has switched to Bt cotton, the use of pesticides has not reduced, in fact there has been an increase. And with this years floods a large part of the high-priced seeds have been washed away adding to the farmer’s woes.

So, the farmers are pushed deeper into the clutches of the rapacious moneylenders. Sahibrao Adhao in his suicide note profiles the state of moneylending in this belt. He says, here there is no mortgage. You just give the moneylender a straight deed of sale for your land. In theory, he returns the land when you pay up. In truth, he holds on to it even after you have paid up. In fact, he demands more money. When he was alive he made a police complaint against the moneylender for cutting down the trees on his land. The police arrested him for trying to stop the moneylender from cutting trees on land grabbed from him.

Till now in the last one year about 1,000 farmers have committed suicide in the six districts of Vidarbha. The number of suicides since the PM left Vidarbha on July 1

st is now (August 3rd) well past the 100 mark. Before his visit, 101 farmers took their lives in 49 days. The same number killed themselves in 33 days after the visit ended. That is, the rate of suicides rose from around two a day to over three each day. One in every eight hours!! This means that July 2006 saw an eight-fold increase compared to the same period last year. But, these are the understated official government figures; the actual deaths would be much higher.

In this season as pesticide spraying starts and they lie in the hands of the farmer and the debts continue to mount the number of suicides can only go up further. One must remember that the actual suicides are only the tip of the iceberg. Lakhs and lakhs would be in a similar situation but would struggle somehow to stay alive and not take the fatal step.

Meanwhile as we go to the press it is reported that even with the interest waiver the banks are not giving new loans as they are well aware that with the low price of cotton the farmers will not be able to repay the loan any way. The tragedy is that, except for a few journalists, the bulk of the media and intellectuals are silent on this horrifying tragedy unfolding in rural India. If in just one region there have been 1,000 suicides the figure in the whole country could well be imagined. The figure of the number of those killed in so-called Naxalite violence in the last one year is, according to official figures, about 500 in the last year — a small fraction of those who died by suicides. But the government and the media (also some intellectuals) make a hue and cry about it as those killed are often the pillars of the establishment or their henchmen (whether police, informers, lumpens, contractors, or village elite who have been ousted from their power base), while those who go for suicide are the helpless poverty stricken rural masses. A Salwa Judum ‘activist’ has been given a high-flying label by Mahendra Karma of being a tribal revolt (though actual a lumpen or an agent of the ousted village elder), while a Rahate in village Kavita of Amravati district, who committed suicide is a non-entity.

The cause of the suicides is basically hopelessness of the poverty stricken masses. They see no way out of their spiraling debt. They see no future for their children except to be born into debt and die in greater debt. It is this horrifying scenario that is pushing many a farmer to the brink. But if Naxalites were present they would immediately call for the abolishment of all the debt to both the banks and the moneylenders. They would build their armed forces to beat back the hoodlums of the banks/moneylenders who attempt to seize their property with the assistance of the police. There will be deaths in the process but the villagers will witness a new awakening of the possibility of a better future, if not for themselves, at least for their children. The deaths here will have a meaning, as it will give birth to a new hope, a new future. It would then be ridiculous to cry over the deaths of the rapacious moneylender or his ‘poor’ (lumpen) henchmen and police/SRP associates. Thousands of lives will be saved from suicides.

The birth pangs of any new society are indeed painful; and no amount of modern technology can do away with the pain. The Naxalites would put forward the following immediate demands: abolish all the debt of the poor and middle farmers, ban Bt cotton and kick Monsanto out of the country and punish their agents here; increase the subsidy to agriculture and raise the price of cotton to Rs.3,000 per quintal; reduce the prices of inputs; punish the moneylenders, corrupt traders, and their rapacious touts; reverse the decision to privatize sale of cotton; and compensate the small and middle farmers for the losses they have faced.

