Tribal People Join Growing Insurgency Against Land Grab
Derek Rosin – BASICS Issue #19 – May/June 2010
Deep in the forests and hills of India lay vast untapped natural resources. Both Indian and multinational corporations have grand ambitions to develop the abundant deposits. They want to use the coal and iron to make steel and crank out new cars. Bauxite can be refined and smelted into aluminium and shipped to China’s coastal Special Economic Zones, worked by low wage workers into flat-screen televisions for our living rooms. The new factories could be powered by damming the rivers and flooding the valleys.
There’s just one problem: people live there.
Moreover, these people, minority nationalities called tribals, do not want to leave. They do not want to see their homes flooded by a reservoir. They do not want to have their farms swallowed by an open-pit mine and regurgitated into a barren rocky moonscape. They do not want their water polluted by the toxins from tailing ponds.
But the Indian government has refused to take ‘no’ for an answer. Police have been driving the tribals off their lands with a long-running terror campaign of murder, rape, and village-burning. To fight back, the tribal peoples have been linking up with the Naxalites: Maoist Communist rebels named after the village Naxalbari, the 1967 birthplace of their insurgency against the government.
Having earned the loyalty of many tribals and poor people like them in India, the Maoists have grown to the point where they are now active in a third of the country and control vast swathes of forest. In recent years, their growing strength has convinced the government to intensify their anti-Maoist campaigns.
One such project, as reported on by BASICS in summer 2009, was the creation of Salwa Judum militias – vigilante groups organized to kill rebels and terrorise their peasant supporters. However, even the Economist, which grotesquely refers to the Maoist insurgency as an “infestation,” has been forced to admit that the brutality of the Salwa Judum has backfired and has served as a “recruiting sergeant” for the Maoists.
Most recently, the government has launched a military offensive into the tribal areas, called “Operation Green Hunt”. Well-documented reports say that currently 30-40 tribal people are being killed each week in the affected areas. Authorities may try to hide or sanitize these figures, but they fool almost no-one. Indian police are known to carry Naxalite uniforms on them, so that when they murder a tribal they can claim they shot someone in an ‘encounter.’ Police even receive money for killing Naxals, giving incentive for more murder and cover-ups.
As I write this, the war intensifies. On April 5, Maoist rebels killed 76 Indian troops in an ambush in Chattisgarth, the biggest ever attack in the Maoist insurgency. For their part, the government talks of bringing in the airforce and using the drone aircraft and assassination techniques borrowed from Israel and the US.
But more government firepower alone is unlikely to stop the war, which flows from the real-world social problems of India’s poor. For them, armed insurrection and revolution have become the only answer.
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