[News] “Everywhere is Kashmir”: Unraveling Weaponized, Corporatized Hindustan in India’s Northeast

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/06/everywhere-is-kashmir-unraveling-weaponized-corporatized-hindustan-in-indias-northeast/ 



  “Everywhere is Kashmir”: Unraveling Weaponized, Corporatized Hindustan
  in India’s Northeast

by Sarang Narasimhaiah 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/sarang-narasimhaiah/> - September 
6, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

“In India today,” said an Indigenous activist I recently interviewed in 
the northeastern Indian state of Jharkhand, “everywhere is Kashmir.”

At first glance, this statement seems overblown, perhaps even 
outrageous. No other part of India is as much of a consolidated internal 
colony as Kashmir. For that matter, Palestine is one of the only other 
parts of the world that that can match or exceed Kashmir’s horrific past 
and renewed present of curfews, communication blackouts, transportation 
blockades, forced disappearances, and military and paramilitary 
brutality and bloodshed. (India’s ever-closer collaboration with Israel 
gives these parallels a particularly timely and unsettling 
significance.) In so many ways, nowhere is Kashmir but Kashmir itself.

And yet, the seeds of Kashmir’s never-ending misery are bearing 
poisonous fruit all across India. Animated by the interlocking forces of 
neoliberal capitalism and Hindu nationalism, the Indian state’s 
insatiable appetite for natural resources, ironclad commitment to 
elite-led economic growth, and gleeful deployment of grassroots fascist 
thugs and police, military, and paramilitary forces have fueled a 
mounting avalanche of tragedies across the country. Together, these 
priorities and capacities have caused an ongoing parade of 
stomach-churning mob lynchings; the harassment, imprisonment, and even 
assassinations of dissenters like Gladson Dungdung, Stan Swamy, and 
Gauri Lankesh; and the gagging, obstruction, and expulsion of civil 
society organizations like the Lawyers Collective and the Navsarjan 
Trust. If Kashmir’s condition can be described as a syndrome brought on 
by a shamelessly chauvinistic, mercilessly exploitative, and openly 
repressive state, its early and intermediate symptoms are increasingly 
visible everywhere.

The widespread nature of these symptoms should not, by any means, 
normalize Kashmir’s nightmare. If anything, it should stimulate 
solidarity-building between the state’s besieged population and the many 
others who find themselves more and more at the mercy of the Modi 
regime’s push for a Hindi-speaking Hindu Indian nation ruled by a 
handful of billionaires and their state collaborators. I dare suggest 
that I found traces of Kashmir on the streets and in the forests of 
Jharkhand. I offer the reflections below on my time there in the hopes 
that they will illustrate the need to confront combined weaponized, 
religiously sanctioned economic occupation as the defining political 
mode of the prevailing Indian state and its subcomponents.

*The Investment Decimation*

Billboards all over Ranchi, Jharkhand’s capital city, promote Momentum 
Jharkhand, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government’s 
tireless campaign to convert Jharkhand into “The Investment 
Destination.” This campaign exemplifies Jharkhand’s approach to economic 
growth by any means necessary since achieving statehood in 2000: 
successive Jharkhandi governments have signed hundreds of memorandums of 
understanding (MOUs) with public and private corporations across a range 
of industries, from steelmaking to agriculture to digital technology. At 
the inauguration of Momentum Jharkhand in 2017, reigning Chief Minister 
Raghubar Das signed no less than 209 MOUs worth Rs. 3 lakh crore or 42 
billion USD, receiving New Delhi’s wholehearted approval and support in 
the process; one activist described Modi and Das as “brothers” for all 
intents and purposes.

 From the Oracle Corporation to the Tata Group to hatemongering godman 
Baba Ramdev, Jharkhand’s investors have promised benefits galore to the 
residents of their host state, from jobs to educational institutions to 
technological innovation to support systems for small farmers and 
business people. In exchange, they have demanded uninhibited access to 
Jharkhandi land and the riches it contains; Jharkhand, after all, is 
home to 40% of India’s mineral wealth, including sizeable deposits of 
coal, bauxite, uranium, and gold. Jharkhand’s leaders have been more 
than happy to meet these demands: here, as elsewhere in Modi’s India, 
the irresistible spoils of economic occupation dissolve the notorious 
inefficiencies of bureaucratic and parliamentary institutions, forging 
public-private partnerships in which the actual public is a passive, if 
not entirely absent, actor.

