>
>
> Interview: India's Operation Green Hunt
>
>
> 11 January 2010. A World to Win News Service. In the following
> interview, conducted in London last Noveber, G. N. Saibaba, General
> Secretary of the Revolutionary Democratic Front of India, gives his
> views on Operation Green Hunt, an Indian government offense against
> Maoist revolutionaries in the hills and forests of central and eastern
> India. It has been excerpted and somewhat condensed.
>
>
>
> Q: Why has the Indian government decided to escalate its offensive
> against the revolutionaries in India on such a huge scale right now?
>
>
>
> A: The particular context actually expresses the hidden agenda of the
> Indian government. During the past five years, it has been very busy
> making agreement called memorandums of understanding, MOUs, with many
> foreign and domestic companies, but mainly for foreign investment. These
> agreements are mainly for large-scale mining projects and industrial
> projects in special economic zones. Vast areas within India, both rich
> agricultural fields and areas rich with minerals like Jharkand, Orissa,
> Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal were agreed upon. But in the
> past five years one could see widespread resistance to land acquisition
> for these projects, with or without the leadership of the Naxalites
> [Maoists], both in the areas where these minerals are found and
> elsewhere. As a result, most of the revolutionary forces working in
> these areas have gone from strength to strength, and the Indian
> government recognises that the Communist Party of India (Maoist)
> benefited most from the resistance to the land acquisition process. This
> is clearly mentioned in Home Ministry reports.
>
>
>
> Now after five years of this resistance, when the government understands
> that none of these agreements have gotten off the ground due to the
> resistance of these movements of the people, now in the name of flushing
> out the Naxalites or Maoists they want to actually acquire this land.
> They want to go to war with the people, and in the name of fighting the
> Naxalites, whom they also call terrorists, the CPI(Maoist) has been
> banned under a particular law called the Unlawful Activities Prevention
> Act, the UAPA, an amended colonial act. Using this kind of terror
> tactics and colonial laws, they have already created an atmosphere where
> they have demonised these people. Now they have declared a war, but
> their real intention is to take over the vast areas that are under the
> control of the revolutionary movement to a large extent, and in other
> regions where there is resistance with or without Naxalites. They have
> used organs of repression before, torturing the people, terrorising the
> people and creating the Salwa Judum, a kind of private army created by
> the authorities. But none of these low-intensity warfare techniques
> promoted by the U.S. worked. So now they want to launch a full-scale
> war. Their hidden agenda is to hand over these natural resources, land
> and forests, to the multinational companies. That is their real agenda.
>
>
>
> Q: Could you tell us a little more about tribal people in these area?
>
>
>
> A: The tribal people or adivasis live in the areas and the hilly
> regions of central and eastern India and some other areas. They have
> their own economy, their own culture and traditions, and religion. They
> are outside the Hindu caste system. Traditionally they have never really
> become part of what is called mainstream India. Their economy remained
> based on food gathering, animal husbandry and primitive agricultural
> methods. They revolted against the British and never allowed them to
> take over their lands. After independence in 1947, the Indian government
> came up with a constitution that provided specific laws and provisions
> recognising their distinct cultures. There are hundreds of tribes. Each
> tribe has its own identity and mechanisms, with a tribal economy
> dependent on forest produce. The Constitution does not allow the Indian
> government to apply the same laws there as in the rest of the country,
> and the specific conditions have to be taken into account, though the
> Indian government has always violated this.
>
>
>
> They are the poorest of the poor, and in the past years at least 20
> million of them have been displaced for various projects. Their
> experience is that their brethren who have been displaced from their
> areas have never been able to go back – it is a lot like what
> happened in the U.S. with the Red Indians, or what happened with the
> aboriginal people in Australia and New Zealand. They are almost 100
> million people, and most of them are now facing destitution and
> decimation.
>
>
>
> Traditionally the tribal people took up arms. They had a great history
> of armed struggle against the British. The Naxalbari uprising [the 1967
> peasant rebellion from which the Indian Maoist movement emerged, named
> after the West Bengal village where it started] was a tribal uprising.
> Later Marxist-Leninist groups in India chose and entered these areas to
> organise these adivasis, after studying the history of the armed
> rebellions, and because they are the most backward regions where the
> Indian state could not penetrate.
>
>
>
> Of course the Marxist-Leninists and the Maoist movements are not limited
> to these areas in India, though they are there predominantly. There's
> one part of the story about Indian revolutionaries that holds that they
> represent only adivasis – they do represent adivasis, but it is not
> restricted to that.
