Lalgarh and the Radicalisation of Resistance: From ‘Ordinary Civilians’ to Political Subjects?

by Saroj Giri

(we are posting this article of Saroj Giri on the lalgarh peoples maovement. Saroj Giri is Lecturer in Political Science, University of Delhi. the article underlines the significance of the lalgarh struggle as a qualitatively advanced democratic movement of the peoples and brilliantly exposes the human rightist neutralism based on the thesis of the sepration of common masses and maoists. we are posting it here from MRZine for the purpose of discussion — Editor)

One image stands out from the Lalgarh resistance.  Chattradhar Mahato, the most visible leader of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA), distributing food to ordinary villagers — not as a high-up leader doing charity but as one among them.  Is this the ‘new’ image of the Maoist?  But maybe Mahato is not a Maoist — he himself denies being one.  But if he is not, given his power and influence in the area, the ‘dictatorial’ Maoists must have eliminated him by now?  Then maybe he is only being used by them, following their ‘diktat’ out of fear.  But a man with the kind of popularity and love from the masses would fear the Maoists?  So, is he a Maoist, or like a Maoist, after all?  But a Maoist who is this popular among the masses and who does not seem to terrorise them?

These questions are tricky, almost baffling to many.  For the resistance in Lalgarh is a unique experiment, not following any formulaic path or given script.  The Lalgarh resistance not only rattled local power relations and state forces but also challenged accepted ideas and practices of resistance movements, their internal constitution, and above all opened up radical possibilities for the initiative of the masses — partly symbolized in the unscripted image and contested political identity of Mahato and indeed of the PCAPA vis-à-vis Maoists.  Crucially, Lalgarh undermines conventional ideas about the relationship between ‘peaceful’ and ‘violent’ forms of struggle and inaugurates possibilities of resistance unfettered by given notions of political subjectivity or by subservience to the ‘rule of law’.

Lalgarh defied the long-standing shackles on social movements in the country that would ultimately restrict their forms of struggle within the confines given by the lines of command emanating from the Indian state’s monopoly over violence.  Lalgarh showed that, when the democratic struggle of the masses runs into conflict with the repressive apparatus of the state which has lost all democratic legitimacy, the struggle assumes the form of a violent mass movement.  This violent action, being the expression of heightened mass democratic struggle, bringing down structures that anyway have lost all basis, is in every sense a political struggle, an armed struggle if you like, but has nothing to do with a so-called ‘conflict situation’ where ordinary civilians are shown as only trapped and suffering.

Take the violent Dharampur mass action of June 19, an event many on the left and right decried as a Maoist take-over and an end to the democratic struggle.  When this action triggered an offensive by security forces to ‘reclaim’ the area, did the situation turn into a conflict zone between the state and the armed Maoists, with ‘ordinary civilians’ trapped and waiting for outside aid?  This then is the crucial point: Lalgarh refused to lend itself to the usual narrative which presents every armed struggle into a depoliticized ‘conflict situation’ with images of suffering women and children waiting for the international community and NGO aid workers to come and save them.

The image of the ‘ordinary civilian’ here was not one of ‘refusing to take sides’ and rushing to grab the first bit of relief supplies, but one exemplified by someone like Malati.  Clearly showing where her political sympathies lay, Malati stayed on in the PCAPA-run camp and refused the administration’s medical help as she gave birth to a baby — the ambulance waiting for her went back empty (The Statesman, Kolkata, June 30, 2009).  Malati’s ‘humanitarian needs’ were fulfilled by the very struggle which carried out the ‘violent mass action’ — no space for NGOs and the welfarist state, exemplifying the autonomous character of the resistance.  What happened was not just that ‘ordinary civilians’ and adivasis supported the Maoists; the very image of a Maoist underwent a change so that anybody, including women and children, could be a Maoist.

‘Ordinary Civilians’, Maoists

The question then: do ordinary civilians stand opposed to and separate from the Maoists?  This point becomes pertinent from another angle.  Large sections of democratic forces in the country opposing the security-centric solution to the upsurge in Lalgarh proclaim the need to always separate the ordinary villagers/adivasis from the Maoists.  The chief minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, is attacked for conflating the two and using the ‘bogey of Maoists’ to victimize ordinary civilians and crush the democratic struggle of the masses.

Lalgarh thus throws several questions: Is the tribal morphing into the Maoist?  Is the groundswell of support for the Maoists such that the adivasis will mostly be Maoists?  In today’s situation, is it possible to be other than Maoist and still assert the kind of political resistance and autonomy that the masses of Lalgarh are presenting today?

The question really is: where and how does the adivasi in resistance stand vis-à-vis the Maoist?  What if the separation of the two is integral to the present statist approach to the Maoists, so central to it that it has to be invented and enforced where one does not exist?  Then, the democratic rights approach calling on the state to make this separation, and spare ‘innocent civilians’, may be a dangerous double-edged sword.

Now what Lalgarh showed is that separating the adivasis from Maoists is no great democratic act, but is in fact what allows the state to undertake severe repression and at the same time claim that it acted in the interests of ordinary civilians. Thus where this separation cannot be made, the state in fact invents it.  This was clear from the responses of state officials.  When the West Bengal home secretary Ardhendu Sen admitted that “it is tough to distinguish between the PCAPA and the Maoists”, it was clear that the separation does not hold (The Statesman, Kolkata, 19 June 2009).  And yet, even though ordinary people cannot be separated from Maoists, the State chief secretary invented this separation, when he stated, in the same news report, that security forces would “ensure security for ordinary people”.  Further, “he stated that common villagers are not involved directly involved with the violence but they are the victims of the violent activities of the Maoists”.

There were reports of the “Maoists support base in women and children” (The Statesman, 28 June 2009).  This support base meant that state officials could hardly find locals for gathering crucial intelligence inputs about the Maoists after the CPIM network collapsed; a senior state officer was quoted stating that “unless we have local sources, it is going to be extremely difficult to identify the Maoists, who have mingled with the villagers.  Although these (new) men are from Lalgarh, we haven’t got people from the core area.  Those villages are still out of bounds”(The Telegraph, Friday June 26, 2009).

In this light, as in the case of Malati, it is not really the armed Maoist who is most dangerous in Lalgarh; it is the ‘ordinary civilian’, the PCAPA supporter who is indistinguishable form the Maoist supporter.  Is Malati a Maoist?  If she refuses health care offered during her most vulnerable moment, then what is the state supposed to do to win back her support?  If ‘ordinary civilians’ do not want to get out of the ‘conflict situation’, and want to take sides, maybe not in any dramatic manner but at least by wanting to err on the side of the ‘violent Maoists’, then the task of separating the Maoists from the civilians becomes tough — and in fact politically reactionary.

What the state realized in Lalgarh was that if anyone can be a Maoist, and if the separation does not hold, then the way to go, under a democracy, is to technically enforce a ’separation’.  A technical solution: reports tell us that the security forces in parts of Lalgarh would sprinkle a special kind of an imported dye from a helicopter in areas where Maoists are present.  This dye makes a mark on the skin which stays for almost a year.  Well, now you can clearly separate Maoists from the ‘ordinary civilians’!

