[News] India - Operation Green Hunt
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Mar 8 14:41:02 EST 2010
India Green Hunt (a second and longer piece follows)
www.icawpi.org
Today the Central and Eastern regions of India
are witnessing the largest police/paramilitary
deployment unprecedented in the history of
independent India or even in the days preceding
it. All independent sources acknowledge the
deployment of around 250,000 paramilitary/police
armed to the teeth in these regions while the
government comes out with a conservative estimate
of around 150,000. This military build up is a
calculated assault on the poorest of the poor of
the peoples in these regions-the tribals. The
ostensible intent behind this heavy paramilitary
build up-with Indian military experts providing
the technical expertise under the watchful eye of
experts' from US and Israel-is to secure' the
area from the hold of CPI (Maoist) and then usher
in development and civil administration, as time
and again claimed by the Home Minister, P
Chidambaram in the media. The real intent of this
war is to facilitate the unbridled loot and
plunder of the rich resources-forest wealth,
minerals, water etc-through the MoUs signed with
the domestic corporates and multinationals.
Starting from the month of September till date
the mounting information of growing instances of
killings, disappearances and atrocities on the
tribals are slowly trickling out in a situation
where none are allowed access to these areas
enforced by the lawless paramilitary and other
vigilante gangs let loose by the government. In
the meantime while building up the concentration
of the paramilitary in these areas the home
minister suddenly denied the occurrence of any
such thing as Operation Green Hunt'-as it is
commonly called-and simultaneously asserted his
government's readiness for talks if the Maoists
"abjure violence". The recent offer of the CPI
(Maoist) for a 72-day ceasefire provided the
government do observe the same and also its call
for talks has opened up a new dimension.
In this context when the large sections of the
media is oblivious or is prevailed upon by the
official propaganda of a war which it is fighting
for development, prosperity and peace it is
important to bring the perspective from the
margins of a continuing sordid tale of
destruction, destitution, displacement and death.
Please join the PRESS CONFERENCE to be addressed
by Ms. Arundhati Roy, writer, Kabir Suman,
well-known Singer and Member of Parliament and
other civil rights and people's movement
activists at the FCC on 5 March 2010, Friday, at
3 pm dot. Kindly send your reporter and camera person.
Email:
<mailto:info at fccsouthasia.net>info at fccsouthasia.net
This e-mail address is being protected from
spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: www.fccsouthasia.net
For more details contact: G N Saibaba:
09910499553, Email:
<mailto:concernedcitizens at gmail.com>concernedcitizens at gmail.com
*******************************************
A Briefing to the International and All-India
Media based on Press Reports in the Local Languages involved,
Fact-finding Reports of teams of Democratic and
Civil Rights Organisations and the Statements issued by the CPI (Maoist)
Press Note
(This is a note released to the International
Press in a Press Conference held in
Foreign Correspondents, Club, New Delhi on the 5th March, 2010 at 3 PM)
The last quarter of 2009 has been quite
significant in the annals of history of the
Indian subcontinent with the much publicised war,
euphemistically called as Operation Green Hunt,
of the Government of India on the Adivasisthe
poorest of the poor of the region ostensibly to
usher in, what is being time and again termed as
Progress, Prosperity and Peace. The tragedy
unfolding behind the smokescreen of this media
blitz of the Government of India should be
brought to the notice of one and all for its
alleged intentions, and the real, concrete
fallout of this campaign that is taking place
under the direct guidance of the learned, erudite
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the
lawyer/politician/finance minister turned Home Minister P Chidambaram.
An unprecedented military offensive
If the total number of government forces
presently engaged in this operation is taken in
its entirety (including the paramilitary forces
and the state elite police) it comes close to a
quarter of a million. This is more than double
the US forces presently deployed in the
occupation of Iraqapproximately 120 thousand in
September 2009and bigger than the armies of
Australia, Netherlands and South Africa put
together. The preparations speak volumes about
the real intentions of the government as Indian
Air Force helicopters turned into gun ships are
being used against adivasis, airstrips
constructed in Raipur and Jagdalpur,
jungle-warfare schools opened to train the forces
in special operations, new barracks and bases to
station armed forces are established all over the
war zone, public buildings including schools and
panchayat houses are converted to paramilitary
and police camps and torture chambers. To top it
all, army commanders are overseeing the war
operations while US is providing advisors,
military intelligence, satellite surveillance and
guidancein one word called logistic support.
Contrary to the claims of the government, to
secure the land against the single largest
internal security threatNaxalismto this
country, what is unfolding to the concern and
anguish of every democratic and progressive mind
is the calculated assault on the tribal people
inhabiting the forests of Jharkhand, West Bengal
stretching from Paschimi Midnapur-Bankura-Purulia
in West Bengal to
Srikakulam-Vishakhapatnam-Vizianagaram-East
Godavari in North Andhra Pradesh and
Khammam-Warangal-Adilabad in North Telangana as
well as the eastern districts of Maharashtra
Gadchiroli and Chandrapur. The war zone under the
blue-print of the Operation Green Hunt slated by
the Government of India includes the Southern
districts of Orissa Koraput, Gajapati, Ganjam and Mulkangiri.