>
>
>
> The Lalgarh movement in its present phase started as a spontaneous
> movement against police repression and the West Bengali government and
> the CPI-Marxist. [Contrary to its name, the so-called Communist Party of
> India-Marxist is a reactionary party. It runs the state of West Bengal
> and is part of the central government. It is infamous for its attempts
> to violently suppress the people and imprison and kill revolutionaries]
> . The CPI(Maoist) has been there for the last 12 years, organising among
> the Lalgarh people. A major development project was planned there, and
> the West Bengal chief minister, along with the project officials, went
> to inaugurate the project. As they were returning, the Maoists tried to
> blast his car but he escaped. The government used that as a pretext for
> sending a huge number of troops there in the name of catching the
> Maoists responsible for that blast. But the troops resorted to major
> atrocities against the tribals, and this provoked mass resistance. So
> since the Maoists were already there, this resistance grew from village
> to village.
>
>
>
> The kind of movement that developed is very interesting – it's a
> mass movement involving everyone of all ages, from child to the elderly,
> women and men. Each village formed a committee, a People's Committee
> against Police Atrocities. Each committee is composed of five women and
> five men. This happened initially in 1,100 villages, and then spread to
> 2,000 or even more today. A cluster of villages will have another
> committee, sending one woman and one man from each smaller committee..
> So there is this other committee that also has an equal representation
> of men and women, and each decision to take a rally or protest or arms,
> everything is decided by the committee. And the committees are
> responsible for the general welfare of the village. All the committees
> sit together and decide on what date will a rally be held, when or if
> they must take up arms, with the elders sitting there, and the general
> body of the village.
>
>
>
> The Maoists have existed there, and were part of the villages. This mass
> formation is at the forefront always. The Maoists gave quiet training,
> whatever was needed – though the local tribals who are themselves
> Maoists are leading sections.
>
>
>
> Lalgarh comprises only a small part of a region as big as Great Britain
> – and the movement spread throughout this region. The initial
> demands of the tribals was that those police officials who were
> responsible for atrocities should be punished. And they decided the form
> of the punishment: the officials should come to the villages and
> apologise, particularly in the face of the victims, things like that.
> Then when the entire existing administrative structure was thrown out of
> the region, they started constructing a new society, building roads,
> digging wells, distributing land, creating collective agricultural
> formations – this all happened within a year. They have started
> schools, hospitals, they've invited doctors and nurses from outside.
> They are trying to build self-reliant means of establishing everything,
> crops, vegetables, schools, hospitals, cooperatives, developing
> agriculture collectively. The women's movement came within this when
> they didn't get an equal opportunity in it. This is a new social
> movement and it's taken this kind of shape. At the back of it the
> Maoists are there, and they are no one other than they themselves,
> unlike what the Indian government is saying that they're infiltrating
> from outside, which is totally untrue. At the most, a few people are
> there from outside, the rest of the leaders are from there own
> community.
>
>
>
> Q: So you are saying that this movement and the Maoist leadership is out
> to change the world, to build an embryo of a new revolutionary society
> – isn't one of the goals of the Indian movement to go in and smash
> that kind of revolutionary dream?
>
>
>
> A: When I talked of the new society taking shape in Lalgahr, there are
> other larger experiments taking place in other parts of the country,
> especially over the last decade. In Chhattisgarh, Orissa, parts of
> Jharkand – these are all tribal areas, and they have had consistent
> movements for more than two decades. The Maoists entered these areas
> about 30 years ago, and in the last twenty years they have built up
> movements in vast areas. The area around Lalgarh is in fact small
> compared to all this. Thy have already built new societies throughout
> these areas I named above. And the government clearly wants to smash the
> revolutionary alternative in these areas. The CPI(Maoist) clearly
> declared that they wanted to expand to other areas only after showing a
> model of a new society in these particular areas. And they have declared
> that they can influence the vast majority of masses of India by showing
> a new society already working there..
>
>
>
> The first attempts were started in Chhattisgarh where thousands of
> villages were freed from the exploiting classes, the feudal classes and
> their ruling elements, the police, the army, the state, and people have
> elected governments in village after village, called revolutionary
> people's councils, thousands of villages in Chhattisgharh and Jharkand,
> hundreds of villages in Orissa, thousands in Andhra Pradesh, and they
> still have their own governments, they are directly elected by the
> majority of people. The few handfuls of five or six ruling class
> elements who decided to remain will not have the right to vote; they
> have to accept the government of the people. This government has
> different departments for health and education. They have started
> producing food grains, establishing agricultural cooperatives. The
> people decide themselves, all the decisions are referred back to the
> people's committees, and all the committees, including the militias and
> armed forces and so on, will work under the control of the people's
> government.