Inventing and enforcing a separation therefore allows the state to repress a popular movement in the name of winning over or defending ordinary civilians.  This enforced separation is such that even when the adivasi in Lalgarh stands with the Maoist or is a Maoist it is regarded not as the condition of the adivasi in the given conjuncture, as part of what it means to be an adivasi, his being or life, but negatively understood as the fallout of government policies.  Thus an adivasi Maoist is treated as just waiting to be rescued or won back into the democratic mainstream by benign policies and favours.

Images of Adivasi and Forms of Struggle

Now the Maoist cadre can and must be distinguished from the ‘ordinary villager’ or adivasi.  However some quarters are not just making this distinction but heavily invested in proactively separating the two — trying to understand Lalgarh through it.  This is happening since this separation is sustained by at least two other long established images of the ‘ordinary villager’ and in particular of the adivasi.

In one case, this separation is sustained by presenting a now familiar image of the ordinary villager or adivasi as the victim, the displaced, a negative fallout of the Nehruvian belief in science and industrial development.  In the second case, there is the image of the adivasi resisting ‘modern development and industrialisation’ and engaging in democratic forms of struggle, engaging in non-hierarchical and autonomous welfarist activities outside the state and statist logic.

The first image informs some ‘pro-poor’, welfare policies of the state, for the ‘upliftment of tribals and displaced’, the kinds declared in rehabilitation packages or ‘poverty alleviation’ programmes.  The second one comes from the dissident, anti-state left where being the marginalized and the subaltern (’outside’ of modernity and capital) in itself is supposed to form the basis of ‘political’ struggle.  These two images, often running counter to each other, however start converging as they get invested in and start deriving their rationale and intensity from their ability to ideologically pit the benign, democracy-loving ‘ordinary villager’ or adivasi against the supposed violence, top-down terror methods and repressive character of the Maoists.

However the events in Lalgarh have shown that this separation pushes back the ‘ordinary villagers’ into political infancy, not allowing them to break with the statist logic and the morass of parliamentary democracy.  For once the ‘ordinary villagers’ or adivasis break with being mere victims and act autonomously as political subjects, they very soon come into conflict with the logic of not just the state but also of oppressive power relations more generally.  Deep-rooted power structures that have found their expression in the abstraction called the state do not fade away progressively through democratic practice and rational deliberation; they exist with a necessity, a knotted base which cannot be untangled unproblematically, without a rupture.

Dharampur marked this rupture where the use of force bringing down the now decrepit power structures was anticipated by the democratic struggle and marked its intensification and qualitative expansion.  From the perspective of the longer struggle, the use of violence at this stage is only a gentle push to bring down terribly weakened but knotty oppressive structure — a push to eliminate the now even more intolerable limits imposed on the democratic practices of the masses.  The mass violence at Dharampur was such an intensification of the autonomous practices of the Lalgarh adivasis.  This ‘ordinary villager’ or adivasi who refuses to limit his democratic practices and struggle within the lines of command given by the state and its oppressive relations, at this point, emerges as the Maoist.  In the given conjuncture, the ‘Maoist’ is the articulation of the ordinary villager or adivasi as the political subject.

What Lalgarh showed is the interplay and interrelation between the ‘peaceful’ and ‘violent’ methods of struggle.  This means that it is not possible to separate the democratic struggle from the Maoist moment in it.  However the state as the defender of oppressive relations in its most generalized form, isolates the violent methods of the Maoists and tries to show it in isolation from the larger struggle of the people against oppression.  In a bid to force ‘ordinary villagers’ to restrict their democratic struggle and practices within the limits set by the state and its agencies, by the limits of parliamentary democracy, the state wants to target Maoists.  This is where the state and, perhaps not surprisingly, the democratic rights activists make the separation between ordinary villagers waiting to be uplifted and the violent Maoists exploiting their plight.

It is against such deft ideological operations that it needs to be pointed out that the ‘violent Maoist’ is actually an emergent quality of the democratic struggle and autonomous political practices of the ‘ordinary villager’ or adivasi in Lalgarh. For, the moment you separate the two, you are back to enclave democracy, NGOisation.  It is here that we have to ask what it means to oppose the state for using the ‘bogey of Maoists’ in order to kill and repress ordinary villagers and ordinary civilians.  Now, the state does not always kill civilians; nor does it right away go after anyone who calls himself a Maoist (didn’t the Bengal government arrest Gour Chakraborty¹ only at an opportune time?).  The state invariably kills, as we see in Lalgarh, when civilians, ordinary villagers, adivasis, enter into a symbiotic relationship with the Maoists; or when the Maoists enter into such a relationship with ordinary villagers.  That is, ‘ordinary villagers’ now are no ordinary villagers engaged in ‘participatory democracy’ or ‘rural empowerment’ but are challenging the very framework given by the state as the generalized expression of power relations; similarly the Maoists are not a small band of abstract believers in violence roaming the countryside recruiting children and poverty-stricken tribals for a Cause but are now engaged in a real struggle on the side of the masses.

Therefore the state does not really kill ordinary villagers in the name of killing Maoists; it kills those who are ’supporters’ of the Maoists, those who are part of the larger, longer struggle which at some point or other assumes the name of Maoist.  To be sure there are armed Maoist combatants and unarmed civilians and one needs to differentiate the two.  However if the democratic struggle and the ‘violent’ struggle so often get intertwined and intersperse each other, if the Maoist moment is an integral moment of the overall struggle, then unarmed civilians are an integral part of the Maoist movement.

To say that the Maoist is the name for the articulation of the ordinary villager/adivasi as a political subject is to say that autonomous democratic practices do not close shop once the repressive state moves in, the form of struggle often alternates between ‘peaceful’ and ‘violent’ ones, and armed revolutionaries as much as unarmed civilians form part of the struggle.  Thus the resistance in Lalgarh was such that it was extremely difficult to sustain the separation between the Maoists and the adivasi population.

Benign Government

Even as there is mounting evidence that ordinary adivasis are part of Maoist politics in the area, the government today is forced to somehow act as though the adivasis are waiting to be won over through the right development policies, employment opportunities.  First security forces were sent in to flush out Maoists.  With hardly any encounters with the Maoists, the armed forces basically marched endlessly from one village to the next, across empty fields and villages whose male members had mostly fled.  It is anybody’s guess where the male members had escaped to!  After the ’success’ of this ‘flushing out’ operation, sincere attempts are being made to reach out to the people there with all kinds of development plans, employment generation, food and medical provisions.  Under express directions form the chief minister, the secretaries from different ministers are posted in the different villages finding out the problems and needs of the people there.

One should not here doubt the sincerity of the CPIM to really follow the democratic rights perspective here in separating ordinary villagers and the Maoists.  In fact it declared that it wants to fight the Maoists politically, grudgingly accepting the centre’s ban on the Maoists.  So much so that the state government declared that it does not want to apply the UAPA, except in rare cases and that too the police will not have the authority to decide its use which will be decided by the government at the highest level.

Now all these welfarist proposals derive their rationale from the belief that ordinary villagers/adivasis stand opposed to the Maoists or got temporarily duped into supporting Maoists.  However in a total reversal of this separation theory, in Lalgarh ordinary villagers not only rejected the welfarist state but upheld the Maoists precisely in their supposed violent avatar.

