How Chhattisgarh shames "us" – dreams , nightmares and our dark underbellies

http://www.himalmag.com/Two-faces-of-extremism_dnw228.html
Garga Chatterjee

"As a person born and brought up in Bastar I have been studying the recent happenings in this district with deep concern and I have come to the conclusion that in the long drawn out battle of nerves between the Government and you-know-who, the obvious casualty is the poor Adivasi, who has been constantly ignored and misunderstood. The Government has completely failed in understanding the sentiments of the people of this region. Economically depressed, and perpetually exploited by the urban settlers, these tribals are easy prey to the corrupt and high-handed administrative and police machinery. As a result, a permanent wedge has been driven between them and the Government. Community development schemes and tribal welfare departments of doubtful utility will not save the situation" - reads a letter by a certain S R Naidu to the editor of a weekly magazine.

Of late, most of us have heard similar views which seek to paint the state as a corrupt force, ruling by police intervention in Chhattisgarh. Such writers do not want to understand that development schemes take time to show effect and harbour sympathy for the Maoists at their root - right? Wrong. S R Naidu was really talking about Prabir Chandra Bhanj Deo, local Member of the Legislative Assembly and ex-ruler of the area. The letter was published on 6th May in NOW - a political and cultural weekly. In 1966.

Looking into the thoughts that rushed through our heads and the conclusions we made before we were told it was 1966 can give us a few insights into the automated consumers of packaged "information" we have become. None of this is new - not the packaging nor the consumption. Naxalbari in 1966 was still an unknown village in Darjeeling district. There were no armed Maoists in India then. In the 1967 general elections, in Bastar, Congress came fifth after two independents (including the winner), Jan Sangh and the Samyukta Socialist Party candidates. Times change. Or do they?

In 1967, 40 percent of the 20 million babies born in India each year were projected to eventually suffer from some degree of brain damage. The International Food Policy Research Institute in its 2008 India State Hunger Index classified the state of hunger in Chhattisgarh as "alarming". The best performance came from Punjab, classified as "serious", a notch better. An Indira Congress minister admitted to Time magazine in an interview in 1967 "we are producing millions of subhumans annually". That minister's name was Chidambaram – Chidambaram Subramanium. He died in 2000. We have a different Chidambaram – P Chidambaram ruling over this hungry multitude.Times change.

Some of the subhuman babies of 1967 are 38 years old now. What creatures have they developed into? Some of them inhabit Chhattisgarh. According to the much-denounced Arjun Sengupta commission report, in 2004-05, a total of 836 million (77 percent of the population) lived on below INR 20 a day. To people caught between 20-20, Sensex and MacAloo Tikki, these numbers come as anti-national conspiracies to denigrate the emerging giant that is India. What image are we projecting to the world - we ask detractors. Shouldn't we be united in this hour of initiation at the big table? We are preoccupied with what the world thinks of us. I wonder what do those millions of subhumans think of us - what do they think of our cafés, our news anchors, our "sufi" music, our engineering colleges, our BPO "revolution", our Dial-a-pizza.

When the sun goes down in Chhattisgarh tonight, when one of the subhuman women tries to close her eyes in sleep - what does she see. Does she dream that a four-lane highway come to her village? Are there cars on those roads? Is that me at the steering wheel of one of those cars? or is that you? How do we appear to these creatures in their dreams and nightmares - do we look human?

Abujhmad for the Gonds of Chhattisgarh is the unknown forest. For the Madia Gonds, this is their universe and reality of existence - the forest holding within itself chronicles, snake-bites, culture and much more. And this reality permeates much of Madia Desh [what is true?]. In 1978-1998, 91 percent of the Madia Gonds lived below the poverty. These are the people of whom Verrier Elwin wrote "These are the real swadeshi products of India, in whose presence all others are foreign. These are ancient people with moral rights and claims thousands of years old." Our cities are expanding - our gated communities need iron gates and wrought iron furniture is all the rage. Our eyeing at their land and the iron-ore beneath them is not new - their eyeing us back is not new either. They have been there since the Iron Age. They are not "innocent" tribals - they have never been. No human is. Those of us, living in sun-lit megalopolis, who learn the past from history books with worlds as broad as TV channels, feel distinctly uneasy about all this talk of moral rights and thousand-year-old claims. We know of our high cholesterol and lack of exercise epidemics, while overworked anaemic Gonds live in our republic. The possibility of a connection is bound to be distinctly unpalatable. I might even change the channel.