>
>
>
> After some years of this experiment, for the first time one could see
> that irrigation projects are made, in huge numbers, whereas the
> government of India in six decades never paid any attention to
> irrigation projects there. Drinking water projects were made, hundreds
> of schools have been started, health care systems at the village and
> higher levels have been made, the illiterate adivasis were trained by
> experienced doctors from outside and inside, for each village there's
> one barefoot doctor in a cluster of villages, and the healthcare clinics
> are working continuously. The educational system includes regular
> schools, makeshift schools – which move from time to time when the
> children have to work in some other area – and adult schools. They
> have their own syllabus. The syllabus is framed according to scientific
> models using outside and internal educational experts, and a grade by
> grade syllabus is made. All the world-famous scientific models of study
> material, including audiovisual material, have been translated into the
> tribal languages and then used in the education.
>
>
>
> Further, for the first time in the history of these regions, they have
> surplus grain – not only for the revolutionary army, which is called
> the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army, but for the people too. Even now
> if the Indian military offensive blocks these areas for several years
> they will not have a problem due to this surplus grain, and in addition
> they have fish ponds and other income-generating activities. These
> villages and their governments have started exporting to other markets
> as well, keeping the surplus for their own consumption, and using the
> surplus they have accumulated to build other development projects. This
> is the way in which their self-reliant economy is developing, which is
> not dependent on imperialism or on any other outside areas. This is the
> way that they wanted to show that socialism, a new society, can emerge
> from these kinds of areas, so that the entire country can take
> inspiration for socialism.
>
>
>
> Q: What about these accusations that these movements are blocking the
> economic and overall development of the Indian people?
>
>
>
> A: The Maoists don't view these so-called development projects as
> beneficial to the people. They see this particular kind of development
> as for the superprofits of the multinational corporations through the
> superexploitation of the people's labour. They will degrade the land,
> and lead to the people being thrown off the land. So this is
> pro-imperialist development which benefits a section of the ruling
> classes in India and the imperialists, monopoly capital. The Indian
> government has announced that the movement is blocking these projects
> and will be harmful to the people of the region and the entire country.
> But it is development for the corporate sector, and the people are
> offering an alternative vision of development, and they are doing it
> practically, on the ground. There is no case of real government
> development programmes being blocked by the Maoists. For example, if the
> government tries to build a school or hospital, then the Naxalites will
> never block it. Or if they are building something for the people's
> economy – but of course the government has no intention of carrying
> out development projects for the benefit of the people. In addition to
> these projects for the benefit of the multinational corporations, the
> only other kind of development projects the government plans are vast
> projects for roads in the interior areas, to bring in the army and
> security forces, which definitely the people stop and block.
>
>
>
> The question is, what development model has the Indian government
> adopted for the past 60 years? It is a pro-imperialist development
> model, which serves the imperialists by giving resources and raw
> materials to them
>
>
>
> It is better for the people of India and the whole world if the minerals
> remain underneath the hills and the forests, for two reasons. One, if
> you want to mine these minerals you will have to displace the adivasis
> and you will not have any system where they will be fully rehabilitated.
> And the ruling class has no right to displace them – it is their
> natural habitat. Second, another major reason why the minerals should
> not be exploited is that not only will the people be displaced, but that
> these are vulnerable fragile forest and hilly areas, and if you exploit
> them there will be irreparable damage to the countryside. It will cause
> major upheaval for climate change and warming, and the Indian
> subcontinent would never recover. It would have a major impact on the
> entire subcontinent. So for environmental reasons and the reasons of
> people's lives, these should not be exploited. But there are ways in
> which these minerals could be mined in minor ways, ways that would not
> aggravate the situation and displace the people. They could be used in
> small quantities for the benefit of the people, but that would have to
> be decided by the people of the region themselves, and not by outsiders.
>
>
>
> Q: How do you answer the charge of terrorism that the Indian government
> is hurling against the Maoists?
>
>
>
> A: The Indian government has come up with a law stating that the
> CPI(Maoist) are terrorists. But there is widespread acceptance that the
> Maoist movement is a people's movement, and there is no acceptance among
> the people to call them terrorists. It's a charge that is totally
> untrue, for there is no activity they conduct that could be called
> terrorist. They are working for the people and for their liberation.
> They do not want the country to be split into parts, except for Kashmir
> and some states where national liberation movements are very strong.
> This is a social and political movement, it is based on a political
> ideology, Marxism, which at its present stage is called Maoism, and they
> want to conduct social transformation by defeating the ruling classes,
> the comprador bourgeoisie and bureaucrat bourgeoisie and feudal class
> that are ruling this country, and to establish an egalitarian society.