That is, while, on the one hand, you had the case of Malati rejecting the most benign offer the state can ever make, the 0ffer of medical care to the mother and new-born baby, on the other hand, you had ‘ordinary civilians’ cheering and celebrating (ululate) the mass action at Dharampur, destroying the house of the CPIM leader Anuj Pandey.  Where does one draw the line between ordinary villagers and ‘violent Maoists’ when women who reject welfare measures offered by the state are more than participative in violent programmes of the Maoists?  The Hindustan Times reports from Dharampur, “A huge crowd gathered below in the area now under Section 144 lustily cheering each blow that fell on the white two-story house, quite out of place in this land of deprivation under Lalgarh police station.  By sundown, the hammers had chopped off the first floor, leaving behind a skeleton of what was a ‘posh’ house in the morning” (Hindustan Times, 16 June 2009).

Conclusion

Thus the approach of trying to defend the human rights of ‘ordinary civilians’ by arguing that they are not with the Maoists allows the state to justify repression of the Maoists in the name of defending the rights of these civilians.  Far from this separation being something which the state must be forced to adopt, the state in fact was seen in Lalgarh to enforce it.  Lalgarh showed that when the ‘ordinary civilians’ rejected the state even at its welfarist best and made it difficult to separate them from the Maoists, the state was forced to invent a technical separation (a particular dye mark on the body identifying a Maoist).  This however did not work.

Those on the left who support the democratic struggle in Lalgarh but deplore its supposed Maoist takeover, too, vociferously uphold this separation.  What this separation does is prevent the interplay between different forms of struggle, ‘peaceful’ and ‘violent’, and constrict it within the limits set by the decrepit structures of state power.  In the name of defending the democratic struggle from the authoritarian Maoists, it actually precludes the autonomous emergence of this struggle, a full-fledged political struggle against and beyond the limits set by state power.

Lalgarh showed that the Maoist is the name for the articulation of the democratic struggle which now refuses to give up even when it comes face to the face with the state exercising its monopoly of violence.  Opening a novel chapter in the interrelationship between the ‘Maoist party’ and mass resistance, the Maoist ‘take-over’ of the ‘democratic struggle’ was actually the latter’s articulation beyond the last limits set up by given structures of power, the refusal of the struggle to recoil and rescind in the face of this power, refusal to remain merely another enclosure of democracy, the site of ‘primitive accumulation’ for capital and its democratic claims.  It is a movement and a resistance where ordinary civilians no longer appear ordinary, and where the Maoists do not appear crudely vanguardist.  Lalgarh today helps us rethink the entire question of political subjectivity, party, and the masses — but above all of democracy and its concrete realisation through mass action.

1 Gour Chakraborty, a veteran and widely  respected Communist in his early 70s, had been a leading figure of the Ganapratirodh Mancha (Democratic Resistance Front), a coalition of left revolutionary groups in Kolkata.  On December 26, 2008 West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said that the government wished to deal with the Lalgarh rebellion “politically.”  Gour Chakraborty then announced that he had quit the Democratic Resistance Front to become the public spokesperson for the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in West Bengal, offered to meet with the chief minister, and said “we are giving the CPM a chance to deal with us politically.”  But despite efforts from other constituents of the Left Front in West Bengal, the leadership of the CPM refused to enter into political discussions with Chakraborty.  On June 23, 2009 the West Bengal government arrested Chakraborty, using the provisions of the draconian anti-terrorism Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, as he was leaving a talk show on a TV channel. [ed.]

लालगढ़ पर रेयाज़ उल हक की रिपोट

ज़मीन जब पक रही थी

रेयाज़ उल हक, लालगढ़ से लौटकर
साभार : रविवार

अगर वे गांव से भागे नहीं होंगे तो अब कादोशोल के गोपाल धवड़ा को शाम ढ़लने के बाद अपने मवेशियों को जंगल में खोजने जाने से पहले सौ बार सोचना पडेगा. सिजुआ की पांचू मुर्मू को सुबह शौच के लिए जाना पहले जितना ही आतंक से भर देने वाला काम होगा. मोलतोला के दिलीप को फिर से स्कूल जाने में डर लगेगा.
17 जून के बाद लालगढ़ में सीआरपीएफ़, पुलिस और हरमादवाहिनी के घुसने के साथ ही सात महीने से चला आ रहा पुलिस बायकाट खत्म हो गया. और इसी के साथ लालगढ़ के लोगों के शब्दों में उनके पुराने दिन शायद फिर से लौट आये हैं, पुलिसिया जोर-ज़ुल्म के, गिरफ़्तारियों के, यातना भरे वे दिन, जब…लालगढ़ के रास्तों पर फिर से पुलिस और अर्धसैनिक बलों की गाड़ियां दौड़ने लगी हैं. थाने फिर से आबाद हो गये हैं. स्कूलों, पंचायत भवनों और अस्पतालों में पुलिस और अर्धसैनिक बलों के डेरे लग गये हैं. लालगढ़ में पहले भी बाहरी लोगों के जाने पर रोक थी, लेकिन तब भी पत्रकार और बुद्धिजीवी, छात्र आदि जा सकते थे, राज्य के शब्दों में ‘आतंकवादी’ माओवादियों के नियंत्रणवाले लालगढ़ में क्या हो रहा है, यह जो देखना चाहे उसकी आंखों के सामने था.

लेकिन अब सरकार के नियंत्रण में आने के बाद लालगढ़ में क्या हो रहा है, किसी को नहीं पता. वहां जाने पर अब पूरी पाबंदी है. लालगढ़ में ‘लोकतंत्र’ को बहाल किये जाने की प्रक्रिया के बारे में हम अब भी कम ही जान पाये हैं. कभी-कभार आ रही खबरें बताती हैं कि किस तरह लोग अभी चल रही कार्रवाई से आतंकित होकर भाग रहे हैं. लोगों के घर, स्वास्थ्य केंद्र, स्कूल जलाये जा रहे हैं. उपयोग में लाये जानेवाले पानी के स्रोत गंदे किये जा रहे हैं. और अनगिनत संख्या में लोगों को माओवादी कह कर प्रताड़ित किया जा रहा है.

विरोध

कुछ हफ़्ते पहले के लालगढ़ में ऐसा कुछ भी नहीं था. माओवादियों से ‘आतंकित’ और उनकी ‘यातनाएं सह रहे’ लालगढ़ के लोग निर्भीक होकर कहीं भी आ जा रहे थे. बच्चे स्कूल जा रहे थे. महिलाएं अपने जीवन में पहली बार बिना किसी डर के जंगलों में जा रही थीं. गांवों में शाम ढले घर से निकलने पर किसी को कोई डर नहीं था. अब ‘मुक्त’ लालगढ़ में ऐसा सोचा भी नहीं जा सकता.