This has added yet another sordid chapter to the
continuing assault on the tribals of the
subcontinent in the form of Destruction,
Destitution, Displacement and Death (four dreaded
Ds of the Indian states policy). Thus the
campaign for Prosperity, Progress and Peace by
the Government of India under the UPA government
is bringing in untold miseries to the adivasis in
the form of Destruction of their lives and
livelihoods, growing Destitution among them,
massive Displacement running into hundreds of
thousands due to increasing atrocities of
barbaric dimensions by the paramilitary and
security personnel, and last but not the least
Deaths and Disappearances of tribals who have
refused to leave the forest areas which are their
natural habitats. Thousands of paramilitary,
CoBRA, Greyhounds, C-60 and other elite armed
police forces reared for this purpose by the
state governments are being deployed in each and
every part of Dandakaranya and other regions
under this operation. These forces are entering
forests, hills and village settlements unleashing
immense brutality on unarmed and defenceless adivasis.
Adding intrigue to this murderous exercise, the
Home Minister, who has been, and is still
travelling the length and breadth of this
country, announcing the various facets of this US
inspired war on the poorest of the poor of this
land, is the sudden and audacious denial by the
minister himself about the presence of any such
operation termed as the Operation Green Hunt.
What provokes any discerning mind into
consternation is the total blackout in the media
of continuing atrocities on the tribals while P
Chidambaram who had earlier graphically explained
the various manifests of the Operation goes on a
denial mode of such a massive military
exercisewith the paramilitary belonging to the
CRPF, BSF, CoBRA, Grey Hounds, C-60, SPOs and
what not deployed in the forest tracts of Central
and East Indiaunheard or untold in the history of this region.
The terror of development
While this massive operation is taking place in
the rural interiors of Central and Eastern India,
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke with a forked
tongue at the Chief Ministers Conference on
Implementation of the Forest Rights Act 2006, on
4 November 2009 in New Delhi. To quote: "There
has been a systemic failure in giving the tribals
a stake in the modern economic processes that
inexorably intrude into their living spaces. The
alienation built over decades is now taking a
dangerous turn in some parts of our country. The
systematic exploitation and social and economic
abuse of our tribal communities can no longer be
tolerated." But the Prime Minister was quick to
add while stressing the need to make tribals the
primary beneficiaries of the development
process, the need to win the the battle for their hearts and their minds".
What is worth mentioning here is that the
geographical terrain, where the governments
military offensive is planned, is very
well-endowed with natural resources like
minerals, forest wealth, biodiversity and water
resources, and has been the target of systematic
usurpation by several large, both Indian and
foreign, corporations. So far, the resistance of
the local indigenous people against their
displacement and dispossession has prevented the
government-backed corporates from exploiting the
natural resources for their own profits and
without regard to ecological and social concerns.
As hundreds of MoUs have been signed by the
various state governments under the auspices of
the Central Government and the foreign and
domestic corporations the government is
deliberately hiding the truth behind this
unprecedented military offensive as an attempt to
crush democratic and popular resistance against
dispossession and impoverishment. Significantly
the Prime Minister himself is on record talking
about the need to make way for the vast mineral
and other forest wealth in these forest lands to
be exploited to facilitate the march to progress.
This is corroborated by the statement of the Home
Minister about the need to secure the whole
area first so as to usher in development.
Operation Green Hunt thus is unequivocally a
calculated move towards facilitating the entry
and operation of these large corporations and
paving the way for unbridled exploitation of the
natural resources and people of these regions.
Operation Green Hunta euphemism for genocide of the tribals
Of significance is the number of killings that
has happened ever since the commencement of the
Operation Green Hunt, say from the third week of
September under the gaze of the Reality Show
driven sensation hungry media wherein more than
4000 CRPF and 600 anti-Naxal CoBRA commandos
entered Dantewadas Chintagufa area. People
resisted this intrusion by the governments armed
forces, and in the battles six soldiers,
including two commanding officers were killed.
To avenge the death of the armed forces, the
troops managed a massacre of adivasis while
resorting to arson of their villages, in which at
least nine villagers were murdered in cold blood
and four villages got totally gutted leaving
nothing behind. The government claimed that all
those killed were Maoists, while the eye-witness
accounts, local media reports and independent
fact-finding visits have confirmed that it was
yet another stage-managed genocide of adivasi
villagers, who were picked up and killed.