The acquisition of land, however, has proven a crucial stumbling block 
to the state-backed corporatization of Jharkhand. Landforms the basis of 
traditional socioecological, sociopolitical, and sociocultural life for 
the state’s adivasis or Indigenous peoples, who account for 27% of 
Jharkhand’s population. “Our religion is our land,” explained renowned 
adivasi journalist and activist Dayamani Barla. “If it is taken away, 
nothing can live.” Between 2006 and 2010, Barla spearheaded a mass 
movement against the proposed establishment of two steel plants by 
global steel giant Arcelor-Mittal, which had signed an MOU with the 
Jharkhand government worth roughly 9.6 billion USD in 2005. Barla and 
her fellow protestors waged an effective public awareness campaign 
showing that the project, like so many other similar proposed and 
completed projects, would displace 30 to 40 villages, destroy adivasi 
sacred sites, key ecosystems, and prime agricultural land, and provide 
meagre compensation for these gross transgressions. In the course of her 
work, Barla received repeated death threats from middle-men 
subcontracted by the state and the company to secure the land in 
question, who assured her that her loved ones would not be able to 
identify her body once they were finished with her.

Barla and her compatriots prevailed in the face of these prospects of 
unspeakable violence; as of today, Arcelor-Mittal’s plans for Jharkhand 
remain in limbo. However, other corporations have made their marks all 
too clearly on Jharkhand’s landscape. “Every river in Northern Jharkhand 
has died, and every forest is black,” laments Barla. Furthermore, the 
Das government has only stepped up its efforts to facilitate the 
expropriation of land by public and private interests. In late 2016, it 
unilaterally passed a bill to amend the colonial-era Santhal Parganas 
Tenancy Act and Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act, which prevent the sale of 
adivasi land to non-adivasis. The abrogation of Article 35A of the 
Constitution, which limits the right to buy and own property to 
Kashmir’s permanent residents, echoes this bill in striking ways. Though 
it was forced to withdraw the bill in response to the public outcry that 
followed, the Jharkhandi state has attempted to divorce adivasis from 
their homelands by other, far more insidious means.

*Death by Conversion*

“Adivasis are not Hindus.” Virtually every activist, journalist, and 
intellectual I interviewed in Jharkhand drove home this point. It is a 
dangerously defiant response to the narrative spun by the BJP and, 
moreover, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the massive 
paramilitary volunteer organization that Arundhati Roy deems the 
“mothership” of the Hindu Right. The RSS has operated in the jungles of 
Jharkhand since at least the 1980s; in that time, it has done everything 
in its power to convince adivasis that their traditional beliefs and 
practices are squarely situated within its brand of casteist, 
patriarchal, materialistic Hinduism, despite countless scholarly texts 
and oral testimonies that indicate otherwise. RSS missionaries have 
offered numerous material incentives for conversion, from subsidies to 
the saving-and-investment schemes that have become the hallmarks of 
neoliberal “good governance” and “participatory development” across 
India and the Global South as a whole. Material enticements go 
hand-in-hand with symbolic warfare in Jharkhand’s public and private 
spheres: a prominent statue of legendary adivasi leader Birsa Munda was 
recently encircled with saffron flags, which also fly from every other 
rooftop in Ranchi and vie with red-and-white-striped adivasi sarna flags 
for dominion over the city’s street dividers and roundabouts. By 
reincarnating adivasis as Hindus, the RSS can defuse battles over land 
and forest rights before they can even begin, minimizing the costs 
associated with these battles: economic occupation in Modi’s India is a 
divine mandate underwritten by financial prudence.

To draw attention away from its own conversion programs, the RSS and its 
allies have attempted to stoke public paranoia around the boogeyman of 
forced conversions by the diverse Christian denominations that have been 
active in Jharkhand since 1845. In 2017, the Das government passed a 
hugely controversial anti-conversion bill that has served as a pretext 
for a heightened crackdown on Christian civil society actors. This is 
not to say, of course, that the state requires a sound legal basis for 
lashing out against religious dissenters and scapegoats: Jharkhand has 
witnessed 17 mob lynchings over the past three years, a good number of 
them carried out by gau rakshaks or cow protectors against Dalits, 
adivasis, and Muslims accused of slaughtering cattle or transporting 
them for slaughter. “It’s everyone against the Muslims,” remarked 
economist and activist Jean Drèze, encapsulating the Hindu Right’s 
deadly effectiveness at pitting the various victims of its policies 
against each other, in Jharkhand and beyond.

*Fortress Jharkhand*

As should be evident by now, legislated repression and extrajudicial 
violence work in tandem in Jharkhand. When middlemen and gau rakshaks 
prove insufficient to achieve its ends, the state can leverage its 
monopoly on legitimate violence by calling upon the myriad police, 
military, and paramilitary forces at its disposal. Securitization 
secures investments and conversions for Hindutva, Inc. at gunpoint by 
making non-compliance a blasphemous act of high treason, punishable by 
death. Ranchi’s glistening shopping centers teem with rifle-toting, 
khaki-suited personnel from the paramilitary Central Reserve Police 
Force (CRPF), which has incidentally become synonymous with 
extrajudicial detention, disappearances, and executions in Kashmir. The 
Indian Army, meanwhile, maintains a cantonment or barracks area with a 
population of over 50,000 in Ramgarh, which just happens to home to 
several exceedingly rich mineral fields, including one of the region’s 
largest coalfields. Jharkhand’s security forces also drive dislocation, 
dispossession, and environmental degradation in and of themselves: for 
over thirty years, the Army’s has attempted to acquire 1,471 sq km of 
land in the Gumla and Latehar districts for the Neterhat Artillery 
Firing Range, which would permanently displace 100,000 adivasis and 
periodically displace another 150,000.