In the long term the Maoists would demand:

thorough-going land reforms and the redistribution of land along the lines of "land to the tiller"; with only 11% of the land irrigated, undertake massive irrigation works (focusing primarily on small projects); undertake projects for re-forestation, water conservation and water harvesting; encourage organic farming suited to people’s needs and not that of the market; improve health care which has reached terrible proportions today; and organise people’s committees and the entire masses so that the people can run their own lives with a new confidence.

No doubt if the Maoists were to enter the region and organise the masses along these demands they would have to face the bullets of the state for which they would have to defend themselves with their own people’s army. But what is the alternative? Is there any ‘peaceful’ answer? Or should the mass suicides continue, no doubt ‘peacefully’?

People Hit Back




http://www.bannedthought.net/India/PeoplesMarch/PM1999-2006/archives/2006/Aug2k6/Vidharba.htm
Volume 7, No. 6, July-August, 2006


Imperialist MNCs and their Indian Agents get out of Bastar!

- Sharda


This was the slogan with which the Adivasi peasants of Dandkarnaya launched a militant anti imperialist struggle as a fitting tribute to the memory of the three great revolutionary heroes, comrades Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of their martyrdom.

Defying the on going brutal campaign of suppression, the "Sulva Judum", thousands of Adivasi peasants held series of meetings in hundreds of villages all over the Dandakaranya area, distributed thousands of leaflets, pasted hundreds of posters and erected banners during the period 20th to 23th March, paying rich revolutionary tribute to the three most beloved sons of our land, comrades Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev.

Speakers at these meetings dwelled at length on the great patriotic zeal and staunch anti-imperialist stand of the three great martyr heroes, particularly emphasising that the only true tribute the people can pay in their memory is to carry forward the immortal heroes’ banner of struggle against imperialism through to the end, to wipe out once for all both imperialists and their Indian agents.

Focusing in particular on Bastar, the speakers pointed out how the imperialist plunder is going on unhindered for the past six decades and how this process is being accelerated under the impact of the globalization policies of the ruling classes.

Bastar, they pointed out, with its vast mineral and forest resources has for long been the happy hunting ground for the imperialists and their Indian agents like the Birlas, the Thapers etc. The Japanese imperialist have been plundering iron ore from Bailadilla mines from decades on, that too yet dirt cheap rates. The Indian ruling classes, forever at the service or their imperialist masters, have even constructed a railway line right from the mines all the way up to Visakhapatnam port in Andhra Pradesh – Kirundum – Waltair line – spending thousands of crores of people’s money, solely to benefit the Japanese imperialist. To further accelerate this export of the ore at a much cheaper cost of transportation, the rulers recently completed the laying of a pipeline upto Visakhapatnam, to carry the ore through the slurry method – this project was executed by one of India’s big comprador houses, the ESSAR.

Moreover, the National Mineral Development Corporation (a central government undertaking), which is the main facilitator for the Japanese imperialists in this route of looting our ore for the past four decades, recently concluded another agreement to continue to supply ore for ten more years – which is certain to be extended until all the mines are totally depleted. This, the speakers pointed out, happened at a time when 112 iron industries of the small and medium sector, located in Chattisgarh, closed down as the raw material was beyond their reach – they had to pay four times the rate at which Japan is purchasing the ore. This is in essence is the patriotism of our rulers, the speakers pointed out – the rulers are feeding more and more iron ore to satiate the hunger of Japanese steal industries, while pushing national industries out of existence by denying than the raw material. The BJP government in Chattisgarh, for all it’s rhetoric about "Swadeshi", did not lift even a finger to rescue these Indian industries, which are dying out. Moreover it is busy signing MoUs with big comprador houses like the Tatas, the Jindals, the ESSARs, selling away all the forest and mineral wealth of Bastar forever. Thus, the speakers urged the masses, unless they stand up and fight for the retention of their traditional right of ownership over the land, water and mineral resources of Bastar, the entire Koya (or Gond) race will get trampled out of existence.

This, the speakers emphasised, was the background and one of the main reasons for the launching of the genocidal ‘Salva Judam’ campaign.