Starting from the incident of 9 August 2009 in
Vechhapal under Bhairamgarh police station
(Bijapur district) to the one near Kistaram
(Dantewada district) on 10 November 2009, all
have been fake-encounters. Seventy adivasis in
total have been killed in these fake encounters
in this period. It should be noted that not a
single one among them was a Maoist!
The governments claim of killing 7 Naxals in
an encounter on the 10th of November 2009 near
Kistaram is incorrect as the CPI (Maoist)
issued a statement stating that none of their
cadres died in the incident. It must be
registered here that even if one of their cadres
get killed, the CPI (Maoist) declares it openly
apropos the normal conduct of CPI (Maoist) is
observed. On 9 December, more than 500
paramilitary and policemen entered the area under
Kistaram police station from Cherla Dommaguda
police station area in Khammam district of Andhra
Pradesh. They reached Tetemadgu village through
Dokpad and Kurigundam, and encircled it. From
morning to evening of that day, the police burnt
down houses, women were particularly targeted
through sexual violence while the rest of the
villagers got brutally tortured. They took away
four persons from the village. Two more villagers
from Dokpad who came to visit their relatives in
Tetemadgu were also abducted in this manner.
After spending the night in the forests, the
police force reached Palodi village in the
morning of 10 December; they detained yet another
adivasi while completely burning down the
village. The police then took all the seven
captives near Kistaram and riddled them with
bullets. The government is quick to claim this to
be an encounter with the Maoists. The police
took away a few more adivasi villagers with them.
Till date they are untraceable.
Between 7-9 November hundreds of CRPF, CoBRA,
SPOs and police forces unleashed a reign of
terror in the adivasi villages under Chintagufa
police station. They attacked the villagers of
Burkapal on 7 November, Elma Gonda on 8 November,
Minpa on 9 November, and forcibly abducted 24
persons. Their whereabouts or their fate is still
unknown even after two months. Given the track
record of the security personnel operating with
impunity there is every reason to apprehend that
the police has murdered many of them and disposed of the dead bodies.
At least seven adivasis were murdered by the
paramilitary-Salwa Judum forces in different
villages under Kistaram police station between 9
and 10 November 2009. Of them six were abducted
from Tetemadgu and Dogpadu villages on 9 November
while the other was picked up the next day from
Palodi village. As the recent Tehelka field
investigation with eyewitness accounts confirms,
the two villagers from DogpaduMadkam Budra and
Vando Mangduwere dragged from their villages and
shot dead. Similarly, eight adivasi villagers
were killed on a single day on 9 January 2010 to
be branded later as Maoists. While four were
murdered in Sarpanguda under Jegurgonda police
station in Dantewada, the other four were killed
in Farasgaon under Benur police station in Narayanpur district of Chhattisgarh.
The body count of the adivasis is mounting day by
day with intensification of the Operation Green
Hunt. According to the governments own admission
107 Maoists have been killed during the joint
operations under Green Hunt till mid-January. As
more and more information pour in from local
reporters and facts collected by activists
braving heavy repression and threat to their
lives, there are reasons to believe that as much
as four-fifth of them were unarmed and
defenceless adivasi villagers who have been
killed in cold blood in fake encounters.
Operation Green Hunt has replaced the Salwa
Judumone of the worst murderous campaigns on the
adivasiswith much more brutality as is evident
from what is unfolding in the poor tribal hamlets
in this mineral rich forest tracts. If in Salwa
Judum more than a thousand adivasis lost their
lives in Dantewada and Bijapur districts alone,
in the hands of the 4500 SPOs created by the
government, the present onslaught reaching
fascist proportions is adding to those statistics
of the growing casualties of adivasis. More than
700 villages were burnt down and close to three
hundred thousand people were displaced from their
homes in the worst days of Salwa Judum. In all
the places where the Operation Green Hunt is on,
the police, paramilitary and SPOs are resorting
to large scale arson, rape, torture, illegal
detention, destruction of property, burning down
of villages apart from regularly gunning down
adivasis in so-called encounters claiming them as
Maoists. The print media has reported that an
additional two hundred thousand adivasis have
left their homes and took refuge in the
neighbouring Andhra Pradesh in the last three
months fearing atrocities during Operation Green
Hunt. Moreover, the Chhattisgarh government is
planning to make strategic hamlets out of the
displaced population forced to live in
government-run camps, thereby permanently
dispossessing them of their ancestral land.
In Maharashtra, Operation Green Hunt was launched
in the second week of October from the Gadchiroli
district, in which 10,000 troops took part. M17
helicopters of the Air Force gave surveillance
and logistical support. 18 bases have been
established by the paramilitary forces from where
they are launching combing operations and
extermination campaigns. Large scale repression
of people are reported from in the eastern
districts of the state, where the police and
Anti-Naxal forces like the C-60 have a long
history of committing atrocities and terror on
the adivasi people in the name of curbing
Maoism/Naxalism. In March 2009, policemen from
the C-60 force gang-raped a 13 year old girl in
the Pavarvel village in Dhanora tehsil. In the
Kosimi village of the same tehsil, policemen from
Gyarapatti police station raped and killed
Mynaben, a 52 year old adivasi villager in May
last year. In the latest assault on the people,
the paramilitary forces are given a license to
kill and torture by the government.