Godless ideologues of the Maoist variety, who possibly imagine the ghotuls, or youth dormitories, as future Red-Guard communes, are now arming the Gonds for their own violent ideological ends - pawns in their macabre "revolutionary" game. But what paths have we left for the Gonds - we, who think that an armed Gond is unnatural but a hungry Gond is natural. What happens when all that constitutes a people's dignity - Gods, histories, grandmother's tales, stubbornness, honour, ghotuls, groves, hills – have been off? Should they apply for a stay-order through the proper channel, in triplicate? Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian if there ever was one, and an untiring satyagrahi in Chhattisgarh, says with a sad rage "For how long will middle class ‘bhadralok’ remain silent spectators to the State’s colonization of tribal territory to subsidize urban growth in the name of ‘tribal development'?" It does not portend well for our democratic society.

During a showing of his documentary on the NGO Narmada Bachao Andolan, film-maker Sanjay Kak told me in almost a resigned voice that he was possibly filming an obituary of non-violent struggles in India. Is Himanshu Kumar a voice in the wilderness? Have we finally accomplished what Nathuram Godse tried to do? In these troubled times, Himanshu Kumar and his satyagrahi ways might actually appear insane to those deeply entrenched in urban society. Like some Aztec shaaman in a trance, Himanshu Kumar is talking a language which appears eeriely unfamiliar to us – non-violence, dignity, humanity.

In 1966, Prabir Chandra Bhanj Deo led the Bastar Gonds into a non-violent struggle for famine relief and cheaper rice against the Madhya Pradesh government. The government declared he was insane and finally shot him dead at his home along with many of his supporters when the Gonds had come to greet him during dusshera. The Gonds still revere his memory and were recently dispersed by force on his memorial day. That is how that story ended. I shudder at what new story ideas our collective greed is coming up with. We have no shame.

“The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera

Garga Chatterjee is a researcher at Harvard University and an observer of contemporary power, self-identities and plurality in the Indic context. He used to be a physician but now investigation into the psyche dominates his mind.

Kalboishekhi in Poush: The Aftermath of Nandigram

http://sanhati.com/articles/614/

By Garga Chatterjee, Sanhati.

The events in Nandigram have possibly changed the trajectory of contemporary political discourse for good. West Bengal’s “leftist” government started a policy of forcibly acquiring land from peasants, dependents on soil and other communities that live off the soil. Incident after incident followed where discontented locals spontaneously organized, into Krishi Jami Raksha Committee, Bhumi Uchhed Protirodh Committee, Uchhed Birodhi Committee, and more.

They were posing a direct challenge to the logic of “development” that West Bengal’s CPI(M) [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] government was trying to push. And what a push it was — urban centers were soon filled up with huge banners trumpeting the governing party’s rhetoric — “Krishi amader bhitti, shilpo amader bhobishyot” (Agriculture is our foundation, industrialisation our future). It lined up sections of the media crying hoarse for development, with the upwardly mobile urban classes joining in. It’s not an accident that those who never bear the brunt of displacement and loss of livelihood due to “development” schemes are the shrillest supporters of it.

The first wave of mutiny

Just when all this was looking inevitable, mutinies started — in Mahishadal, in Singur, in Haripur, in… Nandigram. What we witnessed is something rare in South Asian politics: A decentralized and uncoordinated people’s movement, fighting for fundamental rights like life and livelihood, pushed the government’s offensive to the backfoot, made the opposition pick up its slogans, split the intelligentsia and in fact served as an example that other such movements sought to emulate. All this in a year: perhaps the strength of most political status-quos in the world is overrated.

Nandigram, an erstwhile center of Tebhaga and Quit-India movement, shot to the headlines. Threatened by the CPI(M) government’s initiative for acquiring lands for a chemical hub for the infamous Salim group (an ally of the brutal General Suharto of Indonesia), the largely left-wing area, mostly CPI(M) supporters rose up in open rebellion against the party’s Stalinist diktat, for their land and livelihood, and indeed for their identity as humans — not displaceable, expendable numbers in a macabre play called Development.

Government agents massacred at least 14 people in Nandigram on March 14th, 2007. There were rapes and house burnings. But the locals were resilient. After being hooted out and brutalized they marched back to their homes and dug in. A long war of attrition started with the government-backed party encircling Nandigram for more than six months, hurling bombs, killing activists. Though thoroughly outgunned, the locals continued to resist.

Threat of a rainbow

Opportunist fly-by-night parties like the Trinamool Congress by now had lent their support to the BUPC. Other left-wing outfits joined, as did Jamiat-e-Ullemah-e-Hind. It was a rainbow coalition of sorts, the bulk being formed by former CPI(M) supporters.

CPI(M), one of the most ruthless perpetrators of extra-state violence, was facing a huge challenge. If this rainbow coalition could successfully resist corporate and state-backed hoodlums of the CPI(M) at Nandigram, the party apparatchik feared a “domino effect” — many areas would want to get out of its stranglehold of fear, and its plans of evicting people and communities for “greater common good” by making private factories could be derailed.