Since, the people of the Dandakaranya, during the last 25 years of the revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the Maoists, have not only vanished all institutions of the exploitive state from their area but also started building their own organs of peoples power – the Janathana Sircars - including military organs, with good capabilities. Moreover through this process they not only accepted their traditional right of ownership of their land and are firmly determined to defend their right. So, the rulers at the state and centre were in a quandary, as they were not in a position to hand over DK on a platter to the compradors and the imperialist MNCs. So, the speakers explained, the state government, with the active backing of the centre, launched the genocidal Salva Judum campaign, aiming to achieve their objectives. The firstbeing to try to wipe out the revolutionary movement led by the Maoists, under which the people were running their own organs of power, and the other is to wipe out villages one after the other and forcefully herd the people in new settlements located on highways, so that, the MNCs, and the comprador houses will have all the forest areas for their free exploitation and will, in addition, have a vast reserve of uprooted Adivasi peasants as a cheap source of labour. As such, the speaker pointed out the fight against Salva Judum is in essence a fight against the imperialists and their Indian agents. The speakers urged the Adivasi masses to act as the true inheritors of the anti imperialist struggle legacy of comrades Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Shukhdev by defeating Salva Judum, thus dealing a telling blow to the imperialists and their Indian agents.

Enthused by this, the Adivasi masses responded with a firm resolve "Come what may, we will certainly defeat the Salva Judum !", "We will not allow Bailadilla ore to be exported to Japan !", "It must be supplied to the national industries only!". The people then gave a call to the owners of local industries "Come join hands with us in the fight against the imperialism!"

Having taken this pledge they immediately went in to action. The Koya Bhumkal militia of Bailadilla, at first, conducted an extensive campaign against the policies of the NMDC, which is exporting iron ore depriving the local industries of this ore and thus leading to their closure. They distributed leaflets and pasted posters about this. There after they raided the Banse railway station on the Krundul-Waltair line, blasted a railway engine, due to the impact of which the warhead electric traction also got damaged. There they removed rails to a length of 30th meters. Meanwhile the Koya Bhumakal militia, roared that they are the rightful owners of all lands, water and mineral resources, burnt a conveyer belt at Bachali to a length of fifty meters. Than another batch of this militia blasted a tower carrying 220 KV(HT) electricity supply lines near Barsoor in protest against the state and central government negligence towards the closer of the 110 industries.

Finally, the entire DK area observed a Bundh on March 23rd as a militant anti imperialist protest in commemoration of the 75th martyrdom day of the three great anti imperialist patriots.


http://www.bannedthought.net/India/PeoplesMarch/PM1999-2006/archives/2006/July2k6/MNCs.htm
Accoring to the cultue and tradition of tribal people have the entertaintment programmes of Dance and songs. The chief attraction is the evening dance and songs. Though tribal people talk in the own language at home, they use regional language in the market places.

All the tribe adopt music as one of the chief items of amusement and during peak festival season it becomes their main occupation.They are very fond of music and a varity of crude instruments, stringed, and percussive are in use. Women sing in chorus when working in the fields, and men and boys while away in the lonely hours of watching cattle by warbling to themselves plaintive melodies on bamboo flutes or twanging a two stringed mandolin provided with a dried gound for a sounding board. Dancing is however, the dirversion of which all men and women alike are most passionately fond. In time of festivals dancing parties begin at nightfall, last whole night and continue even through the following day. Each tribe has its own particulr dance. The best efforts of the Kondhs are clumsy beside those of some of the tribes. Tribes like Bondas, Gadabas, Kondhs and Koyas have their own distinctive music and musical instruments. The preparation and manipulation of some of these instruments are done with such skill that, exteremely simple though they are, it becomes almost impossible to emulate them. In each tribe different type of music are prescribed for different seasons and different occasions.

