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<h2><b>India Green Hunt (a second and longer piece
follows)</b></h2><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.icawpi.org/" eudora="autourl">www.icawpi.org<br><br>
<br>
</a>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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<b> 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</b> dot.
Kindly send your reporter and camera person.<br><br>
<br>
Email: <a href="mailto:info@fccsouthasia.net">info@fccsouthasia.net</a>
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript
enabled to view it <br>
Website:
<a href="http://www.fccsouthasia.net/" eudora="autourl">
www.fccsouthasia.net<br>
</a>For more details contact: G N Saibaba: 09910499553, Email:
<a href="mailto:concernedcitizens@gmail.com">
concernedcitizens@gmail.com</a> <br>
*******************************************<br>
<b>A Briefing to the International and All-India Media based on Press
Reports in the Local Languages involved, <br>
Fact-finding Reports of teams of Democratic and Civil Rights
Organisations and the Statements issued by the CPI (Maoist)<br><br>
<div align="center">Press Note<br><br>
</b></div>
(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)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>An unprecedented military offensive<br><br>
</b>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
‘guidance’in one word called logistic support.<br><br>
Contrary to the claims of the government, to secure the land against “the
single largest internal security threat”Naxalismto 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. <br><br>
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 state’s 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>The terror of development<br><br>
</b>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 <i>Chief Minister’s Conference on Implementation of
the Forest Rights Act 2006</i>, 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". <br><br>
What is worth mentioning here is that the geographical terrain, where the
government’s 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.<br><br>
<b>Operation Green Hunta euphemism for genocide of the tribals<br><br>
</b>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 Dantewada’s Chintagufa area. People resisted this
intrusion by the government’s armed forces, and in the battles six
soldiers, including two commanding officers were killed.<br><br>
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! <br><br>
The government’s 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The body count of the adivasis is mounting day by day with
intensification of the Operation Green Hunt. According to the
government’s 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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 government’s 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
people’s 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. <br><br>
<b>Draconian Laws and blanket ban on any form of dissent<br><br>
</b>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.
<br><br>
What is evident from the increasing arrests, incarceration of activists
of people’s 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. <br><br>
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 government’s 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.<br><br>
<br><br>
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