What happened after that is party-sponsored violence of a type that only few armed groups can undertake. There had been talk of reconciliation started by veteran Forward Bloc leader Ashok Ghose only to be torpedoed by the CPI(M). And when the idea of putting central forces was floated (the state armed police being thoroughly discredited by the massacre it had committed and assisted in), the CPI(M) knew that it was time to finish off the resistance for time was running out. CPI(M) goons massacred common folk, raped, shot at peaceful gatherings, stopped the Central Paramilitary forces from entering, and closed off the whole area to the media and the outside world. Nandigram was converted to a ghost-area.

The bloodied hands of CPI(M)

Top CPI(M) leaders like Brinda Karat egged on cadres to give the opposition “Dumdum dawai.” After the killings ended, CPI(M) Chief Minister stated that the resistance in Nandigram “has been paid back in their own coin.” Incidentally, he is also the home minister which makes him responsible for police forces and law and order. On being asked pointed questions in Kolkata by the media, he commented that it is only because of his government that a certain media house can still exist - a veiled threat to it to behave itself. Throttling of the media was compounded by destroying cameras as well as attacks on activists, including Medha Patkar of Narmada Bachao Andolan fame, noted artist Shaoli Mitra, and singer Suman Chattopadhyay. The leader of the opposition in West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee tried to visit Nandigram - her car was shot at and she was physically prevented from entering.

In the immediate aftermath of this, the Kolkata High Court ruled that the earlier March 14th massacre by police and others was both avoidable and unwarranted. This destroyed all the stories the CPI(M) government had spun about Maoist extremists being behind the incitement of violence.The Maoists are a similarly violent group like the CPI(M) and hence are easily usable as a punching bag in the absence of proof - but the Kolkata high court ruling exposed the government lies.

Enough is enough

The intelligentsia of West Bengal and students, 100,000-strong, came together in a historic rally in Kolkata against the second Nandigram massacre. Somewhere , the pride of Bengalis who prized human rights in their state had been slighted. Somewhere, the citizenry had stopped believing government lies. Intellectuals, writers, painters, actors were on the street, including Mahashweta Debi, Nabarun Bhattacharyya, Aparna Sen, Suman Chattopadhyay, Kousik Sen, Suman Mukhopadhyay, Shubhaprashanna, Bibhash Chakrabarti, Joy Goswami and even Bengali rock bands like Fossils.

Buddhijibis (intellectuals) separated from Buddhojibis (intellectual sycophants of Budhhadeb Mukherjee, the Chief Minister). The citizenry boycotted the Kolkata International Film Festival; the festival had the deserted look of a mourning. But the state came down hard. Students and intellectuals in their peaceful processions were detained by the police. A dark cloud of fear and intimidation was produced all over the state.

The immediate fallout of this was seen in student union elections all over India. In the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, the student group of the CPI(M) called the SFI, lost all top four positions. All over Bengal, the SFI was routed, at some places for the first time, like Jadavpur University. In Calcutta Medical College, Medical College Democratic Student Association (MCDSA) led the struggle for solidarity with Nandigram. But the stirrings were to be wider.

Even discredited opposition forces like Trinamool Congress regained credibility. Left parties like the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the Forward Bloc , which are part of the government, squarely put the blame on CPI(M)’s murderous politics. RSP had launched scathing attacks against the CPI(M) and the Forward Bloc has decided to fight the coming Panchayat elections against the CPI(M). This points to a possible future re-alignment between left democratic forces in West Bengal. Calls for an alternative left front has been made. In municipality election in Panskura, CPI(M) lost. In Haldia, its votes were slashed. In Balagarh, in the heart of Bengal, in Hooghly district, CPI(M) has started to bleed as by-election results showed.

Displacing development

Nandigram has opened up a whole debate on the premise, scope and cost of development. It has torn off the aura of inevitability of suffering and sacrifice of peasants and other displaced people in the name of development. Also, it has become an example where concerted people’s resistance succeeded in stopping a seemingly invincible bulldozer of the urban industrial vision. Anti-Special Economic Zone movements all over India have started drawing inspiration from Nandigram. Anti-Dow Chemical activists, fighting for the rights of people poisoned by Union Carbide (subsidiary of Dow Chemicals) in Bhopal have shown solidarity. Nandigram has grown beyond is geographical limit to become a symbol of resistance against unethical corporate practices supported by the government.

Right now, the strange peace of a cremation ground hangs over Nandigram. People whose houses have been burned down by CPI(M) are holding up CPI(M) flags in their broken homes and saying “I didn’t see anything.” The cost of inciting such fear in Bengal will be unsustainable, as the British had experienced. The alienation of the intelligentsia from the government is complete. But for the time being, West Bengal’s sad fate is that no opposition party exists that can harness this discontent into a constructive agenda. Still, Nandigram will go down as a watershed event in contemporary South Asia, a source of great inspiration to this part of the world, where civil liberties are under constant assault.

This article was also published in The Progressive Bangladesh