लेकिन लालगढ़ में ‘मुक्ति’ से पहले की, लालगढ़ के लोगों के शब्दों में ‘आज़ादी’ हमेशा से नहीं रही. कुल सात महीने थे, जिनमें पुलिस और अर्धसैनिक बलों को लोगों ने बेहद शांतिपूर्ण तरीके से इलाके से बाहर कर दिया था. यह हुआ था इलाके में पुलिस के आम बायकाट से, जो शुरू हुआ था छोटोपेलिया की चिंतामणि मुर्मु की आंख पुलिस द्वारा फोड़ देने की घटना के बाद से.
लेकिन इसके लिए ज़मीन बहुत पहले से बन रही थी. लोगों में एक गुस्सा था, जो बहुत पहले से खदबदा रहा था. लालगढ़ में किसी से भी पूछ लीजिए, वह इसकी अनेक कहानियां सुना देगा, पूरी तफसील से.

1997-98 में, जब विश्व बैंक और विश्व मुद्रा कोश की वनों की रक्षा के लिए परियोजना आयी तो उनके फंड पर साल वन की रक्षा के लिए तत्कालीन ज्योति बसु सरकार ने ग्राम रक्षा कमेटियां बनायीं. इन कमेटियों में सीपीएम के लोग भरे गये. कमेटी का काम जंगल पर पहरा देना था. इसके बाद आदिवासियों के लिए जीवन मुश्किल होने लगा. फ़ारेस्ट आफ़िसरों का ज़ुल्म भी बढ़ गया.

जंगल पर अधिकार ……….

Open Letter to UCPN (Maoist)

Politbureau, Communist Party Of India (Maoist)

May 20, 2009 (Became available 28th June 2009)

Dear Comrades!
We have been keenly following the recent developments taking place in your country, Nepal. With the CPN(M) emerging as the single largest party in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in April 2008 and the formation of the new government consisting of a coalition of several Parties, some of which are known for their anti-people, pro-feudal, pro-imperialist and pro-Indian expansionist past, an ideological-political debate has arisen in the entire revolutionary camp in India and the world regarding the path, strategy, and tactics pursued by your Party, the CPN(M), in advancing the revolution in Nepal. There have also been reports in the media concerning the proposal of your Party leadership to change the name of the Party by removing the term `Maoist’. All these make it all the more urgent to conduct a deeper debate on the ideological-political line pursued by the CPN(M), particularly after it came to power through elections, after a decade-long people’s war and forming the government with some of the arch-reactionaries who had earned the wrath of the Nepalese masses.
Several issues need to be debated by Maoist revolutionaries in the context of the CPN(M) pursuing a line and policies that are not consistent with the fundamental tenets of MLM and teachings of our great Marxist teachers—issues such as proletarian internationalism; stages and sub-stages of revolutions in semi-colonial semi-feudal countries; understanding of the Leninist concept of state and revolution; nature of parliamentary democracy in semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America; meaning of rigidity of strategy and flexibility in tactics; and such other related questions. There are also some specific issues raised by your Party in the name of creative application of MLM such as the concept of 21st century democracy or multi-Party democracy, Prachanda Path, South Asian Soviet Federation, fusion theory, and so on.
It is true that Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action. Those Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries who followed it only in letter and discarded its spirit had failed to understand the essence of Marxism, failed to understand what com Lenin had taught, that is, `concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the living soul of Marxism’. Such dogmatists failed to apply MLM to the concrete practice of revolution in their countries and hence failed to make any real advances in the revolutions in their respective countries. Dogmatism, no doubt, has been a bane of the Marxist Leninist movements and hence the struggle against dogmatism should be an inseparable part of the ideological struggle of the Communist Party.
However, in the name of struggle against dogmatism, there have been serious deviations in the International Communist Movement (ICM), often going into an even greater, or at least equally dangerous, abyss of right deviation and revisionism. In the name of creative application of Marxism, communist parties have fallen into the trap of right opportunism, bourgeois pluralist Euro-Communism, rabid anti-Stalinism, anarchist post-modernism and outright revisionism. Right danger or revisionism in the ICM has emerged as the greatest danger in the period following the usurpation of the leadership of the CPSU and state power in the Soviet Union after the demise of comrade Stalin. Com Mao and other genuine revolutionaries had to wage a consistent ideological-political struggle against revisionism and reformism in the ICM and also within the CPC. However, despite the great struggle waged by com Mao and other Marxist Leninist revolutionaries all over the world against revisionism, it has been the revisionists who had temporarily won and dominated the ICM in the contemporary world. The ideological-political debate over the creative application of MLM to the concrete practice of the revolution in Nepal has to be conducted with a correct grasp of this international struggle ever since the time of com Lenin. …..

Lalgarh Update

Lalgarh Update

Amit Bhattacharyya

22-23 June 2009

Let us pick up the threads from the last report (published by Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan as a book entitled Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram, April 2009) which ended with the meeting between People’s Committee leaders and some members of the civil society with the chief electoral officer on 12 April. Ultimately it was decided by the election commission that polling booths would be shifted from areas that come under police boycott. Lok Sabha elections throughout the country ended on 13 May and results were declared on 16 May. The phase of struggle that started from then on was something that was totally unprecedented in the history of our country—in depth, magnitude and significance. The subsequent history can be divided into Phase III and Phase IV. Phase III is related to people’s movement, while Phase IV with the deployment of para-military forces, brutality perpetrated by them and resistance by the people and the Maoists.

Phase III

• The attitude of the West Bengal ‘left-front’ government became clear when it refused to give permission to hold a demonstration in Kolkata to be organized jointly by CAVOW (Committee Against Violence on Women) and the women’s wing of the People’s Committee with traditional weapons on 5 June, as it would be political in nature. The Kolkata police even threatened the local convenor of CAVOW with arrest if they did not listen. Such a decision is discriminatory. Processions with traditional weapons have always been allowed by the state government to the Muslims at the time of Muharram or to the Sikhs during their religious ceremonies. If the government allows these processions to take place as these were religious in nature, then how would they explain the holding of a procession in November 2007 by the CPI(M) after the recapture of Nandigram with adivasis wielding the same traditional weapons like bows, axes, etc. The organisers were thus forced to shift the venue to West Medinipur. Traditional weapons are a part of tribal culture and the West Bengal government, acting in this way, actually rejected that very right of the tribal people. Superimposed upon it was the fact that when a cultural team went to Chakulia in Jharkhand on the Bengal-Jharkhand border to make propaganda among the adivasis there so that they could join the rally on 5 June, many of them were arrested by the Jharkhand police and a number of women were molested and one raped in Chakulia police station. When the Committee went to enter Jharkhand on their way to the Chakulia police station, a huge force was mobilised on the Jharkhand side and they were greeted with tear-gas shells. Chhatradhar Mahato declared that the road from West Bengal to Jharkhand would be blocked to cut off supply lines if the arrested were not released. That resulted in the spread of the movement to new areas also. The administration retaliated with the promulgation of Section 144 of the Cr.PC within 2 kms of the Lalgarh police station.

Meanwhile, the CPI(M) hit back to recover lost ground with 200 armed goons from Keshpur and Garbeta. On 11 June, they fired at PCAPA members such as Mirza Abdul Mannan, Hafiz Abdul Mannan and Omar Sheikh. On 12 June, the goons shot and injured four members of the PCAPA namely, Syed Afsar Ali, Jainal Abedin, Sheikh Kamruddin and Safiur Rahman at Sijua (TOI, 12-6-09). The people retaliated quickly. One CPI (M) leader of a branch of Dharampur was killed.