On the whole, the Bondas keep their own rules fairly well. they observe the taboos on incest or adultery and their religious obligations with such fidelity that the few exceptions are long remembered. The Bonda spent a great deal of time on their religion and its feasts and holidays are an important part of Bonda life which can hardly be understood apart from them.Cetrain features are common to every festival. The religious occusions are real festivals and holidays; dancing accompanies each festival and there are some relaxation of rules which forbid men and women of the same village to dance together. At every festival there is a routine worship or placeation of every demigod and demon in the calendar. The chief festival amoung the Kondh is the Kedu festival which was once associated with human sacrifice. At present a buffalo is sacrificied in place of the human victim.

Hunting is one of the people's favourite recreations. In the hot season and especially in the month of "Chaitra", when all the world makes holiday, organized beats are held in which all the men and boys of the village take part, armed with bows and arrows, axes or spears and occasionally with matchlocks and slay any live things, irrespective of age or sex, which they may meet in the forest. Such expeditions, as a matter of course, culminate in a feast and earouse inthe village.

The Koyas have an interesting dance i which the men tie buffalo or bison horns on their heads and engage in mimic fight; their women also dance prettily in a ring with their hands in each other's shoulder.

At a Parojas dance all the girls and the younger married women of the village form themselves into a chain, each maiden passing her right hand behind the next girls back and grasping the left elbow of the third. The girls arrange themselves carefuly according to size, the youngest, who are generally nine and ten years old, at one end and at other the leader of the crops de ballet who carries a boton of pecocks feathers in her right hand to mark the time. Three or four men take their stand in the middle of the dancing floor and strike up song which they accompany on their mandolins while the long chain of girls linked together and moving in perfect time, follow the leader with her, swaying baton, through an intricate searies of sinuous lines, curvest spirals, figures-of-eight and then unnavel themselves back into line again.The chain of comenly young maidens dressed in their hair neatly oiled and decked with flowers and all in the height of good humor is a picturesque and pleasing sight.

The dances of the Gadabas are simpler but no les spirited. The chain of girls, alldressed exactly alike in their red, white and blue striped sarees reaching barely halfway to the knee, and with their feet loaded with heavy chased brass anklets which they clink together in time, swings around in a circle to the accompaninet of muffled drums.The girls chant together in unison as they go around, and the time gets ever quicker and quicker, their steps longer and longer, but still perfect steps is kept until the chain breaks or the leader is exhausted.

Under the guidence of the director dances and songs were performed in the regional language. Many entertainment and cultural programmes were organised by the officials working in Dandakaranya Project. Public Relation Officers of Dandakarnya Project arranged film shows in villages. At the eneavour of the local people teachers and Government official dramas were shown in the recreation centre of District Hqrs. The Kalamandap is used for entertainment programmes. The Sakhi Dance of Ganjam was also practiced here for some time. Dashera and Kalipuja are celebrated here with much enthusiasm. During puja Bengali Opera and dramas played. At Balimela under the sponshorship Gopabandhu Cultural centre and Tamasa Art centre cultural programmes are also held. Tribal folk songs are also relayed by Jeypore Akashbani centre. Rajesh Hanshada of Anglo vaidic School at M.V.-2 participated in the Bankok Asiad Sports in Archary.



http://malkangiri.nic.in/Dance%20&%20Music.htm

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While the media have always sensationalised issues related to the Naxalite movement, for journalists like me, the actual happenings in the thick jungles have always been a mystery. Our attempt to get a first-hand look at what is happening at ground level succeeded after much effort (see accompanying story, ‘I don’t draw conclusions’). Eventually, we toured the dense forests of Bastar and Dantewada districts in an attempt to understand the working of the Janatana Sarkar (People’s Government).


There is an Alternative

‘‘WE welcome media friends to India’s first Liberated Zone in the making,’’ says the welcome note handed out by the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee the moment we enter the ‘base area’. We are also handed a document titled ‘Janatana Sarkar: Policy Statement’.

The Janatana Sarkar, we learn, is an alternative form of governance established by the Maoists after overthrowing the present Government system. Their three concerns: local administration, development and defence.