In Jharkhand too, the initial rhetoric of peace
talks and negotiations by the newly-elected chief
minister Shibu Soren has now taken a u-turn for
support to the Operation Green Hunt. The
government has stepped up the mobilisation of its
armed forces by bringing in CRPF battalions from
Asom and Tripura. The unleashing of state terror
on the people of Jharkhand is not new,
particularly on those sections who have resisted
the state-sponsored corporate attack on
jal-jangal-jameen. In fact, the police and
paramilitary forces along with the vigilante
gangs propped up by them like the Nagarik
Suraksha Samiti, Tritiya Prastuti Committee,
Sunlight Sena etc. have long been a byname for
repression, torture, rape and murder. Like Andhra
Pradesh and Maharashtra, Jharkhand too has
recently raised a special anti-Naxal force
called the Jharkhand Jaguars in order to crush
any voice of dissent against the governments
policy of destruction in the name of development.
Anyone and everyone who dares to stand up against
the attack on the lives and livelihood of the
oppressed, is branded as a Maoist or a Maoist
sympathiser, and persecuted. Various peoples
movements against the displacement of adivasis,
civil rights organisations, etc. are facing state
repression for a long time in Jharkhand, the
scale and brutality of which is going to go up
during the fascist extermination campaign of
Operation Green Hunt. We can already see the
inevitable fallouts of this war on people as
exemplified by the murder of Rajendra Yadav who
was picked up on the night of 31st December 2009
by Jharkhand police, tortured in the name of
interrogation, and killed in custody. Similarly
in Orissa there are several cases of rape, arson
and killing reported from Narayanpatna ever since
the commencement of the operation. In fact the
president of the Chhasi Adivasi Muliya Sangha was
shot dead while in a demonstration before the police and the paramilitary.
Draconian Laws and blanket ban on any form of dissent
Despite the rhetoric of the battle for the hearts
and minds from none other than the Prime Minister
the manner in which the security and paramilitary
forces have wreaked havoc in the lives of the
adivasis stand testimony to the utter disregard
for the laws and procedures of the land. In fact
several laws like the UAPA and the Chhattisgarh
Special Areas Act are being conveniently used on
anyone and everyone who dares to raise the voice
against the policies of the government. The
recent arrest and booking of KN Pandit, veteran
trade unionist and anti-displacement activist in
Ranchi and Gananath Patra, former professor and
veteran communist leader who is also the official
advisor of Chhasi Adivasi Muliya Sangha of
Narayanpatna at Bhubaneswar are fresh examples of
the increasing lawlessness of the police and
paramilitary in their desperate attempts to
browbeat the people into submission. In fact any
effort to make independent fact findings into
these areas have become next to impossible with
the police and the murderous goons of the local
parties join hands to humiliate and assault the
civil rights activists and intellectuals who took
care to visit these areas. The recent case of the
humiliation and assault on the all women fact
finding team that went to the villages in
Narayanpatna to record the testimonies of the
rape victims in the police stations let alone in
public by the police and the goons speaks volumes
of how the Government of India would want to
browbeat the hearts and minds of the people into
submission. Another case was the detention of the
30 member fact finding team that was trying to
visit the areas of atrocities in Dantewada and Bijapur districts.
What is evident from the increasing arrests,
incarceration of activists of peoples movements
fighting for the rights to lives and livelihoods
is a clear cut case of the government bringing in
development through the barrel of the gun. As
is evident from the protests and various
submissions made to the governments at the Centre
and the states it is evident that these talk
about development is nothing but a total loot and
plunder of the local people and their resources.
The fact that all these areas that are under the
cross hairs of the war machine of the government
come under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution
has hardly deterred the local administration,
police and the paramilitary to break laws and
provisions with impunity.
Despite the heavy militarisation and the terror
unleashed by the governments the protests from
the people against such anti-people
pro-corporate/multinational policies of sell-out
have only increased. The efforts of the centre
and the states to handle the situation as a pure
law and order question have further
deteriorated the situation. The Indian
governments proposed military offensive will
repeat that story all over again. Instead of
addressing the source of the conflict, instead of
addressing the genuine grievances of the
marginalized people the Indian state seems to
have decided to opt for the extremely myopic
option of launching a military offensive. As
conscious citizens of this country and sensitive
to the questions of inclusive growth, justice and
equality for all we strongly demand the
government at the centre and the states to
immediately stop this extermination of the
adivasis reminiscent to the days of the US genocide of the Red Indians.
Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977
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