Turning things upside down

On June 14, 2009, the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) started from Lalgarh, covered 11 kms and took control of 48 villages including CPM party offices in Dharampur—an apparently invincible CPM citadel used by the CPM hermads for launching armed attacks on the people. This was preceded by intense firing between the CPM goons and the Maoist fighters for five days in areas such as Dharampur, Jirapara, Hodhodi and Bhaudi. An unspecified number of CPM goons (around 14) died, many people left their homes from the battlefront and the Maoists, according to press reports, have seized the weapons left behind by the miscreants. Then they attacked Sijua, a CPM stronghold that would allow them easy access to the Jindal’s proposed steel plant site at Salboni. So decisive was the power shift in Dharampur that CPM zonal secretary Anuj Pandey, a resident of the village, had to flee out of sheer panic. ……………

Statements on Lalgarh

Statement from CPIML(Liberation) on Lalgarh – June 24, 2009
Statement from PUDR on banning of CPI(Maoist) – June 25, 2009
Statement from Chhatradhar Mahato – June 21, 2009
Statement from PUCL president Kannabiran on Lalgarh – June 25, 2009
Statement from a group of Delhi intellectuals on Lalgarh – June 19, 2009

“लालगढ को लालगढ तक देखना वैसी ही भूल होगी जैसे माओवादियो को सिर्फ लालगढ में देखना “

माओवादी नेता कामरेड किशनजी से पुण्य प्रसून वाजपेयी की बातचीत

पुण्य प्रसून वाजपेयी के ब्लॉग से साभार

लालगढ़ में पुलिस और अर्धसैनिक बलों के आपरेशन शुरु होने के 72 घंटो बाद हालात कितने बदले हैं और माओवादियों की अगली पहल क्या होगी यह सवाल हर किसी के जहन में है। खासकर पहली बार सीपीएम लालगढ़ में माओवादियों के सफाये का सवाल उसी तरह उठा रही है, जैसा कभी नक्सलबाडी में किसानों ने जमींदारो को लेकर उठाया था । जब इन सवालो को मैंने कामरेड किशनजी के सामने रखा तो उनका पहला और सीधा सपाट जबाब यही आया कि “लालगढ को लालगढ तक देखना वैसी ही भूल होगी जैसे माओवादियो को सिर्फ लालगढ में देखना। ” कामरेड किशन के इस जबाब के बाद मैने सवाल-दर-सवाल उठाये और जबाब भी बिना किसी लाग लपेट के इस तरह आया जैसे लालगढ युद्द में पुलिस का ऑपरेशन नहीं बल्कि कौई बौद्दिक क्लास चल रही हो।

सवाल- लालगढ को लालगढ तक देखना भूल होगी । इसका मतलब क्या क्या है ।
जबाव- लालगढ पश्चिमी मिदनापुर का हिस्सा है । और इस वक्त मिदनापुर के करीब साढे सोलह हजार गांवो में आदिवासी ग्रामीण सीपीएम सरकार के खिलाफ लड़ाई लड़ने को तैयार है । इन ग्रामीणों की हालत ऐसी है, जहां इनके पास गंवाने के लिये कुछ भी नही है । इन गांवो में खाना या पीने का पानी तक सरकार मुहैया नहीं करा पायी है । सरकारी योजनाओ के तहत मुफ्त अन्न हो या कुएं का पानी । इसके लिये इन्हे सीपीएम काडर पर ही निर्भर रहना पड़ता है । गांव की बदहाली और सीपीएम काडर की खुशहाली देखकर यही लगता है कि इलाके में यह नये दौर के जमींदार है । जिनके पास सबकुछ है। गाड़ी, हथियार, धन-धान्य सबकुछ । लालगढ के कुछ सीपीएम काडर के घरों में तो एयरकंडीशन भी मिला। पानी के बड़े बड़े 20-20 लीटर वाले प्लास्टिक के टैंक मिले । जबकि गांव के कुंओं में इन्होने कैरोसिन तेल डाल दिया जिससे गांववाले पानी ना पी सके । और यह सब कोई आज का किस्सा नहीं है । सालो-साल से यह चला आ रहा है । किसी गांववाले के पास रोजगार का कोई साधन नहीं है । जंगल गांव की तरह यहा के आदिवासी रहते है । यहां अभी भी पैसे से ज्यादा सामानो की अदला-बदली से काम चलाया जाता है । इसलिये सवाल माओवादियों का नहीं है । हमनें तो इन्हे सिर्फ गोलबंद किया है । इनके भीतर इतना आक्रोष भरा हुआ है कि यह पुलिस-सेना की गोली खाने को भी तैयार है । और गांव वालो का यह आक्रोष सिर्फ लालगढ़ तक सीमित नही है ।

सवाल- तो माओवादियो ने गांववालो की यह गोलबंदी लालगढ़ से बाहर भी की है ।
जबाब- हम लगातार प्रयास जरुर कर रहे है कि गांववाले एकजुट हों। वह राजनीतिक दलों के काडर के बहकावे में अब न आये । क्योकि उनकी एकजुटता ही इस पूरे इलाके में कोई राजनीतिक विकल्प दे सकती है । हमारी तरफ से गोलबंदी का मतलब ग्रामीण आदिवासियों में हिम्मत पैदा करना है, जिन्हें लगातार राजनीतिक लाभ के लिये तोड़ा जा रहा था । सीपीएम के काडर का काम इस इलाके में सिर्फ चुनाव में जीत हासिल करना ही होता है। पंचायत स्तर से लेकर लोकसभा चुनाव तक में सिर्फ चुनाव के वक्त गाववालों को थोड़ी राहत वोट डालने को लेकर मिलती क्योकि इलाके में कब्जा दिखाकर काडर को भी उपर से लाभ मिलता । लेकिन पिछले लोकसभा चुनाव में हमने चुनाव का बांयकाट कराकर गाववालो को जोडा और सीपीएम काडर पर निशाना साधा। उससे सीपीएम उम्मीदवार जीता जरुर, लेकिन उनकी पार्टी में साफ मैसेज गया कि मिदनापुर में सीपीएम की पकड खत्म हो चुकी है । जिसका केन्द्र लालगढ़ है ।

सवाल–तो क्या ममता बनर्जी अब अपना कब्जा इस इलाके में देख रही हैं । इसीलिये वह आपलोगों को मदद कर रही हैं ।
जबाब- ममता बनर्जी क्या देख रही है या क्या सोच रही है, यह तो हम नहीं कह सकते । लेकिन ममता ने नंदीग्राम के आंदोलन में जो सवाल उठाये उसपर हमारी सहमति जरुर है । लेकिन लालगढ में आंदोलन ममता को राजनीतिक लाभ पहुचाने के लिये हो रहा है, ऐसा सोचना सही नहीं होगा । ममता को लेकर हमें यह आशा जरुर है कि वह ग्रामीण आदिवासियो की मुश्किलो को समझते हुये अपने ओहदे से सरकार को प्रभावित करेंगी । लेकिन संघर्ष का जो रास्ता यहा के आदिवासियो ने पकड़ा है, उसे राजनीतिक तौर पर हम राजनीतिक विकल्प के तौर पर देख रहे हैं क्योकि बंगाल की स्थितिया इतनी विकट हो चली है कि लालगढ़ आंदोलन को पूरे राज्य में बेहद आशा के साथ देखा जा रहा है । वामपंथी विचारधारा को मानने वाला आम शहरी व्यक्ति इसमें नक्सलबाडी का दौर देख रहा है ।

