On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 8:55 AM, john reed <reed2link@gmail.com> wrote:
Rally Against War on People
from Ramlila Maidan to Parliament Street
11 am, 17th December 2009, New Delhi
Dear friends,
For a vast majority of the people of our country, these are indeed
difficult times. It is not just because the prices of every commodity
in the market is rising sky high, not even because jobs are being cut
and workers are facing retrenchment, also not because health care and
education are increasingly going out of reach of the man on the
street. In this period of an all-encompassing crisis, when a vast
majority of the people in the cities and villages of this country are
struggling to procure even the basic necessities of life and to make
the ends meet, a greater and more immediate crisis is looming large on
a section of the most oppressed people of this country: the entire
population of central and eastern India. This crisis is forced upon
them because the Indian government led by Manmohan Singh and P
Chidambaram has declared war on the people, a war not against any
external enemy, but against our own people. This war however is not
going to be confined to the forested and far-off adivasi regions
alone. It will engulf the entire country and all its inhabitants,
including each one of us. In a desperate attempt to wriggle itself and
the big corporations out of the present economic crisis which has
engulfed the entire capitalist world and their dependent economies,
the Indian government is at war against the poorest and most exploited
of our people, a war that we must make all efforts to stop.
A war against the people: As a result of the government's war
preparations, a civil war situation is building up in the regions of
central and eastern India inhabited primarily by the adivasis which
include Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa,
West Bengal and adjoining areas. After Kashmir and North East, where
the Indian government has been fighting the nationality movements for
decades, it is now opening its third war front. The central government
is drawing its troops from Kashmir and the North East for deployment
in the regions where Operation Green Hunt is presently going on. More
than 100,000 soldiers of the Indian security forces are already
operating in these regions, and these forces are being increased to
2,50,000. Central paramilitary forces such as CRPF, IRB, ITBP, CISF,
along with Grey Hounds, CoBRA and other special forces, state police
and Special Police Officers, state-sponsored vigilante gangs like
Salwa Judum, Sendra, Nagarik Suraksha Samiti, Tritiya Prastuti Samiti,
Harmad Vahini, Sunlight Sena etc., all are being pitted against the
adivasi people. The special units of the army such as the Rashtriya
Rifles are being readied for deployment, air force helicopters and
drone surveillance aircrafts are brought in to strengthen the war
operations. The government is taking help of intelligence inputs from
US defense satellites too, as was revealed during the joint
paramilitary operations in Lalgarh, West Bengal. It is worth noting
that many teams of US security establishment secretly visited
Chhattisgarh in order to assess and assist in the government's war
preparations. Draconian laws like the UAPA, NSA, Chhattisgarh Public
Securities Act etc. has been put in place to silence all voices of
resistance and dissent and to give the security forces a license to
kill without impunity, as AFSPA has been used in Kashmir and North
East. This is in addition to the state's routine acts of extra-legal
murders through fake encounters and custodial killings, of using
torture, rape and arson as means to crush the people's resistance
against exploitation and repression in all these regions. The results
of these acts by the government have already started to take its toll.
The war has begun: After the war was started on 1st November this
year, the casualty among the people is escalating by each passing day,
as grows the number of burnt villages, persons displaced, injured or
arrested, as per the sporadic news from the war zone that through the
media. By mid-November, more than 12 villages have been completely
ravaged, their inhabitants forced to take shelter deep in the forests.
Two separate incidents of mass killings took place in Dandakaranya and
one in Orissa, in which more than 17 adivasis were murdered by the
government's armed forces. There are reports that thousands of
adivasis are abandoning their houses in Chhattisgarh and migrating to
adjoining Andhra Pradesh after the Operation Green Hunt was launched.
The renewed offensive by the joint forces in Lalgarh too has left
hundreds of protesting adivasis homeless. The brutalities of the
government forces are increasing by every passing day as can also be
seen in Narayanpatna, Orissa. Last month, adivasi peasants
demonstrating for land rights were fired at by the police killing two
of their leaders. Seventy two people were arrested on cooked-up
charges. Cantonments are being built and school buildings are being
used to station Security Forces in these areas. Likewise, three
districts in UP in adjoining Allahabad have been declared
'Naxal-infested', and a meeting of peasants and workers was disallowed
by the government. No open meeting is now allowed in this region. And
these are only two examples of state terror unleashed during the
present war. Given these developments, the number of dead and injured
people along with the displaced and destroyed villages will only mount
in the coming weeks if the Indian government does not call for an
immediate halt to this military offensive against the people, against
our fellow citizens. And the government is not going to stop this war
on its own, it can only be stopped by building up a strong people's
resistance against it.
Whose war and against whom? The declared aim of this war
is to 're-establish the sovereign rule of the Indian state' by
clearing off these areas from the Naxalites or Maoists. However, this
war is being fought by the Indian government at the behest of the
corporates and for their benefit, targeting the life and livelihood of
lakhs of adivasis. The worldwide imperialist economy presently faces
its most severe crisis after 1929. The military-industrial complex,
which includes multinational and Indian big business interests, is
looking for wars that have the potential to artificially generate the
much needed demand for their products in a crisis-ridden market.