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Dandakaranya is home to various primitive tribes undivided by caste and religion. The area we visit is inhabited mostly by Gotti Koyas and Gonds, who prefer to be known as Koya Doras, after their language, Koya. Some members of the Maoist squad and a few locals who know Telugu or Hindi act as interpreters, allowing us to talk to many village elders.
‘‘Twenty years ago, when these dadas first came here, we thought they would rob us and molest our women. But they kept on visiting our villages, whether we gave them food or not. Gradually, our fears died down,’’ says one elderly villager. ‘‘In fact, harassment by village chiefs, forest and police personnel decreased after the dadas set foot here.’’

From what they say, it seems the tribals—dependent on the forest for their livelihood—were taxed or fined for everything, from grazing and firewood collection to house-constructions and weddings. The alternative was arrest.

One elderly villager tells us an interesting story: ‘‘Though we had pattas for our land, our patel told us our rights were restricted to the top six inches of that land—and it was government land below that! We were fined if we ploughed a little deeper or dug a pit.’’



Root of Reform

The idea of establishing a guerrilla zone in Dandakaranya was first mooted by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, founder of People’s War. Way back in 1979, a squad was sent here for a recce; another five squads followed the next year.

But their task was not limited to organising the tribals against atrocities. The Naxalites understood that the tribals—still dependent on gathering food—needed to develop their skill in agriculture. ‘‘Teaching them to plot, plough, manure and weed land was a herculean task,’’ recalls a long-time Maoist leader, showing off rows of nursery fields within the forest.

In the early days, after erratic rains undermined their agricultural efforts, the Naxalites came up with the idea of digging lakes, which would ensure at least one crop a year. That idea laid the foundation of today’s Janatana Sarkar: Since 1995, hundreds of such lakes have been dug in Bastar and Dantewada districts, irrigating land and breeding fish.

The Janatana Sarkar has also experimented with cooperative teams, usually comprising five families each, who work together on their own fields while the landowner claims the harvest. After many trials and errors, the system is now running successfully in many villages.

Though the very existence of private property means that society is class-based, the Maoists believe that the experiments taking place here will serve as a model for tomorrow’s classless society.



Two-Way Bond

There exists a strong bond between the Maoist party and the local people, fostered through monthly village meetings that discuss common problems and the needs of the village. It helps that a majority of squad members are from the local tribes. ‘One from each family to the People’s Army’ is the slogan of the Maoists.

The bond works both ways. To tackle malaria—a major scourge, which claims hundreds of people every season—the Janatana Sarkar has set up a small team trained to administer a few medicines and injections in each village. To simplify things, each team-member is in charge of a particular medicine. So a villager goes to one person if he has fever and to another if he has loose motions.

In return, the armed village militia act as a shield for the Maoists, the first gatekeepers for police combing squads, informers and spies.

So integrated are the Maoist squads with the adivasis’ lives that the village children play ‘Ambush’ and ‘Lal Salaam’ just as other children play ‘Chor-Police’. ‘Ambush’ pits one team playing police with sticks (guns) against another team, which surprises the first to snatch away their weapons. In the other game, the teams stand facing each other and conduct a kind of marchpast with the usual saavdhan-vishram punctuations.

FEMINISM IN THE FORESTS

At one time, it was common for Adivasis to kidnap young girls and ‘marry’ them forcibly. The Maoists played a crucial role in ending the jabardasti marriages and removing taboos that barred women from the granary and proximity to deities.Today, there are two main people’s organisations for the party in Dandakaranya: the Adivasi Kisan Majdoor Sangh and the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangh. While the first focuses on tribal agriculture, the second works on the uplift of tribal women. The Mahila Sangh won a major victory when it acquired, for married women, the right to wear a blouse. If women constitute around 30 per cent of each squad today, the Sangh gets a major share of the credit. Women head two of the five divisions of the Janatana Sarkar committee in Dandakaranya.



http://www.indianexpress.com/news/out-of-the-red/2488/0



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