सवाल—नक्सलबाडी से लालगढ़ को जोड़ना जल्दबाजी नहीं है।
जबाब—जोड़ने का मतलब हुबहू स्थिति का होना नहीं है । जिन हालातों में सीपीएम बनी और जनता ने कांग्रेस को खारिज कर सीपीएम को सत्ता सौपी । चालीस साल बाद ना सिर्फ उसी जनता के सपने टूटे है, बल्कि सीपीएम भी भटक चुकी है । क्योंकि जिस जमीन-किसान के मुद्दे के आसरे वाममोर्चा तीस साल से सत्ता में काबिज है और जमीन पर खडा किसान लहूलुहान हो रहा है तो उसका आक्रोष कहां निकलेगा । क्योंकि इन तीस सालो में भूमिहीन खेत मजदूरो की तादाद 35 लाख से बढकर 74 लाख 18 हजार हो चुकी है । राज्य में 73 लाख 51 हजार भूमिहीन किसान है । इस दौर में चार लाख एकड़ जमीन भूमिहीनो में बांटने के लिये अधिग्रहित भी की गयी । लेकिन अधिग्रहित जमीन का 75 फिसदी कौन डकार गया, इसका लेखा-जोखा आजतक सीपीएम ने जनता के सामने नहीं रखा । छोटी जोत के कारण 90 फिसदी पट्टेदार और 83 फिसद बटाईदार काम के लिये दूसरी जगहो पर जाने के लिये मजबूर हुये । इसमें आधे पट्टेदार और बटाईदारो की हालत नरेगा के तहत काम मिलने वालों से भी बदतर हालत है। इन्हें रोजाना के तीस रुपये तक नहीं मिल पाते। लेकिन नया सवाल कही ज्यादा गहरा है, क्योकि एक तरफ राज्य में 11 लाख 75 हजार ऐसी वन भूमि है, जिसपर खेती हो नहीं सकती। और कंगाल होकर बंद हो चुके उद्योगों की 40 हजार एकड जमीन फालतू पड़ी है । वहीं किसानी ही जब एकमात्र रोजगार और जीने का आधार है तो इनका निवाला छीनकर सरकार खेती योग्य जमीन में ही अपने आर्थिक विकास को क्यों देख रही है । यही हालात तो नक्सलबाडी के दौर में थे ।

सवाल- लेकिन बुद्ददेव सरकार अब माओवादियो पर प्रतिबंध लगाकर कुचलने के मूड में है ।
जबाव- आपको यह समझना होगा कि सीपीएम का यह दोहरा खेल है । बंगाल में माओवादियों के खिलाफ सीपीएम सरकार का रुख दूसरे राज्यों से भी कड़ा है । हमारे काडर को चुन चुन कर मारा गया है । तीस से ज्यादा माओवादी बंगाल के जेलों में बंद है । अदालत ले जाते वक्त इनका चेहरा काले कपडे से ढक कर लाया-ले जाया जाता है …जैसा किसी खूखांर अपराधी के साथ होता है । दमदम जेल में बंद माओवादी हिमाद्री सेन राय उर्फ शोमेन इसका एक उदाहरण है । प्रतिबंध लगाना राजनीतिक तौर पर सीपीएम के लिये घाटे का सौदा है क्योकि लालगढ सरीखी जगहों पर गांव के गांव माओवादी हैं। क्या प्रतिबंध लगाकर बारह हजार गांववालो को जेल में बंद किया जा सकता है । लेकिन चुनाव के वक्त चुनावी सौदेबाजी में यह गांववाले सीपीएम को भी वोट दे देते है क्योकि हम चुनाव लड़ते नहीं है । अगर प्रतिबंध लगता है तो गांव के गांव जेल में बंद तो कर नहीं सकते लेकिन पुलिस को अत्याचार करने का एक हथियार जरुर दे सकते है । जिससे सीपीएम के प्रति राजनीतिक तौर पर गांववालो में और ज्यादा विरोध होगा ही । अभी तो आंदोलन के वक्त ही पुलिस अत्याचार होता है । नंदीग्राम में भी हुआ और लालगढ में भी हो रहा है । महिलाओ के साथ बलात्कार की कई धटनाये सामने आयी है । लेकिन प्रतिबंध लगने के बाद पुलिस की तानाशाही हो जायेगी इससे इंकार नहीं किया जा सकता है ।

सवाल- लेकिन काफी गांववाले माओवादियों से भी परेशान है, वह पलायन कर रहे हैं।
जबाब- हो सकता है…क्योकि पलायन तो गांव से हो रहा है । लालगढ़ में जिस तरह सीपीएम और माओवादियो के बीच गांववाले बंटे हैं, उसमें पुलिस आपरेशन शुरु होने के बाद सीपीएम समर्थक गांववालो का पलायन हो रहा है…इससे इंकार नहीं किया जा सकता । लेकिन इसकी वजह हमारा दबाब नही है बल्कि पुलिस कार्रवायी सीपीएम कैडर की तर्ज पर हो रही है । जिसमें गांव के सीपीएम समर्थको के इशारे पर माओवादी समर्थकों पर पुलिस अत्याचार हो रहा है । इसलिये अब गांव के भीतर ही सीपीएम समर्थक ग्रमीणो का विरोध हो रहा है । उन्हें गांव छोडने के लिये मजबूर किया जा रहा है । जो गांव छोड रहे हैं, उनसे दस रुपये और एक किलोग्राम चावल भी गांव में बचे लोग ले रहे है । जिससे संघर्ष लंबे वक्त तक चल सके ।

सवाल–आप ग्राउंड जीरो पर है । हालात क्या है लालगढ़ के ।
जबाब– लालगढ टाउन पर पुलिस सीआरपीएफ ने कैप जरुर लगा लिये हैं । लेकिन गांवो में किसी के आने की हिमम्त नहीं है । आदिवासी महिलाए-पुरुष बच्चे सभी तो लड़ने मरने के लिये तैयार हैं । लेकिन हम खुद नही चाहते कोई आदिवासी – ग्रामीण मारा जाये । इसलिये यह सरकारी प्रचार है कि हमने गांववालो को मानव ढाल बना रखा है । पहली बात तो यह कि गांववाले और माओवादी कोई अलग नही हैं। माओवादी बाहर से आकर यहा नही लड़ रहे । बल्कि पिछले पांच साल में लालगढ में गांववाले सरकार की नीतियो के खिलाफ आवाज उठा रहे हैं । फिर हमारी तैयारी ऐसी है कि पुलिस चाह कर भी गांव तक पहुंच नहीं सकती है। जंगल में गुरिल्ला युद्द की समझ हमे पुलिस से ज्यादा है । इसलिये पुलिस वहीं तक पहुच सकी है, जहा तक बख्तरबंद गाडियां जा सकती है । उसके आगे पुलिस को अपने पैरो पर चल कर आना होगा ।