Moreover, this war is an attempt to forcibly displace the adivasis
from their ancestral homeland and hand over their land and forests to
the multinational and Indian corporations who will then plunder the
rich natural resources. One of the main proponents of this war on
people is Manmohan Singh, who was an economist with the World Bank
controlled by US imperialism before he joined active politics. Till
the day of becoming the finance minister of the UPA government, P
Chidambaram was a member of the Board of Directors in Vedanta, the
British mining multinational. He was also the lawyer of the notorious
US electricity corporation, Enron. Both Singh and Chidambaram have
been die-hard advocates of foreign investment to the country, the two
foremost agents of US imperialism in the country. Three years back in
June 2006, the prime minister told the parliament that 'the
environment for foreign investment is going to be severely affected if
left-wing extremism continues to grow and expand in the mineral-rich
regions of the country'. This makes it very clear in whose interest
the government is waging this war. This at the same time his war is to
crush all forms of resistance against the policies of the government.
In the pretext of war, the government has imposed an undeclared
emergency, and is curbing the democratic rights of the citizens
guaranteed by the Constitution. Right to free speech and opinion is
restricted or is denied outright, the media is being muffled, bribed
and censored to ensure that only the government's version gets
publicity. A situation already exists in many parts of the country
where any protest or dissent against government policies is branded as
anti-national or 'against the national interests', where all forms of
resistance is termed as 'Naxalism' or 'Maoist', and persecuted.
After 'liberalisation' in 1991, and particularly from the
year 2001 there has been a scramble among various state governments to
outsmart one another in inviting foreign investors and big business
houses of the country to their respective states, and to conclude
hundreds of agreements and Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs). In
Jharkhand itself, more than 100 MoUs were signed by the state
government with Mittal, Jindal, Tata, RioTinto and other foreign and
Indian big corporations in the last nine years involving mining
projects, steel and aluminum plants, electricity plants, dams, and so
on. In Orissa too, companies like Vedanta, POSCO, RioTinto, Tata,
Hindalco, Jindal and Mittal are eyeing for the unexplored natural
resources. The BJP government in Chhattisgarh has already concluded
many agreements with big corporations to set up Special Economic Zones
(SEZs) in the mining sector. In these three states alone, agreements
worth Rs.873,896 crores of investment in various projects have been
concluded till September 2009. In addition, the people of Bengal,
Maharashtra, etc. too are facing the forceful acquisition of land,
leading to an outburst of people's anger and protests. There are many
more MoUs, the information of which the government has been hiding
from public view.
The most oppressed of our people and their resources are
the targets of this war: Exploited and dispossessed continually by the
feudal forces as well as by British colonialism, the adivasis who have
been systematically robbed of their natural resources, have continued
to pay the heaviest price for 'national interest' even in the
post-1947 period. They have been forced to give up their land and
forests for big projects, be it for mining or for big dams. Even
though constituting about 10 percent of the country's population, the
adivasis constitute more than 40 percent of the 5 crore people
displaced by such projects in the last six decades. The rich of the
country have become richer by plundering the adivasi land, who
themselves have remained the poorest of people. They are among the
people who come to our towns, build our houses, construct your metro,
work on our roads… people who paid with their land, homes and lives
for the benefit of a few. Theirs are the land where our steel, coal,
electricity comes from, but has got nothing in return. The rulers have
been mindlessly selling away the most precious minerals of the country
to the MNCs to extract super-profits at a time when minerals have
become scarce anywhere in the world. The government intensified its
onslaught on the people soon after the agreements and MoUs were
concluded, and the adivasis in particular subsequently became the
targets of state terror.
The unleashing of Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh have left hundreds of
adivasis dead, raped and mutilated, thousands of houses burnt, and
more than seven hundred villages displaced. Children were decapitated,
dead bodies of adivasi villagers were mutilated and hung from trees,
rape and violence on women was used as a means of state repression.
Around three lakh adivasis were forced to leave their villages, of
which more than fifty thousand were forcibly kept in Salwa Judum
camps. As a recent government report admits, the first of these police
camps that came up in Chattishgarh were financed by Essar and Tata.
Those who have refused to be herded into these camps or give up their
land are being all termed as 'Naxalites', and the Operation Green Hunt
launched against them. The peasants who are largely dependent on land,
forests and rivers for their livelihood, particularly the adivasis,
have refused to give up their resources for corporate plunder.
Inheritors of a glorious legacy of uncompromising anti-colonial
struggles, the adivasi masses have organized themselves against
age-old exploitation and oppression, against forcible land-acquisition
for big projects, and for defending their lives and livelihood. Both
unarmed and armed, the resistance movements of the people have been
able to beat back the brutal repression of the state, be in the form
of police-paramilitary or the Salwa Judum-Harmad. The present war is
an intensification of the offensive by the government which has so far
failed to crush the people. Though the state is presently targeting
the adivasi-inhabited regions for its war offensive, this war is not
against the adivasis alone. It is against all the oppressed people who
have chosen the path of resistance. Nor is it only against the Maoists
and or all Naxalites, but is against any and every people's movement
and organization that questions or challenges the imperialist-dictated
policies of the government at the centre or the state.
All the democratic and progressive forces of the country
must come together to resist this war. We need to demand that the
Indian government must stop this war on people, followed by an
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of its armed forces from these
regions. We must demand that all the MoUs and agreements with foreign
multinationals and Indian corporations for the plunder of natural
resources of the people must be scrapped, and the land forcibly
acquired for such projects must be restored to their rightful owners.
The rights of the people over land and forests must also be
acknowledged.
Participate in large numbers in the RALLY AGAINST WAR ON
PEOPLE on 17th Dec. 2009 from Ramlila Maidan to Parliament Street
(Assemble at Ramlila Maidan, 11 am).
Forum Against War on People
Contact: Mob. 9971164713, Email: stopwaroncitizens@gmail.com
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