In the past 16 years, Jharkhandi police have opened fire upon adivasis 
protesting land acquisitions for development projects at least 16 times, 
proving their vital roles as day-to-day, ground-level enforcers of the 
state’s repressive extractivist agenda. Arbitrary arrests and staged 
“encounters” with alleged terrorists abound in Jharkhand: in 2015, the 
police gunned down 12 villagers with no criminal background whatsoever 
in the Latehar district, subsequently branding them Maoist insurgents; 
in early 2019, they arrested 20 young people in the Khunti district on 
the grounds that they shared seditious sentiments on social media. When 
heinous crimes do occur–such as the gang rape of five anti-human 
trafficking activists or the cold-blooded murders of anti-mining 
activist Suresh Oraon and journalist Amit Topno–the police either leap 
at the opportunity to frame pre-designated troublemakers or drag their 
feet when investigating the matters at hand. Under the circumstances of 
occupation, in which lawlessness is codified into law and smash-and-grab 
capitalism is the order of the day, calling upon the police to uphold 
law and order is a suicidal exercise in futility.

*Battling Occupation Everywhere*

Adivasi activists in Jharkhand and across India are alarmed by the 
abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A for very concrete reasons. For a 
start, it could pave the way for the abrogation of Article 371, which 
provide vital special provisions for the states of Nagaland, Assam, 
Manipur, Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and, by extension, their sizeable tribal 
populations.

Indians across the country, and people of conscience across the world, 
should be just as alarmed, even if not for the same exact reasons. India 
as a whole is under occupation by the hydra-headed forces of 
militarized, corporatized Hindustan. The blacked-out streets of Kashmir 
and the blackened forests of Jharkhand prove the cannibalistic nature of 
these forces. Instead of merely endangering the country’s overly 
idealized secular liberal democratic values, they threaten to devour 
virtually all of the human beings, ecosystems, and belief systems in 
their path, even those supposedly out of harm’s way. India is a sea of 
saffron at the moment, but, even in the handful of areas not controlled 
by the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance, the RSS is hard at work 
establishing shakhas or local branches; Arcelor-Mittal, Reliance, Tata, 
and Mahindra are hard at work setting up steel mills, supermarkets, and 
world cities; and local police, the CRPF, and the military are hard at 
work keeping the peace by normalizing war against the burgeoning ranks 
of the destitute. Bracketing Jharkhand and Kashmir as exceptional cases 
only provide time and space for these exceptions to become the rule; the 
most vulnerable members of Indian society will pay for this process of 
becoming with their lives even if it cannot achieve its genocidal goals.

India’s current sacred political economy of occupation is thus 
ontological in its orientation: it is an all-out attack on the very 
material and spiritual core of India’s being itself. And it can only be 
overcome in the final estimation by ontological means: by reclaiming the 
land itself from the sovereign political domain of the autocratic state 
and establishing autonomy, dignity, equity, justice, and resilience at 
the most basic levels of political life. Kashmiris across the 
ethno-religious spectrum have continued to courageously insist that 
their struggle cannot be reduced to a geopolitical tug-of-war between 
India and Pakistan and that they must be allowed to determine their own 
fate. Similarly, adivasis involved with the Pathalgadi movement that 
erupted across the states of Jharkhand, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh in 
early 2017 have refused to negotiate with the public authorities and 
private enterprises that threaten their very existence: they have 
erected massive stone slabs that list their constitutional and legal 
rights, using these declarations to keep out all hostile outsiders and 
construct their own banks, schools, and self-defence mechanisms. The 
brutal repression of both mobilizations possibly reflects the fear that 
they inspire in the combined powers they confront–fear of the emergence 
or re-emergence of other worlds and worldviews that, for all of their 
admitted limitations and contradictions, disrupt the relentless onward 
march of the bloodthirsty, privately incorporated Hindu nationalist 
juggernaut.

Everywhere in India today is Kashmir insofar as it is in the clutches or 
within the reach of neoliberal Hindu nationalist occupation. Everyone in 
India must now fight alongside Kashmiris–and Jharkhandi adivasis–to 
resist this occupation by any means necessary.

/Sarang Narashimhaiah is an Indian doctoral candidate in political 
science currently studying in the United States./

-- 
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