आखिरी सवाल- कभी यह अतिवाम सीपीएम में ही थी, अब आमने सामने आ जाने की वजह ।
जबाव–अच्छा किया जो यह सवाल आपने आज पूछ लिया । क्योंकि आज 21 जून को ही बत्तीस साल पहले 1977 में ज्योति बाबू मुख्यमंत्री बने थे । पहली बार जब 1967 मे संयुक्त मोर्चे की सरकार में ज्योति बसु उपमुख्यमंत्री बने । लेकिन 1964 में जो सवाल भूमि को लेकर वाम आंदोलन खडा कर रहा था उसे संयुक्त मोर्चा की सरकार ने जब सत्ता में आने के बाद टाला तो अतिवाम ने सीपीएम के खिलाफ आंदोलन की पहल की । उस वक्त जमीन के मुद्दे पर ज्योति बसु सरकार ने सीपीआई एमएल पर या आरोप लगाया था कि उन्हें अतिवाम धारा ने नीतियो को लागू कराने का वक्त नहीं दिया । अब हमारा सवाल यही है कि जिन बातों को ज्योति बसु ने 42 साल पहले कहा था जब आजतक वही पूरे नहीं हो पाये तो अब और कितना वक्त दिया जाना चाहिये ।

Interview with the former Chinese Cultural Revolution Red Guard Bai Di

Growing up in revolutionary China

The following interview with the former Chinese Cultural Revolution Red Guard Bai Di is from the 12 April issue of Revolution, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (www.revcom.us). It was done in February 2009 by Revolution correspondent Li Onesto. Bai is a co-editor of the book, Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up During the Mao Era and the Director of Chinese and Asian Studies at Drew University in the U.S.

Li Onesto: A young person who heard you talk about your experiences growing up in socialist China told me that before this they had no idea at all what it was like during the Cultural Revolution, including what it was like to be a woman during that time.

Bai Di: In my generation, most of the women hoped to accomplish great things. When we were young, when we were teenagers, there were revolutionary ideals. We worked for some goals. We felt that our lives were full of meaning, not for ourselves but for all these larger goals of society. That is what we were discussing at that moment. We were idealistic about the world that we envisioned. We were about 15 years old when we went to the countryside, around 1972. At that point I graduated from high school. The school was reopened after about a year of closing in 1966. We spent most of the time studying Chairman Mao’s works, and some math, chemistry and physics. Later on we were digging tunnels in the schoolyard because of the Soviet threat of war. We were trying to protect our country.

Our class had more than a thousand students and four of us, all women in our high school, got together and decided to write an epic of the history of the Red Guards. We were very ambitious at that moment, now to think about it. There were two guys who tried to join us and we interviewed them. I remember that each of them presented something poetic written by them, and the four of us looked at them. We decided not to have them in this writing group because they were not good enough. We just laughed at their writings because they were not up to our standards. We totally rejected them. The four of us, we thought we were the best. We wanted to record our deeds of trying to educate other people with Chairman Mao’s teachings. We organized the first “Chairman Mao Thought Propaganda Team” in the school.

LO: When most people hear the term “propaganda team”, they don’t know what that is and/or they look at it like a negative thing, like it’s about just telling people what to think, that it goes against critical thinking.

BD: The Mao Zedong propaganda teams in the beginning of the Cultural Revolution were organized by the revolutionary Red Guards so that educated people, students, armed with all the songs and poems, could go to the neighbourhoods in the cities and later on in the countryside to spread knowledge to the not so well educated. They tried to teach the so-called “less educated people” about the party’s directives and Chairman Mao’s ideas. Our propaganda team taught people revolutionary songs and read the current events from the newspapers to them. We organized our school’s students to go to clean up the neighbourhoods and after that we performed dances and songs and called on people to clean up the neighbourhood because sanitation was very important. We felt that was part of building a greater society.

LO: How did you see that in relation to the ideals that you had?

BD: The idea was that we could make a change, that there were all these opportunities. We were going to change the world; we were going to change China. That was the mission of my generation because we lived in a very special era: the great 1960s and 1970s. We called that moment the dawn of communism, that’s the point. We were working to build up this great society and we felt that everyone in that society should have education. Because we students could read and we could write so we used this to try and inspire other people – to teach them to sing and teach them sections of Mao’s works. That was what the propaganda teams did. Something gets lost in the translation of this concept to English. In Chinese right now this phrase still refers to what is considered a very positive thing. The phrase propaganda team is not a negative thing, it is to let everybody know what they need to know, the ideas of the party’s central committee, what they are doing. During the Cultural Revolution everybody needed to know that. China at that point, it was such a large country, and the government organization at each level had a propaganda department, you needed this at every level. There was a lot of illiteracy. And Chairman Mao’s teachings aren’t all very easy and they are open to interpretation. If you change one line, it changes the meaning. You can’t just teach the words, you have to explain it.

Take something like what was called the “constantly read three articles” by Mao: “Serve the People”, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains” and “In Memory of Norman Bethune”. Look at the old story about the foolish old man – why do we have to talk about that? That is an ancient Chinese fable that everyone already knows. It is about an old man who called on his sons to dig away two big mountains that were obstructing their way out. Others made fun of him saying it was impossible for them to dig up these two huge mountains. But the Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity.” This resilience impressed the God so much that God sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. But Chairman Mao changed it and said it was the hard working people who moved the mountains. He said, right now, we the communists, the party are like the Old Foolish Man. We will try to move all these three mountains – imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism – but we cannot do that. So we have to impress the Chinese people; they are the God. Only they can move away the three mountains that are oppressing us. And we have to entrust the people. Do you get that? So we have to move them, we have to understand what we are doing. You have to explain that to people, why that is very important. We have to keep doing something and we have to keep letting people know what we are doing. We have to politically educate people – that is our job. When I think back – that was our whole mission. We were so lucky that we were able to get the ability to write and understand things and others didn’t understand that, didn’t see the connection. So that’s what we were doing and when I think about it, what confidence we had.

LO: What effect did the Cultural Revolution have on the status of women? ……..

Binayak Sen free on bail

A World to Win News Service.
The Indian Supreme Court ordered Binayak Sen freed on bail 25 May. Lower courts had denied him bail and the high court had refused to hear an earlier petition, but support for the doctor has been building up in India and globally. Recently a former Supreme Court judge wrote an open letter saying that the case against him should be dismissed. At the same time, there have been fears for the 57-year-old Sen’s life, because of a heart ailment that Ilina Sen, his wife, warned could be used by the state authorities to kill him.

A graduate of one of India’s leading medical schools, Sen has been working in the state of Chhattisgarh since 1981. He and Ilina Sen run an NGO that trains rural health workers in adivasi (tribal) and poor peasant areas, organises rural clinics and promotes campaigns against alcohol abuse and violence against women. These and other public health programmes Sen has been associated with have reduced the deaths of children due to diarrhoea and dehydration, helping to bring down the overall infant mortality rate in the state. All this has made him one of India’s most prominent public health specialists.

He earned the wrath of the Chhattisgarh authorities because of his political advocacy for adivasis and his vocal opposition to the Salwa Judum, a state-backed militia formed to fight the Maoist-led revolutionary movement among them.