> So they are the most humanist people, with a particular class ideology,
> working class ideology, and they are a political force. This is the real
> opposition to the ruling classes in India, which is building an
> alternate development model, and so they cannot be called terrorist. The
> Indian government wants to influence the middle classes and broader
> strata by calling the Maoists terrorists.
>
>
>
> Very recently the Prime Minister of India, when declaring this war, also
> admitted that the Maoists have huge mass support, including from the
> urban areas, but at the same time he is declaring war. So this is a
> major contradiction that can be shown to the people, and the government
> has been forced by the people to admit that the Maoists have this
> support from the people and the intelligentsia. The Home Minister, who
> comes out every day with a statement against the CPI(Maoist) and the
> Naxalites, has acknowledged that the government cannot deal with the
> Maoists in the same way as it does certain other organisations that he
> has termed terrorist. There is a big contradiction in the government's
> statements: while agreeing that there is mass support and making this
> distinction with other groups that they call terrorists, they at the
> same time talk about the Maoists as terrorists.
>
>
>
> Thousands of prominent people from all over the world have signed a
> petition against the Indian government's offensive.. It has been handed
> to the PM and released to the press. There is a vast protest that is
> being galvanised in every city and town in India, hundreds of
> conferences have been held against the military offensive,
> demonstrations are being held all over the country.
>
>
>
> The Maoists are appealing to these people, saying that if they have
> these differences they should be sorted out amongst the people, but this
> is a time to come together against the state offensive. So there is a
> debate.
>
>
>
> Q: Could you say something about the role of the U.S. and the West in
> regards to this offensive?
>
>
>
> A: The Home Minister, the minister responsible for internal security,
> had gone to the U.S. and stayed there for a whole week. He stayed in an
> office of the FBI and according to reports in the U..S. and Indian media
> spent four days there. And after he returned from the U.S., he said that
> this military offensive was very necessary in order to conquer, hold and
> develop the regions. This is the same slogan as is used by the U.S.
> military generals in Afghanistan, and is now being used to refer to this
> war being prepared against India's people.
>
>
>
> Four years ago, when the Memorandum of Understanding was signed, two
> members of the U.S. military establishment went around these areas, that
> is, the Maoist strongholds, to conduct a survey. Before that they came
> to Mumbai, where they met with U.S. consular officials, along with
> Indian industrialists who were partners in these projects. A major
> meeting took place there. They then went to Chhattisgarh. When it came
> out in the newspapers that these military strategists were travelling
> around this area, a big hue and cry erupted, and they had to cut short
> their trip after two days, and then they left.
>
>
>
> Soon afterwards, the Indian government announced that the Salwa Judum
> militia would fight the Maoists. They unleashed terror and caused the
> emptying of 700 villages. Interestingly, these were villages that were
> in plans signed for major projects. They wanted to vacate more. They
> displaced 300,000 tribals, burning down many villages, thousands were
> killed, and the rest were herded into camps and the like. Very
> interestingly, the major companies that had big stakes in U.S.
> investment, could not establish anything in those areas because control
> of those areas fell back into the hands of the Maoists within months.
>
>
>
> The latest evidence of U.S. involvement is that the Indian government
> has conceded that the U.S. is providing logistic support for this war.
> What does that mean? They are using the U.S. global positioning systems
> in order to mobilise their troops and to locate the Maoists in the
> forests. The U.S. is helping to map the deployment of forces on the
> ground, and while they're doing this, from time to time the U.S. is
> providing support for the movement of Indian forces, according to Indian
> government statements. I don't think U.S. support is just limited to
> mapping deployments and the like, it is much more than that.
>
>
>
> Recently Prime Minister Mahmohan Singh went to the U.S. and met with
> Obama. That led to a new agreement to buy huge amounts munitions and
> other military supplies from the US, in the amount of 18 billion
> dollars.
>
>
>
> Israel is providing drones. It has also trained a huge number of Indian
> forces, and is continuing to do this. Last month the U.S. and Indian
> armies held joint military exercises in the heart of India, the centre
> of the country, which lasted more than a month. The press reported that
> the Indian armed forces have gained training from the experience of the
> U.S. military's wars in different parts of the world. So U.S. support is
> more than just logistical – the joint exercises, this arms deal, the
> Israeli involvement in training the forces, and supplying the latest
> military technology, usually provided by the Israelis, but recently by
> the U.S. as well.
>
> - end item-
>
>
--
Palash Biswas
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http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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