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href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/06/everywhere-is-kashmir-unraveling-weaponized-corporatized-hindustan-in-indias-northeast/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/06/everywhere-is-kashmir-unraveling-weaponized-corporatized-hindustan-in-indias-northeast/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">“Everywhere is Kashmir”: Unraveling
Weaponized, Corporatized Hindustan in India’s Northeast</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/sarang-narasimhaiah/"
rel="nofollow">Sarang Narasimhaiah</a> - September 6, 2019</span></div>
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<p>“In India today,” said an Indigenous activist I
recently interviewed in the northeastern Indian state of
Jharkhand, “everywhere is Kashmir.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The Investment Decimation</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Death by Conversion</strong></p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Fortress Jharkhand</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Battling Occupation Everywhere</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p> <em>Sarang Narashimhaiah is an Indian doctoral
candidate in political science currently studying in the
United States.</em> </p>
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