His 2007 arrest came shortly after he exposed a massacre of tribal people. At that time he was charged with sedition and waging war against the state, allegedly by passing along letters from an accused Maoist he had treated in prison. As the former Supreme Court judge pointed out, at his trial, which has now gone on for more than a year, the state has failed to produce any evidence against him.

Sen considers himself an advocate of non-violence. His supporters report that on 17 May, state authorities bulldozed the Vanvasi Chtna Ashram, also run by Ghandian non-violence advocates, in revenge for its opposition to the Salwa Judum. The group had exposed the phoney “encounter” killing of 12 people in late March and subsequently filed a court case against the Chhattisgarh government

Sri Lanka: a foreseeable massacre

A World to Win News Service
For more than 26 years the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged the struggle for a Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern part of Sri Lanka. The Tigers once held a third of the island and administered it as if it were a mini-state. The roots of their struggle reside in the national oppression of the Tamil minority at the hands of the Sinhala ruling class. Thousands of Tamils were killed in pogroms in 1956, 1958, 1977 and 1983 by Sinhalese nationalist elements. These oppressive conditions have understandably led to resistance.

The last months of the war were particularly cruel for the Tamil masses. Reportedly 7,000 people have been killed since January. Thousands more were critically wounded, according to United Nations reports. The number of civilians trapped in the “no fire zones” (NFZs) in the northern part of the country was estimated at several hundred thousand. The Sri Lankan Government used the propaganda of “the war on terror” as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of rights in the country. Unspeakable crimes were committed against the Tamil people, from rape and death squads to “white van abductions”. Working on the principle that every Tamil is a terrorist unless he or she can prove otherwise, civilian areas, hospitals and shelters were being bombed and shelled with heavy artillery. As the Sri Lankan army advanced, the government kept journalists and other potential witnesses out of the NFZs so that no one could report the atrocities it committed.

The more than 250,000 Tamils who escaped the war zone are now forced to live in 13 camps under military control. They lack freedom of movement, adequate food, water and healthcare. Many wounded are without medical attention. According to an article by Arundhati Roy, due to their long years living under the LTTE, the government says the Tamils will have to be “re-educated” in the camps, an ominous phrase indeed.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told CNN after visiting Manik Farm: “I have travelled around the world and visited similar places, but this is by far the most appalling scene I have seen.” Manik Farm is one of the most presentable of Sri Lanka’s squalid and dangerous internment camps for Tamil civilians. The UN chief promised international action to investigate the shelling of civilian populations during the fighting. The Sri Lankan government has not made any concessions to Ban’s call for unhindered access to the camps by international aid organizations and that screening of displaced persons be expedited so that families can be reunited.

Ban’s meaningless phrases are like a balm on an ugly situation, a massacre that was totally foreseeable. The world stood quietly by as events in Sri Lanka unfolded. The U.S. and the UK, so quick to call for UN sanctions against Zimbabwe and Iran when that suited their purposes, have done little in this case besides declare that this is “not the moment” for an IMF loan to Sri Lanka. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called what has happened a “humanitarian crisis” (not like the “war crimes” she has accused the Palestinians of committing when a handful of Israeli civilians were killed). She said she was “disappointed” by the Sri Lankan government.

For many years the U.S. and the rest of the international community were somewhat ambivalent about the civil war going on in Sri Lanka, viewing it as an internal struggle between two armies. They thought that some compromises could be made between the two sides and in that way the war could come to an end. After 11 September 2001, the U.S. delegitimised the Tamil Tigers, putting them on their terrorist list, which in effect declared their struggle illegal. From then on, the Sri Lanka government had freedom to plan and carry out the crushing defeat of the LTTE and the massacre of Tamils. For instance, near the end of the war, when the Tigers said they would lay down their arms, the Sri Lanka government refused to accept this offer and kept up the offensive. This and many other acts (for example, treatment of Tamils in the internment camps) go against the Geneva Convention, according to international legal experts, yet the Sri Lankan government seems to have been acting on the cues of the big powers.

The U.S. does have an underlying need for stability in the world and some particular interests in that region as a whole, especially the Indian Ocean and therefore Sri Lanka and its harbour at Trincomalee on the eastern coast (south of where the fighting was). In a March/April 2009 Foreign Affairs article, Robert Kaplan identifies some geopolitical concerns for the U.S. in the South Asia region: the struggle for influence over the southern tier of the former Soviet Union, the growing presence of India and China in the Indian Ocean, the importance of the ocean’ s trade routes, the strategic significance of the adjacent energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia and the danger of a decline of U.S. influence in the region. The article notes that Sri Lanka is located at the confluence of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, and that China is constructing a refuelling station for its warships there. The U.S. also feared that the political unrest among Tamils in Sri Lanka would destabilise the Indian government with its own Tamil population and thus affect the U.S.-India strategic partnership.

For several years, government efforts to rout the Tigers were stalemated, reflected in a series of truces. In 2007 Sri Lanka sought and purchased weapons from a variety of countries, including the U.S., U.K., India, Pakistan, Russia and especially China. The U.S., Canada and European governments cracked down on Tamils abroad to prevent overseas fund-raising for the Tigers. Joint Indian-Sri Lankan naval patrols drastically reduced arms supplies reaching the rebels. India also provided the government with crucial intelligence. All this enabled the government to step up its offensive in early 2008, with predictable results.

China has cultivated ties with Sri Lanka for decades and became its biggest arms supplier in the 1990s when for a time during the civil war India and the Western governments had stopped selling weapons. Since 2007 China significantly increased its arms sales. According to Jane’ s Defence Weekly, Sri Lanka signed a 37.6 million dollar deal. In another deal it bought radar equipment. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2008 China gave Sri Lanka six F7 jet fighters – without charge. China has also encouraged Pakistan to sell weapons and train Sri Lankan pilots to fly the Chinese planes. Also last year, China’s aid to Sri Lanka jumped to 1 billion dollars. According to Asia Times, among the string of docking bases (in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Myanmar) developed as deep sea ports for refuelling, China is developing the Hambantota port project in Sri Lanka.

The Tamil diaspora around the world has condemned the atrocities of the Sri Lankan army as news of the deaths of their loved ones becomes known to them. For several weeks hundreds of Tamils in the UK maintained a non-stop 24-hour vigil in the area around Parliament, which was also the scene of demonstrations of tens of thousands and repeated clashes with riot police.

The Sri Lankan government is gleefully celebrating its victory, while the governments in the international community are clucking their tongues in an expression of hypocrisy and satisfaction.

Poem about My Rights (1980)

here is a powerful poem by June Jordan that begins by describing one of the most pervasive and universal expressions of women’s oppression — the fear of walking alone at night — and develops into an all-around exposure of the oppressive family unit and capitalist imperialism and ends with a righteous call to resist. — Editor

by June Jordan

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent:
Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the hell is everybody being reasonable about
and according to the Times this week
back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem
and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they
killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba
and before that it was my father on the campus
of my Ivy League school and my father afraid
to walk into the cafeteria because he said he
was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong
gender identity and he was paying my tuition and
before that
it was my father saying I was wrong saying that
I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a
boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and
that I should have had straighter hair and that
I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should
just be one/a boy and before that
it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for
my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me
to let the books loose to let them loose in other
words
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life